With the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies tearing up the National League East, and its All-Star lineup poised for a (dare we say it aloud?) World Series repeat – you just had to know the focus of the entire city would be on Citizen’s Bank Park these days.
This week, though – the focus is not so much on the Broad Street Brawlers as it is the brawlers outside on Broad Street.
By now, you have surely heard of David Sale, the 22-year old from Lansdale caught in the drunken fury of liquored-up white guys. Sale and his friends were partying at the game when they came up against a different group of boozehounds, drinking their way down to the stadium from Moe’s Tavern in Fishtown.
Beer was spilled, words – then punches – were exchanged, and both groups were ejected from McFadden’s, the bar attached to the stadium, to continue their disagreement in the parking lot.
By the time the disagreement was settled, so was David Sale. Beaten and stomped to a fare-thee-well, Sale succumbed to his injuries a few hours later at the hospital. Three of the Fishtowners, James Groves 45, Charles Bowers, 35, and Francis Kirchner, 28, have been arrested and charged with homicide.
Since then, the pundits, bloggers and talking heads have been playing The Blame Game hot and heavy. It’s the Phillies’ management’s fault for making copious quantities of alcohol available to the drunken hooligans who buy tickets, it’s McFadden’s fault for not cutting the lushes off sooner, and it’s the Police Department’s fault for not responding to the fight sooner, considering the number of officers on duty there at the stadium for any given game.
Well, it’s partly all of the above, but not to any great degree.
The Phillies’ organization cuts beer sales off after the sixth inning, so McFadden’s is the popular place to go to continue drinking. But in all fairness to McFadden’s, I have seen the numbers of drunken Phillies’ fans who spill drinks, break glasses, cause a ruckus, and generally stumble about the place on game days. They have plenty of security, but there’s no way to keep up. Ditto the cops. There’s just no way to be everywhere at once, monitoring every drunken fool in the vicinity.
The lion’s share of blame – who’s really at fault here – belongs to the drunken white guys themselves.
Now, I do not use that term lightly. I spent six years in the military in my younger days - as a sailor, no less. I have seen, and participated in, quite a few rowdy bar fights; and I believe I’m as well qualified as anyone to recognize the inherent danger of the drunken white guy, known scientifically as Caucasius Stupidus.
If you were ever in the armed forces, or a college fraternity for that matter, you can back me up here. Take five or six testosterone-filled white guys, get them all juiced up on beer, Jack Daniel’s and Lynard Skynard, then put them in a setting with similar groups of drunken white guys. Fifteen rebel yells later, somebody spills a beer on somebody, somebody steps on somebody’s foot, or somebody jokes that Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, or Elvis was probably gay.
Seconds later, you have pandemonium.
If you’ve never been in an actual bar fight, it really is something to see. The amount of carnage and havoc these guys can create in just a short time staggers the imagination. And usually, the bleeding and injured are left on the field of battle while the able-bodied stagger away. I’ve never seen anyone killed, but I sure understand how easily it could happen.
This is a brand of violence our society is not prepared to address.
If it’s Black teenage thugs with guns, well, as a society, we know how to deal with that. Lock them up and throw away the key. If its sickos hurting children, we first beat them to a pulp, then lock them up and throw away the key. But drunken white guys? They’re your plumber, your electrician, your friendly neighbor who lent you his lawn mower. We can’t start throwing away the key on them too, can we?
Damn right, we can.
It’s long past time for Caucasius Stupidus to take his rightful place among our society’s worst elements - unless you’re willing to argue that a senseless killing with an idiotic motive at Broad and Pattison is somehow different from a senseless killing with an idiotic motive at 58th and Baltimore.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Scared Straight
Every once in a while, something happens that changes your entire perspective. One isolated incident, by itself nearly overlooked, which causes you rethink an entire philosophy to which you were once zealously committed.
So it was for me with the saga of Kyree Slocum.
You may have read about Slocum a few weeks ago. According to the Philadelphia Police version of the story, Slocum, 35, of North Philadelphia, was wanted by authorities in connection with the murders of Barry Johnson, 33, and Rubin Rasheen Eason, 28, inside a rowhouse on Marshall Street last October.
A month later, Slocum used a fake passport and ID at New York’s JFK airport to board a flight bound for Cairo.
Not speaking a word of Arabic, and not knowing the slightest thing about Egyptian customs and lifestyles – our boy from North Philly may have found it difficult to blend in as well as he thought he would. Egyptian authorities soon had Slocum under surveillance, and arrested him May 29. His false identity unraveled, the FBI was called, and arrangements were made for the FBI and Philly police to fly over and get him.
Here’s the part that made me go “Hmmmmmmm…”
When they finally picked up Kyree Slocum on June 19, he was practically begging to come back to an American prison. He profusely thanked his local escorts for freeing him from the Egyptian hellhole he’d been in for three weeks, and couldn’t wait to get on the plane.
Apparently, sleeping on a damp concrete floor with ten men to a cell, rancid, insect-filled food and a bucket in the corner for a bathroom were not accommodations to Mr. Slocum’s liking. You have to imagine there is a prison hierarchy over there just like here, and a prisoner who doesn’t speak a word of the language is probably not treated well.
It was a filthy, harsh, frightening environment – conditions so severe that even a hardened career criminal could be broken - brought to his knees crying and babbling with gratitude in a less than a month.
That got me to thinking.
All the neighborhood hard guys who take pride in their long prison stretches, whose chests swell when they speak of their exploits behind bars, who gleefully teach the next generation of young black men to speak, think, and act as if they’re already incarcerated – would change their minds about how cool prison is if they’d done time like Kyree Slocum.
For Slocum, after his Egyptian experience, American prison must seem like Club Med.
Those of us on the outside - particularly those of us who, from a safe distance, like to think of ourselves on the side of prison reform – like to talk about the effect of those two million American prisoners on society as a whole.
That effect is magnified tenfold in minority communities. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, based on current rates of incarceration, an estimated 32 percent of all Black males will enter prison during their lifetime, compared with 17 percent of Hispanic males and 5.9 percent of white males. In most states, convicted felons are not allowed to vote from prison; and in twelve states, felons are banned from voting for life.
Once released, many prisoners are still poorly educated, lack basic job skills and face employer suspicion, provided they can find a job at all. The result? More than two-thirds of released prisoners are re-arrested within three years, and the cycle begins anew.
So we do-gooders lobby for increased funding and for more programs encouraging education, proper physical and mental exercise, music and the arts behind bars as a means toward rehabilitation.
I still think those are causes worth fighting for, but I have to wonder if perhaps a case could be made for giving prisoners a taste, just a taste, of what life is like in a place untouched by us liberal do-gooders and prison reformers. I can’t help but wonder if this whole concept of prison reform would do better with a more little reform of the prisoners themselves.
I don’t know what the recidivism rate is in Egypt, but I’m willing to bet it isn’t even close to two-thirds.
There probably aren’t many tough guys holding court on street corners in Cairo, wearing their pants down below their butt, boasting to the local young bloods about how they aren’t afraid of prison because they run the cellblock.
Prison in Egypt is a scary place, and no one who’s been there is anxious to go back.
Just ask Kyree Slocum.
So it was for me with the saga of Kyree Slocum.
You may have read about Slocum a few weeks ago. According to the Philadelphia Police version of the story, Slocum, 35, of North Philadelphia, was wanted by authorities in connection with the murders of Barry Johnson, 33, and Rubin Rasheen Eason, 28, inside a rowhouse on Marshall Street last October.
A month later, Slocum used a fake passport and ID at New York’s JFK airport to board a flight bound for Cairo.
Not speaking a word of Arabic, and not knowing the slightest thing about Egyptian customs and lifestyles – our boy from North Philly may have found it difficult to blend in as well as he thought he would. Egyptian authorities soon had Slocum under surveillance, and arrested him May 29. His false identity unraveled, the FBI was called, and arrangements were made for the FBI and Philly police to fly over and get him.
Here’s the part that made me go “Hmmmmmmm…”
When they finally picked up Kyree Slocum on June 19, he was practically begging to come back to an American prison. He profusely thanked his local escorts for freeing him from the Egyptian hellhole he’d been in for three weeks, and couldn’t wait to get on the plane.
Apparently, sleeping on a damp concrete floor with ten men to a cell, rancid, insect-filled food and a bucket in the corner for a bathroom were not accommodations to Mr. Slocum’s liking. You have to imagine there is a prison hierarchy over there just like here, and a prisoner who doesn’t speak a word of the language is probably not treated well.
It was a filthy, harsh, frightening environment – conditions so severe that even a hardened career criminal could be broken - brought to his knees crying and babbling with gratitude in a less than a month.
That got me to thinking.
All the neighborhood hard guys who take pride in their long prison stretches, whose chests swell when they speak of their exploits behind bars, who gleefully teach the next generation of young black men to speak, think, and act as if they’re already incarcerated – would change their minds about how cool prison is if they’d done time like Kyree Slocum.
For Slocum, after his Egyptian experience, American prison must seem like Club Med.
Those of us on the outside - particularly those of us who, from a safe distance, like to think of ourselves on the side of prison reform – like to talk about the effect of those two million American prisoners on society as a whole.
That effect is magnified tenfold in minority communities. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, based on current rates of incarceration, an estimated 32 percent of all Black males will enter prison during their lifetime, compared with 17 percent of Hispanic males and 5.9 percent of white males. In most states, convicted felons are not allowed to vote from prison; and in twelve states, felons are banned from voting for life.
Once released, many prisoners are still poorly educated, lack basic job skills and face employer suspicion, provided they can find a job at all. The result? More than two-thirds of released prisoners are re-arrested within three years, and the cycle begins anew.
So we do-gooders lobby for increased funding and for more programs encouraging education, proper physical and mental exercise, music and the arts behind bars as a means toward rehabilitation.
I still think those are causes worth fighting for, but I have to wonder if perhaps a case could be made for giving prisoners a taste, just a taste, of what life is like in a place untouched by us liberal do-gooders and prison reformers. I can’t help but wonder if this whole concept of prison reform would do better with a more little reform of the prisoners themselves.
I don’t know what the recidivism rate is in Egypt, but I’m willing to bet it isn’t even close to two-thirds.
There probably aren’t many tough guys holding court on street corners in Cairo, wearing their pants down below their butt, boasting to the local young bloods about how they aren’t afraid of prison because they run the cellblock.
Prison in Egypt is a scary place, and no one who’s been there is anxious to go back.
Just ask Kyree Slocum.
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