Incarceration: The Prequel
Filling in the story of the time leading up to my arrest
In July, I posted a story of my month in jail when I was 17 years old. That was the third in a series. Part One provided a bit of background on my earlier life, and Part Two described the events surrounding my arrest and being released from custody for a short time.
In Part Three, The Year With No Autumn Foliage (the account of my time in jail), I promised that Part Four would be Incarceration: The Aftermath, explaining the path my life took upon my release.
Since that time, however, I have received numerous requests to fill in the blank space between my earlier years and my arrest in 1963. What had I done to bring about my jail time? This post (Part 2.5?) will begin the prequel to my time in the slammer.
As I thought about the background story, I’ve realized it may occupy many posts, so be prepared for additional installments — perhaps Parts 2.4 and 2.6 and so on — maybe I can number these so as to indicate chronological order, but no promises!
I have already mentioned that this was not my first brush with the law. From Part One:
I was arrested for the first time in my young life when I was just 13 years old.
The story of my arrest is ASFAT; it’s a story of trouble and also of privilege. The short version is that I stole some mail that was destined for the Housatonic National Bank, thus combining two federal crimes in one action.
I was never told about the negotiations that must have ensued, but somehow, rather than facing federal charges, I ended up being ushered into the County courthouse in Lee.
The judge was very kind to me, and explained that although I was being convicted of a crime, I was being put on probation. I was instructed to stay out of trouble and to write a weekly letter to my probation officer, telling him what I had done that week.
All of this must have been puzzling to the adults in my life. Up to that point, I had been a fairly well-behaved youngster, active in the Boy Scouts and my church, and doing well in school.
That incident, in turn, was only one of many. Although no one ever (to my face) labeled me as a kleptomaniac, I’m sure that word came to mind for many who knew me. Oxford Languages defines kleptomania as “a recurrent urge to steal, typically without regard for need or profit.“ This isn’t a bad description of my childhood behavior, but it is an outsider’s view of that behavior, and does not evince any understanding of motivation. In that sense, it is similar to definitions of (my) autism; completely superficial and without regard for how it feels to be experiencing behaviors so cavalierly labeled as belonging to a “disorder”…
In recent years, I have come to understand that human personalities are far too complex to lend themselves to easy categorization. There are a seemingly infinite number of personality traits, and each of us has all of them to a greater or lesser (perhaps zero) degree. A friend of mine has likened my conception to a very large sound board with all its sliders. I think that’s an apt way to picture the vast mixture of personality characteristics.
I began to develop this way a thinking about 20 years ago, when I first figured out I’m autistic. As I met more and more autistic people, I began to notice that, although they were all very different from each other (and from me) in many ways, they all had one thing in common; their personality “sliders” were set very far from the center. On the neatness scale, for example, the autistic people I got to know were either obsessively organized or completely disheveled. On this and most other characteristics, they seemed to be at one end of the board or the other, and very seldom were “average” or near the center.
I bring all of this up because I want to disavow attempts to categorize people based on just a few personality characteristics or types of behavior. There is an entire industry (psychiatry and its insurance company enablers) built around this bogus idea that people can be slotted into a narrow category, such as described in the DSM.1
In contrast, I have derived some comfort from going back to the origins of experiential psychology. David Hume (Edinburgh 1711-1776) is credited by some scholars as being the first to develop a coherent theory of motivation. I have read a fair amount by and about2 Hume, and will have much more to say in future posts. For now, suffice it to say that I agree with his essential premise that to understand human foibles, one must look beyond the behavior to the motivations, or reasons, that people act the way they do.
So, back to my self-description of being a kleptomaniac. It is true that I had a habit of stealing when I was young, and it was that behavior that landed me in jail. Today, at the remove of many decades from those painful days, I think I understand a great deal about why I did what I did. At the time, however, I’m sure many of my overseers wondered why I undertook those exploits, in what must have looked like action out of character with the rest of my activities. Caught up, as I was, in the fraught behaviors, I did not have the maturity or the self-awareness required to understand and change my behaviors.
Before I close out this post with promises of more to come (both about my earlier life of crime, and more information about the spree that led to my jailtime), let me provide a brief outline of the events leading up to my arrest.
Breaking and Entering in the Daytime, and Grand Larceny
These were the charges against me. The “grand” in grand larceny was to be taken literally. It meant stealing something valued at more than “a grand” or $1,000. It should be noted that $1 in 1963 had the same purchasing power as $10 today, 60 years later. It appears that the legal definition has not kept up with inflation, since petty larceny in Massachusetts is now anything less than $1,200.
The “breaking” part never actually happened. I did rob some houses (in Pittsfield), but my entry was always very gentle. I often walked into houses where the front door was unlocked. The “grand” came from one house where I found quite a bit of jewelry lying around. The owners (falsely) claimed that I had taken more then $1,000 worth.
At another house I visited, no one was home, but the doors were locked. (How rude!) So I found the key and let myself in. I roamed through the house, but did not notice anything of obvious value except a large jar of pennies. At the time, I had a coin collection, so I thought maybe I could find some valuable dates, and I kept the jar. As I was leaving, I decided that the least they could do for me was give me lunch, so I opened the fridge and found some bread, cheese, and mustard. After making a sandwich and putting it on a small plate, I poured myself a glass of milk and sat down at the kitchen table to eat. Once finished, I rinsed my dishes and left them in the sink. I then let myself out, relocked the door, and placed the key back under the upside-down coffee can on top of the pipe used to receive oil deliveries. I later learned that the neighbors had been suspicious and had called the police. They arrived after I had left.
And that, dear reader, is a preview of the career of a felon. Be on the lookout for many more posts in this vein. I will delve more into my motivation (I needed money for college) and describe my exploits in more detail.
Also, please give me your forbearance if, along the way, I mix in posts about more current interests, and possibly stories of episodes from other parts of my life. I had, for example, I wonderful time earlier this month leading a group of Brothertown Indians on a walk in Stockbridge. They were here as part of a trip around this area to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth or Samson Occam. So I want to report on that day, as well as to post additional information about the history of Stockbridge that I did not have time to present to them.
Also, I have a nearly-completed story about how I first learned to play bridge (nearly 60 years ago), and I can add to that some yarns about relearning the game this year — it’s been fun! Stay tuned!
An administrative footnote: several of my readers have kindly offered to subscribe to a “Paid” version of this substack newsletter. So I may activate that option in the coming days. If and when I do, please don’t feel obligated to choose that option. At the present time, I don’t envision any difference between the “paid” and “free” versions of what I write.
The DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR). Its purpose is to “help clinicians and researchers define and classify mental disorders“ even though the conditions it describes may be perfectly natural variants of human neurology. Homosexuality, for example, appeared in earlier versions of the DSM as a “disorder” and autism is still in it, although most autistics believe that our condition is of a different order, and not a “dis”order.
For example, https://davidhume.org/ and Hume on Art, Emotion, and Superstition A Critical Study of the Four Dissertations, By Amyas Merivale