“Vindicta” is Latin for vengeance — payback for wrongs others have done.
Or wrongs you imagine they’ve done. Or might do.
Look around. We are in the golden age of vindictiveness. It’s the thread that holds everything together, the hidden hand. The only questions: Who is the object of retribution this week? Who can we safely hurt?
Nearly a decade ago, when Donald Trump went down that escalator, vindictiveness was directed against Mexicans (rapists) and Muslims (terrorists). We were building the Wall and banning immigrants from Muslim countries. Trump was elected president on that platform and might yet be again.
Like fashion, the specific objects of our scorn change with the seasons. Now Mexicans and Muslims are out, more or less, and Venezuelans (too many) and trans people (predators) are in.
In a pinch, there’s always criminals.
You don’t need Trump to tell you to disdain felons. That’s the default. The United States incarcerates nearly 2 million people, more than China, four times our population. The U.S. is the world’s top jailer — our incarceration rate is 531 per 100,000, nearly double the 300 of Russia. Canada’s is 85.
Our country is in such peril right now that I’m reluctant to bring up another concern. But when you consider our problem as one of general vindictiveness — the urge to punish driving our political nightmare — the fate of prisoners becomes very relevant.
Particularly after reading “Correction: Parole, Prison and the Possibility of Change” by Ben Austen, a compelling, well-reasoned book that looks at incarceration in Illinois through two longtime prisoners.
First, Michael Henderson, who borrowed a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver and shot a fellow teen outside a bar in East St. Louis in the summer of 1971.
Then 18, Henderson was offered a deal — plead guilty, and be sentenced to 7 to 21 years. He declined, was convicted, and sentenced to 102 years.
Second, Johnnie Veal, convicted of gunning down two policemen in Cabrini-Green in 1970. The notorious murder of Sgt. James Severin and Officer Anthony Rizzato shocked the city. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, but Veal was a Cobra Stone, and several rival gang members fingered him. He was sentenced to 100 to 199 years in prison
Both men were sentenced before 1978, when sentences still could be adjusted by a parole board. Austen focuses on this dwindling population of men who have been in jail for decades and are offered the carrot of release, as a goad to self-improvement, while that decision rests with parole boards, often staffed with retired cops and prosecutors more interested in regurgitating the details of a crime than considering any improvements in the criminal over the past 20 or 30 or 40 years.
Parole boards generally base their decisions on “the crime the person committed, not their time in prison, not their rehabilitation or likelihood to reoffend,” Austen writes.
Austen explores the changing purposes of incarceration, as punishment, rehabilitation, warehousing, shifting more on political whims and fear of crime than on actual societal cost.
Meanwhile there is race, which affects everything, but particularly our criminal justice system, where whites tend to skate while Blacks do time. Blacks make up 14% of the population in Illinois; while the state’s prison population is 53% Black.
There isn’t room to fully summarize the book, beyond noting that Austen skillfully explores the issue, giving full attention to the families of victims, who show up year after year to present their view that prisoners should rot forever in jail, a dynamic that can thwart their own healing.
It’s difficult — for me, anyway — not to have some sympathy for a person who entered the criminal justice system at 17 and is now 68. The best praise I can lavish on “Correction” is it wasn’t an assignment — nobody asked me to read it. I could have cast the book aside at any time. I didn’t, because “Correction” is gripping, and makes you care about Henderson and Veal and the prison system in general.
“Correction” reads like a novel; you race toward the ending, genuinely concerned about what happens to these two men — do they ever get out? Do they die in prison?
“Concern” might be the opposite of vindictiveness, and Austen’s book is an apt reminder that the way American society is structured, how we’ve chosen to run our country and its penal system — vindictiveness, like lying, wins elections— is not the only way life could be arranged. Other countries do it far differently, and we might want to considering changing ourselves. If that is possible.
The Cabrini-Green housing project. In 1970, a sniper murdered a pair of Chicago police officer here, a crime that figures into “Correction: Parole, Prison and the Possibility of Change,” a book by Chicago writer Ben Austen, looking at the parole system through a pair of long-time prisoners, including Johnnie Veal, convicted of the killings. The project, now torn down, is shown here in 1983.
Chicago Sun Times file photo
