Like Felon, Like Son

By Gordon Hopkins I recently read a book called “In My Father's House: A New View of How Crime Runs in the Family.” If I had the cash, I would buy 49 copies, one for each member of the Nebraska Legislature.The book raises an important question, one that has been asked for centuries but never satisfactorily answered. What, exactly, is the point of prison?In theory, the United States criminal justice system should be focused on rehabilitation. At least, that is how some people view it. Others see prison as about punishment. Theoretically, make prison unpleasant enough and people will stop committing crimes to avoid going back. Either way, prison is supposed to be about stopping people from committing crimes. As our ever-expanding prison population proves, it isn’t working.That is where this book comes in. The author posits that the reason so many people live lives of crime and keep going back to prison is that they simply don’t know anything else.“In My Father's House” is a book about a crime family. I don’t mean organized crime. When one uses the term, crime family, the image that pops into mind is the mafia, the mob, the “Cosa Nostra” or criminal gangs. That’s not what this book is about. I’m not talking about some organization, perhaps with some family ties, like in “The Godfather.” I’m just talking about a family that commits crimes. The book tells the story of several generations of the Bogle family. The Bogles are infamous primarily in parts of Texas and Oregon. The book outlines a history of parents exposing children to criminality at an early age. Those children grow up to live lives of fraud, theft and deceit, and raise their own children in a similar manner.The book makes an extraordinary claim, “As few as 5 percent of families account for half of all crime, and only 10 percent account for two-thirds.” I have no idea if this figure is true and wouldn’t even know how to begin to prove it. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that many people in the criminal justice system were born into crime and raised to be criminals. The seemingly never-ending cycle of incarceration and recidivism begins at home.The author of this book, Fox Butterfield, is a journalist, not an academic promoting some sociological theory. He worked for the New York Times and was part of the team that won the Pulitzer for publishing the Pentagon Papers. Unfortunately, in the 1990s, the author became the subject of a rather sarcastic meme before memes were a thing, when he wrote a series of stories puzzling over how crime rates could be dropping while prison populations continued to increase. Dubbed “The Butterfield Effect,” it became shorthand for failing to put two-and-two together. Of course, the people who laughed at Butterfield for not making the connection themselves failed to put two-and-two together and realize that if people can’t commit crimes while they are locked up, they sure as heck can once they are released.Butterfield’s choice of the Bogles as the subject of his book was important. He had broached the subject of family crime in a previous book, “All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence.” Because the Boskets were black and Butterfield traced their roots to the days of slavery, the book focused heavily on the discrimination and racism the family faced.The Bogles were different. They were white. They were not Italian and clearly not part of the mafia. Indeed, their ethnicity seems to be largely unknown. The book could focus primarily on the impact of family and criminal behavior.Butterfield’s book makes the case that addressing criminal behavior needs to start at the family level and needs to start BEFORE the young members of such families enter the criminal justice system. Unfortunately, the criminal justice system, like much of our government today, isn’t geared to address issues until after they become serious problems. Butterfield does mention some promising programs that do address family criminality but they are mostly small, local programs given little, if any, state or federal support and almost always facing the chopping block when the government is looking for short-term budget cuts.

Gordon Michaelis

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