The latest on our recent earthquakes:
After the biggie yesterday, about three hours later, there was a 5.something quake farther north, near where my friend Mountain Mama lives. I got an email from her, and they are all right.
The relatively small amount of damage is due largely to the fact that there are not many man-made structures in the area (since nobody but geologists looks at or cares about the cracks in the Earth), and we have a long history of moderate quakes which have already knocked down some of the more vulnerable structures, plus we have building codes geared to preventing earthquake damage.
Oddly enough, mobile homes, these flimsy boxes that tornadoes and hurricanes love to toss around, are surprisingly flexible when shaken. Ours popped and creaked and the floor undulated, but it held together. Log cabins are also quite flexible. Where most of our recorded damage occurred was the highways. Yesterday, I heard reports of truckers stranded on islands of asphalt, between large cracks. Three of our highways were closed last night, and damage to some supports triggered a shut-down of the pumps on the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline.
There were power outages in the Anchorage area, hundreds of miles from the epicenter, and in Seward, hundreds of miles farther still. This morning, I’ve heard that the Alaska Railroad has stopped all trains until crews can check the tracks, and that one trucker got out with no injuries after his truck went into a four-foot-deep crack in the road. Flyovers are planned for today, to asess the “surface ruptures” along the Denali Fault, which extends from The Mountain to the Canadian border and beyond.
And now… that second job I got in Anchorage,
Autumn, 1973—
Mike, the Community Counselor, was charged with creating a Parole and Probation Center. It was to be a place where ex-offenders could get the help they needed to get back into civil life after their release. As his assistant, my job was primarily job development. I called on employers and advocated that they hire ex-cons. I built a database of jobs available at those businesses where the management expressed a willingness to employ jailbirds. When people were released who had skills in a field we hadn’t covered before, I started canvassing businesses in that field to find a job for that inmate, preferably to be waiting for him when he got out.
At the start, Mike and I shared the offices on the third floor of the McKay Building (once the McKinley Hotel, before the 1964 earthquake, and still showing cracks–it would be condemned a few years later and has since been torn down) with the parole and probation officers. His office was a janitor closet, and they squeezed another desk into the typing pool for me. Another new hire, with a job created by new federal funds, was Barb, the public relations officer. I became her de facto secretary until Mike found a storefront that met our needs, just a block down 4th Avenue from the parole office, next to Household Finance. That’s the way we always told people how to find us.
Those first weeks when all I was doing was typing news releases and newsletters for the PR woman, and listening to the chit chat of the clerks, and occasionally making a cold call on some businessman who had been approved by the brass, I was discouraged. Mike would come in each afternoon and give me a progress report and pep talk. He was great. The clients were #1 for him, and everything else: the politics and red tape, were just the stuff he had to fight to do his job.
Among five men, there was one female parole officer. When she had some free time, Vicki would come into the typing pool to drink coffee and schmooze. I picked up some wonderful gossip, learned the names of many state bureaucrats whose names I would be hearing in the media for years afterward. One memorable story concerned her immediate boss, who had locked himself in his office one day, with a pistol, and threatened to kill himself. She had kept him talking on the phone while her male colleagues had contrived to enter the office, rush the distraught drunk, and disarm him. The poor guy survived and went into detox and then an alcohol treatment program. After that, he moved to Juneau, to a higher-level administrative position.
Every P.O. I ever met was nuts one way or another. If they weren’t already that way when they signed on, the job drove them crazy. What it does to cops, parole officers and other “innocents” is one of the main things wrong with our criminal justice system. What it does to convicts is an even bigger problem. The system creates career criminals. It takes young misguided or even innocent people and warehouses them along with every kind of sophisticated miscreant. Prisons are universities of crime. One conviction, even a very minor one, sets up a slippery slide leading to future incarcerations.
Recidivism was the problem our agency was designed to prevent. The idea was to make it as easy and comfortable as possible for people to make the transition from prison to the streets, so they would stay out of prison. Being locked up doesn’t just disrupt employment, education, marriage and parenting. It leaves an indelible stigma that drives many ex-cons to try and hide their background when they look for work, leaving them looking over their shoulder from then on, fearing exposure. The difficulty of getting work with a prison record impels many people into crime and the underground economy.
I never really enjoyed looking for jobs. It’s a high-stakes game, where I must be at my very best or even better. Looking for unspecified jobs for anonymous ex-offenders whose crimes could be anything at all, upped the ante and put me at a distinct disadvantage. It was the hardest work I’ve ever done, but I believed in what I was doing. I did it well. Many of our clients were interviewed and hired before their release.
Every man or woman who came through our program had a job within at most a few weeks, except for the printer who had been sent up for forgery. We tried every print shop and publication in Southcentral Alaska without success. He finally went to work as a carpenter in an organization we were instrumental in starting: Re-Entry Concern Foundation and its business arm, Re-Construction, Inc., both known as Re-Con. More on that later.
Some of the people for whom we found jobs needed several jobs. With neither work skills nor social skills, and “institutionalized” from being locked up, some of those guys went through one entry-level job after another before hitting one with an understanding employer or where they liked the work enough to put the needed effort into showing up every day.
A wee digression here, on institutionalization: I don’t mean simply placement in an institution, the primary sense of the word. Institutionalization is psych-soc jargon for the physical and mental lethargy and laziness that sets in for most people when they are imprisoned or hospitalized, or shut up in other institutions such as boarding schools or military bases. The habits that develop vary according to the type of institution, but each of them tends to make adjustment to life outside the institution difficult. It is not uncommon, especially with older ex-cons, for a man to try to get back into jail when life on the streets gets tough.
After Mike managed to wangle a state car that either of us could use to contact prospective employers, or to take clients to interviews, etc., I got out of the office more. By the time our new office space was ready for us, I had weaned Barb, the PR person, from my services and she was trying to retrain the clerks to her exacting standards. Before we made the move, Mike convinced his bosses that our work would be hindered if it was done under the label of “Parole and Probation Center”, the one we’d been working under thus far. When the new sign went up over our door, it said, “New Start Center.”
To be continued….
The
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