Conversations with a Convicted Felon About Charitable Giving, Morality and Doing What's Right

"The only way you can help someone," he says, slowly, deliberately, "is with violence." Later, he says: "Everybody deserves to die." And: "What if you helped someone, and it turns out that they're a cock sucker?" And: "I don't want to help people." Then he regales me with his recurring fantasy of liberating an African village from a gang of warlords. In his fantasy, the warlords drink fancy wine while the villagers starve to death, some of the villagers are kept in stick cages. He liberates the village, Indiana-Jones style, Rambo-style. There are explosions.

This is a man of overwhelming internal contradictions. He's also an inmate in a federal prison, doing time for selling crack. He's also my cell mate. He's told me I should write about him. I'm not sure anyone would believe me.

Moral turpitude, I can understand: I've been accused of it myself. I happen to believe my accusers were wrong about me, but I can identify with and understand the man whose greed is stronger than his sense of right and wrong. The problem is that my cell mate does not seem like the sort to wallow in moral turpitude. On the contrary, he has a deep unshakable devotion to his parents, his sisters, his young daughters. He claims to have pushed a pistol into the face of a drug addict who was mistreating his own daughter. And then there's the fantasy, informed by a laughable ignorance of both world events and his own limitations, but a noble intention nonetheless.

"There is no right and wrong," he tells me, "only points of view." I may disagree with some of his implications, but taken to mean "morality is complicated", his statement is quite defensible. It's only when he keeps talking that he unloads one absurdity on top of another. "Everybody deserves to die," for example. He was arguing that his warlord scenario was different from ordinary charity, which he dismissed as "stupid." He's given "two or three dollars" at church, but never more than that: to give money to someone you don't know would be not just ineffectual, but "stupid": "how do you know that they don't have a basement full of dogs all chained up, and every time you give them twenty-five dollars they hack off one of the dogs' legs?" As reasons for not donating to charities go, this is certainly original. I may try it the next time the Fraternal Order of Police calls the house. He has no "desire" to be synonymous, he revises it to be "just has to." He only helps people he knows, he explains, but in the warlord scenario would feel as if he knew the villagers and would thus have to help him.

He has only disdain for people he considers selfish, but also dismisses those who act without any discernible self-interest or "stupid" or "retarded." He develops elaborate plans to spend money he doesn't have on his daughters, plans that don't involve giving the money to his ex-wife: he'll buy so many outfits for each girl every three months, and have his mother get the outfits dry-cleaned once every ten days. He'll buy a house and let a woman live there rent-free if she "watches out for" his daughters and the rest of his family. Against the background of misguided acts of generosity applied to his own family, the warlord scenario is an aberration. But what of his encounter -- real or imagined -- with the drug addict deadbeat dad? What of his implication that the "lots of" good things he has done have mostly been accomplished through violence?

I think this man has been partially successful in confining his charitable feelings to his own family and ersatz family. When he behaves benevolently towards someone outside that circle, he actually experiences remorse and thinks that he's backwards: that he enjoys doing what's wrong instead of what's right. He describes a scenario where his respect and protectiveness of a friend would make him betray that trust of someone who planned to hurt his friend. "It would be wrong. I would do it because it was wrong." We talk about "because" and "even though" and "and", and the idea that an action cold be perceived as simultaneously as right and wrong at different levels: morally right and legally wrong, for example, or vice versa. Beneath all the dogma, there is a thoughtful man who has never given himself the opportunity to think. Do not believe that this man is incapable of guilt or remorse He is filled with both, but his framework of right and wrong has become so warped that what ought to be compass points at opposite ends of the earth uncomfortably share positions. Charitable impulses are wrong because they take resources away from the family unit. Helping strangers is wrong because his mental template of a stranger is not a likable man; it is a man whose hands are as dirty as his own. How could he not have perverse self-image, when he feels guilt and shame not only for doing wrong but for doing right?

In the end, he takes the apostate's pleasure in being damned. His religion is one of extreme fatalism: if it is written that he will come back to prison, then he will -- there is no point in modifying his behavior to try to prevent that outcome. Fatalism provides a similar excuse against comparison, work ethic, planning for the future, or "worrying" about just about anything. That this fatalism is based on such shaky foundations -- a vague belief that the faith of his fathers and preachers on TV both support the notion of determinism, despite the fact that he practices no religion -- matters little, perhaps because it is an excuse and not a reason for his attitudes. He has spun his presumptive domination into a fantasy world where he is the most evil, the least principled, the most ruthless towards women, opponents, strangers, and anyone who crosses his path, but perversely he does this because he believes it is right.

Someone once said they prefer scoundrels because you know what they're going to do. I'd feel a lot better about this guy if I knew he was a scoundrel. But then I hear him berating another inmate for being selfish. And I imagine him riding like General MacArthur into that African village.