them in jail”

Crime

“There are not a lot of Islanders in Washington, hut there are a lot of them in jail”

By David North

There were four strong, proud Island men in that room in Washington.

One identified himself as being from Papua New Guinea, and the others were from the capitals of Tonga, American Samoa, and Western Samoa.

The talk was serious, but it was no international conference room, and it was not in the city of Washington.

The room was a 10-by-10 concrete prison cell, the four were convicts, and they were in the Coyote Ridge Correctional Facility in the State of Washington, on America’s West Coast.

It was in this cramped room that Jason Hershey, the one from PNG, wrote to the editor of Pacific Islands Monthly to urge other Island youth to avoid the lure of the gangs, and to become constructive mem bers of society (see accompanying letter).

Jason learned the hard way, but the les son seemed to have (belatedly) grabbed control of his life. As he said to me over the telephone, he had fallen into bad com pany while attending high school in the small city of Spokane, Washington. He did drugs and alcohol and ran with other young men from the islands, as well as some Blacks and Asians.

But Jason was also a remarkable swim mer, worked out regularly with a club team, and (despite bad high school grades) was recruited by the University of North Dakota’s swimming team.

His college grades were so bad that

they barred him from varsity swimming,

and he dropped out of college after one year.

Even in North Dakota, one of America’s most straight-laced states,

Jason found drink-and-drug companions,

he told me.

Back in Spokane, challenged by fellow gang members, he got a gun and tried to hold up a man coming out of a supermar ket; no one was hurt, and the shopper was one who used credit cards and cheques, so

there was not much cash for the first-time robber.

Jason tried a second time, with the same results, but he was soon arrested, and, at the age of 20, faced two counts of first-degree armed robbery.

Jason was convicted and was Out on

bail pending sentencing, a fairly typical

scenario in the American criminal justice system. During this time, he recounted that he got in still more trouble (a theft and a marijuana possession charge) and he decided to, in effect, revoke his own bail, and to go back in jail while awaiting sen tencing. That’s a very unusual scenario in the US.

“I wanted to get the time behind me, and my lawyer said that doing it this way might impress the judge,” Jason told me over the phone. It apparently did, because Jason was held in prison for only 28 months, while some of his island buddies were working on 30-year sentences.

“When I got to prison, I noticed some thing; there are not a whole lot of islanders in the State of Washington, but there are a lot of them in jail,” he volunteered to me.

In addition to the Tongans and Samoans, he said there were Fijians, Guamanians and native Hawaiians at Coyote Ridge. (There is no national census of prison pop ulations that would indicate how many Islanders are in US prisons.) “What were they in for?” I asked. He initially misunderstood the question, and asked if I wanted their names.

“No, no, thank you, but what did they do?”

He was apparently more willing to name his cellmates than specify their crimes - he had been very specific about his own - so he said, “Pretty heinous stuff, gang crimes, violence and drugs, and they all seemed like pretty nice guys.”

We talked a little about the peer pres sure of gangs and their role as a sort of an underground family for young men who were away from their roots, and not solid-

ly in touch with the majority society; an unhealthy but understandable institution, and one that is a major influence on many parts of America.

Jason feels strongly that the apparent glamour of the gang way of life has a pow erful pull on many young Islanders, and was clearly pleased to leam that PIM was about to publish his letter on the subject.

Jason came to the gangs in a different way than most Islanders, just as his rela tion to the islands is different from most.

First, he has been a migrant to the islands, not a migrant from them, like his cellmates. Bom in the US to medical mis sionary parents - his father is of German extraction and his mother has British and native American (Choctaw) ancestors - Jason was brought to PNG when he was eight months old. His father is a surgeon and his mother a teacher.

Although we did not discuss it in these terms, Jason’s profile is such that one would think that he would be considerably less likely to be a gang recruit than many others; he has had a religious upbringing, and his parents are professionals. The gangs’ influence is strongest on those, par ticularly those in ethnic minorities, with out Jason’s advantages.

He liked to talk about PNG, the coun try where he spent two-thirds of his young life. “We lived in a rural area in Morobe Province, about 60 miles east of Lae,” he said. “And my first language was Tokpisin; I used to be able to speak Yabin also, but I have lost a lot of that.”

His parents worked through the Lutheran Church and he used the modest lingo of the committed in describing his father’s profession. He first used the term “medical worker” and only with a little prodding did I find that his father is a

physician and surgeon. Jason wants to fol low in his mother’s footsteps, and teach in PNG. “I want to go there and spend the rest of my life there,” he said in our con versation, which came the second day after his departure from prison.

It so happened that Jason had been released from prison hours before I called the Coyote Ridge Correction Centre. I told an official of his letter and my desire to talk to him.

That seemed to present some privacy problems to her, so then I said: “He reached out to us {PIM). Why don’t you ask him to call me collect? If he does not want to do so, his privacy will not be vio lated.”

She said she would see what she could

do, and she did. He called me less than 24 hours later. Jason said in that phone con versation that he had wanted to go to col lege in Hawaii, but the Washington State probation authorities said he had to spend his year of probation in that state. He relayed that decision without bitterness, although his chances of getting a swim ming scholarship seemed better in Hawaii than elsewhere.

What was he going to do next?

“I am going to college, even though I earned no credits at North Dakota; I think I will start right here at home at the

Spokane Community College.” He had

picked up some college credits while at Coyote Ridge, but he still faces four more years before he gets a degree and teacher certification.

A bureaucratic botch-up kept Jason in prison for 17 days beyond the expected length of his sentence, retaining him in jail over Christmas. But this, like the no- Hawaii decision, he accepted with good grace. “At least I got home for New Year’s.”

It will be a sober holiday, Jason promised. He gave up drinking and pot a couple of years ago, as he seeks to fulfil his ambition, a return to PNG which he has not seen since his parents brought him back to the US for high school - a deci sion which apparently did not work well for Jason.

While one often reads of serious crime in PNG, Jason said he never got into any trouble until he started attending (an American) high school.

PIM wishes him well and will try to keep track of him in the months and years ahead. ■