Dear Judith,
I take as my text this morning a story in the New York Times metro section about one Terence M. Brewer, who escaped from the Mercer County Correction Center last week and is still at-large somewhere in New Jersey. Mr. Brewer sounds like about as bad an actor as you could hope to find. He committed his first murder at age 15, spent his young adulthood in prison for robbery, and earlier this summer, at age 38, was convicted of his second murder. As long as he’s running around there, I’m glad we don’t live in Mercer County, N.J. (known to me chiefly as headquarters of the Educational Testing Service).
What was interesting was the way he escaped from prison. He somehow scaled the prison wall and jumped to the ground from 30 feet up. Then, whether by accident or design, instead of running away he lay on the ground outside the prison, face down, moaning, until the guards found him. He told them he had been on his way to visit somebody in the prison but had fallen and aggravated an old football injury and now he had to be taken to the hospital. Seven (!) guards gathered around him, sympathizing with his predicament, suspecting nothing. Somebody called an ambulance, and when it arrived, off went Mr. Brewer. The ambulance took him to a hospital in Trenton. The attendants left him on a gurney in the emergency room. As soon as they had gone, Mr. Brewer walked out of the hospital and nobody has seen him since.
The story struck a chord with me because many years ago I used to work as a volunteer admitting clerk one night a week at a hospital in Washington. At least the final part of Mr. Brewer’s escape was incredibly easy to picture. We all know about emergency rooms from ER and Chicago Hope, but those shows, for all the bows they take in the direction of urban-chaotic, spend most of their time in the relative efficient territory behind the door that lies at the far end of the waiting room. If you’re trapped inside the waiting room, as I and all the people waiting there were, it’s much worse. The place fills up in the evenings, nobody knows what’s going on, and the waits are endless. People who arrive in ambulances bleeding from gunshot wounds are rushed inside, but people who arrive in ambulances in relative decent shape are, indeed, left by the door on their gurneys, clipboards resting on their chests, while the ambulance drivers go off to answer the next call. The general feeling is, “Who the fuck is that guy on the gurney?” Not only was it easy to picture Mr. Brewer just wandering away–if he hadn’t, he might still be waiting to be seen. People on gurneys generally aren’t in a position to complain to the admitting clerk.
Mr. Brewer’s secret, it seems to me, was exploiting the strangely total disjunctures between juncture points in our society. The prison guards’ responsibility, even their consciousness of responsibility, ended at the prison walls. The ambulance drivers’ responsibility ended at the door to the hospital emergency room. The emergency room’s responsibility never began, and we’ll never know whether it would have sooner or later. If you want to live outside the rules, all you have to do is take yourself out of context.
So, what’s the lesson here, other than that Mr. Brewer is a clever man?
a) We need tougher prisons.
b) We need health-care reform.
c) We need new leadership.
You tell me.
Love,
Nick
