The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [126]
AND BEYOND THIS, WHAT? The social services Betts is recommending did not lift masses of people out of poverty in the projects. Perhaps, outside the projects, they will help people a little more. But perhaps not. The problems of poverty run so deep that we’re unlikely to know the answer for a generation. Social scientists tracking people who are trying to improve their lives often talk about a “weathering effect,” the wearing-down that happens as a lifetime of baggage accumulates. With poor people, the drag is strong, even if they haven’t lived in poverty for long. Kids who leave poor neighborhoods at a young age still have trouble keeping up with their peers, studies show. They catch up for a while and then, after a few years, slip back. Truly escaping poverty seems to require a will as strong as a spy’s: you have to disappear to a strange land, forget where you came from, and ignore the suspicions of everyone around you. Otherwise, you can easily find yourself right back where you started.
Leslie Shaw is writing a memoir, and it contains more weather than most of us can imagine. At 15, she left home with a boy named Fat, who turned out to be a pimp. She spent the next seven years being dragged from state to state as a street hooker, robbing johns and eventually getting addicted to crack. Once, a pimp locked her in his car trunk. Another time, her water broke in a crack house. This covers only the first few chapters. She works on the memoir endlessly—revising, dividing the material into different files (one is labeled, simply, “Shit”). She still has two big sections to go, and many years of her life left to record. Her next big project is to get this memoir under control, finish it, have it published, and “hope something good can come out of it,” for herself and the people who read it.
When I last saw Shaw, in March, she had her plan laid out. About seven months earlier, she had taken in her 2-year-old granddaughter, Casha Mona, for what was supposed to be a temporary stay. The little girl’s mother was getting her act together in Albuquerque, where Casha’s father (Shaw’s son) was in prison. Shaw’s plan was to take Casha Mona back to Albuquerque, then begin a writing workshop at the Renaissance Center in Memphis to get her memoir into shape. And just before Easter, she’d dropped Casha off, come home, and signed up for the class. Two days later, she got a call from an aunt in Albuquerque. Casha had swallowed a few crack rocks at her mother’s house; state officials had put her in foster care. More weather. Last I spoke to Shaw, she’d bought another round-trip bus ticket to Albuquerque and was going to get the little girl back.
The writing class would have to wait, or she could do it at night, or…“I’m just going to get on that bus,” she said, “and pray.”
HANNA ROSIN is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a founding editor of Doublex.com, an online women’s site. She has also written for The New Yorker, The New Republic, GQ, and the New York Times. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Slate deputy editor David Plotz, and their three children.
John Colapinto
STOP, THIEF!
FROM The New Yorker
ON A RECENT MORNING, a dapper man in his fifties with a narrow mustache, dressed in a black Armani suit, strolled past the cosmetics counters on the main floor of a midtown Manhattan department store. He was the store’s vice-president of corporate asset protection, second in command in the store’s loss-prevention department. Loss prevention is devoted to reducing what retailers call “shrink”: the erosion of profits—some forty billion dollars in 2006, according to the University of Florida’s National Retail Security Survey—resulting from shoplifting, employee theft, and organized retail crime (professional thieves who steal goods in large volume for