This episode is from the WNYC archives. It may contain language which is no longer politically or socially appropriate.
"Before I met her, I was a model husband and father… but that girl…"
In the third installment of Toward Return to Society, the New York Department of Corrections classification board looks at the case of an embezzling insurance salesman.
An actor reads the thirty-two-year-old man's story in the first person. He was a cashier for many years, and was devoted to his family, until he met a beautician. He stole over a thousand dollars from his company to keep her a paramour, and was arrested.
The board (Peter F. Amoroso, Commissioner of the Department of Correction; Captain Jerome Adler, Captain in charge of classification and assignment at Riker's Island; Dr. Bertram Pollens, Executive Secretary, New York Consultation Center; Herman K. Spector, Director of Education and Recreation, Department of Correction; George E. Mears, Probation Officer, Kings County; Norman M. Stone, Correction Department Executive Secretary) reviews his medical, social, and psychiatric reports, trying to make a recommendation for the man.
Mr. Mears adds some details to the case, relating that the man did not just neglect his wife during the affair, but actually began to beat her. The tests, he says, reveal that the man is intelligent, and the psychiatric evaluation concluded that his crime and his infatuation were "sort of a rebellion against the certain degree of monotony and frustration in his life."
The majority of the conversation centers around the man's trade assignment. The board is split. Some want the man to pursue further clerical work, including stenography, while others believe that he should pursue a trade like metalwork and tin-smithing. Their reasons differ. Dr. Pollens, for example, fears that he will grow bored again if he returns to a clerical job, and suggests that mechanical work might be a creative outlet. Dr. Amoroso worries that he will not be able to get another clerical job in light of his arrest, and should focus on developing new skills for a new career. Mr. Mears, by contrast, worries that his self-esteem will be impacted by a shift in careers, and that metalwork will not use his full metnal potential.
Occasionally, they drift into other topics—the possibility of eye glasses, the potential for parole, visits from his family. The longest tangent, however, is a short debate between Mr. Mears and Mr. Stone about the nature of the man's crimes.
Mr. Stone reminds the board that the man has committed a crime, and Mr. Mear's challenges a part of his statement, asking him if he means that the man's attitude is illegal.
Mr. Stone begins to recant, but then reverses himself again. "Well his attitude might be illegal," he says, "How about this, uh, this affair he had with another woman while he was married?"
"Well, we don't send people to jail for that alone, do we?" Mr. Mears replies.
"That's not the point!" says Mr. Stone, "The point is, uh, his attitude is not right!" His actions, he continues, are not correct, "morally and in every other way," and their duty is to "help him change his attitude towards society and help him become a more worthwhile member of society."
Mr. Mears interrupts, "I think we are making a serious mistake to set up a standard or a code of living for this man that is your code of living and it may not be the code that he's setting up."
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection
WNYC archives id: 69891
Municipal archives id: LT922