A change of gravity

The clerk-magistrates and the other people who worked in the courthouse were well aware of this tactic and its practice, and the vengeful feelings it was meant, but failed, to conceal, so they treated the batterers differently from other defendants, discounting their displays of woe, sadness, regret and remorse by sixty to seventy percent. This made it difficult for the personnel to conduct themselves in their customary courteous professional manner, dealing with the men who had hit women. The only way they could do it was by acting as though they didn't know why it was the men had come before them. This was harder for the women workers in the courthouse than it was for the men, because they had to hide fear as well as anger and contempt for the defendants. The men who had hit women found the pretense unconvincing and knew very well that the courthouse people did know that was what they had done, and scorned and despised them for doing it. The men tended to be fairly quiet, but still visibly resentful of this additional injustice they perceived against them.

Most of the time most of the people who worked in the courthouse tried to seem sympathetic and be polite to everyone who was there because they had gotten in some kind of trouble. The defendants often found their professional solicitude condescending, and sneered at it to demonstrate contempt, but in that, too, they were mistaken; it was not feigned. The personnel felt real empathy with hard-working men and women who had never been in court until the morning after the night they had had too much to drink and had gotten stopped driving home at two in the morning, doing fifteen miles an hour in the middle of the road, steering by the yellow lines, had blown.18 on the Breathalyzer, ten points over the legal state of drunkenness, and had fallen down when ordered to stand on one foot. "There but for the grace of God' was a phrase they often murmured as the Driving-Unders begged futilely to retain their licenses in disregard of punitive statutes mandating revocation. When they were convinced that an injured defendant, accused of resisting arrest, had in fact been unsuccessfully attempting to defend himself against a police officer gone out of control, they saw to it that the judge handling the case became aware of the relevant facts, even if no evidence of them was offered in open court. They also often felt real pity for aimless early teenagers from dysfunctional homes whose undifferentiated fear and pent-up hostility enabled them to commit their first serious criminal offenses on the apparent basis of mere evil impulse (new personnel speedily acquired and inexpertly used the diagnostic jargon of psychology as a handy means of mental self-defense, reflexively learning early that they needed it to explain behavior they would otherwise find frighteningly incomprehensible).

The majority of the young people crowding the stairwells and the hallways were repeat offenders, but experience did not enable them to foresee whether they would have to go into the courtroom, perhaps emerging from it with their wrists in manacles. They had been ordered to report for interviews with other courthouse personnel, either adult probation officers or Department of Youth Services caseworkers. Until the public address system raspily summoned them by name to report to Rooms 17, 18, 18A or 20, they beached themselves in the halls and clustered in the stairwells, obstructing the passageways. Some were morosely silent, but most talked, elliptically, ceaselessly asking each other for predictions that none of them could make, repeating questions none of them could answer, now and then casting wild glances outside the groups of people whom they knew, wishing to discover somewhere in the hallways someone their age who looked just like them and who therefore could be trusted but knew the answers to their questions; could tell them what was going to happen to them when the judge went on the bench.

Even those who had been most boisterously demonstrative in the corridors spoke cryptically and softly, never assertively, once alone in those conferences. Averting their eyes from the persons pressing questions on them, they shook their heads a lot, shrugging their shoulders and rolling their eyes; saying "Myunoh' for "Mmm, I don't know' to indicate they lacked sufficient information to say where they had gotten the narcotics or the stolen property the police had found on them, or when they were asked to account for the whereabouts of some fugitive habitual associate or the gunshot wound of some hostile competitor.