The Transom Effect - Introduction

My 40-year career in the criminal justice system, first in a series.

If you read my first two publications, you know my vaccination injury story, a 3-year ordeal which persists at this writing, albeit with some improvement. I will perseverate on that dark topic no longer, except to say that one of its well-known components is Brain Fog, a multi-symptom syndrome which includes impairment of short-term memory. I will not need that for my upcoming series of publications, since I retired ten years ago. Rather, I will rely on another syndrome I have, a positive one for me…hyperthymesia, the ability to recall nearly all past experiences in great detail.

Some years ago, I started writing notes on my memoirs, intending to develop a book for publication. My target audience was people in the field, academia, and the general public. After consulting a few professional publishers, I decided that perhaps I was being grandiose. Academia would not be receptive to having its field of study criticized, as only I could do; those working in the field would not want their profession besmirched; and the general population was worn out by exposes’ and impervious to their shock value, to wit: William Bennett was the Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan from 1985-1988. He was a conservative politician and political analyst who graduated from Harvard Law School. A prolific author, he published a book in 1999 entitled The Death of Outrage. Many updated versions were re-published. The original sits in my home library; the title alone validated my concern, even more so today.

I will use pseudonyms and avoid geographical references to protect the culpable. I was an Adult Probation/Parole officer in a major U.S. city, heavily populated and full of high crime areas, a.k.a. bad neighborhoods. My original intention was to record my experiences under the assumption that it would be therapeutic, especially in preparation for retirement. I have always analyzed, philosophized and otherwise cogitated about my work life in an effort to reconcile a profusion of essential contradictions about which I obsessed.  Downloading my head was the computer-era equivalent of a technique used, perhaps invented, by Dorrice , a renowned therapist. She worked at a hospital with the most severely compromised patients, those whose substance abuse had resulted in physical and mental degradation of the worst kind: brain damage and organ failure topped the list, all with significant behavioral manifestations, many of which were serious crimes. Such patients were called ‘dual-diagnosed’’. Dorrice called her technique "Cognitive Clearing.” It involved having the patient write notes during group therapy or even draw or scribble in an effort to reduce mental blocking and enable verbal participation.  I sat in on those sessions because some of the participants were on my caseload. I don't think my work life was quite that deleterious, but it took its toll.  Today it would be called PTSD. My love of writing made Dorrice's technique a natural for me. I wanted to credit her, wherever she is, for having had the fortitude to work with the most unpopular among us, in whose company most would opt not to be, criminals all.

As I began to organize my thoughts, it occurred to me that perhaps this stuff would be interesting to others, so I decided to write it as though the audience was larger than my computer.  I have a lot of corroborating empirical evidence (tongue-in-cheek). I frequently had the experience of being asked at social gatherings what I do for a living, a topic which I preferred to avoid.  "So, Ed, what do YOU do?"  or "So, Ed, what business are YOU in?"   The former is the more benign form of the question, since I come out looking OK as long as I have a job.  The latter implies some sort of significant enterprise which yields more than my subsistence-level income.  Either way, when I tell them what I do and then a little bit about it in response to their follow-up (patronizing) questions, they invariably say one of two things: 

1.   "That must be sooooo interesting".

2.   "It must be difficult working with those people".

My unspoken response to #1 was that it is so damned interesting that I have three other jobs.  It was never interesting.  Not when you're in it.  Pathological, traumatic, sickening, exhausting, but not interesting.  That's a more fitting description of an exhibit in a museum that you are viewing at your leisure.  It's also what I hope this series is for you.  Statement #2 is a little more insidious and pregnant with assumptions.  The people being referred to are either criminals, blacks or black criminals.  What I tell people is not what they expect to hear; the offenders are the only ones who are doing what they are supposed to do; offending, committing crimes. It's the organization in which I work that's the problem.  But more on that later.

This series is about the perspective provided by the phenomenon of hindsight.  You know what they say about hindsight…it's always 20-20.  The idea is to have the foresight to anticipate what you will ultimately learn from hindsight, acting on it before the former becomes the latter.  I just made that up and hopefully someday I will become famous for having said it.  There are people who can do the foresight thing, but I'm not one of them, hence the name of this series.

Just what is a 'transom' anyway?  One thing it can be is a land-surveying device which sits atop a tripod.  The other thing it can be is the one I have in mind here; a window pane above a door.  This is a feature you would find in houses built before sheet rock was invented. They would install a heavy wood door on the front of the house, particularly row houses, and place a wood-framed pane of glass atop the door.  Sometimes there would be stained glass in the frame.  Sometimes the street number of the house would be imprinted on the glass.  This is a transom. It was stationary. The interior upstairs doors in such houses were built of solid wood and had a transom as well, with frosted glass to allow light but obscure the view.   The transom had a steel dowel imbedded perpendicularly into the frame on each side, then into the frame of the doorway. This allowed the transom to pivot, tilting even to the point of being parallel with the floor, facilitating air flow. A pulley mounted on the inside top was operated by a thin rope. The ceilings in such houses were usually 10 feet high, so the transom was pretty far off the floor. Children of this era who were curious about what was going on behind closed doors had two choices:  the key whole - accessible but usually plugged; the transom - inaccessible but with an excellent view.  And isn't that always the way. Pre-schoolers had no hope of peeking over the transom.  As they grew, so did their options, and eventually they would stand on a chair, maybe with some books on it, reach up and get their fingertips over the edge of the frame, and hoist themselves just enough to peer over.  They weren't seeing much but it was an adventure. Given the need to avoid banging the closed door with the tips of their shoes, they removed them. As the interloper grew older, ingenuity increased. Eventually a clear look inside the room was feasible, undetected.

THE TRANSOM EFFECT is an apt metaphor for my burgeoning awareness of the dynamics of the environment in which I worked.  This is not very complimentary of my perceptual acuity, nor of my political I.Q. As Al Franken said on Saturday Night Live in his skit called Daily Affirmations, "You must own your dysfunction".  O.K., so I'm a slow study.   This is exactly how I view the 25-year learning curve that I traversed in my ascent from Probation Officer Trainee to Administrator, not in terms of what to do in each position I held in the hierarchy, but how the Probation Department and the Court System of which it was a part really functioned.  It didn't take me the whole time to figure it out.  I did that in less than a decade.  That was the diagnostic phase.  I spent the rest of the time trying to "fix" it, which is what I thought I should do, as I was clearly sent by God for that reason. I am reminded of the oft-repeated line in the movie The Blues Brothers, “We’re on a mission from God”. The remainder of my learning curve consisted of what could be gleaned from the organization's response to my remedial efforts.  That, as we shall see, was the real wake up call.  The trouble was, I kept hitting the snooze button.

Credit goes to my grandmother for this lesson in the mechanics of ‘transoming’. Her row house had many transoms. IIt was beautiful. All the wood was maple. Had it not been trashed by future occupants; it would cost $400,000 today. If she was alive today, she would be 140. I still miss her. Her childhood was a time when personal creativity was, of necessity, the source of all entertainment for kids.

This series is a review of 40 years of my work in the field of Probation and Parole. Therefore, it is highly autobiographical.  One thing I promise the reader…there is nothing herein that did not actually happen and happen the way I said it happened.  As I have repeatedly told people who didn't believe me when regaling them with stories about my job, there is simply no need to insert hyperbole or embellish it in any way to make it interesting, surprising, revolting, unusual or anything else that would get a rise out of the listener. Why go to the trouble, when it's already been done for me by reality? All I have to do is just say what happened and that's what I have done, because the truth is stranger than fiction.  I hope you find it interesting and thought-provoking.