High Price

“highest” level of moral thinking, according to him, in early childhood: I’d gone from thinking that rules alone determined what was moral to thinking about universal principles of justice, before I’d hit my teens.
    It had always seemed obvious to me that if, say, your family needed a lifesaving drug, it would not be immoral to steal it. What kind of person would let arbitrary rules that let rich people have access and let poor people die stop him if he had a choice? I didn’t understand why everyone wouldn’t see the situation as unjust if property was more valued than life.
    During my senior year, Derrick Abel and I plotted with a guy we knew who transported money from a local movie theater to the bank. We were going to rob him but not hurt him; he was, in fact, our inside man. The runner, we were told, carried thousands of dollars. It would be our biggest heist ever. We talked and talked about it. Our friend Alex, however, refused to get involved. He was about five foot eleven, with a small mustache and muscular build. I’d always thought he was cool. But he said, “Fuck that shit. That’s stupid.” To my shock, he flat out said no.
    Thinking back later, I realized he was from a two-parent family and had had a lot more guidance than I did. At the time, though, we decided at that instant that he was uncool. Fuck him, we’re no longer friends. We dropped him without further thought for a few weeks; someone that punked out couldn’t be down with us; he couldn’t be trusted. I didn’t see this as cold or callous; that was just how it was.
    In fact, it boggled my mind that someone would ever say no to his boys; for me, cool and its requirement of loyalty to our group always came first. It was the foundation of my values, one of the few things that really meant something to me and structured my social life. Putting those ties at risk, to me, seemed much more dangerous and threatening than anything the system could do to you if you ever did get caught. If you stayed cool, you could handle that. If not, you weren’t a man and there was nothing much to live for anyway. As it happened, we never got around to robbing the guy. I reinstated my friendship with Alex about a month later. But I never shared information about my capers with him again because I knew he wouldn’t be interested in participating.
    Episodes like my narrow escape from the battery store and our somewhat arbitrary decision not to do the movie payroll job pose deep questions about the role of luck and chance in a person’s life. If we’d gone ahead with that risky plan or if I had gotten caught and punished for some of my other activities the way so many of my friends eventually did, many of the opportunities that I have had would almost certainly have been lost to me. It wasn’t that I didn’t do the foolish things that other kids around me did; it was that I didn’t get caught doing them. Like Presidents Obama, Clinton, and George W. Bush, some of my fate rested on not getting caught taking drugs or engaging in other “young and irresponsible” activities.
    As a scientist, I’m familiar with Louis Pasteur’s notion that “chance favors only the prepared mind”—the idea that while luck does play some part in great discoveries, hard work prepares the soil without which they cannot grow. The same is true in my life. Without a lot of hard work, I’d never have gotten to be where I am. Unlike luck, hard work is under your control: you can either do it or you can take shortcuts. That’s quite clear and often differentiates between winners and losers. I believe deeply in putting in the effort and tell my children so ad nauseam.
    But I’m also acutely aware that often, hard work isn’t enough, especially when the stupid things that black children do are punished much more severely and with much more lasting negative effects than happens with the equally stupid things that white children do. Of course, I’m not arguing that crimes like robbery and burglary shouldn’t have consequences. They should. I just think that the consequences should both be educational and allow for redemption.
    And data shows us that the criminal justice system is not the best way to impose these consequences. Its personnel aren’t trained as educators or counselors; they’re trained to contain damage and dole out punishment. Besides this, prisons are difficult to run in a way that keeps children safe and healthy and they are far more expensive to