Ryan Emko Committed a Murder
“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.” – Nicholas Klein, 1914
The National Abolition Council states, in a pamphlet I was handed upon release, “Personal safety is a feeling determined by every person and group for themselves. The national project of abolition brings everyone into the work of protection of our communities. Rather than cruelly confine persons accused, convicted or released in prisons, out of sight, we understand them as a part of our communities. But if the presence of an offender causes anyone else in our communities to feel less safe, we simply assert boundaries, which modern technology makes easy. The convicted must honor these boundaries as a condition of their release. Such boundaries are the consequence of their offense.”
My name is Ryan Emko. Before the great shift in consciousness, I was held in two different prisons, for two different crimes. I am now released.
The news of abolition came down as a slow trickle at first. Those of us who maintained regular connection with the outside world heard rumors, mentions, optimism from our family and friends. My niece, the only member of my family who remained in contact with me throughout my last stay in prison, told me about it during a phone call. “There’s a great shift in consciousness happening out here,” she said. “You might be out sooner than you think.”
Almost overnight the guards started to treat us with more respect. They engaged us in direct conversations, and even something approximating friendship. Some minor offenders went on work release programs and never came back. Some guards became quieter, less concerned with maintaining order. It was unintuitive to outsiders to discover that life inside the prison was more orderly with less strictly-enforced controls. Any of us inside could have predicted as much. About a year after first hearing the word “abolition” from my niece, the guards were always accompanied by supervisors in lab coats. And then, the guards were gone and it was just the supervisors. A couple of the kinder guards returned, wearing lab coats for a short while, though most said the work was “too close” to their former lives before the shift. And then, after a few long evaluations with supervisors, we were allowed to leave, most with some form of ongoing supervision.
Upon my exit supervisors handed me a bundle of pamphlets and the clothes I had worn on the day I was first incarcerated. Taking the advice of a friend who had done time, on the day I turned myself in I wore my favorite sweater and my largest pair of pants with a belt. Upon my release I learned that a moth had eaten a small hole in the collar, and the pants weren’t quite as large as they had been, as I’d gotten a bit stockier. But these scraps of fabric otherwise helped me feel some finality to my stay in the loveless, concrete hotel where I had spent, up to then, more than three years of my life.
My supervisor makes sure I’m doing okay. Since my release she and I have checked in at least once per week. She is kind, she loves hockey, and she is one year and one month older than me. She trained as a psychiatrist, has studied martial arts since she was 8, and did reconnaissance in the armed forces. Her children are 8 and 5, but she is required under statute not to tell me more about them than that.
When I was on trial for murder, no shift in consciousness had yet occurred. The burden of proof was on the prosecution to demonstrate that I had committed the murder. This was quite easy for them because I admitted it. A crime of passion, an immediate regret, I was never going to be able to bring back to life the man I had killed. The court-appointed attorney had the job of lessening my sentence from death, or a life behind bars. He would do so by proving my inherent goodness, and that I was not an ongoing danger to those around me. I made my attorney’s job somewhat easier by being remorseful, and admitting guilt, and because I was interested in gardening. I made his job considerably harder by having a criminal record, and having previously spent time in jail. My sentence was 15 years, with opportunities for parole.
I have a harried relationship with the usual clerk at the tiny convenience store near my house. English is his second language. His first is something from Eastern Europe, perhaps a former bloc country, that gives him a deep drawl when he speaks to me. It almost feels at times that he is doing an impression of an American, who is doing an impression of a Soviet character from an 80s movie. He usually speaks in short, halting phrases.
Smoking tobacco calms my nerves and passes the time. Still, it is a vice, and I live on a limited income, so I budget and ration for two packs of unfiltered cigarettes each week. The purchase is the point at which I feel most guilty about smoking, so I try to hurry it up. I’ll ask the clerk for my brand at regular intervals, and hope it doesn’t take too long. He must always feign checking a customer’s ID during a tobacco purchase, or the owner, his boss, could be fined for lacking diligence. Right above my photograph in red, bold print, are the words “Committed a murder. Released.” He can’t help but notice such a prominently-placed status and conviction.
The visit feels like it endlessly repeats. He looks at my ID without looking at me to compare the photograph. Nobody would fake an ID with a conviction and a released status. “Aww,” he will say with some condescension. He feigns sympathy, I think, because the shift in consciousness tells him that he must. He has seen this ID dozens of times, but he treats each visit as an opportunity to start fresh. “Imagine putting a man in a cage because of a murder,” he says, loud enough that the woman behind me, standing in line to buy potato chips, can hear him. “Today, this is unthinkable.” I don’t respond. I thank him, pick up 40 cigarettes in two small boxes, and I walk away. I feel their eyes burning a hole in my back. I am among the last people who will hold the “Released” status. I feel these eyes everywhere I go.
As soon as I was out, I caught sight of the new first-responders for emergency calls. Apparently this change, closing down police departments and replacing them with safety officials, “orderlies,” was a big sticking point with some of the more fearful people in society, during the public hearings regarding abolition. Many of these hearings included alarmist inquiries like, “who do we call for help?” The creation of orderlies was the answer provided by the National Abolition Council. Orderlies’ functions are extremely limited under statute. New laws state their role is to “prevent death and injury through exhausting every alternative.” Orderlies are most known for having inordinate diplomatic skills, engaging in therapeutic conversation with abusive boyfriends and suicidal teenagers, intervening in street brawls with charisma and occasionally administering a mild tranquilizer to someone beyond negotiation. Many orderlies fashion themselves storytellers, or motivational speakers, or just interesting people in a world that sometimes needs one. An orderly who drinks at my neighborhood bar, while off-duty, once called himself “a hobbyist who explains his hobby to people who don’t have hobbies.” He believed a lack of hobbies led people to commit crimes – that crime was for those who lacked preoccupation. One of his hobbies was making fun of the now-defunct policing system, and the skills of the former police. His ongoing joke was to say “they had the wrong hobbies for peace work.”
I live in a studio apartment as a part of a complex of affordable units, which are occupied by several other released from the former system, a few convicted or accused under the new system, and quite a few families I don’t know much about, because we don’t speak the same language. I assume they’re adjacent to the new justice system, by virtue of living in this building. Fifteen units sit on a lot in a neighborhood between a high-capacity shipping corridor for large trucks, and a railway line that ships oil and coal and consumer goods. We have a pool, which is only useful in the three months out of the year it isn’t raining, and when the building manager remembers to add the cleaning chemicals. In the laundry room, near a sign warning that the building manager is not responsible for stolen goods, is graffiti that reads “wash away your sins,” which I assume one of the convicted, accused or released wrote.
My supervisor lives somewhere close by, I’ve reasoned. Statutes state plainly that I shouldn’t know precisely where she lives. To my understanding, if I’m out jogging and see her walking into her front door carrying groceries, for example, I would be required to report this fact to her, and that would be the last time we spoke. I would then be assigned a new supervisor, to maintain the professionalism in our relationship, and a no-contact order with my now-former supervisor. Orders violated lead to escalating boundaries.
The example “a released person jogging past a supervisor carrying groceries into their front door,” which she provided me in a pamphlet, has some obvious flaws. For one thing, to my knowledge she is like most people and has her groceries delivered. For another, I don’t jog and if I did jog, I would likely do so on a treadmill at a gym where I was welcome. This would avoid the risk that I would enter an area wherein the tracking chip in my left hand would emit an unmistakable beep warning me that I was approaching an area where I was unwelcome, and continue to do so until I left. In my case, for my crimes, I am not automatically excluded from many public parks, proximity to schools, or most stores.
Yet many neighborhood associations, private businesses, and social groups are unevenly progressing through the various stages of the great shift of consciousness. They pass neighborhood resolutions which exclude my status from passing through or being present. I get an alert on my phone each time this happens within 50 miles of me. I would rather avoid learning and re-learning my local jogging map as those resolutions are approved, and simply find a gym which explicitly catered to any released, convited or accused. But as I said, I don’t jog. I smoke cigarettes to calm my nerves and pass the time.
I had to find a job, which is not easy. An ID check is standard practice in most employment situations at the time of application. Once a boss knows your status, he can review the boundaries set by anyone who interacts with the business – customers, vendors, and the like – and tell you to your face that he can’t hire you because of your status as an offender, or even because of your particular crime and the people it impacted, or who have heard about it. The community of offenders is good about sharing opportunities where such contact is limited – there’s a bulletin board in the lobby of my building, for instance. I was able to find regular work in a commercial laundry, where all the people in the basement washing hospital sheets and painters’ tarps and such are accused or convicted or released. Mostly accused. It’s not really spoken of, we don’t ask one another what we did to end up working in the laundry room. One man I work with is clearly very smart, the way he speaks during our lunch about the things happening in the world. I’ve heard people at work make the same joke as the graffiti – “wash away your sins.”
Housing, job, and mobility barriers are collectively called “consequences” in the experts’ pamphlets. Aside from these, I’m free to live as anyone who hasn’t committed a murder.
One evening, after a long shift of drying and folding, I returned home and turned on my television. That evening, the great shift in consciousness was explained on a late night television show through a simple and informative conversation with a self-styled expert in abolition. The host of the show smiled obnoxiously through prompted questions. The expert said with authority that “kindness was always the solution.” The host’s face shifted toward stoicism, he nodded to model for the audience that he understood the expert. The audience grew quiet during the exchange, receiving no instructions to laugh or to applaud for this few moments of the expert’s monologue.
“Our systems of punishment have been remarkably cruel for centuries, and the cruelty never eliminated our most pressing problems,” he said. As experts go, he was relatable, despite his resume. He had studied the scholars of abolition, read and edited reports on the prisons, and built institutions in partnership with the policymakers to replace the former system of disciplinary cruelty with what he called “responsive kindness.” He sat now on the National Abolition Committee, but he looked like a daytime television doctor, his teeth white and skin dramatically tanned. He had been a criminal prosecutor, but through the great shift in consciousness he had recognized his role needed to change. “My job was to inflict harsh punishment,” he said with remorse. “Now, our national response to crime treats the offenders as human beings.” The audience gasped at the simplicity of his message. “Our results speak for themselves. We will never go back to the old ways.” Cue audience applause. The host reminded us that the expert has a new book, available now on digital and delivery platforms. Cut to commercial. A trade school offers an 18-month course to become a certified supervisor, an orderly, or any of the other newly-open positions created to bolster a national responsive kindness. A new soap in a pink bottle promises to wash your clothes clean, no matter what soils them. A television drama tells the story of white woman whose status is released, who overcomes her dark past to save a hard-luck high school in the inner city. Back to the late show, a singer who is going through a public, dramatic breakup with a movie star. The singer seems in good spirits, and says cheerfully “we just want people to know that our relationship ending doesn’t need to be the end of either of our careers.” The audience loves the singer for being so kind and forgiving, though she need not be after publicly accusing the movie star. The host makes a joke that the movie star won’t be invited back on the show, and the singer laughs for a long while. I imagine how many people watching make the choice to remove the accused movie star from their media services, ticketed events they may purchase, or digital advertisements they may see.
My first conviction isn’t mentioned on my ID, and I’ve never brought that up to anyone. It seems inconsequential. When I was in my last year of high school, my friends and I planned and executed the robbery of a convenience store. We were all 17, a part of the plan so that we would be tried as minors if we were caught. Unfortunately, during the robbery the hood of my sweatshirt became caught on a shelf below the cash register, pulling my hood back for just long enough to reveal my face. My photo from the security camera hung in the convenience store for a year before someone who knew me but didn’t like me spotted it. They told the clerk who I was. We all have enemies, I guess, who would go out of their way to get us in trouble.
Two friends and I split the $1250 we pulled from the register. I used mine to buy an engagement ring for the woman I had loved since I was ten years old. She had always loved me, too. I would never spend that kind of money on a ring unless I knew she’d say yes.
I was tried as an adult, and served two years for armed robbery between the ages of 18 and 20. Many men in my neighborhood served some time for small crimes. Three years was considered a light sentence for a felony involving weapons. But back then, there was nothing light about spending time locked up. The guards were cruel. The other prisoners tell you when you show up, if you fight back, it gets worse. They’ll make your sentence longer and longer if they want to. The worst guard was a guy from my neighborhood who had somehow kept his nose clean long enough to get a job in the prison. He hit me more times than I could remember. The best option you have is just to take it, same as with the beatings from other prisoners. If you let it happen, it will prove you’re not gonna cause trouble, and it’s easier. If you snitch to the guards, and the prisoners catch wind, it’ll happen again ten times worse. If I’d snitched to the worst guard that someone had beaten me in the shower, he would have told the guy who did it, because they worked together to keep the prison flush with cigarettes and cell phones. It was a heavy time, even if I only served 24 months. I was approved for parole at my first parole board hearing. I’m not a bad person. I keep telling myself that even though, after the great shift in consciousness, we all decided there are no bad people – just consequences for the accused, the convicted, and the released.
The only thing that kept me going during that time was an occasional visit from my fiancé. It would break my heart to see her on the other side of glass. After a 30 minute conversation where I could never tell her what I had actually been through that week, our visitation phone would buzz and stop working. A guard, often the worst guard, would then escort her back to the free world. I once saw him place a hand on her back to usher her through the doorway as she walked out, and I wasn’t able to sleep right for a week.
The minute the police showed up at our door to take me in, my own mother stopped speaking to me. She’d wondered aloud many times as to where I got the money for an engagement ring, and by the third or fourth knock from the police she stopped wondering, and she was no longer my mother, just a stranger whose home I’d occupied for 18 years. The isolation in prison is total, even when you are surrounded by other men who are just like you, in one particular regard. All of us were unfit for the outside world, but then what does that say about the world inside? About us? What world are we fit for? The world we could make for ourselves, I supposed, given the confines of the walls and bars and fences, the guards and warden, the courts and police outside. Whatever personnel, guns, handcuffs and relocations against our will it took to put us there, that was what everyone else had deemed necessary to protect everyone else from us. As I would lay awake in my cell some nights, tasting blood from my last fistfight or squinting through a painfully swollen eye, I would imagine that after my two years, I was sure I’d keep my nose clean. But there’s something about the violence of incarceration that changes you. It changes who you are inside, how you see yourself. But it also changes how others see you. We don’t put people through that anymore, which brings some comfort.
My supervisor often uses the word “consequences” to refer to various ways my life has changed because of my status. I sometimes agree, and sometimes I don’t, about that. I told her about the clerk announcing that I had committed a murder to the people in the store. She was quietly sympathetic, taking notes as she usually did while we spoke. “The status disclosures do seem to have some unintended consequences,” she told me. “But for the sake of being transparent, and keeping everyone safe, it’s probably better they hear it from you as soon as they meet you, instead of finding out later on.” I told her that my sister wouldn’t let me talk to her teenage daughter anymore, because she worried I’d be a bad influence. “Consequences,” she said. I told her that I was asked to leave a house party, because someone there went to elementary school with my fiance. And of course I left. “Consequences.”
I saw a flyer on a telephone pole. Some local anarchists were organizing a teach-in on the housing crisis, and I decided to go. I’m lucky to have an apartment, but so many people don’t, especially offenders who can’t find work.
I was called into my manager’s office at the laundry and she told me I couldn’t work there anymore. “We got a call yesterday from someone. I can’t tell you who. But they told me that someone who works here is close with a family member of the man you killed. I don’t want this to turn into a conflict in the workplace – it’s a matter of safety. The right thing to do is for you to find another place to work. I’m sorry.” My face felt hot. I was sure it had grown flushed. Despite the very clear text on my identification, apparently there is always the potential that every detail of my past could come back to haunt me. My supervisor called it “consequences,” though she did seem to understand how defeating it was to lose a job in one of the few places that seemed to be built around accepting offenders. But apparently I’m unfit to put piss-soaked sheets into gigantic washing machines, because my presence could cause conflict. I felt deep shame.
This same logic applies to my futile attempts to fall in love. I took a bit of time out from romance after my fiancé broke off our engagement. There’s a dating app for offenders to meet, but it has some quirks. The target demographic immediately limits the dating pool, but it also gets us both past the awkwardness of disclosing our status to people who may not know. I’ve gone on a handful of first dates, and one second date.
The second date was the only one where we didn’t have a conversation on the first date about our offense. It turned out she wasn’t an offender, but someone who got off on the idea that she could sleep with one. I didn’t find out until I’d finished telling her about everything I’d done, and everything that happened after, all the consequences. “You poor thing,” she said, her eyes shining after her second glass of wine. “That is so unfair to you.” She reached out to hold my hand across the table, and stared at me with bedroom eyes. On normal first dates, this would be the moment when she’d volunteer her own misdeeds. But on normal first dates, especially mong the released, we wouldn’t be holding hands. Spending any time in prison makes initiating physical contact with a stranger much more deliberate than she was being. But she just stared salaciously at me, up until the moment I told her that the day I got home from two years in prison for armed robbery, I found my fiancé in bed with the worst guard, and I beat him to death. She told me she’d call me. I’m not sure I want her to.
I went to the organizing meeting. I’ve had a hard time keeping stable housing since I’ve been out, because conflicts and safety concerns seem to crop up all around me. The organizers opened the meeting by asking if anyone had a status to disclose, and so I did. They asked me to leave.