People who kill with their cars while intoxicated deserve severe punishment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that higher sentencing guidelines are what will work to prevent deaths. If tomorrow it was announced that I could watch a drunk driver be dangled by his or her ankles from the top of the Superman Building, I’d be out at Kennedy Plaza with my lawn chair to see the debacle. As cathartic as that might be, though, there are better ways to approach the issue.
The Ocean State was a leader in ending the death penalty, and we should recognize as a culture that severe punishment is less important than consistent punishment.
Rhode Island suffers from a serious DUI problem. It’s ahead of its New England peers–in the sense of more drunk driving, not better policy–and needs desperately to do something about the problem. But the U.S. approach of using prison to deal with any social problem is a failed one that we should reconsider. The places that lead on road safety don’t share our views about imprisonment.
In the Netherlands, which boasts some of the safest streets in the world, prison is a last resort. The Netherlands impounds people’s cars much more easily and for much longer periods of time than the U.S. The response to driver offenses is swift and sure in the Netherlands, to be sure: people lose their licenses for much less than vehicular homicide there. What would be considered baseline Rhode Island driving technique–speeding and failing to yield to pedestrians–is considered a serious breech of public safety in the Netherlands and not tolerated. People are arrested for such behavior, but from there the focus is less on competing for longer and longer sentences than it is on keeping irresponsible people away from cars, fining them for their behavior, and moving on.
The Netherlands has such a low imprisonment rate that it’s renting out empty cells to inmates from other Scandinavian countries.
Motor vehicle fatalities declined from 65 in 2013 to 52 in 2014, all time low but still 52 fatalities too many.
— Peter Kilmartin (@AGKilmartin) March 11, 2015
I have nothing but respect for Atty. Gen. Kilmartin’s proposal. In Rhode Island, many of our lawmakers treat DUIs as a joke. So much is this the case that we made it to Last Week Tonight for the flippant and disrespectful behavior of State Senators Ciccone and Ruggiero related to a drunk driving and shoplifting incident:
What should Rhode Island do about drunk or otherwise impaired driving?
We live in a culture that sees prison as the first solution to any criminal problem. Prison is a tool, and should be available as an option for offenders who cannot be controlled by other means. But the design of our communities, the consistency of our enforcement, the standards we have for our drivers’ licenses, and other factors are far more important than blustering over large sentences. I encourage Atty. Gen. Kilmartin to take a different route to solving this serious problem.
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]]>Despite a larger police force, the capital city had more murders during Buddy Cianci’s last four years in office than the most recent four under Taveras.
From 1999 to 2002, the statistics are stark: 26 murders in 1999, 30 in 2000, 23 in 2001, 23 in 2002. During his 1995-1998 term the numbers of annual murders ranged from 25 to 12. There were 22 murders in 1993 and 21 in 1994.
From 2011 to now, under Mayor Taveras, the homicide rate has varied from 12 in 2011, 17 in 2012, to 14 in 2013. There have been 13 murders this year.
Think about this -even though jobless rates are worse in the city now, even with a smaller force, more transparent, honest police leadership and partnerships have kept murders down.
According to the San Diego Reporter, just prior to his last term, upon arriving on the scene after a 1998 double-homicide, potentially tied to drug trafficking, Cianci remarked, “Seen one you’ve seen them all.”
Can you imagine Angel Taveras saying that upon arriving at a homicide scene?
The Narragansett Indians called it Clths Slaaag, which Rhode Islands founder Roger Williams translated as The Old One.
Roger Williams joked about it in his diary journal.
After a sparse meal of fish and corn, Cannonicus, the Sachem, warned me not to build my home on the hill. He said that was where The Old One, a horrific monster, lived and fed. His vivid description reminded me of the demonic stories told by Popish priests to cow the superstitious. Most probably a rabid bear.”
Roger Williams was wrong. Seventeen years later, his second son, Elijah mysteriously vanished and was discovered three days later at the mouth of a cave concealed by a fallen apple tree. The boy’s hair and skin had turned white. Three fingers on his left hand were gone, as if they had been gnawed off. Elijah had lost his mind and never spoke again.
Roger Williams heart was broken. He spent much of the rest of his life abroad in England. A scrap of paper with a crude drawing of an anchor
In 1860 when his bones were dug from the family plot to be re-interred beneath his statue in Prospect Park, the popular story was that an apple tree had eaten through his corpse, and the roots had taken the shape of his leg bones. The truth was much darker.
In his diary, Stephen Randall, a witness wrote,
The stench that emitted from the opened grave was beyond imagining. There lay Roger Williams, looking as well-preserved as the day he was interred. Yet his eyes were open, his mouth peeled back baring his teeth in a rictus of horror. When Elder Brown bent down to close the poor man’s eyes, the body disintegrated into thousands of wriggling worms. Those who were present fled, and when we returned all that remained were the roots of the apple tree, looking strangely like a leg bone.
Moses Brown discovered the mangled corpse of a slave girl in the basement of his East Side Home in 1773. No one knew who she was or how she had died,
Brown wrote,
The corpse’s condition was appalling. Her back was scarred with lines that John said betrayed the excessive use of a lash, but reminded me of both the jagged tares rendered by an animals claw and the infected ruin of a child caught in a wave of jellyfish tentacles.
A short time later, Moses Brown freed his slaves and began working for abolition.
Edgar Allen Poe, the author, was the next to write of the thing that lived beneath the Hill. In the margin of the original manuscript for the famous poem, The Raven
Poe wrote in a crabbed hand,
Only in the form of a black bird I can indicate the monstrosity. I have tried again and again to describe the Old One, but language fails me, and the words I use seem unnatural and unreal.
Following his failed courtship of Sarah Helen Power (Whitman), Poe spent weeks wandering up and down Benefit Street in a laudanum-induced haze. Many say that he never recovered.
The most direct references to the creature came from Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who is still famous for his horrific tales of the Necronomicon and The Great Old Ones with unpronounceable names. Lovecraft lived most of his life on Providences East Side, at the tip of a triangle between the land near where Elijah Williams was discovered, and the basement of Mosess Browns house.
“ that cellar in our childhood house was my constant nightmare,” Lovecraft wrote to his brother Peter near the end of his life. “While you and Emily laughed and played, I peered into the darkness. I fear that soul-destroying blackness corrupted me somehow.
More recently, on May 1, 1993, a party thrown by a group of Rhode Island School of Design Students in an abandoned train tunnel ended in horror.
The Providence Journal reported that, After the tear gas and pepper spray cleared, police found thirteen naked students, their backs bleeding as if they had been struck with a whip. One girl was dead. Police have no suspects, but report the probability of drug abuse.”
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Side_Railroad_Tunnel)
In 2003, when more than 30 house cats were reported missing, the Providence Journal attributed the disappearances to a coyote roaming the neighborhood, yet suggested that small pets and children remain inside after dark. In 2009, three homeless men who had been reportedly sleeping under a nearby bridge were also declared missing, by the police, but “presumed to have left the state.:
An article in an alternative The Agenda suggested in 2006 that the changing landscape of the City was bringing the horror to the surface.
“The rivers have been uncovered, a highway is shifting, and a billion dollar project has dug underground sewage overflow tanks beneath the hills where Roger Williams once planted his crops. What else have the construction crews dug up?”
The Agenda
Shortly afterwards, the sidewalk behind the First Baptist Church in America on Benefit Street began to disintegrate and cave in. It took several years to effect the repairs on the sidewalk and fence behind the First Baptist Church.
A city contractor reported in a brief memo that has since gone missing, “ every time we tried to fill it, the sinkhole beneath Benefit Street would fill with slimy brown ichor. We finally had to lay in rebar and cement in layers going down fifteen feet. It is possible that the missing day worker fell in and wasn’t noticed, but I doubt it.”
Even now, week after week, at WaterFire in Providence bonfires are lit in the river and haunting music is played while tens of thousands of people wander through the smoke as an ancient ceremony is reborn and recreated.
Less than six months ago, the mutilated body of a missing Brown University student was found in at the site of an old Narragansett burial ground. The details were hushed up, photographs of his corpse were deleted and television cameras were kept far from the scene.
When asked to comment bout the rumors that these and the other events documented in this article were the work of the Old One, the Mayor refused to answer. This was clearly the work of a sick human being,” he said. “We have far more pressing problems in this city in terms of education and infrastructure. Dont bother me about this nonsense.
Have the shifting lands disturbed the creature? Are the fires and the people drawing the monster closer, bringing it nearer and nearer to the surface?
It is hard to tell with all the noise. But if you listen carefully, as you wander the darkened streets of Providence late at night, perhaps you will hear a sound, a soft and slurping sound, as if a moistened finger was caressing the cartilage next to your ear.
If you hear this sound, do not stop. Do not turn around. Do not scream. It feeds on fear and despair.
Enjoy your breath. It may be your last.
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Mark Binder’s latest books are works of fiction: Cinderella Spinderella – an illustrated ebook for families coming September 2013, and The Brothers Schlemiel
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