Brooklyn Zoo (6 page)

When Dr. Wolfe finished, he returned to his cubicle. It was still early. “What happens now?” I asked one of the others.

“We wait here,” he said. “When the doctors go down to the holding cells, they take us with them, two at a time, to watch.”

Dr. Wolfe overheard. “Actually,” he chimed in, “I’m going to treatment court this morning. Only one of you can come. Any takers?” I had never heard of treatment court, and I did want to go but wasn’t sure what the etiquette was in the group. I waited, though not very long, to see whether anyone else volunteered. When no one did, I stood up, and Dr. Wolfe and I made our way out of the office to ride the elevator downstairs.

Was I expected to know what treatment court was? Was I supposed to have any idea whatsoever about forensic psychology? I’d figured the rotation would expose me to a branch of my field I knew nothing about, but was that also the expectation that the rotation had of me? I must have looked uneasy because Dr. Wolfe asked, “Everything going okay?”

“Yes,” I said, but then decided to lay it all on the line, my inexperience and inadequacy: “So what is it we’re doing this morning? What is treatment court?”

Dr. Wolfe did not look aghast. He explained in his paradoxically good-natured and cantankerous way: “The court recognizes that nonviolent drug offenders aren’t necessarily criminally minded but that they commit crimes to support their drug habits. Locking them up doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; they’re just going to go back to using and crimes that support using as soon as they get out. So they offer an alternative: do a drug treatment program rather than serve jail time. If they complete the program and stay clean for a certain amount of time, the charges are wiped from their record. We’re called to evaluate the defendants eligible for treatment court when their lawyers think there might be mental health issues. So the woman we’re going to see today, we need to find out, first of all, whether she’s interested in a program and, second, if there are psychological issues that need to be addressed in order for her to complete it successfully.”

This didn’t quite make sense to me, because developing a drug problem was in and of itself evidence of a whole host of messy psychological issues. But I knew I had to shift my thinking according to context. The courts were probably concerned only about the most pronounced psychotic symptoms—hallucinations and delusions and such—and those were what
we had likely been called in to assess. I resented having to make this adjustment. It felt like selling out. Still, having little knowledge about or faith in the offerings of the justice system, I was surprised that such a reasonable thing as treatment court existed. I let my bad feeling go and thought instead: fantastic.

The person we sat down across from in a small space adjacent to one of the building’s many courtrooms was less enthusiastic. Maria was thirty-nine and frayed. She was Hispanic, pretty if too thin after years of taking in less food than heroin—about two hundred dollars’ worth a day, she told us, rolling up her sleeves to show us the track marks on her arm. She was on methadone now. “I wouldn’t be able to sit here and have a conversation with you if I wasn’t,” she told us. She’d started drinking and cutting herself at a young age, soon after her uncle began sexually abusing her, and then an older friend introduced her to heroin, which she eventually began prostituting herself to get, conceiving two children that way. Both were living with their grandmother. Her eyes teared up and she looked ashamed when she told us this, and I felt remorse about being there, an unnecessary interloper on Dr. Wolfe’s work. She said she wasn’t much interested in a program, and Dr. Wolfe asked why. She answered, “I was the middleman in a drug buy, a B felony. I’ll get one to three months. A program is five times that long.”

“Sad,” I observed as we left. Maria had this traumatic history that she relied on drugs to numb herself against, and she didn’t know that therapy might make that numbing less imperative.

Dr. Wolfe agreed. He said he was going to recommend a program rather than jail time despite what she’d said. Maybe she’d take it once she had more time to think. “She’s an unusual
case,” he said. “She seemed reachable.” It seemed regrettable that we would not be the ones to try to reach her. On forensics, I quickly got it, we weren’t that kind of psychologist.

I went back upstairs with Dr. Wolfe, and we found Dr. Pine, whom I’d met at Bellevue, waiting for him. Dr. Wolfe went to the back to collect one more student, and the four of us plus the lawyer Jim Danziger were off to see another defendant in the basement holding cells where most of their business was conducted. I felt energized by the pace of the morning and all the things I was learning that were new to me. “We’re assessing a female defendant today,” said Dr. Pine. “Young and charged with assault in the third degree. Grabbed a woman’s breasts.”

Our group rode the elevator to the lobby and then took a long flight of cement stairs down to a very cold and vast underground complex. We signed in with the guards, went through more metal detectors, and were admitted to a holding cell, a large room painted steel gray with metal bars like a jail cell on a movie set. The female defendant was brought in, no laces in her shoes. The officers uncuffed her before she sat down across from us. Dr. Pine introduced us and explained why we were there. The woman’s name was Katrina, and she was nineteen years old and jailed at Rikers Island as she awaited trial. She rocked back and forth on the bench, smiling and looking off to the side as if at someone, though we five were seated across from her. She knew her Social Security number and her birthday and that she’d earned a GED. She also knew that she’d been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons for the first time at age fourteen, by her mother, and that she’d since been readmitted at least fifteen times.

“What are your symptoms?” asked Dr. Wolfe.

“Nausea,” she answered.

“Any voices?” he followed up.

“All the time,” she said. “They annoy me. Say, ‘Katrina did this, Katrina did that.’ ”

“Are you hearing them now?”

“Yes. I’m trying to figure out how they’re there, everywhere I go.”

“Do you recognize the voice?”

“It’s the same person all the time. A lady’s voice. Bothering me.” She looked off to the side again and laughed.

“What’s funny?” asked Dr. Pine softly.

Katrina didn’t answer.

Jim Danziger—who was not technically required to be there and had very little official business during the course of any evaluation—sat scanning and highlighting an issue of
The New Yorker
as if it were a used textbook. He’d been representing clients like Katrina for longer than I’d been alive, and like Silly Putty laid over newsprint, he bore the stain of their mannerisms. His questions often tumbled out abruptly and in response to stimuli the rest of us were not quite privy to. “So what happened the day you were arrested?” he asked.

“I went to a department store to buy something.”

“Why’d you grab this woman?” Jim was less gentle than Dr. Pine and Dr. Wolfe, and I got the sense that while they liked him, they didn’t often appreciate his interruptions.

Katrina began laughing again. “She’s lying. She’s a good liar. She’s a lying liar. A good lying liar.” Katrina was very fat and wore orange sneakers. Her flesh shook all over as she laughed.

“What do you plan to do about the charge?” asked Dr. Wolfe.

“Fight it,” said Katrina.

“What would your defense be?”

“I’d tell the truth.”

Dr. Wolfe paused. “So what did happen then?”

“It’s like, I just kept passing by her, and she probably thought I was stalking her. She hit me first. It was a fight.”

“Do you want to go to trial?” asked Dr. Pine.

Katrina looked off to the side again. She said, “I don’t
know
why they’re so eager to put me in jail!”

Dr. Wolfe redirected her, and she explained to him her understanding of courtroom procedures and participants. When he praised her, she looked directly at him for the first time before blurting out, “To tell the truth, I do that all the time and walk away!” She went back to laughing with the companion the rest of us could not see. Like the defendants I saw at Bellevue, she was not oriented to reality and would be found unfit.

After that we interviewed two more like her. Both men heard voices, wore shoes rendered laceless to preclude suicide, and could not make logical decisions about how to proceed with their charges. Unfit, unfit. We returned upstairs, and I settled back in the waiting area. The master’s students flirted and made boozy weekend plans. By four o’clock the staff was packing up. The defendants had to be taken back to Rikers around three, and once the psychologists’ paperwork had been finished, there wasn’t anything left to do. I went home to take the dog for a walk along the promenade and wait for George, who had been getting home much later than I. It was our fourth week of internship, and while I was eagerly awaiting the assignment of outpatient cases and supervisors and seminars to fill my days, he was already swamped with work and with classes—five outpatients and five outpatient supervisors, a rotation in a drug and alcohol treatment center, seminars
with heady titles. The discrepancy had me antsy, worried that I wasn’t going to get enough.

When George got home, I told him about my day: Dr. Wolfe’s lecture, treatment court, the basement holding cell. “So all you’re supposed to do is watch these interviews for three and a half months?” he asked.

“I guess so,” I said, feeling protective of the experience. “But they’re interesting. The defendants are basically psychiatric patients, just in a different setting.”

“Well, I’m sure that will be good,” he said, only almost trying to keep the skepticism out of his voice. It irked me, not least because I quickly made it my own.

George told me about his day. He’d been assigned some interesting cases and was excited about the analytically trained supervisors he’d met so far. At least one of his seminars seemed as if it was going to be thought provoking, as good as any of the best classes we’d shared in the last four years. Columbia-Presbyterian was clearly more like grad school than Kings County. I missed school intensely then—my supervisors, my classes, my patients there. One of the latter had wanted to continue our work together after my course work ended, to come see me at the hospital’s outpatient clinic, but in an e-mail exchange over the summer Scott had declined to approve that, suggesting that the very request was indicative of my own pathology—a difficulty coping with separation and loss. (Having your personality critiqued was an expectable part of being a doctoral student in clinical psychology, so it wasn’t a particularly surprising rejoinder.) “What about the fact that long-term cases are valuable to your training?” Dr. Aronoff had asked, with feeling, in the last session we had before internship began—logistics would make it impossible
for us to meet during the coming year. In her voice I heard the chagrin that might have been my own had I not leaped so quickly to feeling shamed. I tended to take all criticism to heart. It seemed the one true thing.

George’s training director had allowed him to transfer one of
his
grad school patients to the outpatient clinic at the Pres (as he and his fellow male interns were calling it, in tones of jaunty Ivy rowers). He had been seeing this old patient since week one of internship, Tuesdays and Thursdays. This was another point in favor of his fancy private hospital—the opportunity to do twice-weekly outpatient treatment. I sighed at my own predictability. Was I bound to spend the whole of the year comparing my experience with George’s and always to find my own wanting?

One of my graduate school supervisors once made the offhand remark that a lot of people walk around a little psychotic a lot of the time. I was in my fourth year, and in my inexperience this took me by surprise, though I had by then read enough that it might not have. On forensics what I saw was that, also, a lot of people walk around a lot psychotic a lot of the time. With Dr. Wolfe’s lecture on the ambiguity inherent in the fitness standards in mind, I’d looked forward to animated debates about whether this one could make rational choices about his options, or that one could maintain emotional stability throughout a trial. But each of the men and women who sat down across from us in the basement holding cell was simply batshit. It didn’t leave much to discuss.

Dedon Willis wore several dirty T-shirts and baggy jeans. At first he was very upset, too agitated to listen to the doctors’ questions or take in the charges presented him by his lawyer,
Jim Danziger. “I want this case to be dropped,” he insisted over and over, raising his arms and popping off the bench a couple inches, then finally settling down. “I don’t know what they said I did.”

“Disturbing the peace. Screaming at people on the subway. Spitting on a police car. Cursing out a cop.” Jim ran down the list.

“It’s not true! This case is garbage. I want to get out of here,” he said. He had a black eye after three fights at Rikers. He was homeless with a long history of psych hospitalizations. He was twenty-seven and had been arrested eighteen times.