On the wall of her modest trailer home next to a grove of hazelnut trees in the western Willamette Valley, Tammie Bogle kept a fading black-and-white photo of herself at the age of five, back in the early 1960s, with her father, mother and one of her brothers, Louis. Tammie was a towhead at the time, with a round face and a warm smile full of freckles. The photo is a rare souvenir of a happy time before her own branch of the Bogle clan was consumed by alcohol, drugs, violence and too much time locked up behind bars. Twenty-one members of her immediate family, starting with her father, an older brother of Rooster’s known as Babe, have been sentenced to jail or prison. Tammie’s brother, known as young Louis, himself was incarcerated forty times, by his own count, before eventually being injected by his drug dealer with a hot shot of liquid Drano, instead of what he thought was meth. The injection left him in a coma, and when he unexpectedly regained consciousness, he was a quadriplegic; he was bedridden for the last eighteen years of his life. “Too mean to die,” he liked to joke. The weekend before he passed away, Tammie went to visit him and heard Louis talking with someone. “I asked him who it was, and he said, ‘Tammie, I’ve been talking to an angel. I’ll see you with God.’ ”
A deep religious faith, in fact, was what kept Tammie from succumbing to the perils and pitfalls of the kind that destroyed so many of her relatives. Religion for Tammie was not only her personal salvation, but also a shield against the temptations and the contagions that consumed the Bogles and made the family itself a cause of crime.
Inside her trailer, painted beige with red trim, there were photos of Tammie’s three children. One, Jason, went to prison for eight years but then became director of a Christian-based halfway house for inmates leaving prison. The other two, Shannon and Amy, married former prisoners and now work as counselors—one in a drug rehab program and the other as the head of a preschool program. On the trailer’s narrow walls there are also pictures of Tammie’s fourteen grandchildren, along with photos of some of the three hundred foster children the local courts have entrusted to her over the years. As a young girl, Tammie picked up her interest in religion from her mother, Lola, herself a devout Southern Baptist who was part Native American from Oklahoma, where missionaries drilled Christianity into her on the reservation. Faith was a refuge for Tammie from the time when her father would preach on Sunday mornings and then get drunk on the way home from church and beat his wife until her face was bloodied. Tammie would then direct her brother Louis, who was a fast runner, to take off across a farm field to distract her father and make him give chase. “Those beatings used to really hurt me too,” Tammie said.
The natural world outside the trailer was also a haven for Tammie, a place where she found God. Tammie had gardens planted with wisteria, honeysuckle and clematis. In one section sat an old bathtub filled with butterfly bushes in bright lavender, yellow, pink and purple. Early each morning Tammie walked through a grove of young fir trees being grown for sale at Christmas, and she prayed in the soft dawn light coming through the green branches. There were rabbits, pheasants, skunks and foxes moving among the trees.
“I am walking with Jesus out here,” Tammie liked to say. “It is as close to heaven as I can get. I am talking to Jesus, praying to him, listening to the birds. It is a healing place for me. Some of my grandkids say they have seen angels out here.”
Tammie had a small sculpture of a bronze angel in a fountain sitting on an old wooden whiskey barrel someone gave her. “When I hear the fountain and the water, I think about the Lord’s peace.”
For her, Tammie said, “Jesus is as real to me as anyone in our family. The factor in our family that differentiates people is the ones who choose God, to keep them out of crime. I look at the Lord as my spiritual daddy because I didn’t have a real strong relationship with my dad.”
From all her years of watching her fellow Bogle family members, and raising so many foster children, Tammie developed her own philosophy of what makes children into criminals. “Throughout our family, the boys always said, ‘I am such a screwup; I am going to turn out like my dad,’ ” Tammie said. “They believed they were cursed and could not change their destiny. We called it the Bogle curse.”
Tammie found a passage in the Bible, Proverbs 18:21, which seemed to fit her family precisely: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”
“So when someone in the family said, ‘You are going to turn out just like your dad,’ it was as if the power of death was spoken over us,” Tammie said. “This created a link among our family members.”
It was another way of stating the social learning theory of becoming a criminal.
Tammie was born in Amarillo two years before the Bogles moved up to Oregon. Her father, Babe, had been a young ironworker trying to connect some bolts on a forty-foot-high oil-refining tower owned by Phillips Petroleum in June 1960 in Borger, Texas, when he slipped and fell face-first into a pit of carbon black. Both his arms and wrists and both legs were broken, along with his back, and carbon black penetrated the bones of his face. A doctor who examined him wrote, “This patient will, in my opinion, be totally disabled for at least a year, and I doubt if he will ever be able to return to heavy labor.” Babe was placed on a morphine drip to relieve his acute pain, and that led him to alcohol. As predicted, he could never find full-time employment after that, so the family lived off his $300 a month in Social Security disability payments, along with whatever he could earn as what Tammie called a “shade-tree mechanic,” someone who “could fix anything with an engine, a car, a motorcycle or a truck, if you pulled it under a tree.”
Over time, Babe’s drinking got worse, and when he was drunk he’d beat his wife until her lips were split and her glasses were broken, Tammie said. “One time he got so drunk, he passed out and we tied him up and wanted to set him on fire,” Tammie recalled. “We begged our mother to let us burn him, but she said no.
“This happened so often and was so widespread in our family that we thought of it as normal family stuff, with the men violent or criminal or drunk and the women codependent,” Tammie said.
When she turned sixteen and was of legal age to marry, to get away from the troubles plaguing her family she decided to marry a young man she had met, Durrell Burden, whose own family were migrant farmworkers. As her father led her down the aisle of the local Baptist church, he had a sudden clarity of vision and said to Tammie, “Take off and run.”
“My dad really meant it,” Tammie said years later. “It was not a joke. He knew what that family was like and that I would just be repeating the same mistakes as the Bogles. It wasn’t a good omen.”
In fact, Tammie moved in with her husband’s family, and they were just like her own, except now it was Tammie’s new husband getting drunk most nights and she was the one taking the beatings. He was eventually sent to jail for being drunk and disorderly. By then Tammie was pregnant, and soon she was worried that her husband, when released, would beat her in the stomach and might injure their baby in the womb. After their son, Jason, was born, her husband became uncontrollably suspicious that the baby wasn’t his child and so increased the beatings, leaving Tammie unable to walk some days. When Jason was three months old, her husband beat Tammie and the baby she was holding in her arms, sending them crashing to the concrete floor.
“It was okay to beat me because I was worthless anyway,” Tammie recalled. “But it was not okay to beat my baby. So that was it. I called my mom and said come get me. I never went back to him.” She had just turned seventeen.
Tammie soon met and married her second husband, Curt James, who earlier had been sent to jail for attempted murder. He was originally from Missouri, and said he was a direct descendant of Jesse James. Even though he was on parole when they met, Tammie thought the marriage would work because they had been introduced by a friend in her church and James seemed to be doing really well at the time. “I thought it would be great,” Tammie recalled. “But he soon went back to doing drugs and started beating me, and even threatened to kill me if I told anyone about the beatings.” Tammie eventually had two daughters by James, Shannon and Amy, before she divorced him.
Tammie’s choices for husbands were what criminologists call “assortative mating,” selecting partners with similar characteristics, in this case men from families with criminal backgrounds, or a history of incarceration, drunkenness and violence much like that of her father and other Bogle relatives. This tendency, criminologists have found, is another explanation for the transmission of crime across generations. A Danish criminologist, drawing on Danish national statistics, has shown that “women who experienced parental contact with the criminal justice system when they were girls could transmit delinquency across generations through their choice of a partner.” This kind of assortative mating “makes women just as likely as men to transmit delinquency across generations,” concluded the criminologist, Lars Hojsgaard Andersen. In a way, this tendency to pick marriage partners with similar lifestyles and outlooks is like what political scientists and demographers have found in American politics in recent elections. Democrats and liberals are more likely to move to the northeast or the Pacific Coast, to Blue states, while Republicans and conservatives are more likely to cluster in the South or the Midwest, in Red states. Pollsters have come up with a name for it—the Big Sort.
In Tammie’s case, a few years after she divorced Curt James, she found herself in a small church outside Salem, where she met a tall, lean, muscular man about her age, thirty-five, with short sandy hair, long sideburns and a gunfighter mustache that drooped around the corners of his mouth. His eyes were a piercing blue and looked sad, until he smiled at Tammie. She had her own three children with her, plus the three children of her brother Louis and two of her foster children. Tammie was on her way to see Louis, and the man smiling at her volunteered to watch all the kids for her. His name was Steve Silver, and, as it turned out, he had grown up in foster care because his own father was in prison. Steve had also been sentenced to the MacLaren School for Boys as a teenager and later to the Oregon State Penitentiary, so he had “grown up in the system,” was how Tammie sized up the situation. Improbably, Steve had also become an ordained minister, and when he looked at Tammie and all the children and thought about Louis’s predicament, he quickly asked if he could go pray over Louis. During their drive to visit Louis, Tammie explained that she did foster care, and Steve asked her if she would have any trouble helping him with his own new work doing prison ministry, helping counsel convicts in prison with their spiritual needs and finding housing and jobs for men coming out of prison. “I just laughed at that and thought, You don’t have a clue, buddy.” So she told him, “The people in prison are my family. I’m used to going to prison to visit my family. It would be nice to help people in prison who are not my relatives. So, yes, I’m all for that.”
They started dating, and Tammie soon discovered that Steve was very good with her foster children. “My kids could never figure out how he always knew what they were up to. They couldn’t con him.”
Steve was in the process of putting together some friends from a church where he served as a minister to invest in a decrepit 1920s Roman Catholic nursing facility in a run-down neighborhood of Salem called St. Bernards. He planned to turn the sprawling building into a transition facility, or halfway house, for inmates coming out of the Oregon State Penitentiary and the Oregon State Correctional Institution. They were two of the prisons where the Bogles had been incarcerated: Rooster’s sons, Tony, Bobby, Tracey, Glen and Michael, as well as Steve himself and Tammie’s brothers Louis and Mark and her son, Jason. This would have been a huge challenge for a well-endowed and experienced charity, but Steve wanted to try the impossible. He told the Oregon State Department of Corrections he would take only inmates who had been convicted as sex offenders, the most troublesome to work with, given the nature of their crimes and the stringent legal restrictions they would now have to live under. As an indication of how difficult the task would be, there were no other places to live for newly released sex offenders in the Salem area. Many of these men would be homeless when they got out, which usually led to them getting into more trouble.
The rambling wooden two-story frame building was repainted a pleasant blue-gray and the interior cleaned and carpeted, all by the thirty-five residents Steve had initially accepted. In 1995, Steve renamed it Stepping Out Ministries, to signify the momentous action the newly released convicts were undertaking. Steve also directed the residents in building a weight room and a computer room. Steve and Tammie insisted that the home be Christian-based, with required nightly devotional Bible lessons. Given the constitutional separation of church and state, this meant that the government of Oregon could provide no funding, leaving the home’s finances dependent on the generosity of Steve’s investors and payments of $300 a month that each of the residents were supposed to make when they found work, which was a requirement for living there.
Steve was always careful not to say he belonged to any one denomination. “We are in the broad, Charismatic, Pentecostal tradition” was how he liked to describe his brand of Protestantism. “I see myself following in the path of the apostles, trying to do the Lord’s work, and my task is to work with these former offenders. I had to get over the corporate idea of being head of some large church.”
None of this came easily to Steve. He knew since childhood that there was a fine line between good and evil. It was not until Steve was in his thirties that he learned the man his mother told him was his father was really his stepfather and that his father had been in prison when he was born. His stepfather began sexually abusing Steve at the age of six, and later sold Steve to some friends for a bottle of whiskey. When Steve was fourteen, and full of anger, he ran away and began his own crime spree: robberies, burglaries, assaults, stolen cars and kidnappings. He ended up in prison for a total of five years. As he was being released, a guard said to him, “You’ll be back.” To which Steve replied, “You’ll have to kill me first.” Fearing he would be sent back to prison gradually led Steve to religion. “In a sense I lived up to my word,” Steve said. “I died, and now I’m a new man in Christ.” To keep himself from slipping, Steve decided to go back into prison to bring the lessons he had learned to other inmates. This led him to the idea of a prison ministry, and to Tammie.
Tammie already knew, from her own family, that she might be able to help save some relatives from alcohol, drugs and crime, but it was an ongoing struggle and some, she learned, she could not save.
There was her favorite brother, Louis, whose drug habit ended up leaving him paralyzed. There was her younger sister, Flory Bogle Black, who was sexually molested by their father when she was eleven and he was drunk. Soon after that Flory became a drug addict, starting with marijuana, and moving on to acid, cocaine, heroin and meth. “I would do what I could get,” Flory said. “When I didn’t have the money I’d hook up with someone who did, and I’d lose all my morals.” Flory had her first child at fourteen and was married at fifteen.
“You can’t get out of all that alone,” Flory recalled, “and Tammie would pray for me, but I hated that for a long time.” One day, high on drugs, she grabbed a knife from her husband at the time and stabbed a girl who was her best friend. Flory was charged with assault and was sent to jail for the first of many times.
While Flory was incarcerated, Tammie took custody of her three children. Both of Flory’s husbands were sentenced to prison, as was her son, Robert Wayne Cooper Jr., who was convicted of drug possession and stealing a car. Gary Black, her first husband, eventually died from a drug overdose.
“Flory has been to jail so many times even she doesn’t remember how many,” Tammie said. One time Flory went to Tammie’s house to say she had received a summons to appear in court for yet another arrest. “But she said she couldn’t remember when the date was because she ate the ticket,” Tammie said, laughing at the memory, even though it was more sad and pathetic than funny.
For a period of time, Flory worked in a center for mentally-ill seniors, but lost her license because of all the drugs and crime. Now, years later, Flory is finally off alcohol and drugs and she is going to church on Sundays, but she is homeless and lives in a small campsite with other homeless people on the banks of the Willamette River outside Salem. “Even if I had a house, this is what God wants me to do,” Flory told Tammie. “He wants me to help these people.” It is not much of a life, but Tammie thinks her sister is finally at peace.
There was also Tammie’s other brother, Mark Bogle, and his wife, Lori. They both have served multiple prison sentences for identity theft and manufacture of methamphetamine, living for a period of time in a cabin in a state park where they printed fake identification cards and bank checks using a computer. Mark and Lori also lost their son, Joshua, who was taken away by the state government under an Oregon law that says a couple cannot maintain custody of a child if they are both incarcerated for more than twelve consecutive months. Joshua was given up for adoption to another family by the state.
As time passed and more and more of Tammie’s family members were incarcerated, she often tried to estimate what all the drug and alcohol addiction and crime in her family cost to society. She had become convinced that the only way to stop the costs from increasing was to find a way to keep her Bogle relatives, when they got out of prison, from moving back in with their families, much like Judge Norblad had concluded.
“And not just for my family members,” Tammie said, “for other inmates getting out also. That’s why we established Stepping Out, as a different place for the men to go.” Otherwise, Tammie said, “they are continuing the vicious cycle.”
Their biggest success at Stepping Out was an inmate who initially refused to leave prison when he was released because “he was afraid of going home and cooking meth again,” Tammie said. “Then, when we opened Stepping Out, he came here and he stayed with us for eight years. He even got married, and now he is helping run another prison ministry facility.”
There is one widely respected academic study of the costs imposed on American society by a typical career criminal, starting at birth. It was derived by Professors Mark A. Cohen of the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University and Alex R. Piquero of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Their estimate considers not only the obvious costs such as the number of offenses a persistent offender commits over a lifetime, plus the average expense of a year in prison and the costs of maintaining police forces and court systems, but it also takes into account the social costs of pain and suffering caused by crime. The study concludes that a typical career criminal, like a member of the Bogle family, with six or more arrests, is likely to impose between $4.2 million and $7.2 million in costs on the United States. Considering that at least sixty Bogles have been sent to jail or prison, many for multiple years and multiple sentences, the study suggests that the total cost they have imposed on American society ranges between $252 million and $432 million. Whatever one’s politics, liberal or conservative or in between, that is a staggeringly high price.
In 2012, after Steve and Tammie had been running the big, rambling Stepping Out Ministries house for seventeen years, with three thousand former convicts having lived there before finding their own housing, they were stunned to discover they were being sued by the woman they had themselves appointed to be president of their board of directors. Her name was Sue Willard, and she worked as a paralegal for a lawyer in Portland. Willard charged Steve and Tammie with buying personal items like new cars with the ministry’s funds and charging other expenses including a hot tub and their cable-television bill on a ministry credit card. Willard’s accusations at first seemed frivolous, since Steve rode a secondhand Honda motorcycle and Tammie still drove the same battered van, and they didn’t have a hot tub. Believers in the biblical practice of tithing, Tammie and Steve had been giving 10 percent of their income to other churches around the Willamette Valley. The minutes of meetings of their board show that this tithing had been approved, but Willard contended it was embezzlement totaling as much as $39,000. With help from the lawyer she worked for, Willard went to court and got a no-trespassing order blocking both Steve and Tammie from setting foot in Stepping Out ever again. Steve and Tammie had no money to hire an attorney to defend themselves.
“Steve and I were in shock,” Tammie told me. “Here was this ministry we had founded—it was our whole life—and now we were being ordered to stay away. We had prayed with these men. It was crazy. I couldn’t believe it. All we wanted to do was help these men. For two weeks all I could do was cry.”
At Thanksgiving, which had been an important holiday at Stepping Out, when the residents, friends of theirs and volunteers got together to cook turkeys and hams and all the stuffing and cranberry sauce, Steve decided to take a chance and dropped in to wish everyone a happy holiday. Willard had taken the precaution of alerting the police, so an officer was on duty inside the building. Willard wanted the officer to arrest Steve for trespassing, but he was a friend of Steve’s and recognized the preposterousness of the situation, so he just asked Steve to leave the building.
Afterward, Steve and Tammie conducted their own investigation among the other directors and grew to suspect that Willard had fallen under the influence of a resident of the facility who had hoped to gain control of Stepping Out and siphon off its funds for himself. Whatever the case, Willard’s overthrow succeeded. Willard and the remaining directors later sold the building to the bigger and older Union Gospel Mission in Salem, and Stepping Out ceased to exist as a separate entity. Steve and Tammie lost their life’s work.
The county and state ultimately declined to press legal charges against them for fraud or embezzlement. Tammie now volunteers part-time at a free clinic in a Baptist church and helps take care of an elderly neighbor with dementia next to their trailer in the farm fields where she can still walk with Jesus in the mornings.
“It may be better this way,” Tammie said. “We now realize that by doing ministry full-time, you can lose your own identity.”