Bobby Bogle had never read a book about criminology. He knew even less about the research showing that 5 percent of families account for half of all crime, and that 10 percent of families account for two-thirds of all crime. But he had learned, instinctively, from his own family, that crime often runs in families. After all, Bobby has been locked up in a series of juvenile reformatories and adult prisons since he was twelve years old, and his eight brothers and sisters have all been incarcerated themselves. Altogether, with a little figuring, Bobby could count at least sixty members of his own extended family who have been sentenced to jail or prison or placed on probation or parole—in other words, put under the supervision of the criminal justice system. Like other members of the Bogle clan, Bobby had come to believe they lived under a curse of crime, where crime was an incurable virus that had infected them. “My brothers always end up here eventually,” Bobby said during an interview in the Oregon State Penitentiary. “They always show up. It’s an honorable thing to do for your family, as a criminal. It’s normal.”
But even Bobby was not prepared for the day when he met Jeremy Vanwagner, a youthful-looking inmate with big, protruding ears like many members of his family. They were out in the penitentiary’s exercise yard and they got to talking. “This new guy says he is from a town called Angola, Indiana, and suddenly a wave of excitement came over me. It made me want to jump,” Bobby later told me. “It sounded very familiar to me because when I was fourteen in 1977 I met a woman named Ginger who worked with my mother in a nursing home, and we followed her back to her hometown, Angola, Indiana,” Bobby said.
Ginger was a year older than Bobby and she was very open sexually, and pretty soon they were sleeping together. Bobby noticed that “she had a large birthmark on her butt.” He also remembered that he contracted gonorrhea from Ginger and that his mother took him to a local hospital for treatment.
Now, out in the prison yard, Bobby asked Jeremy when he was born, and Jeremy answered that it was 1978, which fit the timing Bobby was calculating in his head. Jeremy could be his son. Bobby then asked Jeremy what his mother’s name was. Jeremy said she was named Ginger.
With that, Bobby grew more cautious. In prison you never wanted to reveal too much. It could open you up to a fight, or create enemies or some gang grudge. But Bobby also felt something he had never felt before—that he might have a son, an experience all those years of incarceration had denied him. So, without explaining anything, Bobby invited Jeremy to be his cellmate, since his previous cellie had recently been released.
Once they were sharing the five-by-seven-foot cell, with two steel bunks stacked one on top of the other, Bobby mentioned that he had known a Ginger from Angola, Indiana, and that she had a birthmark on her rear end.
“I was amazed,” Jeremy said during a prison interview. “I had no idea who my father was. My mother just said my father was a gangster and a gypsy, and now here was Bobby, who had a gypsy tattoo and said his family were gypsies.” Bobby even knew about his mother’s birthmark. “This whole thing just landed in my lap,” Jeremy said. “I was not upset about my father being in prison. I was glad to finally find out who my father was.”
Jeremy’s mother had been an alcoholic who beat him when she was drunk when he was young, Jeremy told Bobby. And she had boyfriends who hit him in the head with a baseball bat and a golf club, and he had the scars to prove it. Jeremy said that, as a result of this physical abuse, he had run away from home and got into drugs and stealing cars and was eventually caught and sent to prison.
Bobby and Jeremy found themselves talking for hours about what the story of their lives and its intersection meant. Jeremy later said, “It really helped me to find my father. He helped me to see there is such a thing as a true family. I had missed a lot of important things in my life.”
For Bobby, ending up in the same prison cell as his son produced some unfamiliar introspection. It had long been an accepted fact of his life that his father and uncles and his older brother, Tony, had passed on a criminal life to him. They were living exemplars, right in his father’s house, of how crime can run in a family. But how, exactly, Bobby now wondered, did that criminal proclivity get passed on to Jeremy, a son he had never met. “I became afraid that there was something genetically wrong with me and our family. That we were doomed,” Bobby told me.
After three years of being a cellmate with his father, Jeremy was scheduled to be released in 2012. Bobby knew his own earliest possible release date would not be until 2023, and even that depended on a decision by the parole board, which would not be favorably inclined, given Bobby’s record. So Bobby set himself an unusual task. “I told Jeremy, you are ruining me, man,” Bobby said. “I lived a life without love from my family, so I had to be hard, without emotions, to survive in prison. I was a very messed-up human being. Now you’ve showed me a different way from outlaw culture.”
Bobby said he had a big request to ask of Jeremy. “When you get out, don’t mess up. Stop the crime. I don’t want to see you back here.”
That was five years ago, and Jeremy has not gone back to prison. That was another way to break the cycle: create a strong family bond.