Crime

Doug Honig works for the ACLU in Washington State. They recently challenged a Seattle ruling which makes it a crime to panhandle aggressively, and to sit on sidewalks in the downtown district.

Maria Foscarinis is founder and executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. Foscarinis has been active in legal issues affecting the homeless since 1983. In 1985, she established the office of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington. She calls anti-panhandling laws inhumane and possibly unconstitutional, and works to prevent cities from passing laws which attempt to sweep people off the streets. She has litigated several federal laws which enforce the individual rights of homeless people.

New York City transit police officer Brendan McGarry. He's been at the job for 21 years. McGarry wrote (also in a recent New York Times article, 10 Apr 94) about the homeless and the panhandlers on the subways, "for a transit cop, they are a tough, unpleasant, sometimes dangerous part of a sometimes thankless job." McGarry complains the public misunderstands them and accuses them of mistreatment. But he says they've worked hard at finding shelter and services for the subway's homeless, setting up a homeless outreach unit.

Mary Previte, superintendent of the Camden County (NJ) Youth Center. Previte, the great granddaughter of missionary pioneer Hudson Taylor, grew up in China with her missionary parents. During World War II, she and her fellow students and teachers spent three years in a Japanese concentration camp. Previte credits the structure her teachers' created with making the horrific experience bearable. For the past twenty years, Previte has run the youth center, a holding center for boys and girls charged with serious crimes.

Writer Mikal Gilmore, youngest brother of executed killer Gary Gilmore. Gilmore's 1977 death --at his own request-- by firing squad in Utah, was the first American execution in ten years. Brother Mikal finds seeds of his brother's two murders sown far back in Gilmore family history, and its Mormon roots.

Journalist and author Lawrence Wright. Wright's latest book is "Remembering Satan: A Case of Recovered Memory and the Shattering of an American Family" (Knopf) Wright explores the nature of memory and the notions of recovered memory and repression. "Remembering Satan" is the story of Paul Ingram and his family. Ingram was a Washington state deputy sheriff. His two grown daughters accused him of sexually abusing them. They said that Ingram and other members of the sheriff's department had committed Satanic ritual atrocities.

Colombian journalist Maria Jimena Duzan helped expose the connection between Colombia's drug traffickers and the nation's military in 1988. Duzan and her paper, El Espectador, were the targets of death threats and attacks. By 1990 all of the members of the paper's former investigative unit were either dead or in exile. Duzan went into exile, but her sister, a documentary film maker, was murdered. Duzan returned to Columbia in 1992. She has a new book, "Death Beat: A Colombian Journalist's Life Inside the Cocaine Wars." (HarperCollins)

Lionel Dahmer is the father of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who committed some of the most ghastly crimes imaginable. Lionel has written a new memoir about his life with his son, "A Father's Story." (William Morrow), in which he tries to understand what happened to his son, and how he could turn into such a monster.

Author and museum director James Cameron. Sixty four years ago, an organized mob of more than 10,000 white men and women dragged Cameron and two other black teenage men from a jail cell in Marion, Indiana. The mob mercilessly beat the three young men. They lynched two. Cameron was spared. In 1984, he recounted this experience in his memoir "A Time of Terror" (Available now from Black Classic Press). Then in 1988, Cameron founded the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.

Journalist Erik Larson of the Wall Street Journal. Larson has been on the show before to talk about polling, privacy and direct marketing and about how a gun goes from the manufacturer to the hands of a teenager. In fact he's written a new book, "Lethal Passage: How the Travels of a Single Handgun Expose the Roots of America's Gun Crisis," (Crown Publishers). Today Terry will talk again with Larson about guns, about gun control laws, the NRA, etc. Larson is also the author of "The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities."

Terry talks with a young man who has been through the program at the Camden County Youth Center, a juvenile detention center in Camden, New Jersey: Derrek Penny.

Mary Previte. She's the administrator of the Camden County Youth Center. Over the 19 years she's been at the CCYC, Previte has witnessed the increase of violence in our society, and the effects on among America's young. Previte says that most of the kids she sees live in terror, knowing violence as the only way to express their emotions. Fourteen years ago Previte started a student newspaper called "What's Happening", establishing a dialogue between herself, the kids, and the community.

Terry talks with two young men who've been through the program at the Camden County Youth Center, a juvenile detention center in Camden, New Jersey: Eddie Budah and Derrek Penny. Budah will read some of his poetry that has appeared in the Center's newsletter, "What's Happening."

Novelist Albert French. He found inspiration for his first novel, "Billy" (Viking), in the true story of an 11-yr-old getting the electric chair in the 1930's. "Billy," is the story of the "legal lynching" of a ten year old boy in the deep south who inadvertently kills a white girl. French writes in "Delta" dialect, epitomizing racial hatred in America. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

Ed Ryder and Reverend James McCloskey The story of one man's fight for freedom. Three days after Ryder arrived at Holmesburg prison to do time for theft, he was accused of murdering a prisoner in his cell block. For twenty years, Ryder fought to prove his innocence... the city of Philadelphia rallying behind him. Reverend James McCloskey, who helps prisoners he believes are unjustly convicted get pardons, spearheaded the efforts for Ryder's release. Now Ryder is a free man.

Martin Espada, a poet, tenant's right attorney, and now Assistant Professor of English at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Brooklyn born -in 1957- of Puerto Rican heritage, he calls his work, "poems of advocacy, based on the lives ...consigned to silence." Espada was lauded by PEN/Revson Award for Poetry for giving "dignity to the insulted and injured of the earth." Poet Carolyn Forche describes Espada as "that subversive someone we know." His new book of poems is "City of Coughing and Dead Radiators" (Norton).

Director Brian De Palma. Now 53, he's the son of a orthopedic surgeon in Philadelphia, and sometimes watched his father's surgeries. Perhaps this explains the frequent depiction of blood and violence in many of his films, which include "Carrie", "Dressed to Kill", "The Fury", and "Scarface". His thrillers were often compared with those of Hitchcock.

Commentator Maureen Corrigan reviews "The Morning After," by Katie Roiphe. (Little, Brown).

For over 15 years, Linda Fairstein has directed the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit of the Manhattan D.A.'s office. The unit was the first of it's kind, and has become a model for others in cities across the country. When Fairstein began working there, rape cases were rarely tried in court, rape victims were stigmatized, and there was little understanding about rape in society. Over the years, Fairstein and her colleagues have made great strides in combating such crimes, and improving conviction rates.

Ellroy sets his novels in 1950's LA, where he grew up. His series of novels, "LA Quartet," was a bestseller. His latest novel is called "Hollywood Nocturnes." When Ellroy was ten, his mother was murdered near their LA home. He wrote an article about returning to LA to go through the police files on his mother for this month's issue of GQ, where he is a contributing editor. He'll talk today about how his mother's murder led to his crime writing.