If justice treats everyone the same way, chances are that pretty soon I will be meeting Justin Timberlake. The recurrent meeting would take place behind bars, and if that is the case he would be donning a green prison uniform. It sounds like a joke, but it is not.
On Tuesday June 18, a few minutes after midnight, the singer/actor was arrested for driving while intoxicated. He spent a night in a cell at the police headquarters in Sag Harbor, on the East End of Long Island. The details have been widely reported.
Timberlake left the fancy American Hotel on Main Street late at night, got behind the wheel of his brand new BMW and sped away. Literally within a couple of blocks he was spotted by a policeman ignoring a stop sign. The cop started following the gray BMW and once again observed a driving pattern consistent with drunken driving. The vehicle repeatedly crossed the divider. The policeman pulled the driver over unaware of who was doing the driving. He smelled alcohol on his breath and observed glassy eyes. That’s when he asked him to take a breathalyzer. Timberlake refused, claiming to have had only one Martini. Nonetheless, he failed on-the-spot sobriety tests and was arrested. In the morning hours, after a night in a small holding cell, he was escorted to the Sag Harbor Village Justice Court. There, he appeared in front of a local judge. He is scheduled to be arraigned on July 26.
What will happen if Justin Timberlake is found guilty? Will he have to pay a fine and walk away free? Or will he be sent to jail? And if that was to be the case, will I get to meet him? This is not wishful thinking. I am not salivating at the idea of rubbing elbows with a celebrity. I am just connecting the dots.
The reader might wonder what Timberlake’s one Martini — or several Martinis, who knows? — have to do with me. The first accidental connection is that I am a resident of nearby East Hampton and extremely familiar with the geography of the land. I can close my eyes and visualize the American Hotel; the intersection with Madison Street where Timberlake failed to stop; the police department on Division Street; and the nearby courthouse.
But there is another part of Long Island I am very familiar with: the jail in Yaphank. For the past year and a half, I have been going there weekly and meeting with groups of inmates — males and females. I’m a so-called “service provider”. The service I provide is memoir writing workshops. The purpose is to make participants think, process and reflect on their lives and the choices they made. What most of “my” incarcerated people have in common is that they ended up in jail due to criminal charges related to substance abuse.
Now, let me connect the American Hotel to this jail. Sag Harbor is in Suffolk County and so is Yaphank. Crimes committed in Suffolk County often mean time served behind bars at SCCF (Suffolk County Correctional Facility.) It is there where many Long Island residents guilty of DUI end up in a special rehabilitating program offered by the Sheriff’s Department. It is known with the acronym SATP, which stands for Sheriff’s Addiction Treatment Program. This is an initiative meant to help incarcerated individuals with criminal charges that stem from abusing drugs or alcohol. The hope is that their time in jail will remain an isolated episode, instead of a revolving door in and out of jail.
Let me make it very clear that I don’t know whether Timberlake was driving intoxicated, nor do I know whether a judge will find his actions worthy of time in jail. I am just saying that many of the incarcerated people I deal with are there because the excessive use of alcohol or drugs leads them to commit acts that are considered criminal. Inmates participate in several programs, memoir writing is one of them. The idea is not to turn them into published authors. Rather, my workshops are a powerful tool in their hands. They are a form of introspective therapy without the presence of a therapist in the room.
A parallel workshop with a similar goal in mind is the photography workshop brought to Yaphank by photographer Saskia Keeley. Inmates photograph each other and learn to capture feelings and emotions; thus, revealing their frame of mind behind bars.
For privacy reasons I cannot go into details. Several of the people I work with are awaiting sentencing; therefore, I cannot name names nor can I get into specific situations. Additionally, I do not require inmates to write about the crime or crimes that landed them in jail. I prompt them to develop a narrative on a variety of topics and it is up to them to choose whether they want to write about their drug or alcohol addiction and their criminal behavior.
Suffice it to say that many months ago one of the incarcerated participants in my workshops was a person who had left Sag Harbor highly inebriated and ended up in a terrible accident. There was also a guy who went to a concert in New York and on his way back got into a bad accident due to DUI. And then there was a young woman who was driving impaired and was involved in a hit-and-run accident.
But you don’t need a dead body to end up behind bars in Yaphank. I remember a lovely young inmate who ended up in jail because she had been arrested for the third time driving under the influence of alcohol. The additional crime was that her children were in her car. All this to say that DUI arrests and jail time are real.
People drink, do drugs, drive, get into trouble, end up at Yaphank. When they are lucky, they get out of Yaphank after a bunch of months. When they are not lucky, they are there awaiting sentencing and they end up somewhere upstate for years and years. It is not for me to judge whether the system is serving society right by locking people up. But I can comfortably say that these situations are frequent, painful, and life changing. Jail is real and people behind bars are not necessarily lowlife bad criminals. More often than not they are good people who made bad choices. Getting behind the wheel intoxicated was one of them.
I don’t know what is going to happen to Justin Timberlake, but it struck me as odd that a patron at the American Hotel who was randomly interviewed on NPR the day after the arrest dismissed the event as a big media circus. “After all, he didn’t kill anyone,” he said. True. Because if he had killed someone, I would imagine he would be heading upstate and locked up for a long time. But the fact that he didn’t kill anyone does not mean that he could not have been mortally dangerous, as the men and women I work with in Yaphank know very well.
Will I meet Justin Timberlake in Recovery Room 1 where I meet the men and women once every week? I can only hope that justice is the same for everyone. And the judicial criteria that was applied to the inmates I’ve been working with is applied in equal measure to a celebrity. I don’t wish ill on a celebrity. Being famous is not a crime. I just feel the pain of the many unknown people I work with whose lives changed from one moment to the next. Fame or anonymity, no matter what.
