Wrong time. Wrong place. Just ask Charley Pernasilice. Well, you could have asked him until his death last December. You might have seen his obituary recently in The New York Times.
Charley’s story shows how things can spiral downhill if not completely out of control. Bad luck can seem to follow bad luck and, without adult supervision or with incompetent if not evil intent by some people, things can escalate into calamity or even conflagration.
The leader’s responsibility in potential escalatory situations is to defuse, disarm, and get to truth. That means learning how to take a deep breath in stressful conditions and not instantly reacting or overreacting. It means asking questions to seek real-time clarity, engaging in active listening, and seeing beyond your assumptions. It means not saying or doing things that make matters worse. It means helping people not do stupid things. It also means to care enough to remove bad actors interested in escalating matters or disinterested in doing the right thing.
Charley’s story? Hold on to your hat:
- He was a wayward 15-year-old kid who stole a neighbor’s motorcycle in upstate New York.
- The neighbor refused to press charges but the police did so anyway.
- Charley was sentenced in 1967 to two years in juvenile detention.
- He jumped parole in 1970, was arrested for hitchhiking in Utah in 1971 and returned to New York.
- There was no room in the juvenile detention facility so the 19-year-old was transferred to a prison to await a hearing.
- That prison? The disgracefully dangerous and overcrowded Attica.
- Two weeks after he arrived, Attica exploded into monstrous riots with 43 prisoners and guards dying mostly from law enforcement’s indiscriminate gunfire.
- Some guards were beaten by prisoners. One of the guards died from his injuries and, while Charley had nothing to do with it, he was charged with murder.
- With no evidence against him, the murder charge was dropped but Charley was still charged with assault and sentenced to two years in prison.
- He was repeatedly beaten in prison by vengeful guards.
This was all an unfathomable escalation that started with a 15-year-old kid stealing a neighbor’s motorcycle.
Charley was no innocent, of course, and he was clearly to blame for some of his demise. It was corrupt and indifferent systems, however, that owned far greater escalatory responsibility. There was no adult supervision and there certainly was a breathtaking lack of leadership, judgment, ethics, and justice throughout this dirty chapter. After all, he was just some disrespectful kid who, in some people's thinking, had what was coming to him no matter what he said or did.
(As an aside, I was in my early 30s and having lunch with somebody who served on Governor Rockefeller’s Attica Review Commission. I asked, “What was Attica like?” The response? “Oh, I never went there.” So much for wanting a firsthand sense of conditions, causes, and solutions.)
.webp)
Charley's image courtesy of The New York Times.