ABSTRACT
IGUESS I wanted to show everybody and me, too, that I’m a man! This was the explanation given the probation officer making the court-ordered presentence investigation of the “circumstances” that led to a twenty-one-year-old’s actions during a flare-up in a racially tense neighborhood. Without any vocational skills, a drop-out from the tenth grade (“What good would it have been, man?”), he had held only occasional, always menial jobs (“Poor pay, man!”). Of his family—three younger siblings and his divorced mother whose income came from her work as a file clerk, with intermittent public assistance—he said only “With me gone, they’ll have more bed room.”
