Poking at how various circumstances emerge from this mess and how characters are shifted around by those is completely fascinating, even when I'm theoretically in the driver's seat. (I've learned that I'm rarely if ever actually in the driver's seat of these things. Or, if I am, the steering is crummy and the acceleration is wonky and there are no brakes.)
One of the fun things I've discovered is that this Peter is politically active, but mostly in a 'write-your-congressman' sort of way; he finds the whole CCCR thing deeply intolerable, and has to tolerate it because it's what there is. But that sort of quietly fixing-the-rules-by-the-rules is how he knows June, and in this universe, he's the one who gets Neal settled in with June, because she's also an abolitionist, because, well, you can just imagine what happened to Byron under this plan.
(Okay, in reality, he probably just made sure that she was one of the people offering contract bids, because I'm sure that the FBI has some kind of contractor requirement that passes everything through a bid system. But June is independently wealthy and can undercut the big industrial Conditional Citizen housing companies and give her tenants a decent place to stay if she wants to.)
And Neal, while he's still maneuvering to the best of his ability to put himself in the best possible position, not only has to deal with less experience on his own/on the wrong side of the law, but also with a society which has a lot more resources dedicated to securing and tracking convicts and a lot more cultural awareness of and resistance to people trying to skip on their sentence. (Hence the much more difficult-to-cut trackers, and the fact that with the GPS in there, even something like an underground railroad would have a much harder time helping anyone. And there's probably some kind of national hotline, with rewards and everything (funded by the labor of increased CCCR points applied for an escape attempt?) for information leading to the recapture of escaped slaves leasees. It's just such an American institution that unless you can get into Canada, or something, you're not going to have a lot of luck. ...and wow, I hadn't thought of needing to clarify Canada's stance on this, but I guess I need to figure that out, now.)
Add to that the fact that someone like Myrvold can pretty much stick leased convicts into dormitories at night, have private security load them into vans and transport them to a work site during the day, then have those same private security ship them back to the dormitories at the end of the day and guard all the exits, and not be under any obligation to provide anything so much as newpapers, TV or internet, the effect is that you can end up completely isolated from the outside world and under constant surveillance, and the close quarters of dormitory living doesn't even afford as much anonymity as an individual prison cell.
Which leads to an interesting later snippet I've been poking at, wherein Neal is sneaking around June's house one night being very careful not to be seen or heard, and ends up overhearing a conversation between June and Peter, about him. June wants to see if Neal would be eventually amenable to sitting down with a reporter who might be doing a piece on abuses of the points system, because "[...]he's articulate, photogenic, personable, when he lets himself be. And he's received exactly the kind of treatment we're talking about. With a little media training, he could have the whole nation eating out of his hand. He could be a gamechanger." (June in this 'verse seems to be one hell of a media-savvy lady.) And Peter doesn't even want to ask Neal if he'd be amenable, because "I'm his direct supervisor, and you're handling his lodging. I think that no matter how we phrase it, it's going to come across as coercion." And goes on to say that "[...]he's spent a lot of time with the illusion of choice. I can tell when we offer him one, sometimes, he's still looking for the right answer to satisfy me, not thinking critically about the problem. I'm not even sure he knows he's doing it."
Which is more or less when Neal decides that he's heard more than enough of this conversation, and sneaks back up to the penthouse, where he gets to really pissed-off, because okay, yeah, he does that. And he's usually aware of what he's doing, but there's also the thing where a lot of it is conditioned response. If he isn't thinking, that is the behavior that slips out automatically, because that's the behavior that has served him well thus far.
And:
That was one of the things they said – career criminals, by which they meant lifelong leasees, got to watch their critical thinking skills deteriorate; they became domesticated, unsuited to making their own decisions, unsuited for anything but a life under the stewardship and careful direction of their leaseholders. It was propaganda, but everything about conds was propaganda. Peter and June were sitting at the table downstairs deciding whether or not to buy into that propaganda or offer him the choice to make propaganda of his own.
–and besides, if he didn't know how to make his own choices, whose fault was that, exactly? And did Peter intend to fix it by making sure he didn't have choices to make?
And perhaps one of the most painful bits of that entire little knot is that he gets to go up to his apartment and quietly bottle up all the anger (and resolve not to talk about it, because admitting that he was eavesdropping seems like a bad idea) and lock it in the little root cellar in the back of his head, so that he can put on a pleasant, agreeable face for when he has to interact with people again. Because for seven years, there has not been a safe way for him to express or externalize anger.
(...one of these days he's going to blow up at Peter, and damn, that'll be something. He'll probably end up having the Neal Caffrey version of an anxiety attack, while Peter gets to figure out how he's supposed to communicate that, yes, okay, he's pissed too, but not in the way that's going to get Neal reclassified as a violent criminal or extend his sentence or anything. And Elizabeth will probably see it as a breakthrough and bake them a cake. A coffeecake. For their perfectly-routine-totally-not-celebrating-a-breakthrough-or-providing-emotional-support-and-aftercare workin'-on-a-case-at-the-Burkes'-house brunch.)
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2013-06-23 12:07 am (UTC)One of the fun things I've discovered is that this Peter is politically active, but mostly in a 'write-your-congressman' sort of way; he finds the whole CCCR thing deeply intolerable, and has to tolerate it because it's what there is. But that sort of quietly fixing-the-rules-by-the-rules is how he knows June, and in this universe, he's the one who gets Neal settled in with June, because she's also an abolitionist, because, well, you can just imagine what happened to Byron under this plan.
(Okay, in reality, he probably just made sure that she was one of the people offering contract bids, because I'm sure that the FBI has some kind of contractor requirement that passes everything through a bid system. But June is independently wealthy and can undercut the big industrial Conditional Citizen housing companies and give her tenants a decent place to stay if she wants to.)
And Neal, while he's still maneuvering to the best of his ability to put himself in the best possible position, not only has to deal with less experience on his own/on the wrong side of the law, but also with a society which has a lot more resources dedicated to securing and tracking convicts and a lot more cultural awareness of and resistance to people trying to skip on their sentence. (Hence the much more difficult-to-cut trackers, and the fact that with the GPS in there, even something like an underground railroad would have a much harder time helping anyone. And there's probably some kind of national hotline, with rewards and everything (funded by the labor of increased CCCR points applied for an escape attempt?) for information leading to the recapture of escaped
slavesleasees. It's just such an American institution that unless you can get into Canada, or something, you're not going to have a lot of luck. ...and wow, I hadn't thought of needing to clarify Canada's stance on this, but I guess I need to figure that out, now.)Add to that the fact that someone like Myrvold can pretty much stick leased convicts into dormitories at night, have private security load them into vans and transport them to a work site during the day, then have those same private security ship them back to the dormitories at the end of the day and guard all the exits, and not be under any obligation to provide anything so much as newpapers, TV or internet, the effect is that you can end up completely isolated from the outside world and under constant surveillance, and the close quarters of dormitory living doesn't even afford as much anonymity as an individual prison cell.
Which leads to an interesting later snippet I've been poking at, wherein Neal is sneaking around June's house one night being very careful not to be seen or heard, and ends up overhearing a conversation between June and Peter, about him. June wants to see if Neal would be eventually amenable to sitting down with a reporter who might be doing a piece on abuses of the points system, because "[...]he's articulate, photogenic, personable, when he lets himself be. And he's received exactly the kind of treatment we're talking about. With a little media training, he could have the whole nation eating out of his hand. He could be a gamechanger." (June in this 'verse seems to be one hell of a media-savvy lady.) And Peter doesn't even want to ask Neal if he'd be amenable, because "I'm his direct supervisor, and you're handling his lodging. I think that no matter how we phrase it, it's going to come across as coercion." And goes on to say that "[...]he's spent a lot of time with the illusion of choice. I can tell when we offer him one, sometimes, he's still looking for the right answer to satisfy me, not thinking critically about the problem. I'm not even sure he knows he's doing it."
Which is more or less when Neal decides that he's heard more than enough of this conversation, and sneaks back up to the penthouse, where he gets to really pissed-off, because okay, yeah, he does that. And he's usually aware of what he's doing, but there's also the thing where a lot of it is conditioned response. If he isn't thinking, that is the behavior that slips out automatically, because that's the behavior that has served him well thus far.
And:
And perhaps one of the most painful bits of that entire little knot is that he gets to go up to his apartment and quietly bottle up all the anger (and resolve not to talk about it, because admitting that he was eavesdropping seems like a bad idea) and lock it in the little root cellar in the back of his head, so that he can put on a pleasant, agreeable face for when he has to interact with people again. Because for seven years, there has not been a safe way for him to express or externalize anger.
(...one of these days he's going to blow up at Peter, and damn, that'll be something. He'll probably end up having the Neal Caffrey version of an anxiety attack, while Peter gets to figure out how he's supposed to communicate that, yes, okay, he's pissed too, but not in the way that's going to get Neal reclassified as a violent criminal or extend his sentence or anything. And Elizabeth will probably see it as a breakthrough and bake them a cake. A coffeecake. For their perfectly-routine-totally-not-celebrating-a-breakthrough-or-providing-emotional-support-and-aftercare workin'-on-a-case-at-the-Burkes'-house brunch.)