There was always that family. Call them a “cursed” clan, in which every generation inherited its parents’ easy rapport with sin and retribution. From truancy and shoplifting to bootlegging and burglary, they might have chalked it up to bad luck and blamed their nosy neighbors for their bum reputation. Or they might, like the subject of Fox Butterfield’s latest familial deep dive, take perverse pride in their criminal lot, every son wanting to be just as bad as his brother.
Part of the pleasure of the unseemly story Butterfield unspools is its universality. The existence—in seemingly every predominantly white American hamlet of the upper south, at least—of a family whose sons were always in and out of prison and daughters always between bad marriages (if they weren’t full criminals, too) feels about as reliable a fixture as the county sheriff. The Bogles, Butterfield’s subject here, will ring familiar even if you’ve never personally known anyone like them.
It helps, too, that In My Father’s House handles the Bogles with reporterly remove. As he did in 1995’s All God’s Children, which traced the African-American Bosket family through generations from antebellum South Carolina to New York City, he narrates the detailed lives of Bogle after bad Bogle punctuated by sociological interludes. Since the sociology is cold and colorless on its own, the crimes of the Bogles—including a salmon hatchery heist, countless scams, and the theft of a long haul truckload of liquid sugar—seem almost abusively vivid. A back-and-forth between soft science and hard, though outlandish, truths has the effect of reminding the reader that what we learn here of the Bogles is not altogether unique. Indeed, as we follow their crime-ridden caravan from Tennessee to Texas to Oregon, they could be any one of those families.
Not 10—as he’d initially heard when, seeking a subject to follow All God’s Children, a source brought up the Bogles—but at least 60 of them were incarcerated across these generations, Butterfield tells us. And this isn’t so striking a fact as it seems, he explains, given that “5 percent of all families account for half of all crime,” according to Cambridge University criminologist David Farrington whose intergenerational study Butterfield refers to, and “10 percent of families account for two-thirds of all crime.” Crime isn’t purely a product of circumstance or character, he sets out to prove. It thrives on a value system, or a lack of one, reinforced most effectively by kin.
And so, when you’re a Bogle, the inevitability of becoming one’s parents means prison time. Butterfield focuses most of his attention on three generations of one branch of the family, in which Elvie and Louis Bogles’ sons followed their grandmothers into incarceration, both of whom had led liminal lives that ended in Texas mental institutions—and had accustomed young Elvie and Louis to the outer edges of acceptability in the Prohibition-era South. She was a daring motordrome driver, a carny, and a con-artist. He was a moonshiner. Their sons were troublemakers. Rooster Bogle, Elvie’s favorite, strove to outdo his older brothers’ already infamous fighting, thieving, and drinking. He wasn’t just born into the family mold but indoctrinated from birth into its mythos—and so, he set out to be baddest Bogle he could be. For this, Elvie loved him the most. Stints in prison didn’t chasten him, Butterfield writes, as he returned home to his insistently enabling mother. Even when Rooster moved his wife and family to Salem, Oregon, Elvie and her powerful influence followed.
Criminological studies show this to be a typical pattern: Ex-convicts who did not return home to their old social networks after their release were 15 percent less likely to wind up back in prison within three years, according to findings by Oxford professor David Kirk. Butterfield compares these findings to Italian interventions into the Mafia’s generational chain, a state-run program that takes children from their mob-affiliated families and places them in foster homes.
Just as Rooster pushed himself to outdo his brothers, his son Tony aspired to follow his father in breaking the law. As a teen, he was repeatedly relegated to state-run mental hospitals—which he escaped multiple times, once by arson—and twice to a reform school renowned for cruelty and abuse. It was there that “sexual deviancy” with another boy would land him in the Oregon State Penitentiary as a teenager. Not so many years before, Rooster drove Tony and his brothers by the prison’s Salem campus years before, telling them to get used to the sight of it. Because before long, they’d wind up there too.
Tony’s brother Bobby followed him in due course. Tony wrote to him in a different, nearby, state correctional institution, where he was serving an 18 sentence for hijacking a truck with their younger brother Tracey. And in his letter, Tony challenged Bobby to “do something crazy” enough to spur a reunion: Sure enough, he started a fire in prison and joined his brother for a lengthier sentence in maximum security. Like their father before them, the Bogle brothers were locked “in a perpetual competition to see who could be the baddest, or in their minds the greatest, outlaw.”
Criminal heredity, while hardly a new subject, finds confirmation not just in the Bogle stories but in the studies Butterfield cites: Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, at Harvard Law School in the 1940s, found that two-thirds of the boys in Boston’s reform schools had fathers in prison, half had grandfathers who’d been arrested, and 45 percent had mothers who’d crossed the law.
When Tracey Bogle, the youngest of the three, was released from prison in 2009 after close to 20 years’ incarceration, he asked Butterfield to pick him up. Everyone else he knew was behind bars. And, in the aftermath of his release, Butterfield observed Tracey’s seemingly inevitable slide—from community college and a new social circle, to heavy drinking and refusing drug tests, a parole violation that would land him back in prison.
There is no “criminal gene,” per the sociological consensus. But environmental factors aren’t the only strain tying together the Bogles’ long line of crimes. There is no single satisfying explanation for their “curse.” But its stubbornness, told in reportorial sequence, makes undeniable sense. No one ever departs absolutely from the cycles our parents and their parents set in place before us. It’s true of course that, in every family, however law-abiding they are, a certain hardwiring gets set early in life under the generally unintended guidance of parents and siblings. It determines how we make consequential decisions all our lives.
The Bogles’ destiny was so deeply ingrained as to preclude therapeutic intervention, according to the pioneering psychiatrist and behavioral scientist Scott Henggeler who told Butterfield his family therapy program, which advocates for children’s removal from deviant peers among other interventions, wouldn’t break the powerfully reinforced Bogle chain of crime. “The Bogles’ own family is their deviant peer group,” Butterfield wrote, adding that, per Heneggler’s assessment, the best recourse for a Bogle seeking to go straight “‘might be to move away.’”
But there are Bogles who’ve broken the chain without doing so. Chief among them is Tony Bogle’s daughter, Rooster’s granddaughter, Ashley. Butterfield saves her story for last. Ashley earned a college degree, “the first Bogle in 150 years,” and now commutes to work every day at an Oregon hospital—and every day, she drives past the state prison where many in her family have made lengthy stays. She’s never too far from a reminder of what it means to be a Bogle. Or, what it used to mean.
