What We Talk About When We Talk About Hot Felons
It’s an easy joke, but there’s probably more to Jeremy Meeks than his viral mugshot
Jeremy Meeks is hot. I mean, objectively model-hot. In many ways he looks like a felon, which he is—his mother claims he’s being profiled due to his tattoos. But when you photoshop his mugshot into a Givenchy or Calvin Klein ad, as people have been doing since it went viral, he looks completely at home. I’ve occasionally seen “hot mugshots” going around the internet—usually young white women, usually in Florida, usually taken during Spring Break—but never with this much fanfare. And normally I’m all for unabashed female gazing and accompanied male squirming, but this time it bothers me.
There is a mountain of evidence—differences in sentencing, arrest rates, etc.—that our judicial system is racist and classist. Adam Dawson’s very excellent series “An Ex-Con Reviews Orange is the New Black,” which deals with the show’s rose-tinted portrayal of federal prison, reminds us that “a white blonde girl who went out and willfully fucked up and committed armed robbery…got five years. There were tons of black girls in…prison who were holding onto a bag of dope for a couple of days, and they always seemed to get, like, 10 years.” More and more inmates are held because of an inability to pay court costs; more and more live in overcrowded, dangerous, and squalid conditions. But while it is easy to voice support for those who are falsely imprisoned or jailed for killing their abusers, it’s understandably difficult to say an admitted rapist deserves more blankets or better health care. Drug dealers, murderers, armed robbers—part of us thinks “they made antisocial choices, so why should we work hard to treat them well?” Although we and the DOJ pay a lot of lip service to reducing recidivism and prison as a place for rehabilitation, ultimately our prisons are a place to punish, and to punish some more than others. And we know that, but we don’t like to think about it.
If we strip the humanity and identity from offenders it’s a little easier to swallow. You often hear it in arguments about capital punishment, that people who have committed crimes of that magnitude must be evil inside and out, devoid of the shades of grey found in all humans. Similarly, if we objectify Jeremy Meeks, we can ignore what’s in store for him. Jokes about “he can rob me any time” or “when are the conjugal visits” let us gloss over the meaning of his crime and incarceration. Reduce him to the beautiful brute, and you could be the Jane to his Tarzan. This is impossibly easy to do when all you have of someone is a mugshot posted to Facebook.
When criminals are not people at the hands of a system designed to oppress the most vulnerable, they can be funny TV show characters, or dreamboats, or whatever you want. And you can forget about the system, the fact that we allow other humans to be treated horribly and never really talk about it.
I think people are surprised to find out I’m related to a felon. I’m white, my background was working-class but very stable (both parents around and no periods of unemployment), I went to a four-year private university on scholarship and have only worked white-collar jobs since graduation. A family history of substance abuse and mental health issues certainly made its contributions, but I struggle to understand what happened, or didn’t happen, that set my brother and me down very different paths. My brother felt abandoned when I left for college, but he was already abusing drugs and alcohol by that point. Did my parents have it too easy with me, their cautious, withdrawn older child? Is this just the decay of my small hometown in the south, eaten from the inside by shuttered factories and drugs, infecting my family? Although there’s a hardness behind his eyes now, I don’t know that you’d guess my brother was a felon at first glance either.
Girls always had crushes on my brother. Younger, he was all giant blue-green eyes and a big smile. Older, he was tall and tan, full of dry wit and natural charisma. When I was a senior in high school and he was a freshman I would hear rumors from girls in the grades below me, that so-and-so had a crush on my brother and maybe I could see if he might ask her out? He was jumped once in the sketchy park near the halfway house he lived in and they cut his face deeply. His embarrassment over the resulting scar was vain but endearing anyway. He never smiles in pictures, because the implant to replace a tooth he lost skateboarding never took. But the constant stream of girlfriends continued over countless arrests and stints in county jail and rehab, until he was arrested for breaking into cars in another state—an egregious parole violation—and sentenced to three years in prison at 21 years old. Jeremy Meeks did nine years for grand theft auto, so my brother was the lucky one there.
Lucky is a big word in my family, all things considered. We’re lucky we’re white, or my brother could have had it a lot worse. We’re lucky my parents could send him money for commissary and phone calls and could afford the gas to drive four hours to visit him. We’re lucky I had a job that afforded me the time to research a special unit for young offenders with substance issues, which got him transferred down to minimum security and authorized to work outside the prison after completing their counseling program.
Jeremy Meeks is not lucky, though he’s certainly blessed in the bone structure department. His race and socioeconomic status play the biggest role, both in how his arrest will play out and in the internet’s peculiar, rabid interest. A handsome thug? How novel. A handsome corrupt politician or banker? Less so.
Meeks’ mother is leveraging the internet’s bemusement to try to raise funds for his cause; the GoFundMe page is unclear what the use of the funds would be for, but it could be a bail bond or lawyer. The page is short on donations, but full of black-and-white arguments: Jeremy is a definitely-guilty gangbanger, Jeremy is an innocent father well on his way to leaving behind a life of crime. Some women are also joking about raising money for his bail, presumably on the assumption that nobody with an angel’s face could be a real criminal. Either characterization makes it easy to push aside the complexities of our justice system and the fact that ultimately, Jeremy Meeks is undoubtedly as morally ambiguous as the rest of us.
I was terrified when my brother was released. Afraid for him, his job prospects, the challenges of adjusting not just to life outside of prison but to adulthood, and afraid for my parents for sheltering him. It worried me—everything worried me—when girls started commenting on his Facebook posts. I had read that recovering addicts should avoid romantic relationships, and it seemed like it should go double for recently released felons. But within months he had a new girlfriend, a girl who knew him growing up, a single mother. She wanted a father for her son, I think, and his being a felon wasn’t that big of a deal. He started drinking again, they split up, and he started dating another girl. She knew about his drinking, but it didn’t bother her.
Relapses are really shitty rollercoasters, not sudden drops, and things fell apart last Christmas. I haven’t spoken to my brother since—I’m afraid I trigger him—although my parents keep me updated. As far as we know he’s clean and going to NA, living in a trailer park with other NA members. I worry there is something in him that will never be fixed, because it’s easier to simplify things. It’s easier to project the things you want to see—gangbanger, drunk, boyfriend prospect, innocent victim, Givenchy model—onto a felon’s face than to try to understand his knotty past, his uncertain future.
