What Tulsa King Tells Us About Reentry

A silver lining of being out of commission with a bad cold is that one is not good for much beyond catching up on streaming series I’ve missed, of which there are plenty: I work full time, study full time, volunteer full time, and parent full time. This morning I belatedly became acquainted with Sylvester Stallone’s Western Mafia series Tulsa King, which tells the story of septuagenarian mobster Dwight Manfredi, released from prison after a 25-year sentence in a federal facility, and banished from the heart of the crime family in NYC to build a crime empire in Tulsa, OK.

There’s plenty to love and admire about Tulsa King, and Stallone’s humor, old-school charm and old-fashioned violence are a big part of it. But I think that the series has important lessons to teach us not about folks in reentry who try to return to organized crime, but about their counterparts who try to live a law-abiding postrelease life.

The vast majority of people who have lived and worked in organized crime do not become kingpins. As one of the classic articles in law and economics teaches us:

A crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise: You have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage. But selling crack is a lot more dangerous than most menial labor. Anyone who was a member of J. T.’s gang for the four years covered in the notebooks stood a 1-in-4 chance of being killed. That’s more than five times as deadly as being a timber cutter, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the most dangerous job in the United States.

So if crack dealing is really the most dangerous job in America, and it pays less than minimum wage, why on Earth would anyone take such a job? Well, for the same reason a pretty Wisconsin farm girl moves to Hollywood. For the same reason that a high school quarterback wakes up at 5 a.m. to lift weights.

They all want to succeed in an extremely competitive field in which, if you reach the top, you are paid a fortune (to say nothing of the attendant glory and power). But in each of these glamour professions, the same problem exists: A lot of people are competing in what is essentially a tournament.

Earning big money in J. T.’s crack gang wasn’t much more likely than the Wisconsin farm girl becoming a movie star or the high school quarterback playing in the NFL. But criminals, like everyone else, respond to incentives.

For this reason, the vast majority of people who end up incarcerated for a long stretch don’t have anything secure lined up for them postrelease–especially not if they are released in middle age and beyond, an age bracket that mellows our penchant for violence, our overestimation of our personal safety, our appetite for taking risks, and our susceptibility to peer pressure. Once they are out, their main concern is basic survival: finding a place to live and a job. And they must adapt to a very different world than the one they left behind when they were first locked up: a world with cellphones, big data collection, GPS, social media, facial recognition and AI. All this, of course, has implications for how crime is committed: cash is no longer king, which changes a lot of how criminal transactions are conducted. Things leave the kinds of digital trail that they did not use to. But it also has implications–much more common ones–for completely lawful behavior. How do you apply for jobs and housing? If you have an independent business (construction? landscaping? manicures?) how do you drum up business? How do you look things up? How do you keep in touch with your loved ones? How do you socialize and date? And how do you even begin to make your way in this new world without feeling completely unmoored and irrelevant?

The reason we root for Manfredi in Tulsa King is, partly, Stallone’s charisma, charm, and humor, but also Manfredi’s almost instantaneous adaptability to the surrounding world. He has quick instincts, finds way to oil social transactions with cash to get people to help him with the things he does not understand (such as asking the hotel concierge to order him an Uber with her app when he doesn’t have one; he doesn’t let on that he has no idea what an app is), and whatever he cannot accomplish with charm, he accomplishes with bravado and violence. How many midlife people will still have such razor-sharp instincts, or be able to translate the ones that served them well on the yard to outside businesses and social situations?

If you find sympathy for Manfredi as you watch the show, see if that sympathy can spill over to the many, many people who will eventually find themselves in his shoes in their fifties, sixties, and seventies–but making their first steps in a law-abiding world and an above-board economy.