The Third Robbery: What Drives a Life-Imprisonment Parolee to Reoffend?

Three downfalls that crushed a person's life.
The first time, as a juvenile, he committed an offense under the Punishment of Banditry Act, was imprisoned, and later paroled; the second time, his parole was revoked due to a wrongful conviction for theft; the third time, before returning to prison following the parole revocation, he decided to commit an irreversible, serious robbery.

How did he fall?

When I was twenty, a friend asked me to go collect some money, saying the other party owed them money, though it seemed the other party intended to pocket the money privately. I was the driver; I stayed in the car. When my friends went up, a shot was fired, and someone died. I didn't know the situation at the time, I just heard the gunshot. I knew my friends had a gun, but I didn't know they would go up there and beat someone to death. Afterward, I drove my friends away from the scene. Although I wasn't at the scene from start to finish, I knew something was going to happen, even if I didn't know it would cost someone's life. At the time, I was prosecuted and sentenced to life imprisonment as a principal co-offender under the Punishment of Banditry Act. I served thirteen and a half years in the Tainan Prison before being released on parole.

That was his first downfall. At age twenty, he was prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned as a principal co-offender in a homicide.

What kind of person would be driven to desperation and 'decide' to reoffend before their parole period expired?
Especially someone on parole for life imprisonment.

How could a parolee serving a life sentence for a 'heinous crime' endure more than 700 days, only to fail at the very last few months? Knowing full well that even if he committed a crime carrying the minimum fixed-term imprisonment, he would still have to return to prison to serve out the remaining twenty-five years of his sentence, why did he still reoffend—and in a relatively minor theft case, no less?

When I was forty-three, I had been out on parole for ten years. The business I worked hard to build was finally picking up, and I had started a family and had two sons. That year, the Morakot typhoon struck, bringing continuous heavy rain for two or three weeks. The Pingtung Bridge flooded, trapping my wife and me in Pingtung so we couldn't get to Kaohsiung. At the time, seeing people on TV rescuing disaster victims, I told my employees to stop working and help with the rescue efforts. I said if anyone needed to donate and transport supplies, our company could dispatch vehicles to assist. During the rescue, I met a company shareholder who said a Kaohsiung County representative was looking for a construction firm owner to cooperate by dispatching vehicles to jointly salvage driftwood, because the entire mountain area and rivers were blocked by driftwood, but they lacked equipment. I borrowed about thirty heavy machinery units from everywhere and salvaged about five large piles of driftwood. To my surprise, that representative owed money to others, and he hauled away the driftwood, stole it, and sold it for cash. Out of anger, I loaded the remaining seven or eight pieces of wood from the five piles back onto my company's premises. Unexpectedly, I was accused of theft by the representative and prosecuted. The court of first instance acquitted me, but the second instance found me guilty. According to the old provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure, theft offenses could not be appealed to the third instance, and an eight-month prison sentence was finalized.'

That was his second downfall. At age forty-three, he was prosecuted and convicted of theft, resulting in the revocation of his parole.

When I heard my mother had passed away, I couldn't even stand. I didn't know where to go or what to do.

After his parole was revoked, he had a six-month period to prepare to return to prison, but he felt he couldn't go back this time. Feeling both aggrieved and panicked, just after receiving a call from his mother telling him not to worry and not to run, he was immediately confronted with her death. She was the few drifting logs in his turbulent life that he dared to grasp firmly; he knew he could never grasp them again, and he lost his emotional anchor. The few times he sought help in his adulthood were once after his initial parole when, at thirty-three, he thought his life had seen the light of day again, but the reality was he didn't know where the mark of a criminal record could lead him. 'Who do I look for? After being locked up for over ten years, who can I go to when I get out?' he seemed to ask himself about the destination of his life. While he was in prison, his mother visited him at the Tainan Prison every week, and after his release, she constantly reminded him never to walk down the wrong path. With a trace of self-affirmation on his face, he said his mother had always been the person he was most willing to listen to.

At that time, I was keeping vigil by myself in the mourning hall, not a single day clear-headed. After the funeral affairs were settled, I thought, this is the final path. Once I finish this, it's over.'

It seemed as though he was still waiting for the darkest night of his life to pass—the nights he spent seeking help in front of his mother's mourning hall, adopting his most humble posture. But that night, no one caught him. That was a flare signaling the ignition of crime, and also a smoke grenade extinguishing any remaining desire to survive.

Afterward, he 'reoffended'—truly reoffended. He decided to let himself fall into a place where no one else existed.

He decided to kidnap his wealthy businessman friend in Tainan, whose assets were rumored to be worth twenty to thirty billion. At that time, he was burning with anxiety, wondering what he could leave for his wife and children before he was locked away in prison for good, or rather, before he fled, was arrested, and committed suicide. In his eyes, there was only how his wife, who had been without support since childhood, would raise their two children who were just in elementary school. Yet he didn't know how to approach a friend, as a construction firm owner, to borrow tens of millions to bridge the funding gap caused by company operations and to secure living expenses for the next twenty-some years. Or rather, he didn't know how saying he had a prior life-imprisonment parole record that had now been revoked would scare away his fellow industry friends. Struggling for two months, he decided to choose one of the dead ends, the one with no way back. He said he removed all the bullets from his gun because those friends had also helped him along the way; he only wanted money. Until he was arrested two months later, when the kidnapped wealthy friend saw it was him at the police station, he angrily asked, 'If you had any problems, you could have told me. Why did you do something like this?' Yet he didn't know where to begin explaining, because everything had already been done.'

That was his third downfall. At age forty-three, following the revocation of his parole due to a wrongful conviction, he reoffended by committing a serious robbery and was sent back to prison to serve his sentence. Even his last dying breath of survival was swallowed by the demon of despair.

To him, having no end in sight was the most terrifying thing—just like the six months between the revocation of his parole due to a wrongful conviction and his return to prison, and the two months of lingering anxiety after reoffending. It was endless anxiety, unease, and powerlessness. Therefore, he decided to stop himself. He carried a gun with him, intending to end his life when the police came to arrest him, stopping at a moment he felt he could bear. But before that, he always wanted to see his children one last time. That day, by the roadside in front of the after-school care center, he saw the police lying in wait. He walked back to his car preparing to take his life with the gun. Two steps short, he was subdued, but after all, he finally found a destination.

Back to this iron window once again.

Everything has been returned; all criminal proceeds have been returned to the victim. He treats me like a father and cares for me a lot. After I came in, I wrote to him; he didn't know what to say to me and asked me to reflect deeply. I feel quite guilty about this latter offense. To be honest, when I saw my friend being kidnapped by me, I knew that if I ever crossed paths with him and his wife in the future, I wouldn't even know where to hide if a hole opened up in the ground. So after I came in, I asked my father's family to go look for him, and they said forget it. I comforted myself; otherwise, if my children encounter this couple outside when they grow up, it would be too shameful, truly too shameful.'

Speaking of the series of crimes he had set out to commit, a wave of shame filled him to the brim. Sitting within the four high concrete walls of the prison visiting room, it seemed to have become the air-raid shelter he desperately dug to hide himself in. Yet what he still cared about most was, 'How can a father be a thief?' The second, wrongfully judged theft conviction severely insulted his personal dignity. That crime, carrying the lightest penalty in the eyes of the world, was perhaps the most unbearable burden in his life.

As for this second 'offense', which was both the heaviest and the lightest, the Prosecutor-General twice filed extraordinary appeals on his behalf, both of which were dismissed. The investigative report submitted by Control Yuan Members Wang Mei-yu (Wang Meiyu), Fang Wan-fu (Fang Wanfu), and Yang Mei-ling (Yang Meiling) also clearly pointed out the procedural flaws in the adjudication by the High Court's branch court: 'The witness gave inconsistent testimonies regarding the number of partners and prices on two occasions in court, but the judge did not allow Huang Ming-fang to exercise the right of cross-examination, yet used this as the basis for a guilty verdict. This violated the rules of evidence and infringed upon Huang Ming-fang's right of cross-examination and right to litigation.' However, these still failed to secure vindication for his wrongful conviction. Could it be that because a person has committed a serious crime in the past, they must suffer injustice for a minor crime of which they are innocent? To him, this tiny piece of innocence was perhaps the only complete piece of innocence he had left before being crushed.

During this reporting trip to the Chiayi Prison, visual recording was blocked by the warden, making it impossible to keep image records. The boundaries between murderers, wrongfully convicted persons, parolees, or ex-convicts became even more blurred in my ideal picture. It seemed there was never an occurrence of crime with sharply defined 'good people' and 'bad people', nor were there such deserving or unforgivable victims and perpetrators. What stood out most clearly were those key stakeholders who appeared to have nothing to do with it yet managed to extricate themselves from the situation.

And for those who once paid the price for redemption, is it harder to shed the detestable label of a criminal record, or to put back on the criminal's garment that they had struggled so hard to take off?

The right and wrong of a 'crime' are not as easily identifiable at a glance as the naked eye perceives, and the severity of a 'punishment' fails to bring redemption to either the bearer or the borne.