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Retired From Crime — and it Follows Me Into Retirement

Steve Russell
11 min readNov 24, 2019

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Geezer and Cop Photo by Dmitriy Nushtaev on Unsplash

Being a rumination on geezer self-defense.

I should be ready after two careers in crime.

My first career, as a judge, was about crime in a direct sense. My second career, as a criminal justice professor, was about crime in a less direct way. I was determined that my retirement would not be about crime.

Retirement?

Don’t roll your eyes — your time will come.

An early clue will be when some kid gives you the senior discount before you ask.

An even earlier clue is when you start calling thirty-somethings “kids.”

When my wife and I put the clues together, we started considering where to retire rather than if.

With public policy becoming more an exercise in meanness every year, we looked first at becoming ex-pats.

Canada would not take us because of age. We had not paid into the social safety net we were on the verge of needing.

Mexico looked good and I even located a beautiful place we could afford in San Miguel de Allende, but the disputes the drug cartels were having over prime smuggling routes made getting to the Mexican interior running a gauntlet through what used to be the friendly highways of…

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Steve Russell
Steve Russell

Written by Steve Russell

Enrolled Cherokee, 9th grade dropout, retired judge, associate professor emeritus, and (so far) cancer survivor. Memoir: Lighting the Fire (Miniver Press 2020)

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