Field Conditions

A Stakeholder’s Guide to Rehabilitation in Prison

August 2012

Dear Ant,

It’s been a dawg’s age since I last heard from you, so I’ve decided to drop a quick hello, along with belated wishes for a happy birthday. You’re likely enjoying it with some good greens…that you’ll wind up not paying for.

Check it: I’m sober. Haven’t gotten baked in over a year. When we were chasing our bud connect around Attica’s yard in ’02, I never thought I’d give it up. But here we are.

Speaking of things I never thought I’d be doing, I’m a peer counselor now. I know, I know, when I was the office clerk in maintenance, I confided in you that I wanted work that kept me away from other prisoners. Sheet, man, of the 1,800 men in Comstock, I’ve been working in orientation long enough that—I just calculated, Poindexter—at least 1,000 have cycled through my weekly group. Crazy, right? Friends joke that they can’t walk with me in the yard because I’m always getting stopped by a past participant who has a question. I’ve become the Help Desk of Comstock, and truth be told, I like it. I’m enclosing something I wrote about my work in orientation. Enjoy.

Write when you can. Stay outta trouble.

—Adam

Day One

They are seated in school desks with their backs to the wall, these fifteen felons staring me down. This is just a meet and greet; in a few minutes, we’ll begin the official program. A little past nine on a Monday morning in this maximum-security prison, and I’ve already managed to annoy one of my peers. But that’s why I get paid the middling bucks.

This portly black fellow—who is to be released in three months—has treated the room like a complaint department since walking in twenty minutes earlier. His guff has midwifed a rotten atmosphere. “Just relax, sir, try to enjoy the ride,” I deadpan. “There are people in this place who could do ninety days standing on their head.” I’m thirty-six years old, have a baker’s dozen in, almost as many till I see the parole board, and sometimes that gives me the right. Somewhat mollified, he takes my meaning and lets it drop. I turn to my boss, Ms. D, sitting behind her large desk in the corner, and we exchange grimaces. So much for getting off to a good start.

The classroom, built over a hundred years ago, is large, spartan, and clean: high ceiling, lots of windows (exterior and hallway-facing), battleship gray wainscoting, concrete floor, dark and glossy with wax. It’s as if a side room of an old airplane hangar were refurbished by a decorator with OCD and a penchant for minimalism. Every other week, for several mornings, this concrete room is home to Phase 1, the first of two mandatory phases: therapeutic programs “offered” by the Department of Corrections—voluntary compliance is required. There’s a second phase called, you guessed it, Phase 2, based around cognitive behavioral therapy, but it’s not mandatory for everyone. Phase 2 can come at any time during one’s bid, but Phase I fills its dance card as men get off the bus from reception centers. This is orientation, meant as an on-ramp into the American prison experience, a mile marker on our individual roads to rehabilitation (or ruin).

As an inmate facilitator, I have run these groups for over two years now. They vary in size from five to twenty men. The participants run the gamut from first timers to life-of-crimers: the seventeen-year-old doing a one-to-three for running away from
a group home; John¹, our ornery customer with three months to go on a six-month parole violation for breaking curfew; the middle-aged frequent flier who, having been declared a persistent violent felon, has been given “lights-out numbers” and will die behind the wall. (With one sentence, we adumbrate a lifetime of suffering.) In any given group, about sixty percent of the men are recidivists; some age out of criminal behavior in their fifties while others go on to do life sentences on the installment plan. Some men are scared, some are cocky and brash; there are earnest, hopeful types who are hopefully only passing through. But, to the casual observer, the mélange purls into a patternless jam of malingerers, troublemakers’ shirkers, and grumblers.

Sitting directly in front of me, the Latino in his late teens called Zeta can be in here for a drug sale, assault, rape, or triple homicide. Personally, it makes very little difference. Of more pressing concern is that most of these men would prefer to be in bed or in the yard or anyplace else right now. Some won’t get past the fact that I’m a skinny white boy from a very different side of the tracks who sometimes uses big words—no way I can understand what they’ve been through. So, I bring my A-game. Because while my payroll sheet reads FACILITATOR, I think of myself as something more: counselor, concierge, consigliere. I am field support, these are my charges, and their well-being matters to me.

Past participants have included men I recognized from my years in prison. They’re back on “new ones,” sometimes they’ve been in and out a couple of times since we last met: a wild-eyed guy from county jail; the kid I bummed a cigarette off of in reception. I wonder how many of these faces I’ll see again in the coming years of my bid.

Starting up, there’s an opening I’ve cobbled together like all other segments of the program. I’m constantly trying to improve content and delivery. Permanent beta tester’ that’s me. First, I address those wondering why they’re here, and what, if anything, they’ll get out of this: “For starters, you’re here because you have to be, but that doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from our time together. Simply put, what we all want is the smoothest bid possible, so we’ll cover what you need to stay under the radar and maneuver safely; and who’s who staffwise to get your needs met.” I encourage them to think of all of us as a team, working in an environment where over the next several days we can discuss our concerns and thoughts without being called stupid or having our heads ripped off. “For the next ninety minutes we’ll be discussing any questions you have. To make this most beneficial for us all, let’s talk about what we can expect from each other. I’m here to help. I’ve done two-and-a-half years here and over a decade in my last spot and I’ve-learned some things that can make your bids go quicker and smoother. I'm not staff, and I don’t judge. It’s important that we remain open minded towards our peers and we respect each other and don’t turn this into a nonproductive gripe session.”

The FAQ that ensues was one of the first things I brought to Phase 1, refining it based upon the questions and reactions of participants. It’s needed, but their FAQs elicit prepackaged answers which are often disheartening or frustrating to them upon hearing, and for me dealing with the same negative reactions group after group. This soul-crushing first day is more technical than adaptive work. I could sit at my desk near Ms. D’s and make origami cranes while a trained chimp filled in for me.

“Getting right into it, I say, “Who’s been pulled out of line and pat frisked?” Hands go up. For those who haven’t, I describe how the experience will go. To a man, they pay attention when I talk about how to get through the encounter as quickly and safely as possible: don’t suck your teeth or screw your face; be prepared for guards to ask us where you’re from, how long you’ve been here, and what your crime is—they’re not supposed to ask us about our crimes, but if you have something to hide, like a rape charge, it pays to have a lie on the ready—speak only when spoken to, and make your answers direct; don’t make any sudden moves.”

Zeta puts up his hand, and I give him the nod. “I heard they be smackin’ dudes for no reason.”

The chorus grumbles horror stories that they’ve heard on the bus ride here, in the yard, or from a neighbor in the cell block. File it under “G” for Get past it. “Remember: we agreed not to turn this into a gripe session. Let me tell you a quick story.”

I tell them about the time when, on my way to the yard one afternoon, I was randomly stopped by a trio of guards—a three-man rumble unit—and ordered to put my hands on the wall, high and flat. Digging around my pants pocket, P., a widely-known sadist, found two ketchup packets that I didn’t use in the mess hall at lunch (it was hamburger day). I heard a friendly guard halfheartedly try to stop, whose gloved hand went to the small of my back, against my skin’ and traveled south into my boxers, where I soon felt cold and sticky.

I closed my eyes for a moment and took a breath, but didn’t otherwise react.

R, a high-ranking member of the guards’ union, held my ID card in his latex-gloved hand, and said my name a couple times, slowly. “You’re not gonna have your family call up here to complain, are you?”

“No,” I said, smelling the vinegar from down-market ketchup as it worked its way down my crack. “We both know what that’ll lead to.”

“Smart kid. Go on, get outta here.”

Walking out to the yard, I felt like crying, A few of my peers saw it go down, I knew they did, and they knew I knew, but they didn’t joke me about it—could’ve just as easily been them.

That evening, I recounted the scene in minute detail in my journal (which, for years, I’ve mailed out every few days to be safe). By writing about it, I took possession of it, took a sad song and made it better. I even worked in a happy ending. The moral of the story is, Condiments work better on mess hall buns.

The men don’t cotton to my detached, gallows humor. John, our resident complainer, says he’d have come off the wall and got to swinging. That’s seconded. If someone is certain that all staff members will—sooner or later—capriciously punish them, and if there’s some anxiety about when it’s going to happen, then provoking a beating will alleviate the anxiety and, perversely, confirm one’s power to self-fulfill a prophesy. Hence, more than a few of my peers choose the time and place of their suffering.

“That’s your freedom,” I say. “Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Nazi death camps, said that the only freedom that can’t be taken away is how we react to any given situation. You come off that wall, throw an elbow, get a few shots in—you’ve got that freedom. But, then they have the freedom to put the boots to you, drag you to the Box, and quite likely bring you out to court where you’ll be charged and convicted of an assault on staff, maybe have a few years added to your sentence. I had that freedom, but I chose to take it on the chin, write about it, and now share it with you all as a teaching moment.”

The part I leave out, rather than muddy the emotional waters, is that I was recently in the visiting room, where I saw R, the union man, bend down to speak to the child of an inmate, a little girl of no more than four, who was stuck behind a three- foot cinder block wall. While I couldn’t hear what was said, I’d like to think that he asked her permission; she smiled and nodded her blond pigtails, then he gingerly lifted her over the wall, and she tottered off to her daddy.

I don’t know why that sticks with me. Perhaps it’s the incongruity, or maybe I need to remind myself that the people who run these places are capable of humane behavior.

With the multiplier effects of power, R’s benevolence towards the little girl seemed as saintly as his veiled threats to me felt diabolical. Jim Collins, in the management tome Good to Great, exhorts one not to “confuse a culture of discipline with a tyrannical disciplinarian. A culture of discipline is not just about action. It is about getting disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who take disciplined action.” This squares with Ronald Reagan’s dictum: Personnel is policy. In any organization there are bound to be a few bad hires; in prison, however, they’re practically untouchable, thanks to a very strong union, which spends the bulk of its efforts making sure even the most unfit employees don’t get fired. It would be optimal to offer them enhanced training, say, The Complete Idiot’s Guide lo Empathy—when you can’t change the people, change the people—but good luck selling that to management. With breathtakingly inept responses, management is often complicit in covering up the bad, undisciplined behavior doled out under the rubric of discipline. In some of their estimations, inmates are sent to prison not as punishment but for punishment. Punishment that they have deputized themselves to inflict. Their lingua franca is rules and regulations, always to be obeyed, procedures, always to be followed, unless it’s too sweet or expedient to ignore them. Pareto’s eighty-twenty rule also holds up for inmates and staff: twenty percent of troublemakers make eighty percent of the trouble. The majority of guards just do their eight hours and go home, but they stand idly by as their coworkers run wild (or, worse, lie to the rare investigator called in after an inmate is savagely beaten during an “assault on staff”). The criminal justice system is extremely customer-focused—if you view staff as the customer.

While the Department dispenses bromides about positive programming, rehabilitation, and reentry, it peels open our eyelids, forcing us to watch as unlucky peers are broken. Total domination, nothing less. The Orwellian signage couldn’t be more incongruous: provide safe and secure facilities; address the needs of all inmates so they can return to their communities better prepared to lead successful and crime-free lives; recognize the value of each person, protect human dignity, and operate with ethical behavior. (This always struck me as similar to the billboards produced by Third-World dictatorships, on which the regime congratulates itself for various projects and the models smile brighter than toothpaste ads.) When errant personnel are kept securely in their jobs, the policy message is clear, and one can be forgiven for dismissing the self-satisfied pap that’s disseminated as the Department’s mission statement.

The truth, however, centers not so much on a few bad apples—the default excuse proffered by prison administrators—but rather a bad barrel of moral flexibility, as Dr. Philip Zimbardo discovered decades ago upon aborting his Stanford Prison Experiment.² Cover up the criminal behavior and gratuitous cruelty of the small but reliable amount of clinically-diagnosable psychopaths drawn to working in an environment of unchecked power, rebrand prisons as “correctional” facilities, and make the system opaque to the public—nothing good happens under the lid of such barrels. To think of prison as a correctional facility is to believe the politician’s rhetoric that Iraq is an “emerging democracy.” The thing about a broken criminal justice system is that cascading failures can only cascade for so long. As in any ecosystem, the water eventually settles in stagnant pools, the terminus of decades’ worth of public policy—a handful of ghettos and prisons in every state of the union. Each eddy is murky and chaotic in its own way.

Comstock Prison is a catchment facility for men coming out of the numerous isolation units (the “Box”). Boxes statewide, or arriving as a result of a disciplinary transfer. It’s one of the worst barrels in the state. A few schmucks, like yours truly, get sent here as an unofficial punishment for becoming a nuisance to another prison’s administrators or for running afoul of the gods in Central Office’s Division of Movement and Control. And, of course, there are the rare souls who come here voluntarily, to be close to home, or maybe to satisfy a masochistic bent. Every week, the several reception centers throughout the state send between five and ten newjacks here; within a week they’re in Phase 1.

Ten days after my arrival, I came to the attention of Mrs. Saunders, a human resource manager of sorts. Because the guards at Attica Prison thought it would be a scream to “lose” the cord to my typewriter when I was packed up to be transferred here, I furnished this mandarin with my handwritten CV. She then went to her screen, pored over my (nearly spotless) record, confirmed that I had the requisite schooling and certifications, and deemed me a good candidate to fill the newly- vacated facilitator position in Phase 1. I wasn’t keen on working so intimately with my peers, but the alternative was washing dishes, swinging a mop, or sitting in my cell all day. It was strange that Mrs. Saunders would throw a barely-qualified naïf into such an important position, but I figured I’d see where it led. I fell back on the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” And so began my tenure here.

While this prison was built over a hundred years ago to house those inmates who’d proven they could behave, over time its institutional culture has changed drastically. For more than fifty years, it’s been known to its inhabitants as a gladiator school. Hard cases are sent here to this hard place where there is little incentive to remain out of trouble; they treat it as a “war spot,” do some damage, and get shipped back out to the Box. The human inventory turns over quickly in this baroque warehouse of eighteen hundred and thirty of us in and out each week, give or take—which ensures a steady stream of new troublemakers who inevitably make their trouble. This, in turn, reinforces the calculatingly cold institutional culture, the guards’ belief that we’re violent animals worthy of their harshest treatment. Uglier than homemade sin, Comstock is a drab hell where hope and mirth come to die.

“But,” I tell the group, “we are here now, and this is a good place to learn how to bid. Learn how to follow the rules here, you’ll be able to do time anyplace in the state. Plus, unless you get shipped to the Box, anywhere you go will be an improvement.”

The rule of thumb is that one has to do a year here before transferring. About half of the men sitting in front of me will leave this place the hard way: they’ll smoke or sniff a little escape and come up dirty on a urine test; mouth off to the wrong guard; come to with an angry bump on the noggin courtesy of the goon squad; shiv someone in the yard; get their face sliced over a debt unpaid. They wind up reinforcing their personal narratives of failure and suffering. It’s a bad way to start one’s bid in the land of permanent records. Some of the young ones don’t recognize the tough talk of their older mates for what it is: ill-conceived bluster. They sometimes think that turning up the violence is the only way to make one’s bones. A few years down the road, those types usually come to regret it.

I see The Fear on several faces, and reassure them that if they’re careful about who they associate with, stay away from weapons, don’t gamble, and don’t get high, they’ll likely be fine.

Sobriety is important. Getting altered in here provides a refuge from thought and feeling, and facilitates the type of escape that keeps one rooted firmly in the past. I tell the men that when I went away, I drew a line in the sand with heroin, ending a sixteen-month stint as junkie, but leaving everything else on the table. Over the years, as I matured and really paid attention to cost-benefit, I gradually stopped eating other people’s pharmaceuticals, quit smoking cigarettes (for which I’m extremely grateful), and, finally stopped smoking the occasional joint. I’ve been sober for over two years, and my thinking is quicker, clearer, and more creative. This draws a few dubious looks.

“I’m serious, what I now create—writing and drawing—is better than what I produced while I was high.” Lao Tzu wrote: “To conquer others is to have strength, to conquer yourself is to be strong.” Prison can be a good holding environment in which to get sober; there’s a ready supply of temptation and ample stress. This is where you test your mettle.

My watch reads ten-ten, just over twenty minutes left. Scanning their faces, I see some sour pusses, ice-grilling me with their displeasure; a few staring into reflections on the shiny floor or glazed over in what appears to be psychopharmacological torpor (an understaffed mental health department hasn’t yet tweaked the dosages of those who’ve been over-medicated for the bus trips from reception—some of these men will soon be taken out of general population and housed in special mental health units). And a few are paying attention, bright-eyed and alert. The latter group get me out of bed in the morning. I spent a decade clerking in areas of restricted-access, playing office assistant to important civilian employees. Over the years, I used the botheration of unappreciative thugs as a reason to avoid interacting with my peers in a work setting. Perhaps I have visceral reactions to their behavior—immature, entitled, selfish, lazy—precisely because that was once my modus vivendi. Note to self: control for that.

Our first day together is almost over, we’ve covered the meat and potatoes, and I decide to do a little adaptive work with the group. We talk about taking accountability for our actions, and what led us here. Entering county jail as a newly-detoxed twenty-three-year-old, I quickly came to the conclusion that everything I’d done up to that point was wrong. In the years since, I’ve salvaged the core principles I’d received at home, but I’m never far from self-distrust. I’ve learned not to think too highly of myself or too much about myself, to be ever cognizant of my weaknesses, and recognize self-delusion as it arises. Accountability makes the time go and is the only way to move forward. But that’s easy for me to say—I’m guilty of murder, and need to do time. The past is the past, but it’s always present. My whole life has, and will forever be, a reverberation of that day. The chief punishment is knowing what I’ve done. How about an eighteen-year-old like KB, who’s doing ten years for a smallish drug sale, the result of a buy-and-bust? I’m white, grew up in a tony zip code, and my family had the resources to provide me competent and dedicated legal counsel. The detectives didn’t use me as leverage against an older brother they wanted to lock away for a gangland homicide. For the same offense as KB, I would have been plead down to community service.

“But, the Department of Fairness this isn’t,” I say. Again, I borrow from Frankl, and tell KB that he was free to become guilty, now he’s free to move beyond it. And, furthermore, it’s on each of us to find meaning in our suffering, these misfortunes of our own making, and the suffering we’ve caused others. Our life is no one else’s responsibility. Rebelling against our parents, teachers, and society was really just a way of making our lives a giant reaction to other people. Just as self-destructive behavior is a process, so is self-reclamation. As Dylan sang, If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying. It’s time to actually begin to live.

And, with that, we end for the day. “Are there any questions that can’t wait til tomorrow morning?”

“What about the package room?” says John.

“Good question. We’ll have to save it for day two. In the meantime, everyone be safe, and we’ll meet again tomorrow morning.” Like a flight attendant, I ask them to remain seated and feel free to talk amongst themselves until the guards open the door and tell us to go. I walk to my desk and put away leftover handouts and various pages of notes. “Decent group,” I say to Ms. D, and she agrees, says I did a good job.

The door swings open, one of a trio of guards says: “Let’s go.” Same as always. As I stand up, Ms. D thanks me for my work. Conscious of not appearing too friendly with her in the eyes of the guards, I give a quick, professional nod, then I’m out the door, past the guards, and informally leading my charges down the corridor in a quiet procession. As I cautioned them earlier, they remain quiet in the hallway. For the time being, they’re heeding my advice.

1. Changing some names, and being vague about certain details allows me to be concrete with my facts.

2. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Philip Zimbardo, Random House, 2007.