Field Conditions cont.
A Stakeholder's Guide to Rehabilitation in Prison
Day Two
Walking into the sunny, still room, I say Good morning to Ms. D and the gents, noting a few new mugs and some missing. From behind my desk, I watch dust motes lazily floating in shafts of light.
Quietly, Ms. D asks what my thoughts are on cutting the week to three days instead of four. This question—phrased to imply that I have a say in scheduling—isn’t a question at all. The opposite of mission creep: weekend creep.
“That’s cool,” I say. And I am cool with it. Emotionally, this is not easy work. It forces me to relive the dread inherent in being brand new to an uncaring prison with its myriad written rules and unspoken mores. (It also triggers the stoic’s frustration upon hearing a litany of complaints that he knows will improve with time.) In light of this now-standard bowdlerization, I ask if we can nix tomorrow’s movie.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” she says.
With a running time of forty-six minutes (half of our class time), the cost-benny doesn’t line up on The Wave. It's not bad, though: based upon actual events in a Palo Alto high school in 1967, the short movie shows the dangers of group-think and the ease with which we can be led to blindly follow.
Rather than seeing all the parallels to prison life, however, most of the guys spend the time giggling at the actors’ feathered hairdos (this was made in the eighties) and the overabundance of pastel-colored sweaters.
Ms. D is a good boss, and a decent human, a rarity in here (it’s been my good fortune over the years to work for such rarities). She’s not more than a few years older than me, in her late thirties. During the two years I’ve worked for her, we’ve kept our extracurricular convo confined to the superficial: we share an enjoyment of The Office and I have a decent memory for lines. This keeps me safe and her comfortable. I’m forever recommending books that she’ll never read.
We’ve formed a nice dynamic. She gives me tremendous leeway to lead the groups in my customer-focused manner. Ms. D sits at her desk in the back, doing a never-ending stream of paper work, only interjecting when one of the men gets too belligerent or confrontational for me to handle. She seldom has to play the heavy, but I always thank her afterward (and think how I could’ve handled it better). When their hand calls for it, she cuts these churlish men to the quick by asking what their issue is and showing them no quarter as they fumfer through an answer that collapses upon its inadequacy.
I empathize with her during these moments. She’s a corrections counselor—basically a case worker, a lowly touch point with inmates—whose job it is to tell us things we don’t want to hear and to collect information (new numbers for our phone list, emergency contact information, where we’d like to be transferred, etc.) that’s fed into a host of databases that help run the Big Machine. Counselors, like embassy officials in war-torn countries, don’t venture out of their offices and most exhibit little knowledge of a prisoner’s daily experience. In Comstock, each counselor also has to administer a therapeutic program. Due to budget shortfalls, the administration has been slow to hire replacements for staff who’ve retired or been promoted; Ms. D’s caseload of one hundred inmates has doubled. I feel her frustration at being asked the same things: she gets paid a lot more than me and gets to leave at the end of the day, but Ms. D is as powerless to change the system as I am. That frustration and annoyance at being the target of misdirected anger affects all staff in this high throughput system and has led to quite a negative feedback loop.
And therein lies the problem with the Department of Corrections in general: tremendous resources go into smoking the mirrors with enlightened-sounding policy, while there is little follow through in terms of support for staff who actually interface with inmates or accountability when the important jobs don’t get done. Naturally, implementation suffers when the spirit is taken for the deed.
Not long ago, on a slow day at work (in my afternoon job, an office gig), a boss asked me to empty a thick binder and shred its contents. It was quickly apparent that I was destroying the training manual for a therapeutic program—a comprehensive course, by the looks of it—on rehabilitating oneself. Into an Enron-grade shredder I fed page after page of handouts, group exercises, meditation techniques, bold-text mentions of the forty developmental assets, cognitive behavioral therapy, functional behavioral assessments, and other treatment modalities. There was heavy science behind this stuff. “How come I’ve never heard of this program?” I asked Mr. McCandless.
He took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and smiled the smile of a thirty-year employee about to retire. “Too much paperwork for Central Office.” He continued: A reporting requirement created paperwork for middle management in Central, they complained to their union representative, who found an obscure clause in their contract which allowed them to declare this out-of-title work.
I know such counterintuitive things happen in large bureaucracies, but it seemed so beyond the pale. Who were the experts—psychologists, penologists, sociologists, management consultants—flown in to design this program? How many collective hours went into the informal meetings, memos, working groups, presentations, and layout? How much money was thrown down that hole?
Organizational theorists refer to this as a doom loop: reaction without understanding... new direction/program/leader/event... no accumulated momentum... disappointing results... reaction without understanding...
That’s the only instance I’ve heard of a program being dead on arrival. More common is the lackadaisical implementation seen up and down the supply chain. The training manual for Phase I is good stuff, too, but designed in a sterile office building, removed from the realities on the ground. It’s structured as a six- week program, with an entire week dedicated to watching The Wave and doing group exercises based upon it. But, with five to ten newjacks arriving each week, needing this comprehensive orientation whether they admit it or not, it’s just not practical to run a six-week cycle. Quite a few men would get in trouble before they even showed up to class. And given the nature of the course work, rolling admissions isn’t feasible. Hence the abridged compromise of an information-packed three or four days.
It’s not just duration but the timing of programs that could use serious tweaking. Reentry preparation is backloaded with programs that begin a year or so before an inmate is to be released. There has been talk over the last few years of changing that. Some states have even introduced science-based assessment instruments so as to best determine the risk of return of each person who enters the system; the thinking being, their rehabilitation will be personalized. But, bureaucracies, like large ships at sea, change course slowly. It’s a lot easier to decide a course correction than it is to implement it. The talk is good, but I’m not sanguine about the walk.
Between the theory and the practice lie the shadows of a criminal justice system. Show me a lofty-sounding program and I’ll show you a disconnect in its implementation. Those at the top must know about this, but, if they do, they don’t care. It would seem that their overarching concern doesn’t extend beyond those thick binders used to show outside agencies that services are being provided. No one will accuse the criminal justice system of being person-centered. Drug and Alcohol Treatment, Aggression Replacement—with the amount of mission statement talk about rehabilitation, these programs should be the Department’s raison d’etre, yet a fly on the wall would be appalled to see the civilian instructors doing crossword puzzles while the inmate participants are treated to another DVD about the dangers of huffing paint. When outside monitors do come in on official tours, Central Office gives ample warning to the local managers, who have weeks to get things in shape for the yearly Kabuki. Phase I is always running when the officials tour. I am not coached in how to answer the questions put to me by these visitors, but it’s not necessary. They don’t stop long enough to ask questions. While it’s better than no oversight, these visits are just syndicated versions of the dog and pony show put on for the public. As Adam Gopnik noted in The New Yorker: “The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons.”1 Moral hazard is baked in; the system isn’t apathetic apathy is the system.
Being one of them, I don’t lose sight of the lives at stake. “Good morning, gentlemen, and welcome back.”
Rather warmly, they respond in kind. Matt—an easy-going, freckled kid from farm country—says I was right about how a pat frisk is handled.
“Everything go smoothly?” I ask.
“Yeah. I guess. One guard called me a cracker.”
This is met with laughter. Zeta somewhat good-naturedly says: “You is a cracker.”
“Aside from the disparaging remark, did it go okay?”
Matt says it did.
Just a couple weeks ago, a guard called me a cracker, as well. Actually, he called me “Saltine,”and, I dare say, hoped that I’d find it witty. When I didn’t respond, he clarified: “Cracker—get it? Saltine.” This demented hayseed called me a cracker.
“Look,” I say to Matt, and then sweep my gaze over all the men, “you’re going to be called some pretty ugly things: character judgments and racial epithets. It stings. But such indecent appraisals say everything about them and nothing about you. Doesn’t make you less of a person. Please remember that. Now, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
I launch into the rules governing the package room through which we receive food, clothes, toiletries, and books from home. But, they’ve already heard how it’s run much differently than any other prison in the state; that the guards take particular delight in denying items that are permitted elsewhere. Why me? ask the downtrodden. Why not? replies an uncaring universe. As I hear myself numbly parrot the company line, I begin to feel like a failure, or worse, a collaborator. Complacency’s a killer. In here, it’s all too easy to be ground down and reshaped into the standard-issue uncaring mold. Like a lobster slowly boiling to death in a pot, I sometimes fear that I will leave worse than I entered, that I’ll lose my humanity somewhere along the way. (Another fear: that losing my humanity is a moot point, because I die in here.)
The grumbling gets louder as they misdirect their anger onto me. My job right now is to hear their anger, because it needs to be heard, accepted, understood empathically. Ted Kaptchuk, of Harvard Medical School, has recently discovered the care effect (once dismissed as a placebo response). Studies are confirming that the opportunity for a patient to feel heard and cared for can improve his health. I need to hear my own feelings, as well, my ego’s anger and resentment at the group’s misdirected anger. Like Sartre’s No Exit, I find myself saying the same things over and over and over again; about once each cycle, I have to remind myself that it’s a new group, and not just the same people rehashing their complaints just to torture me. This is one of those moments when I feel like throwing up my hands, plowing through the material, and not taking any questions or comments. Passive aggressive or not, I’d get paid the same. But, I hear Mr. McCandless, repeating what was told to him by an old boss, and what kept him going during rough patches. The job is the boss.
As if he were an insufficiently-devoted apparatchik being posted in Siberia, Mr. McCandless came to Comstock through the staff equivalent of a disciplinary transfer. He had spent decades with the Department creating drug treatment programs in several prisons. These programs were, in turn, held up as models of how to foster stable inmate populations and greatly reduce recidivism; they attracted delegations of state senators and prison officials from different states. But, in the eyes of the Commissioner’s Office, it was too much attention—funding began drying up and key employees were transferred. It added up to a whole that was less than the sum of its parts. To get him out of the field, he was actually promoted to statewide Director for Drug and Alcohol Treatment in Central Office (the Department keeps its enemies close). From that lofty position he was able to help his old coworkers set up new programs; and, when they ran afoul of management, Mr. McCandless stuck his neck out for them—just enough for a Deputy Assistant Commissioner to chop it off.
Or, so it was thought. Fortunately, he had experience dealing with the Department’s backstabbery. He kept meticulous records, and they were put to good use by an attorney who made quick work of the allegations of employee misconduct. The Department, however, isn’t accustomed to losing. While Mr. McCandless couldn’t be fired, he could be demoted and shipped to whatever far-flung outpost they saw fit, i.e., the fetid dumping ground that is Comstock to serve out his sentence until he retired.
Mr. McCandless dared to change the system and found that he stood a better chance fighting City Hall. They say you never really understand and appreciate how things work until you try to change them. The best one can hope for is to positively affect a few people, to be good and compassionate, and deal responsibly with whatever is in one’s locus of control. My job is to do the best job—whatever and wherever that may be—despite any issues that arise with bosses or counterparties.
Though I fly solo these days, I’ve had several coworkers during my two-year tenure in Phase 1. One of whom—Jay, a very angry young man—made this segment even harder by enflaming the group with package room horror stories, working himself into a lather recounting such perennial favorites as the belt not allowed in because it was a sixteenth of an inch too wide, or the multitude of cookies ruled verboten because the guards read “chocolate liqueur” to be liquor. As Jay became red-faced, I would just look at him, thinking, Must you?
I’ve always felt this segment to be important not for the cut and dried passing on of package room guidelines but because, as a populace, we need to learn that dealing with a No is a crucial step in our evolution to becoming responsible humans. We want, we want, we want. But, learning to get past what’s often an arbitrary denial can, I hope, eventually lead to an understanding that our wants aren’t paramount, and that there are other people in the world with desires as powerful as our own.
To quiet the room, I put up my hand and wait. “O.K. Life is what you choose to focus on.”
When I got packed up to be transferred here from Attica, I was forced to leave a good deal of my clothes and books in the cell so as to hew to the four-duffel transfer limit. Upon arrival, the guard in the intake room picked out items not allowed: the zippers were too long on several fleece pullovers from L.L. Bean, birthday presents from my grandma over the years; all the art supplies my brother bought for me. I’d have to reapply for an art permit and then buy new supplies.
“Sure, it was an inconvenience,” I say, “but I don’t feel that my quality of life has suffered because of it. Truth be told: I feel lighter.”
“This place is straight trash,” says John. Grousing amplifies as the men buzz angrily to life like a downed hornet’s nest.
From my years behind the wall, I remember scenes I hope to someday forget: the twenty-something stabbed to death in the yard, over a mistake, a week before he was to be released, faces bloody and sliced open to the white meat; lonely screaming and deranged ululation in the cell block at night; disembodied shrieks from a stairwell, hoarse with frenzy, punctuated by thudding body blows, the echoing cracks of nightsticks against concrete, as guards perversely bark, Stop resisting! Any pretense of objectivity would only falsify such moments. But this isn’t that, so it’s appropriate to broaden their frames of reference with some downward comparisons.
“Look, guys, I’m not going to tell you this is a great spot. It’s not, we all know that. But, think about doing time in the deep South, or in any of the states that border Mexico, or in a privately-run prison operated by a bottom-line-fixated outfit like Wackenhut or Correction Corporation of America. How would you like to be triple-bunked in a converted gymnasium in a California prison? Or disappeared down the extrajudicial black hole that is Guantanamo?”
When you can’t change your situation, you work to change the way you think about it: Human Engineering 101. I can see that, for the time being, focusing on those who have it worse has helped the men feel a little better about Comstock. I almost don’t want to harsh their newly-found mellow by talking about the medical department, but it’s the work of work. Rather than dwell on the poor quality of care, I try to teach these men how to advocate for themselves, speak clearly, know their rights as a patient, get the names of their health care providers. Along with noting the date of the encounter, I encourage them to record who they were seen by and what they were told. This can be used to keep staff honest in a precisely-written follow-up letter, or if we need to file a grievance.
Looking around, I see two men—boys, really—sitting at the far end of the row of desks, awake but totally lost. KB and Alex are in their late teens. I see so many like them in these groups: ADHD or learning disabilities never diagnosed, or just youthful exuberance coupled with limited world view. I wasn’t that different when I went away, a twenty-three-year-old clown whose emotional age, in retrospect, was that of a fifteen-year-old’s. The development of these young men was arrested before they were, sometime in their early teens; they lack a frame of reference and had few or no positive role models. Their brains literally experience time slooooowwwwerrrr than brains over twenty-five years old. The frontal lobes aren’t finished forming (see: lack of critical reasoning skills), so their wetware relies on the limbic system for core processing (see: unbridled id). And, to make things squishier, some of these kids have smoked serious amounts of PCP and the bath salts that seem to be all the rage these days. If anything at all, I’ll just be a glimmer in the gauzy memories they have of their beginnings in prison. When I get technical, their jaws slacken and their eyes glaze.. They get frustrated and put their heads down, or rip scraps of paper. Reaching them is a skills builder for me.
“Alex, you went out to the bathroom earlier, right?” He’s startled.
“Relax, kiddo,” I say. “You didn’t do anything wrong. But, before you could enter the bathroom, you had to sign a log book, your name, number, and what classroom you’re in. Right?”
“Yeah,” says Alex.
“Right. The Department has paper records of everything. If they think it’s important enough for you to enter your name and number before you take a leak, you have to believe that it’s important enough for you to keep a similar record whenever you meet with staff. Name, date, what you were told. Doing these things are part of learning to advocate for yourselves. Our loved ones can’t help us when we go to sick call, this is something we must do for ourselves.” When my peers vent, staff get frightened or self-righteously angry in response. It’s not easy learning how to assert without coming off as aggressive.
I return a sheaf of directives to the binder and retrieve a copy of the monthly inmate account snapshot provided by the Department’s local business office. “All right, we’ve got columns here, some math. Who’s ready for some crazy wild fun?!” I go through the piece of paper, showing them how to make sense of the transaction history; debit, with a minus sign, means it’s taken out of your account (commissary purchase, money sent home); credit, with a plus, means money is going into your account (money sent from home or earned at our jobs); the account balance, at the end of the month, is what’s left in your account, it’s the bottom line, at the end of day. Naively, I used to urge the group to think of these monthly statements as being akin to their checking account summaries from before they went away, as if all their parents gifted them a bank account.
Zeta says. “They’re takin’ all my money.” “Yeah,” says KB, “me too.”
“Who knows why that is?” I say.
“That’s the Department,” John says, “taking its surcharge.” His mouth purses like he’s suffering from a peptic ulcer (and, given his sour disposition, he may well be).
“Exactly, John. Thanks.” Everyone’s account is encumbered at the start of the bid-DNA fee, crime victim’s fee, court fee. For most of us, that amounts to a few hundred dollars, which is withheld from a hundred percent of the money sent from home (why Zeta, KB, and several others feel like there’s a heavy boot on their necks), and fifty percent of the paltry sum we earn at our jobs. There are an unlucky few—I wouldn’t be surprised if this applies to one of these men—who are slapped with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of surcharges, a punitive bonus prize for certain defendants who lose cases the state really wanted to plea bargain rather than bring to trial. With all their money from home getting diverted, and half their work pay being taken—leaving them with, at best, five dollars a week—many of these men look to supplement their income by smuggling in drugs and selling them at five- to eight-hundred percent markups. It’s an extremely lucrative business, while it lasts. Deep down, they know drug dealing (and gang banging, for that matter) isn’t wholesome. But it’s an option because they saw so much of it growing up in the American ghetto.
“And,” I say, “onto our next topic. Who here has filed a grievance?”
Several hands go up.
One of them hasn’t spoken in two days, so I ask if he’d like to share his experience. He’s in his mid- to late forties, a light- skinned black man who says we can call him Robertson.
On Robertson’s previous bid, a guard broke his glasses by stepping on them during a pat frisk. The lenses were intact, but the frame was mangled, so he taped, tied, and glued what he could. After a month of requests, Robertson still wasn’t seen by the optometrist to be issued a new pair. He filed a grievance (in this prison, like many others, medical issues account for upwards of fifty percent of grievances).
The grievance process arose in the mid-nineteen-seventies to remedy some of the draconian conditions that led to a spate of prison uprisings around the country, Attica’s included. In each prison there is a Grievance Office staffed by both civilian and security staff, along with inmates, whose job it is to hear the testimony of grievants, formally or informally resolve the issue, or deny the claim. If the claim is denied, the grievant can appeal the decision to Central Office, and then “go outside” to the courts. Thus, the grievance process is part of exhausting one’s remedies.
Informal resolutions—say, a sergeant picking up a phone and getting an inmate into a program assignment that was arbitrarily refused to him—while expedient, allow the system’s flaws to remain unchanged. Rather than serve as a customer-service metric which shows policy makers what areas are in need of attention and improvement, grievance has come to be a pressure-release valve of sorts.
An inmate gets “burned” on dinner two nights in a row (the guard doesn’t let him out of his cell as punishment for something minor, like talking in the hall, or just as harassment), he grieves it; a week later, he’s called up to the Grievance Office. The guy has since been allowed to attend dinner as normal, but he’s legitimately angry over the guard deading his chow two nights in a row; maybe he had PB and J or ramen noodles, or maybe he went to bed hungry. He wants the guard to get in trouble. (Good luck; a trio of guards just came back to work after spending all of four days on paid suspension after beating an inmate nearly to death.) When the sergeant calls the cell block to make inquiries, the guard doesn’t recall burning the inmate on chow. Nor do his coworkers. Case closed.
Robertson faired better. The Grievance Office at his last prison on the previous bid got him seen by the optometrist, and he was issued a new pair of glasses. That set him back thirty dollars (for Robertson, the equivalent of four or five weeks’ pay).
“I’ve never filed a grievance,” I tell the group, “so I’m not the best one to advise you on how to go about it, other than reading off my worksheet. ‘You have to file within twenty-one days of the alleged occurrence.’ If you have a legitimate grievance, even if you’re not sure, drop a grievance. Seek the counsel of men in the law library or Grievance Office. You can grieve any area in the prison without fear of physical retaliation, except for security.”
“Yeah,” interjects Zeta. “You grieve a guard...hmmph...you done off, son. They’ll beat the shoes off ya.”
“You’re right, security will often retaliate if you grieve one of them: a copy of your grievance ripped up and thrown on your bed; threats; the same type of harassment that caused your grievance, but served up by a different guard. Anything up to and including, in the rare case, a weapon ‘found’ in your cell or a urine test that mysteriously comes up dirty.”
The men hiss and fidget. Tough room.
“Understand something: we’ve all heard the horror stories, and we remember them because they’re scary. But, in so doing, we give them a disproportionate weight in our memory. Meaning, for every one of those setups that result in serious Box time, there are, I don’t know, fifty that result in little to no retaliation by security. I say this not to excuse their behavior, but to minimize some of our worries.”
The group isn’t happy, their worries aren’t minimized.
“Here’s the take away: there is a grievance process if you feel you’re being mistreated. It’s far from perfect, but it’s the best we have. If you’re having an issue with security staff, and it’s not a one-time thing, try to approach the particular guard when he’s away from his coworkers. Humble yourself; it’s his house. Ask if you’ve done something to piss him off. Listen to what he says. More often than not, this clears things up. It shows that you’re acknowledging his power. Personally, I’m not overly concerned with his feelings, but if it means he’ll stop giving me a hard time, I’ll stroke his ego. But, I find such obvious shows of submission as distasteful as you probably do. So, I try to avoid them all together, follow the rules, and fly under the radar.”
Even John nods along with that.
I turn off one bank of fluorescent lights and press play on a twenty-six-minute DVD, an entertaining inmate-produced video on preventing hepatitis and HIV/AIDS in prison. It’s a time suck, but the message is important: minimize risks, don’t get tattoos in prison.
This being my umpteenth viewing; I can quote lines better than I can with The Simpsons. Sitting behind my desk, I sketch the men as they watch the video. Robertson’s legs stretch out in front of him, straight like planks and crossed at the ankles; he props up his chin with the palm of a loosely-curled fist. The thinker. Zeta and Alex are giggling over the production values. A couple men are showing their displeasure by sleeping.
Some of these guys see me as a sellout—to them, my attempts at cognitive reframing smack of the company line, like I’ve drunk too much of the mess hall’s off-brand Kool-Aid. But my motives are pure: alleviating suffering. I acknowledge, however, that who we are (our brains, our pasts, the color of our skin) plays a role in how we view our situations and respond to them, but that’s not to say there’s no room for self-determinism. I’ve learned to change what I can, accept what I can’t, and always make a concerted effort to focus on the positive. That’s the message I try to get across.
As to the charge that I say what I say because I’m paid to do so, I point out that I make twenty-five cents an hour, nowhere near enough to turn me into a mouthpiece for the state. I understand, however, where they’re coming from, and they’re not entirely wrong that I get treated differently. Being a tall, white male has never hurt a salesman, business leader, or politician. I get given the benefit of the doubt more often than do my peers. But, I’ve had black friends over the years who were treated just as well (or as poorly) in here as I was, so I take the stance that it’s possible, with a little effort, to improve the quality of one’s treatment. Some of the men buy that, while others remain unconvinced. They’d like me to join the gripefest and confirm all their ugliest suppositions of this place. I’m repackaging Frankl when all they want to hear are the aggressive lyrics of, say, 50 Cent.
To the assembled microcosm of the prison population, it’s obvious that I’m not the average bear. That’s where my previous coworker, Ro, really came in handy. We’re the same age, both went away young, though I had a couple more years inside. Earlier in his incarceration, he was a Somebody in his gang and spent almost eight years in the Box for stabbings. It was in the Box that Ro finally turned it around, seeing that his lifestyle was about nothing and had only served to distance him from his family. He behaved himself, volunteered helping guys study for the GED, and eventually was given a time cut out of the Box. That’s when we started working together. Ro and I were both laid back and shared a similar sense of humor. You find good people in the trenches, it never fails. Aside from the fact that he was all-city amazing on a basketball court, we were brothers, he my dark-skinned doppelganger. The perfect team: my science, his street cred. The gospel of positive self-actualization was an easier sell coming from Ro, who looked and sounded more like our participants. During every group, I tell our participants that if they’re affiliated (with a gang), unaffiliate, and, if they haven’t, don’t crew up; as a litmus test for psychopathy, I advise that they try telling “friends” no when a favor is requested to see how they take it. These messages carried more weight, however, when Ro said them.
He left for a medium-security prison several months ago, before the summer. Getting transferred to a facility with better access to therapeutic programs than exists here improved Ro’s chances of being released. Hopefully he’s out by now; he deserves a second chance. I miss him, as a friend and a coworker, but don’t mind working alone. It’s hard enough to keep the group from going to pieces without having to work around the often-destabilizing influence of a coworker who normally isn’t as proficient as Ro.
Booming out of the TV, a hip-hop beat kicks up as one of the actors spits a homespun Hep C rap: thusly, the credits roll. As I eject the DVD, unplug the hardware and wrap up the cables, I ask the group what they’ve learned.
Zeta: “Yeah, um, I learned how to make a tattoo gun.” Right.
This segment wouldn’t be complete without a bon mot or two.
“That’s fantastic,” I say. Maybe later, in private, I’ll urge him to be a person, not a performance. So much energy is wasted acting for others as opposed to listening to them, learning from life, yet another lesson I learned the hard way. “What else have we learned?”
Matt volunteers, “Not to get tattoos in prison.”
Me: “Not to get tattoos in prison. To minimize risks. No unprotected sex.”
The chorus, laughing, squirming, “Hey, whoa.”
“Again, minimize risk. If you’re having sexual relations in prison, I don’t judge, be protected. I’m of the harm reduction school. If you feel your life just isn’t complete without a flaming skull and barbed wire inked on your biceps, make damned sure you assemble the tattoo machine yourself out of new gear, and buy brand new ink.”
Zeta says, “How do you make a tattoo gun?”
“You just said you learned from the movie.”
Laughingly, he admits he was lying. “So, how do you make one?”
“If you have to ask...wait till you hit the street, get some professional ink work. More importantly, if you haven’t been tested for blood-borne diseases, drop a slip to Medical and get tested. If you have an issue, you want to know about it, so you can be treated. This is especially true if you engaged in high-risk behavior on the street. I was an intravenous drug user, had unprotected sex, and worked on an ambulance. So, I got tested a couple times since going away, to account for a window period.”
There’s a vaccine for hep B offered by the department. So as to not even entertain the inevitable conspiracy theories about vaccines—long-form death in a syringe, implanting a tracking device, et paranoid cetera—I tell them that if they’re offered if, they can refuse, but I’ve taken it.
Matt asks if instructional videos are made in this prison. The men snidely dismiss him. Look around, you know where you’re at?
But I’ve learned to listen to what’s not said, and Matt’s question holds promise. “Matt, is that something you’d like to do?”
“Not so much the acting, but the production side. Did some of that in high school.”
“Not me,” says Alex. “I wanna act.”
I remember my days of overconfident goofiness. “Wait, don’t tell me,” I say. “You’ve been auditioning all morning for the part of Ball Breaker.”
“Day-ummm, son,” he says, folding into a giggle. “How you gonna disrespect me like that?”
I tell Matt and those interested that there are a couple of prisons in the state that have volunteer theatre programs, usually closer to metropolitan areas.
In prisons throughout the country there are these shining examples of volunteer-run, self-sustaining rehabilitative arts programs (the ones dependent on state funds, like California’s, have mostly disappeared). Some of the better known programs include the Shakespeare Prison Project at Racine Correctional Institution in Wisconsin; Rehabilitation Through the Arts in New York; Story Catchers Theatre, Illinois Youth Center; Prison Performing Arts, Missouri. Ask these civilian volunteers why they keep coming back year after year, and they often say that working with cons is more fulfilling than working with the pros and students they deal with in their nine-to-fives. These largely-unsung heroes patiently wait to come into a place everyone wants to leave; it is no exaggeration to note that the true rehabilitation that occurs in these volunteer-run programs saves taxpayers untold millions of dollars. If there is a Heaven, these volunteers will arrive via the express elevator. Based upon documentaries I’ve seen on PBS, and the rare peer I’ve encountered who’s been in one of these programs, it’s apparent that taking part in something positive and bigger than oneself transforms those in my shoes better than any therapeutic program mandated by the state. Socialization, group therapy, stabilizing factor, vehicle for reentry—not to mention what is, by all accounts, damn fine theatre (see Jonathan Shailor’s Performing New Lives).
From its inception in 2006 until I was transferred out of Attica four-and-a-half years later, I attended a weekly writers’ workshop. It was led by a saint of a professor, a real mensch, who drove hours each way to be with our small group for three hours. His university provided him a small stipend with which he brought us used books, anthologies, and texts. He gave lessons in craft, and we did in-class writing assignments; my peers and I read aloud pieces we’d worked on for months, and then the floor was open for constructive critique. A few of us eventually had work accepted for publication by literary journals. By gradual, unspoken agreement, we made a sanctuary out of that small classroom, a portal through which we left behind the degradation and darkness of Attica and traveled, line by line, to a place where intellectual beauty and emotional honesty were venerated, and we were all worthwhile. There was an esprit de corps in that group that I doubt I’ll ever again experience. Through the grapevine, I hear that the workshop continues—if I were still in Attica, I’d be keeping time with my old friends.
“What about college?” says Robertson.
Again, I have to be the messenger of disappointment. Robertson remembers aloud the college programs from his last bid. In the mid-nineties, federal tuition assistance for inmates was taken out of the budget; state governors happily followed suit, eliminating TAP and Pell grants for incarcerated learners. When I arrived at Attica in 2001 the college program had recently stopped accepting new students, but, for a couple of years, it continued serving those already enrolled. They were living on borrowed time courtesy of a local legislator who continued quietly disbursing discretionary funds, until it was no longer politically viable.
As Lyndon Johnson was fond of saying: Never watch hogs slaughtered before breakfast, and never show young children how legislation gets enacted. Perhaps more than any other issue, the shuttering of college programs for the incarcerated illustrates the public’s willingness to be whipped into a bitter hatred by conservative politicians and a few sound bites. Why should your tax dollars pay for a criminal’s higher education when you have to pay thirty or forty thousand a year to send your son or daughter to college? Prisoners using up federal grant money that should be going to traditional students: that was another canard readily swallowed by the citizenry. On its face, their argument has the ring of common sense and packs an emotional punch; if I were struggling to send my child to college, this would certainly raise my hackles.
The numbers, however, tell a different and more nuanced story. Numbers (used often enough to be taken close to face value) say that for every dollar spent on higher education in prison, seven dollars are saved on the back end (i.e., even if an incarcerated learner doesn’t complete an associate’s or bachelor’s, he or she is drastically less likely to reoffend, thus saving the state the opportunity costs incurred by a trip through the criminal justice system culminating in a thirty-five-thousand-do 11-a-year stay in the steel bar hotel). But nuance and long- term thinking has never sold well to the American public. It’s always easier to judge than to understand, thus relying on numbers dictated by politics, not the realities on the ground. When you discuss the criminal justice system, be aware: you’re dealing with twenty percent facts, eighty percent psychology.
As the economics of higher education change (thanks to free and reduced-cost online options like Udacity), some prison systems have once again began offering college programs in secure online classrooms in the cell blocks. Call me cynical, but I can practically hear the sound bites shouting at me from the future: Why should prisoners be able to use bandwidth your child could be using?
I’m one of the lucky few: finished my bachelor’s inside using one of the ever-dwindling handful of universities still operating a “distance-learning” program that doesn’t require an Internet presence. When I graduated in 2007, the cost of tuition for a three-credit course ran between five hundred and a thousand dollars. Comparatively inexpensive to a school on the street, it’s prohibitively expensive for most incarcerated men and women. If I myself were to pay for a thousand-dollar course, it would require that I saved every penny I made working in Phase 1 for two years. I was fortunate to have family who were willing and able to pick up the tab.
“Those are the cold, hard numbers, gents. But don’t despair.” They’re despairing.
“Seriously. Just because you can’t take a college course now doesn’t mean you can’t transfer to a prison that has a self-sustaining college program, immune to the whims of bureaucrats, law makers, and a fickle public. And, in the meantime, find a subject you’re interested in. Find a textbook in the library, or, more likely, buy it used from a store. At the end of each chapter you’ll find questions. Read and answer the questions, think about the subject matter, and talk about it with your peers—you’re doing college-level work.”
One of my overarching goals is trying to help these men become self-motivated searchers awakened to the possibilities of their own lives, not passive containers waiting to be shoddily crammed with mandatory programs. I see that I’ve lost the group. It’s not that they can’t marshal the will to perform self-directed work. Unknown unknowns: where would they even begin?
Two-and-a-half years ago I was provided a coworker a week after I’d started working in Phase 1. A cool, simpatico kid called Murph, six years my junior. In one of those where’s-the-hidden-camera moments, we learned that we each had been expelled from the very same Syracuse University, six years apart, each a mortarboard’s toss shy of graduation. It felt wrong: two white college boys (misfits but college-educated nonetheless) leading a group of Black and Brown people, many of whom left school in their early teens. I was forever on guard against gaps in my empathy for these men who had a very different life experience. A not uncommon backstory: mother was an addict; brother, who dealt drugs, was killed in front of the home. The science has shown that such repeated stress stunts the growth of the prefrontal cortex—the fight or flight reaction is set at a much lower threshold. Additionally, their formative years were marked by inadequate nutrition, limited reading at home, and little or no preschool experience; they began at a disadvantage very difficult to overcome. Despite those differences, we all landed in the same spot, but Murph and I had been taught skill sets that help us remain adaptable, resilient, and productive. The disconnect between us and the group was that he and I remade ourselves into passionate pilgrims, belated college juniors looking for art and adventure. But we are able to do so only because we had that behavior modeled for us.
I’ve heard a few of my peers lament: How can I be rehabilitated when I was never habilitated in the first place? Murph and I deviated from a fine path, and we’re working our way back there. We came from homes where there was a premium placed on education. How can I offer the same advice to peers who left school at thirteen and entered the criminal justice system? Who’ve never been told they can achieve anything they set their mind to? Who’ve never felt that the system is there to help them?
Murph, like F. Scott Fitzgerald before he cracked up, espoused the belief that life was something you dominated if you were any good. He was determined to acquit himself well in prison. With only a few years in, he was roughly where I was on the attitudinal learning curve when I was a newjack: having learned how to adapt and thrive in the harsh environment, I became cross with those who pitied themselves and griped that the system should be doing more to help them. Slowly, though, I came to realize that some (perhaps most) of my inner resources and aptitude for learning to maneuver within various systems was at least partly due to a nurturing home and my socialization within an upper-middle-class milieu.
Murph came from a more modest background. You don’t understand, he said. I had the same obstacles. Not exactly, I replied, not as a white male who has never known a day of real hunger, never lived the street life, never been the victim of unreasonable prejudice. Really? he said.
I saw his point, though. While it’s an order of magnitude less severe, we’d both experienced nights of sleep-depriving hunger during lockdowns; we live amongst those who personify the street life; and we’re all prejudged as persistently dangerous and consistently untrustworthy convicts. Despite the differences in all our respective former lives, Murph pointed out, we live under the same roof now, and there’s no sense whining about it. Thus, for a time, he and I rode roughshod over our share of complainers.
But, as is often the case, I tested my reality against his and clarified my thinking on the subject. It was around then that I began to realize this job did more than just pass the time, and was more than a stepping stone on a path where I network my way into better, higher-paying work. Phase I satisfied my mind the way work does when you actually care about it and feel like you might be making a difference. Through practice, I learned the importance of bridging the gap, taking what I’ve learned and teaching these men to apply it in here, and eventually, out there. Noncognitive skills can be taught: malleability, resiliency, self-control, resourcefulness, drive; how to rebound, rebrand, network, and interface with a changing environment. Liberal guilt, noblesse oblige, call it what you will. Given the givens, it is one of the few good things I can do.
Turning, I see Ms. D’s hand on a small cerulean stack of suicide prevention pamphlets. My watch says we have just over five minutes before the guards fling open the door. My heart (and experience) says that ending an already difficult day with talk of suicide prevention is a good way to make those pamphlets perversely germane.
Yet, I don’t make the rules around here, so stoicism is the word of the day. I introduce the segment, then Ms. D gets into it. She lists the warning signs of a potential suicide as the men decide whether to take this seriously.
Two summers ago, when I first arrived here, there was a rash of suicides. Seven in total, out of a population of eighteen hundred, over the course of three months. Some blamed the triple-digit temperatures, the air thick and close like a Third-World favela. Many of my peers riled themselves up if you refused to believe the guards didn’t stage these suicides (actually, one or two were suspicious enough to warrant an outside investigation of the guards and supervisory staff working in the respective housing locations, but the deceased had no family or friends, so no one raised much of a fuss). In Phase 1, I’m still dealing with distorted echoes of such motivated reasoning; couple guys per group will have heard third-hand horror stories from a peer who felt it his duty to acclimate the newly arrived to the dangerous waters of Comstock. During that ridiculously hot summer, when my peers seemed to be dropping like flies, this place felt like a combat zone. I was numbly standing in the hallway at eight AM, the temperature already in the high eighties, as forty or so of us were stopped in company formation, waiting to proceed to breakfast. The guards’ walkies crackled to life with calls for assistance, a location, the terse back-and-forth of supervisors, then: “...better bring the stretcher.” The stretcher was produced from a side room, an ersatz parking garage for this conveyor of maladies. With a nurse in tow wheeling an oxygen tank, a guard walked past with the stretcher—an incongruously shiny yellow, up-market Stryker—and nodded to the guard escorting us to chow: “Another one.” It was the second suicide in as many days.
Suicide prevention is a vital topic because some kill themselves in county jail rather than getting sucked into the abyss; some hang up after a string of disappointments, while some just fantasize about it. It’s personal for me because I’ve had my share of dark nights when I felt like imploding under the weight of the suffering I’ve caused. I am not one for whom the suicide option is unthinkable. In county, on suicide watch, I was close to ending this bid before it even technically started.
Ms. D hits a snag when she suggests to the group that if they see a peer who’s giving away personal property, becoming disheveled, and muttering that everyone will be better off without him, they should “drop a slip” to any staff member, giving the information on who needs help.
“Oh, hail no.” The younger ones, Alex, Zeta, KB, say they’re “not about” telling.
She’s getting angry, and I know this is going no place good.
No, Ms. D doesn’t mind that I have a go of it.
“All right, check this out, guys. It may save someone’s life. We have just a few minutes, and it’s an important subject, so, on this, there will be no debate. I’m going to present some information, and it’s on you whether you choose to ignore it or be decent, caring humans. There are some staff who actually care about our well-being, but they go home at the end of the day. So we have to be good to ourselves and look out for each other. If you’re feeling mentally not well, you can refer yourself to Mental Health the same way you drop a call-out slip in the box for the library. I referred myself last year to get help with some anxiety. It’s no big deal, and there’s nothing weak about seeking counseling. And if you see a peer going through a rough time, try to be his friend, talk to him, give him a bowl of food; ask others if this is normal behavior for him, or if there’s something drastic going on. If there’s any question as to his ultimate safety, refer him to Mental Health. He won’t get in trouble and he just might get the help he needs. Don’t confuse referring someone to Mental Health with dropping dime. You’re not a rat or snitch or whatever you want to term it, you’re someone who’s looking out for a peer, getting him the help he dearly needs.”
“I’m not tryin’ to be funny,” says KB, “but what if killing yourself is, like, the best option?”
“I’ve read firsthand accounts of failed suicide attempts, as well as the writing of mental health professionals who have an unfortunately vast amount of experience with this subject. Overwhelmingly, those who survive come to be very grateful that their suicide attempt wasn’t successful. Of course, if they’re really serious, it’s just a matter of time before they’re successful. Do enough time and someone you know will kill himself. Some of you have likely experienced it on a previous bid.”
Heads nod. I remember my friend Ronald in county, rushed past my cell on a gurney, ashen, slobbery, and very much dead from hanging.
“So, be prepared for it. Thinking about how you’ll act beforehand will enable you to act rationally when life starts getting crazy.”
Walking back to my cell, I feel heavy. Day two tends to do that to me, but this Tuesday feels particularly crummy. As if to confirm this, it has begun raining. Passing a window in the corridor, I see one of the prison’s feral cats, a skin-and-bones calico, waiting out the storm in the relatively-dry doorway to the hospital. I replay the morning’s drudgery, the misdirected anger, and topping it off with a fucking talk about suicide—jagged icing on one bad cake of a morning. Not for the first time, I contemplate getting out of this line of work.
Ted Conover, in Newjack, his unvarnished work of immersive journalism about working as a guard in Sing-Sing, details how he cut his little project short. (The Department has banned the book, but a friendly guard in Attica lent me his copy.) He’d planned on working there for a year, but found he was taking more and more of the job home with him. It wasn’t fair, Conover felt, to his wife and newborn daughter, so he quit a month or two shy of his year.
I know my work counts for something, but are the psychic costs too high?
As soon as I pose the question, I know its answer. It comes from a work of fiction, which, like all good fiction, is true and honest. As Junot Diaz’s narrator learned in The Brief Wondrous Life Oscar Wao: The only way out is in. There will be tough moments, but maybe teaching others about redemption is a form of penance that can actually lead to my learning how to forgive myself.
Accounting for the various checkpoints along my route, I’ll be back, locked in my cell in under five minutes. The positive effects of writing have never been lost on me. I’ve conditioned myself to push past the depressive lethargy of these mornings, and just begin writing. Scribbling away in my journal or typing a letter to a loved one, focusing on the things I’m grateful for, until, line by line, the darkness lifts, and I begin to feel lighter.
That’s what I’m after for the remainder of this gray morning. sitting with the darkness, refracting it through the cathartic prism of the white page, and soaking up whatever light comes through the other side.
Selah.
“The Caging of America.” January 30, 2012, is an indispensable primer on how the United States came to be the jailingest nation in the history of the world.
Smart and insightful, incisive and humane--as expected.