Field Conditions cont.
"We carry the numbers, but they do the math..."
Day Three
It is still raining, but my brightened mood allows me to see the room as cozy and warm. The dark sky fills the multi-paned windows like a Mondrian painting in gray scale.
I realize I’ve been daydreaming when Ms. D asks me to help the man pliantly standing in front of her desk, struck dumb by the sign-in sheet. He wears a beseeching smile, like a dog doing its business.
I mime the international sign for writing and remember my dad in restaurants, asking for the check.
“No puedo,” he says. Ah, so. I’d mistakenly taken his caramel complexion for Persian, as his features remind me of my late friend, Doc.
“Hola,” I say. “Como te llamas y cual es su numero?”
Jovo L- tells me, and I sign in for him. Then I lead him to a seat, and take the one next to him.
He is polite and reserved, and simply stares at me, not knowing enough to know what he doesn’t know.
I communicate easily in Spanish but am far from fluent. Leaning in for privacy, I tell Jovo: Talk to me, ask me anything you wish.
Instantly, I regret sitting so close: his breath is vibratingly halitoxic, and I can almost feel my eye lashes being singed. I give him a pass on that, however; the state isn’t the best provider and it’ll be another week or so before Jovo can get to commissary and buy toothpaste. Turns out Jovo can’t read or write...Spanish. My heart sinks. Without a framework in his primary language, this fifty-year-old will have great difficulty learning English. Growing up in Puebla, outside of Mexico City, he was a field hand who never went to school. He came to the States illegally and found work on landscaping crews and in restaurants, washing dishes. Throughout his life there was always someone around to help him with directions, a George to his somewhat of a Lenny. So long as he doesn’t have a “bad case” (i.e. a rape charge), that will continue, and his countrymen will gladly help this viejo.
I ask if he’s in prison for drugs or violence. My hope: he’s just some schnook that one of the cartels used to mule their wares.
No, Jovo says.
Un problema, I think. I don’t know how to say “rape” en Español, we didn’t cover it in Señor Glick’s eighth-grade Spanish class. Instead, I ask if he’s in here because of trouble with a woman.
Sheepishly, slowly, he wags his head: not cut and dried. Jovo tells of the long night he spent in a precinct’s interrogation room; the statement he was coerced into signing, not knowing, to this day, exactly what he signed that took a piece of his life away. Months later, his lawyer from the public defender’s office was less than no help and apparently rushed Jovo into signing more papers. The poor bastard didn’t realize he’d just been sentenced to ten years until the guards led him out of the courtroom.
In this regard, he is just like the multitude of defendants who have little more than a brief encounter with a lawyer, who will likely advise them to plead guilty. After being held in jail because they can’t raise bail money, they are more apt to take such advice. If TV’s primetime court room dramas followed reality, the case would be closed before the second commercial break. Amy Bach, in Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court, sheds useful light on how it goes for someone who doesn’t have tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars to spend on a defense. Ordinary injustice is standard operating procedure and “results when a community of legal professionals becomes so accustomed to a pattern of lapses that they can no longer see their role in them... Whether through friendship, mutual interest, indifference, incompetence, or willful neglect, the players end up not checking each other.”
It’s little wonder that, according to Bach, forty-seven million Americans have criminal records. The overwhelming proportion of criminal prosecutions end without going to trial, a result of the concerted efforts of lawyers and judges, who, in their haste, often ignore the law. A defendant forfeits due process rights by engaging in a plea agreement, so there’s no real accountability: this is the foul-smelling gunk which keeps the conveyor belt running smoothly, constantly feeding the insatiable maw of the criminal justice system. And for those defendants who dare exercise their sixth amendment right to trial, should they lose, or “blow trial,” they will find themselves loaded down with a considerably heavier sentence than would result from a plea agreement. This harsh sentence has less to do with culpability than it does in setting an example: Thou shalt not gum up the works. Not wanting to even slightly upset this brutal clockwork, it is the rare appellate judge who’ll overturn a trial court’s conviction. And while there are armies of Americans who’ll flood a legislator’s in-box over a wardrobe malfunction on the public airwaves, sadly there is no citizen’s group which regularly monitors the courts.
Jovo asks me how much time he’ll have to do before he’s released. There’s a lot of inside baseball to these numbers: percentages of time to serve, good time, conditional release, parole boards, max-out dates. On a ten flat, he’ll have to do eight years, mas ó menos, more mas than menos. In a few weeks, he’ll see his counselor, and I tell him she’ll be able to look on her screen and get a better idea of what kind of time he’ll have to do. There will be a translator present, one of several inmates whose job it is to translate for Spanish speakers during disciplinary hearings, consults with medical staff, and counselor interviews. I am friendly with these men; they’re professional and discreet. Their Spanish has words for parole and early release: They might be able to help him.
With constant budget shortfalls, you’d think that a foreign national like Jovo wouldn’t be denied parole, that he’d get released as early as possible and put on a plane back to Puebla. But I had a Malaysian friend in Attica who, last I heard, was just denied parole for a third time: six additional years, thirty thou’ per, for a non-citizen who’s going to be deported eventually.
Years ago in Attica, a friendly old timer named Ralphie told me that I wasn’t yet doing time, that my bid would truly begin once I see my first parole board and get denied release for another two years. I didn’t understand him at the time, though Ralphie’s words have begun to bubble back up and repeat on me like a greasy late-night meal. He went away in 1965—before Vietnam was a household word—and is still hashing off years on a twenty-to-life sentence. Forty-seven fucking years in prison and counting. How he handles that math, I have no idea, and hope I’ll never have to learn for myself.
After appealing his tenth parole board’s decision, he was mistakenly sent pages from his file meant only for viewing by parole commissioners. The most damning: a letter on official stationery from the former mayor of a large city—who is friendly with the affluent family of the victims—stating that Ralphie should never be released. Ralphie is an old man now in failing health, and it seems that this administrative fiat will serve as an extrajudicial death warrant. As far as his case is concerned, the system has fallen back on Machiavelli’s advice that men should either be caressed or crushed; might as well tell him Arbeit macht frei. During the seven or so years we locked near each other, I sat with him in the numb days following three of his parole denials, “hits” in local parlance. There was nothing I could say, nor would I dare offer palliative clichés.
I tried to imagine these parole commissioners watching Ralphie totter in, bald and pudgy like a cherub; peering up at them, his eyes look tremendous behind thick glasses. The senior commissioner begins the interview, while the others half listen to what is going on, scanning the folder of the next case.1 Ralphie speaks well and advocates for himself but it doesn’t really matter, does it? Not with that mayoral coup de grace serving as a cover page to his file. So he sits there as they berate him, and when they ask what his plans are if he’s to be released, well, he tells them. His wife of many years recently passed away, family is scattered or dead, he thinks there’s a second cousin couple hundred miles away; yet, a group of Quakers have written to the parole board pledging to house Ralphie, ditto the director of a program for returning citizens, who would guarantee employment for him administering their database (the old man learned to code in the nineteen-eighties and, remarkably, has kept his skill set current). And then it’s over, just a matter of waiting about a week to receive the denial in the mail, a terse, boilerplate invite to the confab two years hence.
Disappointing, he says, but no surprise. Stoic. But alone, the night after receiving his denial: crushed, gutted. Two days later, he opens the accordion folder that holds a copy of his appeal to the previous denial, two years earlier when the parole board reconvened. He highlights names, dates, and other changes that will need to be made on this go round. That appeal was never ruled on, nor were any of the ones that preceded it, each one made moot by not being heard within two years. This is a Catch-22 by way of Kafka, and only someone who’s learned patience from decades spent in a cell can face it without decompensating. On one hand, Ralphie knows that, after spending countless hours assembling and mailing his appeal, it will be mooted by his appearance at the next board, which will hit him again, which will lead to his retrieving his appeal yet again from the accordion folder, revising and resubmitting, but on the other hand, he has to work the process, do what is expected of him, and hope that one day soon the fates will tire of making him their plaything. The days go by, and we go with them, but don’t start counting too closely.
We carry the numbers, but they do the math, and so the subject of parole is physically depressing. Herman, a close friend, recently got denied by his eighth parole board, over forty years in on a twenty-five-to-life. Twenty-five-to-life: my sentence. Alas, all politics is local. I’ll first see a parole board in twelve years, when I’m forty-eight. I don’t expect to be released then. Or at the next board, two years later. Or the one after that. Will I have any loved ones left? Will I get out before I’m sixty? Ever? I’m not a betting man, so I won’t start now.
Instead, I think of Ellis Boyd Redding going before the parole board forty years into his stay in Shawshank prison. Like most of us who have matured and deal daily with the weight of our past, Red looks back on the young, stupid kid who committed a terrible crime. He wants to talk to him, talk some sense into him, tell him the way things are. But he can’t. “That kid’s long gone and this old man is all that’s left. I gotta live with that. Rehabilitated? It’s just a bullshit word.”
There’s little I can do for Jovo at this moment. He’s at the beginning of his bid, imagining the end, but nothing of the in between. I write out the name of his counselor and give it to him on a scrap of paper. We rehearse how to respond and what to say when the guards inevitably pull him out of line for a pat frisk. I write down his name and number; later, I will give it to the school’s principal and ask if she can place him in an ESL class; I’ll also tell the translators about his plight. When I wish him luck, he grasps my shoulder while thanking me. Standing up, I take in a look of loneliness and fear in his dark, searching eyes, and I know that look will stay with me for a long time.
At my desk, I riffle through my folder, and withdraw a well- worn page replete with my sloppy handwriting. As opposed to days one and two, the FAQ and policy directives, I work off a single page of bullet points today. Adaptive work: my wheel house. I preach what I practice and, unlike my Mobius strip of a Monday morning, the flow never feels tired or stale (although I do question whether I come off as corny or, worse, self- deceiving). The ground we’ll cover today is meant as a buffer against this harsh place (and not just for the participants).
“Good morning, gentlemen. This is our last day.”
“We gonna get cake an’ ice cream?” says Alex. Invariably, I’m asked some version of that; say what you will of human nature, it’s a lot more universal than we give it credit for.
“We certainly are,” I say. “But more importantly, no Phase 1 group is complete without”—I make wormy parabolas with my arms—“break dance fighting! Who’s first?”
Laughter. “You crazy, son.”
Because Ms. D agreed yesterday to nixing “The Wave,” I’ve got ninety uninterrupted minutes. The time stretches like a pristine canvas in want of vibrant splashes. Today especially, I stand on the shoulders of Martin Seligman, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Deepak Chopra, and Alec Baldwin’s “Blake” from “Glengarry Glen Ross.” My humanistic pitch centers on positive psychology, personal transformation, the wonder of consciousness—I sell ‘em the undercoating, and I’m always closing.
“O.K., today’s going to be a really good day. First couple of days, we went over the nitty gritty. Concrete answers, but not what you wanted to hear. Those unforgiving policies will become easier to tolerate, and this place gets a lot less scary after a month. That’s where today’s material comes in. Today is about giving you the tools for you to transform your bid into something of substance, to use your time wisely, and come out the other side better than you came in, refashioned as the good person your loved ones know that you really are. Does that sound like something you’d be interested in?”
Some nods, a grunt.
“Good. Here we go.” I pull out the Department’s mission statement, which is probably similar to the mission statements of corrections departments the county over, and exhort them to withhold their snickering as I begin to read excerpts: address the needs of all inmates, so they can return to their communities better prepared to lead, successful and crime-free lives; develop and implement positive individualized treatment plans for each inmate; teach inmates the need for discipline and respect, and the importance of a mature understanding of a work ethic; protect human dignity.
John looks at me like I’m the dumbest person on earth. Oh, he of little faith. If nothing else, these men are helping me overcome my need to be liked by all. I’ve seen so much pain—and caused my share of it—that somewhere along the line I made a decision to be good and nice, even if some of my peers call me a sucker or initially view me as a target. They often feel that if you live among wolves, you have to act like one. I’d like to believe that I’m in this prison, not of it. With creative works, reading, and letters home, my head is out of prison as much as possible. For that reason, they are often incredulous when I tell them how long I’ve been inside or that I’m doing twenty-five-to- life. What I’ve learned is that it feels better to be a good, earnest person making nice memories to put on top of the ugly ones.
“No one likes hypocrisy,” I say, “which is why the Department’s mission statement is so infuriating to those of us under its control. So let’s acknowledge that it’s window dressing...and move past it. Imagine that you, each of you, wrote those words as your own personal mission statement. Reads a little differently now, does it not? Every one of those things we can do for ourselves. Because the truth is, we’re on our own.”
Some of us have outside support, and it’s not unheard of for a staff member to take a special (positive) interest in us. But when the cell bang closed it’s just you in there, alone with your thoughts. And in any touch point with staff, no matter how dire, we’re there on our own. For those of us who went away young and were accustomed to mom advocating for us, flying solo during such encounters takes some getting used to. The successful amongst us learn how to adapt to that.
Prison strips life of most pretenses, and you see how illusory connections truly are. We are all floating alone in a sea of time; if we’re lucky, venturing ashore in our minds. The smart thing to do is accept lifelines as they come; from a friend, loved one, mentor.
Be passionate, I tell them. Be involved in something. We grow towards the sun. Learn a language, read the collected works of an author, find a pen pal; practice drawing, painting, playing a musical instrument; get in shape; help others. Do these things and your time becomes filled with life; it moves more quickly. That’s the incentive that piques their attention. Unlike our lives before, the parties we wished would never end, time in here can’t go quickly enough. With any luck, that drive to do things to make the time go quicker will jumpstart an intrinsic motivation, the drive to do something out of enthusiasm, to do it for its own sake. When the journey is the reward, real positive change starts to happen.
I bring it back to the concrete by introducing a segment on writing. “We’re going to discuss writing to staff, writing letters home, the benefits of keeping a journal, and creative writing for those who have such aspirations.”
This entire segment was created thanks to the anti-example set by an early coworker who only responded to the name, or, really, honorific, “Sheikh.” A slight Hispanic man in his fifties, the Sheikh was a frenetic narcissist filled to bursting with banal self-delusion (he’d recently rebranded himself a “Sufi mystic,” thus the moniker). Murph and I had an understanding with the Sheikh. So long as he controlled his pathologies during each cycle of Step 1, he was allowed to blow his load in an orgy of solipsism on the final day.
For the better part of an hour, he bounced and stomped and gesticulated, subjecting the captive audience to a reading of his accomplishments as presented in a perfectly organized portfolio, which contained a dog’s breakfast of megalomania: five-page résumé, highlighted and annotated, poems that read like a smattered mashup of motivational posters and Hallmark schmaltz; an embarrassingly childish ball-point self portrait of a man in a cage.
As opposed to the Sheikh Show, I focus on my audience.
“Who’s comfortable writing to staff?”
A few hands.
We do a quick lesson in writing a professional letter, a persuasive request. How to format and present; how to get your reader on the same page, minimize objections, justify the request, make a proper closing that clearly and confidently states an easy- to-follow request. Brevity and decorum warrant special attention. Over the years, it’s often been part of my job to read and respond (ghost-written for a boss) to the incoming mail of my peers. I’ve seen the rambling screeds, the disquietingly stained pages, unraveled inner monologues of paranoiacs who mention, in a surprising number of cases, the state of their bowel movements.
“These people aren’t your friends so don’t begin a letter asking about their weekend. It’s a waste of time that adds up when they have a three-inch stack of mail on the desk. If you can fit it all on a third of a page, it’s in your best interest to do so. Brief, to the point. Know that guy who locks a few cells away from you, always asking for something? Yo, son, had a mad stressful day...”
The men laugh knowingly. We’re complicated, but our intricacies aren’t random.
“And he goes on, taking you around the world just so he can ask you for a cigarette or shot of coffee. You know damn well where he’s going, and wish he’d just get there so you could yea or nay him. We know that guy, perhaps some of us have been that guy. In our letters to staff we should never come off like that. Capisce?”
They do.
“And now to one of the more crucial things we’ll present in Phase 1: the importance of building and maintaining ties with our loved ones.” The nature of leading selfish lives and going away is burning bridges, hurting the ones who love us because they screwed up and gave us their trust. Our imperative is to right those past wrongs whenever possible. It’s the human thing to do, but there’s also this wonderful benefit baked into the process. “There is no quicker, easier, safer way to get out of this place than to write a letter home. Writing to someone is like having a conversation with that person in your head; an fMRI would show your brain lighting up as if you were speaking to that person. For those of us who smoke cigarettes, if you’ve ever lost yourself in a letter, only to realize you haven’t had a cigarette in hours—
Knowing nods and murmurs.
“—congratulations, if you’re anything like I was, as soon as you realized you hadn’t smoked in hours, you rewarded yourself with a chain of cigs. But never mind that. The flow state is important, whether it’s writing, reading, creating, working out, whatever. When you’re in a state of flow, you’re completely dialed into your activity, it’s constructive play, your brain is alive and singing. The more flow states you build into your day, the more optimal your experience.”
Whether someone has been away ten months or twenty years, one can usually tell who has people out there, sending love—these people are more emotionally robust. Much of the credit for my resolve is owed to the love I receive from my wife, family, friends, and mentors. A few of the men volunteer that they enjoy writing home. To hear Zeta tell it, he has a “mean pen game, son.”
“Thing about writing—or, any type of communication—is that it pays to be a good listener. And part of being a good listener is listening for what’s not said. You send three letters and get one in return, don’t think that you’re owed. Listen to what they say about how hectic their lives are.”
“You saying they’re too busy to sit down and write back to me?” says Alex, a young, good-looking guy, probably feeling the sting of no longer being doted upon by the women in his life as if he were a late Roman emperor.
“What I’m saying, Alex, is that it pays to think about what it means for them to sit down and write a response. They work a nine-to-five and maybe another job; there’s a commute; taking care of the kids, running a household, feeding themselves and getting some sleep. After all that’s said and done, maybe they have an hour or two to themselves. Writing to us, that’s at least a half-hour task, which might be half of their leisure time for that day. Think about how you’d feel if someone got upset with you for not spending half your leisure time performing an activity of their choosing. And in an age of two hundred-eighty-character messages and text-speak, long-form writing might not come easily. Thanks to email, they might not even have envelopes and stamps at home. So, just go into it assuming that you’re going to write more to them than they you. But that’s O.K., it’s actually good for all of us to work on being more selfless, more focused on others. How do we do that? By adding value to their lives one letter at a time, being good listeners, being humorous and informative and understanding. Write about your life in here, the good, the bad, and the fugly.”
They balk. Matt says he doesn’t tell his people about the brutality of this place.
“As a general rule, neither do I. However, in the absence of information, human nature is to conjure some real horror show. Unless your people have done time, they imagine your life as they see it on one of the countless televised examples. ‘Lockup,’ ‘Locked Up Abroad,’ ‘Locked Down,’ ‘Prison Break,’ ‘Oz,’ et cetera. Sleeping with a shiv under your pillow, scenes of gang-rape in the shower. I’ve been away awhile, so you guys know better than I—how close are those shows to your daily experience?”
Not very, they say.
“So, part of what we do in our letters should be inoculating them against the lowest-common-denominator lunacy of pop-culture. Do that by painting scenes of your day. Hey, Sis, you would not believe what I heard this guy say in the mess hall, or, Ma, I was able to make mac n’ cheese in my hot pot...nowhere as good as yours, though. You can also tell them about the realities of this place, how soul-crushing it is to be treated like a second- class citizen at best, and, at worst, less than human. Do so without self-pity, and understand that your loved ones are powerless to stop the ugliness you face daily. You walk a fine line and are always conscious of not making them feel guilty. They can, however, help keep you whole. After a day of being treated like a nuisance or like I don’t exist, it’s life affirming to get a letter from a loved one. It reminds me, reminds us, that there is a world beyond these walls, a place where out failure isn’t a foregone conclusion, and we’re judged not for the destructive and selfish acts of our past, but for the selfless conduct of our present. Speaking of which, work on being a good listener, empathizing with the person on the other end of the line. If you’re told about a litany of bills and financial struggles, the next thing out of your mouth shouldn’t be: ‘Yeah, uh, that sucks...can you buy me a pair of sneakers?’ Don’t be a taker. Do be understanding of what your loved ones are going through. Let them off the hook: they’re not responsible for your being here, so don’t treat them as such; let them know you’re safe and making productive use of your time. Earn their trust back by showing, over time, that you’re emotionally honest and making positive life changes. We keep ourselves relevant by adding value to the lives of others, by being about something. End of story.”
Taking a breather, I scan their faces. Writing home isn’t a hard sell. Most recognize what I’ve said to be valid and have likely practiced it. I hit a note of positivity that makes them feel hopeful, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few nice letters get written tonight. The work, however, entails their getting to a place where they see the intrinsic value of maintaining contact with friends and family—from there, whether they’re conscious of it or not, emotional development occurs. Flexibility, openness, and willingness to listen leads to feeling elevated, freer, more accepting of ourselves and others, more open to new ways of thinking.
“Who’s kept a journal?”
“When I was a kid,” says Zeta, who strikes me as barely old enough to drink. “A counselor in the group home made me write in a journal.”
“Made you?” I chuckle.
“Well, you know.”
“Actually I do, kiddo. When I was in county, a therapist urged me to start keeping a journal, so I could process the strong emotions.” Momentarily, I flash back to the long aimless days in county jail. Like a child’s escapism, sleep was an activity, and I would sometimes snooze away ten to twelve hours. When I knew I could get to sleep easily that night, I would anticipate that delicious crossing over to a refuge from inner experience; in those days, most of my dreams weren’t set in prison.
Not that they asked, but the men learn that I’m a big believer in the cathartic power of writing; how writing about our days and our thought processes can gradually lead to increases in self-awareness. From these exercises in self-observation come emotional growth. By encouraging their ability to evaluate themselves, autonomy, self-responsibility and maturity will hopefully ensue. It also serves as a limbic watermark of progress, as we look back and cringe in embarrassment at the things we once deemed unshakably true. Observe your inner observer observing. One learns that our notions are rarely static, and we shouldn’t cherish our opinions.
“A journal is a safe and effective way to process your day, learn about yourself, and purge the ugly moments. You may recall that on our first day together I told you about my little ketchup incident. It was by writing about it that I was able to wipe away most of the ugliness. It allowed me to get the last word...safely.”
This reminds me of something I forgot to mention moments earlier. “For any of us who have someone who died or isn’t able to be reached for whatever reason: if there was something left unsaid, it likely weighs on you. Or maybe there are some strong emotions you need to vent rather than express to someone with whom you are in contact. Write a letter to this person. Say what needs saying. You can save it, flush it, whatever. I know it sounds silly, but you’d be amazed how helpful this can be.”
The faces of a few men tell me they hope I’m telling the truth. And I find myself wondering if they will try writing that undeliverable letter, hoping that it will give them some peace.
“On a lighter note, who writes for fun?”
“I write rhymes,” KB says.
“A’ight, a’ight,” I say. “Give this man a beat. Uh, uh.”
Ever the ham, Zeta starts beat-boxing. Eyes turn to KB, who quickly decides he doesn’t want the stage, and deflates into his chair.
I rescue him. “Who wants a little Beastie Boys?”
“Who?” says Alex.
“Whaddaya mean, Who? Beasties. ‘Licensed to Ill,’ circa eighty-seven. You kids these days.”
“Spit a little somepin’.” Zeta says.
“Let me think.” Think, think, think: something not inappropriate. “One lonely Beastie I be / all by myself wiffout nobody / ridin’ across the land / kickin’ up sand. / Sheriff Price is on my tail, ‘cause I’m in demand.”
“Oh, shit,” says Zeta.
“Yeah,” I say. “You know, you know. That’s how we do.”
They laugh at my self-effacing niceness. I heard somewhere that the act of smiling makes people happier.
“Getting back to it. For those of you who have creative energy, this is a great place to exercise it. You can write rhymes, poetry, personal essays, short stories, full-length novels. Lots of other ways to occupy your time in here creatively—drawing, painting, building models, learning an instrument—but writing is the one thing that they can’t take away from us. The cost of admission is a pen and paper. Martin Luther King, writing in the margins of a dirty old newspaper in a Birmingham jail cell, noted that time can be used either destructively or constructively. Let’s think about that as we move through our days.”
“Sometimes, I just don’t feel like doin’ nuttin’,” Alex says.
“Word, son,” Zeta seconds.
“I hear you. We all have days like that. Remember, though, that hopelessness brings out the best of art.”
“Did Martin Luther King say that, too?” asks Alex. “No,” I say. “I think it was Questlove from The Roots.”
There’s latent talent in everyone—it just happens that we don’t always get a chance to nurture it, especially if there was no positive reinforcement growing up. Many are simply too busy working, taking care of loved ones, consuming vast quantities of social media content. One of the upsides to this incarcerated downer is the amount of time we can devote to creative endeavors. Steinbeck wrote that man “grows behind his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.” Bringing light to this dark place, we discover, if we turn inward and search, hidden reserves of power. One must write his own tale of redemption. If the cell block weren’t so noisy, it’d be an enviable writer’s retreat.
I tell the men about two of the most-widely published books by American prisoners— George Jackson’s Soledad Brother and Jack Henry Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast—both comprised of letters home, describing the scenes, showcasing the content of their inner lives.
I don’t mention my writing about prison, or that it’s been published. There’s no percentage in it. Nor do I mention the fact that, after a rigorous application process, I was accepted into an MFA program with a concentration in creative nonfiction. There was even scholarship money in the offing.
Then, two months before the semester began, I received a letter from the directors of the program expressing their “deep regret” that the university’s attorney balked at my participation (even through the mail), and they were forced to rescind my acceptance.
What I do, however, is surreptitiously record the contact information of those interested in writing or those who I feel have a story to tell (this morning I added the “government names” of KB, Zeta, and Matt, call it a hunch). For the last year or so, I’ve been chewing on an idea to help writers in prison (field support comes in different flavors). A creator’s workshop without walls, whose mission is to empower these captive creators, help them find a sense of purpose during their bids. Structured properly, this can be impervious to the whims of a know-nothing public or hostile/apathetic bureaucrats. Through the mail, a man or woman will receive motivation, tools, and examples of the form: a tool kit in an envelope, a lifeline served up on demand. The service can be made available online, and some will get it that way, third party. Quasi-finished work will be posted online, with the help of volunteers. Mentors in various disciplines can then be incentivized to work with the creators. I’ll cloudseed the project with writing from over a dozen men whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the past few years. Gradually, quietly, steadily, I’m working towards this goal. As “Finding Nemo” taught us: You survive to fulfill your purpose for others.
Having goals and overarching projects has kept me going these thirteen years, propelling my forward, sometimes simply out of habit. I hope to continue in similar fashion. “Any of you have a to-do list?”
“Yeah,” says Robertson.
“If it’s not too personal, what are some of the things you have to do?”
“Mostly people I have to write to.”
“You and me both, partner. Thanks.” I talk about the importance of having self-imposed goals, a to-do list and, often more importantly, a stop-doing list. The nature of our chaotic lives before going away entails an accrual of negative behaviors that we’d be wise to curtail. Peel away enough bad behaviors and you eventually get to the cause, the gooey center of your functional deficit. Drug by drug, I’ve become sober (and quit smoking in the process). Now that the proverbial smoke has cleared, I’m better able to work on the fire that led to my embracing such self-destructive behavior. Once you stop doing, you’re free to embrace the positive and life-affirming. “The people who have goals, things to do—their lives go quicker. Hear me clearly on that. Their time goes quicker. I have multiple lists, long-term goals, stuff I want to get accomplished that week, things I want to get done that day. And every night that I go to sleep with items still on my list, I think two things. One, I wish I had more time in my day. Two, I’m in prison and I’m wishing for more time in my day.”
That’s something I wish for them. We discuss the mechanics of setting a goal, then back-filling it with all the steps required to reach our objective. I point out that these are things we already do when we want something; draw parallels to their spotting a pair of must-have footwear, and the steps they go about to attain them.
But the men have lost interest, perhaps because it’s repeatedly drilled into their heads that they need to have goals in life. More than a few of these men are disillusioned repeat offenders: they feel they jumped through hoops on their last bid, taking all the programs offered, believing it would magically ensure a crime-free life. They’ll need to convince themselves that rehabilitation is for their benefit and that of their loved ones. I’ve come to see goals and their logistics as technical work, whereas reaching our potential is a never-ending adaptive challenge. When you’re focused on your potential, the goals set themselves.
“I want to talk about something personal for a moment. We’ve all come from different walks of life, and we’re all traveling different paths. But the one thing we have in common is that each of us was brought home from the hospital, a brand- new person, and our loved ones stood over us in our crib. We were fresh and innocent, cute, big-eyed little critters. And they stared at us lovingly and imagined bright, successful futures for us. What they didn’t imagine for us was this life of crime and hurt and prison.”
Their self-referencing has been triggered, and all ten, eleven, twelve men are, perhaps for the first time, active participants. On their faces I read an emotional connection.
“Stings, doesn’t it? Knowing how far we’ve deviated from the hopes of our parents.” A pregnant pause as I make eye contact with all the men, showing them that, at core, we’re the same. “Remember that sting. It’s your better self acknowledging that you’ve hurt your loved ones by not living up to your potential. So, we kind of know the way forward, don’t we? You think of your parents, loved ones, or, your better self. Bring them into your life, imagine them sitting on your shoulder as you make your way in the world. Imagine that they have access to your thoughts, they hear and see what you do. Ask yourself, moment by moment: Would they be proud of me right now? So, goals are good, and you should have them, but focus on constantly meeting your potential. Nothing less is satisfactory.”
And that’s why our rehabilitation is on us. These so-called correctional facilities are about “correcting” in as much, and only in as much, as one is willing to correct oneself. Thus, the corollary to Murphy’s law: If any of us can go wrong, we can fix it. My aim is not to solve one particular problem, but to assist the person to grow, so he can cope with the present situation and with later problems in a better fashion. The state can’t change us for the better; at best, this is a holding environment in which we can learn to achieve our own betterment. To paraphrase Hillel, If not us, then who? And if not now, when?
I’m working on myself, and there are many others like me, not uncommon anomalies, helping others when we can, but it’s not enough. Not for the jailingest nation of earth. Not when 2.2 million Americans live in a cage, upwards of ninety-five percent of whom will eventually be released. Not when roughly seven million Americans are under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system in some form: jail, prison, parole, probation. For each of those seven million, add four people—a conservative estimate of family and friends—and the resulting twenty-eight million is practically ten percent of the United States who, through no fault of their own, are affected by criminal justice policies.
The problem lies below the surface. It is the yearning of a single soul, for human connection and some security, multiplied seven million times. Mind starved for conversation, body aching to grow and do something productive, multiplied seven million times. Like the earlier scenes in a zombie flick, there are burgeoning pockets of walking dead in our land, “civil dead” who, because of a felony conviction, can’t vote, get a driver’s license or a job, can’t leave the city, state, or country. In some states —Florida comes to mind—after doing time for a sex offense, parole’s residency restrictions are so exclusionary that modern-day Hoovervilles have sprung up in the dark recesses of highway underpasses (some of the counties even deliver mail there), Washington State established a penal colony off its coast, to house men once convicted of a sex offense. This is who we are now: a nation of concertina wire and ankle monitoring-bracelets, a country of bars and stripes. Amidst our amber waves of grain, houses of correction lay prone, like crouching beasts, wan and bluish in distance, lousy with foreboding.
The legal scholar Michelle Alexander came to the grim conclusion that the criminal justice system isn’t broken, it’s doing what it’s designed to do: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.” When Dostoyevsky noted that one can tell a lot about a society from its prisons, he meant it qualitatively. That still holds, always will, but now that almost ten percent of the American public is affected by the criminal justice system, we can tell a lot about our society quantitatively. No discussion of the criminal justice system is complete without bandying about a few statistics. Ours is a country with five percent of the world’s population, but twenty-five percent of its prisoners; our incarceration rate has quadrupled within the past thirty years. One in forty children have a parent in prison; for Black children, that number jumps to one in fifteen. According to the Pew Center, the national average for recidivism is 43.3 percent. Most people in the know attribute such rates mainly to poverty, the concentration of public housing complexes, major disparities in the quality of education, and a long history of gangs and drug culture.
Granted, there will always be crime and, thus, always a need for a process to redress the grievances of victims and for their families, as well as a place to isolate and rehabilitate those who violate the laws of the land. But think how much better the country would look if everyone involved in the criminal justice system—judges, lawyers, police, guards, administrators, bureaucrats—acted as if their job was to work themselves out of a job. That is, forget reality for a moment, and imagine a criminal
justice system whose first principle is to do such a good job rehabilitating that it becomes obsolete: tumbleweeds blow past courthouse steps and prisons are turned into carnivals with haunted houses. Pie in the sky, sure, but a step in a more equitable, humane direction, more aligned with what we purport to be our national character and in stark contrast to the political thought on the criminal justice system, which is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other. But timeless political truths are seldom true and rarely timeless.
Rehabilitation outcomes are viewed as binary—re-offend or not—but humans aren’t light switches. In twelve-step groups and smoking-cessation programs, failure—recidivating, in a sense—is merely practice for the next attempt at getting better. We readily embrace the rhetorical concept of second chances, but in practice we are a single-serving society: our landfills are just as overcrowded as our prisons, and they’ve each been made fetid by myopic public policy. This is a generational issue. If we continue as we have, paying lip service to rehabilitation, the problem—i.e., the ninety-five percent of us who will be released, and don’t for a second assume the parole board can judge who’s rehabilitated—the problem will literally come home to roost.
The answer to that isn’t “throw away the key,” build more prisons. Social scientists have demonstrated that mass incarceration actually leads to more crime: The man locked away at twenty years old for a drug sale is immediately replaced (the streets, like nature, abhor a vacuum); furthermore, it leads to a dearth of middle-aged men in the urban areas, men who would have mostly aged out of crime and acted as stabilizing factors in the community—middle-aged males are rare in the ghetto: they either didn’t live past their thirties, are in prison, or have made enough money to move to a better section of town. Now the most visible role model for a teenager in the ghetto is the flashy twentysomething drug dealer. It’s a never-ending cycle.
The solution begins by getting society involved; disseminating nonpartisan facts in lieu of empty rhetoric, Willie Horton-esque political attack ads, radical misrepresentations and sensationalized fear mongering on the local news. The way forward is to muster the collective will. Only when the myriad stakeholders are engaged can such an adaptive challenge be addressed: establish a sense of common cause amongst the disparate groups; move beyond self-interest defined by power roles; concentrate on common interests that lead to fulfilling the potential of all stakeholders. That’s no mean feat, but I have hope. As Carl Rogers, a leading light of the person-centered approach, wrote: “Just when it seems too late, the great social collective mind grasps the seriousness of a problem and begins to move dramatically ahead.”2 Margaret Sanger established the first birth-control clinic in 1916, and faced a very bitter opposition. But the public, for the most part, came around eventually. The average citizen today is becoming aware of the prison problem, that dark side of American exceptionalism. Someday, hopefully there will develop a public will to deal with this issue, if for no other reason than that a person-centered approach (not just in theory, but in practice) will be more effective, and cheaper in the long run.
Thankfully, the work has been started. Though these walls keep the public from peeking inside, there are excellent examples of firsthand accounts of doing time, investigative journalism of the criminal justice system, and public policy white papers: Prison Writing in Twentieth Century America (Penguin), edited by H. Bruce Franklin, gives entree to, for one, Jack London’s time in prison (‘Pinched’: A Prison Experience”); Eric Schlosser’s seminal essay, “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” published in The Atlantic (1998), can be found online (perhaps he can be persuaded to revisit the Complex); Atul Gawande’s “Hellhole” (The New Yorker, 2009) provides a medical explanation of the harm done to those who undergo extended periods of isolation in the Box; “The Central Park Five,” a recent documentary, in telling the story of five young men wrongly convicted for rape in 1989, paints a disquieting portrait of social inequality; Vera Institute of Justice is a great clearinghouse for policy information; Bryan Stevenson, a public-interest lawyer, is at TED.com, talking about how to achieve more fairness in our legal process.
And I can’t help but think that our country can benefit from a criminal justice X Prize. Ten million dollars yielded Space Ship One, a reusable craft capable of suborbital flight; the winner of the 1.4 million dollar Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge quadrupled the rate of oil spill cleanup.3 These are demonstrations that lead to a shift in paradigm, to think what could be accomplished if a prize was awarded for a top-to-bottom overhaul of the criminal justice system based on data-driven analysis instead of backwards-looking conventional wisdom. Perhaps this can be run through the Open Government Initiative, the public version of X Prize—it would have as its goals the reduction of supervised populations, a workable model for a person-centered approach, and an honest rehabilitation component undergirding the process. As Elon Musk, of PayPal and SpaceX fame, has said: “The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”
If I had the money, I’d donate the million-dollar prize money myself. But, at twenty-five cents an hour, it’ll be a few thousand years before I can pony up the dough. In the meantime, I’ll work with what I can, what’s in my power to change. If I can’t change the system, I’ll help my peers navigate and grow within it. That’s my prime directive. No better way to choose freedom than by unlocking your neighbor’s chains as well.
There are mornings when I’m sick, tired, or disheartened, and I have to really drag myself to work. Thankfully, those mornings are few, and I work through them. Unfortunately, there is a steady, never-ending stream of young men beginning their time in prison; there will always be a need for someone like me to help them on their way. By working with them to improve their ability to reflect, strengthen their tolerance for frustration, understand their blind spots and patterns of troublesome behavior, they improve their overall adaptive capacity for future challenges. “The world breaks everyone,” Hemingway wrote, “and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” A random citizen, fed a junky diet of local news, believes that all twelve men in front of me will be back to committing crimes as soon as they’re released. Looking in their eyes, I am not naive. Without accounting for specific crimes, life circumstances, and the respective likelihood that each will reoffend, my experience says that four or five are coming back. In the rare cases, you can chalk it up to opportunistic sociopathy, but more often it’s because there’s little choice other than to return to the same drug- and crime-laden neighborhoods from whence they came. While they spend their final days in prison professing this will be the last time they have to deal with such loathsome conditions, such disdain doesn’t have the substantive value of true rehabilitation, and it wears off pretty quickly. Still, the majority of these men will get out and stay out. And so I look at them, as I’m wont to do as these groups draw to a close, and imagine how they’ll redeem themselves, and how many lives they’ll positively impact.
Robertson and Jovo—neither one a spring chicken—will be released in their late fifties and sixties, respectively; both, I imagine, will migrate to warmer climes (being deported, Jovo won’t have any say in the matter); they’ll live out their days on tranquil, sunny porches. Barely nineteen, KB will likely pass his GED and make his way to a prison that has a college program; in his late twenties, he’ll rejoin society with an associate’s or bachelor’s degree under his belt, work his ass off at a job for which he’s overqualified, move his small family to the burbs, and eventually get his piece of the American Dream. Young, freckle-faced Matt from the sticks will return to a loving family in two or three years, resume the good path his life was on before he got involved with some local thugs and took a series of wrong turns; he’ll take the hard-won lessons of these dark years and use them as the impetus to be a better, more caring and involved person. These are just my simplistic musings—all of the men have their own detailed hopes, dreams for a brighter future.
I sense an essential human goodness working in Phase 1 and truly believe that solitary acts of kindness create unforeseeable ripples from which there are no diminishing returns. Since my college days I’ve been helping others, but, in retrospect, I see that playing fixer was easier than dealing with my own issues. I’m still adept at fixing, but now I’m more the other thing. The rehabilitation of these men is my rehabilitation, and I launder my karma one day at a time.
Just as Bob Barker urged his audience to spay and neuter their pets, I close with a litany of positive non sequiturs: read whatever you get your hands on, write thoughtful letters, watch less TV; patronize your local artist, buy the greeting cards he makes and send them to your loved ones; be good to yourself and your peers; be realistic about your situation while maintaining faith in your ability to overcome it; work on continuously improving yourself. “And, with that, we’re done. You’ve been a great group.”
A few of the guys thank me.
I wish them all luck, while silently hoping they’ll know what to do with it.
Then the door kicks open.
“…half listening to what is going on, because they are focusing on the next case” were the words used by Vernon Manley, former New York State Parole Commissioner, to describe the parole process during a panel discussion held by the New York City Bar Association, February 15, 2007.
Carl Rogers on Personal Power
Wired, July 2012