Theys of We
Step into their world.
Take a good look at these men shuffling into the yard in the early morning. Jerky gaits and wild hair, substandard clothing—notice how they curl in on themselves against the cold. There are patches of dirty snow on the blacktop, and the sky is coloring into orange marmalade. Pigeons the color of the prison wall peck about. Crows blast into the sky as a freight train chugs nearby. A Mental Health clinician and a guard stand together, their breath fogging as they confer over large paper cups of branded coffee. The men disperse amid the lattice of concrete tables, their movement halting yet deliberate. Viewed from overhead they are Pac Men: move...stop...bend over...pickup an object...inspect it...pocket or toss...power up...reverse course. They're ghosting, mistaking rock salt for something to smoke. Move, move, move, find the powerups. <<<<<<<GAME OVER>>>>>>>
Step into their world. They gather in ragtag groups of threes and fours, comparing their haul of cigarette butts—the brown, wet roaches of hand-rolled cigs from inmates who were in the yard the night before. One man cracks them open and uses his shirt cuff to dry out the resonated shreds of tobacco; his partner holds out a rolling paper to be filled; the third man retrieves a matchbook from his pocket.
They huddle together, shoulders touching to protect the flame. Holding their breath. Silence as the match expires. Has it been enough to dry the wet tobacco? Light another. Hush, be still. And another match. A wisp of smoke. Smoke! The first man takes a deep pull, so deep, and explodes into wet coughing. He spits. The next in line reaches out his hand to carefully take hold of the rollie. Now the next.
Pop culture has it wrong. These men you are looking at, not sex offenders, are the bottom of the food chain in prison.
"M.0."
By the mid-nineteen hundreds, mental hospitals were filled, as one account has it, with "naked humans herded like cattle."1 A nationwide movement to "deinstitutionalize" the mentally ill took hold in the late seventies, which led to states mothballing such facilities, both to appease the reformers and save money. The National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors estimates that, between 2009 and 2012, close to ten percent of state psychiatric hospital beds were eliminated across the country due to budget cuts.2 Rather than funding community mental-health centers that could help patients live independently, many states left the mentally ill to fend for themselves. As a result, profoundly unstable people ended up on the streets, getting high and committing crimes that sucked them into the criminal justice system. We, as a nation, have forgotten that mental illness is not a crime but an illness, and its treatment shouldn't be tied in the criminal justice system. By the nineties, prisons had become America's primary mental health institutions, the default provider for poor Americans who need psychiatric care.
In many prisons they are segregated and locked away like in Attica’s Mental Observation cells—thus the label "M.O." In Comstock, we passed the mental health inmates as they were escorted to chow, over-medicated zombies en route to the mess hall. The higher functioning guys had to be aware of the disdainful looks from peers. Here, in the more integrated Prison C, they walk side by side with us to chow. Shambolic men, disorganized from kicks to crown, like my man Kyle the Wildchild, clopping along in unlaced boots, obscenely dirty pants, backwards sweatshirt, runny nose slug trailing into his beard, hair like a pencil troll. "Hi, Kyle," I say as he passes, and he smiles at me, a gap-toothed smile. He is a walking assault on the guards, who are squared away and often ex-military, and I get a kick out of watching how scandalized they are by Kyle.
Kyle and many like him spend their days going to social-skills programs and visiting clinicians and occupy their free time bumbling around, trying to get coffee and cigarettes. I heard someplace that schizophrenics self-medicate with nicotine, which has a sedating effect and elevates mood, understandable since depression is very common in such people. So, I understand how a guy can spend much of his free time thinking about ways to get tobacco, and I keep a few postage stamps on me, to give away, so they can buy a "set-up": three hand rolled cigarettes. Quite a few peers, however, don't like that they walk among us as opposed to being locked away in segregated units, and they complain about the unpredictability of being near someone who's mentally unstable (though I prefer them to certain squared-away peers who only appear to be mentally stable). These are the guys most apt to throw around words like "nonjob" and "bugout," looking down on "deaf, dumb, and blind motherfuckas."
Maybe the mentally unstable are more integrated in Prison C because of their greater numbers and the paucity of bed space in the segregated Mental Health Unit. All but the most seriously ill walk among us in the yard and mess hall and work alongside us in program assignments. Some diagnosed, some not. Sitting at a table in the mess hall often feels like an intergalactic bar scene in Star Wars—faces extremely slack or painfully taut from decades of psychotropic cocktails, unabashed bed heads, eyes big and glassy, animated table manners as if they were dining with the Mad Hatter—but the guys are mostly harmless. I observe them with a calm curiosity: the man on fast forward, who moves like a coiled spring, laughing to himself, sitting next to a man who moves like he's underwater.
I've been housed next to men obviously on the mental health caseload, who shuffle to the med line several times a day and are known by the roving clinicians. Some of my neighbors are less obviously medicated (can you tell which of your coworkers are medicated for depression?). There have been neighbors like Mac, who suffer a boisterous meltdown and get brought to a more secure and closely watched setting, the offsite mothership.
After seven years working as a peer counselor to general population inmates, I began to volunteer in Mental Health, facilitating groups of five to ten men. It's a segregated area, home to clinicians' offices, video-conference suites, suicide watch cells, and small conference rooms. To get there I pass through a succession of check points, guards differentiating me as "a teacher." I get escorted down a corridor, taken up an elevator, and off to see the Wizard.
Feels different up there, closed off, sanitized, and quiet. The Office of Mental Health, a separate agency operating within the Department of Corrections, picked up the tab in the wake of a class action lawsuit for this newly-renovated wing in a prison that's well over a hundred years old. The Wizards of Mental Health operate a secure offsite unit for the most unstable prisoners, but it's a temporary placement. Guys are transported there for a tune-up, get stabilized, and then are returned to their prison. Vis-a-vis the prison's general population, tremendous resources go into housing these men, so Mental Health, severely overtaxed to begin with, looks to step down their care as soon as possible, to see if they can function with less intensive resources, the goal being nothing more than a monthly video conference consultation with an offsite psychiatrist who's apt to over-prescribe psych meds. Mental Health handles everyone from fully decompensated psychotics on down to someone like me, who self-refers every few years for an anxiety problem.
The programs that I facilitate—aggression replacement and reentry—use the same manuals as for my groups in population, but it's necessary to modify activities based on the group's daily level of functioning. The difference is that, like during my years in Comstock working for Ms. DeLauro, I have a chaperone of sorts in Mr. Marks, a young counselor, new to the system, who's all too happy to have me lead the activities.
In the groups so far there have been men with OCD; minimal-affect depressives; loose-limbed schizophrenics; an extremely rapid-cycling manic depressive, whom I would have to talk down then up; manic babblers, inappropriate laughers, twitchy catatonics; several have disappeared midway through the cycle, the result of a psychotic episode that landed them in a stripped-down observation cell before being taken offsite. If l'd been volunteering there two years ago, Alex with his autism would've been in my group.
Rather than focus on the diagnosis they've been given, or what's "wrong" with them, I try to figure out what's going on for them—how they're interacting with this environment. I make it a point to shake their hands, call them by their preferred name, not simply their surname, and acknowledge them in the yard. Like homeless people you step over on your way to work, the disheveled guys are ignored in the yard, lest they make eye contact and ask you for a cigarette, a stamp, some coffee, anything. They are invisible. My friends ask what it's like working with them, but in a pointed way, or sometimes they just blatantly ask if "those bugouts make the room stink." If my friends could only see how hard some of these men try to internalize the more technical information and how good natured they are when we practice social skills. "Actually," I say, "I really enjoy working with those guys. They're often more prosocial and they give me a lot less attitude." And usually that earns me a disbelieving look.
"Rape-o"
It was the second day of that week's orientation cycle, and Andrews—a fifty something white man who was in standard operating condition the day before—now sported a mean-looking shiner and angry scrape on his forearm. He was withdrawn and skittish among the men in his row. When he went out for the bathroom, I followed, and asked him to join me in a side room. The look on his face: white-eyed terror, which made me feel terrible. "It's OK," I said, "I'm not gonna hurt you. I thought you might want to talk to me in private."
And that's when this man old enough to be my father started crying. Not for the first time I realized that I was serving as perhaps the only one who spoke to the person in front of me. "Do you have anything to eat?" he said. I dug into my pockets, and withdrew a couple pieces of candy.
Andrews took it greedily: ''I'm so hungry. The guards don't open my cell for chow at night." They also threatened the inmate workers against passing Andrews any food from someone who had a heart. That was just for starters. When he saw that I was willing to listen, he unburdened.
Guards kicked him down the steps on his second day here, which would explain the scrape on his arm. Who sees that coming? Who expects to be kicked down the steps? Well, after that day, Andrews couldn't stop expecting it.
Stairwells and landings are secluded and offer opportunities for a handful of guards to smack around an inmate, like they did with Alex, or throw an Andrews down the stairs. But these guards also have their collaborators. I was once encouraged to kick someone down the stairs. Attica, B-Block, two years into my bid. I was twenty-five years old, and a guard said he'd look the other way if I kicked a specific sex offender down the stairs. In the moment I shook it off—realizing that the guard thought I was the kind of troublemaker who would do such a thing—but I've thought of it since, from time to time, particularly when I hear that someone was kicked down the stairs, and I know that a guard found the right inmate for the job. The guards had been opening Andrews's cell at random times so an inmate porter could barge in and use his body as a punching bag. When it happened the night before we spoke, he was left with that shiner. Punched in the eye. Kicked in the back. So, Andrews, traumatized, kept his bright fluorescent cell light on, constantly alert for his cell being popped open, unable to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. He was exhausted and in some type of shock. "Help me," he croaked.
Help him. I had just as much chance of stopping the beatings as I did of curing old Albert of his cancer. Andrews here was targeted because of his case, this I didn't have to ask. Depending on the prison I've been in, the population was comprised of between ten to thirty percent rape cases, many of whom fly under the radar, but there is an obvious archetype, a rape-o aesthetic: white, older, bespectacled, disheveled, scared. These are the people who are selected for special treatment by guards, same with pedophiles or someone who, say, got into a bar fight with the brother of a guard.
The general consensus was that Andrews had fondled a small child, though the most solid evidence came on the first day of Orientation, when a guy with neck tats and a skinhead vibe, queued up in a line waiting to sign the attendance sheet, called out, "Uh, attention, attention, that piece of shit with the glasses"—here everyone focused on Andrews at the front online—"is in here for raping his eight-year-old daughter. Just thought everyone should know." Wonderful way to start the morning. Thankfully, no one moved on him right there—as a peer counselor (and fellow human being) I wouldn't have been cool with a beating in front of my face, but as a prisoner, I would have taken major heat for protecting him (assuming I could; or felt like garbage if I froze and let him get beaten). As it is, I sometimes take guff from peers for nothing more than speaking to a guy with a rape case. I am more concerned with how someone is behaving in this moment as opposed to what he's convicted of. I've seen so-called standup guys pass the rap sheet pedigree test only to turn out to be a junkie who doesn't pay his bill and leaves his friends holding the bag when he signs into protective custody.
Recently, a friend who works in the prison's law library gave me more details than I wanted to know about a guy's case: held his girlfriend's two-year-old captive for four days of rape and torture. I was sickened to hear it, angry and disgusted—but I didn't fantasize about enacting revenge. A few guys thumped on him when they were going to chow, just a beating, no heavy weaponry. This was one of the rare occasions when I didn't feel anything upon learning that a guy was jumped, and I wondered if a guard could have talked me into kicking him down the steps. No, I decided, even in this case, I would not have.
The judge sentenced Andrews to ten to fifteen years in prison, but prison culture condemned him to ten to fifteen years in hell. This is a man who will be doing hard time. To be sure, many guys like him fall back under the radar after a couple months; with the constant turnover in the criminal justice system, there are just too many new arrivals for the guards to take a prolonged interest in any one of us. There are, however, exceptions. Some men are the subject of perpetual focus, repeatedly victimized due to a label attached to them as they are shuffled from cellblock to cellblock. I got the sense that would be Andrews's fate.
After telling this to my boss, Ms. Fields, a civilian caseworker, she interviewed Andrews and called who she needed to call to get him moved to protective custody. PC is designed to segregate an inmate from inmates who wish to harm him in general population, but if guards are your tormenters, then you are a fish in a locked-in barrel, and they're not about to catch and release.
As a peer counselor my proximity to the inner torments of sex offenders has at times produced what I've come to understand is secondary trauma: bad dreams, recurring visions of the violence I've witnessed or had relayed to me.
There was a guy named Greg who had a rape case, but he was built like a linebacker, so I thought he'd be OK. His size, however, caused guys in his welding class to conspire. One afternoon the yard was delayed on account of alarm bells, and as the keys jangled past, I heard walkies crackle out a medical emergency. Greg was LifeFlighted out of the prison for third-degree burns. In the yard, I passed a couple of guys talking about it:"...Son took a fuckin' blowtorch to the rape-o's face. Yo, shit was ill." The guy who did it was taken to the Box, Greg was choppered to a hospital with a bum unit, and as to the two guys who held Greg down—they were out in the yard, doing pull-ups. Watching them bullshitting at the pull-up bar, I thought about Greg's parents, a couple in their late sixties whom I saw visiting Greg most weekends when I was spending time with Lily. Who would deliver the news to them? How would it be phrased? What must it feel like for parents to hear their son's face was torched and not be able to do a goddamn thing about it? If the parties responsible could visualize Greg's parents, would they care?
There is a small percentage, a vocal minority of guards who sadistically victimize sex offenders, but they signal approval to collaborating inmates who—to ingratiate themselves and/or satisfy sadistic urges of their own— assault with little to no disciplinary repercussions. The story I've heard them tell themselves is that they are on the side of the angels. Along with the tacit permission from superiors, what allowed a small group of American soldiers to demean and torture Iraqis in Abu Ghraib, turning the prison into a carnival of depravity, was their "moral disengagement": they redefined harmful behavior as honorable and reconstructed their perception of victims as deserving of their punishment while simultaneously blaming them for the consequences.3
This mindset enables some—guards, inmates, the public—to believe that we come to prison not as punishment but for punishment. Google becomes a tool for crusading, quicker and farther reaching than the Grand Inquisitor ever hoped to be. Guards look us up on a supervisor's computer or when they go home for the day, while we ask others to do so for us over the phone. Shame on those of us who have been the subject of newspaper crime reporting, who've experienced articles that the district attorney's office has filled with half-truths and outright falsehoods about us, and who then believe everything they read about another prisoner. But most of us don't go digging, nor do we have to. We see it on the local news, where grieving family members wish for the perpetrator to be violated in prison, and primetime dramas with detectives who chuckle about the welcome their perp will receive in a holding cell.
The public's fear of sex offenders is wholly disproportionate to the risk they pose to the community. According to Marie Gottschalk, a social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, "released sex offenders are considerably less likely to be re-arrested for any offense compared to non-sex offenders."4
With no other subset of felons is it more underscored how society trades actual safety for the appearance of safety. The indiscriminate expansion of sex offender registries has had the effect of actually driving people to the fringes of society where they are more apt to reoffend.5 Yet despite all the best science, there are those who want to get tougher on crime. I sometimes wonder how these tough talkers would behave if they were in prison, and whether they'd walk the walk even after seeing a sex offender's face partially melted with a blowtorch.
"Homo"
When they performed, the band Van Halen had a list of conditions—or "contract riders"—that had to be met by the concert promoter and venue managers, everything from what kind of food was to be served in the green room to the number of security guards present backstage. One of the riders was that only brown M & M's were to be available to the band, which sounded cartoonishly prima Dona. Years later, Eddie Van Halen explained that they couldn't care less what color the M & M's were, but it was aquick and easy way to see if this was the type of venue that followed instructions, and was thus more apt to adhere to the more important provisos, like the redundant back-up system of safety rigging above the stage.
I had that anecdote in mind when I entered the library shortly after transferring here to Prison C. At the counter stood a striking and buxom transwoman speaking to a flamboyantly gay library worker assistant on the other side of the counter (the librarian, Paris, would later become a close friend). This was a scene that would never play out in the more oppressive environs of Prisons A and F. There were gays and transpeople there, but should they cavort out in the open like that, some guard would give them a very public cease and desist. So I read that scene as a telltale, the brown M & M that signaled an environment that is more laid back.
Street guys from the sixties and seventies used words like "chump," "sissy," and "punk" to denote a gay man, and the slang survives in prison among men who've been down for decades. Not only does their development arrest, but their slang gets encased in amber. When the septuagenarian Mac melted down, he called Jay a sissyboy and a punk muhfucker. This anachronism caused guffawing from the young boys who, these days, use "mook" to describe a gay man.
The slang has changed along with attitudes. As in society at large, gay and trans folk are more open, and they are more accepted by peers and staff. There are, however, instances of vocal backlash. A memo was posted stating that we could no longer walk around our cells shirtless and in underwear. The edict probably had to do with the Department hiring more female guards, but many inmates read it as having to do with the buxom Tiffany, whose bra and panty show perhaps shocked a touring administrator. The resultant vex populi: "fuckin' mocks."
In times like that, I felt for my friends Paris and John, an out couple, and interracial to boot. They'd been together for over five years but subtle, not pawing each other, at least not in plain sight. Unlike the Bentons, an interracial gay couple who came to be in Attica’s Writers' Workshop for a couple months before getting set up by guards and transferred to separate prisons, the machinery in Prison C allowed Paris and John to exist. The guards liked them both, each having earned respect during their work assignments. For several years, Paris clerked for guards in the cellblock, and John was a porter in a secure area. Both ended up working in the library, canoodling in the stacks, and the rest is history: a meet cute set in prison.
Because both were smart men of integrity, they were popular and respected but still subject to the indignities of homophobic flare-ups from the surrounding cells. For instance, insecure men uttering the phrase "no homo" before any possible gay double entendre, no matter how remote; say two guys are cooking a meal together and discussing logistics, one would likely say, "I got the black beans and rice and salon, so you gotta—no homo—send the meat." Despite that utterance as talisman, there will still be men who giggle and call out, "Hey, YO!" "What? I said, 'No homo.'" To recognize those voices as belonging to friends is a real kick in the soft stuff. The same old timer who talked of respecting Paris or John also criticized the current skinny jeans style, saying that newjacks who wore their uniform pants like that were fags.
Words are bad enough, but gay and trans people are still physically and sexually assaulted at rates much higher than those of their straight peers. It was no accident that Faith was picked as an Herb to be splashed with boiling chemicals by a nogoodnik trying to leave the cellblock.
When Gary showed up in Orientation saying that he remembered me from Attica, he was a closeted gay man in his forties. Gary promptly came out in Prison C then began transitioning, using female pronouns to refer to herself. If she had never come to prison, perhaps she would have stayed closeted and miserable, or maybe she would have moved to a more progressive city and come out or transitioned—who's to say. She became Geri (signed with a heart over the "i"). Geri had the zeal of the converted and was bubbly with how much lighter she felt living as her "true self." Signifying and signaling her new identity, she took a white lace, dyed it rainbow, and threaded it back into her hoodie. We joked that that would go unnoticed for all of seconds by the hostile guards in Attica, but even though guards are more permissive here, I cautioned her, suggesting she try to stay under the radar. But Geri was making up for lost time, and her methods for coming out as trans were brave bordering on foolish. When a guard gave her whatfor over the rainbow laces on the grounds that we're not allowed to have multicolored clothing, she switched to solid hot pink. Despite having their hackles raised, guards have been given sensitivity training and at least publicly pay lip service to it.
Compared to when I went away in 1999, it's easier to live in prison today. The word has reached inmates that if you assault a gay man or transwoman it can be labeled a hate crime. Perversely, this is met with the claim that "gays are taking over the country." Despite some reductionist thinking, prison is not a wonderful time for the gay men and transwomen I've met; their incarceration is not an endless pants party.
"Bro"
It might amuse you to hear a prisoner say that we never leave high school, but that's one of the lessons I've learned during my time inside. Prison is a small town with apprehensive residents, a backwards world where the cool kids are the gangbangers, crews of drug sellers, and money getters.
They can also be knock around guys like my boys Eric and J-Rock. Guys like that live and die by a code of the street: thou shalt not associate with rape-ohs or homos; thou shalt not drop dime; thou shalt live stand up, share your drugs and food with friends, and don't take no shit off nobody. It was a prerequisite that stand up guys went to the Box, got in fights, started beefs and sometimes squashed them, while treating staff and peers with contempt and appearing to be unfazed by the time. Picture the scene in Goodfellas when Paulie and Co. went to the can: that's how knock around guys bid. They often get good jobs, like hospital porter (Eric) or maintenance plumber (J-Rock) because the guards like to think that if they did time they'd be knock around guys (they wouldn't). They are expected to outwardly show the markers of being squared away: styled hair or clean baldie, nice clothes and boots, a cell that is hygienic if sloppy. They show tremendous compassion and largesse to those they deem worthy—these are guys who will literally give the shirt off their back.
When they moved to neighboring cells next to mine, I knew it would be fun. They were standoffish for a moment, kept me at arm’s length—probably viewed me as weird, someone who talked to the freakazoids, and had pictures of puppies on his wall. Within two weeks we were eating together. When I started bidding I was a lot like them: hung out with a proper crew of knock around guys in the yard, spent wild nights drinking and drugging in my cell. They sensed this, and I even regaled them with some stories from my past, dropping the names of serious men they admired. Eric and J-Rock were into heavy stuff in the yard, so we would give slaps and bro-hugs then go our separate ways—that life was behind me, and I didn't want to know details of their business. If I were their age, I don't think we would have gotten on so famously, but because I was ten years older and had more time in than both of them combined and wasn't a "rape-o" or "rat," they accepted me as something of an older brother who left their life for a better path and wanted the best for them. Their code allowed for such acceptance, but we acknowledged our differences: I was free to speak to the untouchables and didn't have to play politics in the yard. One lazy Friday afternoon in Prison C, the Warden did a walk-through of the peer counseling area, and he sat and schmoozed. A coworker asked him about a repressive new policy regarding access to pay phones, and, cryptically, the Warden said that it had "become necessary."
"Gangs," my coworker said.
"We don't have a gang problem here," the Warden said, "we have a one gang problem," not even using their name.
There are certainly other gangs here—Crips, Nietas, MS 13, Latin Kings—but it's the Bloods that are most numerous and wreak nearly all the havoc: fights, stabbings, razor tag, organized crime rackets like shakedowns and protection schemes, drug sales, and influence peddling. Together in a group they are the worst. They get their knowledge from each other, and many seem to suffer from an urban PTSD from the shootouts and wild lives they lived.
If only they could be deprogrammed. But that's not likely in a system that fears and misunderstands them. Chance, a young black kid with a baby face, came through Orientation one week, his trigger hand sporting a blurred DIY tattoo "MOB." A counselor pulled me aside and said out of the side of his mouth: "M-O-B, see that? Member of the Bloods." I was reminded of Stacey Keach's character "Sergeant Sdanko" in Cheech and Chong's "Up in Smoke," the cocksure cop mentality working on old intel, correct usually by accident. Chance was a lightweight who joined the Bloods in county jail for protection. Sure enough, Chance was tagged as a Blood by the system, which means he'll never get the benefit of the doubt in any interaction, making him even more apt to seek the counsel of his homies.
As much as I despise gangs and their activities, I understand that they fill a need: the urban fraternity. When I joined a house in college, pledging included drinking, stealing university property, and breaking doors and windows. Some drunken weekends ended in brawling. I believe there is much the same neurological processes driving gang behavior, a sense of community. When a thirteen-year-old child of the ghetto—Chicago, Brooklyn, LA, Philly, any metro area—joins a gang, he's not joining to engage in violence but for the excitement, and so he can be with his friends and older siblings.
Most positive outlets have been hollowed out of the inner cities, just like they've been slashed from prison budgets. What fills the void is gangs, big and small. Their activity begets the need for protection, which begets more gang applicants. As with our man, Chance, county jail actually diminishes public safety by adding to the gang population.
But they don't confine their violence to other gangs. Mark, who I knew in Comstock, was an apex predator: a high-ranking member of the Bloods who earned his stripes by putting in more than the usual amount of work (i.e., stabbings). One night, as he nursed a slight from a peer and I talked him out of revenge, he explained how he's a "gunner" and a feared member of a particular "set" that is feared by other Bloods, how he looks at other inmates as food or sheep. It was ego turned violent, the worst excess of looking down on others.
Theys
What inmates like Mark fail to realize is that society makes little to no distinction between prisoners. We're all felons. Shawshank's earnest and innocent "Andy Dufresne" is a rarity in the public consciousness. They are more likely to view us as scary characters, alternating between dirty simpletons and superhumans like DeNiro's character in Cape Fear, vengeance machines impervious to pain and disease. We are to be avoided, locked away, and forever branded with modern day scarlet letters never more than a phone's thumb swipe away: criminal justice registries and rap sheets, the atomic unit of the criminal justice system. If Google can't serve it up comprehensively enough, there are a host of companies that, for a nominal fee, provide background reports. For those of us who have felony convictions, that information will be with us until the day we die, likely appearing towards the top of our Google results.
It doesn't help that our right to vote is often revoked, and there are sometimes permanent travel bans put in place against us. Labeling us Other reduces dissonance for the harsh sentences and inhuman conditions that exist for the 2.2 million residents of the Fifty-first state. But public sentiment appears to be trending progressive, less punitive, at least in rhetoric. Perhaps we can credit that shift in attitude to better reporting on the criminal justice system,6 increased visibility of prisoner narratives,713 and knowing someone who's done time.8
But I also acknowledge the ascendance of more progressive voices in society, like those of the LGBTQ community and advocates for neurodiversity. I think about the program Lily watches, "Born This Way," a reality show that follows the lives of people with Down syndrome. Fifty years ago, someone with Down's would be locked in an attic, thirty years ago they would've been aborted—now they're celebrated on TV. The arc of history bends towards inclusiveness.
Compassion takes work before it can become instinctive. Our brains evolved with the inclination to label an "us" and a "them," a fact readily apparent in the cliques you find in school, work, and prison. That circle called "us" can contract—nation, tribe, friends, family—all the way down to the self, an "us" surrounded by menacing hordes of "them." In extreme instances, the circle gets so small that one part of the mind is at war with another.
As soon as people create the category of "us," everyone else becomes "not-us." "They" are never as smart as "we" are, never as humane or deserving of compassion. But our brains are also built, notes the primatologist Frans de Wall, "to connect with others and experience their pain and pleasure." Just like the bonobos he studies, we derive greater satisfaction from giving treats to others than from receiving them.914 Compassion is the gooey center of what this life is all about. So I practice nonjudgment, unconditional acceptance, and work on meeting people where they're at, all the while thinking of Martin Niemoller’s poem about Nazi Germany, "First They Came":
First they came for the socialists and I didn't speak out, because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak out, because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak out, because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
We
I am not a sophisticated reader of poetry, even though it has helped shape my life. Give me some pulsating visuals and witty turns of phrase, because the hidden meanings almost always stay hidden to me. In E. E. Cummings's "My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love" there is a stanza that has stuck with me for years:
My father moved through theys of we, singing each new leaf out of each tree (and every child was sure that spring danced when she heard my father sing)
Theys of we. I took this to mean a worldview: someone who looks at others and sees them as "we," a group he belongs to, as opposed to "they," the other. I was given to believe that the poem was a eulogy for his father, but his biography in the Norton anthology is mum on the subject.
My father helped undocumented immigrants—the same group maligned by loudmouthed politicians—become citizens of the United States. When I was young and dumb, I thought that he should have made boatloads more money, like the fathers of my classmates, by focusing on better-heeled clients rather than being the savior of the great unwashed.
Alas, I, too, have turned into a helper. But it wasn't always that way; I had to evolve into a glass half we kind of guy. When I was in my early twenties, a couple of years into my twenty-five-to-life sentence, housed in Attica’s B-block, I crewed up with knock around guys like my recent friends Eric and J-Rock (Lou, Boston, Mikey, Philly, Ray, Tommy G). I wanted to help out certain guys in the yard, throw a lifeline to someone who looked scared and lost, but my own lack of confidence prevented my doing so. To be accepted, I was required to tum people away from the table. "Chase them," my boys would tell me. (Laughable now, scared and scrawny me telling someone he couldn't stand there, he'd have to walk away—what would have happened if any of these tougher supplicants said "Make me?") After a time, I broke with the crew, while managing to not have them break me, and moved to honor block. There were elitists there, as well, who beefed about who I "broke bread with," like they themselves were seated at the captain's table on a cruise ship. Freer movement allowed me to see others' cells, their walls that signified interests through taped-up pictures and cutouts, so I began crewing up with simpatico souls. Then there was the writers' workshop, where I learned others' stories and appreciated the lived experience of those different lives. Writing about my own crewing up gave me a better perspective on it.
But the biggest driver of change was when I went from working as a highly-placed clerk to a peer counselor. My early years in Attica were spent in isolated offices on "special assignment." I was away from inmates, around civilians, got sweet perks, had beaucoup juice, and was envied by many peers. Staff viewed me differently, which I encouraged, feeling their validation. I was more elitist than the "bros" and "stand-up guys" and enjoyed the heady pleasure of holding myself apart from and better than the theys.
Then the fates conspired to thrust me into Orientation as a peer counselor when I was transferred from Attica to Comstock. Right in the middle of the hoi polloi, super visible, lots of contact with my peers. I began to realize that I was helping like my dad had helped, eventually coming to open myself to their humanity, sitting with it, allowing it to affect me. Today, I am immensely grateful for the opportunities to be exposed to my peers.
Proximity to the marginalized and their suffering is transformative. Prisons turn over more than you'd imagine, so in the more than seven years I've worked as a peer counselor, I've known and helped thousands of men. When I greet men in Spanish, I use the colloquial Como estamos? (How we doin'?), which I find just plain nice. Jack London, writing on his time in prison, noted that he survived because, "I am a fluid sort of organism, with sufficient kinship with life to fit myself in most anywhere."
Two months after arriving at Prison C, having begun working in the Orientation program anew, I was walking to the mess hall like I was running for public office, greeting passersby and answering a bevy of questions. Knock around white guys didn't know what to make of me, I had more acquaintances than a drug dealer, received the respect paid to a gunner. In the yard, I walked with lots of different groups, men I knew from Orientation here or through my travels. I found old friends, made new ones, and avoided the heat.
It was just a matter of time before Billy and Big Show, the white capos, invited me to their table. Billy and I recognized each other from Comstock. "How come you didn't come to the table there?" he said.
"Wasn't my brand of vodka."
Not what they wanted to hear. With a shared sense of grievance, they pulled a mad face. "Then it's not your brand of vodka here."
"Fair enough."
They eventually came to respect me. I'd say hello and keep it moving, watch them in the yard watching me, walking with the oddballs, chopping it up. In those moments, I'd think about the end of The Breakfast Club, as eighties music piped up in my head:
We are the oddballs, the space cadets, queers, nerds, comic book readers, model makers, making something useful of our time in prison.
All the while, they crew up, their backs to the wall. Embattled. When their conversation partner walks away, they stand alone, better than everyone else, having ultimately set standards that only they can meet. They are an n of 1 and profess to be happy with this arrangement. We'll leave them to it.
"Madness," Eyal Press, The New Yorker, May 2, 2016
"A Troubled Boy," Tom Chiarella, Esquire, March
"The Lucifer Effect," Philip Zimbardo
Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, Marie Gottschalk, Princeton University Press (2015)
"Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World," Peter K. Enns (2016)
Many thanks to The Marshall Project for fighting the good fight.
Check out PrisonTalk.com, BetweenTheBars.org, APWA.org
The writer Carlos Fuentes advised: "Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me."
"The Bonobo and the Atheist," Frans de Wall