Doing Time (2 page)

I thank Elizabeth Kronzek for archival research at Princeton, Brennan Grayson, Lesley Scammell, and Chloe Wheatley for research assistance, and Sara Lorimer, Bob deBarge, Grazyna Drabik, and Laura Schiller for typing the manuscript. I am blessed with friends who are passionately opinionated readers—Janet Brof, Bill DeMoss, Marilyn Katz, Danny Kaiser, Lee McClain, Antonia Meltzoff, Howard Waskow, Grey Wolfe, and Paul Chevigny.

A writer could not ask for a more energetic agent than my friend Sydelle Kramer at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency nor a more sympathetic editor than Coates Bateman at Arcade Publishing.

“Hands like yours help cup the flame,” William Orlando wrote in thanking PEN. The authors' eloquent reminders of how much this work matters to them and others behind bars has made the work most gratifying. For generous research assistance, I thank especially William Aberg, Marilyn Buck, Chuck Culhane, Victor Hassine, Diane Hamill Metzger, Paul Mulryan, Charles Norman, Barbara Saunders, Joe Sissler, William Waters, and members of the writing workshop at Bedford Hills. And finally, I am forever indebted to those who got me started—my parolee students in the Queens SEEK Program in 1967–68 and my class at Westchester County Penitentiary, 1969–71, especially Charles Caldwell, whose example of self-transformation through reading and writing has stayed with me over the decades.

Life in prison in the late seventies was good for those who knew how to serve their time, to be strong, to mind their own business, to not get involved with drugs, alcohol, gambling, loansharking, or other deathtraps guaranteed to bring men down. One could go to school, earn a high school equivalency diploma, study college correspondence classes, take vocational classes and learn a trade, take self-improvement programs to learn to be a better person, go to religious services, attend AA, learn how to create works of art to earn spending money through classes in arts and crafts, share relaxed visits on weekends with loved ones, behave themselves, and earn their release on parole. They could go home. Now the emphasis is containment, storage, and warehousing of growing inventories of faceless, psychotropically over-medicated zombie felons. The keys have been thrown away.

—Charles Norman, Tomoka Correctional Facility, Daytona Beach, Florida

I write because I can't fly.

—Jackie Ruzas, Shawangunk Correctional Facility, Walkill, New York

No one ever said it better than the prison writer Fyodor Dostoevsky— to paraphrase: you can measure the level of a civilization by entering its prisons. What does it say about the level of our civilization that we imprison more human beings than any country in the world? As most of us do not enter prisons, we need those inside to show us what is done in our name and with our taxes. Fortunately, PEN American Center, the writers' association, has been sponsoring an annual literary contest nationwide for writers behind bars since 1973.
Doing Time
presents the best work of the winners from the first twenty-five years. By bearing witness to the secret world that isolates and silences them, these writers offer an incisive anatomy of the contemporary prison and an intimate view of men and women struggling to keep their humanity alive.

To put this work in context, here's a brief history of the shift in American attitudes toward prisoners and the goals of incarceration in the last five decades. Fifty years ago there was wide acceptance of rehabilitative programs, a growing prisoners' rights movement, and an unprecedented interest in prisoners' writing.

The social turmoil of the sixties and early seventies profoundly shaped public attitudes toward prisoners. The civil rights and student movements and opposition to the Vietnam war created a climate critical of established authority and sympathetic to those held down by it. In rapid succession, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Native Americans, women, and gay people developed self-awareness and political consciousness and demanded recognition. In response, American culture grew more receptive to the voices and needs of minorities. And for a while the War on Poverty was committed to building a more participatory democracy by offering opportunity to the poor and the marginalized.

Prisoners, especially (but not only) African-American male prisoners, played a strong role in these explosive times.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
awakened readers to the powerful claims of this dispossessed group, and showed how a man could find himself and his voice behind bars. Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, and Angela Davis soon followed, influencing activists, black and white, with their social analyses. And when movement activists were jailed, they helped politicize prison culture. Inmates began to compare incarceration with slavery, to call themselves political prisoners, and to protest conditions rather than fight with one another.

A prisoners' movement began to grow outside as well. In New York in 1967 David Rothenberg produced
Fortune and Men's Eyes,
a play by Canadian ex-convict John Herbert that brought to life the devastating effects of imprisonment for one young man. When a member of the audience challenged the play's authenticity after one performance, an ex-con rose from the audience to defend it. As more ex-convicts came to the theater, some making public their past for the first time, the post-curtain debate became as absorbing as the play. Rothenberg's theater office evolved into the first office of the Fortune Society, an organization that provides a therapeutic community for ex-prisoners and advocates criminal justice reform.

Dramatizing the social upheaval of the nineteen-sixties were the inner-city riots that became more destructive with each summer and helped spark riots behind the razor wire. Forty-eight riots were reported from 1968 through 1971, every one growing in intensity, the coherence of its racial or political ideology, and organization. In 1970, riots in New York rocked Manhattan's Tombs and the upstate Auburn Prison. In July 1971, a “Liberation Faction” of prisoners in Attica Prison presented the corrections commissioner with demands to change “brutal, dehumanized” conditions. In California, on August 21, 1971, George Jackson was killed in an alleged escape attempt from San Quentin. The next day, Attica prisoners protested with a mass hunger strike. On September 9, they seized the prison, killing one guard and three inmates. The uncompromising state response four days later was a police assault that wounded 128 and took thirty-nine lives, ten of them hostages.

The assault was necessary because hostages were having their throats slashed—or so state officials told the media. But the next day, autopsies revealed that all had died of state-inflicted bullet wounds. This discovery, as well as the guards' brutal beatings of the recaptured prisoners, created a generation of prison activists and a storm of litigation. The official prison-system misuse of power was dramatically curtailed as court orders reformed prison conditions across the country, while new statutes and regulations expanded prisoners' constitutional rights. As a class, prisoners could challenge “cruel and unusual” conditions of confinement, and, as individuals, they won rights to be given due process, and to receive literature and practice the religion of their choice while incarcerated.

“A prison renaissance,” as prison poet William Aberg characterized it, flourished in the seventies. Prisoners organized to form unions, fight for humane treatment, and bring educational, cultural, and religious programs inside the walls. The fruit of their efforts and outside pressures—prison college programs, arts workshops, and other rehabilitative programs— sprang up everywhere.

But in the same decade, forces were mounting that made penal policy swing back from treatment to custody, and from a rehabilitative to a retributive approach. Penologists Andrew von Hirsch (1976) and Robert Martinson (1974) assailed the rehabilitative ideal. Martinson's saying that “nothing works” to reduce recidivism provided a soundbite for politicians who began to find “get-tough-on-crime” rhetoric indispensable to their success. Indeterminate sentencing practices that permitted prisoners to earn early release through good behavior came under attack.

In 1971, Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “America's public enemy No. 1,” and asked Congress to fund an all-out international war. Two years later, New York's governor Nelson Rockefeller scrapped a whole system of drug treatment, and replaced it with the most punitive drug laws in the United States.

In the eighties, much of the country followed New York's lead on drug laws. Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty was displaced—and its effects reversed—by the war on drugs. While cutting back on social welfare, conservatives won votes by nurturing a culture of fear and vowing to be tougher than their rivals. Even liberal politicians could not afford to appear “soft” on crime. The prisons were flooded, especially as more and more of the poor were drawn into the drug trade. Law enforcement persecuted communities plagued by crack cocaine, which was and is primarily used in inner cities, with far greater force than they did those using the powder form of cocaine, favored by white, middle-class communities.

This aggressive war on drugs worked hand in glove with prison construction, which became a major growth industry. It encouraged enormous federal and state investment, private prison development, and associated businesses. As Oklahoma ex-warden Jack Cowley put it, “The war on drugs is a miserable failure because it has not stopped drug use in this country. It's a great success [for prisons] because it's the best economic boom we've ever seen.”

Corporations lobbied legislatures for contracts to build prisons, confidently guaranteeing to fill a certain number of beds. In turn, heavily-subsidized local law enforcement was happy to oblige by providing residents. What came to be called the Prison-Industrial Complex manufactured its own symbiotic cycle.

Life Without Parole: Living in Prison Today
(1996, 2011) by prize-winning author Victor Hassine details the transformation in the 1980s of Graterford State Prison, warehouse for Pennsylvania's most violent felons. A typical 1930s “Big House” (holding fifteen hundred people or more, all sharing common facilities), Graterford kept military-style order when Hassine arrived in 1981. By mid-decade, the influx of homeless, mentally ill, juvenile offenders, seasoned gang members, drug addicts, and dealers had changed everything. According to Hassine, the population explosion made Graterford “a predatory institution where nothing worked right and everything was for sale.” Bathroom-size cells designed for one inmate had to accommodate two; rape became a common occurrence. Overworked guards' dependence on informants divided inmates, raised the level of violence, and facilitated the entry of drugs. “Old heads” recalled bygone days of honor, quiet, solitude, and routine. Hassine wrote, those days existed when “the outside world was kept outside, when inmates' natural enemies were the guards.” Now other inmates posed the greatest threat, especially “young bucks” for whom robbery and assault became addictive. Instead of trying to control gangs, the administration played one against the other. “Anger and hatred are a prison's cash crop,” a lifer explained, “they produce “more money, more guards, more overtime.”

Women in prison have suddenly become the fastest growing sector of the prison population; they now represent 7 percent of prisoners. Harsh sentencing for minor drug offenses has made the incarceration rate of women almost double that of men. Ten times more women are imprisoned in the U.S. than in Western Europe. About 87 percent of women report physical or sexual abuse prior to their arrest (roughly double the percentage of men). Little violence occurs between women prisoners, but they experience more instances of sexual violence and humiliation from the guards on average than male prisoners do. “Being in prison is like being in a domestic violence relationship,” says writer Barbara Saunders. “You never know when the rules will change and you will get ‘beaten' again psychologically or emotionally by anyone who has power over you.”

In many states, pregnant women are still shackled while in labor. Roughly 75 percent of incarcerated women are single mothers. They carry an extra burden of distress and anxiety over the wellbeing of the children, in combination with their focus on surviving, rehabilitating themselves, and reuniting with their children.

The number of children with a parent under criminal supervision is high: an estimated 7 million. Communities of color are especially decimated by the loss of human capital.

In 2008 the number of people in our prisons and jails was 2.3 million. This figure exceeds that of any other country (China, for example, locks up 1.6 million, although it is four times more populous than the U.S.) Our incarceration rate, relatively stable between 1925 and 1972, has since grown sixfold. The U.S. holds one quarter of the world's prisoners, while the country only represents five percent of the world's population. This nation is deemed a “rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach,” according to Vivien Stern, research fellow at the International Prison Studies Centre in London.

Although the decreasing use of the death penalty is certainly good news—there are now sixteen states without the death penalty and fewer executions—there is a downside. The costliness of the elaborate legal procedures associated with capital punishment cases encourages prosecutors to aim for life without parole instead of the death penalty. Consequently, the idea of life without parole is normalized for non-capital crimes. A few decades ago, a life sentence implied harsh punishment, but amounted to ten to twenty years actual time incarcerated. Now, 10 percent of prisoners will leave their prison in a coffin. We have created a punishment previously unknown in the world. We are inventing a geriatric gulag. And juveniles are also serving life without parole.

Our prisons have also become more cruel, influenced perhaps by this century's war on terror. During the 1980s and 1990s “supermax” security prisons were built across the country, designed for “the worst of the worst.” Other prisons set apart solitary sections, variously called secure housing units (SHUs), adjustment centers, and administrative segregation (ad seg). At these locations, confinement is solitary, with at most one hour a day for exercise (also often completed in solitude). The UN Convention against Torture states that torture is treatment that causes “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental” when it is inflicted by officials for purposes of punishment or coercion. Isolation can cause or exacerbate mental illness. Our domestic use of solitary is not far removed from the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, though it has not received as much attention. Moreover, the American public was shocked by photos from Abu Ghraib revealing the humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers. Yet little was made of the fact that four men in charge of revamping Iraq's prisons had committed serious human rights abuses in Arizona, Utah, Texas, and Connecticut prisons.