Doing Time (3 page)

In addition to official and systematic punishment, sexual violence in prisons has not been wholly eliminated. Although Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003, the Justice Department failed to implement many of the demands proposed by the Commission to protect victims.

The United States has the shameful distinction not only of locking up the most men and the most women, the most old people and the most juveniles, for the longest time and for the harshest punishments, but also for holding the highest proportion of racial minorities in the world. To many, mass incarceration appears to be a war on people of color, a substitution of social control for social services. As the ACLU put it, “despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is ten times greater than that of whites.” For Michele Alexander, mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow. Just as segregation was devised in response to Reconstruction, so, she suggests, has the mass incarceration of black people been generated as a response to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. History repeats itself: one form of racial domination breaks and another rises to replace it.

By entering the criminal justice system, many people become permanent members of an inferior caste. Their rights upon release are eviscerated. In many states, they are excluded from public housing, employment, education, voting, and benefits. They become non-citizens. With all these odds against them, many will return to prison. Theirs is a cycle of relentless marginalization.

On the other hand, the twenty-first century has offered many positive developments. A few examples:

•   George Soros' Open Society Foundation has funded influential projects that promote a better understanding of the human cost of our criminal justice system and explore alternatives to mass incarceration.

•   In 2011, forty years after Nixon's call for an all-out offensive on drugs, the prestigious Global Commission on Drug Policy called the international war on drugs a failure and urged the U.S. to consider decriminalizing drugs.

•   Some policy makers and politicians shun “tough on crime,” and substitute it with “smart on crime” and “right on crime.”

•   Mandatory minimum sentences are increasingly less common.

•   Some states have begun to release hundreds of prisoners and to find community-based alternatives to incarceration.

•   The disparity between the high sentences for crack cocaine (used mostly by people of color) and the relatively low for powder cocaine (used mostly by white people) is being eliminated.

•   Re-entry has become in the last several years the most challenging issue in criminal justice policy as the public realizes that almost all people return from prison to the community and need help in preparing to reintegrate successfully.

•   In 1998, a group called Critical Resistance launched the first major coalition-building conferences for prison activists concerned about checking what they called the Prison Industrial Complex and strengthening communities at risk; coalition building has since become the norm.

•   Formerly incarcerated men and women are increasingly designing and staffing programs for people returning from prison. (See the afterword, especially the first two sections.)

Most important, public awareness has grown, and many citizens work with local organizations. Michele Alexander's powerful metaphor—mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow—may startle readers out of their indifference and fire the conscience of the country to engage in a refreshed human rights movement. Such struggles are never simply for the persons deprived of their rights, but rather for all of us. We are all diminished by an unjust society. We are all implicated in this monstrous carceral society whose tentacles reach everywhere. For the good of us all, we must try to understand it and change our approach to crime and criminals.

With prison and prisoners an increasingly large, though still ignored, aspect of society, this collection of prison writings is more relevant than ever. Teachers seeking ways to integrate prison issues into American studies find it invaluable. Many are again prizing prison writing as an essential expression of our nation's underclass and, with its own complex traditions, an important field of American literature.

Prisoners know that they dwell “behind the mirror's face” (in Paul St. John's telling phrase; see “Reading and Writing”), that prison reflects the state of society. This book aspires to dissolve the mercury and leave us face to face with our brothers and sisters. Our future is one. The evidence that this book offers of the complex humanity of people in prison and their very real aptitude for growth has a surprising part to play in our construction of the future.

Writing is my way of sledge-hammering these walls.

—Alejo Dao'ud Rodriguez, Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Ossining, New York

My life was one of perpetual conflict. I held an apocalyptic view. I have spent most of my existence on this earth inside one prison or another, so my mindset toward the world was one of complete antipathy and alienation … I was reluctant to submit my story to the PEN contest I at no point thought I had a chance of winning. When I won the award, it gave me an overwhelming sense of acceptance. I now felt that I had something to offer humanity.

— Anthony Ross, Death Row, San Quentin Prison, California

Public reception of prison writing over the past twenty-five years parallels the plunging and rearing trajectory of attitudes toward prisoners we have seen: enthusiasm and broad-based support in the seventies, doubt growing in the eighties, cynicism dominating the nineties, and beginning to give way at century's end* To some degree PEN's engagement has followed these vicissitudes, but with an important distinction: Every year PEN has provided an outlet for these forgotten voices.

PEN's involvement in this unique creative movement began in a curious way. Born in 1921, PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors, and Novelists) is dedicated to consolidating world peace through a global association of writers. Since 1960 a Freedom-to-Write Committee within PEN's American Center has defended the rights of writers in other countries who have been jailed for their beliefs. But concern for saints of free expression abroad did not translate into concern for ordinary domestic sinners. In fact, this committee's chair in the late sixties, historian Tom Fleming, had taken a dim view of convicts (his father was a New Jersey sheriff and prison warden). But one day, he appeared on a talk show with an impressive ex-prisoner — a Fortune Society spokesman — who remarked that some of the best people he knew were behind bars. “I never forgot it,” Fleming said.

As PEN president in 1971, Fleming encouraged colleague Lucy Kavaler to investigate freedom to write in U.S. prisons. Her report spurred Fleming into intensive lobbying with corrections officials, resulting in reduced censorship, improved access to typewriters, courses, and better prison libraries. Then the revelations of Attica made a prison writing program. (PWP) seem a moral imperative to some PEN members. Convinced that writing is inherently rehabilitative, they persuaded other writers to read, teach, and mentor behind bars and publishers to send materials. “To be able to say what you mean, to put in words what you perceive as truth, to impose form on the formless — this is a way to reconstruct a life, to restore one's sense of meaning, of responsibility to oneself and to others,” PWP chair Kathrin Perutz wrote. “But the others — at least some others — must be listening.”

And so in 1973 PEN launched its first annual literary competition for prisoners in federal institutions and extended it to state prisoners in 1974, soon engaging some fifteen hundred prisoners annually. Winning works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction (drama was added later) were read at annual celebrations, and
Fortune News
(the Fortune Society's paper for prisoners) and other journals published them. The contest reinforced the seventies' prison renaissance nationwide. As college programs grew behind the walls, so did creative writing workshops, some funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Journals devoted to inmate writing — with names like
“Joint
³
' Conference
and
Sentences
— sprang up overnight. Some academics embraced this literature of the American dispossessed as part of their project of challenging, or enlarging, the canon. The bibliography of H. Bruce Franklin's 1989 edition of
Prison Literature in America: The Victim As Criminal and Artist
lists 320 books by prisoners published from 1971 through 1981. Then everything changed.

The year 1981 saw the publication of
In the Belly of the Beast,
a volume of Jack Henry Abbott's prison letters to Norman Mailer, describing the rage he cultivated through his lifelong institutionaliza-tion. Readers were more excited by the writing than mindful of its warning; the book went through five printings and Abbott was released with fanfare. David Rothenberg recently described Abbott on his second day at liberty, sweating through an appearance on
Good Morning, America,
in which Mailer answered Abbott's questions for him. Rothenberg invited Abbott to drop by the Fortune Society for help with the deinstitutionalization process. Abbott was not interested. Within a month, he had killed a man in a fight. The romance between writers and convicts had run its course, and prisoners went out of fashion in the eighties.

Support for prison writing plummeted as well. Under Reagan, the NEA severely cut financial aid to fledgling magazines, and by 1984, every journal devoted to prison writing had gone under. Prison newspapers, a vital branch of this literature, began to lose support in this era. Now, with the notable exceptions of the distinguished
Angolite
in Louisiana and
Prison Legal Notes
in Washington State, most have been suppressed.

The PWP persisted, though many members, always volunteers, fell away, and PEN's executives took little interest. By the late 1980s, most committee work had fallen to overburdened receptionists, and the PWP nearly expired. It is to the credit of a few dedicated members that, even so, there was a never a year without a PEN prison writing contest. In 1990 PEN president Larry McMurtry appointed Fielding Dawson, who in 1987 had edited a special issue on prison writing for
Witness
and had taught in prison, to head a reinvigorated PWP committee, strengthened further by his successors Bibi Wein and Hettie Jones. PWP director Jackson Taylor has restored a rich mentor program, and at a stirring twenty-fifth-anniversary ceremony in 1998, Sister Helen Prejean, author of
Dead Man Walking,
offered the keynote address.

In twenty-five years, PEN has accumulated a rare archive of testimony, a mine of information about linguistic and literary culture as well as social culture behind bars. Prisoners have their own evolving lexicon, well known in their home neighborhoods. Inventive language travels from the street to the “joint” and back, ripening with each journey. Much penitentiary argot is decades old: “joint,
⁹⁵
“slammer” for prison; “hack,” “screw,” “canine,” “roller,” “C.O.” for a guard or corrections officer; “fish” for a new prisoner, “rap partner” for crime partner, “road dog” for friend, “cellie” for cellmate. “Homeboy,” “homey,” or “homes,” shedding its origin in
hometown,
is simply buddy. Solitary confinement (Administrative Segregation, Special Housing Unit, Control Unit, in bureaucratic lingo) is for convicts simply the “hole” or the “box.” An arrest and conviction is a “fall”; “down” is serving time; a sentence is a “bit” or “bid”; near the end of it, one is “short.” The crafted repartee in
Doing Time
owes much to the “dozens” — stylized verbal battles perfected by young African-American men.

Poetry coming out of the seventies was often stamped with Black Arts movement stylistics (including spelling: “Amerikkka”) and marked by revolutionary fervor. It was a heady period for African-American prisoners. (Students in my Westchester County Penitentiary class admired George Jackson's stoical self-discipline in
Soledad Broth en
After Jackson's death, Charles Caldwell wrote, in “A Poem with George Jackson”: “my dying just / as yours will be / a whip to sorrow / ‘cause tears won't build / a body / & you are on the lips / the angry skin of life / that calls tomorrow.”) Vera Montgomery's indignant poem (see Players, Games) about her sisters' failure to seize their common cause sits squarely in this tradition. Matching the proud attention to cultural specificity fostered by the black consciousness movement was that of Latinos — Puerto Rican Young Lords in the Northeast and Chicago, Chicanos in the Southwest and California — represented here by Raymond Ringo Fernandez and Jimmy Santiago Baca.

Some early PEN prison poetry reflected the “toast/
⁵
an older African-American narrative in ballad form that my penitentiary students had introduced to me. Passed from performer to performer in jails, toasts glorify the “life
⁹⁵
(of con games, pimping, and other hustles). The toast's flamboyant hyperbole persists In the “lies” and tall tales that enliven yard culture, and its rhythmic insistence is one of the sources of rap music and hiphop.