Doing Time (57 page)

Now free, Kathy Boudin continues work begun in prison with adolescents of imprisoned parents, developing Teen College Dreams, a program to support their positive development and aspirations. She serves on a committee for parole reform and a restorative justice project with people still inside. With Eric Waters and other formerly incarcerated people, Boudin participated in a research project studying the recidivism of women convicted of murder; it proved to be very low. As director of The Criminal Justice Initiative, Supporting Children, Families and Communities, based at Columbia University School of Social Work, she strives to draw attention to issues of mass incarceration and re-entry throughout Columbia University.

Charles Culhane has marched and even paddled a raft down the Hudson to protest against the death penalty, and he serves on the boards of several organizations supporting people in prison. He edited
SHHHH,
a little book of poems by residents at a women's halfway house in Buffalo, where he works part-time. He is currently enthusiastic about Milk Not Jails, which serves free ice cream in upstate New York towns, where small dairies have been displaced by prisons. The group insists that bad criminal justice policy should not be the primary economic development plan for rural New York.

Not everyone has managed a successful release. Nine have died since 1999. Roger Jaco and Michael Knoll (whose pseudonym was M. A. Jones) died of illness in the free world. The poet Cecil Boatswain (who called himself Ajamu C. B. Haki) was indicted in 2008 for conspiring with others over a seven-year period to smuggle cocaine and heroin from the Caribbean into Baltimore. But, according to news reports, he had been murdered in Dominica months earlier.

When I returned home from celebrating the publication of
Doing Time
in 1999
,
I found a message that the execution date for Jessie Wise had been set. Over the years he had become a most constructive citizen of Potosi Prison in Missouri. Having taught himself how to play, read, and write music using makeshift instruments, he was put in charge of Potosi's music program. When one member of the band he created, Robert Anthony Murray, was executed, Wise felt that “his creativity and musician ship were stripped from the world.” Regardless of their crimes,” Wise wrote, “people do change while incarcerated, but no one takes notice of that fact.” Wise took notice, and composed “Lament for Tony M.” He managed to send a tape of his music. It was New Age jazz, evoking pastoral peace. His copy of
Doing Time
had arrived in the prison mail room, but the officials refused to deliver it to him. Yet he was glad that he was allowed to talk on the phone in the days immediately before his execution, glad that he would be remembered for the good he did, and “not as a monster.” A friend of his was with him his last day, but forbidden to touch his fingertips through the wire mesh.

Stephen Wayne Anderson discovered reading and writing through his decades on death row in San Quentin. Writing was like “coming out of an emotional desert into an exciting whirlwind of expression and release,” he wrote. He'd also written a lot of poetry about the men around him. “Over these incarcerated years /I have heard men wail in the night, / mourning misplaced lives and lost souls,” he wrote in one. “Nothing seems as forlorn as the profound crying / of an unseen man weeping in solitude.” He was calm about his coming death. He liked the title of an op-ed I wrote about him, “Poet Laureate of Death Row.” His lawyers presented a strong appeal for clemency, invoking the mitigating factors of his disrupted childhood. Moreover, the U.S. Court of Appeals had overturned two other capital convictions on the grounds that S. Donald Ames, Anderson's trial counsel, was incompetent. Leaving his cell for the last time, Anderson passed his lawyer a piece of paper on which he'd inscribed “The Last Poem I Will Write.” Outside San Quentin the night of the execution there was a large candlelight protest vigil. Like Wise, Anderson was a self-rehabilitated and creative man. But nothing swayed the governor.

Victor Hassine, an attorney convicted of murder, used his skills to bring conditions of confinement lawsuits against two Pennsylvania prisons. But it did not occur to him to write expressively until he was stricken by the sight of a convict who had tried to kill himself being carried past his cell. When his poem on this incident won a PEN prize, he started writing in earnest. He decided to interview an inmate devastated by sexual assault in prison; the youth recounted his struggles to make sense of his life and to refrain from taking out his despair on newcomers. After this piece also took a PEN prize, Hassine interviewed three typical cases: an addict of the “chemical shackles” used to control the mentally ill, a man locked up for forty years completely unfit to survive outside, and a man with AIDS. These pieces became the core
of Life without Parole,
which was used in many college courses, and Hassine was able to respond to students' questions. Constantly busy with engrossing projects, Hassine seemed to have fashioned for himself a real life even without parole. But when he was denied a hearing about the commutation of his sentence, there was nothing to hope for. He did the very thing that had so appalled him—and galvanized him into action—in his early years inside. He hanged himself.

William Orlando had been locked up for eighteen years, moving from maximum security to supermax. Near his release date he wrote about the violence around him, “A con needs half a reason to stab you.” About his plans, “I hope to find a quiet place to write, that room with a view, beside still waters.” Orlando could handle himself inside, but was given no preparation for the outside world. He prided himself “on making it alone, in spite of.” He was setting out for a halfway house in L.A. “I'll be starting from scratch, no friends or family. Time passes and bridges fall. I can, however, look to my indwelling optimism and resourcefulness. Ha. An ex-con will survive. Like a camel with its hump, its deformity of strength.” From the halfway house, he wrote, “I chafe at their short leash” and “I hope we can meet one day and talk books.” He phoned me, distraught. The people at the halfway house were not helping him find a job or a place to stay, he said. I called around, but could find only an address of a place that might be closed. (Now organizations helping people with re-entry are growing.) Shortly after that, he was dead. After eighteen years in prison, he was in the free world only a few months, never finding that quiet place.

Because of her aggressive uterine cancer, Marilyn Buck was sent to a prison hospital in Texas in 2009. When the doctors could do nothing more for her, she was granted compassionate release three weeks before her scheduled release date. She flew to New York, where she spent twenty days under palliative care, seemingly in bliss in the company of friends, in the home of her lawyer. She died with the children of her comrades around her. It was just twenty days after her release.

In Sacramento's New Folsom Prison, Patrick Nolan was an invaluable resource for the arts coordinator, organizing journaling workshops, poetry workshops and readings. After a race riot, he had persuaded the chaplain to let him meet with other white men, blacks, and Chicanos, to try to build circles of trust and to speak openly of their wounds; it proved to be a remarkably successful venture. But when he was suffering from hepatitis C, Patrick was transferred to California's Medical Facility in Vacaville. There I visited him and attended the poetry workshop he was leading. His spleen was enlarged; he was already pregnant with death. But the sight of people dying spurred his creativity: “Give me a poem that decries life's tragedies,” he wrote, “so I can appreciate life's inviolable sanctity.” In 2000, when he was dying, a good friend and the chaplain traveled to be with him in his last hours; they were not allowed to see him. But the arts coordinator and the chaplain took the very unusual step of organizing memorial services in two Sacramento prison yards, where Nolan was a much-loved figure. Now called The Inside Circle, the men's groups he initiated are still meeting in Sacramento prison eleven years after his death.

In 1999, the
Doing Time
writers testified to the sustaining powers of writing, and that has not changed. Of those still inside, thirteen are still writing. A friend of Charles Norman maintains a website and a blog for him. J.C. Amberchele and Reginald S. Lewis continue to publish books.

Writing workshops surely rank among the top rehabilitative programs behind the walls. An interesting introduction to them is Eve En-sler's documentary film about her workshops at Bedford Hills, including Clark and Boudin, “What I Want My Words To Do To You.” (The PEN Prison Writing Program has published
Words Over Walls: Starting A Workshop in Prison.
See www.pen.org)

While working full time, Susan Rosenberg spent the decade following her release writing her memoir,
An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country,
published in 2011. She traces her experience from living underground to navigating the vast underground circuit of American prisons. In 1984 she and a few other political women were sent to a new High Security Unit, an experiment in small group isolation, literally below ground in Lexington, Kentucky. They were subjected to sensory deprivation and psychological torment tantamount to torture. “Write about it for the record,” her lawyer insisted, and so Rosenberg did. The ACLU succeeded in getting the Lexington unit closed, but as Rosenberg points out, supermax prisons were already being built along the same lines across the country. She says: “I wrote this book to give voice to folks I was inside with who did not make it to the other side. I know how lucky I was to make it out and I needed to write this book to be accountable for all the solidarity and support I got over the years. Also, since I had sixteen plus years of really hard time in the federal system, it had to be shown for what a cruel and wasteful system it is. Finally, I wrote the book, to help give voice to the many political prisoners who have not made it out, or have died while doing time inside.”

Richard Stratton has his hands in all genres and all media:
High Times, Fortune News,
and
Prison Life,
the magazines he edited,
Smack Goddess,
his novel;
Slam,
a dramatic film about a spoken word poet in jail;
Prisoners in the War on Drugs,
a documentary;
Street Life,
a dramatic TV series; and
Altered States of America,
a nonfiction book. He also serves as an expert witness in state and federal courts in the areas of prison violence and prison culture. His creative works are driven by the same desire to use his hard-won expertise on prison, drugs, and crime to offer the public a more honest picture.

Prodigiously productive as well, Jimmy Santiago Baca publishes a book or two every year, often drawing on his prison experience. His screenplay, “Blood in, Blood out” (also known as “Bound by Honor”), about gang culture in Los Angeles, released by Hollywood pictures in 1993, is a powerful introduction to prison reality. Baca played a major role and was a key adviser in the making of the film, partly shot in San Quentin. He also conducts writing workshops with children and adults at countless schools, colleges, universities, reservations, barrio community centers, white ghettos, housing projects, and prisons from coast to coast. His faith in writing as a transformative force is enormous. He says of his students, “If they were taught to be racist or violent, language has this amazing ability to unteach all that, and make them question it. It gives them back their power toward regaining their humanity.”

When I was visiting Anthony Ross in the death row visiting room, before he was put in isolation, he told me how he talks to the young incoming men. “I ask them to tell me three principles that they live by. They can't do it, they're not even sure what principles are!” So the conversation begins. When Tookie Williams was still alive, he, Ross, and Steve Champion authored a pamphlet along the same lines. Called “Walk It Like You Talk It: A Manual for Building Character,” it lays out steps for taking control of your life.

Jarvis Masters' mitigation investigator at San Quentin, the writer Melody Ermachild Chavis, befriended him and encouraged him to write. During her visits, they practiced writing exercises and studied Buddhism together. In
Finding Freedom: Writings from Death
Row (1997), Masters thanks Chavis for guiding him “through the many steps from extreme anger to the clarity of my Buddhist practice.” This collection describes how, after becoming a Buddhist, Masters made himself a “peace activist” on San Quentin's condemned row. In “Scars,” a story reminiscent of Patrick Nolan's work with the men's circle in Sacramento, Masters gets other men to talk about the scars that their tattoos cannot fully conceal; for most of them, scars memorialize the violence done them by parents. Masters presses the men to go beyond “shucking and jiving” to consider how the pain and abuse they suffered as children had trapped them, like him, “in a pattern of lashing out against everything.”

Masters was urged by many to write about his life for the sake of others who were abandoned or harmed as children. So was born
That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row
(2009) Like many prison writers, Masters longs for an opportunity to do some good, particularly to keep someone else from repeating their lives. Masters wrote: “It is for the young children who traveled with me through childhood that I have pried open my heart and relived memories I had repressed in my soul's stomach—wishing never to digest them—in order to write this book. I wrote also for the young children who today are traveling a painful, violent road like the one that brought me to death row… . Although they may sometimes act out in violent and dangerous ways, underneath they are simply longing to be seen for who they truly are: young children with caring hearts who were never given a chance to shine, a chance to succeed, a chance to love and be loved.”