Doing Time (56 page)

Arrested for possession of cocaine in Texas in 1981, he spent thirty-four months in maximum security, He resurrected the award-winning prison newspaper,
The Echo,
wrote several screenplays (unproduced), a novel,
Twist of Faith
(published) and many stories, including “Death of a Duke” which tied for first prize in fiction (1984). “Duke” was later published in
Witness
and in the 1989 O. Henry Awards volume. Xenos is happily married and is writing, painting, and producing videos. Widely published (using pseudonyms), he has won many awards for his work. He values his family life above all else.

What the Lives and Deaths of People in Prison Tell Us

To write in prison takes spirit and character; the very act awakens thought and feeling. A person who begins to write in prison is an unusually interesting person.

For the 1999 edition of
Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing
, I asked the contributors to send me materials about themselves and their experience with writing in prison. Since then, I have continued to correspond with most of them, visited many, and accompanied ffteen no longer behind bars to read their work to college audiences, in bookstores, and on the air.

The reissue of this volume has provided the opportunity to expand the original “About the Authors” section with their news. This Afterword supplements that section with an overview of four essential topics: inside, outside, loss, and writing (which is always a kind of gain).

In 1999, twenty-eight contributors to the anthology were in prison; twelve years later, sixteen are still locked up; the number testifes to exorbitant sentences and merciless denials of pardons and parole. At least fourteen of these have continued to write, and they unfailingly report that the work sustains and refreshes them.

All the long-termers have invested huge efforts in getting parole, clemency, or a pardon. In these last decades, it has become increasingly diffcult to succeed. This situation is particularly deplorable because long-termers are the most likely to have turned their lives around. Diane Metzger, who has repeatedly been denied clemency, spent twenty years of her life-without-parole sentence in Pennsylvania, before getting a “hardship” transfer to Delaware to be near her family. After sixteen more years as a model prisoner in Delaware, a new warden deemed this sixty-two-year-old woman in orthotic shoes an “escape risk,” and in 2011 sent her back to Pennsylvania where she was put in solitary. Metzger writes that she knows “inmates who have been down thirty, thirty-fve, forty years, now thinking about suicide, because no lifers have hope in Pennsylvania,” adding “I'll be damned if I'm going to let them make me want to kill myself.”

These defeats take their toll in many forms, and not only on those who lose, but on their parents and children as well. Some of the men have been married, but after they failed to win release, the women have often cut them loose.

Keen observers, long-termers testify to worsening conditions. Charles Norman, a thirty-three-year veteran of Florida prisons, describes the decline this way: 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.”

Alejo Rodriguez, who benefited from college classes before the Pell grants were abolished, finds that “individuals are no longer intellectually stimulated past a G.E.D. education.” They seek medication more than education, he says. People in prison are “more apathetic; they no longer trust that an individual's efforts will be rewarded.” Reginald Lewis notes, “Inmates are barely out of their teens with multiple convictions for murder and longer sentences. The illiteracy rate is the highest I've ever seen. In the age of advanced technology, this is tragic.”

Lori Lynn McLuckie remarks on the gratuitous meanness in the corrections staff. “Legitimate authority and security are slowly but surely giving way to constant demonstrations of specious power and control, which we know is a completely different thing. It is increasingly dehumanizing for a woman today to spend any amount of time in prison. I don't know what to do about it, except to keep speaking out about it and encouraging people in prison to maintain our sense of selves, and not internalize the disdain with which we are treated.”

Long-termers often find a way to create a life in circumstances that would devastate others. Seeing the prisoner as an exile, Marilyn Buck put it forcefully: “Either the exile is frustrated and lives with rose-colored longing for what is gone, or she finds a reason and a passion to live in her present condition.”
A reason and a passion to live.
Confined in California, Buck found an indisputable passion to live. She worked with drawing and ceramics and taught other women to write, sometimes rising at dawn to do so. She taught English as a second language and, to strengthen the community, commemorated events like Kwanzaa and Black History Month. (One of Buck's poems is entitled, “To the Woman Standing Behind Me In Line Who Asks Me How Long This Black History Month is Going to Last.”) With her international perspective, Buck maintained vital contact with the world. At the end of each year, she sent out her political analysis of the state of the planet.

Having come to terms with himself, Alejo Rodriguez exhibited his passion to live by reaching out to others. He studied sign language in order to lead classes in sign language. He has facilitated the Alternative to Violence Program and is Inmate Director of a Stress Management Program.

Some write about the progressive programs of the past. Some officials recognized and made use of intelligence and good will. Charlie Norman blogs about the R.I.T.E. Program (“Responsible Inmate-taught Education”) through which inmates were trained to be teachers. Locked up for thirty-nine years, Judith Clark wrote “Reflections on the Prison as a Community,” about the twenty years, 1984 to 2004, when Bedford Hills was run on a community model, as opposed to the current punitive model. The women were respected and took pride in their work; they were given responsibility and treated as resources. “Inmate-centered programming” gave the prisoners opportunities to develop the Children's Center, an AIDS Education and Counseling Program, and a Family Violence program. The model worked, Clark says, because it represented an investment in human potential, built on strong relationships, and had an ethos of inter-dependence, not control or force. Women with “long histories of social marginalization” became “stakeholders and active participants in our community.” Clark herself developed courses in pre-natal care and infant care.

Also at Bedford Hills, Kathy Boudin, whose sentence separated her from her son, developed a course on parenting at a distance and a program for the teen-age children of her fellow prisoners. Her son, Chesa Boudin, has become an advocate for other children with incarcerated parents. He argues for the child's constitutional right to the family relationship in his essay, “Children with Incarcerated Parents” in the
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
(January, 2011).

Long-termers who benefited from college education before the 1994 repeal of Pell grants for people in prison, have actively pursued alternative means to make college education available to others. At Bedford Hills, the superintendent, leaders in the community, educators, and women including Boudin and Clark met to discuss organizing a consortium of private colleges to offer courses. The imprisoned women worked with the CUNY Grad Center, researching the importance of education to people in prison and their children. They published a report called
Changing Minds.
This group declared: “We understand the public's anger about crime and realize that prison is first and foremost a punishment for crime. But we believe that when we are able to work and earn a higher education degree while in prison, we are empowered to truly pay our debts to society by working toward repairing some of what has been broken.” The consortium began to provide a full program, and Marymount Manhattan granted A.A. and B.A. degrees. This program has inspired many colleges to generate relationships with prisons around the country, notably the Bard College Initiative, through which Rodriguez took courses.

In Missouri, Jon Marc Taylor, has dedicated himself for years to bring college education back inside prisons, knowing well the difference it makes. At the same time, he has compiled the
Prisoners' Guerrilla Handbook to Correspondence Programs in the U.S. and Canada,
which has proved to be so useful that it has gone into three editions. Such activism is often punished—in the experience of Taylor and Larry Bratt, for example—by transfer to another prison (often distant from friends and family).

Michael Wayne Hunter fought for years to get his death sentence commuted to life without parole. Since his success, he has been dedicating himself to getting an education. He welcomes the opportunity to work and go to college, but misses his friends on death row.

People behind bars hunger for education, sometimes without fully knowing it. The saga of Anthony Ross and Steve Champion educating themselves on San Quentin's death row is a case in point. After a series of violent confrontations inside San Quentin, the two Crips wearied of battle and of their own aimlessness. They determined to learn a thing or two together, to change course, to give up the gang world for study. As Champion, a PEN prize-winning author, wrote in his memoir,
Dead to Deliverance: A Death Row Memoir
(2010),
“
We made a commitment to each other to be responsible and accountable, to never argue unproductively with one another, to be an example for other guys like us, and to study every day.” Obtaining books wherever they could, they studied politics and philosophy and systematically discussed what they'd read. Developing strict discipline, they re-evaluated and altered their behavior, and they put one another to rapid-fire tests on vocabulary. They went “from thugs to bookworms,” Champion wrote. Stanley “Tookie” Williams. the founder of the Crips, joined them, and they pondered ways of showing their fellow prisoners how to understand and change their actions. “We have to show guys that it is never too late to do something different,” Williams said. The three then started writing, often with only the fillers of ballpoint pens, because the plastic housing, a potential weapon, was banned. Champion and Ross took prizes in the PEN contest, and Williams, believing that “kids are the ones who need to be reached the most,” began to publish a series of books arguing against joining gangs. Then Williams got his execution date.

Williams' books, and other efforts to use his fame to protect boys, were invoked in his appeal for clemency. Nevertheless Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied it, citing Williams' dedication of a book to George Jackson (among others) as evidence that Williams had not reformed. Two days before Williams' execution in December, 2005, Champion and Ross were abruptly carried off to the Adjustment Center (the isolation unit within Death Row where one can have no phone calls or contact visits) on another inmate's suggestion that they were planning a riot. They have been there ever since.

Six of the twenty-four writers who have been released since 1999 have dropped out of contact, one has been imprisoned for a new crime, and five have died. The remaining dozen appear to be doing well. At least eight report happy relationships. Several conceal their past or publish under an assumed name. Many prefer to live quietly alone, like Joe Sissler, who raises cattle in Virginia and Judee Norton in Arizona, who treasures her horse and dog. As she puts it, “Even after all these years, the stigma of being an ex-felon, and
a
.
female
ex-felon, to boot—still follows me like a noxious cloud.” Some are watched closely and violated by their parole officers; take Chuck Culhane, sent back twice for failing his urine test, but now free and active. In many states ex-felons are denied public housing, grants for public education, food stamps, the right to vote, or work on the census; they are obliged, when applying for a job, to check a box indicating past convictions, which nearly guarantees that they will be turned away. (Hence the lively movement Ban The Box.)

Others find that they can put their prison experience to constructive use. Eric Waters' first post-prison job was in child welfare. Sometimes he felt uncomfortable, as if his past identity was in the closet. Later, working for the Osborne Association in New York, facilitating support groups for formerly incarcerated men and women and their families, he was able to draw on all he had learned inside. He particularly enjoys going to Sing Sing to train others in the manner he wishes he'd been taught when he was locked up; the training uses a cognitive model, changing the way one acts by changing the way one thinks. At the same time Waters runs Osborne's Jail-Based Services, which begin in Rikers Island and continue in the community. The curriculum workshops range from parenting and computer literacy to job readiness and culinary arts. He also participates in a group seeking parole reform in New York

Since her release, Barbara Saunders has worked in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the state where the female incarceration rate is twice the national average. Currently she works with an interdenominational ministry, Stand in the Gap, and two days a week runs a program she designed, Women in Transition, in the Tulsa County Jail. Sessions include topics like addictions, family secrets and shame, conflict resolution, the legacy of trauma, learning self-care, and the power of no. “This is temporary,” Saunders tells the women about prison. “This is not what will determine the entire rest of your life—if you make a change and build a new woman.” She observes a generally more acute awareness of imprisoned women, evidenced by a series of programs about them on the Oprah Network. “I believe,” Saunders writes, “that transition is all about personal accountability, responsibility and the choices we make vs. the risks we take. There were no transitional living centers for women when I transitioned, so that's definitely an improvement.”