Six Degrees from …

            A true story: Summer, 1998. We are at Myrtle Beach and our younger son is eleven months old. We’re on the beach and realize we need a change of “floaties” and juice. I leave the beach and head through the hotel lobby and into the elevator to go to our room. As the door begins to close an arm comes in.  The door opens and in walks … Kevin Bacon. That’s right, the actor Kevin Bacon. Being who I am, I look at him and go, “Hey, how’re you doing?” I get a tepid “fine” and then Mr. Bacon puts his head down and has no further conversation with me.

            A second true story: we have a wonderful biology teacher this fall. She’s energetic, enthusiastic and brilliant. She’s also a “local,” raised in Charlotte County before moving away to become an infectious disease researcher. We were talking the other day and the subject of the movie, “Sommersby” came up. That movie – starring Richard Gere and Jodie Foster – was filmed in the town I was living in with my wife and then only child.

            “My brother rented his house to Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford,” she told me. I knew the house. And, I remember Cindy Crawford. See, while Richard was “filming,” his significant other was exploring our little town (made famous after Brown vs. Board of Ed, when the white country school board voted to close the public schools rather than integrate). And that led Cindy, in a spandex sports bra and tights, to end up at the gym I worked out at. Cindy (I still feel like I’m on a first name basis!) came over to me and, in a sweet voice, said, “Can you please spot me?” How could I say no? So there I was standing over the lovely super-model as she bench-pressed.

            That evening, I regaled my friends with my “Cindy” story paying particular attention, and providing minute detail, to one part of her anatomy. It eventually led my wife to comment, “You’d think he never saw nipples before.” Which – in turn – led to my retort, “not like those!”

            “Famous people” stories. I have dozens of them from my travels and I use them with the guys in here who are enamored with fame. I tell them their lives matter as much as Jay Z or Snoop Dogg or the dozens of other celebrities they wish they were like. I tell them the same thing I told my older son after I’d spent a night at a high dollar craps table with the producers for the band Coldplay. My son asked me “Did you get your picture with them?” I responded, “They should have asked to get a picture with me!”

            We live in a world that is obsessed with fame and celebrity. But, the truth is, people are people and the real work, the real decency, isn’t in your fame, it’s how you treat each other. I understand why these guys “want” the lives they see these other folks living. But for me, as great looking as Ms. Crawford was, I value the moments I have with these young guys a whole lot more.

            Six degrees from “name the celebrity.” That isn’t what’s important. Heart, courage, mercy, those matter … and never more so than for guys putting their lives back together in here.

The First Casualty

            Aeschylus, the great Greek Philosopher, wrote, “Truth is the first casualty of war.” (words to think about as our nation begins yet another military action). In truth, “truth” is the first casualty of all our follies: broken/failed relationships; dishonesty in business and government; failure in corrections. So often, it is easier to lie and distort and to imprison the truth from the light of day than to admit our failures – and the active role we play in them.

            The Virginia Department of Corrections, a behemoth of money and manpower, is broken. That’s the truth. It is as clear as the blue sky on a crisp fall day. Yet, the politicians in Richmond won’t say it because to do so would be to admit that a few have gotten rich off contracts and sweetheart deals; that corruption permeates the departments core; and that prison neither makes society safer nor rehabilitates the offenders it holds. DOC is a failure of monumental proportions. And, when cast into the light of truth, when exposed for what it really is, you can see the waste in money and lives.

1.     There is no statistical correlation between harsh sentencing and crime rates, between abolishment of parole and recidivism. Crime rates have nothing to do with, “tough on crime” sentencing. In fact, in states where there is more liberal use of alternative sentencing (i.e. not prison) and community-based corrections (i.e. parole and probation) crime rates have dropped significantly more than in Virginia.    

       

2.     All harsh sentencing does is sends more people to prison, for longer sentences, at greatly increasing cost. It doesn’t make Virginia any safer. Worse, in “people issues” it actually harms communities. Harsh sentencing creates an attitude of victimization among many offenders. You send a small-time drug user or nonviolent larceny convict to prison and he (or she) is subjected to violence, humiliation, and arbitrary behavior on the part of some guards, and you create an angry inmate, a person who believes he is being treated unfairly.

There are over 100,000 children in Virginia who have a parent in prison. Statistically, those children are less well off economically and have lower education levels. They also are more likely to find themselves on the wrong side of the law. There is a generational component to prison. You send a father to prison and there is a statistically significant likelihood that one of his children will end up there as well.

3.     Corrections uses sweetheart contracts to prison/industrial corporations which, in turn, pay huge dollars to Virginia lobbyists and candidates’ campaigns in even sweeter deals. The state outsources major portions of its corrections apparatus at ever increasing cost to the taxpayers with worse oversight and results.

For example, DOC no longer provides medical care for the incarcerated. That process has been contracted out to medical companies who are paid millions of dollars for “primary” care of inmates. If specialists are needed, those costs are still paid by taxpayers. Forget the moral argument, namely should government be able to take a person’s liberty away by incarceration, then outsource that function; instead, look at the pure dollars and cents. It costs the state more to have private contractors provide medical care than to do it itself.

            These contracts are all big dollar and add to the huge, billion dollar plus expenditures DOC makes every year. They also lead to multitudes of lawsuits, which the state must defend.

            Medical care in prison is poor at best. There is no “Hippocratic Oath” (“do no harm”) at play in here. No, it’s “churn and burn” to make a buck. Then, when the lawsuits begin to mount, the contractor bails out. Think I’m kidding? Ask the women inmates at Fluvanna who successfully sued in a class action suit over the lack of adequate medical care.

4.     Prisons – individually and as a totality – are corrupt. They say it’s all about public safety; they lie. The public isn’t safer with nearly 40,000 people jammed into Virginia’s prisons. Every day in here lives are wasted. The state spends millions to just sit and watch; there’s no rehabilitation or re-entry (real, meaningful programs that actually matter). Over half of all offenders lack high school diplomas and basic job skills yet those programs – talked about all day long in here – aren’t stressed or adequately funded.

Some may argue, “Prison is about punishment not rehabilitation.” Fair enough. Then make the punishment fit the crime. Don’t run violent, drug and gang-filled facilities where corrupt officers bring in the drugs or look the other way at cases of sexual assault or stabbings and say that is the result of those locked up. No, you take a man’s – or woman’s – freedom, you bear responsibility for them. DOC has not been required to be responsible for those in its custody.

5.     Economic realities: Most of Virginia’s prisons are in rural counties. The prisons become the only significant employer in those areas. Do you ever see a private employer decide to build in Lunenburg, or Mecklenburg, or Buckingham, or Brunswick because the state puts a prison there? No. And what happens in those communities when the prison closes? Nothing but economic despair.

Prisons in those rural counties are a con job run on the locals. They think the state is “investing” in their economic future. They aren’t. Those counties, like the men and women housed in their prisons, have lousy schools and poor job opportunities. Those counties are economically as shackled and imprisoned as those behind the wire.

Truth is a casualty. It is time for an honest discussion about Virginia’s prison system. Lives – both inside and outside the walls – are being lost; money is being wasted. The truth is, one day inside here tells you things are not as those in Richmond want you to believe. The politicians, and the senior people at DOC won’t tell you the truth because it will cost them money. But, as another “philosopher” once said, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Money drives prison policy; it’s corrupt money that destroys lives. That is the truth.

Character Matters

            You would think morals and ethics aren’t very popular topics inside prison. Most times, you’d be right. Oh, guys have opinions on everything; and, most of those opinions are black and white. But, in here, when push comes to shove, you learn early to not comment on somebody else’s wrongdoing. “Let me do me,” is a catchphrase for anything goes if it doesn’t bring heat on you. In that mix there is the college program and a little thing called the honor code.

            As I’ve said before, I was never a proponent of campus honor codes. I thought they were bogus. If you are willing to cheat, you’re willing to lie and say “on my honor.” And, it isn’t my job to rat out the guy next to me. That used to be my attitude. Watching college be held in a prison setting changed my opinion.

            Honor, character, ethics, those aren’t merely words. They matter and they matter especially in here. This is an environment where every day you are confronted by dirt and dishonesty; bad decisions, bad behavior, carries the day in here. The college requires the men in here to “pledge” that they neither gave, nor received help. Imagine a room full of men, the vast majority of whom have never known educational success. They obsess on their grade point average; it isn’t what you know, they think. It’s having a “4.0.” Add to that the vast majority are used to lying, cheating, and stealing their way through this place. Honor codes, like the law, only matter if you get caught.

            Yet, the vast majority of men in here do their own work and don’t cheat. Perhaps it’s a higher percentage than on the “street” (after all, a twenty-four year old inmate going to school isn’t that different from a twenty-four year old in the “real world.”). Still, a few guys will try and cheat.

            Here’s the unique thing about “college life” in here. Guys won’t “look the other way” when another student is cheating. They let me know. And me, I play dad. Like this week, I see a guy turn in a paper. I haven’t seen him pull out a computer yet and here it is, three pages. And someone “tipped” me off – he had help. I have a simple rule – if I ask you, tell me the truth. So I ask him, “Is that your work?” He opens up a notebook and there it is, all written out. “I hate typing so I paid a guy to type it. He edited it a little bit too.” I give him the old “you need to do the paper – typing and all – yourself.” But, it’s ok. See, he didn’t cheat and he was straight up with me when I asked.

            Character matters. You don’t learn that in prison. Prison breaks character; prison promotes unethical conduct. But college – and especially professors who treat these men like students and scholars – brings out the best in men in trying circumstances. Honor is alive and well in our college program.

Plantation Life

           The Virginia Department of Corrections is the commonwealth’s largest state agency, employing over 15,000 at a cost of over $1.2 billion a year.  It is led by a director of public safety. The DOC director, I’m guessing, provides his boss with a department “tree” detailing his own department heads and regional directors and all the prisons which fall underneath. You look at the organizational chart and you think the department is centrally run. Consistency, you tell yourself, matters. And, you’d be wrong.

            DOC operates like the antebellum South. Each prison is its own plantation; all depends on who is the warden and who is the security chief. Prison operation is a bloated business. First, it’s labor intensive. You have to have a significant number of officers to man every housing unit booth and floor. You have to have officers in the towers and in the trucks circling the perimeter. Then, there are officers on duty at vocational and treatment, and in medical and the factory. You have to have “floating” C.O.s to relieve on-duty officers twice during their twelve-hour shift. That’s just line COs. Add a layer of sergeants, “Lts” (lieutenants), two captains, and your security chief and you have a huge officer staff twenty-four, seven.

            Modern technology? Yeah, they have electronically controlled doors for the buildings, but everything else is done with keys. Every classroom door, every cabinet, every drawer, has a lock. There’s one officer whose sole job is to walk around the compound and verify that the correct key goes with the correct lock. Everything is written down; paper is everything in here.

            All that waste of money and manpower would, theoretically, be worth it if (1) society was safer; and (2) going to prison stopped a person from reoffending. Neither statement is true. In fact, just the opposite happens. There is no correlation between “tough on crime” high incarceration rates and crime rates. Want to reduce crime? Have better schools. Make sure lower income workers have a chance to reach the “American Dream” with well-paying employment opportunities and access to both health care and decent housing.

            And, going to prison doesn’t stop recidivism. It’s just the opposite. You send a low risk, non-violent offender into a prison and there’s better than a one out of three chance when they get out, they’ll break the law again. That’s prison. Even at low levels. They are zoos (perhaps zoo isn’t a fair word; zoos are much nicer). Drug use – heroin, pills, weed, you name it – is rampant. Violence is commonplace. There are health crises that brew like a toxic stew; Hep C, HIV, diabetes, not to mention staff infections (MRSA), rotten teeth, rotten skin, rotten psyches. The officers – not all, but a fair number – are corrupt. They are low-skilled, poorly paid minders who use their job to “get a little more.”

            All this goes on under the watchful eye of the warden and the chief of security, the facility major. They run the facility as they see fit, the hell with department policies or procedures. For example, DOC has specific regulations concerning facility operation. “DOPs” (department operating procedures) spell out everything from mail to visitation. And yet every facility enforces those procedures differently. Even going from one level “2” re-entry facility to another is like night and day. It all comes down to the whims and wills of the security chief. Most of the decisions that the major makes are petty and address neither safety, nor security.

            You learn which officers are straight-shooters and which ones are dirty. You watch as they create additional levels of bureaucracy which contribute nothing to the Department’s defined mission of successful re-entry of released inmates to society. Here, we have counselors who don’t counsel; they report to unit managers who worry more about the waxy shine on twenty year-old floor tiles than health and safety in the building. The three unit managers report to an  “evidence based program” manager, a fancy word for a man who should be pushing re-entry programs that matter (like real job training and drug and alcohol treatment), but instead has grown men sitting in a room every morning getting “the word of the day.”

            They have a grievance procedure in place. By law, a prison has to have a system in place that allows the incarcerated to challenge charges and arbitrary enforcement of rules (passed during the Clinton Administration to reduce the number of § 1983 Civil Rights suits flooding the federal courts by inmates). Here, the system is rigged. Due process is ignored. Officers – as uneducated as the offender population (you only need a GED to be a C.O.) – fail to meet minimum standards of evidence and fail to even correctly write charges. Still, the hearing officer almost never finds for the offender.

            All these circumstances breed a sense of victimization and contempt for the judicial system within the offender ranks. When you are in danger of being shook down or sent to the hole based on someone dropping a “note” on you; when most investigations are initiated by information provided by snitches who themselves are dirty (but their dirt is overlooked by the security apparatus), when officers are bringing in drugs and having sex with inmates and – when caught – are just “walked off” without facing prosecution, then you know it’s a rigged game. You are, to quote Bob Dylan, “workin’ on Maggie’s farm.”

            All that goes on here. And you know what – Richmond knows … they just don’t care. How else do you explain that wardens aren’t held accountable for the drug use, fights, deaths, and re-offending of those in their charge? How else do you explain majors getting inmates to wash their cars and playing favorites with snitches while limiting access to education programs?

            This isn’t a well-run department; this isn’t merely a poorly run department. This is a decentralized mismanaged rat hole where each prison runs as its own little fiefdom, its own plantation. It’s all that and it isn’t corrections. And, it doesn’t do a damn bit of good for anyone. Everyone pays for this failed antebellum plantation system: tax-payers, victims, and the families of the offenders. It is time to move corrections into the 21^st century. It’s time to clean up the prisons.