Shut It Down

            Back in my other life, I had a number of Johnny Cash albums and CDs in my music collection. Cash, “The Man in Black” was not just a country musician; he was a pop culture icon and his story – his rise, fall, and resurrection – was the stuff of Hollywood (“I Walk the Line with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon). Cash would perform inside some of America’s worst prisons. It was because he knew what it was like behind bars. He’d been there. He had a conviction on his record – possession of pills – and he did time. He never forgot.

            My favorite Johnny Cash album was one he recorded live from California’s notorious San Quentin Prison. During the show, he told the inmates he wrote a song about the prison. A line in that song came to the other night:

            “San Quentin may you rot and burn in hell

            May your walls fall and may I live to tell”

            I thought of those words as I watched Virginia’s Governor announce the closing of Powhatan Correction Center. My buddy DC smiled when he heard the news. He had been in there, in the hated “M building” solitary lock up over top of the boiler room. “F – that place,” was all he said. I nodded in agreement. “Shut it down,” I thought. “Do the right thing, Governor and shut most of this bloated corrupt system down.”

            That was my visceral reaction. See I was at Powhatan; I saw what a pile of rubble it is; I saw what the true meaning of oxymoron is – calling a place a “correctional center” when no “correcting” is contemplated by the process; how “receiving” and “classification” and “counseling” are terms which mean absolutely nothing positive or constructive in DOC jargon.

            I saw how low custody offenders were put in cells with high custody, anti-social, violent predators. I saw how obviously mentally ill offenders were overmedicated – that was medical care for DOC at Powhatan Receiving. I saw the packs of young gang bangers have virtual control of stairwells while officers hung near the booth. I saw fights, and beatings, and worse. It all made me question my notion of humanity; it made me question my notion of fair justice; at times it made me question my sanity.

            There was one day. I had received the final decree of divorce. For weeks I’d help out hope that somehow she would find it in her heart to forgive me and remember what was so long ago. That wasn’t to be. And the prison – like so much of its ineptitude – lost my legal mail and it sat in an office for over three weeks until it was delivered to me (“sign here”) at 3:15 am in my dark, rank cell.

            Like dozens of other days, I lay there and was convinced I needed to give up. Nothing would give me back what I’d lost. No amount of atonement would be sufficient. I made it outside for rec, and in my prison jumper and Velcro sneakers. I began running 1/10 of a mile laps around the dirt track. “This isn’t right,” I kept saying to myself. And I began to get angry – angry at all that was transpiring, all the hypocrisy that was prevalent in “corrections.” “Punish me?” I thought. I’ve punished myself by losing family, friends, social status. “Correct me?” I was a decent, compassionate, loving man who broke the law and I deserved prison, but this was beyond “justice.” I vowed then and there that I was better than that place and I would overcome what was dealt to me.

            I remembered that day and I muttered under my breath “Fuck Powhatan,” and I didn’t really care that 500 DOC employees were being laid off from this bloated, inept, money-sucking department. Like I said, that was my visceral reaction.

            But here’s the other side: First, there are a lot of decent people who work for DOC. I have met many men and women officers who are honest and treat those behind bars with dignity and respect. For all the bad in this corrupt, politicized system, the vast majority of officers I’ve met have always treated me (and others) fairly.

            Those men and women are losing their jobs because they were sold a false bill of goods by dishonest politicians who told them prison expansion (1) made their communities safer and (2) was a realistic economic plan for disadvantaged, rural Virginia’s arrogance about its “tough on crime” approach. Prisons – for the most part – don’t deter crime, nor are they a cost-effective means of dealing with most lawbreakers.

            Second, there are some who need prison. I have met men who are evil. They lack basic empathy, basic humanity. You see it in their eyes. They would kill you (or do something far worse) and never blink. They are, as my friend DC says, heart – dead sociopaths. They must be segregated from society.

            So the Governor announced cuts to DOC. I hope and pray more are on the way and this Governor has the courage to institute real prison reform in the Commonwealth. There are better answers than just locking people up. That is neither justice nor corrections. There must be real economic investment in Southside Virginia, not low-skilled, low-wage prison jobs.

            “San Quentin may you rot and burn in hell

            May your walls fall and may I live to tell …”

            Ol’ Johnny Cash understood. Yeah, I smiled a little bit when I heard they were shutting a few prisons down. And I hummed Cash’s song as I walked around the compound.

John Retracted

            John Grisham, author, lawyer, social commentator, found himself in the middle of a mess the other day. The irony is that Grisham has made himself rich with his mastery of words. Yet here he was apologizing, retracting, and correcting what he had said. What was all the fuss about? Grisham, in an interview with “The Guardian,” was discussing America’s seeming love affair with over sentencing of so many white-collar and non-violent crimes. “Judges have gone crazy,” he said. So far, so good. After all, Grisham is a well-known advocate for sentencing reform (his nonfiction bestseller, “An Innocent Man,” more than any other, convinced me this nation’s appetite for use of the death penalty was fraught with errors.).

            No, Grisham screwed up because he personalized sentencing overreach to a case involving a friend of his. “I have a friend,” he began. This friend’s life was unraveling. He was drinking heavily. One night, according to Grisham, while the friend was alone and drunk, he “double-clicked” onto a website with young women. “They all looked over thirty,” Grisham told the paper (I wonder how he knew?). A few weeks later his friend answered his door to find the FBI knocking. He was hooked up in a joint Royal Canadian Mounted Police/FBI child pornography sting. “My friend received three years. His life was ruined and he didn’t hurt anyone …”

            “He just “clicked” …” I hear that a good bit in here from almost every child porn offender. “I just stumbled across it,” they’ll say. There was a guy here – computer genius – who vented to me one day that it wasn’t “fair” that a judge gave him ten years for “accidentally” coming across child porn. The problem for him was (1) he knew computers, inside and out, and the porn was deep on his hard drive, lots of it; and (2) the police didn’t just stumble over his one-time viewing, he was marketing the disgusting stuff. So, his “victim” anger at the judge and system was just another guy refusing to say “I did it. I’m sick” (or “I’m sleazy”).

            But Grisham? I want to take him at his word. I want to believe in his friend’s drinking problem as motivation for his behavior because I know all too often criminal investigations aren’t about truth, they’re about convictions. And there’s another reason I want to believe Grisham. He’s standing up for his friend. Let me tell you, you royally screw up, you find yourself on the wrong side of those bars, you watch everyone and everything you care about peel away, and then in the wreckage of your life there are those very few who say, “I’m here for you;” I guess you have to experience it to know what I mean.

            Friends. I have friends who were there at the jail. When the stories hit the paper, when rumors flew, they were there. They took up for me, they defended me, they cared for my family, they prayed for me. And the day I was sentenced they were there with me and they told the court I was a “good man.” No, I respect Mr. Grisham’s defense of his friend and his understanding that sending his friend to prison neither makes society safer nor fairly punishes for the offense. Prison should be reserved for the worst, most violent. Sending to prison the vast majority of those who end up here just creates more problems and does nothing to address the underlying criminal conduct.

            Where Mr. Grisham screwed up was calling child pornography a “victimless” crime. Those children photographed were exploited. They are victims. And candidly, there may not be such a thing as a “victimless” crime. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. The company I worked for took in over $200 million a year. “What’s $2 million over twelve years?” I would rationalize my behavior on more than a few very bad nights at the jail and receiving units. It was always worse when I’d meet a child pornographer doing eight years, or a rapist doing ten. “How can this be fair?” I would wonder. No, there were victims to my thefts: my family and friends who I let down; people at work and the community who relied on me; my employer who trusted me.

            As I said earlier, I want to take Mr. Grisham at his word because his advocacy for changing this broken, corrupt system matters. Until you come in here and see how dysfunctional all “this” is, how it is nothing but a money pit, how it sucks the life out of the offenders, their families, and the community at large. You can’t begin to comprehend what a mess all this is. It does no one any good. You never see what goes on in here until you find yourself on the wrong side of the fence or you know someone on the wrong side.

            A few years ago, John Grisham wrote a powerful OpEd calling on the then Virginia Governor (and now convicted felon) Robert McDonnell to commute a woman’s death sentence. His words struck me deeply and I sat down and penned a letter to him to express my appreciation. Grisham’s intentions were well placed. His compassion and concern for his friend, and his understanding that America’s reliance on prison for millions of nonviolent offenders as well as our over criminalization of hundreds of behaviors cannot be ignored. What Grisham has to say about justice in America is correct. I only hope we don’t miss the truth by a few misplaced words.

Transform Your Mind

            I read a good bit in here. Frankly, one of the things about doing “time” is how much time you actually have. Outside, “in the real world,” you make a dozen excuses for not reading, not just talking – and listening – to your kids, your spouse, yourself. Every day you run at a frenetic pace. You rush out the door before the sun rises, cup of coffee in your hand. You rush through work – all morning there are meetings and conferences, and calls, and emails – dozens of emails. You are so “busy” doing exactly what you aren’t really sure.

            Morning turns into afternoon and you fit in a four mile run. The time it takes – 30 to 35 minutes – you try and listen to your heartbeat, try and remember why it is you fell in love with running, with the law, with her … but you can’t because you’ve got too much to do, too many irons in the fire, time to run becomes just another exercise, just another item to check off your to do list.

            You’re dying, only you don’t know it. You’ve succumbed to all those things you hated when you were young and thought you knew everything, back when everything came easy. Life has a way, as a law professor of mine would remind us each class of “disabusing your mind from your vision of self-importance.” Yeah, time was killing me outside. There wasn’t enough time. So, you cut corners, you rationalize, you break your word and you think you’re finally living. You aren’t though.

            Back to reading. So now I have time to read a couple of books each week. And, I start each morning in the dark reading, and thinking, and talking to God about where I am at that precise moment because time isn’t an enemy, nor is it a friend, it just is; and how we use it matters. All this week I kept coming back to a letter written long ago. The writer had been a success: Good upbringing, well respected in the community, future career plans in a “profession.” That was then. As he writes he’s under arrest. I know how his story ends already; he’ll die under arrest. In our way of thinking, this guy, this letter writer is a criminologist’s case study of recidivism. I’ve lost count of his arrests, his jailings, his repeated run-ins with the law.

            But the guy, for some odd reason, he writes from behind bars. And over and over he talks about the joy he feels in the worst of times because he’s found the answer. I never even thought to confront the question. He writes, “Do not be conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

            Transforming your mind, what a crazy concept. And yet, almost every day I find myself sitting here thinking about those three words. The brilliant scholar/author C.S. Lewis, in his book, “God in the Dock,” described a group of people. Half think they’re in a hotel; half think they’re in prison. Here’s the twist: The half in the hotel, they find it quite intolerable. But the other half, those in prison, they conclude things are fairly tolerable. It is all, CS Lewis concludes, based on our expectations.

            Couple of quick stories before I get to life in here. I’m in Vegas with a few buddies and our wives and we decide, while eating a huge meal at an overpriced steakhouse with a tower of seafood three feet tall staring us in the face, that we – the guys – need Johnny Walker Blue. Those who know “JW” know you get Red rather cheaply and Black for a nice blended scotch. But Blue? It’s $70 a glass. “F – it, it’s only money.” So the four of us have a round, then a second, and a third. We drop close to $1,000 on Blue. We’re stuffing our faces looking the part of some mob movie – four middle aged white guys in pressed slacks and blazers talking way too much about sports and women.

            So the next day, we get together for cigars and drinks, our mid-afternoon ritual, while our better halves go about shopping and spa treatments and all the other things we couples would do “together” while “apart.” “Let’s get some Johnny Walker,” one of the guys says. “Just get Black; the Blue wasn’t that good.” We all looked and nodded in agreement. The “best” wasn’t that good.

            Fast forward to my life in complete collapse. I’m at the jail and I’m a mess. I don’t want to go on. I still hear Neil Young in my mind’s eye singing “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” and I’m thinking I never felt so totally alone and broken and hopeless. My friend – what a word “friend” it can’t begin to describe someone who stays when all is lost – he’s a lawyer who visits every day. I see it in his eyes as he looks at me: “Larry’s on the verge. He’s going to crack.” So one day he reaches through the attorney pass-through slot and hands me a piece of gum, wintergreen. And it is delicious! Just that taste of mint snaps my synapses and I feel refreshed, and alive, and I hate to say it, but I’m happy.

            Seventy dollar scotch, beautiful, vibrant, young women fawning over me in Vegas, limos and first class plane trips, none of those things gave me a sense of joy, of pure happiness. And here I was, with nothing to live for, and I’m almost giddy over a piece of chewing gum. Transforming your mind, all comes down to expectations just like Mr. Lewis said.

            Prison life. This week one of the cable channels comes back with another season of a show revolving around zombies, “Walking Dead,” dragging their feet as they scour the earth looking for live flesh to devour. And that walk, that vacant stare, I see it every day in here. Prison is dead time. Many of these guys, with the prescription meds to address their DSM-rated mental disorders kicking in each day and keeping them dopey, or the plain dumb-ass guys who want to act like they fit in and know something when in reality they are just ignorant and have failed at everything (yeah, I mean the idiots on the weight pile who yell out “Larry, man my people found your blog” and don’t even get what it is I’m saying), these guys are dying day by day in here. They have no purpose, they see no future, they are beaten down by time.

            I talked to a couple of the younger college guys. They pick my brain over financial issues and the law. We discuss philosophy, and politics, and ethics (funny how important discussions about ethics are in here). They just don’t get that money couldn’t make me happy. I keep telling them, money, a big house, prestige, it all goes away. I tell one of the guys, P McDiddy, to listen to “Heart of Gold” –

            “I want to live

            I want to give

            I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold

            It’s these expressions I never get

            That keep me searchin for a heart of gold”

            I tell him about the guy writing letters in prison and how, I imagine, if he had a CD player back then he’d have listened to Neil Young and smiled and thought “Neil gets what I mean by transforming.” And my young friend, he smiles at me with one of those “Larry’s losing it” smiles.

            “Transform your mind.” What really is important? Do you honestly think anyone, when you die, is going to say, “that man drank seventy dollar scotch?” No. Here’s what matters. There’s a guy in here paying for college. Fourteen years locked up; GED earned inside. He has a chest tattoo that says “addiction.” And he bitches and whines daily about his English assignments (just like he did this summer with his other class papers!). And I probably enable him; I let him moan and carp, and then I read his drafts and correct his words.

            So, “John” – he pulls “A’s” in class. I call him “4.0.” He writes a piece last week about self-image and he is profound and insightful and compact with his words. I tell him “best piece you ever wrote.” He smiles and quietly says, “When I get my degree it’ll be because of you. You really believe I can be a college graduate.” Perspective. Real value for me, even in prison.

            Three months ago, the last thing I dreaded happened. It was stupid and it was fleeting, but still deep down I couldn’t let go. And she moved on, she remarried. Funny, but the dread I feared wasn’t that bad. The heart, well that’s another matter. But, I was listening to some music the other day, and heard “It’ll All Work Out.”

            “There were times apart

            There were times together

            I was pledged to her

            Through worse or better

            When it mattered most

            I let her down

            That’s the way it goes

            It’ll all work out

            She’s better off with him

            Than here with me

            It’ll all work out … eventually.”

            Transform your mind. Get perspective. Tom Petty knew it would all work out. Prison is tolerable with the right mindset. Time is what you really make of it. Even a drug addict can be transformed into a scholar. Almost two thousand years ago a repeat offender wrote a warning, “don’t be conformed to the world.” “Transform” your mind. He was right.

             

Ziggy & Sparks

            Guys inside are so often, so alike. They fall into pre-defined categories, caricatures of “typical” inmates. There’s the dirty, hillbilly crack head. He’s with four other guys who look – and sound – the same. Four dumb white guys “talkin bout the time I hit the pipe and the rock. Oohh doggie it melted good,” and they laugh and say “shit man” and nod. They are a portrait, a snapshot of what I think of when I think of rural, blue collar, poorly educated white guys from Southside Virginia who are hooked on a crack, crystal meth, and pills. They’ve stepped right out of Daniel Woodrell's “Winter Bones.”

            There are the young black guys – more teen than men – who preen and walk with “authority” because, well simply because “they from the streets.” Many are “bangers” – bloods and crips mostly, a few offshoot groups pop up. They talk big about guns and armed robberies and turf battles. Yet, to a man, they exude fear. No, in a pack they are dangerous because fear of your peers is a driving force to act tough. Most know that there’s a whole world out there they’ll never see. So they talk about “Henny” and clubs and “makin it rain” with twenties and hundreds except, except most have never seen a paycheck, or a home with a yard.

            The molesters – those middle aged, middle class white guys with their contempt for the system and the “dumb” drug users. Not to be outdone by the rapists – mostly young black men who “took it” they’ll say, but not too loudly because up the road, at higher levels, rapists – like their molester counterparts – are hunted and extorted.

            Yeah, it’s like that inside. Guys fall into categories so easily. Uniqueness means aloneness, and alone you can fall victim.

            Which is why I watch for the “other” guys, the ones who aren’t character sketches. Like my buddy ‘DC.’ No one is like him. He was one of the worst, a rogue; murderous, quick to settle scores, feared throughout the system. And today? I feel like he’s an older brother; I trust him, I respect him, I like him. He’s genuine. He’s like our own “Forrest Gump” – he knew, he knows everyone from the District. Take this little “drop” story:

            “Main man. You know (CBS Sportscaster/NFL host with initials “JB”). He’s from the district. I used to put a ladder up against his house go in and (have conjugal relations) with his sister. So one day he pulls up on me and says, “Bird” (DC’s name in the district), you gotta stop sleepin with my sister or …” Or what, I say, and nothing. He goes to Harvard, I go to robbing banks …”

            Unique. That describes two guys I’ve recently met: Ziggy and Sparks. Two different men: one black, one white; one from rural North Carolina, the other from the Bronx. So Ziggy, he’s a big, burly “country” fellow with a Carolina accent that drips of butter biscuits and pulled pork. To look at him, you wouldn’t think he’d spent over half his life behind bars. And Sparks, with his shaved head and daily quips about the Yankees, it’s hard to imagine he’s down to two years on a straight seventeen (fourteen with the Feds and three with the Commonwealth) after a prior five in New York.

            I first met Ziggy shortly after he arrived here from a higher level. I noticed his CDs – there were a lot of Southern rock discs: Skynard, Marshall Tucker, the Allman Brothers, all bands I remembered from my own days in the ‘70s and ’80s going to school in Tennessee. And his voice, that accent, it reminded me of my parents’ church in Raleigh with the distinct drawl North Carolinians maintain.

            A day or two later, Ziggy pulled me aside. “You used to be a lawyer, right?” Yes, I told him. “You have a blog, don’t ya?” I wondered how he knew (I’m always surprised when someone comes across the blog). “I have a friend, from a church in South Carolina. She reads it.” And after that, Ziggy and I were ok. I noticed his tattoos – many of them relate to his “race.” He’s “tatted” up like a lot of white guys in here who’ve done serious time at higher levels. Just like the young black guys who get into “bangin” so too do white guys. “Stay with your kind.” “There’s safety in numbers.” Ziggy – a man who’d done long stretches in solitary – was part of that side of prison life I’d always avoided.

            A side story. While at the jail in ’09 waiting for transfer to DOC two young “Aryans” tried to recruit me. “No thanks,” I said and then stealing a Groucho Marx line, I told them, “I don’t join any group that wants me as a member.”

            But Ziggy, he isn’t like that. He’s a nice, friendly guy. He isn’t a bigot; he’s not a racist. He’s a guy who came in the system and, out of fear – or a sense of loneliness – lined up with what he was familiar with. Did he have to? Race is a reality “inside” and I can’t help but think that prisons push racial hostility – separate is easier to control than united.

            But Ziggy proves a tattoo is just a tattoo. The heart matters more … which is why Sparks is so like Ziggy.

            Sparks is a big “OG” in a particular street gang. But what was once of utmost importance to him – that street life – isn’t that important anymore. Like Ziggy and his “Caucasian” connections in days before, Sparks has grown beyond the street life. He has plans for a janitorial business. During computer class he uses lab assignments to design and hone his business model. And, like the dozens of other long-term incarcerated I’ve met who decide college isn’t just a choice but a necessity, these two men are well read and comfortable about themselves and their futures.

            I see men like Ziggy and Sparks and can’t help but think of Hemingway’s words, “Everyone is broken in life, and some are stronger in the broken places.”

            So often, we go through life trying to fit in, trying to be who we think the crowds expects. Safety, security can only happen that way, we tell ourselves. We’re wrong. We are much better as who we are supposed to be – no matter alone or how difficult the circumstances – than to be a caricature.