Too Much Material/Too Little Time

The past few weeks I’ve been inundated with work – getting adult ed students ready for the GED; prepping and reviewing 30 guys’ college essays – and personal projects.  I set a goal for myself to get an e-book out on Amazon by September.  Stories and essays are written, cover art in process (thanks to a guy in here named “Troll”) and I’m trying to understand the whole process of e-publishing.  Still, life goes on in here.  And it’s not life like outside. In so many ways we are sheltered from the day to day stresses of the “real” world.

But, things happen each day that I jot down and think “I want to remember that”.  These little snippets form most of my daily journal entries as I continue trying to understand why we do what we do.  In reality, it’s more material than I can ever use.  Still, things stand out...

We never had a spring lockdown.  I know that sounds weird.  We usually have two per year.  They lock us down (restrict us from leaving the building) and building by building search everything, including us (you get used to strip searches after your first thirty days, that is if you every really get used to standing fully exposed before two or three officers).  They very seldom find anything of significance.  And why would they?  They can’t swoop in and hit every building, every inmate at once, so stuff gets tossed and hidden.

Instead of a general lockdown they now spot check us.  Two or three guys every day, make sure you really own the electronics listed.  And, they find stuff.  In my building four guys lost TVs (bought from other inmates).  There were knives, a little tobacco, and of course, fresh vegetables and fruit from the kitchen.  I’ve been through it and, living like a monk (my only “living on the edge item”, and extra set of sheets), five minutes flat I was cleared.

Prison is a constant battle between what you can have versus what they want you to have versus what you can get.  The simple truth is you can get anything inside.  Another truth is if you get caught, you lose good time.  And, a final truth, you’re better off without all the extras.

Some day they’ll lock us down for a full sweep.  But right now, it’s business as usual.

I got a new mattress the other day and it’s extraordinary.  For close to three years I’ve slept on a standard prison issued mattress.  Barely three inches thick and lumpy until the stuffing begins to breakdown.  But the other day, Mouse went home.  After ten straight years, Mouse walked out a free man.  He has already been admitted to school down at the beach, with financial aid, and Goodwill lined him up a job cooking at a beach restaurant.

Mouse had a Cadillac mattress, triple-stuffed and re-sewn (that’s the key; if it’s sewn its legit).  I spent a lot of time the past two years working with Mouse on his college classes.  He left as an honors grad.  The night before he left he gave me his mattress, close to seven inches thick!  I don’t feel the metal frame anymore.  What a way to sleep!

Randy – our fitness guru – wrote the other day.  He’s been home since January.  As I’ve written before, Randy earned his Associates Degree while locked up and became a certified personal trainer.  His last year here he put a business plan together to start a personal training business.

Randy joined a gym in the west end of Richmond and began signing up clients to train.  His goal was to gradually build his client base over eighteen months, then open a studio.

I’m pleased to report that on July 1^st, Randy will have his own gym.  His business is booming with more clients than he ever imagined.

Randy is one of the success stories from prison.  They’re few and far between it seems at times, but it is possible.  Prison can be transformational if you are willing to struggle and dedicate yourself to learning in spite of the circumstances.

I want to tell you about Dom, a/k/a “Fat Boy”.  He’s from Petersburg and has experienced the difficulties of life beyond his thirty-four years.  Given up at only eighteen months old by an alcoholic mother (his father was in and out of prison his whole life), he went from foster home to foster home.  Finally, at age six his grandmother was given custody.

His mom fought in court to get him back (“She wanted the state check”).  The courts returned him to his mom where he was routinely beaten by her (“I looked like my Dad; she just did to me what he did to her”).  He’s a large man – 250, 260 maybe, and 6’2” tall.  He was known by everyone in the projects of Petersburg.  He was the muscle for all the dope dealers.  You needed someone hurt, you called Dom (“It was the only time my Dad told me he was proud of me.  ‘They fear you son,’ he’d say.”).

That is not the Dom I know.  I see a gentle man who spends a great deal of his time counseling young “brothers” to give up violence.  The other night we were talking and he told me about an incident that still weighed on his mind.

“It was with a dope fiend.  He owed a guy money.  I saw him go through an alley and I followed him.  I had a baseball bat.  I caught him and beat him.  You never heard a bat hit bone did you Larry?  It’s a sound different from a ball.  It’s hollow.  Anyway, I did that when I was 19.  The guy was in the hospital for months; fractured skull, broken bones.  I didn’t even know his name.  I still see him at night.”

I’ve learned to take stories like this in stride as best I can.  I’ve learned not to react with revulsion – or judgment.  And, as Dom looked at me I saw the pain he felt for the things he’s done.

I realized at that moment how fragile our lives are.  We hurt people in so many ways.  We break their bones, their hearts, their dreams.  Somehow, God still loves us.

And I knew I’d done a lot of lousy, hurtful things in my own life.  I’d let down the people closest to me.  But, I knew in my heart that God forgave me and was giving me another chance.  And if God could forgive me, He could certainly forgive Dom.

It was reported this week that a number of inmates at Virginia’s Red Onion super max prison were on a hunger strike to protest the conditions at that facility.  Red Onion has been the subject of much negative press the last few months.  Approximately 400 inmates are kept in isolation at Red Onion; there are 1700 in solitary statewide in the Virginia system.

As I’ve quoted on a number of occasions in this blog, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky said you can judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners.

America has lost its moral imperative.  This nation operates both at the Federal and individual state levels a barbaric prison system that lacks safety, rehabilitation and simple humane treatment.

This country spends approximately $70 billion each year to incarcerate and monitor close to 10 million citizens.  Approximately 25,000 prisoners are held in solitary confinement nationwide.  Thousands more work in prison industries for little – if any- pay and in unsafe conditions.  Even the 13^th Amendment to the United States Constitution which disallowed slavery in America still allows the incarcerated to be used as slave labor.

Violence, mental illness, disease and hopelessness are rampant in America’s prisons.  A prison – industrial complex has sprung up with corporations being granted sweetheart deals to provide products and services to predominantly poor, uneducated inmates at exorbitant pricing.  Fraud and price gouging is rampant.

Perhaps things are changing.  No less than conservative Christian leader Pat Robertson has now joined the chorus demanding a massive overhaul of “Incarceration Nation”. 

Can America do better?  What are followers of Christ called to do regarding law breakers and their confinement?  Is the answer punishment or justice?

As Medal of Freedom recipient Bob Dylan once sang, “The answer is blowin in the wind.”

And a final thought.  A friend recently sent me a quote from a well-known minister. 

“The blessings of God always override the curses generated in our lives.”

As I’ve pondered those words I realized that isn’t a bad way to get through this sentence.

Peace.

Incarceration Nation

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria recently revealed in a Time magazine column what those of us inside already know – America is now “Incarceration Nation”.  America, “land of the free” and “home of the brave” has over 6 million people under “correctional supervision”.  That’s more people than Stalin held in the Soviet Union’s infamous gulag system.

There are many reasons for this, some benign, some well-intentioned, too many the result of political myopia.  But, as Zakaria noted, the worst of the American political system can be seen in the growth of the prison-industrial complex.  “Tough on crime” politicians – in Virginia it’s been “abolish parole”/longer sentencing politicians – helped fuel the money trail.  “Many state prisons are now run by private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state capitals . . . Partly as a result; the money states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education in the last 20 years.”

Governor McDonnell touted relief for Virginia families facing ever increasing tuition demands from the Commonwealth’s university system.  He gave higher education lip service while turning a blind eye to the bloated, badly mismanaged bureaucracy that is Virginia’s Department of Corrections.  Thirteen thousand employees, almost 40,000 inmates, over $1 billion a year to maintain a system that houses a majority of those inmates in level 1 or 2 facilities, all the while the recidivism rate remains flat and not one dollar of state money goes to the very program that reduces recidivism:  college education. 

Like his predecessors, Governor McDonnell talks a good game; most snake oil salesmen do.  But, Virginia needs leadership.  And, leadership means it’s time to change the way things are done.

In a May 2011 release, the Institute for Higher Education Policy advised that the single most effective determiner to recidivism was an inmate earning a college degree.  No prison program has a more lasting effect in breaking the cycle of recidivism than college.  Ironically, forty-three states participated in the study.  Virginia chose not to.

As I read the Institute’s findings and reflected on my own experience in here working with the college students, I understood how right, how easy, it is.  Give an inmate an education and you give them hope and skills to make it on the outside. 

So why does Governor McDonnell refuse to spend even one dollar on the college program here, a program internationally recognized twice in the last month?  Why is the Governor willing to spend millions on a software program that is easily manipulated (questions seek to determine remorse and empathy levels) to identify “recidivism risk” rather than any money on the one identifiable method of eliminating recidivism?

Perhaps things will change.  The founder of Governor McDonnell’s law school, Regents University, recently came out in favor of prison reform and dramatic reductions in America’s incarceration levels.  Rev. Pat Robertson joins a growing list of Republicans and Conservatives who are calling for drastic changes in America’s love affair with corrections.  The leaders in that movement, RightOnCrime.org released new polling data from the Pew Center which showed 84 percent of respondents agreed that tax dollars could be shifted from prisons to community corrections alternatives for non-violent, low risk inmates.  Significantly, 77% of responding Republicans and 85% of independents agreed.

Perhaps change is coming to America’s, to Virginia’s, love affair with prison.  Each day I pray that today is that day.