Do You See the Irony?

            Do you the irony all around us? In a Washington Post editorial this Sunday, a Columbia University professor who lost a son fighting in Iraq for this country, points out that since 1980 we have bombed fourteen Middle Eastern, majority Muslim countries. What has been accomplished? Nothing. Yet, here we go again. In our quest to protect “America,” the President has created a grand coalition of willing partners to take on the brutal thugs in ISIS. They behead their victims. Yet, one of our coalition partners – Saudi Arabia – beheads as a punishment. In September, 19 were beheaded (publicly) in Saudi Arabia. We claim such behavior is a danger to the “civilized” world; this country however is one of the few who still allow capital punishment. Irony, yes indeed.

            In Virginia, hundreds of inmates are held in solitary confinement. “Solitary,” “the hole,” is used to excess throughout this country. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and a significant number of America’s religious organizations have called on the nation to end this cruel incarceration practice. And still, as I write this, thousands languish alone in cells, deprived of human contact. Ironic in a nation that cherishes freedom and basic human dignity.

            Hundreds are held at Guantanamo Bay. These men, labeled “enemy combatants,” have never been charged with any crime. The United States, a nation built on the “rule of law” ignores that very concept by holding without charge. Worse, at the military tribunals being held for the few who have actually been charged, the CIA is entitled to interject in legal proceedings and stop them from moving forward if, in the intelligence officer observing the hearing’s opinion, questions of National Security are in issue.

            Irony. Virginia Courts sentence young men like “Cubby” to prison for heroin usage where, with the help of corrupt guards, drugs flow as freely as on the streets. Then, DOC penalizes the inmate for his dirty urine and takes his good time. They ship him to a higher custody level where drugs are even more prevalent and, because of his youthful appearance he becomes easy prey for violent, predatory inmates. Nice “justice” system.

            How about this? You are told every day that DOC “prepares offenders for re-entry” by providing quality programs especially “education.” Then, they promote a security mentality at the lower levels that each week somehow manages to interfere with schooling. The security chief, i.e. “The major,” holds schooling for inmates in contempt. And yet, as guys earn GEDs, as the college program succeeds and gets national recognition in spite of his efforts, he is lauded. Irony.

            Irony. We live with it every day. We “hold these truths” to be self-evident then accept less from those in charge. “Allies” are as barbaric as our enemies; our enemies – while cruel, hold no exclusivity on cruelty or ignoring basic human dignity and rights. And, corruption overflowing in our “justice” system is met with yawns. The most ironic thing is we continue to tolerate it.

Another Investigation

They raided the shop Thursday morning. Both investigators, the Major (in street clothes) and a half dozen COs walked into the furniture shop and took all six office workers into custody. All six have – change that, “had” – access to computers. Wednesday night on a “tip” (i.e. an inmate dropped a note) a factory worker in 1A was shook down. In his possession were notebooks full of parley slips. And, the slips were all typeset. There were hundreds of tickets for NBA and NHL play-offs, NASCAR, and Major League Baseball. The guy had an OTB operation running out of his locker.

            They took him into custody and he did what an inmate is never supposed to do: he told on his business associates. Those associates were all the computer guys at the factory. Now they’re all together in the hole.

            The hole. There’s a lot going on in DOC right now about solitary confinement. Virginia has been under the watchful gaze of church groups, Amnesty International, and the ACLU for its liberal use of solitary confinement. These groups, supported by scientific and medical research have argued that solitary confinement for long stretches causes long-term psychological harm. For some sociopathic, violent inmates, solitary confinement is the only option. For most, however, the hole is pure punishment.

            Most guys in here will puff their chests and tell you that you haven’t done “real time” until you’ve (1) been to a “major” (a high custody facility) and (2) been to the “hole.” I did my 4 ½ months in receiving with the psychotic murderers, and rapists, and child predators; I witnessed firsthand the packs of gang bangers robbing, rolling, and beating other inmates; I saw the after-effects of stabbings and rapes; I did enough “time” to meet test #1. I have no desire to notch, as a completed goal, item #2.

            The same day the VCE shop guys got locked up I had to walk over to 7 building. No, I wasn’t “in trouble.” I was delivering worksheets and a test to one of our college guys sitting in the hole for dirty urine. The warden allows guys doing their hole time to stay up on their classwork – provided it’s on paper; no hardback books allowed in solitary.

            My buddy DC, once one of the most notorious convicts in the Virginia prison system, pulled over a dozen straight years in solitary. There were times, he told me, when he thought he was losing his mind. Being alone in a small confined space begins to play tricks with your mental state. Doing hole time back then was serious. There weren’t cameras anywhere. Officers would come along at different times and pop your cell door and beat on you. DC was a boxer; he got his shots in, but six on one and he usually came up short.

            The hole today is different. You get outside once a day (weather permitting) for rec. You’re put in a “dog kennel,” a twelve by twelve fended-in enclosure, just enough room to walk around, do some calisthenics, and get some fresh air. Every three days you get walked down the hall to the shower.

            Where the hole gets you now is the idleness. You aren’t allowed any electronics – no TV, no radio or CDs. Books are limited; stamps, envelopes, and paper and pen if you already possess them. You give up all your commissary – food and hygiene products – and live on the 3 trays they give you plus small tubes of toothpaste, a state toothbrush, and bar soap. You sit in a cell, with no view of the world and no sounds, and you sleep, you sleep the days away.

            One of our other college students, “Wes” was back there for fifteen days at the beginning of April. He came out ten pounds thinner (he only weighed 160 to begin with). What did he do? He typed a sexually charged letter to his girlfriend on a work computer. They found it, fired him, threw him out of the college building, and left him sitting in the hole for over two weeks.

            Every week you see guys with officers in tow pushing carts with all their belongings toward “7.” It’s a long walk with 900 pairs of eyes fixed on you. No matter what guys tell you about toughness and “manning” up, it isn’t fun.

            There’s no honor in prison on either side. The officers – many of them anyway – are as dirty and corrupt as those they’re paid to police. We have a new investigator who is busy locking guys up; all the while, we know about the tobacco he used to sneak in and the furniture he had built – for free.

            And then there are the inmates. Most end up getting caught due to their own stupidity and arrogance. “Cubby” – he was using heroin two to three times a week. Wes – he forgot to put a stamp on his envelope. The letter came back, was opened, read, and Wes was walking to “7.” The shop workers – they used their work computers to run book even knowing that they watch every keystroke.

            Investigation? This isn’t the Warren Commission at work. We, collectively, are our own worst enemies. So the gambling and the drugs, the store boxes and the Google numbers, the guys who run the hustles change but the hustles keep going and the officers, running their own hustles, keep playing along. Another week, another investigation, and a few more in the hole.

Just Another Dead Inmate

The staff here screwed up the other day. An inmate had a breakdown on Friday while in his building. He was handcuffed, taken to medical to check him out, then dropped in “the hole,” isolation, and placed on suicide watch. That’s not uncommon in prison. Guy gets news from home – death of his mother, a sibling, or child, maybe finds out his wife is divorcing him and taking up with a new man – and he snaps because he can’t do anything else, and prisons have a way of breaking your psyche. Prisons make grown men weak. And weakness is preyed upon inside.

            So the inmate, having a fit and throwing whatever he can get his hands on, is tossed into isolation. Security protocol dictates that nothing be in the cell except basics: toilet paper, a small bar of soap, a set of sheets (of course, at another Virginia prison a few years ago, an inmate choked to death trying to swallow a sheet), and officer instructions to check on him every fifteen minutes. And that’s what an officer will do. Every fifteen minutes he’ll walk up to the door, peer in the window and through the metal tray slot yell, “You alright?” Then, he’ll log it in “the book.” Everything gets noted in the book, thick log books – dozens of them – in building booths and security stations going into program and vocational buildings. Every minute detail is noted in the book. Of course, it’s easy to fudge the book when you only check on someone every hour instead of every 15 minutes.

            All Friday night, into Saturday morning, night shift checked on the inmate and logged in “inmate alright.” Day shift arrives at 6:00 a.m. and shortly thereafter, breakfast trays are served back in the hole. The guy on suicide watch can’t be given a plastic spork or a hard plastic tray – after all, he could hurt himself with those things. He’s given a Styrofoam cup and a Styrofoam box holding his meal. The day shift drops it off then decides to let him eat in peace – or should I say pieces.

            See, the inmate ate Styrofoam cup and tray. By the time the day shift C.O. made his next pass through, the inmate was already blue and unresponsive. Per guys in the hole, the C.O.s hadn’t checked on him for over 45 minutes. An officer saw him lying face down on the cell floor. “Get up. Count time.” When he didn’t move, the C.O. called for backup. That took another ten minutes. A medical emergency was called and staff tried to resuscitate him. The compound shut down – no one moved in or out of any building – as the nurses wheeled him to a waiting ambulance for the short ride to the hospital and the official pronouncement of death.

            That’s when the fun really began. Medical shut down for the rest of the day. Officers on duty in “7 Bldg” – a/k/a “the hole” – had to be interviewed and log books verified. But, at the end of the day it’s just another dead inmate, just another law breaker who’d been costing taxpayers $25,000 per year. And in the schadenfreude society we live in, I’m sure a number of folks will say he was weak for killing himself, or created this situation by breaking the law. I just find it ironic that folks are sent to prison to become “law abiding” citizens and these prisons are nothing but dysfunctional, soul breaking zoos. Not really a healthy environment to rehabilitate in.

            Another dead inmate. It happens. It happens quite regularly. In this case, it happened to a middle aged son – and father of two children – who was suffering from severe depression. It happened to a man in the middle of a mental health crisis and correction’s response to that crisis was to throw him into a windowless 8 by 10 cell. And, I wonder if there needs to be a law against not giving a damn when you throw a depressed man in solitary? What do I know, I’m just another inmate.

Jah Provides the Bread

Somewhere up above Bob Marley is smiling. For those that don’t know, Marley was for a time the most known reggae performer on the music scene. He brought reggae music into mainstream, middle class America. I still recall listening to Bob Marley and the Wailers sing “Rastaman Vibrations” and “No Woman, No Cry” on my stereo as a college freshman back in 1977.


His music was born of struggle and oppression, music from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. It was exotic, rhythmic and spiritual.

Marley was a Rastafarian. Rastas, a quasi-Christian sect, consider former Ethiopian King Haile Selassie to be the Messiah restored. They also smoke marijuana religiously (sorry for the pun). Rastas also are known to wear their hair in long dreadlocks.

In 1999 Virginia DOC implemented a hair profile for inmates. Prior to that time inmates were allowed to wear their hair to any length. Facial hair, full beards, sideburns and goatees were permitted. DOC deemed long hair and beards a security risk. Inmates, they reasoned, could hide knives, razor blades or contraband in their hair. Inmates with full beards could escape their shave and make it difficult to track them down.

The new hair policy required hair to be kept close cut, above the collar, off the ears. All facial hair was prohibited except groomed mustaches.

A number of Rastafarian inmates objected. On religious grounds they refused to submit to cutting their dreadlocks. DOC responded as they typically do: the protesting Rastas were placed in solitary confinement until they agreed to cut their hair and comply.

1999 became 2000. 2000 became 2001. Each year came and went but eleven Rastas held to their protest. There had been more, but men were released, their sentences served, their dreadlocks still in place.

Eleven men, kept separate, deprived of many basic needs most take for granted: daily human contact, fresh air, daily showers, access to telephones. DOC’s goal was to break the Rastas. Their tool was isolation and deprivation.

Word went through DOC prisons about the Rastas. Inmates who didn’t know the name of the Governor knew of the Rasta 11. Other Rastafarians in the system shaved their heads (a practice followed until this day). The Rastas were heroes. They were “buckin the man” for Jah.

2005, the ACLU agreed to file suit on behalf of the Rastas. Meanwhile, one man died while in solitary. Ten remained. Ten continued to refuse to cut their hair.

What is your limit? How much will you endure for your religious convictions? I realized, as I learned of the Rastas early on in my prison stay, how truly courageous these men were. In my entire life of “freedom” I had never met anyone willing to risk it all on principle. My life had been one of compromise. “It’s not worth it!”

My friend “Black” is a Rasta leader. I’ve watched the Rastafarian community (it is a recognized “religion” according to DOC) continue on as their brothers remained “in the hole”.

In “No Woman, No Cry”, Bob Marley, in his haunting Jamaican accent sings

“Good friends we had
Good friends we lost along the way
In the great future
You can’t forget your past
So dry your tears I say.”

Then later in the song over and over he sings

“Everything’s gonna be alright
Everything’s gonna be alright.”

I often wonder what makes ordinary people do extraordinary things. What would make a young man run head long into enemy fire to rescue a friend? What would make Big S go to trial instead of pointing out the real defendant? What would make eleven Rastafarians accept the hole for years rather than cut their hair? What would make me sign everything I owned over to my wife?

Character is revealed, not when things are easiest, but when we have he the most to lose.

Thursday, November 18, 2010. The front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch announced “Inmates Released From the Hole”. DOC gave in, surrendered, to ten dreadlock Rastafarian inmates. They were being released from solitary confined and transferred together to serve the remainder of their sentence in two-man cells with daily rec time at Keen Mountain Prison. They’ll be kept separate from the rest of the inmate population because the hair policy remains in force for all other inmates.

In a documentary about Marley’s life he is heard telling an interviewer “Jah provides the bread”. Jah, to the Rasta, is the name for God. It is a basic tenet of faith, whether you are Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Rastafarian, that “God provides”.

So often we think everything we have, everything we’ve accumulated is a direct result of our own hard work. We fail to understand that at our weakest we are truly strongest. No power can overcome Jah. Eleven years in solitary. Eleven years deprived. Eleven years Jah provided the bread.

I started playing a CD. Bob Marley’s singing “everything’s gonna be alright.” I can tell he’s smiling.