Rainy Saturday Observations

I was all set to go run, clear my head, breathe deep and think and feel and “13” – the C/O in charge of movement whose job it is to stand in the middle of the boulevard and radio in and out of the buildings – he let me know, “there’s a storm moving in, no morning rec.” No morning rec. No 5 or 6 mile run to loosen up from a week on the weight pile trying to do “cross fit” with guys half my age. Prison is schedule; schedule is everything. You organize and discipline yourself or you and your mind turn to mash potatoes …

I’m sitting here and listening to the rain pelt the dorm building roof and it’s rhythmic and entrancing and I feel, for just a second at least, that I’m not in here. I have Johnny Cash playing in the CD player; he’s singing “Long Black Veil” and the peddle drum matches the “thwap” of the rain: “Nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me …” Damn Johnny made great music. He did time; his life was a mess and then, well then God saw fit to tell Johnny “You don’t have to fight anymore. You don’t have to carry all that anger and guilt and pain anymore,” and he was free.

Funny the things you see in here when you scan the building. Seventy men; seventy stories, some worse than others. DC, he’s become the “bird man” of Lunenburg. A few months ago, not even sure why, but he decided a few small birds needed crumbs of bread. Now I see him heading to our ball court with a quart and a half bowl full of breadcrumbs. Twice each day he goes out and feeds dozens of birds, and two small field mice who now venture close.

He’s tearing up bread – I can’t even tell how many slices he’s pulled out of the chow hall this morning – and I’m laughing because he’s so damn precise with his efforts: crust off first (“I shred that between my palms main man!”); then small cube-like pieces. His cut is awash in bread scraps; crumbs flying everywhere; he’s oblivious, focused only on the bread. 

Guys, young mostly – but hey, in here anyone below 40 is considered young – don’t have a clue how you do laundry. There’s a guy jamming everything he has – 3 jeans, 3 blue shirts, sheets, blankets – into the washer and he’s measuring out boxed “All” detergent. Problem is, we buy “All” in one-load boxes and that half of box sprinkled on tap of a non-agitating load of clothes won’t clean anything. “Should I add some shampoo?” he asks.

Look guys, here are a couple of simple rules. First when you use the bathroom you wash your hands (you’d be surprised how many in here don’t bring soap into the bathroom). The shower is for your bathing, not washing your tees and boxers. Second, laundry. You need detergent to clean your clothes. And, washers are built around the principle of agitation and then spin. Don’t over fill. And whatever you do, don’t put your washcloths and towels straight from the shower and throw them in the dryer!

I watch these guys. They don’t know how to make a bed, do a load of laundry, wash a dish, or keep themselves clean. I think we need “life skills” classes. You want to be a “grown ass” man (a favorite inmate expression) then learn to live independently! Institutionalization – you get comfortable letting the institution take care of you. They do. Frankly, it’s easy for them if they can provide for you. You lose your self-respect. You forget everything comes at a price.

Three sex offenders, all white middle-aged guys who in a prior life and without their warped predilections, could have lived in my neighborhood – carry on; they “know more” than anyone. I find myself angry watching these three guys because there’s an undercurrent of racial and economic superiority in their demeanor. None of them will admit to any wrong doing; all “misunderstandings.” Sure those kids (yup, all child sex offenders) asked to be touched and photographed.

What’s the issue? Seems the school has a rule: No sex offenders can work in “academia.” These three all have degrees. The young guys in here can’t stand them – they’re arrogant and abrasive (funny, but at higher levels child sex-offenders don’t behave that way; they become “cell rats”). Me? I work every college class – 3 new ones starting in a week with female faculty who know they can trust me and know there won’t be any crap in the classroom. I read a piece a few weeks ago about “hearing” when God calls you to your vocation. I understand that now.

There is redemption in suffering and atoning. These three don’t get that. They feel persecuted, wronged. Their wives still visit; their lives “outside” still exist (except for that little “registration” requirement!) and yet they feel that they are the victims. I don’t get the mindset …

Rain still falling. There’s a whiff of mackerel in the air. It’s 10:00 am and this guy is microwaving pouch mackerel. “I need 30 grams of protein,” he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen. Health and fitness are big topics yet guys don’t know the first thing about anatomy, physiology, kinesiology. The other day I ran a 6:45 mile – smoked past four young muscle-bound guys half my age. “How’d you do that?” Iggy asked me. “Know your body. Forget 600-pound squats. Get your cardio right. Stretch.

Mumford & Sons on the CD player. Great acoustic music. Dylanesque with their lyrics. They sing, 

“It seems that all my bridges have been burnt

But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works

It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart

But the welcome I receive with the restart.”

And the rain keeps falling and I feel great. I’m six years in. I lost everything and found so much more. Should I feel this good? I don’t think that judge who sent me here expected this. I don’t think anyone did.

“You were a lawyer once, right?” The question caught me by surprise. A new “resident” of our building; big burly, country fellow with a Carolina twang and broad toothy smile. He leaned in. “My pen pal, a nice Christian girl in South Carolina reads your blog.” What? I laugh. I started this blog four years ago to document publicly what I was writing in the cells of the jail and receiving unit. I accept full responsibility for every word. I’ve pissed people off at times; I’ve whined and moaned; but I write, I keep writing every day. Why? Because I thought, what seems so long ago, that maybe – just maybe – this journey would someday matter to someone: my sons; my friends; the woman I loved and lost.

I thought, back then, if I wrote I would be steeled and courageous in whatever I faced, even I thought I couldn’t do this; I could never redeem myself. I wrote and I have had guys threaten me and curse me and officers find the blog and tell me to back off (and once, an assistant U.S. attorney read it and said, “you’re a pretty good writer.”) I wrote, I write, because I have a story and I think of Victor Hugo who said, “If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” The writing brings the light. 

It’s raining and I write because even on a slow, rainy Saturday, this matters. The men in here, so many of them anyway, matter to me. I write so I’ll never forget – good or bad – this. 

“Love it will not betray you

Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free

Be more like the man you were meant to be”

Who you were meant to be. I tell the young guys who daily gather around my cot that idea. Mumford & Sons put it to music. “Be;” “Live;” the words fall like rain…. 

Barbarians at the Gate

“Robins Williams is dead. His death has been ruled a suicide.” The news broke last night and I found myself thinking about the tragic waste of a remarkable, creative life. Suicide. Why, we ask, would such a talented man take his own life? No one really knows you. The face we put forward masks what we feel. And, Mr. Williams wasn’t alone in his choice of endings.

Ernest Hemingway is my favorite author. His stories, written in simple, direct sentences are powerful and emotionally connect with me. He wrote of men in periods of war and trial; he wrote of obstacles and man’s quest to overcome. He wrote:

“A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.”

He lived as he wrote. As a young man, he went to Europe and served as a member of the Italian army in World War I, before America’s entry. He served with an ambulance team in the trenches; he served and was seriously wounded. He fell in love with a British nurse who then broke his heart. And wrote all about it in prose that clutches at my soul (A Farewell to Arms).

He witnessed firsthand the fascist atrocities in Spain’s Civil War. He climbed mountains; he fished for tuna in the Caribbean; he ran with the bulls in Pamplona. He drank to excess and smoked cigars and slept with a bevy of beautiful women. He lived life to the fullest. He was man, primal and cerebral and passionate and powerful. He lived a life most men could only dream about. And then, he put a shotgun to his mouth and ended it all …

One of my friends was out recently and he remarked how well I have help up over the past six years. That’s right, six years ago Monday I walked into work at 6:30 am a “success” – by everyone’s way of thinking. I had “everything;” or so people thought. And this friend, I am so blessed with real friends, people who have stayed when I’m not sure I would have, people who like writer Charles Bukowski who said “If you want to know who your real friends are, try getting a jail sentence.” – he tells me “there were times I worried you might try and end it all.” And I remembered how close I came; and I wondered why I didn’t end up like Mr. Hemingway and Mr. Williams.

Confession time. It was day six at the jail. I was a mess. Three days earlier, through Plexiglas I’d watched my younger son with tears streaming down his face tell me he loved me; I’d listed as his mother – my wife back then – told me she hated me, didn’t care if I died, and that I would never see her again. Add to that, the jail recorded the conversation and used her demands for “financial information” (she was on the way to the divorce attorney I had gotten her) as grounds to deny me bond – “flight risk.” And, my attorney, my high-priced white-collar crime specialist – told me there was nothing to really discuss with the prosecution. “You already confessed, Larry,” he told me.

I was ruined; I had lost everything; I was ready for it all to end. As I write this I try and remember why I decided to go on. I don’t think anyone wants to die. You just come to a point where the pain, the hopelessness overwhelms you. The barbarians are at the gate and you can’t keep them away any longer.

Depression. Every night I see some “talking head” psychologist – who never treated Robin Williams – talk about his mental condition. Where is the AMA? Shouldn’t they be regulating what theses assholes say? And it all comes down to depression, they say. I’m twenty-one and the outstanding senior of the year at my small, liberal arts college; I have my future by the balls. I can be, I can do, whatever with my life. And then there’s compromise and love … and I think of Damien Rice singing, “Love will make you cry.” You’re thirty and your dreams are deferred and no one, it feels that way, cares.

So you do, you be what people expect. And compromise leads to selling out your soul. James talks about looking at yourself in the mirror and “knowing” and then turning away and “forgetting” the kind of man you are. James was ahead of his time.

I understood God at that moment when the gates flung open and there was nothing to keep the barbarians at bay. It was the first time in years that I slept peacefully.

I knew I wanted to live; I knew I would somehow find my way back; I remembered and again knew the idealistic young man I longed to see in the mirror.

I thought a great deal about that day at the jail and my coming to terms with God as I watched the news about Mr. Williams. Suicide isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of resignation. You just get tired, tired of life. It’s funny, but I work out with a couple of younger guys who always pick on me and say “the old f---er just won’t quit.” I won’t; I can’t.

Six years ago my life changed. I thought it was over and instead a miracle happened and I began to live again. The barbarians were defeated; peace reigned. I thought about all of that this week and I said a prayer for the Robin Williams of the world and for the strength to hold back the barbarians.

Ferguson

I was still learning my way around the jail, still new to “life” behind bars when I met Ferguson. He was a clean-cut deputy, white, polite, mid-thirties. He spoke to me when he’d come through the pod. He treated me with respect. He treated me the way I was used to being treated…

There was a young black kid in the pod with me. He was always angry and he was, how do I say it, not right in the head. His eyes darted; he spoke in fragments, his hair was a jumbled mess, which matched his clothing and his personal hygiene. I learned on day 1 in the pod to stay clear of this kid.

So one morning this kid goes up to the booth and knocks on the Plexiglas. “I gotta go to court” he stammers and spits out. “You aren’t even on the list,” the deputy retorts in a mocking tone. “I … gotta … go … to … fuckin … court … you motherfuc … !” The kid is swearing and yelling and banging on the Plexiglas booth. “Step back from the booth!” Now the deputy is raising his voice.

This goes on for ten minutes or so and I am transfixed by the idiocy of it all. I’ve never seen anything like this. The kid has run back and forth to his cell a half dozen times only to come back to the booth, hurl profanity at the Plexiglas, paper in hand, demanding to be taken to court. And the booth officer continues to mock and berate him each time, goading him to “come through the glass.” Finally, the pod door opens and in steps Ferguson. He seeks to present a calm presence, but a presence of authority. With his hand raised as a stop sign he politely, but forcefully says, “Son, step away from the booth and go to your cell. You are not going to court.” The kid stops banging on the glass. He turns to the officer and in slow, steady steps approaches him. I notice he has a Styrofoam cup in his hand. I notice it the same time Ferguson does, just as the cup is being thrown at the officer. I look and I watch and I see …

“He threw shit on Ferguson!” The pod erupts. The kid had defecated in the Styrofoam cup and tossed it on the officer. And Ferguson’s hand is now dropped; his authority vanishing before my eyes. “Ferguson is covered in shit!” The chant begins. The pod doors fly open and four beefy, camouflaged clad officers rush in. Three wrestle and throw the kid to the floor; the fourth tries to help Ferguson. I watch it all in amazement. And I wonder, how do you recover after you’ve been covered in excrement?

I thought about all that as I watched another unarmed black kid get killed by a white cop and then hoodlums turn legitimate protests into an excuse to loot. Ferguson, Missouri (this time) is covered in shit. Will we ever learn?

“By vigorously defending the rights of individuals, we keep in check the excesses of the government which, if allowed to grow unbridled, would consume us all.”

These are the words of a conservative Republican, a former New Jersey Assemblyman and lawyer, John W. Hartmann. “Unbridled government.” We live in a post 9/11 America where the police are now given free reign, by the Pentagon, MRAPs (armored personnel carriers). We saw this week police arrest reporters and Baptist preachers for doing nothing more than observing the cluster f --- that has been the police response to the killing of an unarmed black young man at their hands.

Hey folks, this is still America. This “power by government gun” was what the founding fathers were so adamant about challenging in the 1760s through the Revolution. And yet, we have become a nation that buys the lie that the police and the government are working to keep us safe and secure. “Surrendering liberty in the name of security and safety gives you neither.”  Old Ben Franklin, where are you?

Black and white. Here are simple facts – blacks and whites commit crimes generally in equal rates yet four out of five arrests are of blacks. Last year, four hundred police shootings – like the one in Ferguson – took place against black teen males; less than fifty involved white teens. We talk – and by “we” I mean people who look like me – white and affluent – about America being a “color blind” society. I call “bullshit.” Electing a black man President doesn’t get America over its racial animus. It is time for white America to honestly assess race. “All men are created equal; they are endowed by their creator …” Those words are a universal truth, not applicable only to one color, one creed.

Glenn Loury, author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality posed the following:

“Can we imagine a large majority of young white men being rounded up for minor drug offenses, placed under the control of the criminal justice system, labeled felons, and subjected to a lifetime of discrimination, scorn, and exclusion? No, we cannot. If such a thing occurred it would make us wonder, ‘what is wrong with us?’”

What, indeed.

A story. My older son was junior in high school. He was an honor student, on the school’s “Battle of the Brains” team. The high school was in a “drug free” zone, which, I later learned gave the local police power to run drug dogs through anytime the police deemed it “necessary.” Did I mention that out kids attended a majority black school?

So this day, the dogs come through and sit by my son while he’s taking a test. He is led out of the room and he and his book bag are searched. He is then escorted out to his car, which is also searched. No drugs; no nothing. He tells me what happened and I explode – not at him but at an arrogant sheriff who thinks he can run in to a school, violate the U.S. constitution and search minors without parental consent.

The next day, my wife and I meet with the school superintendent. I’m ready to sue the bastards. “You will not search nor interview my son, nor any other minor for alleged criminal activity without the express consent of the parents.”

She understood, and she agreed. But then she said this: “Most parents don’t say a word. Most think the police can do what they want.” They can’t. Every day you need to remind yourself, this isn’t a police state; this is America. And if we’re going to get the old lump in the throat and talk about what a “blessed” country this is, it’s high time we require government to live up to its founding ideals.

The police in Ferguson can pull out MRAPs, they can set off tear gas, they can arrest reporters, but they can’t explain why an unarmed black teen with his hands up is dead; and, they can’t explain why the shooter is on paid administrative leave.

Black and white. How many more Fergusons must there be? How many more black teens have to be gunned down before white families say “that could be our son?” How many more MRAPs need to be let loose in small towns across this country before we say enough?

About two weeks after the Styrofoam cup incident I saw Ferguson. He’d been reassigned from the pods to the attorney visiting area. He wasn’t the same. He couldn’t figure out why the kid lashed out at him. I saw that same look with the white cops the other night demanding that the crowds disperse in Ferguson. Their guns drawn, fear and apprehension in their faces, they couldn’t understand why so many black people walked by, hands in the air, shouting “don’t shoot.”

It’s time we figured it out; it’s time for an end to hoodlums running amok because we are divided into white America and black America, and the militarization of local police. It’s time to stop seeing America in black and white.

The Problem is Here

A man I admire recently retired. He came from humble circumstances, a blue-collar family in New Jersey. He was the first in his family to go to college using his basketball skills to gain a scholarship. He turned that opportunity into a vocation. He earned additional degrees, became a basketball coach to team after team of inner-city black kids, and eventually rose to the level of college President. And he never forgot; he never forgot that education could lift even the most impoverished. There was a second lesson he knew from his life of hard knocks: you can’t ever quit. No matter how badly the odds seem against you, you don’t quit. You play on.

            This man’s mission, his passion, became delivering education to those normally not given easy access. As long as he was president, the underclasses, the disadvantaged, the disconnected, would have a chance to go to college. He even included the incarcerated. “They want to punish you. They want you to suffer. All the talk about corrections, about punishment fitting the crime, isn’t what’s behind this. You get your degrees. You leave here and be the men I know you can be. You don’t quit; you show them.”

            I listened as this remarkable man spoke to a hushed classroom full of students, our students “here,” in this place. It was his vision that started and moved this program forward. It always was an uphill battle. No state money; no public support; no assistance from the powers that be in Richmond; even worse treatment from some of the officers who work here. After all, successful offenders don’t reoffend. Less prisoners means less prisons which means less guard jobs.

            We had a young woman involved in the college program this summer. She’s a visiting scholar from a liberal arts college on the west coast and she read about “here” and wanted to see it for herself. And as she sat in the classes and listened to the discussions and read their words she wanted to let the world know that this matters; in here matters; these men and their lives and their futures matter.

            I was interviewed the other day by this young scholar. She remarked how across the board the students “look up” to me.” They respect you and have great affinity for you,” she said. And, I choked up and told her about my failure as a father and how I came here and was asked to join this program to teach, and tutor, and mentor and how the judge and all those who judged me and sent me away to suffer and rue what had become of my life had failed. I turned 55 the week before and I told her I kept hearing David’s words in Psalm 37.

            “I have been young, and now am old;

            Yet, I have not seen the righteous forsaken,

            Nor his descendants begging bread …   

                     ‘

            There was a professor working in here this summer. She is conservative, Republican, a Fox News watcher. And her experiences in here have, as she told the class, caused her to look at what she took as Gospel; there are consequences for a wrong, but should the consequences never cease? Should you pay forever? That’s the problem in “here” and every time someone from out there comes in they see it.

            I was like that professor. I never met a Republican, a conservative, I didn’t like. And I was sure I knew everything about right and wrong; life wasn’t hued, it was black and white.

            “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord

            And He delights in his way.

            Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down;

            For the Lord upholds him with His hand.”

            The professor wants to return to teach here again because this matters. She’s right. As I told the young scholar interviewing me, I thought I was being sent to prison to suffer and die ashamed. Instead I’ve learned to live.

            Here are a few facts from around the country to consider. It costs a student $37,000 for tuition at Princeton; it costs New Jersey $44,000 to keep a person in a state prison for one year. Think Virginia’s any different? Instate tuition averages $14,000. It costs the commonwealth $26,000 per year for an inmate in one of its prisons.

            California has to most people in prison and in college. If the state emptied every prison and sent every released person to college it would save $7 billion a year.

            The United States has far and away the highest incarceration rate in the world. If the incarceration rates of individual states are compared with other nations you would see that 36 states and the District of Columbia have incarceration rates higher than that of Cuba, the next highest nation. Yes, Virginia is in that group of 36.

            Law Professor Michelle Alexander, author of the controversial treatise, “Mass Incarceration: The New Jim Crow” recently penned an op-ed piece for Sojourner.  In it she quotes the research of Harvard Professor Kaia Stern (Dr. Stern specializes in prison education and is also an ordained minister. She also visited this facility a few years ago in preparation for a new text she was writing: “Voices from American Prisons: Faith, Education, and Healing.”) Alexander wrote:

“The system of mass incarceration is rotten to its core. As Dr. Kaia Stern eloquently explains in her book … the quintupling of our prison population in a few short decades and the relegation of tens of millions of people to permanent second-class status is a reflection of the fact that we in the United States are captive to a “spirit of punishment.” She writes, “there is no more pressing human rights, issue, no more urgent spiritual crossroads or threat to democracy than the current penal crisis.”

            Both Stern and Alexander speak the truth. America cannot nor will not ever be, that “shining city” on the hill Ronald Reagan so eloquently spoke of (borrowing from John’s Revelation) until the soul of this country burns for righteousness and mercy – two tenets at the foundation of our Judeo Christian parentage which are ignored “here.”

            I have never met a young student who has told me “I am innocent.” No, they tell me they did the crime; they accept punishment. But consequences for one’s actions must have a termination date. And a remorseful, rehabilitated man – or woman – must be allowed to live free and be welcomes back to society.

            “Here” is a leper colony. “Here” are criminals and dredges of society; losers; drug addicts; thieves, murderers. And I can’t help but remember the Gospel writers over and over as they told the stories of Jesus. It was these untouchables who the Lord cared for, and ate with, and forgave. You may not want to know what goes on in “here,” but I can assure you Jesus is here. He is with the disadvantaged, the discouraged, the disenfranchised.

            Political courage. We lack leaders with political courage who will tell you that what I write is true: prisons are failing; punishment does not fit the crime. April 4, 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. Inner cities around the nation erupted as news of the assassination spread.

            Senator Robert Kennedy, Democratic candidate for President, was in downtown Indianapolis. Against the advice and wishes of his staff and Indianapolis police (who couldn’t “guarantee” his safety), Kennedy left the hotel and went to the worst housing project in the city. He stood on a car and spoke about pain in the loss of a great leader; he listened as black citizens expressed their dismay and anger, and then he quoted the Greek philosopher Aeschylus: “Excruciating pain leads to greater wisdom.” Indianapolis – unlike almost every other urban center in America that night – remained calm. Political courage.

            The problem is “here.” Prison doesn’t rehabilitate anyone. Prison doesn’t make you more likely to follow the law. And while some violent sociopaths must remain forever separated from society, for the vast majority sentenced, their time behind bars and their treatment after release destroys more lives than are changed. In spite of that, young men in the college program here believe if they just get their degree they can overcome. Even with the odds stacked against them from a society which talks of “second chances” almost with a sarcastic sneer, they believe.

            They believe because of men like Dr. John who tells them not to quit. They believe because professors like Joan, Amy, Joy, Allie, and Anne come out here and treat them like scholars, not felons. They believe because it is in the human DNA to overcome, overcome where they came from, what they did and what is in “here.”

            The great African-American writer James Baldwin wrote a letter to his nephew that became a major portion of his great 1942 book, The Fire Next Time. It was a book of cathartic anger at a white society that continued to place blacks in second-class status. Often, I return to his remarkable words as a holder of the “Scarlet F” (felon). For six years I have held a front row seat to “here.” Instead of destroying me, this place and my God’s intervention have opened my eyes. I read Baldwin’s words and I know in spite of “here” these men will overcome.

            “For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what it must become. It will be hard, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off ...”