The Jericho Mile

There are three distance runners in the building: DC, Omar, and me. And for the last few weeks we’ve been trying to set personal best times on a twenty-five lap run. Our track is longer than the standard quarter-mile track. A little more than three and a half laps gives you a mile. Twenty-five laps is just short of seven miles.

My buddy DC, who I’ve written about a great deal in this blog, is a running machine. Sixty-one years old – forty two straight years behind bars – and not an ounce of fat on him. Every day, no matter what the weather, DC runs twenty-five to thirty laps. He turns those almost seven miles in under fifty-two minutes. Like I said, he’s a machine.

Then there’s Omar, my Spanish tutor. He trains every day with weights and cross-fit workouts. He’s the one guy on the compound who legitimately could compete in a cross-fit competition. He’s short and compact and reminds you of football Hall-of-Famer Emmitt Smith. His personal best time just broke fifty-eight minutes. Not too shabby for a thirty-six year old.

Then there’s me. Fifty-four and – amazingly in better shape than I was twenty years ago. I run four days a week, lift weights three. This morning, I broke fifty-five minutes for the first time. That it took a prison sentence to remind me how much I love running and how free running makes me feel is one of the ironies of my incarceration.

Freedom.  I told DC about a made for TV movie that was on twenty or so years ago. “The Jericho Mile” told the story of a wrongly convicted man sent to prison. The prison, with its stark high red brick walls, looked like Attica, or Sing Sing, or Shawshank. The man, played by Peter Strauss, had been a track star in college. Prison was a merciless place and Strauss’s character struggled to remain safe and sane in the nightmare that was his life inside.

There was the track. No one ran at the prison. The track, potholed and worn, just was there, like so many of the men who sat and stared and watched their lives ebb behind the brick walls. Strauss’s character went out one day and, with old, cheap, prison-bought sneakers, began to run. Over and over he ran and he kept his times. An interesting thing happened. His old rhythm returned. He was running the mile like he did in college.

A local reporter picked up the story and soon everyone was wandering, could the convict set the record for the mile? The other inmates at the prison began to notice as well. As the runner sat in chow, his fellow inmates began to load him up with fruit and vegetables from their trays. They repaired the track. A new pair of track shoes mysteriously made their way inside. And he ran; only now he was running for every man inside who had a dream of a life outside.

As with any good story, there’s heartbreak. The prison track wasn’t certified by the racing board. There would be no chance at the world record. That couldn’t be the end of the story…

My experience in here has taught me human beings have a remarkable ability to make a complete mess of their lives and do horrendous things but – and I’ve come to realize it’s the but that ultimately matters – they also have the ability to be enormously courageous, kind, and hopeful.

Strauss’s character, alone on the track with stopwatch in hand, begins to run. And the men on the yard stop and watch and soon begin to cheer. Two laps down and his stride and breathing are in perfect harmony. Lap three and the ache in his lungs reminds him he is in the flow. Finally, lap four and he stretches and pushes and makes the last turn and the yard erupts with cheers and men rush toward the track.

At the finish, with a hush falling over the other inmates, he looks at the watch and a smile takes over his face; and then he heaves the watch over the fence … “And the Lord told Joshua: and when you hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city will fall down flat …”

Freedom.  Sometimes freedom is all in your mind, like when it’s thirty degrees outside and three runners make their way around the track and other men shout “you can catch him Larry” or “Kick DC, kick.” Running free. “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down.”

 

Attica at 40

In September 1971, the worst prison riot in U.S. history concluded with an all-white force of New York State police and Department of Corrections employees retaking the prison at a cost of 39 (28 inmates and 11 prison employees) shot to death.  What was initially reported out of Attica as the causes for the inmate takeover and the inmates’ behavior subsequent to the takeover to justify the rampant excessive use of force by the police was fully discredited. The simple fact is this:  39 men died in Attica as a result of Governor Rockefeller’s decision to retake the prison.  Don’t take my word, read the McKay Commission report issued years later.

This blog isn’t about Attica per se.  It is about the lessons we should have learned from Attica, but didn’t.  What happened at Attica forty years ago could happen again.  As the old adage goes “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

When Americans reacted with revulsion to the photographs of conditions inside Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, it is hard to remember that for the men at Attica those same conditions existed.  And in the 40 years since the riot, conditions throughout America’s prison system are not noticeably better.

In 1971 there were approximately 400,000 men and women behind bars.  Today, there are over 2.3 million with another six million under supervision with parole or probation offices.  America spends roughly $70 billion annually to maintain its prison apparatus.  Another nearly $200 billion is spent sustaining courts, prosecution and policing.  The vast majority of those who go through the “criminal justice” system have committed non-violent offenses.

America, “The land of the free and the home of the brave” has created a massive gulag system that dwarfs any created by Stalin.  America oversees a massive criminal-industrial complex that makes millionaires out of the owners of CCA, GEO, Keefe Foods and Global Tel-link while exploiting the incarcerated and their families.

And what did the men at Attica riot over?  They believed that even while incarcerated the Constitution guaranteed fair and decent treatment, that abuse and brutality at the hands of a prison administration and all-white guard force was illegal.  They believed that inmates deserved basic medical care, an end to prison slave labor and wages, a fair parole process, and a grievance system to address their complaints.  Doesn’t sound so radical does it?

Within the last few months inmates throughout the California prison system engaged in a hunger strike to draw attention to the inhumane practice of long-term isolation of inmates, many of whom are merely under investigation.

As Fyodor Dostoevsky profoundly noted “a society is judged by how it treats it prisoners”.  Nothing, it seems, has improved in America’s attitude about the incarcerated since those fateful, bloody days in September 1971.

With the American economy in free fall, many states are revisiting their failed corrections paradigms that suck up millions of badly needed dollars.  Yet, politicians will still not be honest with the voters.  Candidates continue to be elected exploiting the lie that increased incarceration rates make citizens safer.  Virginia spends $1 billion annually to keep approximately 40,000 men and women behind bars.  On their release they are not better; they are not “corrected”.  Prisons are places of despair, hopelessness, abuse and violence.  And people of faith who allow such a system to flourish should be ashamed.

Has anything changed since Attica?  You be the judge.  As Prison Legal News recently stated:

“Prisons should be reserved for only the truly dangerous, always with the goal of rehabilitation and release, and with adequate resources provided to achieve those objectives in positive ways.”

Forty years and it seems like yesterday.

Wired

This week CNN reported that the United States government was setting aside millions of dollars to develop “portable Internet connectivity” for people fighting for freedom in repressive societies.

Watching “The Arab Spring” and the power of the Internet to bring images of uprising and repression to the world, the United States government rightly concluded the Internet matters.  What’s the first thing the Libyan and Syrian regimes did when protest broke out?  Shut down access to the web.

So American engineers are now designing briefcase servers capable of being snuck into a country and giving access to the Internet.  As the spokesman for the U.S. agency in charge of the project said, “Freedom is directly tied to the internet”.

Good quote.  Here’s another to consider: 

“Freedom’s just another word for

nothin left to lose
nothin’s worth nothin if it ain’t free.”    ~ Janis Joplin

How ironic that we applaud people protesting in the streets demanding the overthrow of their governments, “breaking the laws” of their societies and we recognize “these people need to be connected to the outside world” yet in almost every prison in this country, inmates are denied access to the “wired” world.  Everyday prisoners in this country are subjected to deplorable conditions, inhumane treatment, poor medical and mental health care.  They are jammed into spaces most people wouldn’t consider adequate for their family pet.  Those are not my words, that’s the word from the United States Supreme Court.

And connection to the outside world?  Forget it.  Inmates are denied basic contact with family and friends, let alone access to the web.  Try teaching a class on computer components when you, as the instructor, are prohibited from bringing components in.  “See that picture of the hard drive fellas?  They look almost like that.”

I love that people are transfixed by ordinary citizens taking to the streets throughout the Arab world demanding basic human rights.  Somehow, that message doesn’t carry through to our own country where one of every four inmates is serving a sentence for drug possession or minor distribution.

“Nothin’s worth nothin if it ain’t free.”  A friend asked me recently if I ever worried about repercussions from this blog.  I told him, “I’d lost the love of my life, my kids have no contact with me, I was sent to hell known as receiving where I saw unspeakable evil being tolerated by incompetent staff.  They took my physical freedom but they can’t take my mind and my faith.”  So no, I don’t worry.  They can’t do anymore to me than has been already done.

Here’s the bottom line.  If we’re going to care about freedom in Damascus and Tripoli, it’s high time we care about freedom in Lewisburg and Attica and Lunenburg.  “Freedom’s just another word for nothin left to lose.”  Sing it Janice.