New York State of Mind--or Not

I can't speak the word--that may be considered a security breach," but the recent reaction here to the events at New York's Clinton Prison breakout shows just how silly--and unprepared the folks who run this place truly are.

Don't get me wrong, I watched those two knuckleheads evade NY's "finest" with a little schadenfreude--after all, what do you expect people to do? You send a man (or woman) away for 50, 60, 70 years- -or life--and then you say "behave." Meanwhile, we applaud POWs as they seek to "e" (you know the word) every chance they get.

No doubt, these two were killers--and socially beyond rehabilitation. But, does it surprise anyone that a middle-aged blue-collar woman would live out some "trues lies" fantasy with these guys or that another "good old" boy would help them. Hey, that's what you get when you employ anyone as a prison guard and set low standards of professionalism.

The same thing happens here. They walk at least one employee off every month for fraternization--this past week it was a nurse lying about her break times so she could diddle a captain. Meanwhile, the "chief of security" keeps telling everyone how they have to tighten up- -this guy is hated by the rank and file CO’s, not because he's tough but because he's incompetent.

How does the facility respond to all this? They announce in meetings that another "count" will be added. They send new memos out to staff warning about "fraternization," all the while they continue with the same failed policies and programs that lead guys to continue to come back.

And come back they do. Our building just welcomed back a man--a graduate of the "new and improved re-entry program" who left the 2nd week of December; ten days later there was coke in his urine; back to jail, court, receiving and--you guessed it--good old Lunenburg--all within 6 months.

Yeah, the drug and alcohol treatment programs work great here.
New York--kind of looked a lot like "Shawshank" don't you think? What's the answer? I don't know, but here are a few things. Prisons are poorly run and managed--the wardens and the chiefs of security are not responsive to reality--they hide behind "security" without being held accountable. Silly rules are enforced that piss guys off, all the while important programming and education is ignored. Medical care is pitiful; too many guys are drugged up with high doses of psychotropic meds--walking dead--who get addicted not cured from their drug reliance.

There are--with long sentences--no reasons for men to follow the rules and change. Tell a 24 year old he has 75 years to do with good time he'll get out in 70!), and see how well he does behind bars. And then, staff your facilities with underpaid, undereducated officers who can get more cash for sneaking in a cellphone than they make in a week--it's a bad combination and it's getting worse.

New York State of mind--it can be a wake up call for serious prison reform--or we can do what's being done now which is the same tired old responses you get every time something like this happens.

Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it--that should be the motto for DOC--sad, isn't it. 

The First Casualty

            Aeschylus, the great Greek Philosopher, wrote, “Truth is the first casualty of war.” (words to think about as our nation begins yet another military action). In truth, “truth” is the first casualty of all our follies: broken/failed relationships; dishonesty in business and government; failure in corrections. So often, it is easier to lie and distort and to imprison the truth from the light of day than to admit our failures – and the active role we play in them.

            The Virginia Department of Corrections, a behemoth of money and manpower, is broken. That’s the truth. It is as clear as the blue sky on a crisp fall day. Yet, the politicians in Richmond won’t say it because to do so would be to admit that a few have gotten rich off contracts and sweetheart deals; that corruption permeates the departments core; and that prison neither makes society safer nor rehabilitates the offenders it holds. DOC is a failure of monumental proportions. And, when cast into the light of truth, when exposed for what it really is, you can see the waste in money and lives.

1.     There is no statistical correlation between harsh sentencing and crime rates, between abolishment of parole and recidivism. Crime rates have nothing to do with, “tough on crime” sentencing. In fact, in states where there is more liberal use of alternative sentencing (i.e. not prison) and community-based corrections (i.e. parole and probation) crime rates have dropped significantly more than in Virginia.    

       

2.     All harsh sentencing does is sends more people to prison, for longer sentences, at greatly increasing cost. It doesn’t make Virginia any safer. Worse, in “people issues” it actually harms communities. Harsh sentencing creates an attitude of victimization among many offenders. You send a small-time drug user or nonviolent larceny convict to prison and he (or she) is subjected to violence, humiliation, and arbitrary behavior on the part of some guards, and you create an angry inmate, a person who believes he is being treated unfairly.

There are over 100,000 children in Virginia who have a parent in prison. Statistically, those children are less well off economically and have lower education levels. They also are more likely to find themselves on the wrong side of the law. There is a generational component to prison. You send a father to prison and there is a statistically significant likelihood that one of his children will end up there as well.

3.     Corrections uses sweetheart contracts to prison/industrial corporations which, in turn, pay huge dollars to Virginia lobbyists and candidates’ campaigns in even sweeter deals. The state outsources major portions of its corrections apparatus at ever increasing cost to the taxpayers with worse oversight and results.

For example, DOC no longer provides medical care for the incarcerated. That process has been contracted out to medical companies who are paid millions of dollars for “primary” care of inmates. If specialists are needed, those costs are still paid by taxpayers. Forget the moral argument, namely should government be able to take a person’s liberty away by incarceration, then outsource that function; instead, look at the pure dollars and cents. It costs the state more to have private contractors provide medical care than to do it itself.

            These contracts are all big dollar and add to the huge, billion dollar plus expenditures DOC makes every year. They also lead to multitudes of lawsuits, which the state must defend.

            Medical care in prison is poor at best. There is no “Hippocratic Oath” (“do no harm”) at play in here. No, it’s “churn and burn” to make a buck. Then, when the lawsuits begin to mount, the contractor bails out. Think I’m kidding? Ask the women inmates at Fluvanna who successfully sued in a class action suit over the lack of adequate medical care.

4.     Prisons – individually and as a totality – are corrupt. They say it’s all about public safety; they lie. The public isn’t safer with nearly 40,000 people jammed into Virginia’s prisons. Every day in here lives are wasted. The state spends millions to just sit and watch; there’s no rehabilitation or re-entry (real, meaningful programs that actually matter). Over half of all offenders lack high school diplomas and basic job skills yet those programs – talked about all day long in here – aren’t stressed or adequately funded.

Some may argue, “Prison is about punishment not rehabilitation.” Fair enough. Then make the punishment fit the crime. Don’t run violent, drug and gang-filled facilities where corrupt officers bring in the drugs or look the other way at cases of sexual assault or stabbings and say that is the result of those locked up. No, you take a man’s – or woman’s – freedom, you bear responsibility for them. DOC has not been required to be responsible for those in its custody.

5.     Economic realities: Most of Virginia’s prisons are in rural counties. The prisons become the only significant employer in those areas. Do you ever see a private employer decide to build in Lunenburg, or Mecklenburg, or Buckingham, or Brunswick because the state puts a prison there? No. And what happens in those communities when the prison closes? Nothing but economic despair.

Prisons in those rural counties are a con job run on the locals. They think the state is “investing” in their economic future. They aren’t. Those counties, like the men and women housed in their prisons, have lousy schools and poor job opportunities. Those counties are economically as shackled and imprisoned as those behind the wire.

Truth is a casualty. It is time for an honest discussion about Virginia’s prison system. Lives – both inside and outside the walls – are being lost; money is being wasted. The truth is, one day inside here tells you things are not as those in Richmond want you to believe. The politicians, and the senior people at DOC won’t tell you the truth because it will cost them money. But, as another “philosopher” once said, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Money drives prison policy; it’s corrupt money that destroys lives. That is the truth.

Happenstance

Happenstance is an outdated word with origins traced back to the 19^th century. It means, “things just happen.” There isn’t any rhyme or reason to what befalls us. No, we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Life, so many believe, plays out like that. You do the best you can, be a decent person, and still one day you find yourself on a plane being diverted into a tower by armed terrorists; or, you’re sitting at a café enjoying lunch while a marathon finishes. You watch the runners cross the finish line, your glass in hand toasting their fortitude when a homemade bomb explodes. Its happenstance, people will tell you. You were just there when everything turned to hell, or so they tell you.

            Contrasting those folks are the “if only” crowd. “If only I’d done this,” they’ll tell you, “then I would have ended up … “In those folks’ minds they are masters of their own fate. They control their lives. They replay every decision and believe “this” led to “that.” There is nothing else at work in the cosmos but their own actions. It’s Hollywood’s “butterfly effect” driven totally by one’s own ego.

            I’ve been thinking about those two theories since my conversation with Rabbi Dave after our recent workout. Rabbi Dave – my name for him that somehow stuck – is my weight lifting partner. Five months ago we asked a young college guy working on his physical fitness/trainer degree to help us with a weight training program. Three times a week, Dave and I hit the weights. I’ve never been a weight lifter, but there’s something about lifting more than your body weight in a dead lift, or bench pressing your body weight, that burns and excites your muscles. And Dave and I are a good pair. We encourage each other and laugh a lot during our ninety minutes moving weight.

            Rabbi Dave is leader of the small, conservative Jewish group on the compound. Funny, but he was raised in a middle-class Protestant home. He came to prison in ’05, felt lost and wasn’t sure who he was or where he was headed. Like Moses at the burning bush, one night he felt called to go in a new direction. He started studying Hebrew, switched to a kosher diet, and then officially converted. There are about twenty conservative Jews on the compound but that overstates the actual committed, practicing Jews.

            Lunenburg, in an attempt to control who gets on the “common fare” (Kosher/Halal) religious diet, provides that any inmate enrolled in a religious program for six months and who attended at least two services in a month can be provided the common fare diet. As a result, all the approved religious programs have large rolls of participants who really don’t participate. Dave presides over a flock of twenty that in reality is really three.

            That doesn’t deter Dave. He begins each morning with a prayer shawl covering his shoulders as he recites his morning prayers in Hebrew. He follows basic Levitican dietary laws (no milk and meat on the same tray). And, Dave knows he stands out. “Dave the Jew” or “Dave the Hebrew” is heard daily as guys look to him to tailor and repair clothing. Dave, apart from being the lead Jewish inmate, is also the best tailor on the compound. He can sew or repair anything. I met Dave eighteen months ago when he enrolled in the college IT program. It didn’t take long before we became friends; mere happenstance.

            A funny thing happened the past few months. I, a guy who’d never thought of lifting weights, now had a workout partner. Dave, a guy who hadn’t run since basic training, now had a running partner. My strength and his mileage began to increase. And during those three a week workouts, those two hours we’d spend together on the weight pile Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, we began opening up to each other and talking about our pain. It’s strange how it would come out. We’d be jogging around the track and one of us would say, “I remember …” and the story would lead to that melancholy moment when you realized how close you still wore your emotions when it came to her, or them.

            I read a book a few months ago by a young writer who’d made it big with his first novel. He was a success, at least to those who saw him. But inside he was a mass of conflict, doubt, and pain. His marriage collapsed. He contemplated suicide, and instead, he began to die slowly from alcohol, drugs, and a dozen other arrows to his soul. He wrote, “It takes a man ten years to get over a divorce.” I couldn’t get his words out of my mind.

            Happenstance. We had a pretty intense workout on Thursday. My arms ached and sweat poured off me even fifteen minutes after we’d finished our last set. Dave told me a story about a guy he’d met at jail. They’d exchanged words, threats were made, and then Dave – out of character for the man I knew – pummeled his would-be assailant before the man knew what hit him. “The guy never had a chance. He was bigger and had friends who could really hurt me. But they didn’t. After that, they left me alone. It’s been like that my entire sentence. God’s always protected me. “And, I realized, he was right.

            How do I explain going from a sense of total helplessness and depression so great that I wished I was dead to where I am now? How was I kept safe each and every time a threat was made to me? How did I negotiate my way through this barren and violent wilderness unscathed? That isn’t happenstance.

            I think often of my five months at the receiving unit. In those five months I saw a lifetime of violence, degradation, and human folly. Yet not once in those five months did I ever fear for my safety. “Though a host of enemies surround me, I will not fear.” I thought about King David’s words a great deal while I was at receiving. David wrote those words with a death sentence hanging over his head. Pursued and hounded each day. Forced to live in caves, he somehow knew his life was controlled by a force larger than his enemies. David knew, even in his darkest hours, that he was shielded and watched by his God.

            At receiving I was told by my counselor (funny DOC word counselor; there is no “counseling” involved. The counselor is the person who serves as a conduit for DOC’s central office to tell you where they’re sending you) that I was scheduled to go to one of three facilities, none of which was this place. The morning they packed me up (3:30 a.m. in fact) I learned for the first time I was getting on a bus for Lunenburg. That was Friday, November 20^th. The following Monday I interviewed for work as a teacher’s aide in the adult basic education program. I was hired that day. It’s unheard of in DOC to get work that soon after arrival.

            Four weeks after starting my job I wrote a proposal for a creative writing class. A few weeks later I was teaching, on my own, and guys lined up to take the class.

            Six months later the school principal called me into her office. She told me the local community college had received close to a $1 million “Second Chance Act’ grant to provide college education to select, high recidivism risk offenders. She told me it was the only program of its kind in the country and that six mentors/academic aides would be hired to live with the students and tutor them. Since that day I have worked with students at all levels of education. Did all that just happen? Did I just “luck” into these opportunities?

            There’s a young guy in the bunk next to me named Thomas. I’ve always felt a special kinship with him. Perhaps it was the fact he’s the same age as my estranged older son, but I always tried to give him advice or just listen when he struggled during his last two years in here. Thomas is a good kid. I don’t say that lightly. He’s a young man who deserved better.

            His parents split when he was young and he became just another in the millions of middle class white kids shuttled between divorced parents. His mom moved to Oklahoma; he and his younger sister stayed with their dad; and that’s when it started. His father began to sexually abuse his younger sister. He didn’t know at least not until years later and he found out and turned his father over to the police.

            So Thomas gets depressed – and angry. He’s nineteen and living on his own and waiting for his dad to be prosecuted. And he’s drinking and using drugs. He gets caught with a bottle of Jack Daniels. “Underage possession of alcohol,” a misdemeanor. He’s given a court date six months later. “Stay out of trouble and we’ll drop the charges.” He hears from a culinary school in Oklahoma – “You’re admitted, but you have to be here by September 1^st,” – two months before his court date. He can’t go.

            Thomas blows all his savings – more than $2,000 – in less than a week and soon finds himself living in the woods in a tent. One day he takes his pocket knife with him, heads down the hill from his campsite, and walks in a combination gas station/convenient market. “Give me money, cigarettes, and food,” he says in a calm, matter of fact manner.

            “Please don’t hurt me,” the woman says from behind the counter. He isn’t going to, and he doesn’t. He gets $300 in cash, a box with twenty cartons of cigarettes and food, and then he walks out of the store and back up the hill. He sits on the hill and smokes and watches the police show up at the store. And, he got away with it. He felt like shit, he wanted to die, but no one knew he was the one who robbed the Shell until …

            Four weeks later he’s in a car with a friend who happens to have a broken tail light. The car gets pulled over and his id is checked. “You’re under arrest,” the police say. Thomas had given all the cigarettes away. One of the guys who got a free carton ratted him out.

            Thomas sat in jail and waited for his court date and then the judge asked for his pleas. “Guilty your honor.” A law professor from Washington and Lee wrote the judge on Thomas’s behalf. “I know this young man (Thomas was friends with the man’s son) … I ask you to consider his situation and show mercy.” Apparently the judge’s definition of mercy is different from mine. He sentenced Thomas to prison for seven years. And here’s irony: Thomas’s father gets sentenced later. Know what he got? Fifteen years with all but six months suspended.

            We were talking the other night and Thomas told me if he’d gone to Oklahoma he’d be dead. “I would have OD’d or worse,” he said. “I was so angry and upset.” His sister and he have grown closer. She’s in college, playing soccer, and doing well. Thomas will leave Tuesday with his mom and aunt waiting out front. He’ll get a job, finish school and his degree, and live a good life.

            “And the Lord will save me …

            He will redeem my soul in peace from the battle

            Which is against me …

            Cast your burdens on the Lord and He will sustain

            you …”

            I memorized those lines from David’s 55^th Psalm within days of my arrest. I was lost, overwhelmed with guilt, remorse, and fear. My life, I figured was lost, hopeless. But, my life was more out of control before my arrest. I just couldn’t see it. It took a long time to get over the shock of what my life had become. But that experience, those nights trying to figure out who I was and where I was going wasn’t just controlled by chance. It was coming face to face with the inevitability of what was beyond me. And I understood what Job felt when everything was chaos and in the middle of the whirlwind, with the storm raging, all around he heard. He heard. It wasn’t happenstance. It was mighty, and wonderful, and beyond his control.

            We aren’t masters of our own destiny and we surely aren’t tossed hither and yon by chance. It’s not happenstance. Sometimes it’s confusing, and painful; always it’s beyond our capacity to fully comprehend and understand. In the end, it’s simple faith.

 

Potpourri for the Week

Anyone familiar with “Jeopardy” knows about the catch-all category “Potpourri.” “I’ll take potpourri for a thousand, Alex.” With that in mind, here’s a potpourri of D.O.C. happenings this week.

An inmate was found dead in his cell at Powhatan. Cause of death: “apparent” heart attack. I say “apparent” because a week after his death his family still wasn’t given any details. “Privacy Issues,” DOC’s spokesman said when the local TV news reporter approached. The family and the press are demanding answers. What they’ve gotten is a copy of the department procedure for dealing with a dead convict.

Hey, people die behind bars. “If you didn’t want the worry of keeling over in prison, you shouldn’t have broken the law.” I know all that. Still, what does it tell you about the system put in place to carry out justice acting corrupt and callous?

Speaking of corruption, Lunenburg is awash in tobacco. Guys are chain smoking in every building bathroom. A library aide went to the hole when he was caught with forty – that’s right forty – cigarettes. There’s only one way that much tobacco can come on the compound and that’s through the staff. And that’s half the problem inside prison – the people paid to run the place are as dirty as the inmates.

The Justice Policy Institute has issued a scathing indictment of Virginia’s justice system. Dated this November and titled: “Virginia’s Justice System: Expensive, Ineffective, and Unfair,” the researcher notes, “Despite some recent small progress in the areas of post-incarceration re-entry … the state continues to suffer under misguided policies and practices of the past.” Here are a few notable highlights –

·       At minimum, Virginia spends nearly $3 billion on its Public Safety Office and Judiciary. $1.5 billion of that goes to operate its crowded jails and prisons.

·       Virginia has the 13^th highest incarceration rate in the county. It costs in excess of $25,000 a year to keep a person in prison. For inmates over age 50 (approximately 15% of all inmates) the costs grow four-fold because of health care costs.

·       It costs over $100,000 per year to confine a juvenile in a juvenile facility. Almost 63% of confined juveniles are on psychotropic meds. Those sent to juvenile detention have a recidivism rate (re-offending within the first twelve months of release) in excess of 75%.

·       Contrary to what politicians say, “Truth in sentencing laws” (Virginia abolished parole in 1996 and requires an offender to serve 85% of their sentence) “have no significant impact on standardized recidivism rates”.  In fact there is no correlation between increased sentence length and recidivism rates.

·       While Virginia’s crime rate has decreased significantly over the last two decades (and across the country) the number of arrests (as opposed to the rate of arrest) has only fallen 1% in the same period.

·       Virginia law contains hundreds of restrictions on convicted felons searching for work making re-entry success more difficult.

·       Over 75% of Virginia’s incarcerated have an education of high school or less (40% have no high school diploma).

The study makes specific recommendations to avoid “an escalating crisis if the state does not take steps to reassess and change its approach to crime and imprisonment.”

1.     Repeal “Truth in Sentencing” and reinstate parole.

2.     Reduce focus on drug offenses.

3.     Work to address racial disparity throughout the criminal justice system.

4.     Demand better educational resources and opportunities especially for low-income communities of color.

5.     Re-allocate juvenile justice resources and restore authority of judges to treat juveniles as juveniles (not adults).

Is anyone in Richmond listening? Virginia’s justice system is broken.

Then there’s Jasper. Jasper is 38 years old. This is his second time in prison; he has a dozen or so trips to the jail. He’s a rural, Southside white guy with a rented trailer and five kids. And, he can’t read or write. He makes crystal meth – at least until he gets caught – because it’s more economically advantageous. His lack of education excludes him from most work.

Every third period at school I work with Jasper and four other men just like him. Five men, all of whom are between 30 and 50; all of whom have children; all of whom read and write below the second grade level.

 That I work with them is in itself a surprise. I’ve never been known as a patient man. Yet, all five guys love the class. For them, it’s the first education success they’ve ever known. And, it’s been good for me. It’s too easy to miss the “other” America, the America without education, good jobs and benefits, and hope in the future.

You want to solve the “prison” problem? Figure out a way to give Jasper’s kids a better chance at the American dream.

Just a random week in DOC.

Honcho: A Tale about Water

It’s pouring and they’ve canceled rec for the day.  Tropical Storm Andrea is off the coast and bands of rain and gusts of winds are making an already dismal prison day worse.  My friend DC convinced me early this morning to head outside and run in the torrential rain.  I was game.  See, we’ve been locked down since 6:00 am Monday – our twice a year shakedown ritual – and didn’t see the fresh air until Thursday after 6:00 pm count, save for the walk down the boulevard for our meals and our hour and a half in the gym waiting on a strip search and officers digging through your stuff. 

No rec.  So much for getting soaked to the bone and taking my mind far away from here.  Lockdown is difficult to describe.  In receiving, we were confined to our cells for four and a half days straight.  Meals and mail were brought to us.  We never moved until our cell was shook down.  Handcuffed and patted down, we stood outside our cell door while two officers tore open everything my cellie and I had, then left all those possessions in a pile on our bunks.  And that, truthfully, is nothing.  I do time with guys from higher levels who endured six, nine, twelve months of lockdown. 

Here, it’s just sit around and wait for your building to be called.   No one ever gets caught with anything.  Now, with the budget tightening, DOC can’t bring that many extra officers in.  And, shakedowns matter a whole lot more at higher levels where stabbings and rapes are part of daily life.  Here, it’s form over substance.  By Thursday afternoon the officers were exhausted, the buildings stunk, and guys were plain tired of the loss of even the little bit of freedom you have in here. 

I put on classical music – Mozart and Franz Liszt chamber music seems to work the best – and I think about the waste that is almost every action by DOC and almost every life inside.  One thing about lockdown, if you can’t get along with someone day to day, it’s magnified by the 24/7 time spent together for those wasted days.  And so it is for me dealing with Honcho.

Who’s Honcho?  He’s the guy in the bunk above me and he is a caricature of everything you think of when you imagine a multi-bid offender with six kids, a wife and girlfriend, and all before reaching age 33.  Honcho isn’t in the college program.  He’s one of those guys who come here straight from the regional jail to do their eighteen to twenty-four month sentence.  We have a few open bunks in here and we end up with the “extras”. 

These guys are all the same, and that – I think – is what pisses me off the most.  Honcho, like thousands of others, is a drug dealer and user:  small time – weed, crack, and powdered coke; give it away to your “homeys”; let your baby’s mamma get state aid while you drink Hennessy; wear your pants low, call everyone “”bro”, and sing nonsensical misogynistic rap lyrics by Lil Wayne or some other knucklehead.

Everything this dude does pisses me off.  He’s dirty, sloppy, loud and ignorant.  And worse, you can see it in his face; he carries on because he has such a low opinion of himself.  It’s so obvious with so many of these twenty or thirty something black guys.  They tell you how “bad” they are, but you see right through it.  They are cowards, and worse – they are failures.

Three times this guy’s been to Lunenburg.  Each time for two years, or so.  He sleeps all day, plays dominoes all night, and burns up the phone begging one of his women to send money so he can eat ($200 to $300 each month on commissary).

I say what I think.  “I’m just doin’ my bid, Bro”, he’ll tell me.  “I’m not your bro crack head.  Get your head out of your ass and do something constructive with your life!”  I reply and guys look shocked that anyone would dare speak to Honcho or another home dog like that.

Here’s the weird thing.   I get away with that because I intimidate these guys.  No less than my buddy DC has told me, “these guys are afraid of you, the way you carry yourself, your self respect”.  So I tell them what I see.  And, what I see in Honcho is a guy too scared, too self loathing to say to himself “Damn it, I can do better”.  And, it pisses me off.

So many people in the “real world” see prison and prisoners as caricatures.  They think they know all about lawbreakers and prison life and they’re so dead set sure that everything that happens inside here to these men and women behind bars is divine or karmic justice.  They couldn’t be further from the truth. 

The late, brilliant American write David Foster Wallace gave a commencement address back in 2005 at one of America’s premier liberal arts colleges.  And, it wasn’t a typical graduation speech about reaching your dreams and self-aggrandizing plaudits for having a liberal arts diploma.  Instead, it was harsh and direct. He spoke about thinking, real thinking, the kind that says “I’m not the center of the universe” and the kind that doesn’t get numbed by worshiping money and status. 

Wallace began with a story about two young fish swimming along when an older fish comes the other way, nods at them and says “morning boys; how’s the water?”  The two young fish look at each other and say “what the hell is water?” http://youtu.be/SFt7EzpsZQo

The point of the parable:  that too often we go through life numb to the world and the people around.

Real thinking is built on empathy and being aware of what is, as he said “so real and essential”.  Truth, he said, is all about life before death.  A life is more than the sum total of your failures.  And even guys like Honcho can grow into someone if they only learn to think, think beyond the numbing rat race of life and their own shortcomings. 

There is as much humanity inside these walls as there is outside.  And Mozart sounds just as sweet.  Honcho is failing, but he’s not a failure.

There are horrible people in prison who have done terrible things and, if let go, they would do perhaps even worse.  But, there are also regular people trying to fit in, trying the wrong way to make it. People like Honcho who succumb to the numbness around them and become so desperate to be “somebody” they’ll do the wrong thing.  I know, I was one of those guys.  And they deserve our encouragement and occasionally a kick in the ass.  As I sat here during lockdown I realized I didn’t know Honcho’s life, hadn’t walked in his shoes.  All I could think was, “this is water”, and somewhere I hoped David Foster Wallace was smiling and saying “he gets it, he’s thinking”.

Moving

A few weeks ago I finally was assigned a bottom bunk.  After almost three years here at Lunenburg, I switched from a “top rack” to a bottom one.  I had other opportunities to switch bunks in the past but decided I wanted a specific area with guys I thought I could live near.  And the area you live in is important.  Cleanliness and neatness matter especially when your personal space is less than two feet to the left or right.  And, being in such close proximity to five other men, you see, hear and smell everything that goes on around you.  You think you’ve “seen it all”, then some new chucklehead comes along and reminds you there is always someone out there more ignorant, more disrespectful, more slovenly, than you imagined.

It’s hard to describe living in such close quarters.  Your bunk becomes your personal island.  There is a list of don’ts in prison and most involve your personal living space.  You never sit on another man’s bunk; you never sit in their chair without permission; going in a man’s cut – without prior approval – is close to breaking and entering; you don’t “ear hustle”, listening in on another guy’s conversation – even when that guy is less than two feet away from you.  Finally, you don’t run your hustle around your bunk to call attention to your cut area.  No one wants the officers snooping around your cut.

Still, guys aren’t locked up because we’re smart.  Everyday someone will leave a plastic knife out (used to cut veggies, smuggled out of officer’s chow).  Everyday someone will leave their locker open with bags of fresh vegetables and fruit in broad daylight; or, they’ll have their TV blasting BET.  It’s stupid, disrespectful, and brings heat on the neighborhood.

So I was careful where I moved.  I didn’t want to live in the “trailer park”, six bunks full of dirty, redneck white guys with trash everywhere.  Nor did I want to move into the “projects”, six bunks of mostly young black guys who listen to RAP late into the night and play poker and tonk nonstop every weekend. 

And I’m happy with my move.  No more climbing up and jumping down from five feet.  I can sit in my chair, watch TV, and write.  And my neighbors are almost all quiet and studious.  If you can have such a thing as privacy and respect living with 95 other guys in the space of a basketball court, I’ve got it.  And, I know, things could be worse.

Lunenburg is changing.  We’re not sure why.  It could be the Gov’s re-entry program, or budget constraints on DOC, or the realization that compounds made for 800 overtax water and sewage at 1200, but the compound population is decreasing.

Those rotten, short middle bunks the warden spent months installing in buildings are being removed.  Top bunks in the middle two rows in buildings 2 and 3 were taken out as were rear bunks sitting in the Fire Lane.  That’s a reduction of 26 inmate beds per building side, 104 less beds on the compound.  And the guys who lived in those bunks?  They were transported elsewhere.  Buildings 5 and 6 are next.  That change will reduce Lunenburg’s capacity to approximately 1,000. 

We’re not sure if our college building (4) or the factory building (1) will also be reduced.  It would be great:  70 guys fighting over four showers and four commodes instead of 96.  But, with 88 students (and more coming in around October 1^st) the college building would need both A side and B side.

Moving is expensive.  To transport an inmate from one compound to the next costs money, but so does keeping a man locked up for a year:  $25,000 and counting.

Ironically, the bunk I moved into belonged to one of our first IT grads who went home.  He’s working, going to school and doing well.  And ultimately, that is the move we all dream about.

Rotten Meat

Shortly after Mecklenburg Receiving Center began its final shut down process in March, our diet here at Lunenburg began to change.  The freezers at Mecklenburg had been well-stocked and the food had to go somewhere.  Lunenburg, less than thirty miles from Mecklenburg, became the main recipient of Mecklenburg’s kitchen closing.

For a few weeks the change was extraordinary.  As with everything else in prison, meals repeat over and over.  The state tells us we are fed a “nutritionally sound” 2500 calorie diet, yet it is heavy (three servings each meal) on starches and carbohydrates and low grade and highly processed meats.  Syrupy, high fructose juice bags are provided each morning as a “fruit substitute”.  Is it any wonder diabetes and high blood pressure ravage almost a third of the compound population?

But, things did look up right after Mecklenburg closed.  We began getting breakfast “hot pockets” with cheese, potatoes and Canadian bacon.  Mesquite and hickory smoked sausage appeared at lunch.  Pork pepperoni, corn dogs, and thick cut pork bologna was served at dinner.  Yes, these were all highly processed meats and probably not the best thing for you to eat (which may explain why I usually eat bean trays almost five nights a week), but it was something different.

It lasted about three weeks.  And then came the rotten meat.  As you can imagine, per day cost for an inmate’s meal must be kept low.  Gravy of some hue is given at almost every meal.  Potatoes likewise appear on every tray.  Meat is usually low grade, a combination of four parts ground chicken to one part ground beef.  It is shaped into burgers which cook up gray.  Or, it is scooped into meatloaf wedges (also called Salisbury steak).  And, it is left loose in pasta dishes from Texas hash (which has no connection to Texas at all), Chili Mac, Yorkisoba (spaghetti noodles and meat).  All these dishes, with the 80/20 mix, while not mom’s home cooking, are edible.

That all changed.  Mecklenburg had low grade “mechanically separated “ground turkey.  What is “mechanically separated”?  Imagine turkeys going through a jet engine.  In principle, the meat (and feathers, fat and skin) being lighter are forced through the rear of the engine.  Bones fall below.  This shredded, compressed amalgam of everything on old Tom Turkey is then forced into cinder block size cubes (five pound blocks).  It is a sickly off grey color with specks of red blood.  And, it smells.  Filler is added as well to “stretch” the cubes use out.

You can always tell when this turkey is being served:  the chow hall stinks of rotting meat and the bean line is out the door.  A pet owner wouldn’t serve his family’s beloved dog or cat this hideous meat mixture.  We’ve had it on at least one tray everyday for almost a month.

A curious thing happened the other day however.  Staff has their own chow hall.  A “perk” of the job is one free meal each shift and subsidized pricing for other meals.  The staff chow hall has a salad bar, ice cream and pre-made sandwiches.  For entrees, they are served the same main course as the population (sided are different and better).  This week, following repeated complaints by the staff, mechanically separated turkey was removed from their chow hall.  Cold cut sandwiches have been substituted until the rotten meat issue is resolved.  The population found out about the staff’s objection to the mystery meat and now a flood of inmate grievances have been filed.

No one’s suggesting we eat steak and get a salad bar (though it sounds delicious!).  But, the state has an obligation to serve at minimum; healthy, safe meals.  When the state takes a person’s freedom away, they must provide at minimum, a set level of care, health and safety.  Budget problems don’t excuse the state’s responsibility.

Tonight is Chili Mac night.  Good news is they’re serving navy beans!

Job Fair

Something new happened at Lunenburg yesterday.  That in itself is surprising.  The thing about prison that is most difficult to bear is the time, the monotonous rolling forward of time.  Day in and day out there are the same announcements at the same time.  Days repeat days; weeks repeat weeks.  And years?  You watch the calendar click.  It’s maddening.  You live your life almost like Bill Murray did in “Groundhog Day”.  If you’re smart, you avoid the temptation to get comfortable with the monotony.  You design your day according to your needs.  You exercise your mind – and your body – and you resist the urge to be institutionalized.  And, in spite of the drudgery, you remain – at least in your mind – free.

Every so often, however, a day comes along which reminds you the monotony can be broken.  College graduation was one such day and the joy, the freedom I felt that Friday in January has sustained me.  Yesterday was another such day.  Yesterday, the LUCC Transition teacher and his aides sponsored a job fair for approximately 100 inmates who leave in the next 90 days.

This was not your typical job fair.  For one thing the majority of employers were contractors.  Second, there was an emphasis on mini-workshops with the Virginia Employment Commission and various non-profit organizations who assist released felons with a myriad of re-entry issues.

I was asked to attend to assist our Goodwill rep who was meeting with twelve of our IT grads who leave within the next 60 days.  It was remarkable seeing these men, resumes and portfolios (of programs completed) in hand looking a potential employer in the face and answering truthfully about their crime, their incarceration and their skills.

And I learned a few things.  First, there is a national fidelity bond that is free to an employer – providing $5000 (more is available for a small premium) of coverage for employee dishonesty – who hires a convicted felon.  “Even applies to a disbarred attorney convicted of embezzlement.”

Second, a significant number of released felons may be eligible for disability payments.  Extensive periods of incarceration may cause post-traumatic stress disorder.  It seems ironic but the “system” designed to encourage responsible behavior is, in fact, one of the main causes of PTSD and anti-social behavior.  Prisons are viscous, filthy, Darwinian environments.  It should come as no surprise that they do not encourage rehabilitation but promote the opposite.

Third, there are employers willing to give ex-cons a second chance.  One recruiter with a national construction firm told me “God gave me a second chance.  How could I not do the same thing?”  A few guys with significant construction training (and licenses earned while here) were made offers.  A few more were told to “stay in touch”.  The results weren’t great, but there was hope.  And in a place like this hope sometimes is all it takes to get you through.

The job fair wasn’t like anything experienced “out there”.  Recruiters had to clear security.  Guys had to be screened to get in.  There was a two and a half hour window to get the entire program in before 11:30 count.  And, it wasn’t some DOC initiative, some project spurred on by Governor McDonnell’s “re-entry initiative”.  It was the brainchild of this institution’s transition instructor, “Mr. Nick”, a twenty-five year veteran of the DOC prison re-entry process.  Mr. Nick believes in the power of hope.  His four aides – two of whom are college students I tutor – carry out his instructions.  Their goal:  to give every exiting inmate a chance at work after release.

Prison is a terrible experience.  It goes against every human emotion and is counterproductive for changing most lawbreakers into “good citizens”.  And against that backdrop Don Quixote – like men and women still launch themselves against the windmills of hopelessness and recidivism.  They believe a man with a job, a man with an education, can succeed.

We need more job fair days, more college graduation days, more days of hope and less groundhog days.

Sex Offender Visits

A new directive was handed down this week by Richmond regarding visitation procedures for sex offenders.  As I have written in the past, the status of sex offenders in this facility presents an uneasy existence.  Simply put, sex offenders are the lowest of low in a prison.  Even the officers hold sex offenders in contempt.  No one is held in lower esteem than child sex offenders and child pornographers.  Sex offenders live in constant fear that their depraved crimes will come to light.  While bounties do not exist for their heads on this compound – as they do at so many higher level facilities – sex offenders are routinely targeted for theft and extortion.  Perhaps it is justifiable.  After all, sex offenders have done – in many cases – unspeakable horrors to their victims.  Still, it is difficult to watch anyone live in fear.

So, this past week Richmond announced a new policy for visits to sex offenders.  Effective immediately, minors will no longer be allowed to visit sex offenders.  That’s no minors, not even the offenders own children.

When I first arrived here at Lunenburg, there were no prohibitions on sex offender visitation. Shortly after my arrival, a new directive was handed down.  Sex offenders were prohibited from having any children on their laps who weren’t their own.  Sex offender visits were closely monitored by staff (yes, the officers know who the sex offenders are.  The inmate “master list” has a code for sex offenders).  Sex offenders didn’t complain.  To do so was to draw attention to yourself.  And, that was the last thing a sex offender would want to do.

That policy has stayed in effect for two years and there have been few – if any – problems reported.  So why the new rule?

As I have disclosed previously in this blog, I struggle with my feelings regarding sex offenders.  I abhor what they did (and contrary to prison “myth”, the vast majority of sex offenders are not incarcerated for “statutory” sex charges, i.e. “I didn’t know she wasn’t eighteen!”)  I also deal with the knowledge that many of the child sex offenders are serving sentences substantially shorter than mine.  Those frustrations are tempered each day by the knowledge that in God’s eyes I’m no better nor worse than that man and God’s grace shines on child sex offenders, embezzlers, and law-abiding folks the same.  None of us are deserving, yet all can receive.

Still, it’s tough to not jump on the “those sick bastards get what they deserve” bandwagon.  But, in looking at the new rule, a number of questions popped into my head.

First, if sex offenders are so awful and their behavior so suspect that DOC can’t trust them in a controlled visitation environment, what are they doing being housed at Lunenburg, a low custody, dormitory-style housing environment?

A fundamental problem with Virginia’s correction paradigm is that the vast majority of facilities – and, by implication, inmates – are low custody.  I have serious reservations about a system that says a murderer or child rapist is a “violent felon”, yet then allows those inmates to serve the bulk of their sentence at a low level.  If sex offenders are so suspect in their proclivities that they can’t be trusted in the Lunenburg VI room, what are they doing here?

And second, how does denying a sex offender access to his children coordinate with Governor McDonnell’s “re-entry initiative” which states that “90% of all inmates will return to their communities”, and “a goal of re-entry is to promote family support for the returning offender?”  It seems to me limiting structured visits is contrary to those goals.

I don’t know what the answer is.  As I said earlier, I’m very conflicted on the issue.  I do believe child sex offenders have a mental illness that needs to be addressed and prison isn’t the best place to address it (then again, prison isn’t the best place to address most nonviolent criminal behavior).  And, child sex offenders tend to also have been victims themselves.  Somehow, that cycle has to be broken

There’s no easy answer.  I’m just not sure DOC’s new visitation policy helps in any way.