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.

Letters to the Soul

Our college students in the student development class were given the assignment to write a letter to their younger self ten to twenty years ago with words of advice about what these years since have meant. Letter writing is an outdated form of communication for most. In here, however, it’s the way many of us communicate. And, writing to yourself? It’s tough. Three days after my arrest I began keeping a journal, a daily recitation of my life in here. This blog grew out of that journal – almost 1500 pages front and back to date. I began the journal so I’d remember all of this and in the hope that after I’m gone someone – my sons perhaps – would read those pages and understand what “this” really is.

            Letters to your younger selves. That’s a hard assignment. It’s tough looking back critically without saying “if only I …” because “if only I” doesn’t exist. The past is closed and unchangeable. We can learn from it, but there is no “Groundhog Day.” We don’t get second, third or even fourth chances at our past; there’s only the present and the future.

            I waited to see what these men would write. My expectations were not very high. Most of the guys in here don’t disclose their true selves. Fears and failures are both embarrassing and dangerous in a place like this. So bullshit is the chief form of oration in here. I expected more of the same. What I read and heard instead was profound. These men opened their souls on paper. Their stories echo in my head. They are gut wrenching, and oh, so human. As I read and edited. I felt moved. I went to one young man, Matt – a vet – and told him as an editor I found his syntax and grammar persuasive. As a father, I hugged him.

            Here are brief glimpses in these men’s stories: Matt wrote of watching his best friend die in a firefight in Iraq. “When this happens to you, remember to forgive yourself. You did all you could and you helped load his body on the plane to return to his mother.” I read about his nightmares, and his anger, and his guilt and I thought about my own support of a war my sons never had to fight. It was – it always is – the Matts of this country, the blue-collar kids, who fight, bleed, and die for America while those of us with education and money talk of geopolitical conflict and politics without a shred of sacrifice.

            My friend “O” wrote about his parent’s desperate travel to this country illegally to escape the horrors of El Salvador with its leftist guerrillas and its rightist death squads killing, bleeding the country to death. “They sacrificed so much, became citizens, worked for their children to have a better life and in my arrogance and impulsiveness I let them down.”

            As I read his words, flowing with Spanish colloquialisms, I felt shame. Thousands of children being sent to our borders as families seek to save their young lives. How are they met? By flag-waving protesters crying “go home.” We are pissing on the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

            “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”

            Yeah right; F- you Lady Liberty. O knows; his family lived it. And in spite of the Nativists (as is anyone really can claim “native” status in this country) and their ignorant protests people will still come. Ignorance can never kill hope.

            I read papers from Cubby, and B, and John Wayne, and Bugsy who told their younger selves about watching friends die from drug abuse. Drugs, alcohol, quitting school; these men all saw a part of life I never experienced. And in this class they felt free to talk about it. “Drugs kill.” “I drank too much and repeated the same behavior my mother did.” “He died in the chair next to me, overdosing on heroin.”

            There was Mike. Locked up since he turned fifteen for first degree murder; charged and convicted as an adult; given fifty years. He stayed in juvenile custody until age 17 then he was shipped within days of his birthday, to Southampton. Southampton (closed in 2006) was known for holding Virginia’s violent, youthful offenders. Gang rapes were commonplace as were brawls, stabbings, extortion. Everything you think you know about prison could be summed up in Southampton and fueled by youth it was a zoo on speed.

            And Mike, Mike wasn’t your typical teen killer. He wasn’t black, in a gang, poor, or on drugs. He was a white, middle-class kid with two educated, employed parents. He was smart, very smart; he was a loner … and he did a horrible thing. Strange, I look at Mike and wonder why, how he did what he did.

            They tested him after his arrest. Everyone wanted to know if he was a sociopath. TV shows called his parents, “Let us interview you. We want to figure out why he did it.” Know what the doctors found? He was just like any other fifteen-year-old kid … and he took a knife and stabbed a neighbor teen to death … 

            Mike wrote to his 17 year old self and said the following: “You’re soon going to head to Southampton and it is scary. You’ll be afraid and face a number of occasions when your humanity is tested. No matter what, be the decent man you will grow to be.”

            Letters to selves before they head the wrong way. My dear friend DC let me read his. I so often forget the man DC was. He was for years – one of Virginia’s worst offenders. He was violent and predatory. Twice the commonwealth prosecuted him for murders committed inside the notorious “walls,” Virginia’s since destroyed penitentiary on Spring Street in Richmond. Twice they tried to have him executed; twice he escaped the death chamber.

            He was in the midst of twelve years in solitary confinement at Mecklenburg Virginia’s Super Max facility. They moved him and fifteen others (the worst sixteen the state had) in the middle of the night with dozens of heavily armed state police – and he wrote his parents and his wife: “I will die in here. Forget me …” DC’s soul was dead; he was cold, his heart black; life was nothing to him. He was, in penitentiary – speak (old style violent cons still know this term) “down-in-law.” That meant he lived by his own accord. He took, he killed, he was the law for himself and being close to him was a life sentence, or worse.

            “Your Pops will show up at Mecklenburg and the officers will drag you from your cell to see him. And your Pops – the man you love and respect more than anyone in the world will tear into you. He’ll tell you being a man means doing right even if the load you up with fifty or sixty years. ‘You made this mess, you clean it up,’ he’ll say. ‘And don’t even think you can walk away from your responsibilities as a husband, a father, a son, a man.’”

            Forty-two years behind bars and I read his letter and know what happened afterward – that day DC gave up his life of violence, and anger, and death. “It won’t be easy but you can do it,” he writes. And all the respect and brotherly love I have for this remarkable man wells up inside of me.

            I realize as I read these letters that no man is beyond redemption. So many times in my old life I said I believed that. After all, isn’t that the point of the cross – that God’s grace can redeem even the darkest hearts, the most hopeless of lives? I read and know grace, true God-given grace is real.

            DC asked me what I thought of his letter. I recite to him William Ernest Henley’s poem, “Invictus.”

            Beyond this place of wrath and tears

            Looms but the Horror of the shade,

            And yet the menace of the years

            Finds and shall find me unafraid

            It matters not how strait the gate

            How charged with punishments the scroll

            I am the master of my fate

            I am the captain of my soul.

Another Lockdown Goes By

Monday morning the announcement came. “The facility is on lockdown. Cease all movement.” Rumors had been swirling the entire past week that it was coming. Rumors in prison come at you by the dozens and they’re almost always wrong. This time they were right.



In the college building we figured it was a perfect week for a lockdown. Classes were on a ten day break. With the exception of the grammar review session I was leading, the guys were on break. Funny thing is, the prison system doesn’t care about scheduling around school. “Security trumps everything”, is the standard operating procedure. They’ve scheduled lockdowns during GED testing, college finals, anything.


The compound thought it was coming for other reasons. First, the new warden showed up a week ago. He’s the warden from the soon to be closed James River Corrections Center, a level 2 facility sitting on the banks of the James in rural Goochland County. That prison, built in 1896, was dilapidated and crumbling, a visible reminder of the “old prison” model: red brick and foreboding, not the new “kinder yet still behind wire” design so popular around Virginia’s correction establishment. James River was known as an “easy bid”. Tobacco was still plentiful; cell phones were all over the compound. Sounds like a perfect guy to take over this facility!


The assistant warden here, a round belly fellow who actually believed in rehabilitation, promptly stepped down. He wanted the warden’s job. Being turned down a second time, he finally decided to move on. His next stop: Mecklenburg, currently used for receiving. The assistant warden at Nottoway (a level 4 just up the road and the site of a significant stabbing incident six months ago – one officer seriously injured, one inmate dead, couple others seriously hurt) decided to come here. A former senior officer here, he loves buildings to shine. “Fresh paint is a must.” I’ve got news for him. Cologne on a turd doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a turd.


So, the new bosses are at work and a fresh shift began Monday. Perfect time to lockdown! The premise behind a lockdown is relatively simple. You hold every inmate in their building, limit access around the compound including access by inmates to guys in other buildings. You then swoop in with a sufficient force of highly trained officers to search out drugs, tobacco, weapons and assorted contraband. It should work, in principle at least. But principle doesn’t have much relevance in the modern DOC.


First, there are insufficient numbers of officers to conduct a fast-paced sweep. Lock down was announced at 8:15 am Monday. Our building wasn’t “shook down” until Tuesday afternoon at 4:00. E and I are bunkmates. We lucked into two female CO’s from our building. They knew we were “good guys” so our search (going through our lockers and personal effects) took less than five minutes. “We miss you guys over in 3.” Truth is, neither of us had anything (other than a few extra t-shirts and an extra pair of running shoes) but we could have hidden a kilo of weed in our lockers and it wouldn’t have been found. These two young female officers are good, hardworking ladies, but they lack the time to actually do the job properly. Instead, they play the odds “they’re cool; we can overlook them.”


Second, a fair number of officers are corrupt. They buddy up to the inmates and for “the right price” get stuff in. This compound is currently overrun with “spice” – synthetic weed that is undetectable in urine tests. The Virginia Legislature rushed a bill through – already signed by the Governor – to make the sale of “spice” illegal. Yet, here on the compound it’s everywhere. How, do you suppose it gets in?


Three days before we locked down, CO’s gave Big S and DC a “heads up” to move extra CDs, books and sneakers. Where does the extra stuff go? Vocational and educational buildings. They only run drug dogs through those buildings so, under the watchful eye of the building officer, bags of CDs and extra clothes are placed in cabinets in the school.


It’s all form over substance. The results from our building shakedown: about 30 empty plastic jars. All the extras are still in place. Meanwhile, the officers are exhausted. They’ve worked extra hours; COs that are off this week are called in and paid extra for additional shift work. The shakedown costs a great deal and accomplishes virtually nothing.


If that’s true, why do them? Great question with a simple answer: because that’s what’s always been done in prison. Why fix what hasn’t worked for decades? DOC is a tired, outmoded, outdated department still investing precious resources in a prison operation that fails miserably day in and day out. Shakedown’s just another example of that broken paradigm.


I sit in my cut. The sun is shining. I’m reading and writing and looking forward to a run at the end of the week. Meanwhile, the COs are struggling to finish buildings 5 and 6 before tonight. They could try a new approach, but they won’t. Six months from now we’ll do it all over again.