Je suis … An Epiphany

THIS BLOG WAS WRITTEN IN JANUARY, 2015.

 

            I was still in high school, the summer between my junior and senior year, when I came across his book. It was heavy, and complex, and difficult. And, it was mesmerizing in its descriptions of inhumanity and tyranny and evil. It was, it remains, profound and etched in my memory. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” transfixed me with its honest, brutal portrayal of life in the Soviet labor camp system.

            Solzhenitsyn let the west, let humanity know the truth about Stalin’s Soviet Union. While many here and in Western Europe glamourized the communist system, Mr. Solzhenitsyn issued a frank rebuttal. “It is a lie.” His book, smuggled out of the USSR and published in English stands as a testament to the words, “the pen is mightier than the sword.”

            Andrew Bacevich, a college professor and veteran from the Vietnam War lost his son in Iraq. He said,

            “A people untouched (or seemingly untouched) by war are far less likely to care about it. Persuaded that they have no skin in the game, they permit the state to do whatever it wishes to do.”

            Bacevich was responding to the American public’s “rah rah” attitude when it comes to this nation sending its young men – and women – in harm’s way. The vast majority of Americans know no one in the military (there are less than 2 million Americans in the armed services) yet we regularly allow our leaders to send those same men and women into combat; we allow this nation to be bankrupted fiscally and morally by defense spending that is 10 times what Russia spends, 7 times what China spends, and more than the next 30 nations after us spend combined. And, as I read Mr. Bacevich’s statement, I can’t help but think changing one word is also a profound truth:

            “A people untouched … by prison are far less likely to care about it.”

            Who in this country, who in this state, really cares what happens behind the walls and fences? After all “bad people” go to prison.

            “Je suis Charlie.” A few weeks ago, fourteen employees of the French satiric magazine “Charlie Hebdo” were murdered by Islamic fanatics. The reason? They dared portray the Prophet Mohammad in a satirical light. “Charlie Hebdo” crosses a great many lines – they were crude and extremely disrespectful to religion (and not just Islam). Many of their cartoons were borderline obscene. And yet, following the massacre western Europe and America rose as one in a chorus that said “Je suis Charlie” – “I am Charlie” – you cannot stop free expression. What a profound and powerful response to those who seek to curtail words … and what hypocrisy.

            “I was just a guy in Georgia writing what I thought.” Erick Erickson, founder of the blog, “Red State.”

            Over five years ago, I began writing for this blog as a way of witnessing to anyone who cared to read my journey inside. I had gone from a seemingly picture-perfect “American dream” life to an alien world, a world where right was wrong, up was down, and the process just continued to churn. I met men and women who I never even knew existed in my “America.” I saw evil, heartbreak, and moments of pure decency that restored my faith. All of it was – and always had been – part of the world I knew but I chose to ignore it.            I decided to blog with a few basic rules. First, I would always tell the truth. I don’t care if people agree with me; at least they know what I write is honest. Second, I would never “out” an inmate – or officer. I write character composites – multiple people rolled into one – to move stories forward. The names – my creations.

            Christian writer Phillip Yancey said in describing the prophets of the Bible,

            “For writers and others who seek to impart wisdom, there is a time to be a good (a prod to action) and a time to be a firmly embedded nail.”

            People stumble across this blog all the time and respond in a myriad of ways. I have been praised and cursed; told I am brilliant and that I deserve this time and more. I have been accused of disclosing too much about my personal life, too much about what happens here. I have been threatened by inmates and cautioned by officers. A federal prosecutor and FBI agents told me they read the blog. I know the facility – DOC - monitors it. Anonymous “notes” have been dropped on me … all because of some words I put together and mailed out to a blog.

            “Individuals and societies are not helpless victims of heredity. We have the power to change – not by “looking down” to nature but “up” to God, who consistently calls us forward to become the people we were designed to be.” Phillip Yancey.

            Much is wrong with America’s love affair with prisons. Many of the men, and women behind bars – while law breakers, didn’t – and still don’t – deserve to be incarcerated. States – and the Federal government – violate basic human rights daily in their operation of prisons and treatment of prisoners. It is a horrible, money-wasting, life destroying system that needs immediate attention.

            “You can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

            How do we, as Americans, answer Dostoyevsky? How do we, as Christians, respond to Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25?

            “Je suis ______” I am. I am a middle-aged, divorced, convicted felon who lives each day knowing I lost a wonderful wife, a great career, friends, wealth, and privilege. And, I am now witness to the mindless destruction and waste, the fraud and hubris that is America’s criminal justice system. I have met men who are not part of the American dream who live with their families outside the mainstream with bad schools, housing, healthcare, and economic opportunities. I see it all, I hear it all, and I write. And …

            I will continue to write about it regardless of the powers that be who are uncomfortable with it. Je suis … Larry. Just because you are locked up doesn’t mean your voice doesn’t count.

Olio

I work one or two crossword puzzles every day. You soon learn from doing that many puzzles that certain clues will appear in almost every puzzle you do. For example, a three letter name for “Woody’s ex” is always “Mia.” And so it goes. For a four letter word meaning, “A mix;” the word is always “olio.” My blog posting this week is a mix of a number of topics, it’s an olio.

Early Counts

            Since I arrived here in 2009 there have been three “standing” counts – everyman at the foot of their bed, standing, electronics all off. There are standing counts at 11:30 a.m., 6:00 p.m., and 10:00 p.m. At night, there are bed check counts at midnight and 3:00 a.m. Then, at shift change, there is a bed check count (all men on or in their beds) at 5:45 a.m.

            A week ago, a memo came out from the warden which explained, in part, that department directives require all “counts” between 5:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m. to be standing counts. Apparently, LCC has been out of compliance for years!

            Starting Monday, February 3^rd at 5:45 a.m., the lights will come on, a whistle will blow, and everyone will assemble for a standing count. Guys’ll bitch and moan – it’s the nature of the place – and then drag themselves back to the rack to sleep until 8:00 a.m. (bed areas must be made and cleaned up). Later that day – at 9:30 p.m. instead of 10:00 we’ll assemble for evening standing count. Then lights – and noise – will lower at 10:00 instead of 10:30.

            Change never goes over well inside a prison. But, this one should be no big deal.

 The “Race” Debate

            I had words with a member of NOI the other morning over – of all things – the school’s African American History quiz and contest. Every February, as part of “African American History” month, the LCC school sponsors a history quiz. The top three scores are presented dictionaries by the school and recognized in the school monthly newsletter. Since 2006 the quiz has been called “African American History.” Of course, since 2006, the aide responsible for running the quiz was an African American teacher’s aide. He was caught up in the great December computer caper and transferred out. Time was running short and the quiz was in danger of not getting out. The principal – my boss – asked me to take the quiz on, which I did. And that’s what led to …

            “No white man can truly understand my people’s history.” Say what? I’m not sure what pissed me off more, him standing in the dayroom spouting his ignorant claptrap or his diatribe on our chalk board. “This quiz is an afront [sic] to Africans like me. We aren’t African Americans!!”

            Not one to back away from a battle with a half-wit, I said, “Hey Socrates, if you’re going to write a political epistle, at least spell your words correctly. It’s a-f-f-r-o-n-t.” I then told him I drafted the quiz. “But you don’t know what we’ve been through. You can’t be responsible and sympathetic to our plight.”

            “Really? What do you know about what it means to be Armenian, or Jewish, or Scotch? Can you have empathy for the Chinese or Italian experience in America? Should I, as a white tutor, only help ‘my kind’?” The dayroom was silent as I lit into him about ignorance and race-baiting. Then it was over; he walked away less sure of the stupid position he espoused.

            And that’s one of the problems with prison; it’s a toxic stew of uneducated, ignorant crap that feeds their obsessive self-pitying. Prison sucks. It is demeaning and counter-productive. But – and this is an important but – most of us did the crimes that landed us here. We aren’t innocent. We did stupid – and in some cases horrible – things. That doesn’t make the system less insane, but it should cause you to focus on real improvement, real education and job skills, not some chin-rubbing wanna-be philosophizing.

 Mental Health Continued

            Last Sunday night, the CBS News show “60 Minutes” interviewed Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds. Deeds described in great detail his son’s mental health issues and the tragic incident that unfolded at the family farm Thanksgiving weekend. Deeds said society doesn’t treat mental health like cancer or heart disease (he’s right). He then talked about the bill he’s proposed in the Virginia legislature to allow mentally ill people to be held 24 hours (instead of the current 6 hours) to find available bed space for in-patient treatment.

            The bill seems to be a common sense approach to a tragic and glaring problem in Virginia’s mental health umbrella. So why then does the Virginia Sheriff’s Association oppose it?

            “We’ll have to babysit ‘those’ people for 24 hours,” the VSA spokesman said. “It’ll cost $4.5 million for the extra manpower.” Really? So the Commonwealth is willing to spend $1.25 billion each year on prisons, a system where over 50% of the inmates suffer from diagnosed mental illnesses. Holding mentally ill people in prison, pumping them full of psychotropic drugs so they spend the days like zombies, that’s a good use of a billion dollars plus. But $4 ½ million, whoa we can’t afford that. Kind of makes you wonder who really is crazy.

 Peter Seeger RIP

            On January 28^th, folk singer Pete Singer passed away at the age of 94. Seeger was part of a great collection of men and women who wrote and sang beautiful folk songs – songs of everyday people – that meant something. “Where have all the flowers gone?” That was Pete Seeger.

            He sang with Woody Guthrie. He sang for civil rights, and social equality, and cleaning his beloved Hudson River. He abhorred violence and militarism, yet during the Second World War he enlisted. Hitler and totalitarianism of the Fascists had to be stopped.

            In his twenties, Seeger joined the American Communist Party. Then he saw that Stalin and the Soviets were as bad as Hitler and the Nazis. He quit the party. America in the ‘50’s wasn’t so forgiving. He was blacklisted and spied on by Hoover’s FBI. He never quit smiling, he never quit singing.

            One of my favorite Seeger stories involved seeing him in concert at Vassar College during my high school days (1976 or ’77). Seeger was at the Poughkeepsie, New York School (my hometown back then) and he began to sing his song “Goodnight Irene.” He told the audience, “You can sing any song lyric to this tune.” Even now, almost 40 years later I find myself singing dozens of songs to the tune of “Goodnight Irene.”

            Pete Seeger wanted people to know he wasn’t perfect. None of us are. But as the character William Wallace said in “Braveheart,” “Every man dies, but not every may lives.” Pete Seeger lived.

            “Irene goodnight

              Irene goodnight
              Goodnight Irene
              Goodnight Irene
              I’ll see you in my dreams."

           

Gideon at 50

March 18^th marked the 50^th anniversary of one of the seminal cases in U.S. Constitutional law. Gideon defined the rights defendants have to counsel after arrest. The decision created a seismic shift in American criminal jurisprudence. That it began with one semi-literate, itinerant man and a letter to the U.S. Supreme Court made the case even more astounding.

            Gideon was a fifty-something, white male who’d spent too much of his life behind bars, going in and out for months – and years – at a time. He was accused of a break in. At his arraignment he asked the court to appoint him a lawyer. The Florida judge denied his request. Florida – as did most states in the early 1960’s believed the 6^th Amendment right to counsel (for indigent defendants) only applied to serious (i.e. Capital or life sentence) felonies.

            Without counsel, Gideon stood no chance. He was convicted and shipped back to prison. From his prison cell he wrote in poor grammar a heartfelt letter to the United States Supreme Court which landed on Justice Abe Fortis’s desk. Gideon said, “I am a poor, innocent man who asked the judge to give me a lawyer so I could clear my name …”

            Gideon’s case was accepted by the Court and one of America’s most prestigious law firms was appointed to argue his case. And it happened, the United States Supreme Court agreed with Mr. Gideon. Any time a criminal defendant is faced with a loss of freedom (i.e. jail or prison) the right to counsel exists.

            Gideon was supposed to change the landscape of criminal justice in America. The Court understood that the power of the State (or federal government) to take a person’s freedom was so significant and that the right to be “innocent until proven guilty” so important that citizens – regardless of their financial ability – are entitled to adequate, legal representation.

            Gideon was a remarkable statement on the power of the individual, the rights of the accused, in the face of a larger, more powerful state seeking to take his freedom. But, Gideon has failed to live up to its words.

            There perhaps is no more lonely feeling than standing before the judge’s bench to hear charges read against you. And, no matter what the law says about “innocent until proven guilty,” there is an almost immediate, visceral public reaction that says “the guy is guilty.” After all the police would never arrest the wrong person; prosecutors would never let ego or politics, or the public’s bloodlust dictate how a case was handled.

            The truth is, police and prosecutors lie, cheat, and steal just like the criminals; the issue usually isn’t about justice, it’s about getting a conviction. The state has virtually unlimited power and money to prosecute a defendant.

            Second, money matters. If you have resources and can mount a defense, the odds of you receiving a more favorable plea deal – or acquittal – grow. The system takes advantage of the poor, the uneducated, the gullible. The law allows the police to lie during their interrogation of a suspect.

            Third, the law is a highly technical field. The average citizen doesn’t understand what elements the state must prove to get a conviction. The average citizen doesn’t understand that being helpful and answering questions truthfully usually leads to words being twisted. The average citizen doesn’t realize that rights exist – not at the allowance of the government like a privilege – from God and are a specific, direct limitation on the power of government.

            Gideon has failed because we live in a country where more people are incarcerated than during Stalin’s days in the Soviet Union. Gideon has failed because lawyers get overwhelmed with huge numbers of indigent defendants. Lawyers cut deals without investigating a case because there’s no money in defending a poor person.

            Gideon has failed because America is a nation of a “gotcha” news reporting. We exercise schadenfraude judgment, gleefully, smugly basking in other’s failures and arrest.

            I have met hundreds of men who – had a less overwhelmed attorney handled their case instead of a young public defender with a plea deal at the arraignment – with adequate, caring defense counsel would not be in here.

            Gideon was an amazing, profound statement about what America believed justice should be. That the country failed so miserably to live up to that ideal is a scarlet mark on this nation.

 

Incarceration Nation

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria recently revealed in a Time magazine column what those of us inside already know – America is now “Incarceration Nation”.  America, “land of the free” and “home of the brave” has over 6 million people under “correctional supervision”.  That’s more people than Stalin held in the Soviet Union’s infamous gulag system.

There are many reasons for this, some benign, some well-intentioned, too many the result of political myopia.  But, as Zakaria noted, the worst of the American political system can be seen in the growth of the prison-industrial complex.  “Tough on crime” politicians – in Virginia it’s been “abolish parole”/longer sentencing politicians – helped fuel the money trail.  “Many state prisons are now run by private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state capitals . . . Partly as a result; the money states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education in the last 20 years.”

Governor McDonnell touted relief for Virginia families facing ever increasing tuition demands from the Commonwealth’s university system.  He gave higher education lip service while turning a blind eye to the bloated, badly mismanaged bureaucracy that is Virginia’s Department of Corrections.  Thirteen thousand employees, almost 40,000 inmates, over $1 billion a year to maintain a system that houses a majority of those inmates in level 1 or 2 facilities, all the while the recidivism rate remains flat and not one dollar of state money goes to the very program that reduces recidivism:  college education. 

Like his predecessors, Governor McDonnell talks a good game; most snake oil salesmen do.  But, Virginia needs leadership.  And, leadership means it’s time to change the way things are done.

In a May 2011 release, the Institute for Higher Education Policy advised that the single most effective determiner to recidivism was an inmate earning a college degree.  No prison program has a more lasting effect in breaking the cycle of recidivism than college.  Ironically, forty-three states participated in the study.  Virginia chose not to.

As I read the Institute’s findings and reflected on my own experience in here working with the college students, I understood how right, how easy, it is.  Give an inmate an education and you give them hope and skills to make it on the outside. 

So why does Governor McDonnell refuse to spend even one dollar on the college program here, a program internationally recognized twice in the last month?  Why is the Governor willing to spend millions on a software program that is easily manipulated (questions seek to determine remorse and empathy levels) to identify “recidivism risk” rather than any money on the one identifiable method of eliminating recidivism?

Perhaps things will change.  The founder of Governor McDonnell’s law school, Regents University, recently came out in favor of prison reform and dramatic reductions in America’s incarceration levels.  Rev. Pat Robertson joins a growing list of Republicans and Conservatives who are calling for drastic changes in America’s love affair with corrections.  The leaders in that movement, RightOnCrime.org released new polling data from the Pew Center which showed 84 percent of respondents agreed that tax dollars could be shifted from prisons to community corrections alternatives for non-violent, low risk inmates.  Significantly, 77% of responding Republicans and 85% of independents agreed.

Perhaps change is coming to America’s, to Virginia’s, love affair with prison.  Each day I pray that today is that day.