Skin in the Game

Skin in the Game

"You'll have to vouch for him -- work, place to live, awareness of parole obligations -- if he's going to leave the halfway house," he said.

He was the manager of the Federal Bureau of Prison's halfway house. He was a big guy, bored and weary. He looked like he had seen it all and then some. Nothing could surprise him.

I felt like passing him a hundred dollar bill just to see how he would react.

The place was sad. Grimy. Defeated men and women wandered around the "campus" with heads down, feet shuffling. Folding chairs sat in the sun next to doors that opened onto a parking lot. It had been a hotel at one time.

The place next door advertised itself as the "No Tel Motel."

We were in a tough part of Tucson, not the best place, I thought, for a halfway house for men and women tying to get away from a life on the streets.

"I can do that," I said. "He'll be working for a magazine as an editor, and he has a guest house to rent on the east side."

He looked at me with an expression, "who do you think you're kidding? This guy is an addict, a hard-core, a ticking bomb," but handed over the paper, a kind of contract, for me to sign.

Here goes, I thought, I'm putting myself on the line here. If he falls, I may be on the hook for something, though I don't know what.

I pulled my pen out of my pocket and signed. He notarized the document and stamped it.

"I'll make you a copy."

As I folded it, J. came in the door with a question on his face. I nodded. He left to get his stuff -- a box of clothes, books, and a blood-red electric guitar. The guitar stuck out the box at a rakish angle, barely balanced.

I held open the chain-link gate so J. could squeeze through.

This was much bigger than leaving a half-way house. We were going out into the free world. He would be sleeping on his own tonight. No cellie, no counts, no flashlights in your face in the middle of the night, no screaming down the block, no watching your back.

He looked sheepish. unbelieving.

He blinked in the bright, knife-edge light of a December dawn.

No Man's Land

I am not good company on prison days. Aloof, irritable, withdrawn, I sleep-walk through Saturday morning chores. I have gone inside and need space to gird my loins, armor myself, visually rehearse my routine: go to Bookman's for used books, magazines, dictionaries, then to an office supply place for pads of paper, accordion folders, and pens, then to the University for copies of inmate work, and turnout lists that I print out. Then the long drive from the sculpted lawns of the university to the strafed, naked ground of the prison. The physical and material preparation is nothing compared to hardening of the psyche though.

My usual life -- and the moralities that go with it -- don't apply in prison. Prison rules of the road fall more into the Darwinian, opportunistic, and brutal plays of dominance and power. Yes, there are power structures in the free world too, but they are less naked, overt, urgent, less desperate, less unrelenting. In prison there are no breaks from the scramble to survive, even the boredom of the place feels close to fatal.

The workshops offer a bit of a reprieve. Often, but not always, we have air conditioning, and they get paper, conversation, and a forum. I am not naive enough to think that the exigencies of prison life don't trail in with the inmates, that some of the shot callers aren't using the time to sneak in some politicking, that notes don't get passed under the table, that looks aren't telegraphing outside prison business, but men show up. They are not just inmates any more. Many of them have something to say and want to learn how to say it better.

With all the conning, fishing, and hustle that goes on, why do prison workshops? And how did I end up here?

On a personal level, I am the last person who should be here. Introverted to distress, soft from a life of academic work, somewhat middle class, white, male, and having avoided violence most of my life, utterly absent of tattoos, guns, and locked doors, I come from a standpoint far removed from prison realities. I live in something like another country, both materially and psychologically. In many ways I am less altruistic than ignorant, or in denial, of prison realities. I don't have to fight for my place. In the eyes on inmates, I likely do not even register on the scale that measures "cred."

The boundaries between the men in the workshops and me are stark, the wall already built (and Mexico didn't even have to pay for it). And getting into prison is almost as hard as getting out. The paperwork of clearance, the doors, the locks, the searches, the occasional contempt of the cops for someone doing "creative writing," said with real disdain, all add up to hassle.

Plus I defy my volunteer directives. I carry contraband, distribute banned reading material. I am already doing what I would do if I were being fished or conned, so why bother?

Part of what helps cross the boundaries is that the usual game of prison life gets short-circuited in the workshops. There are no cops. I turn off the radio. What I am interested in is writing. I invite them to leave their territory, as I have left mine, and meet on the ground of expression. Here we overlap. Here we have stories, we have wounds, we have lost, we grieve and we rejoice. We read what others have written about love, work, death, longing, lust, nature, betrayal, unfairness, fathers, children, cars.

The common ground outside or between the boundaries shakes down my perceptions of the inmates and it opens the possibility to see writing as a kind of freedom from prison.

I am not saying this just because I think it. I say it because they tell me it is so for them, some of them anyway.

Learning to express opens possibilities, other ways of seeing. The voice on the page is not always the voice of the man speaking on the yard. The voice on the page may see an alternative to violence as an answer, may see a connection or a story where before there was nothing. It may speak from an identity heretofore unknown, a stranger.

Here I do step in to say, that I believe in writing and literacy and language as tied to creating a full humanity. Self-critical enough not to be wholly evangelical, I confide with them that believing and living this is what gets me off my ass on Saturday mornings and out to a place where I might leap across a void so impossible that it might as well be on Mars.

But then it happens. And, in a strange way, I am at home in a place I cannot live.

We meet in no man's land for a brief encounter. The air here is too rarefied for both them and me. I offer a distilled tonic of expression, share the refined riches of my life as a teacher and writer. They offer their best truths. We exchange goods, even though the currencies are mixed. It's a barter, but it's contact.

In another life, we might be friends. In this life, we will remain strangers, but for the brief taste, this communion of the word. 

Sucker Punch and Haymaker: How Prison De-Humanizes Inmates

N. has shaved his head again. He has also bulked up over the last couple of months. Crude tattoos sprout from his forearms. He walks with more of a swagger, a don't-fuck-with-me cockiness. When he joins the workshop, he first scans the tables to see who else is there. Most often, he loosens up before giving me nod and smile of recognition. Sometimes, though, he sits outside the circle, back against a wall. 

N. is twenty-two years old, bright, and interested, deeply interested in writing screen plays. He has written a few that he has entered in the Pen Prison Writing Contest. So far, he has not won or placed. He keeps trying though., keeps knocking on the door.

N. is in on drug charges, like many of the other young men in the writing workshop.  He grew up poor in Phoenix, the only son of a single mom. He learned early on to fight, to hold his ground. Raves and the fast life of ecstasy dealing proved too much to resist.

He should, in my view, be in college. If he were at the University of Arizona, he would likely be one of the star students in film or writing courses. He works hard at his craft, taking it far more seriously than even my best university students. He reads well. He devours the books on writing that I bring in.

I know because he cites them when he makes a comment on another man’s work. He is a fine critic, with a good ear. 

I mention N. because he is a case study in what is lost when a country locks up too many of its men and women. He has become invisible to the “free world.” He is losing something of himself that he may never again recover. He wages a losing battle to feed the fires of humanity that burn strong in him. I ask myself how one might feed that humanity. What would it take to keep the burning, to add fuel to the flame? All I can offer is language and its ability to express some human truth, to ask a shared human question. I can bring in words and ideas that may or may not be enough to offset the soul hungry maw of prison. He needs dignity, fire to create, a chance.  He is hanging by a thread. He is one of over two million and counting of Americans who are locked up, which is more than any country on Earth. We are champion incarcerators. But it's killing us, even if we don't know it, especially because we don't know it. 

Money from education has decreased about as much as funding for prisons has increased. Incarceration cost more that drug treatment, and is far less effective. Prison serves to perpetuate poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and organized crime. It makes our nation a less desirable place to live. 
 

Prison, in this man's America, strives to punish rather than rehabilitate, crush rather than foster, reduce to the lowest common denominator rather than enlarge an offender's humanity. This punish and let-them-rot mission of mass incarceration produces monsters rather than fully functioning human beings. The system operates with clinical, if not fully thought through, efficiency.

Prisons exacerbate chronic social ills; they fan the flames of racism, reinforce a toxic form of masculinity, perpetuate cycles of poverty and violence, deprive inmates of contact with nature, and actually strengthen organized crime by letting gangs run the show on the yard. Education programs have been eliminated; vocational opportunities have disappeared. The prison complex in Tucson used to grow much of its own vegetables in a large garden that is now barren, scraped dust. 

Prison culture is racist, misogynistic, ultra macho. Prison populations are the throw-aways of society: the poor, the people of color, the under-educated, the marginalized, desperate, and mentally ill. The message of prison is one of despair more often than hope.   

But the greatest damage prisons exact on the men and women unfortunate enough to end up there is that it deprives them of voice, removes them from the horizon of social visibility. They become forgotten ghosts to all but those who make the trip to visit or volunteer. 

N. is trying. He wants to write. He wants to find his voice. He wants to learn. He wants to be heard, to be seen, to find out who he might become, given half a chance. 

His work is good, and he has published some poems, stories, and essays. He has explored how his identity as a man is tied to combat; he wrote an extended essay about his father that was published in the prison workshop literary magazine. That might give him some confidence, open a door to another possibility. His learning to express his struggles, his gaining a awareness of the forces aligned against him might provide a larger world of possibility. Reading and writing can illuminate and expand his horizons beyond the perimeter of razor wire. If he accepts prison life as all there is, he is doomed. 

Odds aren't good, but he is young enough to learn to dodge a punch, absorb a blow or two, especially if has vision to see what's coming.