Many of my new colleagues are in here on minor charges such as petty theft or parole violation. There are a lot of small-time drug dealers who are repeat offenders. When I first arrived, I was placed in a cellblock that consisted of eight one-man night cells and a day room. There were a dozen of us altogether, meaning that those without seniority slept on the floor. The day room had a TV for our edification and amusement, two steel picnic tables with benches welded to the floor, a shower, a comer commode open to full view and a telephone. One wall of this place was bars, the others steel plates, as were the ceiling and floor. Here most of us watched the tube, read, played cards or squabbled about who would sit where and what shows we would watch.
At day’s end we were returned to our night cells. Night is when the morons and neurotics holler and shake their bars, when the fanatics cry out entreaties to their God. One can shout obscenities at the neighbors with impunity. Those who would like to sleep are not permitted to have earplugs. The jail also offers the pleasures of solitary confinement. That’s where I am right now, in lockdown. One day they came and brought me here, without explanation. After the bedlam of where I had been, the quiet was a blessing, for I like to read and exercise my mind by filling yellow legal pads with introspection. That’s me; solitary is tougher on those with little education or sense of contemplation. On the wall of my cell are graffiti left by former residents. One welcomes the newcomer to bell, others speak of the horrors of aloneness. I realize how fortunate I am that for me silence holds no terror.
I am curious about the way some of my neighbors in lockdown look through you, like zombies. This is not a pose. These men are not only defeated; they are utterly dehumanized, their personalities destroyed. Lying on my metal shelflike bunk, I hear hollow echoes of steel doors clanging and distant cries of pain or desperation. I have heard men completely wig out. They hurl themselves around their cells screaming, beating on the walls and themselves. This behavior is tolerated to a certain point, after which several guards Will arrive and subdue the lunatic with force. Then he is dragged away. Where I don’t know.
I am not like any of these men. I am experiencing my time here as a student, as if I were in the field, discovering an alien society. Within all bad lies good. The state is depriving me of freedom; I am repaid with time to survey this utterly banal world and a monk’s cell in which to write.
Imagine yourself in this place. We are provided a fluorescent fight fixture 4 feet long and 16 inches wide as a “sun.” The solar pattern here is light 24 hours a day, for my keepers never turn it off. They need to peer in at me from time to time to make certain I am up to no mischief. A man can shave once a week when his razor is brought to his cell and left for an hour, the shaving done at a minute sink. Clothing is taken away for washing on an erratic schedule. We have mail service and phone access of a sort. All calls are long distance, collect. Long distance, appropriately, is anywhere outside the jail.
Most of my fellow incarcerates got here through acts of carelessness or stupidity. Some learned to steal and to oppose the greater society from the beginning. Others went to school but were unable to compete because of poverty or home environment. However they came, they’re part of the vast and growing underclass that America is fostering as the distance between rich and poor widens, as the minority at the top gathers more and more of society’s earnings to itself.
After their time inside, these men will go back to living the pointless, dangerous, deprived, depraved lives they lived before. The odds are very good that they will soon be caught in some misstep and resentenced. Whereupon citizen tax dollars will be used to invoke the petty callousness of life on the shelf. Society has no use for them outside, so it pays to lock them up out of sight, without opportunity or spiritual rehabilitation.
Perhaps you will be amused by what I, the intellectual con, feel about this. Let me say that we, the imprisoned, are America’s shame. The real crime here is that of your folly. Millions of people in this land languish wasted, underachieving. From that group are plucked out thousands for special attention at high cost. They are forced to subsist in barbarous environments, written off as a total loss, human trash to be vilified and spoken of in cliches by men and women who ought to know better but lack imaginations.
I say to you, the smug and contented: watch out. As one return for your indifference, our numbers are enlarging, our costs are rising swiftly. Building bigger and better or, alternatively, more degrading prisons does not begin to start resolving the reasons behind the problems and madness. It only makes the gibbering louder and the eventual consequences more awful for everyone when they finally occur. I find this situation to be humorous when I don’t marvel.
Vengeful punishment is ethically maladroit and economically foolish. Guns, educational dysfunction and dissolved family structure lead most criminals to prison. Education should be insightful, not a blind lesson plan-more teachers, fewer administrators; youths should be aimed at support groups, not gangs. What about bonus plans for companies that try to help? That so few see any of this clearly is the real conundrum here.
