Then there was the pivotal scene, Clint revealing his plot at the table over trays of slop. He laid it out step by step, eyes darting about the chow hall. One guy would have to gather hair from the barber shop to put on the dummy heads, another the materials from makeshift life preservers.
“Who’s in?” The Eastwood stare.
“What are the odds?” One of the guys.
“Slim,” like only Clint could say it.
One by one, they went around the table: “I’m in, I’m in, me too.”
See, they weren’t so much asking about the chances of making it out of the building but whether they’d emerge from the dangerous San Fran Bay and onto land somewhere alive. Slim, according to these men, was better than life on that rock. A fate worse than death.
A decade or so later, I’d find myself inside a rock, Graterford State Prison’s 30-foot-high concrete wall.
At age 18, I was sentenced to death by incarceration, more commonly referred to as life without parole. In the mid-90s, Graterford wasn’t as quiet or drab as I expected, large windows, skylights, sunshine pouring in from every angle, green trim everywhere, guys in street clothes, mostly athletic gear, lots of reds, blues, yellows. Masked pain. I masked mine too, trying to stay afloat at first, believing if I kept out of trouble the cage door would one day open. It’s impossible to fathom, until you step foot in a Pennsylvania prison, that life means death.
It wasn’t long before despair stomped out hope and I returned to the marijuana habit I’d picked up in junior high and that multiplied until my arrest. It got me sent to prisons within the prison several times. Mostly it was my attempt to escape from Graterford, to avoid the thought of possibly never seeing the other side of that menacing, nine-sided rock.
After about a decade of attempted escapes, I had what I call my awakening. Laying on a thin sponge mattress atop a concrete slab midway through a 90-day stint in the hole, I started asking myself some previously elusive questions. I began to wonder about things like legacy and the meaning of life, the stuff of midlife crises – at 27. One afternoon, while most of the wing was sound asleep, I asked myself – for the first time – how I’d gotten there. How’d I gotten from straight A’s to sitting in the furthest place from freedom a human can be, from deemed gifted and college prep to deemed irredeemable?
I emerged from that three-month burial determined to make it my last and to make something of myself – despite prison. I stopped getting high, even quit cigarettes and coffee. I jumped into my law work with a new enthusiasm and in a couple of years found my way back into court. I busted out of my comfort zone and caught the tail end of a program speaking with boys from a nearby juvenile hall that the Department of Corrections (DOC) abruptly shut down not long after my entry. Sharing my story and getting the response I got from those few groups of boys launched me into a life of service and purpose that I’d never look back from. I enrolled in a college program run independent of the DOC and earned a bachelor’s degree over the course of 17 semesters, stretching almost nine years. I also cofounded a restorative justice project and began coordinating alternatives to violence workshops. Despite prison.
My journey has been exceptional, unfortunately proving the rule that prisons are not only an effect of crime but a cause. Graterford, the offspring of Eastern State Penitentiary, only 30 miles from Philadelphia, enjoyed a long history of progressive administrations and that valued education and peer-created and -led programming. Any given year, hundreds of volunteers and visitors were granted entry into the Ford to provide a myriad of services. The opportunities there were unlike anything in the other couple dozen Pennsylvania prisons know as “The Mountains,” where racist staff would rather see us in striped suits chained to steal balls and fed bread and water through the slit beneath our cage doors.
My education, both scholastic and experiential, radicalized me. I began to see my individual freedom fight as inextricably tied with a larger struggle for collective liberation. One class in particular got me thinking for the first time about the purpose of prisons. What are prisons for?
There was a time I blamed everyone and thing for my incarceration: The cops, the DA, the two who told, the White Man, my absentee dad, everyone but me. At some point I 180ed to placing the blame squarely on my back and shoulders. Eventually I found myself somewhere in between systems and personal responsibility. But the question of whether prisons are necessary persisted.
Over time my abolitionism grew, but not without extended and critical thought, study, dialogue, and observation. I didn’t arrive at my position of prison abolition lightly or simply because I’m trapped inside one and wish I weren’t – though that’s certainly true. Rather, it’s based on the reality that nothing I’ve seen, heard, or lived in over 23 years has given me any hope that we can somehow trim around the edges, reduce this or that sentence, rename a few things here and there and “reform” an inherently dehumanizing and disempowering machinery into a healthy, life-giving bearer of fruit.
We can call them jails, penitentiaries, prisons, correctional institutions, change the titles of those who work there from wardens to superintendents, guards to correctional officers, surround them with walls or fences, re-create the architecture from spoke and wheel to long cell blocks to stacked tiers to clusters of cross-shaped units to whatever’s next. At the end of the day, we’re caging humans.
Since Walnut Street Jail opened in 1773 and Eastern in 1829, we’ve been “reforming” – a term that has returned with a vengeance in recent years. The idea of locking people in solitary so they can find God and their better selves was itself supposed to reform. After two and a half centuries, the results are clear. There hasn’t been a single year since the first men walked out of Eastern that recidivism was anything other than two-thirds, a number that continues to hang on today despite all the hoopla and funding for “reentry.”
The problem is, we’re lacking imagination. We carry access to the world in our back pockets. We talk in our phones and electronics act, questions get answered. We drop bombs on the other side of the planet without a human ever stepping foot in an aircraft. Yet we can’t – or won’t – imagine a more creative, effective way to deal with humans harming humans, the inevitable consequence of sharing a planet.
Should people who hurt others be separated? Maybe. Sometimes a period of separation might be necessary to the healing process. The person who caused the harm might need time to reflect. The harmed person might need to feel safe and can only achieve that in the absence of the one who caused the hurt. But are concrete and steel human warehouses where most leave worse than they came in the best way to accomplish this? We can do better. We must.
Imagine if people went to some humane location for a reasonable period of time where they weren’t numbered, caged, and infantilized but instead could work for a normal wage, pay taxes and their own bills, purchase and prepare their own meals. What if they could talk with their loved ones on their own phones for the same price the rest of the world pays instead of a day’s pay for each 15-minute monitored call in the middle of a noisy cell block?
Imagine if instead of being trapped in festering, bitterness, and anger at an oppressive, unjust system for years on end, people could focus on the harm they caused and to whom and be inspired to be accountable. Some equate accountability with prison, paying the proverbial debt to society. But who’s really paying, what are they paying, and who’s receiving said payment?
Imagine if people, instead of spending years and decades stashed behind walls, fences, and razor wire high in mountaintops, had to actually face those they hurt, answer real questions not drowned in abstract legalese.
Imagine it, instead of taxpayers footing 40k a year to ensure each incarcerated person remains unaccountable, people who cause harm had the opportunity to put things “more right” through concrete action, whether its working directly for those harmed or indirectly through any number of community vitalization projects. I know if someone harmed me, I’d want them to know about it and then do something about it. I wouldn’t want to pay for them to be hidden somewhere.
Agree or disagree with locking people up; unless you’re a prison profiteer, it’s hard to deny that the current process of administering justice is producing more harm than good.
And just think, the penitentiary model (whatever the name) has only been around over two centuries. People for thousands of years before the end of the 18th century had to and did come up with other ways of dealing with harm. So can we. It’ll require a radical departure from our dominant capitalist paradigms. We’d have to put people over profit and politics.
Now, 1 in 30 or so adults is smothered by the giant thumb of the criminal legal system, either from behind bars or under community service. The US can no longer claim to be the land of the free. Unless we rethink incarceration and whether it’s the only or even best way to address every social ill, we’ll be a nation of jailed and jailers.
Is a fate worse than death the best we can do in the name of justice? To escape from mass incarceration will require a plan much more elaborate than dummy heads and life jackets. Abolition might seem utopian, but only because we’ve been conditioned to view the caging of humans – certain humans, that is – as necessary, normal, and OK. We must change the narrative, our hearts, our senses. A good start would be for more of us to pull up to the table and say “I’m in.”
