“If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master — to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now/’ said he, “if you teach that nigger [speaking of myself] how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”
— Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845
In his classic autobiography, Douglass overhears his master thus instructing his wife. “From that moment,” Douglass says, “I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom,” In a similar way, for the dispossessed young Jimmy Santiago Baca, coming to own language and to inhabit it, was overwhelming and repeatedly empowering as his tumultuous memoir here attests.
In prison, 19 percent of adult males are illiterate, and 40 percent “functionally illiterate” — which means for example that they would be unable to write a business letter — as opposed to the national rate for adult Americans of 4 percent and 21 percent respectively. Learning disability rates, too (11 percent in prison compared to 3 percent in the general population), have contributed to the fact that over 70 percent of prisoners in state facilities have not completed high school. If illiteracy, as some believe, is a major cause of crime, literacy provides a means to see oneself, one’s life and condition, and to imagine alternatives.
Education lowers recidivism more effectively than any other program, and the more education received, the less likely an individual is to be rearrested or reimprisoned. The internal growth made possible by higher education is incalculable; most writers in this collection took advantage of college courses offered behind bars. For this reason, the defeat in 1994 of federal Pell Grants for higher education to prisoners was particularly devastating. One of the thousands of beneficiaries of post-secondary education behind bars, Jon Marc Taylor has been a tireless fighter for the continuation or restoration of such programs.
Education can make an extraordinary difference in the way one does time. Literate convicts with a trace of conscience are kept very busy, as O’Neill Stough of Arizona attested in two prizewinning pieces. In “Deliberate Indifference” (1994),* Roland, a man with AIDS, surprises the narrator into activism. As Roland is illiterate and timid, his requests for adequate blankets, food, and vitamins are ignored. The narrator writes his complaint for him, and when it fails, organizes assistance from other inmates. Later, writing Roland’s obituary in the form of a grievance lands him in isolation, but brings about reform. Stough’s essay “Cruel and Quite Usual” (1993)* narrates how a cruel guard was exposed in a prison newspaper.
Women in prison who have gotten together to address their medical needs (including AIDS), parenting, and the needs of their children, sometimes publish the results. Many men and women write about becoming jailhouse lawyers. Victor Hassine used his legal background to bring successful conditions-of-confinement lawsuits against two Pennsylvania prisons. Other writers have described how hosts of educated men and women become teachers of classes in literacy, AIDS, or whatever they can — work even more vital with the deep cuts in education and other programs.
Poet and teacher Joseph Bruchac analyzes the extraordinary transformative power of creative writing. “A lack of empathy may be one of the characteristics of the man or woman who commits a violent crime against another human being. Having been brutalized themselves as children, they pass on that violence to their victims. But when a person begins to write poetry, to create art, several things may happen. One is a birth of self-respect.. . Another is the ability to empathize.” Many prison writers suggest that coming to feel compassion has saved them from being brutalized; the exploration of the self through writing breaks the hold of the institution and opens the writer to growth (See About the Authors). In “Colorado Kills Creativity” (1994)* J. C. Amberchele recalls “a scared biker handing over a poem about love and loneliness” to a prison magazine (since suspended), “revealing a secret he had guarded most of his life.” Writing “was our first attempt to give something from within rather than to take from others,” he writes, “to act instead of react.”
While for some creativity makes sense only as a solitary refuge, others work well collectively. In Hettie Jones’s writing workshop at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, women meet for what they sometimes describe as three hours of unlimited freedom. Six of them here offer a “tetrina.” (A tetrina is a variant on the sestina, using four end words instead of six, which are repeated in a specified sequence.) When their work appeared in the book Aliens at the Border, the poets offered the facility’s first poetry reading. Later, a sextet composed of workshop members — Iris Bowen, Kathy Boudin, Judy Clark, Lisa Finkle, Miriam Lopez, and Jan Warren — collaborated to set down what the workshop has meant to them.
One of the most complex pieces in this volume, “Behind the Mirror’s Face,” by Paul St. John, is at once an attack on prison writing and a superb example of it. The sardonic monologist vents suspicions of the self-serving cynicism and sentimentality at the heart of “creative” ventures in a site of coercion. In his corrosive view, prison magazines are tokens that serve the administration’s agenda, writing teachers have overblown and naive expectations of the power of writing to change author and audience, and inmate authors seize on writing only to deepen their self-deception. His assaults on the abuses of writing reveal his hunger for an honesty and commitment he despairs of finding. Then, feeling reproached by another inmate’s suicide, he exits the scene in a narcotic flight, assigning classic names — Plethora, Hedone, Cacoethes (excess, pleasure, and bad habits) — to the rescuing drug.
Many writers in this book have been thrust into segregation (the “hole,” the “box,” the Special Housing Unit) or transferred because of their writing. Many have had their books and papers confiscated. Michael Saucier’s “Black Flag to the Rescue” here presents an unusual, comic — but true — writerly predicament. Incensed by reading this poem in the prison newspaper, the warden challenged Saucier to show him the roach casings he had found in his battery-operated typewriter. Saucier complied, to the warden’s chagrin.
On weekend graveyard shifts at St. Joseph’s Hospital I worked the emergency room, mopping up pools of blood and carting plastic bags stuffed with arms, legs, and hands to the outdoor incinerator. I enjoyed the quiet, away from the screams of shotgunned, knifed, and mangled kids writhing on gurneys outside the operating rooms. Ambulance sirens shrieked and squad car lights reddened the cool nights, flashing against the hospital walls: gray — red, gray — red. On slow nights I would lock the door of the administration office, search the reference library for a book on female anatomy and, with my feet propped on the desk, leaf through the illustrations, smoking my cigarette. I was seventeen.
One night my eye was caught by a familiar-looking word on the spine of a book. The title was 450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures. On the cover were black-and-white photos: Padre Hidalgo exhorting Mexican peasants to revolt against the Spanish dictators; Anglo vigilantes hanging two Mexicans from a tree; a young Mexican woman with rifle and ammunition belts crisscrossing her breast; Cesar Chavez and field workers marching for fair wages; Chicano railroad workers laying creosote ties; Chicanas laboring at machines in textile factories; Chicanas picketing and hoisting boycott signs.
From the time I was seven, teachers had been punishing me for not knowing my lessons by making me stick my nose in a circle chalked on the blackboard. Ashamed of not understanding and fearful of asking questions, I dropped out of school in the ninth grade. At seventeen I still didn’t know how to read, but those pictures confirmed my identity. I stole the book that night, stashing it for safety under the slop sink until I got off work. Back at my boardinghouse, I showed the book to friends. All of us were amazed; this book told us we were alive. We, too, had defended ourselves with our fists against hostile Anglos, gasping for breath in fights with the policemen who outnumbered us. The book reflected back to us our struggle in a way that made us proud.
Most of my life I felt like a target in the crosshairs of a hunter’s rifle. When strangers and outsiders questioned me I felt the hang-rope tighten around my neck and the trapdoor creak beneath my feet. There was nothing so humiliating as being unable to express myself, and my inarticulateness increased my sense of jeopardy. Behind a mask of humility, I seethed with mute rebellion.
Before I was eighteen, I was arrested on suspicion of murder after refusing to explain a deep cut on my forearm. With shocking speed I found myself handcuffed to a chain gang of inmates and bused to a holding facility to await trial. There I met men, prisoners, who read aloud to each other the works of Neruda, Paz, Sabines, Nemerov, and Hemingway. Never had I felt such freedom as in that dormitory. Listening to the words of these writers, I felt that invisible threat from without lessen — my sense of teetering on a rotting plank over swamp water where famished alligators clapped their horny snouts for my blood. While I listened to the words of the poets, the alligators slumbered powerless in their lairs. The language of poetry was the magic that could liberate me from myself, transform me into another person, transport me to places far away.
And when they closed the books, these Chicanos, and went into their own Chicano language, they made barrio life come alive for me in the fullness of its vitality. I began to learn my own language, the bilingual words and phrases explaining to me my place in the universe.
Months later I was released, as I had suspected [ would be. I had been guilty of nothing but shattering (Ik* windshield of my girlfriend’s car in a fit of rage.
Two years passed, f was twenty now, and behind bars again. The federal marshals had failed to provide convincing evidence to extradite me to Arizona on a drug charge, but still I was being held. They had ninety clays to prove I was guilty. The only evidence against rue was that my girlfriend had been at the scene of the crime with my driver’s license in her purse. They had to come up with something else. But there was nothing else. Eventually they negotiated a deal with the actual drug dealer, who took the stand against me. When the judge hit me with a million dollar bail, I emptied my pockets on his hooking desk: twenty six cents.
One night in my third month in the county jail, I was mopping the floor in front of the booking desk. Some detectives had kneed an old drunk and handcuffed him to the booking bars. His shrill screams raked my nerves like a hacksaw on bone, the desperate protest of his dignity against their inhumanity. But the detectives just laughed as he tried to rise and kicked him to his knees. When ibey went to the bathroom to pee and the desk attendant walked to the file cabinet to pull the arrest record, I shot my arm through the bars, grabbed one of the attendant’s university textbooks, and tucked it in my overalls. It was the only way I had of protesting.
It was late when I returned to my cell. Under my blanket I switched on a pen flashlight and opened the thick book at random, scanning the pages. I could hear the jailer making his rounds on the other tiers. The jangle of his keys and the sharp click of his boot heels intensified my solitude. Slowly I enunciated the words … p-o-n-d, ri-pple. It scared me that I had been reduced to this to find comfort. I always had thought reading a waste of time, that nothing could be gained by it. Only by action, by moving out into the world and confronting and challenging the obstacles, could one learn anything worth knowing.
Even as I tried to convince myself that I was merely curious, I became so absorbed in how the sounds created music in me and happiness, I forgot where I was. Memories began to quiver in me, glowing with a strange but familiar intimacy in which I found refuge. For a while, a deep sadness overcame me, as if I had chanced on a long-lost friend and mourned the years of separation. But soon the heartache of having missed so much of life, that had numbed me since I was a child, gave way, as if a grave illness lifted itself from me and I was cured, innocently believing in the beauty of life again. I stum-blingly repeated the author’s name as I fell asleep, saying it over and over in the dark: Words-worth, Words-worth.
Before long my sister came to visit me, and I joked about taking her to a place called Xanadu and getting her a blind date with this vato* named Coleridge who lived on the seacoast and was malias* on morphine. When I asked her to make a trip into enemy territory to buy me a grammar book, she said she couldn’t. Bookstores intimidated her, because she, too, could neither read nor write.
Days later, with a stub pencil I whittled sharp with my teeth, I propped a Red Chief notebook on my knees and wrote my first words. From that moment, a hunger for poetry possessed me.
Until then, I had felt as if I had been born into a raging ocean where I swam relentlessly, flailing my arms in hope of rescue, of reaching a shoreline I never sighted. Never solid ground beneath me, never a resting place. I had lived with only the desperate hope to stay afloat; that and nothing more.
† In Chicano dialect: dude. (JSB)
† In Chicano dialect: strung out. (JSB)
But when at last I wrote my first words on the page, I fch an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale. As more and more words emerged, I could finally rest: I had a place to stand for the first time in my life. The isJand grew, with each page, into a continent inhabited by people I knew and mapped with the life I lived.
I wrote about it all — about people I had loved or hated, about the brutalities and ecstasies of my life. And, for the first rime, the child in me who had witnessed and endured unspeakable terrors cried out not just in impotent despair, but with the power of language. Suddenly, through language, through writing, my grief and my joy could be shared with anyone who would listen. And I could do this all alone; I could do it anywhere. I was no longer a captive of demons eating away at me, no longer a victim of other people’s mockery and loathing, that had made me clench my fist white with rage and grit my teeth to silence. Words now pleaded back with the bleak lucidity of hurt. They were wrong, those others, and now I could say it.
Through language I was free. I could respond, escape, indulge; embrace or reject earth or the cosmos. I was launched on an endless journey without boundaries or rules, in which I could salvage the floating fragments of my past, or be born anew in the spontaneous ignition of understanding some heretofore concealed aspect of myself. Each word steamed with the hot lava juices of my primordial making, and I crawled out of stanzas dripping with birth-blood, reborn and freed from the chaos of my life. The child in the dark room of my heart, who had never been able to find or reach the light switch, flicked it on now; and I found in the room a stranger, myself, who had waited so many years to speak again. My words struck in me lightning crackles of elation and thunderhead storms of grief.
When I had been in the county jail longer than anyone else, I was made a trustee. One morning, after a fistfight, I went to the unlocked and unoccupied office used for lawyer-client meetings, to think. The bare white room with its fluorescent tube lighting seemed to expose and illuminate my dark and worthless life. When I had fought before, I never gave it a thought. Now, for the first time, I had something to lose — my chance to read, to write; a way to live with dignity and meaning, that had opened for me when I stole that scuffed, secondhand book about the Romantic poets.
“I will never do any work in this prison system as long as I am not allowed to get my G.E.D.” That’s what I told the reclassification panel. The captain flicked off the tape recorder. He looked at me hard and said, “You’ll never walk outta here alive. Oh, you’ll work, put a copper penny on that, you’ll work.”
After that interview I was confined to deadlock maximum security in a subterranean dungeon, with ground-level chicken-wired windows painted gray. Twenty-three hours a day I was in that cell. I kept sane by borrowing books from the other cons on the tier. Then, just before Christmas, I received a letter from Harry, a charity house Samaritan who doled out hot soup to the homeless in Phoenix. He had picked my name from a list of cons who had no one to write to them. I wrote back asking for a grammar book, and a week later received one of Mary Baker Eddy’s treatises on salvation and redemption, with Spanish and English on opposing pages. Pacing my cell all day and most of each night, I grappled with grammar until I was able to write a long true-romance confession for a con to send to his pen pal. He paid me with a pack of smokes. Soon I had a thriving barter business, exchanging my poems and letters for novels, commissary pencils, and writing tablets.
One day I tore two flaps from the cardboard box that held all my belongings and punctured holes along the edge of each flap and along the border of a ream of state-issue paper. After I had aligned them to form a spine, I threaded the holes with a shoestring, and sketched on the cover a hummingbird fluttering above a rose. This was my first journal.
Whole afternoons I wrote, unconscious of passing time or whether it was day or night. Sunbursts exploded from the lead tip of my pencil, words that grafted me into awareness of who I was; peeled back to a burning core of bleak terror, an embryo floating in the image of water, I cracked out of the shell wide-eyed and insane. Trees grew out of the palms of my hands, the threatening otherness of life dissolved, and I became one with the air and sky, the dirt and the iron and concrete. There was no longer any distinction between the other and I. Language made bridges of fire between me and everything 1 saw. I entered into the blade of grass, the basketball, the con’s eye and child’s soul.
At night I flew. I conversed with floating heads in my cell, and visited strange houses where lonely women brewed tea and rocked in wicker rocking chairs listening to sad Joni Mitchell songs.
Before long I was frayed like rope carrying too much weight, that suddenly snaps. I quit talking. Bars, walls, steel bunk and floor bristled with millions of poem-making sparks. My face was no longer familiar to me. The only reality was the swirling cornucopia of images in my mind, the voices in the air. Midair a cactus blossom would appear, a snake-flame in blinding dance around it, stunning me like a guard’s fist striking my neck from behind.
The prison administrators tried several tactics to get me to work. For six months, after the next monthly prison board review, they sent cons to my cell to hassle me. When the guard would open my cell door to let one of them in, I’d leap out and fight him — and get sent to thirty-day isolation. I did a lot of isolation time. But I honed my image-making talents in that sensory-deprived solitude. Finally they moved me to death row, and after that to “nut-run,” the tier that housed the mentally disturbed.
As the months passed, I became more and more sluggish. My eyelids were heavy, I could no longer write or read. I slept all the time.
One day a guard took me out to the exercise field. For the first time in years I felt grass and earth under my feet. It was spring. The sun warmed my face as I sat on the bleachers watching the cons box and run, hit the handball, lift weights. Some of them stopped to ask how I was, but I found it impossible to utter a syllable. My tongue would not move, saliva drooled from the corners of my mouth. I had been so heavily medicated I could not summon the slightest gestures. Yet inside me a small voice cried out, I am fine! I am hurt now but I will come back! I’m fine!
Back in my cell, for weeks I refused to eat. Styrofoam cups of urine and hot water were hurled at me. Other things happened. There were beatings, shock therapy, intimidation.
Later, I regained some clarity of mind. But there was a place in my heart where I had died. My life had compressed itself into an unbearable dread of being. The strain had been too much. I had stepped over that line where a human being has lost more than he can bear, where the pain is too intense, and he knows he is changed forever. I was now capable of killing, coldly and without feeling. I was empty, as I have never, before or since, known emptiness. I had no connection to this life.
But then, the encroaching darkness that began to envelop me forced me to re-form and give birth to myself again in the chaos. I withdrew even deeper into the world of language, cleaving the diamonds of verbs and nouns, plunging into the brilliant light of poetry’s regenerative mystery. Words gave off rings of white energy, radar signals from powers beyond me that infused me with truth. I believed what I wrote, because I wrote what was true. My words did not come from books or textual formulas, but from a deep faith in the voice of my heart.
I had been steeped in self-loathing and rejected by everyone and everything — society, family, cons, God and demons. But now I had become as the burning ember floating in darkness that descends on a dry leaf and sets flame to forests. The word was the ember and the forest was my life… .
Writing bridged my divided life of prisoner and free man. I wrote of the emotional butchery of prisons, and my acute gratitude for poetry. Where my blind doubt and spontaneous trust in life met, I discovered empathy and compassion. The power to express myself was a welcome storm rasping at tendril roots, flooding my soul’s cracked dirt. Writing was water that cleansed the wound and fed the parched root of my heart.
I wrote to sublimate my rage, from a place where all hope is gone, from a madness of having been damaged too much, from a silence of killing rage. I wrote to avenge the betrayals of a lifetime, to purge the bitterness of injustice. I wrote with a deep groan of doom in my blood, bewildered and dumbstruck; from an indestructible love of life, to affirm breath and laughter and the abiding innocence of things. I wrote the way I wept, and danced, and made love.
1991, Reflections on Albuquerque County Jail, New Mexico and Arizona State Prison-Florence, Arizona
Prisoners are the black sheep of our societal family, and thus discussions of their treatment are relegated to back-room deliberations of how they should be punished. A common opinion is that we are too soft on criminals and that whatever rehabilitation (or lack thereof) they receive is more than they deserve. An example of this disposition was the congressional effort to bar inmate eligibility for Pell Grant higher-education financial assistance. Last year, both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed legislation prohibiting offenders from qualifying for such aid. Before surveying this attempt at capitol punishment, a short history of college programs for prisoners is in order.
Not until 1953, when the University of Southern Illinois matriculated its first class of inmate-students, did higher education enter the nation’s penal institutions. U.S.I.’s radical experiment was slow to take root, for by 1965 there were only twelve Post-Secondary Correctional Education programs in the country. The largest constraint facing these programs was the same as for any type of rehabilitative program — lack of funding.
In 1965, however, Congress passed Title IV of the Higher Education Act, which contained the Pell Grant program entitling student-prisoners who met certain criteria to receive financial aid for college-level studies. With the implementation of this funding, PSCE opportunities flourished; by 1973 there were 182 programs, by 1976, 237 programs and by 1982 (the last official count), 350 programs offered in 90 percent of the states. Yet with the continued growth of the nation’s correctional population, at most 10 percent of the country’s prisoners were enrolled in PSCE.
Even so, prison officials could see the effectiveness of these programs. Correctional administrators, facing ever-growing numbers of offenders whom they had to house and control, found that those enrolled in them were easier to manage and better behaved than the average prisoner, provided a calming effect on the rest of the population, and served as positive role models.
What is more, beginning in the mid-1970s, studies of inmate college students (especially those earning degrees) revealed that they recidivated at much lower rates than nonenrolled prisoners. Between 1974 and 1979, three programs in Alabama, Maryland, and New Jersey reported substantial reductions in offender-students’ recidivism, compared with standard return rates. These reductions ranged from a drop from 57 to 37 percent in one case to a dramatic difference of from 80 to only 10 percent in another program.
Perhaps the most widely reported evaluation was published in Psychology Today in 1983. The study noted that “recidivism .. . among college classes at New Mexico State Penitentiary between 1967 and 1977 averaged 15.5 percent, while the general population averaged 68 percent recidivism.”
The positive reports continue into this decade, with the District of Columbia’s Lorton Prison College Program noting a recidivism rate for students of only 6 percent, compared with an average that exceeded 40 percent. In 1991, the New York Department of Correctional Services reported on its four-year study of the state’s PSCE — the second-largest program in the nation. The study found a “statistically significant” difference in the return rates of those who earned degrees and those who did not complete the college program.
Today it costs $25,000 annually to incarcerate an individual, whereas one year of PSCE programming can be purchased for $2,500. In other words, for only 10 percent of the cost of a single year of imprisonment, an offender can enroll for two semesters of postsec-ondary education. If such education is continued for two to four years, society more than likely will receive ex-offenders whose chances of recidivating are in the low double- or single-digit range, compared with a national recidivism range of 50 to 70 percent.
Besides providing substantial savings by reducing the costly rate of recidivism, prison college programs produce educated workers for the economy. Studies in New York and Ohio in the early 1980s, at the height of the Reagan recession, revealed that PSCE graduates were employed in substantially higher numbers than other parolees in the area (60 to 75 percent compared with only 40 percent), suggesting that the education earned by the offenders favorably influenced employers’ decisions in hiring them and offset the social stigma attached to their ex-con status. Parolee unemployment is a prime contributor to recidivism, so any program that enhances an ex-offender’s employability is of benefit to the community.
The Corrections Program of the College of Santa Fe, New Mexico, has had great success in turning around its inmate-students. Examples include a graduate who went on to become a physician, another who became a vice president of an international company, and others who became personnel directors and teachers. A former death-row inmate rose to the directorship of a state corrections industry department.
These success stories give added emphasis to the words of former Chief justice Warren Burger: “We must accept the reality that to confine offenders behind walls without trying to change them is an expensive folly with short-term benefits — winning battles while losing the war.”
On July 30,1991, Senator Jesse Helms rose to introduce Amendment 938, which read: “No person incarcerated in a federal or state penal institution shall receive any funds appropriated to carry out subpart 1 of part A of Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965.” Helms fulminated that “American taxpayers are being forced to pay taxes to provide free college tuitions for prisoners at a time when so many law-abiding, taxpaying citizens are struggling to find enough money to send their children to college.”
The Helms Amendment was grounded in two assumptions: (1) that a significant diversion of grants from needy young people to prisoners is occurring, resulting in a large percentage of traditional students failing to receive aid; and (2) that inmate-students are not “needy.” Both are false. Only 1.2 percent of the total number of Pell Grants issued went to prisoners. By any stretch of the imagination, this is not a significant diversion of funds.
As for prisoners not being “needy,” a 1986 Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin noted that 60 percent of prison inmates had earned less than $10,000 the year previous to their incarcerations. In other words, they would have been below the poverty line and thus eligible for educational financial aid had they not been imprisoned.
With African-Americans, Latinos, and other minorities composing 55 percent of our country’s prison population, and with 60 percent of inmates coming from the lowest economic levels of society and 41 percent having less than a ninth-grade education, compared with 16 percent of the nation’s adult population, there can be little doubt that student-prisoners are “needy.” “If you want to educate black men, if you want co reclaim the talent out there,” observes Robert Powell, assistant vice president for academic affairs at Shaw University in North Carolina, “you have to go into the prison.” The sad reality in the United States today is that PSCK is one of the few remaining means by which minority youth can receive a college education.
The same day Amendment 938 was introduced, it passed the Senate by a floor vote of 60 to 38 and was attached to an appropriations bill. Helms later attached his amendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act. By then, the legislative action had shifted to the floor of the House.
On March 26, 1992, Representative Thomas Coleman and Representative Bart Gordon presented a joint amendment that would prohibit “any individual who is incarcerated in any Federal or State penal institution” from qualifying for Pell Grant assistance. The basic argument propelling the measure was the same as the one Senator Helms had promulgated the previous July. Many “facts” and “figures” were bandied about during proponents’ orations over the issue, most of them inaccurate.
Representative Coleman, for example, claimed 100,000 prisoners received Pell Grants. This figure would mean that one out of every eight inmates in the nation is a college student! Such a notion is preposterous. In 1982, researcher John Littlefield and Bruce Wolford estimated that 27,000 inmate-students were enrolled in 359 prison college programs, representing less than 4 percent of the national penal population. Another study conducted the same year reported that PSCE funding was arranged through a myriad of sources, but Pell Grants were the primary tuitional financing for 37 percent of the inmate-students. Even with prison populations doubling in the interim, projecting a matching increase of inmate-students and guesstjmattng a doubling in the percentage of Pell Grant use by this population, a reasonable assumption is that fewer than 40,000 offenders received federal higher-education assistance in 1991.
During the House debate, Representative Steve Gunderson tossed more false facts into the mix. He stated that only 3.1 million students out of 6.3 million applicants received Pell Grants, and that this imbalance of aid “to the most needy of students among us” could be substantially corrected by barring inmate eligibility.
Actually, 3.6 million students receive Pell Grants, not 3.1 million. Furthermore, the Senate’s version of the Higher Education Reauthorization Act significantly increased the appropriation Jot the Pell Grant program, enabling an additional 600,000 students to receive aid. The increased funding of the program wiJl raise the family income ceiling from the current $30,000 to $50,000, with grant maximums raised as well, from $2,400 to $3,700 and eventually $4,500 by 1999. Ironically, Senator Helms cast the only dissenting vote against the very program he was so concerned about the year before.
The Coleman Gordon Amendment easily passed, 351 to 39, and was sent to a joint House-Senate conference, whose duty it was to resolve the differences between it and the Senate’s version.
Meanwhile, outside Congress, opposition to the Helms and Coleman-Gordon amendments was gathering. On July 31, 1991, the day after Senator Helms introduced his amendment, a one-page alert, headlined HELMS AMENDMENT WOULD DROP INCARCERATED PELL GRANT PROGRAMS, went out over the national Post-Secondary e-mail network. The bulletin briefly explained the proposition and included some of the debate’s highlights.
This rapid notification of the impending disaster facing Post-Secondary Correctional Education galvanized a wide array of institutions, organizations, and individuals. College presidents and university deans, professional associations and political action committees, friends and family of prisoners as well as prisoners themselves— all organized campaigns and lobbied Congress to vote against the prohibition of Pell Grants for prisoners.
In September 1991, the fourteen universities and nine private colleges that compose New York’s Inmate Higher Education Program (IHEP) convened their semiannual conference with the Pell Grant crisis as the main item on the agenda. Tbey agreed to form a political action committee to oppose the amendments.
The newly formed PAC collected information and disseminated it both within and outside the New York IHEP association. It also cooperated with other concerned organizations, including Educators for Social Responsibility, the Fortune Society, Literacy Volunteers, Minorities in Corrections, the National Education Association, the NAACP, the New York State Correctional Association, the Coalition for Criminal Justice, PEN, the Urban League, and Wilmington College. Additionally, the PAC” contacted the offices of representatives who sat on the joint congressional committees and provided extensive PSCE data.
Another group active in the fight was the Correctional Education Association. Founded in 1946 by Austin McCormick, the man who established correctional education as a fundamental part of prison reform in the 1930s, the CEA is the only professional association ded icated to serving educators and administratots who provide services to students in correctional settings. Steven Steures, the CEA executive director and legislative network chairman, organized the association’s extensive response.
Also active was Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE), which was founded in Texas in 1972, was expanded nationally in 1985, and now has more than seven thousand members. The organization’s position is that prisons should be used only for those who absolutely must be incarcerated and should have all the resources they need to turn prisoners’ lives around. The national office in Washington has extensive contacts with congressional representatives and worked closely with Senator Pell’s staff.
Across the nation, inmate-students also worked to defeat their funding exclusion. On some prison-college campuses, such as in New York State, the faculty and institution staff organized the students’ reaction, while on others the students themselves marshaled their response.
The men enrolled in Ball State University’s extension program at the Indiana State Reformatory were such a self-motivated group. Members of the prison’s debate team utilized the semester’s various speech and communications classes, which had enrolled over 70 percent of the 13 8-member student body, as a forum to get the word out.
With the cooperation of the teaching staff, students in the speech classes were allowed to fashion presentations in accordance with the courses’ structures to provide information on the Helms Amendment. These presentations ranged from simple lectures to round-table discussions to mock debates. The students imaginatively employed cost-comparison charts, experts on PSCE, and audience participation as debate judges to bring home the point of the value of PSCE and the seriousness of the legislative threat. Other students wrote letters directly to the state’s representatives, or to friends and relatives urging them to do so.
The combined efforts of the nation’s colleges and universities, professional associations and political action committees, individual voters, as well as the erudite pleas of the prisoners themselves, effected the defeat of the Helms Amendment in two separate joint committees. The process was repeated against the Coleman-Gordon Amendment.
In this effort incarcerated persons learned that they were not powerless. They could lobby Washington politicians just like any other special interest group. What the men and women who wear numbers on their chests lack in political clout and financial resources, they can make up in cunning and determination to succeed. Across the nation, the motto of prisoners needs to become nee aspera tenant (frightened by no difficulties).
1993, Indiana State Reformatory Pendleton, Indiana
Six women argue with their lives
as they write among their dreams
chasing shadows down streets
and reaching for words
like fruit, like stars, words
to save their lives
to snatch them from the streets
defend their dreams
Don’t we deserve our dreams
our hard borne words
labor of our lives?
We have taken in our streets
the clash, the color, the broken streets
and shaped them into dreams
and then to words
to change our lives
six lives held by dreams
a world of streets, our luminous words
1996, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility Bedford Hills, New York
“Write about something inside that wants to get out — a poem, a bitch, a muse, something tethered.”
It’s six fifteen on a Wednesday evening. Six women, pens in hand, are gathered around a table. The lesson has come from Hettie Jones, who runs the writing workshop at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. This “inside-out” exercise is only one of the many assignments she has brought us over the nine years the workshop has been in existence. We’ve written about “night,” about “an encounter with a stranger,” about persons, places, and events. We’ve even responded successfully to the challenge to “write a poem that makes no sense.”
Each week’s lesson comes with many examples of published work. We take turns reading these and then talk about issues related to writing — techniques, style, form, content. The hope is that the work will inspire us and that we’ll find a starting point to begin our own.
The writing workshop has had a profound and lasting impact on each of us. Some of our writing is taken from personal experience, both in and out of prison, a lot of it comes from the pain of being incarcerated, away from family and especially children. Sometimes the writing just comes from a place never visited before. We all agree that being in the workshop has made a distinct difference in how we see ourselves. To explore this, we decided to respond to a series of questions about it.
What brought you to the workshop initially?
Iris: “I knew I liked to write and wanted to learn the proper techniques.”
Lisa: “I’d come from a battered relationship. The group appeared to offer a safe place to start to figure out who and what I was.”
Jan: “I went because I was looking for anything to do that would help me forget where 1 was. The first time I attended I didn’t feel able to write, although I wanted to. My mother had a gift for words. She could express herself very well and I wanted so much to be like her. But I wasn’t like her. In class that first night, Hettie had to lead me through the experience of visualizing a story. I imagined a tinker who drove a battered car on a dusty road. I could see the place he traveled. I could smell the sagebrush and hear the lullaby of the ocean. But I couldn’t put it on paper.”
What was it like the first time you read aloud something you wrote?
Lisa: “I was scared to death.”
Jan: “I was afraid my words wouldn’t be understood.”
Iris: “Scary. I didn’t like it.”
What has the workshop done for you?
Lisa: “Hettie took what I thought of as personal and private and made me see it as potentially an art form.”
Kathy: “When I was in the women’s movement, and a whole generation of poetry was created out of the rising identity of women, I found myself writing some poetry, but I never thought that I could do it as a regular part of my life. I grew up clinging to the rational. Emotional currents had, for me, the terror of loss of control. Yet poetry always called me. It was my way of letting go and feeling those inner currents — dreaming, hoping, crying, and fearing. With the writing workshop, I had found a space that would, on a regular basis, give me permission to look at the inner self and walk in it.”
Miriam: “I’ve learned to express myself better. If I write anything that hurts, it’s like getting it out of the way. I don’t have to worry about it again. I used to hold things in and lash out. By writing, I can actually calm myself and avoid hurting someone’s feelings.”
Precious: “Writing about my daughter gave me an opportunity to express some feelings I had about our relationship. I work with women in here who have children in foster care. Losing children is a tremendous psychological loss. My poems gave me the opportunity to write that pain out.”
Iris: “I feel differently about my whole life now. Instead of getting angry, I just go and write it. That’s a change for me. Through the workshop I’ve learned to let those feelings out in a productive manner. And as I write more, I’ve begun to discover another part of me.”
Judy: “The workshop is a place in this environment where we let go of the distractions and just work. After we read what Hettie brings in, we sit quietly, preparing to write. The energy of that quietness, that collective quietness, is the moment creativity gets inspired in that room. What’s interesting, looking back at the process, is that the content of what I write about often sneaks up on me. For example, Hettie once gave us an exercise to write a short prose piece in which we focus on pacing by slowing down the action through use of minute detail. I tried to think of an expetience where time seemed to stand still, and found myself telling a story of being molested by a French tutor. I was writing about an event that I had never been able to tell anyone about. I felt a rush of energy as something that had been moldering inside me was released.”
Have you come to think differently about your writing process?
Jan: “I never wrote that story of the tinker. In fact, for a long time I did not go back to the workshop. But when I did, I found myself looking to learn. And I did. I’m not sure I can identify pace and rhythm and drama by pointing to an example of these in my writing. What I can do is sense that what words I have strung together have those qualities. I feel, I remember, I write. And sometimes I’m just very fortunate to end up with a piece that works.”
Precious: “My earliest memories now are of how clinical my writing was when I started. I guess that was to be expected since I had just finished a degree in psychology. Still, I wasn’t pleased with Hettie’s constant reminders of just how dry my writing was. Wasn’t poetry a mosaic of passion, sadness, and happiness — all psychological expressions of our experience? I wanted desperately to write wonderful words about my children and my family — it’s important that we do things in here to let our families know we are okay. Then I read this line from another poet — ‘hit from time to time with lonely postcards.’ It moved me deeply and helped me to write a poem to someone from my past who was, like me, imprisoned. This one didn’t get the usual ‘too analytical’ comment from Hettie, and I was very pleased. It gave me hope, convinced me again that even if I’m incarcerated, my mind isn’t.”
Judy: “At first, I would balk at taking any word out, as though each word represented a piece of my soul. But gradually I learned that a flood of words can muddy up the picture, that often less is more. Making a poem is like carving a sculpture out of rough rock. I get this intense pleasure out of carving away words. It feels like a spiritual experience. Once that happened, that’s when I felt, you know, I’m a poet.”
The workshop has published two books — More In Than Out in 1992 and Aliens at the Border in 1997. There is an interesting story behind the title of one of these publications. One night, Hettie brought into the workshop a photo with a caption “Aliens at the Bordet,” and one of the women wrote a poem about it. The title seemed to be a perfect description of the group. As Miriam said at the time, “I think it is perfect because sometimes I feel as if I’m looking out from the other side of the world.” What were some of your reactions when you finally did see your work published out in the world?
Iris: “It felt good that I had written something well enough and purposeful enough to be brought to the attention of the public.”
Lisa: “I was proud of myself— and that was a strange feeling. It also felt encouraging, I think. It’s one thing to have Hettie say you have potential, that you’re a great writer. Then to have your work published and know that people are buying it — that’s a whole different thing.”
Jan: “When I was young and full of dreams, I used to tell my friends in school I was going to ‘make the books.’ It was my way of saying that I would achieve some wonderful thing in my life that everyone would know about. Seeing my work, pieces of my life laid out in our book, made me feel I had fulfilled that prophecy.”
What lasting effects has your experience in the workshop left you with?
Lisa: “Many, but one is a real desire for writing — not just a desire, but a real joy. I consider myself a writer, a good writer.”
Kathy: “Poetry and my work in the workshop have become a part of my life in the way some people meditate or pray. I go to poetry to help me discover the mysteries of my thoughts and feelings. It is a path into the world that is always present but whose presence we are not always aware of or do not always value. Poetry is also a craft. After struggling with emotions that I should be able to spontaneously write a poem from, I am slowly learning the patience to take a thought and work with it.”
Iris: “I can disperse my pain through my pen.”
Judy: “My poetry has also been a way for me to express feelings of loss and shame and hope as a mother in prison, and my growing sense of remorse for the terrible losses I have caused others by my crime. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the workshop has played a role in my reclaiming myself and my humanity.”
For all of us the writing workshop has been a joy, a burden, but most of all a release from the cinderblock walls that surround us year after year. We assume that we will be there, to release ourselves, every Wednesday. When we presented a reading of our poetry to the prison population for the first time, everyone wondered why we hadn’t done it sooner. But first we had to learn to take ourselves seriously as writers. Not only finding our voices, but also believing that these voices mean something beyond our private world.
1998, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility Bedford Hills, New York
Charlie says to me, “We gotta get ready for that new facility mag, get us our voices heard.” He’s chewing on a nip of his cigar, which I despise, the stogie like a pen on the tripod of his hand.
“This is prison, Chuck, not a facility. In here they don’t facilitate a friggin’ thing.”
Charlie can’t listen and talk in the same context. “Prison writing, man, that’s where it’s at.” He’s staring at a blank screen above my shoulder.
My brain lines up a reasonable response: How long you been down, you big stupid ape? “It makes no difference, bro,” I say instead. This is one redneck I won’t offend.
From here on in it’s a one-way conversation, two hundred and eighty pounds of duress humming on about Jack Henry Abbott writing his way out of the joint because he had the guts to speak up, how prison writing breaks down the walls of isolation, how the pen is mightier than . . .
The thoughts begin to soar V-formation:
Funny that in the end the sword proved to be Abbott’s master, / With Mailer for an editor I’d write my way out of hell. /He also did a little snitching there, if the truth be told. I
But they just dive off and fall away. I wave my hands at the curtains of smoke Charlie has installed in my cell, and he knows that’s enough of him for one morning.
I ride the inside track, and within an hour I find out why the warden has seen fit that a few caged birds should go to print. As every con knows, democracy in the prison setting is just another word for “never,” so when each inmate group petitions to put out their own newsletters, the warden has an aberration to prevent. (Manifold printing costs, new jobs for x inmate staffs to type, edit, and lay out page after page of burning prose and slick graphics on blazing 486 computers. Forget it. They end up smarter than the guards. Then the salaried censorship squad for all whiners who will harp on and on about an evil system and skewed justice, dire living, exploitation, Bill of Rights violations and conspiracy theories ad nauseam.) So what is a reasonably sly warden to do? He will locate two or three lifers who would have been Nobel laureates if not for lack of opportunity, to offer them the chance of their lifetime. It is time his prisoners be heard!
He will leave out one small detail: This is to be a one-time venture, something he can show the inmate groups so their nagging will rest. You will have one facility-sponsored publication, one single vehicle of choice for all your groaning pains and visions. Come and spill out your guts, dudes, in unity of song!
There will be plenty of Dostoyevskys and Malcolms in this number, but from the groups Mr. Warden will hear a single chorus: RUB IT ON YOUR CHEST ‘CAUSE WE AIN’T RIDIN’ SHOTGUN. His calculated effort will be thus consummated, and he will smile to the portrait of Reagan on his wall. Hey, guys, I handed it to you on a mess hall tray and you declined.
For Charlie it will be the beginning of great things. Charlie got soul. If I could synthesize the heart of his verse it would be this: the longing of looking through iron bars at the real world. Real touching stuff once you get past the trademark ache / break and dove / love rhymes. Next time around he would probably push his more radical stuff, things like “Why the Parole Board Should Be Abolished” and “Why Media Coverage of Violent Crime Should Be Abolished” and “Why the Random Cell Search Should Be Abolished.” I just hope he won’t start acting up when he discovers there isn’t going to be a second time.
Prison Writing. The term reverberates in my brain case like kettledrums. The anger returns. I can’t recall the psycho-speak, but I know it’s like a form of Pavlov’s. People are set off by certain sights, sounds, even smells, that affect them in very special ways.
Suddenly the gallery feels awfully quiet. I stare at my typewriter, which turns into a missile-control board. It’s time to fire away.
I will call her Mother Nature, an artist who came into the prison to “find flowers where others saw only weeds.” I taped the Author’s Release to the wall two weeks ago. I feed a blank sheet to the machine.
Dear Mother Narture.
Thank you for the opportunity you have given us to videotape our work for a showing at the Cultural Center. 1 think you are a unique spirit for daring to tap into the voices of this miserably dark place. However, I regret to say that you are on the wrong track if your intentions are to use this so-called Prison Writing Experience as a means for reform, simply because prisoners, although they understand what is wrong with the system better than any criminologist, judge, cop, or outsider, have the credibility of elves. In this sense prison writing’s dead wood.
The only other way to look at prison writing is as a way of expression. And, frankly, who wants to hear about loneliness, hopelessness, despair, loss of autonomy, harassment, contempt, or civil death, except to feel real good that things aren’t as bad out in the world? Please don’t think that I will allow myself to be used as consolation for a civilian audience.
Finally, if you are on a true healing mission, seeking to change the minds and hearts of prisoners through a revolution of the pen, I will appreciate it very much if you’d begin with sending me some real food and vitamins to counterbalance the negative effects of the garbage I am fed. I could also use real medical care, you know, the kind that steps right to the business and doesn’t doubt the patient, and doesn’t wait for rigor mortis in order to proceed. That’s all I got to say.
Very truly yours.
Dr.J.
Sorry, Charlie, I think you better take all your “I hurt” trash and your impossible solutions and rub them on your fat redneck chest. I will be a writer in prison, for now. You be all the prison writer you wish. Be a white gorilla in your cubicle bush with iron fronds and rock-hard soil. Moan your nightly if-onlys and grunt your morning sores of broken luck alone, my man, ‘cause I’ll be traveling light with the Daughters of Sin. Their silken manes fall down their rears like pouring silver, and their moans are all 1 need for a cloak. Their touch is a tingle of mercurial dew, their panting a hot leaden mist on a desert of glass. I won’t tell you about their kiss, not tonight, Charlie.
Charlie would never understand that nothing they do here is for his benefit. The language of his philosophical cutlery will be toned down, watered down, rekneaded to retain the basic dignity of the system, or rejected if he doesn’t go along. Would any prison foster a printed attack on its own ways? Prison writing is as free as the author. Again I engage the machine and begin to spin out a little speech I Have prepared for my prison writing group, which I polish up as I go.
On the Subject of Prison Writing
Good evening, fellow writers. I would like to take a few minutes tonight to discuss prison writing and its place in the larger world of letters.
As we know, writing comes in many kinds. There is fiction writing, journal writing, junk mail writing, copy writing, textbook writing, speech writing, news writing, film script writing .. . you aim, I shoot.
Subject, genre, specialty — the writer enters it by choice. But prison writing is a matter of status. It comes with the bid and that’s that. It must take as subject matter life in prison. Prison writing is literally forced upon the writer, who, incidentally, has been stripped of just about everything else. Now, that’s supposed to liberate.
Hey, Charlie, you dumb ass! You big cigar-puffin’ ignorant crass sack of southern white trash! You bemused witless serf!
A con may write fiction, but everybody will know where it comes from. His fiction wears the stink of prison for a belt. Her fiction is pregnant with loss disguised as possibility. His outlaws always get the better of a wicked status quo. Her heroines grope through a jungle of shame for their stolen womanhood, and perhaps a piece of heaven. A convict may write about Mars, the sea, rebirth, cats, needles and pins; without the “convict point of view” there is no prison writing. Take this goddamned place out of your art is what I am trying to tell you all.
My concentration is assaulted by my boombox-proud neighbot, who jacks up the rapper cacophony until the presence of the guard, like some magical wand, directs him to turn into a punk. (Whatever happened to cool smooth good ol’ American jazz?) As soon as the guard leaves the gallery, he is King Kong again.
King Punk is confined to his cell for talking to another inmate two steps out of character. Although he got the brunt of it, violence has no victims here. Self-defense is without justification. If you’re hurt, you shouldn’t have been there. If you do not defend yourself, you’re on a stainless-steel table with a sheet over your head, it’s that simple.
And yet sometimes I think prison violence is all overstated, amplified, dramatized, mythicized, mostly by outsiders. Mybe I’m desensitized but prison life isn’t really as dangerous as it’s commonly portrayed. Much of the tension on the inside comes more from the perception of danger than from danger itself. That’s why the sneak attack is the preferred mode of action — the little guy sticking a pen in the big guy’s eye after the latter jokingly threatened to make him his girl. Although most cases of violence involve aggressor and prey, prison managers are unwilling to recognize assault because of the lawsuits. So they do their damnedest to make everyone look guilty or well-deserving.
Their process is succored by an important rule: Never believe what an inmate says except when he’s snitching. In the old days telling was an abomination. Sooner or later the snitch would be found out and have to face the music. Today, telling is something of a sport and the facing up usually doesn’t happen, as the snitch may conveniently check his cowardly ass into protective custody.
Underlying this apparent confusion is a beautiful symmetry. In the street, where self-defense is a legitimate act and telling is the bread of concerned citizens, crises tend to ripple off toward agreement. Behind the mirror’s face, the littlest disturbance bears the seed of chaos.
After mopping the gallery catwalk that stretches like a giant steel blade past forty cells, I ease into my slippers and robe. On my way to the shower I pass Captain Lafane, whose harrowed look makes me wonder if it’s me who is doing the time. He knows that my transition from systems analyst to prison porter has not been easy, but that is not the reason for his grief. His oldest son has AIDS.
I awaken to the chirping of birds. “With all the nooks on the outside, they had to nest in here. There are dozens of them, lodged in the stone bowers high above the uppermost gallery. Jailbirds. Now it happens that prison is also a state of mind.
Will there be any stabbings today? Any rapes? Who cares? No one will ever know the half of it. Just as I rake the stubble off my chin two guards rush past my window into the deep of the gallery. A minute later, two more guards go by with a wire mesh stretcher. Here we go.
Except for the crackle of radios, the gallery is dead-still. No one has been out yet. “We must have an overnighter. The portable mirrors go into peeking mode.
The guards are slow on the catwalk. Two are old and overweight; one just looks sick and tired. Their walk is like a funeral march without an entourage. As they approach my cell 1 pull my mirror in and look down at the stretcher. It’s Jimmy G. I better hurry up and finish shaving before they yell for chow.
Questions are being raised about the night guard’s rounds, which should go on every two hours. The coroner has established that Jimmy took his life sometime after two. Even after this leak, we know that nothing will be done beyond tightening up the rounds for a while. No jobs will be in jeopardy, even when Jimmy had been talking suicide a few weeks in advance. Even after he was taken twice for observation to a psychiatric center, and advised that there was nothing wrong with him. Even after he flashed his suicide card to his pastor.
In her letter of thanks to his church for having run a fund collection, his mother stated that Jimmy had a chemical imbalance, foreclosing any possibility of a negligence action. Anyway, thank you, Mrs. G. Now all of us who did nothing to prevent your son from giving up will feel better. It was all in his genes as luck is in the stars, we will say.
Jimmy was four-fifths of the way through a sentence for murder. If the truth be told, I can think of one thousand better candidates for Hades just on the basis of their bearing. Jimmy had found religion. Jimmy had found a good church girl to elope with.
We all knew that he had been distressed over his failed marriage, but in here a man is pretty much left alone with the affairs of his heart. It was a union blessed by God, not to be set asunder by another. Why did she have to have “a male friend” at her house almost every time he called…
It couldn’t have been you instead of Jimmy, could it, King Punk, you rappin’ tappin’ slappin’ wind-up moppet-faced big bad mouth cybernaut stooge. Even you, farther down, who would have your voice heard by the prison machine. How much are you willing to renounce? A noun-slice here, a verb-tuck there, perhaps a sentence-graft or two? Why don’t you just sing praises to the Beast? Something might click. A new trend. Charlie, it might just make a difference!
Jimmy, perhaps you should have come to me. I would have told you their names:
I saw your humbled heart filling your mouth with hardened bread, and I kept silent. You should have known her, too, the one holding the wineskin, that fine hostess of spoils. Plethora will give you of her sac of ambrosia, and you will be made new. I will not risk offending, else I would bring her to you.
When I heard you smite your chest in penitence, I thought, Jimmy, that ain’t no way of doin’ time. Hedone will give you relish, comfort, a new zest. Frolic between the happy slopes and valleys of her Eden, for no one needs saving from love. Rest, Jimmy, rest now, and pound your chest no more.
But of the three, Cacoethes is the crown. She’s the baddest, the goodest, the sweetest, the tartest, the hostess of play. She’s the lifeline, the night life, hops, cheers, saturnalia again. Fandago, tango, fling, and boogaloo.
They say that she’s full of bad habits. Not true. She’s sport, gala, picnic, and game all the same. Overall, she’s a labor of love. In a cinch she’s Ways and Means, my man. For you, she would have plucked the hand that held the knife of infidelity, before it ripped your heart. When Mars directs the rouge over her lips, and paints her eyes for the battle cry, you know there’s no staying and no praying for more. All in all, she’ll save you from a two-timer wife. Cacoethes is the blood of my pen, liberation without the prison writing.
You won’t be needing religion in the bowels of Earth. Neither do I in the belly of Baal. You may judge me unwise, but at least there is no falling from grace in this bed. One day I might tell you the meaning of their names, if you should resurrect.
But tonight I’m riding with the wind.
1994, Eastern New York Correctional Facility Napanoch, New York
It’s a race between the roaches and me to see which of us is going to win final and total control of this typewriter
Will I finish my Great American Novel with all its inherent, time-consuming rewrites before these filthy things that huddle in the dark recesses of my battery-powered machine, scurrying in twenty different directions when I remove the case that swarm all over the printing head as it zings back along its track, sometimes jamming it that impudently crawl up and down a sheet of prose right in the middle of a tender love scene… I mean I’m trying to write some literature here, you repulsive !#@¥+**&! bugs
… before they eventually chew through the electronic ribbon —the lifeline of my machine? Will I be able to complete my hook before they do all this? In past days I’ve noticed they’ve gathered in greater numbers on this critical ribbon as if planning a final campaign; it’s worrying me sick
Pve noticed too during this unseasonably warm and humid
winter at the Louisiana Correctional Center from where I write that a whole new generation has hatched —now there are tiny tot roaches inside my typewriter growing toward full roachhood What do they think this is, a brooder?
The plastic coated ribbon must be emitting some hdlaciously appetizing radon odors or something else equally as sensual that drives these vile creatures into a breeding frenzy because every time I snap the case shut —they’re at it!
How do I work with all this gross activity occurring just inches from my fingertips— ? With much grimacing and teeth grinding.
What we writers have to endure sometimes ain’t nothing nice
I wonder how many other roaches, older, wiser, and warier are crouched in the farthest most inaccessible spaces of my Canon feeding on these nutritiously addictive command wires, disemboweling the computer circuitry byte by byte? Inexorably they’re forcing me to condense my long, languorous tender love scenes into cheap, artless quickies forget foreplay — there’s no time a bunch of stupid roaches are pushing me perilously close to writing pornography Is there no hope? No remedy? Is my art to be sacrificed to these wanton, concupiscent creatures?
If only I had some bug spray — I’d douse those mothers good and proper! Black Flag would do the job but lethal stuff like that is absolutely prohibited to us inmates
A pest control man does come around occasionally, spraying the baseboards, which only drives the little vermins deeper into the sanctuary of my locker and typewriter; they love it here — and why not? They’ve got everything they need for a happy life: darkness, dampness, and lots of hard juicy plastic to munch on I tell you, it’s a battle. I’ve got to hurry and finish this novel before they completely overrun my machine I swear I’d forfeit a month’s Good Time — really! maybe more for just one smalt can of that deadly stuff
1993, Avoyelles Correctional Center Cottonport, Louisiana