Doing Time (52 page)

“My life has been marked by great sweeps of changing fortune,” wrote Egyptian
Victor Hassine
(1955–2008). Following the Suez crisis of 1956, he and his family were exiled for being Jewish. They relocated first as penniless, stateless, refugees in France, then in 1961 in Trenton, New Jersey. A sweep of good fortune saw Hassine earn a B.A. from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and a J.D. from New York School of Law. His American dream ended five months later when he was charged with murder and in 1981 sentenced to life without parole. Feeling as though his vocal cords had been torn out, Hassine said, for a while he “did the prison thing, living in a semi-barbaric world of indifference and primitive survival.”

“My first efforts at self-expression consisted of an almost death-defying activism” which challenged “long standing inmate leadership and practices as well as the might of the prison administration.” Along with other plaintiffs, he filed and won a conditions of confinement lawsuit, which resulted ultimately in $50 million in improvements to Grater-ford. Transferred to Western Penitentiary, which had just undergone a brutal prison riot, he joined another lawsuit, resulting in $75 million in improvements to Western. He also headed the prison's chapter of the NAACP, founded the first accredited synagogue in a U.S. prison, and co-founded a post-release transition house for newly released prisoners. Hassine received the Pennsylvania Prison Society's Inmate of the Year Award.

Hassine was “too angry, frightened, insecure, and ashamed” to think of becoming a writer until his first poem—provoked by a young convict's suicide attempt—won an honorable mention in 1987. Then he interviewed a series of troubled men—mentally ill, living with AIDS, victimized sexually, and too institutionalized to function in the world; out of these prize winning pieces, he developed his
Life without Parole: Living in Prison Today
(1996). This invaluable work has gone through five editions.

His play “Circles of Nod,” challenging the death penalty, was performed by an all-inmate cast in Rockview Prison within two hundred feet of the death chamber. In 2003, the
Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies
published his essay, “How Do I Treat My Hungry Lion: A Model for Violence Management in Prison.” Hassine is the major contributor to
The Crying Wall and Other Prison Stories
published by WilloTrees Press in partnership with Infinity Publishing Company in 2005.

Though still in the midst of writing projects, Victor Hassine committed suicide in April 2008 at the age of fifty-three, shortly after being denied a commutation-of-sentence hearing.

Michael Hogan
(b.1943) was raised in New England. He moved to Arizona in his early twenties, where he was later convicted of forgery of state Supreme Court documents and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. In 1975, while in a writing workshop with poet Richard Shelton, Hogan received first prize in poetry for “Spring.” The following year he became the first prisoner to be awarded an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship.In 1977 his sentence was reversed by the courts and he was released.

Hogan writes, “I believe that words are like snakes we sleep with. If we honor them and respect them, they will protect us from the darkness which surrounds us. If we do not, then we are in real danger both as individuals and collectively as a society. As a reader I know that poetry gave me sustenance in the dark night of the soul. As a writer I hope to give some of that vital energy back.”

Hogan's publications include a history of the Irish Battalion in Mexico and
Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy: Latin America in the Third Millenium,
as well as several books of poetry. He taught for years at the American School Foundation of Guadalajara, where he founded
Sin Fronteras,
a prize-winning tri-lingual student literary magazine. He continues to write poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Michael Wayne Hunter
(b.1958), raised in Sunnyvale, California, joined the Navy and spent four years operating computer systems on a carrier-based S-3A jet aircraft. Honorably discharged, he worked as an electronic technician in San Francisco until 1982 when he was arrested for murder. Five days before being sentenced to death, he married a co-worker from the computer company. Writing to his wife every night until they divorced five years later acquainted him with writing, he says.

Then a legal secretary who had been reading his letters to lawyers urged him to write professionally. “So like many misadventures of men, this one started with an attractive woman telling me she thought I could do something. No one was more surprised than I when my first story, ‘Mother Teresa on Death Row,' was published by
Catholic Digest
.” When another story was published in
Prison Life
along with Susan Rosenberg's “Lee's Time,” which had won a PEN award, Hunter was “struck by her courage in addressing the virulent racism behind bars.

“Without ‘Lee's Time,' there would have been no
Sam,
so Susan has in a way contributed twice to this anthology,” Hunter says. “The PEN awards allowed me to set aside commercial ventures and try to do my best writing.” Neither guards nor prisoners are a monolithic group, he wrote, but the “group-think” of guards is that they are “knights in shining armor, protecting society from predators,” while the “group-think” of prisoners is that “they're hostages of a corrupt, racist, and in the worst sense of the word, ‘political' system. Writing about prison made me re-examine my assumptions, many of which were based upon emotion and did not survive intact once I began to write.”
Sam
tied for first prize in fction (1995). Hunter took third prize for fiction in 2001. He has also written for a broadsheet called “Big News,” sold in the New York subways by the homeless.

In court, Hunter successfully challenged his sentence, arguing pros-ecutorial misconduct; his death sentence was vacated and he received a sentence of life without parole. He misses his friends on death row but appreciates the opportunity to go to school and work. He has received his G.E.D. and an A.A. from Coastline Community College. He has worked in the law library, the Program Office, and as Lieutenant's clerk on third watch.

Roger Jaco
(1944- 200?) was born in McMinnville, Tennessee, one of nine children, all the boys with names beginning with R. At a young age, they lost both their parents in an automobile accident. The children were scattered; Roger was placed in a home in Kentucky. His sister Gladys, always impressed with his high intelligence and his artistic bent, remained in contact with Roger. After Jaco completed his military service, he joined Gladys in Virginia. He became a highly skilled mechanic. When he was arrested for armed robbery, Gladys bought him a typewriter to encourage him to write.

With that typewriter, Jaco wrote a story that won first prize for fiction in 1979; Jaco wrote: “In a world where I am reminded of only my faults while being expected to give my best, hopes are not easily grasped. Until I began writing, I never met myself … Now that I can see myself more clearly, I have discovered that the world contains other humans, all with feelings, trucking toward visions of something more meaningful.” His poem, “Killing Time,” received an honorable mention in 1980 and was published by Janet Lembke (who taught him writing in prison) in
Creative Righters Anthology, 1978–1980.
When his writing about prison officials falsifying records led to his manuscripts being confiscated, PEN protested, and the prison backed down, Lembke recalls.

“Through my writings,” Jaco wrote in 1981, “I began to discover how great and ornery I really am.”

Upon release, Jaco did not settle down. His sister attributed his love of roaming to his artistic nature. When Jaco fell ill, early in this century, he returned to his sister's home to die.

Saxophonist
Henry Johnson
(1949-1996) of Brooklyn and Harlem, said in 1984 that workshops with Joe Bruchac, Paul Corrigan, and Judith McDaniel stimulated his interest in writing. “I believe that the good in man will ultimately overcome the shadier side,” he wrote. “In the meanwhile, I'll keep composing lullabies for the sun.” While in prison, Johnson earned a B.A. in Sociology from Skidmore College, a Master's Degree in Professional Studies in Ministry and Pastoral Counseling,
cum laude,
from the New York Theological Seminary, and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Vermont College. The chaplain's assistant and a leader in the Alternatives to Violence Program, he also taught literacy and led poetry workshops in Sing Sing
.

Johnson won second prize in poetry (1982), an honorable mention in nonfiction (1988), and the Madeline Sadin Award in 1985. His work has been published in the
New York Quarterly,
two anthologies,
Light from Another Country
and
Candles Burn in Memory Town,
and two chapbooks,
The Problem
and—after release—
The Five-Spot Cafe
(Castillo Cultural Center, 1990). He worked briefly for the Fortune Society. He died in 1996.

The late poet Janine Pommy Vega, who had taught Johnson in a Sing Sing workshop, recalls his visit to Woodstock in 1990 shortly after his release. “It had begun to snow, he didn't have proper boots. On the way to the bus-station, we stopped in a second-hand bookstore. He spotted a book by Browning. ‘I love this guy!' he said, and bought the book. As we walked out in the snow, I had to laugh. ‘Hank! Look at you! You gotta be the only black guy in creation walking thru the snow clutching Browning to his breast.'”

Writing and drugs overlap for
M. A. Jones,
who wrote: “Addiction facilitated my incarceration; writing helped to free me—I try to explain how I felt (and still feel) a particular sensitivity or openness to emotional pain. Narcotics, for me, served as ‘medicine' and when they were unavailable, I discovered language. In the James Baldwin story, ‘Sonny's Blues,' the older brother of Sonny, a heroin addict and jazz musician, asks him whether he needs dope to play music. Sonny replies ‘It's not so much to play. It's to
stand it,
to be able
to make it
at all. on any level … In order to keep from shaking to pieces.' Later, listening to Sonny play with his band in an East Village nightclub, the brother discovers how music affords Sonny a kind of salvation, a means to transcend pain, to transform his personal anguish into art.”

Jones got off drugs, got his master's degree, and was working toward a doctorate. As an English instructor in a Boston-area university, he wrote, “I teach the Baldwin story to my students, who at first ‘don't get it.' Like Sonny's brother, they resist understanding; if they struggle with the story, however, they learn something about human pain and art and how art—making it, responding to it—affords insight into our own suffering and joy, the things that make us human.”

M. A. Jones (not his real name) won second prize in fiction (1978– 79), first in poetry for “Overture” (1980), and third in poetry for “Prison Letter” (1981). He taught at two Boston-area colleges where his odd sense of humor and unorthodox teaching methods bewildered some of his students and thrilled others. He died suddenly a few years ago.

Robert Kelsey
(b.1953) was born in New York, raised in northern California, and educated at the Putney School in Vermont. He worked as a carpenter and had his own sawmill, until a drunk driving accident landed him in a New York prison for second-degree manslaughter.

Paroled to California, he took Amtrak, “a wonderful contemplative experience after seven years locked up.” He completed a B.A. at the University of San Francisco. Only in prison, with the encouragement of a community college teacher, did he take writing seriously, confessing in a class paper, “Writing is the therapist I never leveled with, the woman who never understood me, the father who never paid much attention to me.”

“Suicide” won first prize in fiction in 1994. Kelsey has also published in
Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun,
and
Massachusetts Review,
among others. His “Mother and Child Re-Union” was listed in “Notable Essays of 1993” in
Best American Essays 1994.

At bookstores and universities in the Bay Area, Kelsey read from “Suicide” in 2000. He completed his B.A. in English at the University of San Francisco. He had hoped to work as a tech writer, but by then the dot com bubble had burst, so he has worked in construction.

He says that he feels very lucky to have so many things go right for him after prison. In Northern California he met “a wonderful woman who grew up twenty miles from me in New York.” In prison, he says, “I wished I would get the chance to make up for what a lousy son I had been to my mom. She turned eighty the year I got out and here it is fourteen years later and I'm involved with her being able to live in her home, getting her groceries, and taking care of her house.” And, “I finally met the daughter who I only knew about when I was locked up, who now has two sons, aged seven and three. Life goes on. It's great.”

After the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, the family of
Reginald Sinclair Lewis
(b.1954) moved from riot-torn Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia. There Lewis joined a gang called Twelfth and Oxford Street, “one of the largest and fiercest in Philly,” writes Lewis. Later he would join the Nation of Islam. A high-school dropout, he got his G.E.D. in Rahway State Prison in New Jersey, where he was the Rahway State welterweight champion. Paroled in 1981, he attended Temple University for one year, then was convicted again in 1983 and sentenced to death.

“Reading has always been my greatest passion,” Lewis writes. He admires James Baldwin, Sidney Sheldon, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes. “When I received the death penalty, the pain and humiliation spurred an emotional torrent of words. Writing is my life, my spiritual connection to God. Like all writers, I yearn to write the literary masterpiece that would hurl me into immortality, in the company of the literary legends.”