Locked Down, Locked Out (14 page)

I wasn’t expecting an update on that “new life,” let alone the pizza. But a month later, I’m delighted to find a letter from Sable in my box, this one sent from her grandmother’s house in New York. “I did have pizza my first day out—it was SO good,” she writes. She’s also enjoying the series of small decisions that comprise her days on the outside: picking out her clothes, cooking a meal, choosing to go for a barefoot walk along the nearby river ... as long as she’s sure—as sure as one can be—that she will not come across a minor. Indeed, there are many choices she can’t make. She can’t find a job, so is tethered to her “Gram” (who loves her but is prone to getting “worked up into a tizzy”). She still can’t see her kids. And her face is plastered on a sex offender registry for the next twenty-two years. Months later, I receive a short note from Sable: “Being on parole is the hardest thing ever.” I wrack my brain for encouraging things to say—but “Hey, you’re getting out soon!” doesn’t work anymore. I end up simply writing, “I’m so sorry.”

Feel Uncomfortable!

For deeper insight into the emotional and political roles of the pen pal, I turn to Rev. Jason Lydon of Boston. If there’s such thing as a prison pen-pal guru, it’s Jason. His group Black and Pink focuses on helping prisoners connect directly with pen pals on the outside, building both friendships and action-based relationships that link people through the bars. Jason has been incarcerated himself, and many of his own pen pals are people he left behind in prison. He sees pen-palship as a way to “dispel myths about
who’s incarcerated ... it’s necessary for people to recognize that it’s human beings who are being locked up, denied access to health care, assaulted.”

I’m struck by the way he talks about the pen-pal process as active and transformative: It’s not just about making friends. And, he tells me, if you’re fully engaged in the process, it’s probably not always going to be easy. You can’t keep your pen pal in a box. (That’s not what you’re there for—they’re in a box already!)

“We need to challenge ourselves on why we’re creating certain boundaries,” Jason says, when I ask about navigating the sometimes-weird personal terrain of pen-palship. “Are we setting those boundaries to make ourselves feel
comfortable
, or to make ourselves feel safe? Allowing ourselves to feel uncomfortable can help us grow, and to build authentic relationships and understandings. Being uncomfortable at times is OK, as long as we’re still safe.”

Once, I wrote a column for
Truthout
urging readers to link up with pen pals in prison. I was overjoyed to receive a number of responses from eager people seeking prisoners to write. But within two months, a couple of readers contacted me to say they’d cut off their newfound pen-palships. One prisoner pen pal had begun a series of overtly romantic overtures, ignoring the outside pen pal’s cues. Another had persisted in making openly misogynist remarks, even after his outside pen pal told him it upset her. It’s inevitable that, sometimes, you won’t get along with your pen pal. It’s another “side effect” of the fact that they’re human.

I think of my own abandoned pen pals. One expressed such blatant homophobia in a letter that I couldn’t bring myself to respond. I didn’t want to start a conflict but didn’t want to implicitly agree—so I stuffed his letter in a drawer. The other, of course, was Steven Woods; I had quit writing simply because I
didn’t want to face the emotional avalanche of his impending execution, and I will always regret it.

According to Jason, the emotional avalanches are part of the point. In fact, he notes, the eruption of issues like misogyny, racism, homophobia, and transphobia may be a touchstone for important conversations, especially since, when we write to people in prison, we’re in a separate physical space. The medium of letters lends time to process words and contemplate responses. Jason tells me, “My hope is that people would be willing to extend a little more patience toward people on the inside than they would to folks on the outside, because of the amount of safety that we experience as folks who aren’t incarcerated.” He points to situations, for example, in which white prisoners have made racist statements in letters; pen pals have sometimes challenged those statements and engaged in productive dialogues (though Jason emphasizes that people of color shouldn’t feel any obligation to “be patient” in such situations, and if safety feels threatened, it is always OK to walk away). And it’s a two-way street: Your pen pal may call you out on assumptions and biases you never realized you. had.

As a former prisoner, Jason knows the value of outside ties firsthand, especially for particularly marginalized groups of prisoners, who are regularly exposed to excruciating treatment. When he was locked up in a segregated unit for queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming prisoners and repeatedly subjected to cruel treatment and sexual violence at the hands of guards, he vowed to remain in touch with his fellow prisoners upon release. “For those of us who have been incarcerated,” he says, the pen pal process serves as “a reminder to not forget folks who are left behind, that we have a responsibility to maintain relationships and compassion with those folks, to join in the healing process with them.”

Concretely, he says, aside from expanding our boundaries and awareness and engaging in dialogue, there are a few very immediate purposes for a pen pal. Receiving letters during mail call can serve as a function that resembles the other definition of “mail”: a protective shield against potential violence. As noted earlier, it alerts guards that you’ve got contacts and advocates on the outside, so you’re less likely to be mistreated. Such “mail” is also useful when it comes to prisoners potentially harming themselves. Self-injurious behavior is common, and “having a reminder that you’re cared for and not forgotten—and part of a larger thing—can help you deal with the mental and emotional struggle that is the reality of being locked up.”

“We Cannot Be Passive Recipients”

In the book
Howard’s End
, E. M. Forster wrote his instructions on the best way to live in two short words: “Only connect.” (E. M. Forster, incidentally, also announced on the BBC, in a fiery 1934 critique of the mechanization and industrialization of society, “Prison is no good.”
⁶
)

When we reach out to a prisoner to “only connect,” we will always—to some extent—fail, because the barriers are so vast and so entrenched. But there are few cases in which a personal act that takes so little time can make such a great difference.
I encourage anyone with the time, capacity, and emotional energy for it to reach out
. In the appendix of this book there is a list of resources to help you become a pen pal. If you’re reading this book (and I know you are—or at least you’re reading this page), flip on back.

Before diving in, pen pals should check in with themselves, issuing a stern reminder that the act of writing a prisoner is not an act of
charity
. It’s about growing a unique breed of friendship. In fact, it’s one of the few contexts where you’re able to throw out a
line to a stranger and say, “Will you be my friend?” It is an act that is not driving toward any clear, ostensible goal. Rather, it’s the goal-less endeavor of “getting to know” another person, which, for whatever reason, can be one of the most fulfilling, interesting, and transformative things to do in life. It’s also a primary building block for any greater political possibility that relies on connection between human beings—which, it seems, applies to every viable political possibility under the sun.

As the Illinois-based pen-pal collective Write to Win puts it: “We see individual correspondence with people on the inside as one piece of the larger struggle to abolish the prison-industrial complex and to create safe, sustainable, and equitable communities. To this end, we see our work as a way to undermine the isolation, dehumanization, and destruction of the PIC by building grassroots networks of support and solidarity between folks on the inside and folks on the outside.”
⁷
In other words, how can policy change—or, for that matter, deep systemic change—evolve, if outside activists and theorists and advocates aren’t talking
to
the people they’re talking about?

Lacino Hamilton, my pen pal in Michigan, emphasizes that prisoners need to vocalize their experiences, and an outside audience is key. “We cannot be passive recipients of the efforts of others,” he writes. “We have to be part of the work being done.”

What efforts—and what work? Well. The pen-pal journey is certainly not the endgame; it’s the
beginning
game. Perhaps, then,
“Only
connect” is not a perfect motto. Lacino’s words highlight the potential of prisoners’ connections with outside allies to build creative new models, initiatives, movements—maybe even revolutions!—that cultivate a more just world.

Chapter 7
Working from the Inside Out: Decarcerate!

This could be your brother, your son, or your father. This is what’s in our future. We have to stop it.

—Reginald Akkeem Berry, on the need to oppose supermax prisons

In 2006, a letter was slipped in through the door slat in Johnnie Walton’s cell. Johnnie was living—twenty-three hours a day—in a seventy-square-foot cell furnished with a concrete bed, a solid steel door, and a window through which little light traveled. Through the slat in the door, three times a day, Johnnie’s meals appeared. For one hour each day, Johnnie was permitted solitary “recreation” in a small pen just outside his cell.

The same routine went for the roughly 250 other prisoners in Tamms, the supermax prison that had opened in Southern Illinois in 1998. Practices at Tamms were similar to those in other supermax prisons and “Secure Housing Units” (such as the one Abraham Macías occupies at Pelican Bay) around the country: The prison, with no yard, no chapel, no dining hall, no library, and no phone calls (unless a close relative was dying), was designed to extinguish the outside world for the men trapped within.

By the time the letter came, Johnnie had already been living in isolation for more than two years. He tore open the envelope and stared. Tucked inside was a poem. An accompanying letter explained that the sender was a member of the “Tamms Poetry Committee,” a group that had come together to provide some contact for these men deprived of almost every type of human connection.

Johnnie was touched but bewildered, he tells me over the phone, almost eight years later. “I got that letter, and I thought, ‘A poetry committee? Men are mutilating themselves, slitting their wrists here.... What do we need with a poetry committee?’”

Johnnie wrote back with a thank-you note—but the note went further: He asked for help, for advocacy. So did several of the other men who received poems that year. Artist and activist Laurie Jo Reynolds, who was part of the group that initiated the poetry committee and later led the effort to fight for the rights of Tamms prisoners, told me, “Not to insult us, but at the beginning, it was sort of a social club. It was the men who wrote to us and told us, ‘It’s time to do more. You have to tell people what’s happening to us in here.’”

Doing more meant mounting a broad-based organizing effort to confront the conditions at—and, later, the existence of—Tamms. (They dubbed the campaign “Tamms Year Ten,” referencing the fact that, though there was supposed to be a one-year limit on prisoners’ stay at the supermax, many had remained there the entire ten years of its existence.) It meant meeting with legislators at every chance possible and graphically describing the conditions in the prison, guided by the words of the men inside. It meant vigils, press conferences, lobbying days at the capitol, and a community picnic complete with a parsley-eating contest. Tamms Year Ten partnered with dozens of other organizations and sympathetic

legislators, mobilizing for a reform bill limiting terms at Tamms and requiring prisoners to be told why they were transferred to the supermax. At the forefront of the struggle were family members of men hidden away in the prison. As several Tamms prisoners were released (by way of parole, appeal victories, or the end of their sentences), they became leaders in the campaign.

In fact, the day that Johnnie got out, he swallowed his postrelease anxieties and spoke of his years in Tamms to a large crowd at a fundraiser in a Chicago nightclub. “It was scary,” he says. “There was lots of noise ... but I had to start right away, speaking for the people who didn’t have a voice. I had to speak about the torture of Tamms.”

Reginald Akkeem Berry, another former Tamms prisoner, says that advocating for the men he’d left behind in the supermax was tough at first, partly because they were essentially invisible, knocked off the map at the bottom of Illinois without so much as a phone call home. “Most people didn’t know the town of Tamms, Illinois, even existed,” Akkeem says. So when he spoke about the prison, he invoked people on the outside instead. He spoke of family and the ways that solitary confinement harms poor black and brown communities—especially at a time when the Illinois prison population was still rising and supermaxes were multiplying across the country. “Every time I went to a community meeting, I said, these people in Tamms—this could be your brother, your son, or your father. This is what’s in our future. We have to stop it.”

Akkeem was the first released man to be interviewed about Tamms, he says, for a 2008
Chicago Reader
feature titled “Hell in a Cell.” At that point, “solitary confinement” was a phrase most folks on the outside hadn’t often heard. Media attention intensified. In 2009, the work of Tamms Year Ten caught the attention
of Amnesty International, which condemned the prison as “incompatible with the USA’s obligations to provide humane treatment for all prisoners.”
¹

The folks of Tamms Year Ten spoke before legislative budget hearings. In addition to denouncing the human destruction occurring behind Tamms’ walls, they pointed to the prison’s staggering price tag: holding one prisoner at Tamms cost $92,000 per year.
²
Momentum against Tamms caught fire—and increasingly, caught the eye of Illinois Governor Pat Quinn. Meanwhile, the prison guards unions and the town of Tamms fought hard to keep the prison, and the struggle unfolded in the media and in the streets, with prisoners’ families lobbying at the state capital and leading marches in Chicago.