Over the holidays, I was able to see my goddaughter which was a treat. She is now in her teens and was excited to inform me that she was “an expert on prison life” because she had been watching episodes of OZ on DVD. I was struck dumb by her words and in the moment I could only respond with a tight smile and a nod of the head. Later we had a more in-depth conversation about OZ and about the differences between fiction and reality.

I read somewhere that there are more than 250 American films featuring men in prison and 100 focusing on women in prison. Let’s face it. Most people in America don’t know anyone who is currently or has been in prison since incarceration disproportionately impacts only certain groups. Most people have never set foot inside a prison either. As a result, popular culture images of prison fill this breach.

In the U.S., we learn about prison through books, music, movies, and television. These images greatly influence public perceptions. I think that they actually serve to reinforce unconscious racism which leads people to support more draconian measures to curtail what they perceive to be black and brown criminality.

Actual prisons do not resemble popular portrayals. Yet Americans’ views about prisons are shaped to a large extent by popular culture. On television and in films, people in prison are usually there for violent crimes, they are male and usually black. Some depictions feature wrongly accused prisoners often portrayed as white (think of Andy Dufrene in the Shawshank Redemption).

Prison stories in popular culture are framed in terms of personal responsibility and this obscures the structural factors and oppression that play a major role in landing people in prison in the first place. As such when asked why people are in prison, the public’s default response always focuses on personal failing. Popular culture depictions of prisoners feed into this narrative and I believe that this ultimately impacts public policy.

Imagined fears contribute to actual incarceration. As prison reformers and/or abolitionists, making the case for a dramatic reduction in the use of incarceration is made more difficult in the face of public fear and anxiety. Travis Dixon (2010) has written that Americans “have become so inundated by mass-mediated racial stereotypes that we are losing the ability to see past our racialized fears (p.107).” He goes on to argue that “unconscious racism underpins support for a punishing democracy that treats black men as criminals rather than as citizens (p.108).” I think that this is basically true and to be honest I don’t know how we even begin to address these ‘mass-mediated racialized fears.’ I came across an interesting initiative by the Open Society Institute called “Black Male: Re-Imagined” which aims to refashion the public image of young black men through the use of culture and media. I have no idea if this effort will succeed but I am rooting for it.

“The natural state of this society is violence…”

A colleague uttered these words to me over a year ago as we were collaborating on an anti-violence curriculum project. It’s worth reflecting on his words at this time in our country. Currently, the news is saturated with reports about the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt and the massacre of other innocents in Tuscon. What happened is truly horrific and I offer my condolences to everyone impacted by this tragedy.

A few days ago, I received a phone call from the assistant to a famous filmmaker. This person was seeking data pertaining to “youth violence” in Chicago. ‘What specifically are you looking for?” I asked. Of course, she was looking for statistics about the number of youth homicides in the city. I once again found myself deflated at the end of the conversation.

For over two decades now, I have been working to reframe the conversation about the nature and impact of violence in the U.S. It’s been one step forward and three steps back. It is difficult not to feel discouraged in the face of a persistent insistence to define violence in America as homicide or as PHYSICAL assault.

It is certainly true that some young people in Chicago are being wounded and killed by guns. It is valuable and important to address this lethal form of violence. I recommend an upcoming film that I have been privileged to preview called the Interrupters for some ideas on how to stop the shooting. Below is a trailer for the upcoming film:

When tragedies like the Tuscon attack occur, I understand the human impulse to look for a “reason” for what happened. Was the killer mentally ill? What role does media play in the act? Should we have gun control? Should we be nicer to each other?

Yet what is always missed in the countless “national conversations” and recriminations that take place after such tragedies are perspective and honesty. The root cause of violence in the U.S. and across the world is oppression. Frederick Douglass famously wrote:

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where one class is made to feel that society is organized in a conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

There it is. In one sentence. Clearly articulated. Eloquent. Easy to understand. And yet we ignore the truth and the wisdom of these words every day. We do so because it is easier to focus on quick fixes and band-aid solutions that will not disrupt the status quo and will not challenge the powerful. It is a sick game of willful ignorance.

If 50 youth under the age of 18 years old are killed by gun violence a year in Chicago, what about the 30% of youth under 18 who are living under the poverty line this year. Is poverty not violence?

What about the over 2200 youth in Illinois who are currently incarcerated in our juvenile prisons. Is youth incarceration not violence?

What about the thousands of youth in Chicago who drop out of school every year. Is educational malpractice not violence?

My friend’s suggestion that “the natural state of our society is violence” takes on real significance when we are clear in our definition of what constitutes violence. And yet, no one wants to hear this. It is too overwhelming and too dangerous to view the world through this lens. James Baldwin has written that: “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.” Too few of us are acting on the knowledge that we have. We KNOW that only a radical reallocation of resources will help us to end violence in our societies. We know that this is true and yet we tinker around the edges. Everyone wants me to talk about violence but no one actually wants to hear what I have to say.

The United States is the only country in the world to sentence youth to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Last year, the supreme court ruled that life without parole is unconstitutional for juveniles who have not committed murder. So a youth who was previously sentenced to life without parole for any crime other than homicide can appeal his/her sentence.

In Illinois for example, there are currently 103 people who are serving juvenile life without parole sentences. My fascination with history led me to ask whether there were some prominent cases of juvenile life without parole sentences in the American past.

On March 25 1931, police arrested nine young black men at a railroad stop in Paint Rock Alabama after hearing of a fight between black and white youth on a freight train. In the process. they came upon two white women, Ruby Barnes and Victoria Price, who accused the nine young men of raping them. The young men were tried and all were found guilty despite medical evidence that clearly exonerated the boys. The jury could not decide whether to sentence the youngest defendant Roy Wright, who was 13 years old, to life in prison or to death. 11 jurors voted for death while one voted for life in prison without the possibility of parole. The jury was hung. Judge Allfred E. Hawkins immediately sentenced eight of the boys to death by the electric chair. Roy Wright was effectively sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole because he was jailed without a new trial. In 1933, Roy Wright gave an interview to the New York Times.

The firstest I knowed anything was wrong, or knowed who else was on that train was when that crowd of white men stopped the train and Paint Rock and took us off. They took us up the railroad bank to a white rock and stood us against it with their guns aimed at our heads.

One of the white men said to me, “Come on now, nigger, tell us who pushed those white boys off the train, ’cause we don’t want to punish anybody but the guilty ones. If you tell us which ones did it we’ll let you others go.” And I told them I didn’t know anything about it and hadn’t seen nothing.

Then one of them said to me, “You know, nigger, we don’t let no darkies hang around here, and if we catch you anywhere near here after dark we’ll shoot you. Now get going.”

Andy (that’s my brother), Haywood, Eugene and me — we started away. Nobody said nothing until we had walked some little way and then they called us back and loaded us on a truck, tied our hands and feet with rope and carried us to the jail in Scottsboro…

[At the first trials in Scottsboro] I was sitting in a chair in front of the judge and one of those girls was testifying. One of the deputy sheriffs leaned over to me and asked me if I was going to turn State’s evidence, and I said no, because I didn’t know anything about this case.

Then the trial stopped awhile and the deputy sheriff beckoned to me to come out into another room — the room back of the place the judge was sitting — and I went. They whipped me and it seemed like they was going to kill me. All the time they kept saying, “Now will you tell?” and finally it seemed like I couldn’t stand no more and I said yes.

Then I went back into the courtroom and they put me up on the chair in front of the judge and began asking a lot of questions, and I said I had seen Charlie Weems and Clarence Norris in the gondola car with the white girls.

[Later, he said that that testimony was false:]

I didn’t see no white girls and no white boys either.

The Scottsboro Boys case became a cause celebre across the U.S. as an example of the South’s racism and the corruption of the criminal legal system. It was also the most visible and successful example of multi-racial organizing in the 20th century before the black freedom movement of the 50s and 60s.

The Scottsboro Boys case remained consistently in the headlines into the late 1930s. Five of the nine boys would be in Kilby Prison off and on for the next 10 years. Although there were years of appeals, reimprisonment, pardon, compromise, and frustrating negotiation, the case dropped from the headlines after 1939.

The Communist Party engaged in a number of public demonstrations around the country to free the Scottsboro boys. They wanted to use this case to expose the injustices of the criminal legal system in the South. The NAACP worried that the Community Party was using the case for propagandizing and thought that this would not redound to the benefit of the young men.

After 6 years in prison, in 1937, Roy Wright who had been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole was released along with three other Scottsboro defendants. No restitution was made by the State of Alabama.

Roy Wright, the youngest of the boys, emerged from prison at age 19 penniless and untrained for any particular professions. However, the Scottsboro Defense Committee, an organization which had been created to provide legal support to the boys, was able to add a small monthly supplement to whatever the boys could earn on their own.

An article in the Daily Worker by Ben Davis offered the following information about the release of Roy Wright and some of his co-defendants:

“Herself a domestic worker and unemployed for more than a year, Mrs. Wright explained that Roy, even while in jail, would “deny himself things” to send a dollar home. Although Andy (Roy’s older brother who was sentenced to death) is the “sweetest” she went on, Roy has a sense of responsibility “way beyond his age, just like an old man.”

“When I first heard the news I felt like crying, thinking how long my boy had been in jail, his eye-sight nearly failing him from the way the jailers treated him. Even now I tremble when I think how close he came to death. They nearly lynched all the boys in 1931 when they first arrested them. Even after that they kept on sentencing them to die,” Mrs. Montgomery said.

“I didn’t want to cry when I got the news about the boys being free, because I knew everyone else would cry. But that night, I couldn’t help it — I cried all night. This is a real victory for Negroes, especially in the South.”

It is said that Roy Wright was the most successful of the four released in 1937 at reintegrating himself into society. He found a job and married soon after his release. However, twenty-two years after his release in 1959, he found his wife with another man and, in a fit of jealous rage, stabbed her to death. Riven with grief, he committed suicide later that same day. Ultimately Roy Wright did not escape the violence that had been visited upon him by his false imprisonment. Today I am thinking about all of the Roy Wrights that have existed in our history and the current Roy Wrights locked up all across the U.S.

Someone has posted the entire excellent PBS documentary about the Scottsboro Boys case on YOUTUBE. It is well worth watching the whole thing:

I have quite a few out of print books from the 60s and 70s that feature poetry and writing from prisoners. I wanted to share a piece written by a prisoner named Joe Martinez. It was published in a book called “Black Voices From Prison” published in 1970 and edited by Etheridge Knight. I like this short piece because it raises important issues and asks us to think critically about the role of prisons in our society.

Rehabilitation and Treatment
By Joe Martinez

The convict strolled into the prison administration building to get assistance and counseling for his personal problems. Just inside the main door were several other doors, proclaiming: Parole, Counselor, Chaplain, Doctor, Teacher, Correction, and Therapist.

The convict chose the door marked Correction, inside of which were two other doors: Custody and Treatment. He chose Treatment, and was confronted with two more doors, Juvenile and Adult. He chose the proper door and again was faced with two doors: Previous Offender and First Offender. Once more he walked through the proper door, and, again, two doors: Democrat and Republican. He was a Democrat; and so he hurried through the appropriate door and ran smack into two more doors; Black and White. He was black; and so he walked through that door — and fell nine stories to the street.

In this short paragraph, one gets a sense of the many obstacles that exist for prisoners as they seek to address various issues. This is one of the best pieces of social commentary on the criminal legal system that I have read. I have shared it with students in the past and we have engaged in some terrific conversations about the various ideas that are reflected in the text. If the convict had gone through the door marked ‘White’, would he have fallen off the cliff? You decide.

I am excited to share some preliminary images from a comic zine about disproportionate minority contact in the juvenile justice system. These were created by teaching artist Rachel Williams along with a great group of youth who participated in a comic workshop last year. Information about the comic workshop can be found HERE. Keep your eyes open for our entire zine series which will be released in May 2011.

Created as part of the Just Us Comic Workshop 2010 (Rachel Williams, Teaching Artist)

Created as part of Just Us Comic Workshop 2010

Created during Just Us Comic Workshop 2010

I have gotten many very interesting responses to my post about Michael Vick and the ‘Myth’ of Reentry.

One of the questions raised by a commenter was about how the prison system has traditionally handled the issue of prisoner re-integration into society. I thought that this was an excellent question that deserves further investigation.

I came across this ethnographic description by Etheridge Knight of what happens once a prisoner is paroled in his essay “Inside These Walls” that I referenced yesterday.

Finally, when a man is paroled, he is given $15 in cash and a new suit of clothes (out of style) by the state. And most men leaving prison have nothing on which to rely until they can draw a paycheck. (During the years in prison he has earned an average of ten cents a day. A bar of soap costs twenty cents, in prison.)

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a man leaving prison is going to work on a blue-collar job, so the new suit of clothes is without utility. The fifteen dollars will hardly provide him with a place to stay — to say nothing of the personal necessities: work clothes, razor and toothbrush, etc. Because of all of this, a man who has a wife or relatives on whom he must rely us from the outset put into an embarrassing, self-demeaning position. A man who has no wife or close relatives is forced to seek out old friends, usually those in an environment which quickly shoves him back into criminal activities.

Small wonder then that 75 per cent of all ex-convicts return to crime. Men are put into prison for the protection of society, it is said, but is it being protected when 90 per cent of all the men in prison will at one time or another be released and when 75 per cent of them return to crime?

If this was the case in the mid-1960s, how could we update this description in 2011? I would be interested if any enterprising researchers could send along an update of Knight’s description for 2011. Pick the particular state that you want to focus on. Knight was writing about the situation in Indiana. So how much money are prisoners who are released today given (if any)? Are they provided with a change of clothes? How much does soap cost today?

Update: Special thanks to Oona for sending along this information about the current California system…

[H]ere is what I know about the California Dept of Corrections (and Rehabilitation)

When released from a California State Prison, the man/woman released receives the following:
If they have served > 6 months: $200
If they have served < 6 months: $1.10 for each day served in custody. Subtracted from this amount is the ~$40 charged for the clothes on their back (a grey sweatsuit), unless they are lucky enough to have family/friends or one of the few community programs provide them with "dress-outs", ie normal street clothing mailed to the institution and given to the inmate on day of release. The released person is then either picked up at the gate, or dropped off at a local bus station. If, for example, the released person must travel from Marin County, CA to Los Angeles County, CA, there goes 1/2 of their gate money.

I welcome testimonies from others about how things work in your state…

Update 2: A dispatch from Nequam…

There’s basically 2 systems in Texas. If you’re being released from a state jail facility, you’re given no money from the state. You will be given clothing that somewhat fits you. If you have money in your commissary account, this is provided to you in the form of a check. If you have no one to pick you up, you are taken to the bus station. If you are not from the immediate area of your release, you will be provided with a bus ticket. If you are living prison, all is the same except that you are given $50 upon your release and another $50 when you first report to your parole officer. If you have no family to return to you’re basically dropped off on the streets.

I received a letter this week from a young prisoner who I correspond with. As he described how he was doing, he stressed how bored he was in prison. This is the rub of the prison experience for so many. The monotony and the sameness of each day in prison is under-appreciated by the general public. This reality of prison life was first brought home to me in an essay that I read by Etheridge Knight called “Inside These Walls.” In the piece written in 1967, Knight offers a description of a day in the life of a prisoner at the Indiana State Penitentiary. He is writing this from first hand experience having been incarcerated at that same prison.

And what do these men do inside these walls? It’s simple, maddeningly simple: At six o’clock in the morning a whistle blows. They get up and wash their faces. At six-fifteen, a bell rings, and they march off to the prison mess hall and eat a breakfast of, say, oatmeal, prunes, bread and coffee. They leave the mess hall in a line and drop their spoons in a bucket by the door, watched over by a “screw.” They march to their shops — say the Tag Shop, climb upon a stool and dip license plates into a tank of paint until nine-thirty. A bell rings; they smoke. A bell rings; they go back to work.

At eleven-thirty, a bell rings again. They stop work, wash up, march back to their shelters. At twelve o’clock, a bell rings in the cellhouse; they walk to the mess hall where they eat, say, a meal of white beans, frankfurters, and cornbread. They leave the mess hall, drop their spoons into the bucket and, in line, go back to work. The morning performance is repeated. At four-thirty a whistle blows; they march to supper and then into their cellhouse for the night. Maddeningly simple.

Contrast this description of a day in the life of an inmate with a contemporary one offered by a prisoner named ‘Paul’ who I blogged about a few months ago. You will find Knight’s description written in 1967 strikingly similar to Paul’s in 2010. As Paul suggests in prison “every day is the same.”

I encourage anyone who is interested in better understanding prison life to read Knight’s essay in its entirety. In less than 20 pages, Knight paints an invaluable portrait of prison life for readers. He offers details about the physical structure of a cell, about prison guards, about the different departments within the prison, about incidents of physical brutality, etc… Tomorrow, I will feature an excerpt that details life for prisoners once they are released.

As part of my New Year’s resolution to feature more voices of prisoners here, I found this poem called Another Day in Stephen John Hartnett’s new book Challenging the Prison Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, & Educational Alternatives. The poem was written by Erika Baro who is a member of the Writing Workshop at the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility. The piece was first published in Captured Words/Free Thoughts 6 (Spring 2009).

By Erika Baro

Laying in a pool of tears
Hidden by darkness
I wander lost between the hundreds
Of stars that decorate the night sky

As my voice whispers strangely
Driving me deeper into a madness
I cannot escape
I drift farther and farther away
On an infinite path to nowhere

But just as the last drop of hope slips away
A faint ray of light falls on my face
The sunrise dries my tears
And I realize I’ve survived

I will live another day

By Etheridge Knight

The warden said to me the other day
(innocently, I think). “Say, etheridge,
why come the black boys don’t run off
like the white boys do?”
I lowered my jaw and scratched my head
and said (innocently, I think), “Well, suh,
I ain’t for sure, but I reckon it’s cause
we ain’t got no wheres to run to.”

Born in Mississippi, Etheridge Knight grew up in Indianapolis. Given a twenty-year prison sentence in 1960, Knight wrote for the prison newspaper. He was released on parole in 1968 and ended up teaching at various Universities. Knight once wrote:

“I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound and narcotics resurrected me. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.”

There are a couple of reasons why I have resisted commenting on the case of the Scott Sisters in Mississippi. The first is that there has been terrific coverage of the case at Solitary Watch. The second is that this case is unfortunately not atypical. In fact, the truth is that the criminal IN-justice system destroys countless lives every single day in every state of this Union.

Josh MacPhee - Just Seeds

So instead of addressing the Scott Sisters’ case, I thought that folks might be interested in getting a better sense of just how awful Mississippi’s criminal legal system has historically been.

The end of slavery disrupted the South’s main labor supply. Mississippi was ground zero of white supremacy after the Civil War. This was in part because blacks greatly outnumbered whites in the state. This engendered a fear of a newly empowered “free” black majority that could claim social, political and perhaps one day economic power. Something had to be done to prevent the rise of the “free” black man.

Mississippi is the state that gave the country the “Black Codes” after emancipation. As David Oshinsky (1996) writes: “The Mississippi Black Codes were copied, sometimes word for word, by legislators in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana & Texas” (p.21).

W.E.B. Dubois described the Black Codes as follows: “The original codes favored by the Southern legislatures were an astonishing affront to emancipation and dealt with vagrancy, apprenticeships, labor contracts, migration, civil and legal rights. In all cases, there was plain and indisputable attempt on the part of the Southern states to make Negroes slaves in everything but name.”

Vagrancy laws were the centerpiece of the black codes.

Mississippi provided: “That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes in this state over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together, either in the day or night time, and all white persons so assembling with freedmen, free Negroes or mulattoes, or usually associating with freedmen, free Negroes or mulattoes on terms of equality, or living in adultery or fornication with a freedwoman, free Negro or mulatto, shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction thereof shall be fined in the sum of not exceeding, in the case of a freedman, free Negro or mulatto, fifty dollars, and a white man two hundred dollars and imprisoned, at the discretion of the court, the free Negro not exceeding ten days, and the white men not exceeding six months.

According to Oshinsky (1996): “These codes were vigorously enforced. Hundreds of blacks were arrested and auctioned off to local planters. Others were made to scrub horses, sweep sidewalks, and haul away trash” (p.21).

Prior to the Civil War and well after Emancipation, Mississippi had a reputation as a lawless, “rough justice” state. Duels among white men were common until the late 19th century and the courts had no hold over the population. Mississippi was the epitome of vigilante justice. The convict lease system in Mississippi was brutal and deadly. Oshinsky (1996) quotes the state’s former attorney general Frank Johnston as saying that convict leasing in Mississippi had produced an “epidemic death rate without the epidemic (p.50).”

It was against this backdrop that Parchman Farm was established in 1901. Below is a description of the Farm:

“Parchman’s twenty thousand acres covered forty-six square miles. Just inside the main gate was Front camp, which contained a crude infirmary, a post office, and an administration building where new convicts were processed and issued their prison garb. The men got ‘ring-arounds,’ shirts and pants with horizontal black and white stripes; the women wore ‘up-and-downs,” baggy dresses with vertical stripes…The plantation was divided into fifteen field camps, each surrounded by barbed wire and positioned at least a half-mile apart. The camps were segregated only by race and sex. First offenders were caged with incorrigibles, and adults with juveniles, some as young as twelve and thirteen. ‘Feeble-minded’ convicts were everywhere. Parchman housed prisoners like John Brady, an ax-murder with the mental age of a five-year old, because Mississippi did not recognize “idiocy” and “imbecility” as special categories in its criminal code. The result was a brutal, predatory culture made worse by the prison’s vast and isolated expanse (Oshinsky, pp.137-138).”

The Farm is memorialized in the great blues song Parchman Farm Blues written by Bukka White while he was incarcerated there. This is Bukka White's performance of his most famous song:

Here are the lyrics to the song:

Judge give me life this mornin’, down on old Parchman’s Farm.
Judge give me life this mornin’, down on old Parchman’s Farm.
I wouldn’t hate it so bad, but I miss my wife and my home.

Now, good-bye wife, all you have done gone, all you have done gone.
Well, good-bye wife, all you have done gone.
But I hope someday you will hear my lonesome song.

INSTRUMENTAL

Now, listen you men: I don’t mean no harm, I don’t mean no harm.
Now, listen. You men. I don’t mean no harm.
If you wanna do good you better stay off old Parchman’s Farm.

You go to work in the mornin’, just the dawn of day,
just the dawn of day.
Go to work in the mornin’, just at the dawn of day.
And at the settin’ of the sun that is when your work is done.

INSTRUMENTAL

I’m down on old Parchman’s Farm, but I sure wanna go back home, Wanna go back home.
I’m down on old Parchman’s Farm, but I sure wanna go back home.
And I hope some day that I will overcome.

Judge give me life this mornin’, down on old Parchman’s Farm.
Judge give me life this mornin’, down on old Parchman’s Farm.
I wouldn’t hate it so bad, but I miss my wife and my home.

It is worth remembering as we decry the current state of affairs in Mississippi that this state (like many others in the U.S.) has a long history of INJUSTICE. The Scott Sisters’ case has to be placed within the context of years of racialized surveillance in a state that has criminalized black people for generations.