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Introduction
It's an ugly place. Even with subtle hints of spring in the atmosphere and the early-morning sun highlighting houses in the distance across the Hudson, there's something thick and rancid in the aura of the place. It's as if the colors of the few trees and struggling grass plots and stolid buildings have all been crushed and melded together to form a soupy, lifeless gray. Stone and rusted iron, shiny, razored concertina metal rolling across all the perimeters give the place an air of cruelty and constant suffering.
It's Sing Sing Correctional Facility and what goes on here is quite different from what the movies and the television specials and media histories describe. The thirty odd acres of cellblocks, gun towers, mess halls, and recreation areas constitute an organic entity. There are days when the place just smashes down on keepers and kept alike, when the weight of a lurking malevolence and an almost sentient evil reduces it all to a hellish mess.
Like the weather, our prisons have become part of the everyday informational background. Despite eloquent articles in the Op Ed sections of many papers and periodic exposes from our more trusted talking heads, the stories about prisons no longer seem to stimulate concern.
Why consider the prisons? Don't we appoint people to take care of that sort of thing? Professionals who are trained and knowledgeable and dedicated and so on?
Who I am is not important. What's important is that I live here at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and I'm one of the few men left behind the walls of New York prisons who are able and willing to give you a clear perspective of what these places are, what they're doing to you and to your respective communities, and why you should care. I'm choosing to speak for a bunch of reasons, but mostly because I owe it to my family, to past victims and their families, and to all of the individuals on the outside who are putting their time, energy, and finances into efforts to make prisons more efficient, more humane, and ultimately, less necessary.
I bear, quite justly, a permanent guilt and remorse. The things that I have seen and experienced and been a deliberate part of can never be undone. However, I can acknowledge my responsibility by stepping into this spotlight bearing information that may spur meaningful discussion. Because I have been able to study, experience, think, research, discuss, compare, challenge, and draw conclusions, I can offer a perspective that you may not have considered, one that may, hopefully, challenge you to action.
It is necessary to understand two things at the outset. First, those who manage prisons and prisoners, and those who benefit from this management, have priorities that almost never coincide with those of the communities that they purport to serve, inform, and protect. Second, all of these players depend upon the fact that most of you have busy lives and cannot delve into the morass of convoluted information available to you. They believe that lacking time and data, most of you will also lack the motivation necessary to develop opinions. Instead you will allow intellectual reflexes and emotions to shape your responses (or lack of them). These are quite predictable, and therefore, easily manipulated.
I am going to offer alternative positions on a number of issues that I have found to be most substantial. I'm going to trust you all to find your own private questions and pursue solutions that are effective, humane, and attainable. Given provocation and enough opportunity Americans have proved again and again that they are able to root Out truths and build upon them.
The Communities
Alexander Hamilton said,
All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other, the mass of the people...the people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.
There was a time when I was young and naive enough to believe this. It was a time when most kids believed in the good intent of those in charge, when we gave ourselves over to the care of the schools, churches, Boy Scouts, and community service groups that seemed to be on almost every corner. Even the politicians and media personalities of that time seemed to be well informed and well intentioned. Honest debate created forums where powerful, incisive thinking laid the groundwork for a rapidly developing industrial and cultural network of diverse peoples.
Many of our communities are now battlegrounds. High-tech weaponry combined with a crippling of morale has left families and communities in a confusing arena where the ideals that guided their forefathers are gone. The shadow of prison looms over many of these communities, and as neighborhoods feed their children to the monsters of violence and disease and prison, there is a sense of hopelessness and frustration that threatens to overflow into other neighborhoods.
Individual families constitute the main element of influence and authority within communities. This is as true in Scarsdale as it is in East New York, and to know this is to accept right away that families are where the most immediate attention is needed. In some communities, virtually every family on the block has a member who is in prison, has been in prison, or is on the way to prison. It has become something of a rite of passage, and in the big yards of Sing Sing, Attica, and Clinton prisons, hugely disproportionate segments of the inmate population come from just a few New York City neighborhoods.
It isn't simply a phenomenon of New York. The 1998 population of state and federal prisons in the United States exceeded 1.2 million persons. This places the United States ahead of all other industrialized nations in locking up their own citizens.
The harsh truth is that these figures represent the destruction of certain families and, therefore, certain communities. Almost half of all state and federal prisoners are black. The incarceration rate for blacks is more than seven times greater than for whites in the United States. Nearly 30 percent of all black male children will spend a part of their lives in prison. In 1996, 421 percent more women were in federal prison for drug violations than ten years earlier. More than three-quarters of all women in state prisons have children. Overall, parents held in U.S. prisons have nearly one and a half million minor children. More than half of the women in state prisons never see their children while in prison. The family destruction caused by harsh punitive incarceration destroys many young lives. For example, children growing up in fatherless homes (which are, of course, disproportionately minority) are very much more likely to commit suicide, become runaways or homeless, or end up in residential substance abuse centers.
Extra-judicial penalties such as denial of public housing, denial of public financial aid for education, and denial of the right to vote act as final stones added to an already sinking ship. Persons released from prison return to communities that face harsher conditions and receive less aid than any others. It's a vicious cycle of racism, injustice, and economic exploitation that is permanently injuring the fabric of communities. It is creating unfair and repressive policies, punishing those who are least able to respond to them, and denying them the opportunity to re-integrate themselves into the communities on a positive level once their sentences are concluded.
The damaging effects of selective political and judicial policies undermine efforts aimed at stabilizing these troubled areas. Families of incarcerated men and women rapidly lose faith with those municipal agencies that are charged with the responsibility to assist them. Financially-strapped churches, neighborhood block associations, and local non-profit groups are less and less able to contend with the masses of families that need help. Professional clinical and social service assistance is expensive, and recent government budgets have not made funding available in proportion to the needs.
The Columbine High School tragedy and several similar events at suburban high schools have been spotlighted in a fashion that made all of America feel as if these were the children next door. We all wanted to know what had gone wrong. We wanted to understand how these tragic incidents gestated and flowered right beneath the noses of parents, teachers, community and religious leaders. The shock and pain sent reverberations that are still rumbling throughout those unfortunate communities. What's peculiar is that the daily tragedies of violence and disease and homelessness and mental illness among teens and families in the inner cities doesn't generate interest even remotely comparable. There's a not-so-subtle perception by the general public that black and Hispanic teens and families within the inner city ghettoes are not capable of evolving beyond the imposed limits of their lifestyles and are therefore, unworthy of the kind of concentrated attention that middle-class neighborhoods receive routinely.
Consider the financial equation. The annual cost of operating prisons in New York is currently well above two billion dollars. The average cost of confinement for New York inmates is around $34,000 per year with only a small fraction of that sum being committed toward therapy or rehabilitation. Half of all the "crimes" are simple drug offenses, and half of these are for possession of small amounts. Archaic sentencing structures have accounted for the waste of billions of dollars. (Remarkably, the nonpartisan Physicians on National Drug Policy recently said that every dollar spent on drug treatment saves seven dollars in social costs.)
If these expenses resulted in increased public safety and a reduced inclination among young people to commit serious offenses, it could be argued that they were worthwhile. However, there is overwhelming evidence that this simply is not so. The RAND Corporation Drug and Policy Research Center concluded after extensive studies that harsh, strictly punitive incarceration is the least effective method of reducing crime and drug use. If anything, these rigid and insensitive policies tend to perpetuate the kinds of community grievances and lifestyles that they claim to suppress.
As the money spent on prisons has increased, the money available for education in the communities has diminished. Close to a billion dollars was cut from public funding for higher education in New York between 1994 and 1999. As a result of these cuts and the concurrent expansion of the prison system, the state spent nearly twice as much on prisons as it did on the state universities. More than almost any other, this single fact illuminates where the condition and future of the inner city stand with the state's political leaders.
Where is all of this money going? If so much is necessary, why aren't prisoners better prepared to be reintegrated into society when they return? What kinds of alternatives are available to benefit the communities and to create experiences within the prison system that teach and heal while they punish and protect? Is such a system possible? To understand these questions we must look at those groups and individuals who benefit from crime and incarceration.
The Prison-Industrial Complex
The prison-industrial complex has become an entity. It has amassed the financial and political power to wield both overt and hidden influence. At the state level, New York employs guards who earn up to $36,000 after five years on the job. With few requirements other than a clean criminal history, the equivalent of a high school diploma, and a seven-week course at the training academy, men and women can become responsible for the care, custody, and control of some of the 70,000 plus prisoners in the system on a daily basis.
For many of the state corrections workers, especially those who are from upstate areas, the job represents a replacement for the industrial and agricultural careers that have disappeared. Job benefits are numerous considering the low qualifications for employment. However, there are several downsides. There is a long waiting list for the preferred jobs in prisons farther upstate. Most of the corrections officers are white and not enthusiastic about having to live in areas near the city. Most prisoners are urban people of color and their incarceration far from home makes it difficult and expensive for them to have regular contact with their families. It's a situation that creates pressure for both sides and adds to the adversarial context of prison.
During the past twenty-seven years, New York has opened almost thirty new prisons. Most of them are built far upstate and are vied for with furious intensity by local politicians seeking to enrich their respective communities with the added funding that automatically comes with a new prison. Public utilities, commercial vendors, and local workers all profit from a prison filled with what they view to be the detritus of the inner city ghettoes. These prisoners are counted by the state and federal government as part of the local census, thus bringing in more dollars that may be used to subsidize local hospitals, schools, and public utilities.
An officer at Sing Sing said in a recent New York Times interview, "I'm praying for more prisoners." This view reflects the general outlook of those communities where a prison has become a part of the economic mainstay. Because the state legislature is dominated by rural politicians, the location and regular expansion of prisons are perennially important issues.
The privatization of prisons, like the privatization of other social services, is ruled by the bottom line. The very concept of social benefit is pushed to the side in the effort to gratify shareholders. The stock prices of Corrections Corporation of America, the industry leader, rose from eight dollars a share in 1997 to over thirty dollars by 1999. Since then it has risen over 15 percent during each successive year. The number of prisoners being held by private organizations paid with taxpayer dollars is currently close to 250,000 and rising every year. The brochure for a conference organized by the World Research Group, a New York-based investment firm, called the corporate takeover of correctional facilities the "...newest trend in the area of privatizing government-run programs...while arrests and convictions are steadily on the rise [nationally], profits are to be made...profits from crime. Get in on the ground floor of this booming industry now!"
Like all commercially driven organizations, private prisons exist solely to make money. The social mandate of rehabilitation and reintegration are neglected because their costs are high. These facilities work on an "out of sight, out of mind" premise that uses the public's fear of crime and criminals to create a comfortable space that supports wretched conditions, poorly trained staff, and the most minimal preparations for return to society. It works directly against the best interests of the private organizations to create programs that might diminish a person's chances of returning to prison.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, private prisons were a familiar element of American life. Prisoners were routinely fanned out as slave labor. They were beaten, fed slop like hogs, and kept in horribly overcrowded and filthy cells. Conditions became so wretched and despicable that by the beginning of the twentieth century, private prisons were outlawed in almost every state.
Since 1990, private prisons have made a comeback. During the past decade, twenty-eight states have passed legislation legalizing the prison industry for private contractors. Free-market ideological fervor, huge budget deficits, and the deliberate creation of vast new reserves of raw materials (prisoners) have given the industry a boost akin to that of the metals industry with the advent of war.
Weapons manufacturers, food vendors, medical suppliers, and the clothing industry are but a few of those with vested interests in the lucrative contracts available from state, federal, and private prison communities. Phone companies, suppliers of sports equipment, transportation companies, and even novelty vendors are getting on the bandwagon.
The average prisoner spends between one thousand and fifteen hundred dollars a year on items such as personal clothing, cassette players, tapes, cheap jewelry, junk food, books, typewriters, and a list of sundries that are all designed to quell the natural instinct toward rebellion. This money comes from family, minor prison jobs, and the sale of arts and crafts produced by the inmates.
Between 1980 and 2000 the commercial value of goods produced by prisoners rose from $392 million to almost $2 billion. Prisoners earn sums as low as $1.10 per hour to make soap, computer parts, license plates, office furniture, golf balls, mattresses, clothing, and a host of other items that are sold to other municipal institutions.
Lured by cheap, consistent labor, the larger companies, such as major airlines, have moved into the market. At one time, Trans-World Airlines paid prison workers five dollars per hour to book reservations by phone. In Ohio, a local union succeeded in shutting down a program at a state prison where the Waste Corporation was paying prisoners $2.05 an hour to assemble parts for Honda.
Advocates for these predatory companies have argued that these jobs prepare convicts to work in a disciplined fashion and to adhere to socially acceptable employment standards. There is a measure of truth in this, but what they fall to note is that these are jobs which, on the outside, would require higher pay and better training. Having a criminal record almost always precludes this, and without legislative mandates and formal agreements between the companies and the state's prison bureaucracies, prisoners are shunted off to the streets and replaced from the general inmate population when their sentences have been served.
The Prisoners
Which of us has known his brother?
Which of us has looked into his father's heart?
Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
. . . Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
Prisoners are citizens. Whether or not they feel recognized and valued as such, they are members of a family and of a community. Their lives, as mangled and distorted as some of them are, still count. Convicts must embrace this concept if they are to regain a place of stability and harmony within their families and communities. It does not matter if the society is unwilling to accept them. It does not matter what they are called on the daily news programs. It does not even matter if they are doomed to spend the rest of life entombed in a place like Sing Sing.
What matters is that we decide to return from whatever twisted pathway of thinking and feeling drew us here. What matters is that we find ways to understand and accept that, like the prison itself, we too are attached to the community. Not one of us here has come to where we are without a mother or sister or relative or associate. Not one has come without a past that included far more than the guns, drugs, violence, and assorted degrees of madness that rendered us vulnerable to the temptations of crime.
A healthy and respectful recognition of our attachments is the first step toward a redemption of the self and a coming to terms with whatever situations brought us here in the first place. For almost every prisoner, there has been a victim, sometimes more than one. For every tear shed, every life deferred, postponed or altogether canceled by an act of one of us here, a retribution must be paid. There must be a balancing of the scales. Each life and the quality of it are precious. When lives have been bent and twisted to the core, even those that recover are marred eternally. Each prisoner must learn to understand this. He or she must learn to stretch the imagination beyond personal experience and embrace the suffering and loss of the victim. In Soul Talk: A Journey Within, John Mandala, a long-time Sing Sing resident, speaks of forgiveness from a relative of a victim and describes how it inspired him to look further into the nature of his own behavior. He says, "Many times when traumatic life encounters brea k us open, then we can see inside ourselves. . ."
In over fifteen years behind the wall, I have heard all the stories. I've listened to the reasons why men feel that they are here. They are, unsurprisingly, as varied, colorful, sad, tragic, brutal, and complicated as the men who tell them. They reflect each individual perspective, each kaleidoscopic picture that makes sense only to the painter. It's difficult but necessary that each man here learns the concept of being responsible for his actions.
It's true that slavery was wrong. It's true that racism and classism and economic oppression have warped the dreams and ideals that empower people enough to believe in themselves. It's true that the justice system and the political system and the economic system all seem aligned against certain segments of the society. There is a very great deal of evidence to support these charges. It doesn't matter. To allow these factors to direct one's course of action in life is to give up the opportunity to stand as a human being with will and potential and value. To allow oneself to be buffeted about through life by the storms of existing in a black skin or a female skin or a poor skin is to concede the very inferiority that we rage against. Every prisoner who would strive to understand and truly regret the lifestyle that brought him to this point must be able to see these societal failings as only minimally relevant. In the daily battle for the rest of his or her life, each prisoner must look for ways to see past his or her own existence. A way must be found to see the effects of personal behavior on family, friends, and community.
I've learned more than a few things from some of the men who have spent decades behind various prison walls. Some of them have gone on to leave prison and live decent, productive lives. Some are still here and will never leave. What's common among them is that they have learned to live in prison without allowing the evil of prison to live in them. They helped me to understand that responsibility and remorse are active and organic. They go quite a way past "I'm sorry." They include taking responsibility and humbling oneself.
It's important to be sorry. Although counselors and clergy and psychologists always speak of the value of forgiving the self, as a man who's spent almost half of his life imprisoned, I think that it's important to realize that for some things there should not be a total forgiveness. Crimes of violence that end lives or wreck them beyond repair should always, I feel, stay with the perpetrator to a degree. It's a fragile balance that needs to be kept so that the guilty person is forever reminded that there is a part of himself that has demonstrated a capacity to act without regard for the effects of his acts on himself or others. There are lines in life that, once crossed, can never be retreated behind.
Because I choose to carry with me daily, every minute of every day, a measure of the tragedy and pain my actions brought to others, I ensure that the opportunities I have to move forward and enjoy life are always shadowed by the life that I took and the lives I ruined. I think that's something that anyone who has committed a serious crime should consider. It doesn't make up for it. That isn't possible. What it does is keep a kind of psychic light blinking, a cautionary device that holds in check any tendency to discount the weight of what I did.
I can't say that this will work for every prisoner, but I believe that every prisoner who is genuinely remorseful will find the concept helpful and I hope that families and victims will be able to accept this as a step toward any sort of redemption that might be possible.
Taking responsibility means more than remorse, more than apologizing. It means that one must come to terms with the old behavior and build a way to live differently. It means not making excuses or looking to salve one's ego and emotions. Taking responsibility means dealing with the consequences, even when they are seen as unfairly harsh. This is an exceptionally difficult thing to do, especially for younger prisoners who view any concession as a diminution of self. There are so many flagrant offenses against young people these days that it has become a way of life for them to react in a fashion similar to how they think they have been acted toward. People need help to learn to take responsibility. It's complicated and it takes awhile. Often there isn't a lot of help to be found in here but we have to learn to seek out what little there is. It's hard to ask and the risk of rejection and humiliation is always there. Still, it has to be done.
Although we all need to align ourselves with others who are on the same path, we also need to understand that there will come a time when each of us has to stand alone with only the strength of what we've practiced to sustain us. We will have to conquer habit and fear and loneliness. In our communities lots of people are doing it every single day. They're taking care of children, doing jobs that need to be done, struggling to set an example, and they're doing it in relative obscurity. Taking responsibility is realizing, that for now, our community is where we are and trying to bring even to the environment of our cell a sense of integrity and fortitude that's impervious to the surroundings. When we can do this, then we can consider ourselves ready for the challenges of the outside. The community has a right and an obligation to demand that we prove ourselves. It's not enough that we just do time. We have to bring something to the table when we return. The community needs help, intelligence, diligence, honest y, and patience. We who have violated owe it to the community.
Finally, we must be willing to humble ourselves. To humble oneself is an act that brings a person in touch with those elements of living that are at the mercy of the external universe. It is an acknowledgment of the transitory nature of life and brings an appreciation of that life. To humble oneself is to see each life as interrelated in some fashion and to respect and value the connection. When, as a convict, I truly learned to appreciate my life with all of its complexities and shortcomings, I automatically began to understand better the impact of my behavior upon the lives of others. It was a vital, humbling experience not only to identify with my own mother and children and close friends but to stand in the light of what I had brought upon the lives of the relatives of the victims of my crimes. Nothing in my past had prepared me for this revelation. It was enough to have crushed me but for the fact that other people had helped me learn the value of being humbled by life. I do not believe that any prisoner can really change from the inside until he has experienced this. We can never erase what we have done. It is the personal responsibility of every person locked away in some vile cage to transform himself, to seek assistance and be willing to agonize in pursuit of a humanity lost, stolen, or crushed by social circumstance. It isn't a challenge for everyone. The effort could well be beyond the ability of many. Certainly I have seen over these years, hundreds, thousands of lives so mangled by misfortune and deliberate attack that I'm always amazed that any of us survive to learn and prosper.
There's so much more that I haven't talked about. I admit I've written as much from emotion as from experience and reason. It is my belief that discussions of this nature are valuable only when they evoke an emotional fire. The cold reality of columns of figures denoting specific atrocities rarely motivates humans to change until those figures and graphs and charts can be absorbed and translated to images with human faces. It is necessary for particular groups of people to begin to care about other particular groups of people. If the society cannot be concerned about the fate of its prisons and the men, women, and children confined to them, then the facts and figures are moot. There will always be enough money to finance ignorance and brutality and inhumanity. There will always be special interest cliques prepared to manipulate and distort. As the struggles for civil liberties, religious freedom, equal suffrage, and freedom of choice have proved, valid changes occur from the very moment that people commit the mselves, set priorities, and refuse to capitulate, to see beyond the frontier of what is going on to the open plains of what is possible.
On this brisk, gray March morning, Sing Sing prison sits like a chancre on the skin of the Hudson Valley, daring spring to alight here. Even the few trees allowed to live seem colorless and exhausted. While many of the guards here are "praying for more prisoners," the fact that more prisoners would imply more victims does not seem to matter. More and more prisoners mean that more societal institutions are failing. They mean that the fabric of lives within certain communities is unraveling.
Except for a stalwart few, prisoners themselves seem resigned to their fate. They slump through endless cycles of idiot TV fare, exercise, games, and the sharing of shallow dreams. The numbers of those able to work to change themselves and help others to change are dwindling as the public education system feeds the prison maw with the lives of the least capable and most vulnerable from the poor communities.
In the prison visiting room hope remains barely alive. Children are growing up here, spending years of alternate weekends with fathers who may or may not ever come home to them. Family members from the outside strive to be supportive as best they know how. In the face of what the prisoners often need to hear and be pushed to achieve, family members often do not know what to say or do.
It's not hopeless. There are men and women behind these walls who care. There are prisoners and volunteers and clergy and nurses and prison staff members who will not subscribe to inevitability or to hopelessness. These are the people that the community needs to reach out to. These are the people who have answers. They know what the problems are and how to fix them. They have the motivation and the knowledge. You have the power to align the influence of your votes and taxes with them. Your responsibilities to your own communities demand this.
Gregory Frederick is a prisoner at Sing Sing, in Ossining, New York.
He is an artist and musician who has voluntarily taught the basics of drawing and painting to other prisoners.
Copyright 2001 by Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
From the July, 2001 issue.
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U.S.C. section 107, this material is
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