Excerpt from THE MADNESS OF JOHN HAT

by Bob Bergeron

Here is my truth, here are some lies.

At three thirty the light slices through for two minutes exactly, then the Warden calls the sky and says, “ That’s enough.” The Warden seems to be in direct contact with the Eternal Power; he is privy to the secrets of the universe with the result being that he has been allotted control over the length of time that the sun will shine upon the prisoners.

Send a paper airplane over the wall and it ends up on the warden’s desk. Whisper too loud and the whisper stops in the warden’s ear. “Enjoy your ray of light boys.” The stark reflective walls stand as if to say. Nobody listens to the walls around.

Nobody except for the warden and his automatons, nobody except the human rats looking for a little extra something; a pillow maybe, or a third set of socks. Here a man’s dignity sells cheap. Here there are the rules that are printed and then there are the ones that are not printed but are just understood as the way things are. This is one of the unprinted rules. “There will only be as much sun-light allowed as required by law.”

The Warden hands out alms in the manner of a miser dropping scraps at his feet for the dogs to lap up jealously. Stay here long enough and you start to believe the collective powers that be are of some invisible barrier, invested with divine influence. They permeate the air, these powers, imbuing it with a sullen thickness. They are divested of holy power, they are the sons of the Gods and by right of birth or virtue of their ability to jump the correct hoops in the correct sequence, they have control over the lives of all the tired, broken men surrounding this purgatory.

They spit on their shoes and call it a shine, cinch the fat with their belts and call themselves thin, hide behind badges so we don’t remember their school-day fears of being left behind by their mothers, defenseless.

It’s our job to agree and tell them that everything is all right. To collude in the giant lie. The one that says “This is all for our own good…” They have their job and we have ours.

After all, they control the light.

The doors open in the morning and the animated corpses ambulate, careening off of each other. Whether truth or merely illusion, it doesn’t matter. The Warden may in fact be re-running the same filmed performance on a giant screen that is acting as one’s eyesight. Day after day, I might be dreaming, in suspended animation.

If only it were so. Better that way, thinks I.

We shuffle to the coffee, we amble towards the dollop of mush and the muffin on the tray. Here, it is all always the same, it is all the same day, always, and the only thing that changes are the faces of some of the corpses. Move ‘em in and move ‘em out, like pieces of vague meat on a conveyor. These are the hours at which we are called to step out and move. These are the places that we move to, barely discernable, one from the other…

In the morning there is the sound of plastic chairs hitting the floors, (echoes of the violence that brought so many of us low), scraping against the floors before the doors open; the inmate work crew for the unit stirred to action by electronic pulse, setting up for breakfast before the rest of us are let out of our cells. The sound goes right through my head. I start the day wanting to kill somebody.

Different from the days I wake wanting to kill myself. A refreshing change.

We stumble forward into the dim light. There is a setting on the dimmer switch that controls the light intensity here in the jail labeled Depression. It is right between Apathy and Despair. This is where the light is normally set. Our skin takes on the gray pallor referred to as the penitentiary complexion. Some guy’s faces begin to slough off in chips and scales. The water is all recycled.

“Nothing’s wrong Mom, I’ve been washing in some other guy’s bleached urine, is all.”

The water’s hard enough to remove a wart resistant to medicine. I know. I came in with a wart on my pecker that I thought was of a more dubious nature. I smile and think to myself, “At least one good thing’s come of this…”

The judge says “sociopath” but y’know what? Fuck him. The world didn’t fit and I tried to make it fit and I ended up here. End of story, Clementine. A beat dog gets used to what he knows, but that don’t stop him much from finding his place in the shade. I met the world on its own terms and every time it anted, I anted too.

Questioning eyes peer from sunken hollows. Thin necks crane and reach from the darkness. Morlocks appear from the underworld.

There are no other characters here, because there are no other people here, though I am surrounded. They are all ciphers, they come and they go, just passing through. Just meat. You know them only a little, you wave as they pass, you are a cipher to them as well, surely; and as easily forgotten. Forgetting’s another one of the things that we do here.

The kids, the ones that have been in and out of these places most of their lives, starting at the Youth Center, renew their daily frolic after the morning meal as though they were foals in the pasture. Though technically men, they are as socially developed as the average ten year old. The “outs” for them, the street, is a series of nights, weeks or a month or two. Then? Mishap and mistake, and they are back. Blame it on your mom and her crack habit and her Baskin Robbins inventory of liquor store boyfriends. Blame it on the cops. Blame it on the judge.

All the mirrors, everyone in every cell, is scratched so that you cannot see an face peering back at you.

Everybody playing the same games, saying the same ol’ things. Perhaps it’s a survival technique. Go along with everybody else and you will never stand out, never be singled out. Nobody will ever see the holes in your armor. If the thing to do is act as though you’ve received a late night lobotomy, why not?

“Resistance is futile. You will assimilate.”

This criminal variation of the human species ranges from eighteen to elderly. All of them ass grabbing and towel snapping regardless of age. They yell and cavort like newly foaled colts and argue, oh how they all seem to love to argue; and the most intelligent debates are entertained. No subject is too pointless or stupid. No slight too minor to allow one’s pride to overlook it. No silence too sacred to go unmolested, as if some unwritten law demanded that each moment be filled with noise.

In the day to day clamor everyone needs to be right, and for nothing gained. Everyone trying to make the world fit. To cope. The chest thrusting starts, often times before the coffee is even in the cup. These men are ambitious, they waste no time that could otherwise be occupied by silent contemplation of their condition. No, they get right down to exaggerated displays of importance. Who had the most ho’s, who had the most montega, (Spanish for brown powdered oblivion) the most bling-bling, yo. That’s the way that it is, everyone afraid that they are going to lose what little they have left; their skin, their heart, their pride. Not knowing that those can’t be taken by another, they have to be given freely, they trample themselves and each other into dust. It makes the guard’s job real easy.

“Hey, dude, smell my toilet.”
“No dude, you smell my toilet.”
“Man, my toilet smells worse… you smell MY toilet… ”
or;
“You don’t know nothing about being a junkie, man. I’m a fuckin’ Junkie.”
“Fuck you, man,” comes the reply. This is a serious bone of contention, there’s no backing down when one’s honor and ability, one’s capacity as an addict is on the line.
“I’m a fuckin’ real junkie. Montega from Lowell yo’. I drive down and drive back and I got a trail of cops on me all the way back and they can’t do shit ‘cuz I got the juice man. Mutha fuckin’ man can’t touch me and I be bangin’ that shit the whole way, yo. With a bitch suckin’ my dick, too.”
“You don’t know what yer talkin’ about, kid…” the grizzled veteran smirks, quiet-like. The untrained eye wouldn’t notice the danger hidden carefully in his tone. A common trick in prison, unknown, here in the jail. Real killers walk in silence. Go along like you’re playing, until you’re not playing anymore, and then strike. It means the guy’s done some real time, someplace else, (not in this county play camp, this nursing home for feeble twenty-some-things) and is about to bark at the kid. Or bite. “I been shootin’ dope since way before you were born…”
“Fuck you man.”
“No… Fuck you.” And before the kid knows what happened his nose is bleeding. Nobody sees anything.
“Watch yer fuckin’ mouth kid.” The old-timer says in a voice just above a whisper, rising from the table. The circle remains unbroken. Nobody says a word. The old-timer’s still solving his problems with his fists, the young buck is still taking a beating.

And on and on. One morning, any morning during breakfast. This is your bright shining orange juice start to the day. Anytime of day such weighty issues are being explored and resolved. And it is the inmates and the guards, both. The longer one stays here the more the line between the two becomes blurred.

Later that same day we watch a movie in which the one of the characters dies from a heroin overdose. We’re crowded into the classroom in the housing unit, metal seats that make your ass numb when you sit in them for too long. Substance abuse class. We are required to take it. “We know how to abuse drugs” some wit inevitably shouts during the proceedings. The dead character is on the screen, pale, ghastly white. We all see the blue lips, the cold curve of a young woman’s body, her hips sexy to our starving eyes even in facsimile of death, breasts under the t-shirt pert, symbolic of life, offering the viewer contrast, life and death. Death too young. A life never lived.  We see the needle. The arm tied off. The only thing that registers in the classroom is the needle and the tie-off. Nobody sees the body. There is a collective sigh, erotic in the now electrically charged air of the classroom, when the camera zooms in on the syringe. Nobody sees the body. All any of us want is the promise of the next fix. Damn the torpedoes and shit on tomorrow.

I look around, wondering how many of these men I’ll see in the paper, on the back page right after the funnies, men whose faces I will only half remember, dead too young.

I wonder if I will be one of them. Maybe it’s fear that’s causing me to write this shit down. Why, all of a sudden, am I starting to question the whole thing?

“I’m more of a junkie than you are.”

Here is my truth, here are some lies. At three thirty the light slices through for two minutes exactly, then the Warden calls the sky and says, “That’s enough.”

untitled

by Cyndi O’Leary

Dead Man Eating

by WonderBred

I recently came across a website that lists the foods that prisoners on death row have requested for their last meals. Food can tell a lot about our backgrounds, our ethnicities, how much money our parents had, where we come from, and these differences pretty much determine whether in moments of homesickness we crave hush puppies or ployes. Children exposed to spicy food since early life have different tastes than, say, me—raised on potatoes and tuna casserole. And when pushed to an emotional extreme, the food people seek in moments of stress serves a very specific purpose—that’s why they call in comfort food.

Below is a partial last meals request list for the Fall of 2004. I expected to read about surf and turf, prime rib, mussels. But their requests are for food like fried chicken, pizza, cheeseburgers. Knowing nothing else about these men and women, the foods they crave—in what is the last tending of their human bodies and in a time of extreme stress—describe the kinds of people who have been caught up in the “justice” system. Regular people. Poor people. People who are comforted by food from Pizza Hut and who want their last taste on Earth to be that of coca-cola.

It’s also interesting to know that while the list below gives the requests of the prisoners as they submitted them, they often didn’t get even these small things. According to Brian Price, in his article “The Last Supper” in the webzine legalaffairs.org, “Last-meal requests were always released to the media exactly the way the state received them. But like [one prisoner’s] filet mignon, many of the meals that prisoners wanted were replaced with less expensive or more accessible alternatives, which forced me to be creative in honoring prisoners' wishes. The policy of the Texas Department of Corrections was that only food items kept on hand in the Walls Unit kitchen commissary and butcher shop could be used. If the condemned asked for lobster, for example, he would be served a filet of processed fish. The last real steak I prepared was in 1993. Afterward, hamburger steaks were subbed in. Most vegetables came out of cans. Requests for large quantities of food were pared down to more practical servings. David Allen Castillo requested 24 tacos in 1998 and got 4.”

----------------------------------------

anthony fuentes, texas
executed november 17, 2004
fried chicken with biscuits and jalapeno peppers, steak and french fries, fajita tacos, pizza, a hamburger, water and Coca-Cola.

frank ray chandler, north carolina
executed november 12, 2004
a Pizza Hut thin-crust, medium pizza topped with extra cheese, pepperoni, ham, Canadian bacon, mushrooms and black olives served with iced milk.

frederick patrick mcwilliams, texas
executed november 10, 2004
six fried chicken breasts with ketchup, french fries, six layer lasagna (ground chicken, beef, cheese, minced tomatoes, noodles and sauteed onions), six egg rolls, shrimp fried rice and soy sauce, six chimichangas with melted cheese and salsa, six slices of turkey with liver and gizzard dressing, dirty rice, cranberry sauce and six lemonades with extra sugar.

demarco markeith mccullum, texas
executed november 9, 2004
a big cheeseburger, lots of french fries, three cokes, apple pie and five mint sticks.

robert morrow, texas
executed november 4, 2004
ten pieces of crispy fried chicken (leg quarters), two double meat, double cheese burgers with sliced onions, pickles, tomatoes, mayo, ketchup, salt, pepper and lettuce, one small chef salad with chopped ham and thousand island dressing, one large order of french fries cooked with onions, five big buttermilk biscuits with butter, four jalapeno peppers, two sprites, two cokes, one pint of rocky road ice cream, one bowl of peach cobbler or apple pie.

lorenzo morris, texas
executed november 2, 2004
fried chicken and fried fish, french bread, hot peppers, apple pie, butter pecan ice cream, two soft drinks, either Sprites or Big Reds and a pack of Camel cigarettes and matches. The request for the Camels was denied.

charles wesley roache, north carolina
executed october 22, 2004
sirloin steak, popcorn shrimp, salad with bleu cheese dressing, a honeybun and vanilla coke.

ricky morrow, texas
executed october 20, 2004
a cheeseburger, french fries, onion rings and iced tea.

adremy dennis, ohio
executed october 13, 2004
chef salad with french/ranch dressing, fried chicken breasts and legs, french fries, a cheeseburger, chocolate cake, deviled eggs, and biscuits with gravy.

donald loren aldrich, texas
executed october 12, 2004
20 beef tacos, 20 beef enchiladas, two double cheeseburgers, a pizza with jalapenos, fried chicken, spaghetti with salt, half of a chocolate cake and half of a vanilla cake, cookies and cream ice cream, carmel pecan fudge ice cream, a small fruit cake, two Coca-Colas, two Pepsi-Colas, two root beers and two orange juices.

an excerpt from Criminalization of Poverty in Capitalist America

by Jalil Abdul Muntaquin

Crime is big Business

The political decisions of the bankers are decisions about who will be poor. Corporate decisions made in the late '50s to remove industry from communities of color were about who would be unemployed. Decisions by developers and bankers about redevelopment (redlining and gentrification) are decisions about who will be homeless. Such decisions affect everyone, but people have no say in the matter. Generally people, especially the poor, have no say in most social and economic decisions that affect their lives. Somehow that is not part of the democratic method of government, and because people have no say in the process, creating homelessness is not criminal, but being homeless is. Runaway plants and plant closures are legal, but vagrancy is a crime.

Meanwhile the plight of the nation's hungry and homeless worsened. In November, 1984, in a pastoral letter on "Catholic Social Thinking and the U. S. Economy," American Roman Catholic bishops had called poverty in America a "social and moral scandal that must not be ignored," and stated that "works of charity cannot and should not have to substitute for humane public policy. . . . A little more than a year later, the Physicians Task Force on Hunger in America reported on a two-year nationwide study it had conducted and concluded that, despite fifty- eight continuous months of economic expansion, hunger was more widespread and serious than at any time in the fifteen years (affecting some twenty million Americans), largely, in its words, because of "governmental failure". . . (Trattner, p. 337-8)

Hunger and homelessness are deliberately imposed socioeconomic conditions of the disenfranchised large numbers of the American population. This is especially significant when consideration is given to the method and means by which the malfeasance of the powers that be operate to ensure that such conditions stay the same. Thus such pathology ensures the rich get richer, while the poor get prison and early death.

Max Weber has argued that society is structured to function in a specific way to ensure its existence, that the social structure is subject to the mechanics of government, and that governing is all important above and beyond the immediate needs of the people. "Weber held that social stratification depends on the distribution of three resources: wealth (economic resources), power (political resources), and prestige (social resources). Thus, in our society wealthy business owners often gain power by contributing to political campaigns and earn prestige by making large donations to charity or to the arts. In other cases, however, the three are not linked. For example, in our society an individual acquires less prestige (in most circles) than someone who acquires comparable wealth by legitimate means. Artists, the clergy, and others may enjoy prestige but not wealth. On occasion people with few economic resources and little social prestige --bureaucrats, for instance-- exercise considerable power . . . Weber held that because stratification is multidimensional, the formation of groups depends on which interests or identities people choose to emphasize. In capitalist societies, for example, ethnic and national identifications have proved more important than economic or class identification."[3]

We are able to determine the social and racial implications of certain classes, then, having a vested interest in crime. It can be argued that because an elite class of criminals is in charge, they commit capital crimes, crimes against society and humanity. The jails are overflowing, but that doesn't seem to help --because the real criminals aren't in jail. They're in the board rooms and in the White House. They are the social policy makers that run this country. And today, they are increasing social repression by building more prisons, creating harsher legal sanctions (i.e. 52 death penalty laws, three strikes you're out), and becoming ever more heedless to the social implications of poverty as an impetus to committing crime.

Under their misleadership, over five million people are homeless, 37 million have no health insurance, 30 million are illiterate, 30 million more are functionally illiterate, one million are incarcerated, and 60 million live in poverty and are struggling day to day. But contrast a tiny fraction of the population controls enormous wealth. The median net worth of the top 1% of households is 22 times greater than the median net worth of the remaining 99% of outstanding stocks and shares. The wealth of the richest 5% of the population increased by 37% from 1977 to 1988. The wealth of the richest 1% increased by 74.2%. At the same time, the number of people in poverty increased by one-third.

In this case crime does pay. The U. S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics announced on July 15, 1990, the federal, state and local governments spent $61 billion for civil and criminal justice in 1988, a 34 percent increase since 1985. Other findings in the report were that federal, state, local governments spent $248 per capita: $114 for police, $78 for corrections, $54 for judicial and legal services, and $2 for other items.

Almost half of the nation's justice spending was for police protection. Corrections accounted for almost one third of justice costs. Spending for corrections grew the most during that period, by 65 percent. Since 1979 state spending for prison construction increased 593 percent in actual (constant) dollars. That's some 2.6 times the rate of spending to operate prison facilities. In October of 1988 the nation's civil and criminal justice system employed 1.6 million persons, and the total October payroll for them was almost $3.7 billion. [4]

Crime is big business in America. Annually the laws are changed to ensure profitability in the industry of crime. Social conditions that serve to maintain levels of poverty, feed the industry of crime, also put stress on the social stratifications of society. Given the fact that America is a nation of criminals as elucidated in the Wall Street Journal article, social conflict is inevitable. It then becomes a matter of identifying the real culprits of crime, and seeking the means to have them become accountable for their criminal behavior. This may very well include the redistribution of their wealth, and the reorganization of the social contract between the government and the governed.

In response to the stratification outlined above, it requires revolutionary nationalist and socialist efforts to formulate a national political agenda and policy that will challenge the prevailing social contract between the oppressed and the oppressor nation. This means revolutionary nationalists and socialists must have a clear and concise mass-line and political program that identifies and explains the nature of poor peoples' oppression, and how they are to be organized to confront their oppression.

More information on Jalil Muntaquin

Reprinted from Schooling the Generations in the Politics of Prisons, edited by Chinosole (Berkeley, CA: New Earth Publications, 1996). This essay is part of the HYPERLINK "http://www.prisonactivist.org/" Prison Issues Desk. It is maintained by the HYPERLINK "http://www.prisonactivist.org/parc.html" Prison Activist Resource Center.

by Wildfire

May 1, 2005

It’s hard to talk about my experiences being incarcerated—definitely not my shining moments! But I will endeavor to relate my story in the hopes that it will help someone else.

From a personal point of view, I have to admit that jail most certainly saved my life. I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but please bear with me while I attempt to explain.

When the police raided my house last year, my lifestyle was firmly entrenched in the drug-culture. I used to refer to myself as a “professional addict” and had lost all control over my life. I’m convinced that I would have died if I hadn’t been arrested.

Since my initial arrest, I’ve been back to jail briefly several times. It seems to me that once you are in the system, you are doomed to repeat. What I observed was that of the female inmates I originally did time with, nearly half were back in when I returned to jail this last time (almost exactly one year later). It seems to be a regular cycle of in-and-out with many of them. Sadly, it looked like I, too, was becoming part of that cycle. As I said, once in the system, you’re doomed.

The last time I was arrested I was visiting the state of Maine. This puts me in the unique position to be able to comment on and compare the county jail systems in Kennebec County, Maine and Broome County, New York. Let me say up front, the differences are glaring.

Kennebec County Correctional Facility (KCCF) is much the same as I imagine it was fifty years ago. In my opinion the only change as been the addition of electronic locks on the doors. The jail is small, dark, and dirty. Fresh air is only allowed one hour per day (if you’re lucky). I was appalled that such deplorable conditions could exist in the 21st Century. Girls spoke longingly of wishing to be sent to prison (in Windham, ME) where time was easier.

The picture they painted of conditions at Windham seemed to parallel the conditions at Broome County Correctional Facility (BCCF) in Binghamton, NY. The inmates there regularly enjoy a clean, state-of-the-art facility. There is lots of light and space, and an outside rec yard is always open. There are lots of educational and religious opportunities, as well as such programs as AA, NA, and anger-management.

I’m not saying any jail is nice; losing your basic freedom is a hard lesson to accept. Life in jails is no picnic regardless of where you are. The general feeling in jail is one of quiet desperation.

I did notice that both jails have a strong religious population; belief in God helps make incarceration bearable. Also in common is the observation that both facilities seem to be filled overwhelmingly with drug addicts and drug dealers.

Sadly, Maine is either unenlightened or ill-equipped to handle the influx of addicts. New York courts routinely send addicts to rehabs, drug court, and other programs. The judges and jails both recognize that most addicts are not criminals, but sick people who are merely surviving as best they can.

I can’t say enough for this type of forward-thinking. Even if “rehab” doesn’t take, it does plant a seed of hope for the future. This was the case with me, and I’m so grateful to the court for giving me another chance to “get it right.”

I’m determined to break the cycle and reclaim my life as a productive (and relatively happy) member of society. I am currently meeting the court’s terms and conditions by attending daily out-patient therapy, as well as daily AA and NA meetings. My life is gradually improving with each day, and I am extremely hopeful for the future.

Image from death row inmate Bill Clark, found at http://www.todesstrafe-usa.de/death_penalty/voices_ca_clark.htm

Almost dead

by Bill Clark, Death Row Inmate

*the following are special to the website—not featured in the zine*