Prison Propaganda

PRISON PROPAGANDA! PRISON PROPAGANDA! A prison employee in a suite yelled as we waited. There were no CO’s in sight (except for the one behind the window), the prison was completely dead from the outside. I had never seen the prison like this before. Every Thursday evening the lobby will be filled with prison volunteers and CO’s quickly rushing us along, and through the check-in process so that they won’t hold up the entire prison with the volunteers. This week was different. It was completely quite, it seemed like time was standing still.

As I cut through the silence like a doctor making his first incision… I knew something was wrong. I walked up to the man behind the window and gave him my driver’s license as always. He asked me what my number was... “C68, I think” – everything was normal so far. I was confused, I could feel the intensity – something clearly wasn’t right. As the CO behind the window finally passed me my visitor ID (after frantically searching for the right one)– he opens his mouth. Oh no here it comes! “It’s going to be about an hour wait before the CO’s get back to take you across the yard.” –What? An hour for what? Where are the CO’s? “The prison is on lock-down right now, all the CO’s are needed inside. There is no one to take you back, until they are finished back there you will just have to wait!” – For how long? –“At a minimum an hour, you can leave or you can wait. Who’s next?”

I walked away feeling as if my heart had just sunk in. I turned and look around. We have to wait now. I explained the situation to my fellow volunteers. No one knew what to do. There are not chair to wait in the lobby of the prison. Will we stand for an hour? I slowly backed myself against the wall and sunk down to the floor. As my body hit the ground I began to think about the prisoners. What if we don’t get in this week? What if someone is beating them? What if someone is hurt? A riot… what cause the riot? What if they think we are forgetting them this week? If we can’t get in someone has to let them know that we were here! Oh no…

PRISON PROPAGANDA! PRISON PROPAGANDA! The prison employee in the suit was walking around with a prison news letter. He was handing it out to everyone as we waited. He so politely shoved the news letter into our faces. Prison propaganda huh? I opened the news letter and began to glance over the article. Most of the articles were about prison programs, ones like the GED or the College program that volunteers like us were there for. I skimmed over some of the articles. They bored me, we spent the rest of the hour learning numbers and different languages, and having political conversations. About an hour or so later, we had stopped watching the clock because time really doesn’t exist in the prison.

The CO’s suddenly reappeared and began herding us through the security procedures. When we finally got to the other side of the prison, in the school building, we began to take down chairs and set up our classroom. At that time we were told that we would have to wait another 45 minutes before the prisoners would be allowed into the room for our weekly sessions. The guard apologized and left us all to wait. With 20 minutes left for our tutoring session the inmates slowly began to trickle in.

Everyone seemed a little off today, and the class was unusually large. Every single person on the roster was in class today – we barely had enough chairs. I must admit this was a little intimidating, especially because there were a lot of new faces. 20 minutes wasn’t enough time to make a connection… well maybe...

The class ended… our 20 minute discussion of Haiku’s was successful. As we slowly walked down the hallway of the school… like clockwork the lights turned out as we exited to walk across the yard, and leave the prison. As I began to look around at all the men standing in the yard, I began to wonder… a riot in the prison… a lockdown…

What could have caused it? “PRISON PROPAGANDA, PRISON PROPAGANDA” – he said.

The Communication of Races...

So I must admit that it had been a while since my last post. I apologize. The truth is that it has been hard for me to articulate what I want to say. You see every week there are so many different things that happen. In a prison, just like in life there is never just one layer to things. There are layers upon layers upon layers to work with. Like an onion it takes time to peel, and sometimes tears are involved while you are fighting to get to the center. The problem with trying to peel an onion is that you never pick each layer to get to the center; after you peel the skin and just cut through to the center (it’s easier). A lot of times in life we cut straight through to the center – sometimes it’s easier and sometimes it makes things a bit more complicated. I hope that you can allow me to use this space and the next few posts to sort through the layers…. And try to make sense of it all.

There are a few layers to the prison system that I have been having a lot of trouble with recently. Being an African-American female it is almost impossible to realize that everyone in the GED tutoring class and in the yard are either African American or Latino. Why is that? You know before going into an actual prison, and working their every week I had done a little research on the prison systems. It had been a lecture topic on one or two of my African American studies classes, but I had never truly thought about what that all meant. I had heard before that African American and Latino males make up the largest percentage of the prison population. But it is always easy to read a fact and forget about it, but experiences are a lot harder to forget.

So once a week I go to Auburn prison. We park our car, and walk towards the massive structure and metal bars. The guards open the oversized metal gate for us to walk in. Then we walk to the main desk and sign in then we show our IDs and they give us our visitor’s ID (which we have to attach and wear the entire time we are in the prison). Next we had to take off our shoes, jackets, IDS, put down our books, and walk through the metal detector. Assuming I don’t set the detector off, the Corrections Officer (CO) will then check off my name and stamp my hand. After patiently waiting for every volunteer to go through this process we then proceed through the next oversized gate into the small corridor with the black light. After each person crowds into the small gated room and show there hand under the black light so that the CO behind the glass window can see it, the next gate opens and we walk inside. We are now past security, and the next step is getting to the education building. This building is located on the other side of the prison property (in the back). So in order to get there us (the group of volunteers) has to walk through the entire prison to get there. After walking up the stairs, and through several other small gated rooms and hallways we have to walk through the yard. Our only protection walking through the yard is our number, and the 3 CO’s that are accompanying us with their big black sticks swinging in their hands. Deep down though I know they are no protection… I have already been told that our true protection is the inmates that we tutor and the high image they have of us (volunteers) in their head. I, and fellow volunteers, have been told several times that we never have to worry about anyone messing with us because they will always protect us. It’s prison loyalty – just another layer that hasn’t quite been peeled back yet. As I walk through the yard, I listen to the whistling and sexual comments from the prisoners. When I first walked through the yard that was really upsetting for me… and I felt very uncomfortable. But now those comments don’t bother me, I now have the ability to tune them out. What I see now is color, and condition. It’s truly heartbreaking. As I walk through the yard, I pass through bathrooms that you can see-through, and seas and seas of adult African-American and Latino men. After my first couple of visits to the prison I began to search the crowd to see if I could spot a man of a different race – no luck. In fact this past week was the first time there was a man in the class who was not African-American or Latino. It added an interesting dynamic to the class, he didn’t speak much during the discussion time – but he didn’t have to. Just his presence and expressions changed the atmosphere. There are a lot of problems that I have with a prison of this security level being “colored” (if I can use that word)…

The other evening I was watching an old film, a favorite of mine; it’s called “Cool Hand Luke”. If you haven’t seen this movie I would really suggest that you watch it! But anyway this movie is about a prison, prison life, a chain gang – I had watched this movie before several times in fact, but this time the movie had a very different meaning to me. This is a 1967 film about the prison system; it is about a time when prisons were divided colored prison and white prison. This particular chain gang was a white chain gang; they had all committed crimes and were serving their time. Some of them were murders, and others were not but they all worked and served their time together and they were all white. So my question here, one that I have been pondering; are all the criminals just “colored” people now? Or somehow in some weir d way is there a white prison, with all the other white criminals? They must have been put there because their crimes in some way were less heinous then the drug smugglers, gang bangers, murders, and innocent men of Auburn. Maybe I’m imagining things… or maybe there really is a pattern of racial profiling, and biases that place only people or mostly people that reflect my skin color or the skin color of our president in jail…? I’m not sure, I don’t want to pass judgments on our justice system, but I do want to change it! Exactly why I am striving so hard to fulfill my dream and become a judge someday, because hopefully in fulfilling that dream I will also been allowing young African-American and Latino men to dream as well…

I’m not saying that the justice system is faulty, I’m just saying…

“What we have here is a failure to communicate!”

Maybe the justice system and people of color just don’t know how to communicate with one another and comprehend each other’s struggle. Maybe the justice system needs a clearer reflection, a reflection with a little more color, a reflection that could really match the individuals who have to stand in front of that bench…

According to the Washington Post, “one in nine black men 20 to 34 is behind bars.”

Communications is key…