index of 2006 workshop papers

One is a Tragedy

by Stephen Kurtz,
Pelican Bay Prison Project, U.S.A.

“One death is a tragedy; a million are a statistic,” Stalin is supposed to have said. Advocates for social justice face a tough dilemma if that is true. When we emphasize the isolated sufferer, we risk the loss of context. Yet if we we discard the personal, we lose whatever connects us through our hearts. I shall try to strike a balance.

Stalin’s bald remark restates a philosophical distinction between the abstract and the particular. What is the metaphysical status of each; what is its unique reality? At the same time, each element of the distinction represents a temperament. The sort of person who founds an organization that feeds thousands is temperamentally different from the sort of person who takes a hungry person into his house and fixes him in a meal.

I belong more nearly to the second – to that loose category of person whose actions must satisfy two needs: for crossing social boundaries and for establishing intimate connections. Though I seem always to begin with the individual, I tend to move toward a larger, though never very large, scale of organizational response. It is empathy with one person that fuels a broader reaction.

Let me move quickly to an example. Since I have always been a failure at pastimes of every sort: zen, bridge, real-estate speculation – I retired to San Miguel with a burdensome amount of time. And then an old concern resurfaced. I began to write a group of lifers around the United States. Why lifers? Prisoners with forseeable outdates, I reasoned, might need a level of care I couldn’t supply. And Death Row? No way was I going to get close to a person facing execution! But by writing to people with life sentences I hoped to be doing something satisfying and useful – without courting emotional disaster. Of course I was wrong. Life imprisonment is its own agony and, if you love a person with that sentence, you will learn in your soul just what his agony is.

As with all relationships, some panned out, some didn’t. But from the beginning, Donald Johnson and I hit it off in a way that has never ceased to seem miraculous. We have been writing to each other weekly for four years, and out of this evermore-intense friendship has grown a nationwide organization.

But first, the friendship, which is the soul of the rest. Donny’s story, like all stories, is unique, and yet not. As a man, he certainly fits the most important statistic since prisoners are 95% male. But he is white, which puts him in the minority. 75% of all U.S. prisoners are of color: 50% African-American; and 25% Hispanic or Native American. These are national statistics. Regionally, of course, they differ.

Being white in prison is a liability. Though a mild person by nature, Donny became a fighter to be reckoned with; it was the only way. The other principal way is to join a gang. Few prisoners are not gang members – extensions of the gangs they belonged to in their neighborhoods, or new ones formed inside. But Donny’s temperament did not lend itself to subordination to a group. This proved to be a serious problem. But I have jumped too far ahead. Let me retrace my steps to show you Donny as a little boy.

His mother was 16 when Donny was born, having left a home in which her father beat her mother nightly. She left for the protection of a man who, before long, did the same. It was one such beating that Donny witnessed as a five year old – standing helplessly by as the beating proceeded, wanting to protect her and feeling responsible that he couldn’t. It has taken him years to shed the guilt: even now I’m not sure it’s gone.

Donny’s mother left and eventually, remarried a man whom Donny came to care for but, not long after, Jimmy was killed in a shootout with the police. Donny was ten and the emotional shutdown that began when he was five now locked itself into his character. He started using drugs and before long was addicted. He thumbed rides around California, stole cars, did what he had to to maintain his habit. He was in and of juvenile detention and learned to fight well. He wanted help and sometimes found helpful people but he was too far gone to make use of it. At the age of 18, high and in the middle of a deal gone bad, a man was killed. “Flip a coin,” his lawyer suggested to see whether Donny or his partner should take the rap. Donny lost. He is 46 now and has never since been free.

We met when he was 42 and I noticed an ad he’d posted on an online pen-pal site.

What struck me most in that ad was his consciousness of class. “I’m a proud member of the working class,” he said, “and I love our working folks.” How many in America have that consciousness? It was the first hint of how much Donny’s social awareness had developed in this most unpromising setting. Not that this is unique: there is immense intelligence behind those bars; the unconventional wisdom of people who’ve learned everything they know in original ways, not having been been fed schoolroom pap. Donny’s take on the world and society bolsters the views of, among others, Paolo Freire and Ivan Illich on the deadening effects of ordinary schooling. But we mustn’t romanticize the prisoner: there’s also an immense amount of ignorance and group thinking in that world – a world that cultivates brutality and blind obedience to savage laws. Often, within their own world at least, they aren’t ‘nice’. Niceness, however, must never be a criterion for being treated as a person.

But despite the traumas of prison life (which includes being let into a yard with a known enemy, then shot at by guards when they fought) Donny read and thought deeply. Understanding his world became a necessity, and this is what he came to understand. Among other things, that despite the alternating fashions of punishment and rehabilitation, there are underlying social and economic reasons for imprisonment. In the Nixon years, politicians relearned an old lesson: that tough-on-crime platforms win elections. The increasingly commercial media abetted this with lurid stories of kidnappings and child murders. Sentences became longer and mandatory; judges lost their powers of discretion. Even as crime rates dropped, imprisonment rates shot up. In some parts of the country – rural California and New York, among others – prisons became the only growth industry, replacing others lost to globalization. The men who would once have been jobless became the wards of others who would once have been factory workers. 2.3 million people are now imprisoned in the United States.

The Federal prison at Marion instituted the Asklepion program – the first modern super-max to intern men in solitary confinement complexes called Security Housing Units known by the acronym SHU. That is how Donny has lived for 20 years, first at Corcoran, now at Pelican Bay. These are 8’x10’ cells without natural light in which the prisoner is held constantly, being fed through a slot in the door and allowed to exercise one hour a day in a dog run attached to the cell. He has had no physical contact for all this time – not even a shared hug with his mother. All visits are by phone behind glass partitions.

And yet, his spirit is alive. He is too independent to be a born-again literalist, but he is filled with the spirit. One expression of this is in art – which he calls a manifestation of God’s creative essence. He began painting about a year ago, following an unstoppable impulse. Though no conventional means are available to him, he made a brush of his own hair, secured with thread to a rolled piece of paper. For color he uses M&M candies, applying the dyes to the backs of cards he buys at the canteen. The results are not only ingenious but aesthetically remarkable. They can be seen here at the YAM gallery in the Instituto Allende and the New York Times will publish an article about them. “He’s not a prison artist;” one critic said of him, “he’s an artist in prison.”

It was inevitable that, as our personal friendship grew, we should become activists together. We founded and co-direct the nonprofit Pelican Bay Prison Project for whose benefit Donny’s painting are being sold. The proceeds will help establish a program for children of incarcerated parents – known to be at high risk for incarceration themselves. The Project maintains two websites – one for Pelican Bay and another for a similar prison in New York – to provide news and information for families and to give these isolated men a chance to meet friends on the outside – as Donny and I did – through penpal ads. The Project also sponsors a 12-step program called Ex-Offenders Anonymous, since so few resources exist for people after release. We are also working towards a correspondence B.A. in association with St. Francis University in Pennsylvania. Level of education is the chief predictor of recidivism and yet Pell grants for prisoners pursuing college degrees were eliminated in the mid 1990’s. With these programs, we hope both to undo what Donny calls the “otheration” of the prisoner, and to bring him into the world.

II.

Let me expand on a few of the concerns I’ve outlined, beginning with the general and the particular. We have lived through a century of ideologies and their consequences. My father believed the state should assume responsibility for each individual’s welfare and that private initiative only created an obstacle. So, when our neighbor, Mr. Rosen, asked him to help out another man, recently unemployed, Dad refused – on ideological grounds! Even as a child I was shocked. I came to feel that any global solution that discounts one person’s suffering must be wrong. That is why the Pelican Bay Prison Project did not begin with a concept: it began with a friendship. It began with a friendship and its first purpose was to foster friendship – especially, but not only, across social lines.

That is how it has been with Donny and me. I wait for his letters as eagerly as he does mine because the imbalance in our life situations is not matched by an imbalance in our feelings. To put it abstractly, it is not only the imprisoned who need the free; the free need the imprisoned. To put it personally, I need his heart and wisdom as much as he needs mine.

Why this should be the case is a mystery to me, but I have encountered it before – the deep need of at least some people to cross social lines. It is not to expiate guilt, which would trivialize the connection, but something more profound, which I don’t know how to name. Perhaps it is given to some to experience those lines as fissures – as a brokenness they cannot ignore. For more than ten years I consulted at a little private school in Harlem supported by the richest people in the city. Not only did they support it with money – numbers of them worked there with great diligence: Mellons, Drexels, Vanderbilts, even a Dutch princess – folks who might easily have spent their time in other ways. It was not noblesse oblige that led them to shoot hoops or do algebra with the kids on East 129 th Street. And by no means were their lives otherwise empty – on the contrary, they were full. But not with this particular fullness.

Perhaps the point I’m trying to get at is that since heartlessness can easily and insidiously invade systems of social change based on ideas, friendship must be at the core of any such effort. But it must be a friendship in which mutual need is understood and acknowledged. That is to say, a relationship that does not proceed de haute en bas, but meets on level ground.

I came into this friendship with no small amount of arrogance, but I have learned – Donny has taught me – to move towards humility. How could I possibly have known what it is like to be him, and what would be needed to help? I have learned something, though, and that is the value of love and respect.

By listening, I have learned that life in prison – and even more so in solitary – is weighed down by boredom. Boredom, noise, and endless humiliation. Here is Donny’s account of one instance of the routine strip search he must endure every time he takes a shower or gets a medical exam: “… run your hands through your hair and beard; run your fingers through your open mouth; pull each ear forward, hold your arms up and show both sides of your hands; raise your genitals; squat three times and bend over to expose your anus; stand up and raise the bottoms of your feet.” “I’ve done this countless times since I’ve been in SHU,” Donny continues, “…and you must do this whenever you leave the cell. But this time – I don’t know why - it was somehow different. I felt exposed and dehumanized. I thought of the naked victims I saw in “Schindler’s List” as they were herded like cattle into the showers of death. I thought of how vulnerable I was; how exposed. I wondered if this nakedness of mine made the guard embarrassed at all – or if he was inured to the process of stripping prisoners out. I considered the utilitarian language employed: “to strip-out.” To be stripped of clothing, protection, that which shields me from the elements. To be stripped-out, bare in the open, susceptible, open to attack, defenseless. A sadness overcame me… “

As we all saw in the photos from Abu Grahib, stripping a person naked is one of the most basic ways of dehumanizing him. And that, of course, is the point. How could we treat people like this unless we made them, somehow, ‘other’. Donny’s word ‘otheration’ captures this perfectly. So a movement for prison reform, I think, must begin by undoing ‘otheration’ – by restoring the prisoner his humanity – something that can happen only by actually knowing him.

If you move in this direction, you will be faced with deep frustration at the cruelty and intractability of the prison system. It will become not just an objective fact but something that renders you sickenly helpless as you watch your new friend caught in a web about which you can do nothing. To accept that helplessness and continue to offer friendship – the only thing you’ve got – is a lesson.

The powers that would keep the prison system in place are vastly stronger than anything that opposes it. In California – the system I know best – the guards union called the CCPOA controls prison policy through substantial donations to gubernatorial candidates and to candidates for the state legislature. California now imprisons over 160,000 people – more than many nations – and more prisons are being planned. Not only the guards union but the builders of prisons, food and clothing suppliers, weaponry, defense systems. The prison-industrial complex is very real and very rich. Against its wealth we have the families of prisoners – poor and disorganized, as poor people tend to be. To fight the system effectively, a person would have to spend a lifetime acquiring the necessary political clout.

The alternative is to try to improve the condition of prisoners – to offer them friendship, to support their children, to help them acquire a useful education and, after release, to find the resources to avoid going back. That is the path Donny and I have chosen in founding and directing the Pelican Bay Prison Project. We hope to see the Project replicated everywhere there are prisons.

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index of 2006 workshop papers

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