As I drove up to the guard house on the long prison access road, my audio book was in its last two minutes. “The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray, a saga of the decline of an Irish family, is a mighty 26 hours and ten minutes long, so listening had been an investment. In the novel, everything was coming to a head. [SPOILER ALERT] The characters were deep in the woods, with heavy, lashing rain drowning their voices and limiting visibility. Two men had rifles trained on family members whose lives the book had chronicled.
And then the book ended. Ended! A neutral voice, devoid of the Irish accents that had narrated the novel, suddenly said, “Audible hopes you have enjoyed this reading.”
You’re not permitted to pull over on the road up to the prison buildings, so I had to wait until I was in the parking lot to listen to the ending again and see if I missed something. I hadn’t. The reader had to speculate about what happened next. (I know, I know - it seems obvious they were shot, but by this point, I was so invested in this poor family that I kept looking for a way out.)
In any case, it was a good metaphor for teaching the last class - for now - in this prison. Who knows what will happen next to the men in my class? As a listener/reader of the novel, I did not want to be entrusted with the job of figuring out the fate of these characters I’d come to know. I wanted the author to wrap it all up for me, and tie it with a bow.
Of course that won’t happen with the men I’ve met teaching inside a prison anymore than it did in the book.
As always, we opened up the class by going around in a circle and choosing one word to describe our current emotional state. T, one of the older guys, said, “Bummed.” He didn’t want to the course to end. I felt the same way.
We always play a warm-up game to get everyone relaxed and present in the classroom. You just don’t know where each guy is coming from on any given day, or what they’ve been through. This week, it was the “create-a-story” game, where we went around the room and each person added three words to a narrative. We’d done this game once before. The first time, the story ended with a guy putting his foot on the gas pedal and heading to Mexico.
This week, things took a turn towards the silly, and the story created involved two dogs, a beach, the women from the TV show “Bay Watch,” Denzel Washington and “an ancient Alien artifact.” You had to be there, but everyone was cracking up.
Finally the class settled down. We began by reviewing the journalism lessons we’d covered over the course of 12 weeks. Among those lessons: What is the purpose of journalism? Where do Americans get their news? Finding your writing voice. The role of advocacy journalism and writing for social change. Journalism ethics. The different between PR and journalism. Finding the story. The art and craft of the interview. Writing opinion pieces. Prison journalism.
The overall theme was one of authenticity - is objectivity possible? Can there be truth-telling about prison life? Who owns what story?
This last question was especially pertinent to me, because of the ongoing tension between the men telling their stories in class, and me retelling those stories in this newsletter. Is it my story? Their story? Is this a form of cultural appropriation? Exploitation? Is it a vehicle to share their experience of being incarcerated - which they do want out in the world? Or maybe it’s just my experience of teaching journalism inside this particular prison.
I’d told the men about this newsletter last week. But L and K, who had missed last week’s class due to illness, were hearing about it for the first time. “Wait,” L said. “Do we have fans?”
“More like followers,” I said, barely suppressing a smile.
Next, we read two articles written by the same incarcerated author, Joe Garcia. The first was a recruitment speech, titled “The Power of Journalism,” in which he encouraged men to join the San Quentin News staff.
“This newspaper is run by us, by incarcerated folks,” he wrote. “That does not happen often. And when I say us, that includes you guys. This newspaper goes to every California prison, and it gets mailed all around the world - and it’s totally online, too. Story by story, article by article, issue by issue, we have the power to change people’s minds, to change policy.”
Personally, I was ready to sign up then and there, save for the fact that I’m not a man incarcerated at San Quentin, a maximum security prison in California that has been operating since 1854. But I’m a nerd who gets fired up by the notion of journalism as a key component of a functioning democracy, not to mention an agent of change.
The men in the class, however, did not share my enthusiasm.
“Yeah,” said J, “That sounds like a lot of program orientations I’ve heard. ‘I’m running the show but you’ll learn a lot from each other.’”
P chimed in with, “Yeah, this idea of working together as a team. He’s creating a false impression. Once we leave this room, we’re on our own. He won’t have my back,” P continued, jutting his chin towards W next to him, “And I won’t have his.”
My personal balloon deflated. And I wondered why I have the need to “sell” journalism and to romanticize how it might give these men some agency in their lives..
“Okay,” I said. “That brings us to the next article, which he wrote two years later.”
Garcia’s second story, “The Deep Freeze Inside San Quentin’s ‘Jail Within A Jail’” discusses the frigid temperatures inside of administrative segregation, aka “the hole” at the prison. He describes the lack of heat, the “bone chilling drafts" and notes that “AdSeg policy bans long-sleeved shirts, sweats and head gear.”
The men first reacted to this piece with a slew of complaints about the conditions in their own prison.
“There’s a leak in the bathroom, and the plumbing is dripping down the walls. It’s disgusting,” K said.
“How about the asbestos hanging from the ceiling?” J asks. “That’s been there for years.”
The room we are in is very warm, and W snaps off the noisy electric fan. He’s sitting right under it and says he can’t hear the class discussion. But the guys tell him to turn it back on. I suggest W move seats, but he stays put.
“When it gets really hot, like 90 degrees, if the fan is working, it just pushes hot air around,” B says. “This room is hot, but the dorms are freezing.” He gets up and briefly leaves the room. When he returns, he’s brought water for Penny, the “Puppies Behind Bars” dog he’s training.
Penny, meanwhile, had been chewing on what looks like a large, plastic chicken leg, which she repeatedly dropped on the floor. It’s heavy, and lands with a loud clunk each time. For the first time since I began teaching here, I can see the sunset through the windows, purple, pink and hazy through the barbed wire. The days are getting longer.
R told a story about being at a different prison, where he served on the “Inmate Advisory Council.” “We complained about how freezing the hallways were. We were told they didn’t have to be heated, because they were not considered ‘hallways’ but “enclosed walkways.’”
The men talked about how they were not permitted to wear coats or scarves or hats inside, no matter how cold it was. “They’ll yell, ‘Hands out of your pockets!’” T said. “I don’t even think there’s a rule against that.”
The discussion was interrupted by a corrections officer shouting, “Movement” in the hall, signaling the time when the men were allowed to move between buildings. His loud voice startled me, and reminded me that we were drifting off point. This happens every week - men react first to the content of the article we’ve read, and then we back up and talk about craft.
“Let’s look at what was going on between the time he wrote these two articles,” I said. In his first piece he is optimistic and talks about how rewarding and “fun” journalism is. His second story is reported - he interviews others and refers to information in a press release. But it’s also a first-person piece, because at this point, Garcia been placed in solitary confinement.
“I’m in AdSeg because the administration says my safety is at risk, “ Garcia writes. “I don’t buy it, but the system leaves no room for dispute.”
“I thought about that,” S said. “So maybe he was getting punished for some of what he wrote in the newspaper, and that’s why he was in the hole.”
“No doubt,” K agreed.
“And, did you notice that this second article was published - not in the San Quentin News - but by the Prison Journalism Project?” I asked the class.
“Yeah,” M said. “ My guess is that any prison newspaper can’t publish things about what it’s really like. For that, you gotta publish outside.”
In his recruitment speech, Garcia had written: “To be a journalist, you have to be objective, you have to try to avoid emotion.” But I told the class that I’d found his description of the conditions in “the hole” packed with emotion.
We circled back to this sentence from his piece: “‘You think it’s cold?’” said an officer in his heavy coat zipped all the way up to its fur-lined collar, which was below a thick wool cap. ‘I don’t feel it.’”
“Yeah, he’s pissed,” D said.
“He doesn’t have to say ‘This is bullshit.’ You can see it,” M added.
“Is it effective?” I asked the class.
“It’s effective as a sentence,” B said. “But did it end up with them turning on heat? Probably not.”
My evangelist days for prison journalism were clearly coming to an end. Still, I had hope. I’d made copies of the Prison Journalism Project’s submission guidelines for everyone in the class. These men do not have access to the Internet, so I made sure there was a snail mail address where they could send their work.
I’d meant to also bring them the submission guidelines for the Marshall Project’s “Life Inside” publication, but my printer had jammed, and I didn’t want to be late to class. (If you are late to teach at the prison, you may not get a corrections officer to escort you to the classroom, and then you’re shut out.) I’m not allowed to have any mail correspondence with these men (or for that matter, any kind of contact whatsoever outside of prison), but I’m going to try to find away to get them those other guidelines.
The writing prompt this week was: “The thing you need to know about prison is….” I told the guys they had a platform within this newsletter for their thoughts. Or, even better, they should try to publish on their own.
The men wrote quietly for 20 minutes and then shared their work.
B wrote about the folly of collective punishment. He described one correction officer threatening to cut off power to the entire dorm if one guy didn’t turn down his radio. “He was a new CO and probably felt overwhelmed, so he was punishing indiscriminately. Collective punishment is a recipe for rebellion.”
S wrote about going to college in prison. “Prison is ridiculously hard,” he said. “I’ve watched it completely destroy men. But some of us become our best selves here. Those who do, do so in spite of prison, not because of prison.”
P: “There’s no greater feeling of isolation then knowing that even prisoners can turn their back on you. The divide-and-conquer nature of prison creates prisoner-on-prisoner abuse. Many guards use this as away to cover up their own abuse.
W: “I want people on the outside to know our conditions. The asbestos, the black mold, the heat… this prison needs to be shut down for good.”
T: “Being in prison for as long as I have, with three max’s and three mediums [maximum and medium Security Correctional Facilities], twenty one years behind big, nasty walls and now fences, I can finally see the outside world that I long to fully be apart of once again. When will it happen? I’m always being told, ‘They are looking here, or there, or the same news. Still no beds for me as DSS has nothing open.’ And when I say more they say, ‘We’re done.’ And I sit on a dark hard bench until they call ‘Movement.’”
T explained that he has already served two years more than his maximum sentence. P is in the same situation. He has served four years beyond his maximum sentence.
“It’s not suppose to happen to us,” said P. “It’s because we’re poor and we can’t afford housing. They’re making us work to earn our release.”
“It’s indentured servitude,” S says.
[Note: I have not been able to either verify or refute this claim. Need to do more research.]
K is the last to read. “Any one issue that affects us? It’s all pretty damn horrible. And all I can feel inside whenever I am being mistreated by staff and especially by one of my own, is that “I am still a human being.’ I want those orange airplane wands that are used on the runway and I want to flail my arms like a lunatic and scream, “I AM STILL A HUMAN BEING!” I want the whole world to remember that even though people make mistakes and even commit crimes, they should be corrected, rehabilitated or guided as human beings capable of change. Because we are just that: humans capable of bettering that old person into someone much more insightful and aware of humanity.”
We did the traditional closing and then I shook hands with each of the men. (Against prison policy, but still felt necessary.) We all thanked each other. They asked if I’d be back. I told them it wasn’t up to me - the nonprofit sends its teachers wherever they feel a need.
I told the guys I’d like to teach them a Memoir class. Everyone liked that idea. So we’ll see where I go next. There’s also talk about sending me to the first maximum security facility where I taught years ago. We’ll see.
On the drive home, I listened to the last 20 minutes of “The Bee Sting” one more time. I resolved to hop online and see how other readers interpreted the ending. I know what I think happened. But you never really know.
Your pieces make my heart ache for these humans. I'm contemplating that while Americans believe criminals "get what they deserve" and think our prisons aren't "as bad" as other countries, do they really think this is an environment for rehabilitation? It seems like it would take a lot of will and confidence to believe you are worth doing and being better if you were placed in that environment.
What I love so much about this whole series of pieces is YOUR voice - YOU are our lens into your classes and the men in them. I love to hear their voices, but YOU are always there as the writer, and I love hearing that.