My class is shrinking. For the past few weeks, I’ve been losing people.
“Is it the lesson plans or something else I’m doing wrong?” I asked the five men who showed up last Tuesday evening.
“Nah,” B told me. “Guys just aren’t here anymore.”
Last week, I’d learned that one class member had been sent home, and another was injured. This week, I found out the injured man - one of my best writers - had been transferred to another facility. He was hurt during what class members only described as, “the incident in the dorm.” I asked if C was okay. The men shrugged their shoulders. He was gone now.
As was M, an older man who had faithfully attended every class up until last week.
“M? He’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Transferred.”
And so it went. It was clear the guys didn’t want to discuss specific members of the class who were no longer there. I learned that the men have little to no control over transfers. Sometimes, they’re done for disciplinary reasons. Other times, more beds are available in one facility than another. Many times it’s a mystery.
I wondered how this played out with friendships on the inside - a person you’ve known for years could essentially disappear over night. But the men were so obviously disinclined to talk about this, I dropped it.
We did have S’s “Puppies Behind Bars” dog back in class. The golden retriever sat on a ratty towel in the middle of the room and happily - and noisily - chewed a rawhide bone for an hour and a half.
This week’s lesson was on “The Art of the Interview.” As always, we began by going over the basics. Do your homework before the interview. Don’t ask anything you could find out through the public record. (By way of obvious example, and because I try to bring some humor to the classroom, I said, “So don’t walk into the Oval Office and ask Joe Biden, ‘What is your current job title?’”)
When you’re crafting interview questions, think about what information you need to get. Don’t ask yes or no questions. (Instead of “Do you like your job?” ask “What are the three worst things about your job?”)
Have questions prepared, but don’t be afraid to go off script if the conversation is takes an unexpected turn i.e. if someone answers along the line of “…but that was before the big blow up,” don’t nod and move to the next question. Follow up with “What blow up?” When in doubt, try, “Say more about that.” Never be afraid to ask for clarification.
Take notes, not just on the answers but also how the interviewee looks, what their voice sounds like, any mannerisms they might have. You’re going to want to create a picture of the person for your readers.
My original plan had been to have the class brainstorm interview questions for an article about prison jobs. After that, we’d read a piece from the Prison Journalism Program titled, “I Gave Up One of the Best Jobs in My New Jersey Prison,” by Derick Lecompte. Next, I’d have each man write a personal narrative about his own job, using as prompts the interview questions the class had crafted.
As we started to discuss possible questions, I had my own query. “Do you get paid for prison jobs?” I asked. The answer was yes, but nowhere near minimum wage.
“I just read that in Russian prisons, they’re paid a living wage,” S said.
“What?! They treat them better than us?” W asked.
B chimed in with, “Yeah, but then they poison you.”
S added, “And also, we don’t have to take showers with rifles trained on us. In Russia, they’ve got guns pointed at them all the time.”
Once we’d come up with an outline for the interview, I decided to pivot from my lesson plan. Since there were only five men in class, I thought we could try something new. I told the guys my original idea of having them write first-person pieces about their jobs, and asked if instead, they’d be interested in breaking up into groups of two, taking turns interviewing each other, and then writing profiles about the other person.
“See?” I said. “I’m deviating from my own script just like you sometimes do during interviews, because I think this approach will work better .”
Everyone was in. Because there was an odd number of class members, I said I’d partner with someone.
“How are we going to choose the interview pairs?” I asked aloud. I’m super-careful not to show any bias towards one class member or another.
“Names in a hat,” S suggested.
W pulled out a white wool cap. It was a cold night and the men had bundled up for their walk across the courtyard to the school building. I began writing down all the names on a slip of paper, until B pointed out that we only had to put in three names, and then the other three could pick out of the hat.
Well, that was embarrassing, but I suppose there’s mileage in the men seeing that they are often smarter than I am.
We picked teams. I was matched with W.
The men rearranged the desks around the room and we started interviewing each other. Voices were animated, but the noise was manageable. Sometimes, I’d look around, see the guys engrossed in conversation, and call, “Don’t forget to take notes!”
When interviewing W, I remember how much I love being a journalist. It’s like getting “A License to Ask” pass.
In short order, I learned that up until Q was incarcerated, he held a job at a “sub-supervisor” in the food court at a mall. At the same time, he was attending college. Sometimes his boss would ask him to take an additional overnight shift to clean and polish the floors, and he’d be too “zonked” to make it to class the next day.
In prison, he works in the main mess hall, serving food. It isn’t always easy, W noted. “Everyone always wants the best slice of pizza or the biggest piece of chicken,” W says. “I try to be as fair as possible.”
He says he was grateful for the food safety training he got as part of his job, and now knows at what temperature to defrost food, to prepare chicken separately from everything else (“Salmonella”), keep areas sterile and more. Also, W noted, working in food services is one of the best paid gigs. I asked him how much he made.
“38 cents an hour,” he said proudly.
“Whoa!” I responded. “That’s not much.”
“Much better than when I was a porter,” W answered, referring to a janitorial job. “That was 10 cents an hour.”
But the biggest perk, W told me, was that you could get all the food you wanted.
“To eat?” I asked.
“Well yeah, but really to sell,” he told me. “I got contracts.”
So basically, W takes food out of the mess hall and then sells it to other incarcerated men. Hmmmm.
Suddenly, J called out, “Hey Kate, shouldn’t we make time to switch who’s interviewing who?”
Yikes! Time was flying. “Everyone, finish your last question and then switch!”
Obviously W couldn’t interview me about my prison job, so he asked questions about my writing career. I gave him a gift - the story of my most humiliating moment as a journalism. I wrote an obituary of someone who was still alive. It’s true. You can read about it here. Don’t ask why I’m compelled to keep sharing this shameful incident.
W asked if I’d interviewed anyone famous. I told him I’d interviewed Bill Clinton (after his presidency), the actor Christopher Reeve (after his accident) and the comedienne Joan Rivers. What impressed him the most?
“Joan Rivers! Are you kidding?! What was she like?” he asked breathless.
“She spent a lot of the interview criticizing my outfit and my hair,” I told him. It was true.
We had just enough time to read all the profiles. And everyone learned a lot. I had no idea that J managed to hold six different jobs in prison. Or that B had been a tattoo artist. Or that T was a metal worker before he was incarcerated, but his lungs “were wrecked” from chemicals he handled, and now he works as a prison clerk. (“Low pay but low stress,” he said.)
S, a really smart and well-read class member, was a veteran who had been homeless.
In a few of the essays read aloud, men criticized others who turned their prison jobs into “side hustles.” “I got no respect for that,” one class member was quoted as saying.
I was reading my profile of W last, and I made a mental note to skip the part where he talked about selling food to other incarcerated guys. Clearly a side hustle. If it had been an on-the-record interview with a public figure, I’d have included it. But I didn’t want to create trouble in this small class.
Yet again, it made me realize that I understand nothing about prison life. Yes, the guys share their thoughts in writing and conversation. But just like they became buttoned up about transfers, there is so much that they won’t share with “civilians.” That’s what both the incarcerated men and the correction officers call us - civilians.
Any sense of intimacy is an illusion. I know the men enjoy the class. But I’m there for just under two hours a week. I head back out into the free world. They don’t.
That said, though their stories about prison work contained some frustration, this week was the most fun we’d had in class. I think it was the interaction, and the more hands-on activity. Everyone was laughing at the end. They called out their thanks and told me to get home safe.
Walking back to the entrance, with my ID badge hanging from a lanyard around my neck, I asked the corrections officer escorting me whether the prison had a lot of transfers.
Oh yeah, he told me, and most of them were due to “affiliation.”
“Gang affiliation?” I asked, and he nodded.
I remember when I was teaching at a maximum security prison a few years ago, the men on the older side (40+) talked about the young gang members coming in, and how “crazy” they were. “They got no moral code what so ever,” one guy told me. He himself was in prison for a gang-related homicide.
The guard said more. “For my first 12 years as an officer, I never saw a cutting,” [stabbing] he said. “Now we have three or four a day. It’s like there’s scared of nothing and they feel nothing.”
I returned my prison ID - you can’t take it with you, major security risk - hold my stamped hand up to the infrared light, and pass through the heavy metal door into the cold night.
É exatamente como imagino que seja. Meu sonho, era lecionar numa instituição. Ainda não me formei
This brought back so many memories. I did not want to teach in a prison but a fellow National League of American Pen Women member taught art classes and would not stop pestering me about it until I said yes. The delusion of intimacy was something I didn't understand until long after I no longer taught there. It felt so real to me at the time. But it wasn't safe for them to let their guard down for a second. I didn't get that then.