Today I got the job. It includes the use of a typewriter, clean underwear and socks every day, and a view of a blank wall: perfect.
April 18
Supper, the “evening” meal here, is at 3:30 p.m. So it’s absolutely essential (unless you work in food service) to have someone stealing from the kitchen for you; or else you have to be able to get through until bedtime on cookies and shit from the commissary or whatever fresh fruit is available. I have various arrangements now with different men. Since I dispense the new shoes at the Clothing Room, I have good leverage — I can do significant favors. You’re allowed one pair of new black shoes each year, but that’s not enough. If a man wants a new pair he tells me in advance and when the hack’s not looking I falsify his card in the New Shoe file. We’ve gone through a hell of a lot of new shoes my first week on the job. But I’m eating fairly well.
April 19
Yesterday, on the chow line, one guy grabbed three oranges instead of the one allotted to him. He did it openly. While the hack was yelling at him, a second man began stuffing oranges in his pockets and under his shirt as fast as he could, looking at the hack’s eyes all the time. He stopped when the hack’s eyes began to shift toward him. It was a neat two-man operation. I congratulated them outside the chow hall and they laughed and gave me an orange, which wasn’t necessary. I was just so impressed with the dexterity of it.
May 2
My neighbor in Providence House is a big, bouncy, cheerful, coffee colored young black cat named Sonny who plays cards all the time: a pimp and small-time dealer. It took a while for us to get to know each other and then he found out I’d been at Allenwood for six months. He asked me if I’d known his brother Nick there.
“Nick? Sure! Nick was my neighbor, too. He slept next to me the same way you do. Same spot! Man, that’s really a coincidence.” And I babble on. “How is Nick? Wasn’t he due to max out?”
Sonny tells me that Nick maxed out a month ago. He was home in Harlem about a week when he was shot twice in the back and killed as he was leaving a bar. He was trying to collect a debt owed to Sonny. They wouldn’t give Sonny a furlough to go home for the funeral, afraid there would be more bloodshed. “Which there would have been,” Sonny said, “and will be.” Then his buddies called him for a card game and Sonny, grinning, bounced off.
May 9
Pete Costa was transferred last week to a cell in Hartford House, living across the corridor from Shorty Bigshoes, the black moonshine king. Odors waft through the dorm from Shorty’s locker and he’s always apologizing for the smell, which is like that of an overflowing sewer. Finally he and Pete go into business together; Pete apparently has some expertise. You can’t get real booze at Danbury — a pity. Grass, yes. That’s smuggled in through the Visiting Room (mouth to mouth, usually) or by the men who work outside in Hackville.
Here’s the recipe, according to Pete. Put a plastic liner in a wastebasket, fill it 2/3 full of hot water, add two cups of stolen yeast, several pounds of stolen sugar, tomato paste and raisins, with cut-up apples floating on top. Let it cook for some days. After drinking this brew, which is called wine, guys are throwing up in the john all night. It’s best stored in an empty locker, Pete says, so that if it’s found no blame can be attached to any specific individual. I asked Pete where he kept his stash but he said, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you, compadre.” He doesn’t trust me!
But today I found out. It was almost a tragic revelation. A fire broke out in the cable factory, where Shorty Bigshoes works. Just a small fire, easily containable with the fire extinguisher, except that when they began to spray the contents of the extinguisher on the fire it blazed up wildly and consumed nearly half the factory. Several men were scorched, one was burned badly on the hand. Shorty and Pete’s main stash had been stored in the extinguisher. Pete laughed. “Write about this joint some day, compadre. Except no one will believe you.”
May 12
A vote was taken after count a few weeks ago and I was appointed one of Providence House’s representatives on the Inmate Committee. This is meant to be a liaison committee between the population and the administration. Each dorm and cell block sends two men. We meet once a week among ourselves and once a week with the Associate Warden, Chief Caseworker and Industry Supervisor. We’re supposed to air the complaints of the men, make proposals, get feedback. Of course the administration doesn’t have to act on our proposals and can tell us — in administrative language, naturally — to go fuck ourselves. They generally do this by listening attentively to our carefully worked out or impassioned speeches and then saying, “We’ll take the matter under advisement.” Some items have been “under advisement” now for nearly a year. The meetings I’ve attended so far have been pretty raucous. The men assume immunity, so the language is rough. But the A.W. and Mr. Key, the Chief Caseworker, keep their cool. They address the group as “Gentlemen … “ and individually they call us Mister.
Some small things are achieved. And some major ones, too. The committee was formed after a 1971 work stoppage here — in fact, a strike — and that’s about the only leverage it’s got, the threat of another strike, which the administration fears like plague because it not only causes the profit-making cable and glove factories to shut down but reflects on their ability to maintain control over population. Washington doesn’t like it. There’s always the fear of another Attica, even in a medium-term joint like this one. You never know what a man will do if he’s locked up beyond his own personal time limits.
This year the committee’s won the right for each inmate to make a monthly telephone call, collect. That’s a big gain. Some men’s families live too far away or are too poor for regular visits, and the sound of a voice, while it may bring tears, is a living memory.
The committee’s also forced the administration to conform to Bureau of Prisons standards and bring the law library reasonably up to date — that’s important, too. We have twice-monthly mimeographed newspaper and we’re fighting against censorship, but this is sure to be a losing battle. Also an ongoing plea for Christmas furloughs for all men with minimum security status — about a third of the population — is not gaining ground, but we persist. We’re prohibited from bringing up individual cases. If a man has such a grievance, he must go to his caseworker. Caseworkers are uniformly hated because their principal function is to say no.
On the committee’s chickenshit side, there are passionate requests for permission to watch late TV rock shows on Friday night, shrieks that the electric clippers in the barber shop have missing teeth, complaints that we can’t buy powdered soup or peanut better in the commissary, and such other relative trivia.
Well, our life is composed of trivia.
One subtle unstated purpose of the committee, from the administration’s point of view, is that it gives them a fairly accurate pipeline into population. They know what we’re thinking, what’s bugging us. Or at least they think they do. Most of the men think the committee is a lot of crap.
“The institution does what suits them,” Pete Costa says. “If you suggest something and they act on it, that’s because it benefits them, not us. They liked the telephone call idea because they can listen in. They record those calls on tape. Didn’t you figure that one out?”
May 19
Suitcase Smith, a little black dude, works in R & D (Receiving and Discharge), where I first came in. He helps fingerprint you and gives you your first set of browns and a government-issue toothbrush and unlabeled bottle of tooth powder. They call him Suitcase, Sonny says, because he’s always on the move. And he loves the joint. There are a few men like that. Where else can he get three square meals a day? He can’t keep a real job; sniffs coke and gets paranoid. The problem is, he’s scared of winding up in one of those heavy state pens where you get raped and have to suck cock all the time and you never see daylight. He likes it here in Danbury, and in Allenwood, and in Sandstone in Minnesota and in Safford in Arizona — he’s been to all of them, but never for too long
. He’s a snitch, and the men know it. He likes to time it so he’s out on the street for the Christmas holidays, because then his family down in Philadelphia takes care of him, stuffs him with turkey giblets and coke. But eventually they kick him out. He knows exactly what crimes will bring him the sentences he wants: six months to a year in the federal short-term joints. Once he threw rocks through a U.S. Post Office window in Scranton. That’s federal, of course. He was at Allenwood for four months on that beef. Then he did it again but this time the feds in Scranton were wise to him and they just held him a week and said, “You do that again, Smith, we’ll send you to the local county jail as a contract prisoner, and if the niggers there don’t bite your cute little cock off, the lice will.”
Sonny says, “That dude was scared, man. But he ain’t so dumb. He heard any crime you commit in Washington D.C. is a federal crime, so he takes the bus down to D.C. and whips out his black dick in front of the Senate and pisses on the sidewalk. Sure enough, they collar him and give him six months, and he’s here, man, that’s exactly why he’s here. I tell you, that Suitcase is swift.”
May 22
I realize now that the basic function of prisons like Danbury is not merely to warehouse a man but to break his adult male spirit — his machismo, if you will — and reduce him to the psychological level of an obedient child. Basic techniques are: Physical removal to isolated areas (Allenwood, Danbury, etc.) which weakens or severs close emotional ties to family and friends. Segregation of all natural leaders. Use of cooperative prisoners as leaders. Use of informers. Placing individuals into new and ambiguous situations for which the standards are kept deliberately unclear, and then putting pressure on the men to conform and blindly obey authority in order to win favor and a reprieve from pressure and the ambiguity. Rewarding submission and subserviency. Building a group conviction among the prisoners that they’ve been abandoned by, and are almost totally isolated from, the social order.
In some cases, it works. In most cases it doesn’t, because the administrators are just not subtle or intelligent enough to carry out the program without letting the prisoners realize what’s happening. Sadism and indifference reveal the long-term strategy. Once we know what’s going down, we loathe and despise them for what they’re doing. And so the system creates precisely the opposite of what’s intended: a total disrespect for authority; a burning need to break the rules of society and say, “Fuck you!”; to be, heart and soul, a criminal.
The parole system puts the icing on the cake. You’re told, essentially, “Be good and you’ll earn parole.” So, to a certain extent, you behave. But they’re lying to you. They want order and relative tranquility; therefore they dangle the carrot of parole in front of your nose. But you can be good as Little Lord Fauntleroy and work your ass off like Horatio Alger, and it doesn’t matter a damn with the United States Board of Parole, who are a pack of buttoned-down blustering $37,500 a year party-liner presidential appointees: pure political patronage in the Nixon administration. If there’s something in your past they don’t like, if you say the wrong thing when you go before the parole examiners (and who knows what the right thing is?), if you’re too poor, if you’re too rich, if you smile too much, if you look too grim, they shoot you down. And they either give you no reason for the turndown or some bullshit phrase like, “There is sufficient cause at this time to believe that this individual is not yet ready to adjust to social responsibilities.” Why not? That they won’t tell you.
So, having behaved, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, you’re still ordered to “continue to expiration of sentence.” Bring it all, schmuck. And then you know finally that you’ve been had. And you know that they, the social order, will always lie to you and manipulate you. You’re an outsider. You learn to hate them. Who is them? Just about everyone else. You. And you, and you. Watch out, man. Cuidado, hombre. Be cool, brother.
June 7
Joey Giordano and Lefty Colombo, two young hoods from Brooklyn, are clowning around while playing in the softball game, which the Danbury All-Stars are losing to some outside factory team by a score of about 12-2 in the third inning.
Joey, in mock disgust: “Jesus, Lefty, what are you gonna be when you grow up?”
Lefty: “I don’t know. A crook, I guess.”
Later, after we’ve lost the game by the amazing score of 33-5 (I got one hit, made one great leaping catch of a line drive and let one ball scoot right between my legs at second base), I talk to Sonny, who fell on his face in right field running after what turned out to be an inside-the-park home run. I want to know why the inmate teams always get beaten so badly by all the teams in the local factory league. We have all these black kids and Puerto Ricans; we should be good. Is it lack of motivation?
“Naw,” says Sonny. “We wanna win, man. We just not good enough. You dig, all the brothers in here got the muscles, the timing, the speed, the natural ability, but they never had no chance to develop it. They come from the ghetto, man. You not in shape. Kids don’t eat good, don’t live right. Day you get outa school you hustlin all the time, takin dope, sellin dope, out chasin the bitches. You grow up in Harlem, you learn to run, man, that’s about all.”
July 16
I went before the parole examiners today, neatly dressed, respectful. Gray, faceless men, they asked me some bullshit questions and I gave them the obligatory bullshit answers. Yes, I deeply regret my crime. Yes, I can get a job, I’m ready to resume my place in society. My wife, my children, my work, etc. The vodka at Allenwood? A serious mistake on my part, which I don’t take lightly, and which the board will kindly note has not been repeated in any way, shape or form. They record the whole session on a little 33 rpm record. They do that for all the men. Then they go back to Washington, transcribe the recordings, take all the transcripts and throw them against a ceiling with a roll of flypaper hanging from it, and the ones that stick to the flypaper get paroled.
July 31
Yesterday I heard the news. A six-month setoff from the parole board, to January 1974, when they’ll review my case once again. I feel terribly depressed — and outraged. Pete Costa says to me quietly, “Coraggio. Pazienza.”
August 7
Today it happened: my prick awoke from its long coma. I was expecting a visit this weekend (or next) from Tim and Mary, whom I’d last seen at Allenwood in December. But only Mary arrived, with her three-year-old daughter in tow. The marriage is finished, she and Tim have split up and he’s gone off to finish his new book and live in the East Village with some other woman. Mary said, “I couldn’t disappoint you. I read about your being turned down for parole. So I came alone by bus.”
The day was hot and she wore a loose, tent-like red cotton dress — no belt, no bra. I could see her breasts shift and swing a little beneath it when she moved. I could see a woman. I’d been visited before by my dear 65-year-old aunts from Scarsdale, Flushing and Palm Springs, and by others, and by Mary when she was Tim’s wife-in-residence, but this was the first visit I’d had from an unattached and damned attractive female. I think she saw in my eyes what I was thinking and feeling because her lips started to flush deep pink, her eyes took on a certain blue lustre, and I could see her nipples pop out. I had remarked before that her dress was like a tent. Then she said, a little breathlessly, “I wish we had a real tent we could crawl under.”
“Yes,” I said, “I’d love to fuck you.”
“It’s a date,” she whispered.
She had smuggled in a corned beef sandwich on rye, a dill pickle and a cool, fresh, fat red tomato. I ate them while Mary kept an eye out for the hack. They were delicious.
I wonder now if this was a good thing, to have my desire awakened. You have to be partly anaesthetized to survive this experience correctly, and now I’m twitching whenever I think of her blue eyes and what’s under that red cotton dress.
August 11
They shook down the dorm yesterday, found nothing hidden, then announced some new chickenshit restrictions about card-playing on the
beds and wearing belts and tucking in shirts and how many towels you could keep in your locker. They also gave pink warning slips — a shot is the next step — to several men, including myself and Sonny, whose beds were not properly made (without hospital corners) and who had too many things (like books and toilet articles) piled on top of their lockers.
Sonny stopped bouncing and said slowly: “This place, this life, is uncouth.”
They’ve started shaking us down more vigorously for visits, too. You’re called out for a visit and the hack pats you down from stem to stern. After the visit they stripsearch you. You undress completely and stand there, all the men in a row, and they shake out your clothes, look in your socks, your pockets, everywhere. Then the ritual begins. “Raise your arms. Okay. Lift up your balls. Okay. Turn around. Spread the cheeks. Okay. Lift up your feet one at a time. Okay, get dressed.”
The only thing I’ve ever smuggled in through the Visiting Room here was a pair of pink wax earplugs, because I was going nuts trying to sleep in the dorm with the snoring. The summer’s been hot and the more uncomfortable the men get, it seems, the louder they snore. I asked someone to bring the earplugs for me and then I thought for a long time about the best way to smuggle them in. Finally I did the obvious. I put them in my ears. I stuffed them in so deep that I could barely hear what the hack was saying during the stripsearch, but I knew the ritual by heart and I went through the motions without a hitch. Still, as Sonny says, it’s uncouth.
Today we also had an Inmate Committee meeting with the administration. We submit the agenda beforehand and the proper people are there to refute our complaints or table our suggestions. I had embarked on a small crusade. It pisses me off no end that here at Danbury you’re not allowed to visit a man who lives in another dormitory or cell block. If you want to see him, you’ve got to meet him in the yard or the chow hall or some public place. If you step into the doorway of a dormitory other than your own, it’s an automatic shot. On behalf of the population, I had suggested that this be changed, and the Captain of the Guard was at the committee meeting today to explain why that was not possible. He was a strongly-built man in his early forties with curly red hair, and well-spoken. The restriction against inter-dorm visiting, he said, was a policy meant to protect the residents from theft. “Men in this institution have been known to steal things,” he said, poker-faced. It drew a laugh. This way, he continued, if something was missing in a given dormitory, like a wristwatch, it would have to be stolen by someone in that dormitory and therefore the likelihood of its recovery would be increased.
Jailing Page 5
