Jailing

by Clifford Irving

  “Sir,” I said, “is that the real reason for the restriction?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, captain, I’m sure I’m speaking for the great majority of the men when I say that I’d rather risk losing my ten dollar Timex, which is all we’re allowed to own in here, in exchange for the privilege of having friends of mine visit me in my dormitory rather than having to meet them on a bench in the yard.”

  “We’ve found it doesn’t work, Mr. Irving,” he said.

  There is a sign in the chow hall at Danbury, painted in large script on the well. Believe it or not, it’s a quotation from Goethe. It reads: “If you would have a man stay as he is, then treat him as he is. If you would have a man change, then treat him as the person you would want him to become.” I quoted that to the captain. Then I said: “You’re treating us as if we would steal. You should treat us as if we wouldn’t steal. Then, like it says in the chow hall, we have a chance to become the kind of people who actually wouldn’t. Isn’t that what rehabilitation’s all about?”

  The captain regarded me coolly for a moment and then said, “Our policy is pretty well fixed, Mr. Irving. But we’ll take it under advisement.”

  August 12

  I’ve written to my attorney in Washington, Jim Sharp, and asked him to make formal application to the parole board for an emergency re-hearing as soon as possible, on the grounds that my two small children are parentless, under psychiatric care, and one of them is diagnosed as being in an acute state of depression. Christ, he’s only four years old.

  I just won’t sit back and let it happen. I’ll fight these cocksuckers any way I can.

  August 19

  I’ve been elected co-chairman of the Inmate Committee, together with Riley, who robs post offices. He’s a wild, angry, good-looking kid, one of the Berrigans’ proteges. I like him. I’m not sure I like being co-chairman of the committee, because it means extra meetings with administration officials and there’s no way this can benefit me. Grzgorek, the A.W., called me into his office the other day. He’s young, very earnest, and he thinks of himself as a progressive penologist, a fair man. We’ve talked before. He said, “Mr. Irving, you and I could get along and accomplish some things here together if you didn’t maintain this basic attitude of `us against them.’”

  I shrugged. “I have that attitude because that’s exactly the way it is.”

  “It needn’t be. If we cooperated more — “

  “If my aunt had balls, Mr. Grzgorek, she’d be my uncle.”

  He didn’t like that too much.

  August 20

  Sol, a new man, told me his beef. Here’s a winner! He set two scientists to work developing a laser beam to stun horses so that he could bet a frontrunner at the trotters. The other horses would break stride when the beam hit them, and they’d have no more feeling than that of a bee sting, wouldn’t be hurt at all. One of the scientists informed on him and they got him on a conspiracy rap. The story sounded like a joke until Sol showed me some confirming clips from the Saratoga and Miami papers.

  August 28

  I’ve been in jail exactly a year. Maury Nessen, my lawyer, said to me when he delivered me to Lewisburg, “You’ll be out in ten or eleven months, I promise you.” Now the cycle of seasons starts all over again. This is awfully depressing. I used to be able to think, “Well, a year ago today I was in Big Sur for the weekend with a beautiful woman,” or “A year ago today I was in Sarasota, at a pool or on the beach with my kids.” But from now on, every time I think “a year ago today” it’s going to be a memory of prison: a gray time, without hard edges and specific, bittersweet joys. I started out doing time by the day; then I counted the weeks, then the months. Now I think: I’ve done four seasons and maybe I’ve got two or three to go. What about years? I couldn’t cope with that. But men do, all the time.

  I remember Joe D., my pal at Allenwood, saying once, “We’re all doing life in here.”

  September 13

  Escape from Allenwood would have been simple. From The Wall, an exceedingly difficult and perilous task. From here, despite the fact that 20% of the population is classified maximum security, merely a matter of careful planning, timing, and swift execution. We have all figured out workable routes. [Here I wrote them down, but for the sake of future inmates I won’t commit them to print.] I don’t understand why someone like Johnny Dio, for example — a man in his fifties, now facing two more federal indictments and a probable transfer to The Wall — doesn’t bolt. He, of all people, could arrange it easily. And vanish to Australia or Italy. Money wouldn’t be a problem.

  Does he still dream of miracles? Or, worse, has he accepted jailing as a way of life?

  October 2

  A letter from my attorney. The parole board, under pressure, has granted me an emergency rehearing next month. Hallelujah! Now I have to follow the fundamental tenet of life in the joint: hope for the best, expect the worst.

  October 4

  Today, after more than thirteen months of dormitory living, I finally reached the top of the list and was transferred to what’s called a room — it’s a cell — in Hartford House. It has a bed, a shitter, a sink, an unbarred window because it looks out on the yard, a locker and a solid plank of wood that rests on the radiator and serves as a rudimentary desk. I don’t think I could be happier if I’d been given a key to a suite at the Pierre Hotel facing Central Park. Yes, I’m happy. That’s awful, and hard to believe, much less accept. The point is that I feel now that I live here at Danbury and my room in Hartford House means I’m at the top of the socio-economic pyramid in terms of comfort and privileges. I live here. The feeling of imprisonment is almost gone. I’ve learned to jail. I put my photographs, stack my books and line up my toilet articles, and I’m at home.

  This is the awful point of the whole process. Man can survive anything. He can accept anything. He can learn to be content, or at least exist without the need to shout and rebel, in almost any circumstances. This accounts for the fact that most people in this world, in jail or out, lead lives of misery, degradation, boredom, frustration and personal unhappiness — job, marriage, family, social obligations, the whole catastrophe — and yet haven’t got the energy or even the urge to vault out of their personal prison cells and head for the hills. Escape? To where? We’re all prisoners. Some know it, most don’t.

  This is such a terrifying thought that I don’t want to pursue it any further.

  October 12

  Men go nuts in different ways. Sol wants to convince the administration — and of course, ultimately, the parole board — that he’s rehabilitating himself here in the joint, that he won’t point laser beams at horses any more, that he can make positive contributions to society. He works in the commissary. He’s one of the believers and there’s hardly anything you can say to discourage them. They still believe that cause-and-effect is an operative principle in prison, that it’s a logical system run by logical people rather than ill-disguised antihuman chaos run by men who are only doing their job and protecting their ass and don’t give one fuck about any other human being on earth, much less an inmate. An inmate is nothing but an irritant to them, because an inmate always wants something; and if they grant his request it gives them a responsibility other than what’s in the manual, and that’s poison. They dream of a prison without inmates: the prison official’s idea of heaven. They could clang the bars and shuffle their papers all day long and then go home to nagging wifey and yelling kids and nothing would have changed, all would be domestic horror, which all men share.

  So Sol, the commissary clerk, has decided that he’ll do his bit on, and devote his time to, “giving better service to the men.” This is not only a humanitarian gesture, but it’s creative — and moneysaving! — and it can’t fail to escape notice by the administration.

  Sol has worked out an elaborate time and motion study in the commissary to determine where the Orio cookies should be placed on the shelves, the pretzels, the Crest, Tang, cocoa, cartons of cigarette
s, etc. And where the inmate clerks should stand behind the cage, how the inmates should line up to buy, what hours are best, and so forth. It’s a fucking 35-page thesis that he’s written. He showed it to me and asked if I could edit it. To keep him happy, I made a few changes. He says, “They can’t ignore the logic of my proposals, can they?”

  He submits it in quadruplicate to the Warden, the Associate Warden, the Commissary Supervisor, and his caseworker. The Warden is drunk, of course, and doesn’t read it. The A.W. doesn’t need any more headaches than he’s already got, so he files it somewhere. The Commissary Supervisor, Mr. Gage, is furious that some fucking inmate would dare to suggest his operation isn’t efficient; and worse, go over his head to the Warden and the A.W. with that message. He tells Sol to “bag the goddam apples and bananas like you been doin and stop bein a wiseass.” The Caseworker, however, calls Sol into his office and congratulates him, tells him what a fine job he did, and that he’s entering a commendation in Sol’s permanent file. So Sol is elated. “You see?” he tells me, his eyes shining. “You’re a cynic, but you’re wrong in this case.” Maybe he’s right. I hope so. We’ll see next month.

  October 22

  There’s a movie every week here. Usually it’s fairly recent, and violent. Who chooses them in the Bureau of Prisons in Washington, I can’t possibly imagine, but of course nothing makes sense in this context and it seems that everything done in prison and by the prison authorities — I mean everything — is calculated to keep the crime rate as high as humanly possible. If you tell them this, they look nonplussed, like Grzgorek. He says, “You don’t understand our problems. Prisons are very complicated institutions.”

  “We’re your problems,” I countered. “Not the prison. The prisoners.”

  “I treat the men as individuals,” he says. He likes the sound of that. I can’t argue with him as an equal, so it’s best to drop it there.

  Anyway, today’s movie had the guys falling off their chairs with glee. It’s Hotel, and one of the characters is a professional thief, played by Karl Malden. The men yell for him whenever he’s on screen. At the end, handcuffed, he steals an ashtray. The men cheer wildly.

  Coming out of the movies, out of the auditorium into the suddenly bright sunlight, there is a moment or two of total dislocation. Where am I? Where was I? The movies make you feel human for a while, because it’s an experience associated with freedom; you usually went to the movies with a girlfriend, or your wife. Then you come out into the yard and you see the softball field, the grass already starting to grow wintry dull, a few men in T-shirts and browns tossing a football back and forth. A jogger moves by you, breathing hard, his face wet with sweat, sneakers scraping on the concrete. You see the yard, the gray walls, the men hunched over on the benches, rapping. You hear the iron of the weights clank and crash in the distance as men do bench presses, curls, pullovers. After a minute or so you know again where you are.

  November 14

  Sol went before the parole board. He’s got an A-2 sentence, which means immediate eligibility for parole. He doesn’t have to wait until a third of his sentence has passed. The parole examiner had Sol’s file on the desk and he’d read the thesis on the commissary as well as the caseworker’s commendation. He said, “An intelligent, analytical man like yourself, capable of thinking and expressing himself so clearly, has far less excuse to commit a crime for profit than a poor black fellow from the ghetto. You, of all people, should have known better. And you, of all people” — waving the thesis at Sol — “had other ways of making money.”

  The parole board gave Sol a CTE — “continue to expiration” — bring it all.

  Of course, that “poor black fellow from the ghetto” will get a CTE, too, because the board will reckon that he’s a good bet, once he hits Lenox Avenue with $50 of release money in his pocket, to score some dope and stick up another liquor store. The ones who make parole are generally the rats, the guys who cooperated most with the authorities at the time of their arrests, the ones with pull, and — a new thought — fuckups in the institution whom the administration would like to get rid of for a while because they’re disturbing the peace. If there’s any secret, that’s it! Be a fuckup, a troublemaker. Annoy them. Make them nervous. If you keep it within limits they can’t ship you off to The Wall, so all they can do is recommend parole. If this sounds like a joke, it isn’t meant to be. I now believe it.

  Sol cried on and off for two days. He had told his wife at the time of her last visit, “I’ll be home for Christmas.”

  November 29

  I lie in bed, can’t sleep, again outraged. Lefebvre, my caseworker, called me into his office this morning and told me that at a special hearing of the board in D.C. I’d been granted parole — for February 14th. That’s two and a half months from now! If I’m parolable, if my kids are in the deep shit and need a parent at their side, why not now? Why wait? Well, I know why. Because of no reason at all. Because these people are pathogenerically insane and there isn’t a glimmer of humanity — not a shred of humanness, if there’s such a word — behind or involved with their decisions. They decide out of convenience, nothing more. In their gray, righteous stolidity, and aura of inanimate respectability, they are the scum of the earth. From the point of view of species, the men in here are truly their victims.

  I’m going to keep fighting. I’m going to file a writ demanding immediate parole or else immediate release to a CTC — Community Treatment Center; or Halfway House, as it’s called — in Manhattan. I’ve checked the official Bureau policy statements for standards of eligibility and I fit them all perfectly. Of course, that’s reason enough to turn me down. Got to remember that there is no system, no logic; just chaos under wraps. Got to keep hope at a minimum, and at the same time, fight.

  December 3

  I’ve met an old man here who was actually a member of the Purple Gang in Detroit and did time at Alcatraz, the Rock, before they closed it down. They call him Pop, but his real name is Willie Barton. I liked him right away and gave him a new pair of shoes and he was really grateful. Later we sat on a bench, rapping. He’s got five months to finish on 25 years for bank robbery in Texas, but he’s going to max out here because his daughter moved to Connecticut. He told me that he tried three times to escape from Leavenworth and once from Alcatraz. At Leavenworth someone else took count for him by placing his hand on the bars in Pop’s place, and Pop got onto the roof via the ventilator shafts and made it to the top of the wall, where the guntower spotted him. They shot him down with a rifle.

  At Alcatraz he dove off and went with the current toward a place just past the Golden Gate Bridge where friends were waiting to fish him out. But before he reached them he was shot three times by the patrol boat in pursuit. He peeled off his peajacket to show me the scars of the bullet holes in his hip and wizened belly. I asked him if he was going over the hill from here and he said, “Hell, no. I’d be a cinch, but I’m too old now.”

  Pop says that twelve years ago he was at Allenwood and lost 1800 days of accumulated good time for hitting the Camp Superintendent in the teeth. He says that at the Rock they gave you a booklet with swimming lessons. He made parachutes there. I have to talk more with him.

  December 13

  Motherfucker, I’m in the hole again! I can’t believe it! And it looks like I’ve blown parole, everything! How did this happen? I swore it couldn’t, and it did!

  Because, first of all, a few weeks ago the administration let out a rumor among population that there would be Christmas furloughs for all men with minimum security status. Typical. And the men began to bank it. Finally, last Friday, the announcement: two-day furloughs for all minimum security men with less than three months left to serve and no shots against them for the past sixty days. It was quickly calculated with no need for a computer printout that of the 600-odd men here, perhaps 25 qualified. The other 575 became annoyed, pissed-off, angry, enraged: variations on a restive theme. They over-reacted. Well, that’s the nature of the situation;
you’re a fuse primed to explode, and when they fuck with your mind and hint you might go home for Christmas, dangle that carrot and then yank it away, you go bang. There were a lot of bangs last Friday. The men gathered in their various houses, truly spontaneously, and said, “Fuck this shit. No furloughs, no work. I didn’t sign up in no motherfuckin slave labor battalion. I’m a prisoner, they gotta feed me. Don’t say anywhere in my sentence that I gotta manufacture gloves so’s Federal Motherfuckin Prison Industries can turn a five million dollar profit last year.”

  Every withheld gripe, every suppressed rage, bulleted to the surface. Saturday morning everyone tramped around the yard in a drizzle, restlessly. Then some bright guy said, “Get our fuckin Inmate Committee to tell `em what we want!” And so the committee — willing and enthusiastic, no question about that — met and compiled a consensus of demands; mostly, a relaxation of the restrictions on who was eligible for the Christmas furloughs. That was the heart and soul of it. Co-chairman Riley and I nailed Grzgorek in a corridor near Control. “If the men don’t get a better furlough policy,” I said, “I don’t think they’ll go to work on Monday morning.”