Two weeks of idleness followed the medical examination process. Finally I was taken to an examination room for a series of psychological and literacy tests. From the inmate point of view, the testing was an utter sham. For one thing, the written tests were given to everyone without even determining who could read or write. I was tested in an unsupervised room with about thirty other men, most of whom just picked answers at random or copied them from someone else.
Because the tests were given so irrelevantly, inmates tended to see their results only as a tool of manipulation. Under this assumption, many men had developed theories on how to answer the test questions. Some felt it was best to copy from the brightest men in order to improve their chances at getting a clerk’s job over kitchen or laundry duty. Others felt they should give lunatic answers so they could be medically released from work altogether. Still others gave no answers at all and faked illiteracy, reasoning that they could enroll in school and appear to do extremely well, thereby fooling the parole board into believing they had worked hard to make a positive change in their lives. All these connivances were based on the inmates’ understanding that they were being conned as much as they were doing the conning. They believed that the tests were used by the administrators just to maintain the semblance of educational purpose at best and at worst to harvest information from them that would some day be used against them (for example in job placement or for parole eligibility).
Two more months of idleness followed as I waited to be interviewed by my counselor. To occupy time, people played cards and worked out. During these early idle days, long-standing friendships and alliances were made. I also noticed that every rime the four hundred members of E block were let out into the yard, a fight would break out. It is my experience that when convicts are let loose after being locked up for long periods of time, aggressive behavior is an immediate and natural consequence.
This was also a time when inmates distinguished the weak from the strong, predators from victims. The first impressions I made on others during classification have followed me through prison ever since. Since I was not a career criminal, I was initially viewed as a “square John”: a middle-class outsider with no experience of the social world of inmates. To both my advantage and disadvantage, I was seeing everything through the eyes of a foreigner, making many foolish mistakes yet gaining just as many unique insights.
When I was finally called in for my interview, the counselor examined my test results and asked me a few questions about my conviction and sentence. The interview took only ten or fifteen minutes.
Two weeks later, I was summoned to appear before the Classification Committee. Sitting before a counselor, the block sergeant, and a major of the guards, I was informed that I had been classified to Graterford. Just before I left, the major added in a pleasant voice, “You’ll be working for me.” At the time I didn’t consider the significance of my job assignment — a fortuitous clerical job. I was too relieved to know that the tortuous classification ordeal was finally over.
The introduction of the classification process was originally a major prison reform but for me and most of the others, as I later discovered, classification was a total waste of time. While different prisons in Pennsylvania purportedly provided different types of rehabilitation programs meant to serve the needs of various kinds of offenders, in reality it seemed that only three considerations were used to determine a convict’s ultimate destination: (1) race, (2) hometown, and (3) availability of cell space. At the time, most of the minority inmates in the state were classified to Graterford or Western Penitentiary. The other seven prisons consisted of mostly white inmates under an all-white civilian staff.
Getting Dug In
Once I was classified to Graterford, I traded in my blues for browns and moved off Quarantine to B Block. This was a working block, reserved for those inmates who had been assigned a job. Though it mirrored the design of E Block, B Block was considerably less crowded and noisy. Most of the men on B Block were much older than those on the classification block. These were the “Old Heads” of the prison, inmates who had done a long stretch.
“When I arrived at my new home, I quickly signed in at the block sergeant’s desk and requested cleaning supplies. Then I spent the morning scrubbing down every inch of my cell. By noon count I was able to lie down on my bed, smoke a cigarette, and consider my surroundings. My cell measured about six feet by twelve with a ten-foot-high ceiling, from which dangled a single light bulb with a pull chain. For furniture, I had a flat, hard steel bed and a steel desk and chair which had been assembled as one unit. The mandatory toilet afforded a sink directly above it with a steel medicine cabinet above that. High over the toilet was a rusty radiator, my only source of heat in the winter. Finally, I had a flimsy wooden footlocker with a hasp that could be locked with a commissary-bought combination lock. My entrance was a solid steel sliding door with a fixed glass window on the top quarter. On the opposite wall was a window that could be manually opened and closed, just a little. The concrete walls were painted a dingy off-white and adorned with graffiti and cigarette stains.
This was my home. I was due to report to work the next morning and I could feel myself getting dug in. In prison it doesn’t take much to make a man happy: food, some quiet, a good book, a job, and enough heat in the winter. That day I was happy just to be able to lie on that hard bed with a seventy-watt light bulb glaring in my face. I felt the worst was over. I could now begin to serve my time.
Escape from Reality
Like most first-time arrivals to Graterford, I was preoccupied with survival and how to avoid becoming the victim of violence. When there was general movement in the prison, for example, the main corridor would fill with hundreds of inmates in transit. This made the corridor an extremely dangerous place to be. I was more likely to see a stabbing than a guard on duty.
The cellblocks were just as insecure. A guard at one end of a cell-block could not identify anyone at the other end; the distance of seven hundred feet was just too great. Because of their fear of being assaulted where no one could see them, many block guards never patrolled the inner perimeter and spent most of their time avoiding conflicts at all cost, even turning the other way. In fact, inmates serving long sentences preferred to lock at Graterford because, even though it was violent, it afforded them the most personal liberty. The more violent a prison is, the more reluctant guards are to enforce petty rules for fear of being assaulted.
If I made eye contact with a stranger, I would feel threatened. An unexpected smile could mean trouble. A man in uniform was not a friend. Being kind was a weakness. Viciousness and recklessness were to be respected and admired. I could feel my habits, my personality, and even my values change. I came to view the world as a place of unrelenting fear. Oddly enough, these changes were in some way comforting. In the struggle to survive, it was easier to distrust everyone than to believe in their inherent goodness.
By the time I had settled in, however, I found myself feeling safe enough to think beyond the moment, something I had not been able to do since my arrest. Unfortunately, this new sense of security brought with it the “sleeping phase.” I began to sleep twelve to fourteen hours a day. My whole life consisted of eating, working, and sleeping. I never dreamed. I only tried to stay unconscious for as long as I possibly could. Though I had no way of knowing it at the time, I had entered a very common prison-adjustment phase, one so common, in fact, that walking in on a newcomer while he sleeps is the most practiced technique of cell thieves and rapists. In Graterford, a man who spends too much time in bed sends the same signal as that of a bleeding fish in shark-infested waters.
“You can’t be sleeping all the time,” cautioned my chess partner one day, waking me to play a game. “You can’t sleep away your sentence. You have to stay awake to stay alive in here.”
I resolved to keep myself busy. I took up reading and painting. I was allowed to buy almost as many books, magazines, and newspapers as I wanted, as well as canvases, b
rushes, and paints. Self-help was encouraged so long as you could pay for it.
Soon I was reading everything I could get my hands on and painting well into the wee hours of the morning. My cell became crowded with books, magazines, canvases, newspapers, even an easel. I went so far as to rig up extra lighting, hang pictures, and buy throw rugs for the cement floor. I had successfully transformed my cell into a cluttered boardinghouse room.
“You have to spend more time out of that cell, Victor,” insisted my chess mate and only friend at that time. “It’s not healthy to do a ‘bit’ [time] like that. Look at your cell, you have junk everywhere. You even have lights that look like they belong in a room somewhere else.”
“I’m just getting dug in,” I replied in defense, annoyed that my efforts at avoiding reality had been detected.
“This isn’t getting dug in, this is foolishness. You’re in a penitentiary — a tough one. You should never try to forget that. Never try to make yourself believe you’re somewhere else. Do you know what a lit match could do to this cell?”
His words struck an unnerving chord. Only a few months earlier, I had watched a man whose cell across the way had been deliberately set on fire. He had screamed and banged helplessly on his locked door, flames dancing around him, biting at his flesh. Through his cell window, I could see billowing black smoke envelope his pleading, twisted, horrified face until he disappeared. It had taken some time before guards responded to his screams.
The very next day I gave away my books, magazines, newspapers, art supplies. I knew I had to fight as hard for my safety as I did for my sanity.
1995, State Correctional Institution Rockview
Bellefonte, Pennsylvania
Arrival
Judee Norton
bright shiny bracelets
jangling on my arm
wide leather belt
snug about my waist
chains dangling seductively
between my legs.
I am captured
but not subdued
THEY
think they have me
but
my mind
wheels and soars and spins and shouts
no prisoner
I am free
to look to see all that I ever have been all that I ever may be
I hold the small and sacred part of me close
like a royal flush
my poker face
must not betray
THEY
cannot touch it
not even in their dreams
I
am light and air and fire
I
slip through their clutching fingers
like the night
even as they grasp my puny wrist
of simple bone
and blood
and flesh
body here
spirit there
I
am still
free.
1990, Arizona State Prison Complex-Perryville
Goodyear, Arizona
Time and Its Terms
It is so peaceful on the bank of the river, one can almost forget youth tick tick ticking its way into memory.
Coming to terms with time is a solitary, existential experience, forever the province of poets. Poets know time’s brevity, its repeats and deceits, and also how rhythm mimics time, how imagination cheats it. Loss of physical freedom compounds and intensifies these universal experiences, as Henry Johnson knows, viewing the Hudson from Sing Sing in “Sailboats”* excerpted above.
The state reduces the stuff of time, as it does the captured human, to number. It makes time the prisoner’s only possession, while emptying it. The state’s appropriation of human time and domination of its meaning is epitomized in the harshness of the “count,” for which prisoners must at regular intervals be locked in their cells. In “Counting Time” by M. D. Goldenberg (1985),* “The officers count / the prisoners / The prisoners count / the days / The days count / for nothing.” Doing time is also doing space, for the temporal distortion is paralleled by tyrannical control of space, as William Aberg’s poem “Reductions” hete discloses.
Like a sorry mathematician, Derrick Corley worries the impossible calculus of space and time, punishment and ctime. In “Cell” (1996),”‘ he notes that his is getting smaller: “I wonder how / they do that / taking a little more / each day.” Asked name in “Arrest,”* Corley says “Methuselah”; asked age, “a thousand.” They “thought me mad / when I was just so very — weary / to find myself yet again / made old by my actions.” Others recover human time and space in fragments of dream (like Jackie Ruzas in “Where or When”) or in a scrap of music or of fantasy (like M. A. Jones in two poems here). Some try to do time on their own terms. They triumph over the state’s possession of their years with irony, bravado, or a moment of pure rapture. Chuck Culhane does all three in “After Almost Twenty Years”; his darker poem “There Isn’t Enough Bread” registers the collapse of such resources. Roger Jaco’s “Killing Time” pits the recall of the world’s rich calendar against the flattened time of prison.
The possibility of doing “good time” to reduce one’s sentence and win parole sometimes enables the state to manipulate prisoners by appropriating their future. (“Lee’s Time” in Race, Chance, Change dramatizes the moral crises such control can generate.) Here Diane Hamill Metzger illuminates the tortuous effects on prisoners of a system that teases prisoners’ expectations through indeterminate sentences, the hope of clemency, or the phantom of parole. In the face of the growing movement to eliminate parole, however, Larry Bratt offers a sharply differing point of view from Metzger’s.
Exactly how J. R. Grindlay’s “Toledo Madman” expected the sparrows to help him escape remains a tantalizing mystery, and the author is dead. But the Madman finds “ultimate freedom” by electing insanity and becoming master of his own time.
Reductions
William Aberg
Afternoons, in this plague
of flies and white, Sonoran heat, we rarely sing —
to be honest, not at
all- The porter unrolls the hose
and waters the dirt to keep it from blowing
up in our faces when the southern winds
hit. Crouched on the walk
outside our cells, we keep busy
lying about what we would do
if a woman appeared
to us, her lips a coarse violet
wanting each one of us
right now. Or how easily
we could distract the guard
from his perch on the guntower —
one fake fight
and wc would make it
over the tence before the count
officer found us missing. I remember
one cynic, locked up
twelve years, spat tobacco
in a paper cup, pushed up the brim
of his cap, and told us
the jagged range
of mountains outside the prison
fence marked the edge
of the world, and the sky
was .simply a revolving backdrop
someone painted with clouds
and stars. We laughed
but for him, it was the truth:
there could be no other world.
1982, Arizona State Prison-Santa
Rita Tucson, Arizona
Where or When
Jackie Ruzas
Huddled under a tent with strangers,
my woolen clothes soaking wet.
Sharks swim undisturbed over cars, grass,
and concrete dividers.
Hiding in a tree I watch Mom argue with
the seltzer man. He enters my yard. I climb
down from the tree into — a prison yard
where Frankie “Bones” and Georgie Bates
are playing gin with comic size Alice in Wonderland
cards. Their bodies petrified, clay like
res
embling Homo Antiquitus in the Hamburg Museum.
I pass them by.
The yard becomes a winding road, desolate.
I walk and walk as seasons fall behind me and
voices fill the night.
1985, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Ossining, New York
An Overture
M. A.Jones
Something in the darkness
has given birth to a sky
spinning with a fierce impossible light. Here
night and day have different sounds,
the seasons varying textures. We could say
it’s October. On a sidewalk
that goes somewhere blue plaid sweaters
float above the hands of lovers
dampening the crisp air. They sweep
past walls privileged with windows,
transparence lit with small faces, a hush
a hand opening. This story begins
and ends in separate places, with interruptions
where sun-veiled women step out
of themselves, fall
then lift andante, continuing …in this story
there’s always the possibility of morning,a chance
that the screams which drip down at midnight
are not really threatening
but wishing us well,
wishing us a life
in another story.
1979, Arizona State Prison-Florence
Florence, Arizona
Vivaldi on the Far Side of the Bars
M. A. Jones
for William Aberg
Doing Time Page 6
