Incarceration Nations

by Baz Dreisinger

  Professor Christie smiles sweetly, as if to pat me on the head.

  “Once I was invited to give a talk at Bastoy, to the staff and prisoners both,” he begins, speaking slowly. “It was a beautiful summer day, and the island was looking its finest. The sea, the landscape, the animals—Bastoy resembled the sort of place where everyone would want a summer cottage. After my talk, I turned to the prisoners and I asked them a question. I said, ‘If you were offered a home here in Bastoy after you complete your sentence, and you could live here rent-free for life, how many of you would stay?’ There was a long pause, and the prisoners looked at each other, looked around the room, looked nervously at the officers. And then, from the back row, came a single cry: ‘Never!’

  “That is the voice that I hear in my head whenever I dare to think of Norway’s prisons as humane. ‘Never!’ The stigma and the suffering lives here, too. It is harder to pull the blanket off our system because it’s prettier, harder to push human rights issues because of our reputation. But this is not a perfect society, either.”

  I nod. This I concede. And I rattle off some caveats to prove it. Because race is much less of an issue here than almost anywhere else—the majority of Scandinavian prisoners look like the voting majority on the outside—identifying with the prison population is an easier feat. Like everywhere else I’ve been, prisons here are filled with poor people and drug users. The recidivism rate is in part low because even small crimes like drunk driving or intention to commit crime can land one a prison sentence, and such crimes generally have low reoffending rates. About 30 percent of the current prison population is foreign, mostly from Eastern Europe, and when it comes to them recidivism is indeed a problem, since they tend to return to Norway right after deportation.

  At Halden, too, Lasse did apologetically show me the dreary isolation unit, with scratches covering its walls, as eerie as the ones I laid eyes on in Brazil. I know that although one day alone there counts for one and a half days of one’s sentence, Norway places no legal limit on the use of solitary. And as for Norway as a whole, its history is hardly spotless. It may never have been a conquering colonizer like many of its European neighbors, but it did make reparations and public apologies for the fact that during World War II it willingly deported more than a third of its Jewish population to death camps.

  Feeling more confident, I tell Professor Christie about the pottery class I’d visited at Halden. There I met several prisoners, one of whom seemed no older than nineteen and had three small dots tattooed below his right eye.

  “This place is great,” he’d said with a haughty chuckle. “The first day I got here I laughed out loud. This is prison? Ha.”

  The man next to him abruptly looked up from the mask he was carving from clay, an ornate imitation of Edvard Munch’s famous Scream painting, whose original I’d seen at the National Gallery the day before.

  “Really?” he said glumly. “I didn’t laugh. I’m still not laughing.” Then he went back to molding his Scream.

  I share this story with Professor Christie. And I tell him about my New York students’ first reaction to Otisville, with its rolling green hills and lavish autumn colors. “It’s so pretty there,” they say, oohing and aahing.

  As Wiggo the deckhand had said, prison is prison. No amount of beauty, no flat-screen television, can make up for the profound loneliness, the isolation, the time-freezing effect of a prison stay. I suspect that in fact the young man with the face tattoos who claimed he laughed is, somewhere inside, crying. I’d sensed that he was playing tough, or that he’d bought into the hype: hearing the whole “Halden-is-a-five-star-hotel” routine often enough, he’d started to believe it. And even if this prisoner did indeed laugh, it’s a sad statement. Because if prison is better than your life on the outside, what does that say about that life and the society producing it?

  “You are right,” Professor Christie nods.

  I ask him how he feels about Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi who in 2011 bombed government buildings in Oslo, killing eight people, then killed sixty-nine more in a mass shooting at a Labor Party summer camp on the island of Utøya. He represented the biggest-ever test of Norway’s justice system.

  “He deserved pain delivery”—this is Christie’s signature term for prison. He calls it this because, as he writes in Limits to Pain, it “sounds like milk delivery”: innocuous, natural, normal. “Pain delivery is the concept for what in our time has developed into a calm, efficient, hygienic operation,” he writes. “The whole thing has become the delivery of a commodity.”

  Christie tells me that his country’s treatment of the Breivik atrocity made him proud. The trial was handled in a restorative fashion, with every victim, including survivors and families of those murdered, having a direct voice in the courtroom and individually represented, by 174 lawyers. A five-member panel delivered a unanimous sentence of twenty-one years, the maximum for anything less than war crimes or genocide, which adds up to just under one hundred days per murder. Breivik serves his time in a Halden-like setting, where he’s taking university classes by correspondence. His incarceration will be no different from anyone else’s, its aim being correction. If he can be corrected, that is; we know that not everyone can. Surveys show that the public was overwhelmingly happy with the verdict.

  “Most of all,” Christie says, “there was no hysteria, no cultivating of hate and fear.” Instead, the very values that Breivik’s deeds looked to demolish—love, acceptance, diversity—were promoted in moving public events. Roses became the symbol of tolerance, left on memorials nationwide, and import tariffs were dropped to make the flowers affordable to all.

  As in Rwanda after the genocide, then, tragedy here became an opportunity to build community, not tear it to shreds with vengeance and hate. It sounds like the opposite of post-9/11 America, when public discourse centered on payback and self-centered jingoism. Fear reigned and the government response was war; violence thus bred further violence. Such a response, Angela Davis points out, is a form of emotional abuse of us, the community. She calls it a crime of moral imagination because it asks us to sever ourselves from the suffering of others, thus “killing the moral and emotive dimensions of our citizenship.” Why, she asks, “were we so quick to imagine the nation as the limit of human solidarity, precisely at a moment when people all over the world identified with our pain and suffering?”

  I ask this about crime in general. What if it became an opportunity not to cultivate an us-versus-them mentality but an us-and-them ethos? Not a chance to engender separation from others but a profound reminder of how deeply interconnected we are, such that one person’s actions have the capacity to impact so many? This, surely, is utopia.

  For the rest of the afternoon, as the snow dances under streetlamps and the other professors one by one take their leave, Professor Christie sits with me and shares his ideas.

  “Our job is to create a society in which people can be most wise. To create mechanisms for ordinary people to manage their lives.” He speaks against kindergartens—they destroy communitarian spirit by making early childhood education a formal job instead of a joint civic task—and in defense of ghettos and small municipalities, where neighbors can care for, educate, and police each other, where progress happens during village discussions instead of formal meetings and elections. He thinks professors must write for newspapers and other mainstream outlets, and they must write plainly, in order to be understood—“write for your favorite aunt,” is how he puts it. He breaks down what’s really dangerous about drugs: “the fact that they’re considered too dangerous to educate people about.” And he describes Norway’s annual Meeting in the Mountains, during which incarcerated people, prison officials, and professors come together on a retreat to ski, dialogue, and promote progressive change, in prison and out of it.

  Through it all, I marvel at the relentlessly inquisitive mind of this eighty-six-year-old man. He still sees the world with a child’s eye, perpetually questioning syste
ms, structures, and ideas that most take for granted. For this he is a true justice hero. I’m suddenly struck by the fact that the opposite of justice is not crime or injustice. It’s complacency. Complacency of the sort that made me embark on this prison odyssey to begin with. I realize now that what I was really afraid of when I felt myself get even slightly comfortable in prison was more than just intellectual inertia. What I feared was that I was losing my passion for justice itself.

  I think of my students on the outside, at John Jay College. The classes I teach generally revolve around issues connected to race or justice systems, and at the end of the semester, after all those weeks spent questioning two accepted ideological systems, students tend to throw up their hands. “So what’s the answer?” they ask. The answer, I tell them, is a question. I’m not trying to be cryptic; the reality is that there is no pat answer to the big questions around race and crime. Humanity is complex and contradictory; any system addressing it must be equally so. Our task is to keep asking questions, to continue unseating dogmas and questioning widely held beliefs. For the past two years, seeing the very same ugly structure in such radically different settings across the globe, from Uganda to Brazil to Australia, has been a call to arms. What sort of vile stagnation is this? How dare humanity be so lazy? I believe in the human capacity to innovate, to imagine, to create. Prisons are a failure of imagination in the most tragic sense of the term.

  “I’m not confident that our system is good. We can always do better,” Berit Johnsen at the staff academy had said to me. Her words struck a chord. Even in a quasi-utopia, there is work to be done. And in this work lives the very thing I’ve been searching for—in the do-better is justice. As love is an action word, justice is a verb. Justice is a journey. It is never static, never contented, never at ease. Justice is a movement; justice is movement.

  ———

  Returning home for the last time, I feel my usual postprison paradox: alienated, alone, and yet, via the lives I’d trespassed on behind bars, supremely connected to others. It’s the paradox elucidated by concentration-camp survivor Victor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning: “The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side effect of self-transcendence.”

  I delve back into the world of prisons on my own shores. Two of my Prison-to-College Pipeline students are still missing in action. They’d come to visit campus when they were released but have lost touch with me since, despite their plans to enroll in college. I don’t see their names on the Inmate Locator Web site, which means they—whew—haven’t gone back inside.

  Then I survey the world of prisons I’m trying to keep in touch with. From South Africa, Jonathan sends updates, letting me know that a new cycle of restorative justice workshops has started and that Gerswin, though he is doing well and remembers his conversations with me, is still inside and needs a lot of support.

  Santos, too, writes to let me know that the Prison Visiting Project is thriving throughout Rwanda. What he shares about what he and the other youth are learning, visit to visit, tugs on my heart:

  Never give up, continue to make our parents to understand that the reconciliation is a one way to build together a lasting peace in our country.

  Trusting each other.

  Have confidence that we can do it even if it is difficult to restore a relationship destroyed by the Genocide.

  Awareness to the people to give forgiveness and to have a culture to ask forgiveness.

  Young people should not be extremists but they must be correctable people.

  We must not be slave of our bad history.

  Having the habit of telling the truth.

  Having love.

  E-mails from Mara and André in Brazil, Brent in Australia, and Napaporn in Thailand let me know that progressive efforts are still under way there, as well. A package of letters and poems arrives from the prison book club in Norway, which they’d like me to share with my students at Otisville. But it’s Uganda that offers the most dramatic developments. Just when I returned from Kampala more than a year ago, APP staff had e-mailed me a scanned letter from Wilson, my former student:

  You are dearly missed by your writing class. Thank you for the time you devoted in training us in creative writing. We still write and hopefully someday you shall read a book written by Wilson … Very soon I am finishing my sentence. Greetings to all inmates in the prison where you work and the university students that you teach. Tell them someone loves and prays for you. I pray for the inmates in the prison there to change to better citizens.

  The letter was signed “Bafaki Wilson Pastor Boma, President, Creative Writing Club, Kampala Remand Prison.” Some days later, at 4:23 a.m., my phone rang: “Unknown,” said caller ID.

  “Good day to you, Baz!” It was Wilson. I didn’t ask how he’d managed to call me from prison, but I did offer words of encouragement: Six months until freedom.

  Months later, after I’d returned from Brazil, the phone again rang obscenely early. “Baz!” exclaimed Wilson. He was crying. “I am overcome with emotion, Baz. After three years and two months I am free.”

  He also had a home. In the nick of time, my friend Al—the same friend who was persistently puzzled by my commitment to prisoners—had given Wilson money for a month’s rent. And now, after my return from Norway, Al calls to tell me he wants to start a reentry program, connecting incarcerated people to jobs on the outside. The news stuns me to the point of tears. Because it’s evidence that change can come person by person, consciousness by consciousness—and not from me, from the foreign mzungu agent, but from within.

  The news also sums up why I remain a tenacious optimist. My journey has taken me to global hellholes, and being a witness there has changed me irrevocably. It’s made me a far better teacher, enabling me to connect the dots and map injustice from one side of the world to another. But it’s also fortified my rage and deepened my grave fits of depression. I’ve witnessed humanity at its worst.

  At the same time, from country to country, prison to prison, I’ve glimpsed humanity at its very best. I’ve seen the broken systems but also the beautiful people who endure and transcend them, along with the game changers laboring to correct them. Against the dismal backdrop of such evil, heroes shine that much more radiantly. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo writes that, as opposed to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, we should consider the banality of heroism, which makes “heroism an egalitarian attribute of human nature rather than a rare feature of the elect few.”

  The banality of heroism is why, when people ask what they can do about the seemingly insurmountable problem of mass incarceration and mass injustice, beyond donating to organizations or showing up at rallies, I offer simple advice: Be conscious. Learn about the problems and the solutions. Then spread the word, to anyone who’ll listen—whether it’s your friend, your bus driver, the random person you chat with on a street corner. You’re an educator if you want to be. And you never know when some small progressive seed you plant in another’s mind will sprout and flourish and produce change, just as it did in the case of my friend Al, whom I’d managed to impact without even meaning to, somewhere in the midst of our sightseeing and reggae listening. Changing policy is what will ultimately change reality, yes—but changed policy is a product of changed public consciousness. We all have a hand in that mission.

  I hadn’t been in Norway very long but still, I noticed on my return that the world had changed slightly for the better in my absence. Three New York colleges agreed to drop questions about past arrests from their admissions procedures. The ACLU received the largest grant in its history and will use it on a campaign to slash incarceration rates. Entering his final months in office, US attorney general Eric Holder, who ha
d months before announced that President Obama would use executive pardon power to release thousands of federal prisoners with drug convictions, made more statements against mass incarceration and called for an expansion of alternatives; former US president Bill Clinton admitted to a group of officials that “a very significant percentage of serious crimes in this country are committed by a very small number” of criminals, but “we took a shotgun to it and just sent everybody to jail for too long.” On Election Day in 2014—during which an estimated 5.85 million Americans were unable to vote because of felony convictions—Proposition 47 passed in California, downgrading nonviolent felonies like shoplifting and drug possession to misdemeanors and making up to ten thousand people eligible for early release from prison.

  It’s enough to make me hopeful that progress in prison reform might continue. Even the right wing has joined the antiprison movement, after all, citing costs as their main rationale. Bill Bennett, Jeb Bush, and Newt Gingrich are among the members of Right On Crime, a national movement of conservatives whose vision of criminal justice reform includes fiscal discipline and cost-effective methods to reduce recidivism while empowering victims. In Republican-controlled Texas, it was projected in 2007 that over 17,000 new prison beds, at a cost of $2 billion, would need to be built by 2012; legislators instead allocated a smaller amount to expand community-based options such as probation, problem-solving courts, and evidence-based drug treatment. Crime dropped by 25 percent and the prison beds were no longer needed.

  On these shores, we might begin to imagine that the prison era is on the verge of extinction, and history will place it alongside the stocks and the guillotine as another brutal experiment in punishment that’s had its time.

  But the reality is that tinkering with the system—a little change here, a bit of reform there—is not likely to produce the “revolution in values” that Martin Luther King called for, in a rousing speech delivered one year to the day before his assassination. History has shown that racist, classist social structures have a way of stubbornly persisting by shape-shifting, just as Jim Crow was reborn when mass incarceration made “felon” the new “colored.” An economic argument cannot substitute for a moral one. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is not the path to lasting change and greater justice.