Category — activism

Statistics can be numbing.

I am asking you to un-numb yourself for a moment. To let these numbers sink in. To realize that behind these statistics, embedded in these numbers, are real people.

They are living out their lives both behind bars and in our communities.

I will continue to tell their stories. You need to continue to care. And to take action.

>The United States has the largest prison population in the world. We are home to five percent of the world’s population and nearly 25 percent of all prisoners.

>We have the highest per capita incarceration rate on the planet. In 2018 in the US, there were 698 people incarcerated per 100,000.

>The female prison population has doubled since 1990.

>70 million people in the US have a criminal record.

>While violent and property crimes are down by half since their peak decades ago, annual admissions to jails have nearly doubled during the same time period.

>Serious mental illness affects one-in-six men and one-in-three women in jail.

>There are as many as 2.7 million children who have a parent who is incarcerated.

>One in three black men and one in six Latino men will serve time in prison during their lives.

J, a guy in my writing group at the penitentiary, stopped coming to our bi-monthly workshop. I found out it was because he couldn’t climb the long flight of concrete stairs up to the second floor room where we held our sessions. He had diabetes. His foot had become infected. There were complications. He was 66. He had been in prison for 37 years.

M, another of the men in the writing group, also stopped showing up. I found out it was because he was bedridden in the prison’s infirmary after a knee-replacement operation. He was 59. He had been in prison for 30 years.

When we sentence wrong-doers to decades-long prison sentences, what happens is that—no surprise–they age in prison. That is, they become old behind bars. And they become older faster than the rest of us. It’s estimated that incarcerated people age about 15 years faster than we do. (Fifty-five is considered “elderly” in the world of incarceration. Medically, biologically, their 55 is our 70.)

It’s no surprise why prisoners age faster. They live in noisy, crowded, stressful, toxic environments with poor quality nutrition, limited physical exercise, poor sleep and no access to the natural world. They suffer the physical limitations and diseases that often come with age, including Alzheimer’s.

Right now there are more than 200,000 people aged 55 or older in our prisons. From 1999 to 2016, the number of people 55 or older in state and federal prisons increased 280 percent. By 2030 it’s estimated that 1 in 3 prisoners will be 50 or older.

Prisons were not built for or equipped to handle physically compromised people who cannot pull themselves up to the top bunk in a cell or climb up and down stairs or walk across vast expanses of institutionalized space to get to chow hall or the infirmary. They were not built for or equipped to handle those with cognitive issues like dementia.

One solution? Build geriatric prisons. The Kansas legislature will be considering a recommendation next month to renovate a prison to serve as a 250-bed geriatric care facility. Price tag: $9-10 million for renovations, $8.3 million per year for operations. Over the next decade, we could spend hundreds of millions of dollars remodeling and retrofitting prisons as nursing homes.

Or, how about this: We stop sentencing people to absurdly long prison terms.

Criminology research shows that lengthy terms actually have little effect on deterring crime. And that older prisoners pose very little, if any, threat to communities if released.

We can—and should—learn from the past. We can—and should—examine our lives. (The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates famously said.)

But I wonder. I wonder about all this re-living the past, this ruminating (in the cud-chewing sense) and this continued obsession (both of writers and apparently of readers) with memoir. I belong to a Facebook group, Binders of Creative Nonfiction, and it seems to me that 90 percent of what the women—thoughtful, generous, lovely souls as far as I can tell–are posting about, asking questions about, ”humble bragging” about is memoir. Creative nonfiction—or as I prefer to call this genre I have been working in for my entire writing life—narrative nonfiction, is so much more. It is (or can be about) going out into the world and discovering the lives others live and how and why they live them, the communities they are part of, especially communities hidden from view. We learn more about ourselves that way, too, but we get to look both outward and inward.

I think the reason I am concerned at this moment is that I feel the overwhelming need for us to look forward, not back, to imagine futures, not dwell in the past.

It’s about politics, of course. It’s about 2020 and moving beyond the evil and idiocy of the current government. It’s about not chewing over (and, in some odd way, relishing the taste in our mouths) of this terrible, terrible time. It’s about believing in goodness, in actively, forwardly joining together to make that happen.

But it is also (in the spirit of memoir I just finished criticizing and yet right here am practicing!), about my own life. About what has happened, just recently, that has jolted me, that made me want to chew the cud and re-live what was and is no more, that made me, in my darker moments (that would be 3 am) replay, rewind, replay, rewind and (in my truly dark moments) construct elaborate revenge scenarios.

What I should be doing, what I am now pledging to do, is to stop expending energy on the past I can’t change and use it all—and if you know me, you know I have a lot of it—on the good I can do now.

The powerful control the powerless. The rich control the poor. The free control the enslaved. Those with money control politics. Those with keys control access.

I’ve been thinking a lot about control lately having just experienced its heavy hand. Not in exercising it but in the having it exercised upon me. There’s a Japanese proverb, “the nail that sticks out gets hammered.” Deviance is met with resistance. Voices raised are met with efforts to seize the microphone.

This has not stopped us. This will not stop us.

This is not a threat. This is a promise.

We learn from experts, from those who know. They know because they have thought long and hard about the subject, because they’ve studied it. And sometimes, most powerfully, because they have lived it.

I am not an expert on prison life. But for the past four years I have learned from experts, from a group of men who have lived behind bars for twenty, twenty-five, thirty or more years. They are members of the Lifers’ Writing Group I started at Oregon State Penitentiary. They write powerfully, with humor, with heart, with courage, with regret, with confusion and with insight about their everyday lives: sleeping, eating, working, making and losing friends, getting married, sitting by the bedsides of the dying.

I tell some of the stories they have shared with me in my book, A Grip of Time. I have also helped them craft and polish their stories for submission. Two of these stories won national recognition in 2018 Pen America Prison Writing Contest.  Two more won in 2019.

A number of shorter pieces appear on the site I created here. These stories are powerful, important and timely. They are a testament to how people can live lives of meaning and purpose in places designed to deaden meaning and eliminate purpose. They are a challenge to all of us to consider how people, people who have done bad things, might be human beings capable of growth and change.

These stories, written by experts, can help us learn about the criminal justice system we have created, the system that has made the United States the undisputed #1 jailer in the world.

I am so delighted that on Monday the Washington Post devoted an entire issue of its magazine to publishing personal stories, essays and art produced by those formerly or currently incarcerated. Let these stories, by the experts, help us non-experts have informed, humane conversations about crime and punishment, about incarceration and rehabilitation, and about the hidden lives lived by millions—yes, I said millions—of American citizens.

Anniversaries are usually happy occasions.

This one, last month, was not.

In September we “celebrated” the 25th anniversary of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. It was designed as an in-your-face piece of legislation to show that Democrats could be just as “tough on crime” as Republicans.

Here’s what it did: It imposed longer prison sentences, created more death penalty offenses, cut Pell grants for education, and provided billions to states to build more prisons. It incentivized states to create three-strikes laws, enact mandatory minimums, and eliminate parole. This was supposed to reduce violent crime.

Here’s what it actually did: It created the world’s largest population of incarcerated men and women. It targeted (and devastated) Black and brown neighborhoods. It separated families, destabilized communities, further institutionalized poverty, disenfranchised voters, and created a generation of children who would grow up with one or both parents behind bars.

What it did was shred the fabric of millions of lives. What it did was bring shame to the United States, making us #1 in a category no enlightened, free, democratic society ever wants to place first in.

And what it continues to do is to fly in the face of decades of research that shows that longer prison sentences don’t work to cut down on crime, that educational opportunities are the most important part of any rehabilitation efforts, and that children whose parents are incarcerated are physically, emotionally and educationally at greater risk than other kids.

This piece of legislation does not work. Our system, does not work.

To mark this anniversary, let’s commit to serious, informed, focused conversation about deep reform of this so-call justice system. Let’s elect officials willing to work hard for actual justice. Let’s vote to spend our state tax dollars on restorative justice programs and educational opportunities not more prison cells.

Let’s do this.

If you want to know what living your entire adult life is like when you live it in behind bars, I invite you to read my book, A Grip of Time.

What is magic about The Magic Barrel?

Well, first, what is The Magic Barrel?  Every year the Willamette Valley’s literary and charitable communities gather to celebrate great stories and lively music while raising funds to feed the hungry. The event benefits Linn-Benton Food Share, a county where 1 in 5 residents receive emergency food.

The magic? That caring people help feed their neighbors. Almost 4,000 volunteers help to serve 350,000 emergency meals and distribute more than 5 million pounds of food.

The magic? That “barrels” like this one are being filled and re-filled by involved, compassionate, generous people in counties all over the state (like mine, Lane County) and cities and counties all over our country.

The magic? That you can be a part of this, so easily, by coming to the show this Friday or, if you don’t live nearby (mid-Willamette valley), by donating.

The magic of the evening? Ten Oregon writers—all genres—on stage sharing their work. I am honored to be part of this event and will be reading a piece about an unlikely love story in prison from my book A Grip of Time: When prison is your life. I will also be introducing a man I have come to know and respect and care for deeply, a writer, a thinker, an activist—a man behind bars going on 26 years for a crime he committed as a teen. He is a long-time member of the writers’ group I run at Oregon State Penitentiary. His name is Sterling Cunio.

The magic? That we are in this for the long, that we continue to care about our neighbors and our communities. That, in the face of the rancor and hatred and selfishness spewing from the White House, we persist.

The men and women sitting in a circle at the Friends’ Meeting Hall in Salem. The men and women sitting in a circle in the First Methodist Church in Eugene. They’ve come to listen to me share what I’ve learned about those who live their lives behind bars. They’ve come to talk about the morality of punishment and the promise of restorative justice. They’ve come to talk about whether and how people can change, about whether and how we can forgive.

I am so happy to get these invitations to speak, so happy to be part of these discussions that center on—but go so much farther than—the work I do at Oregon State Penitentiary, the book that came from that work, and the men who have taught me so much.

What makes me happiest is being in the presence of these people, many of whom have given and continue to give their time and energy as volunteers. Some have experience volunteering in jails and prison. Many volunteer at local food banks or for Meals on Wheels. Some volunteer in schools, in libraries. Many have long histories of involvement in social justice movements.

It feels good to be in their midst. It feels especially good to be surrounded (literally) by generous, open-hearted folks at a time when it is too easy to feel there are no generous, open-hearted folks. Too easy to buy into the narrative that we all distrust and hate each other. That we wish each other ill. That we are greedy and selfish.

We are not.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, 25.3 percent of Americans volunteer, which is 62.8 million volunteers.

Who volunteers? The groups gathered in the circles at the two church events were mostly older people. That’s who goes to church these days. But volunteers tend to be exactly who you would think would have no time to volunteer: married women with children under the age of 18. Working women. According to the latest survey data, the largest age group for volunteers was 35-44. Women out-volunteered men 27.8 percent to 21.8 percent

That said, more than a quarter of people older than 55 are volunteers. So, while you are erasing the image of a country filled with people who hate each other, please also erase the damaging, insulting and erroneous image of older people doing nothing other than taking up space.
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Oh, and guess which mid-sized cities are in the top 20 in the U.S. for rates of volunteerism? Portland (38.4 percent) and Eugene (33.9 percent). Salem is not far behind, at #29 (29.9 percent).

To all who have encountered NO:
No you can’t.
No you shouldn’t.
No you aren’t.
No I don’t hear you.
No I don’t believe you.
No I don’t believe in you.
No you don’t belong.
No you weren’t chosen.
No you didn’t win.
No I won’t hire you.
No I won’t fund your project.
No I won’t publish your work.

To all who have been told they are too...
old
young
poor
uneducated
overeducated
loud
timid
sensitive
stoic
moody
weird
“damaged”
(fat, skinny, blah blah)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but FUCK ALL THAT.

We can.
We should.
And we are.

Right now.

So many people do good things in the world, in their communities, for their fellow citizens. It is easy to forget this. It is easy to view the world through dark lenses. And it is particularly easy these days when hate seems the coin of the realm, when the “narrative,” as they say, is controlled by a person intent on doing evil in the world.

But just this morning I was reviewing the invitation list for Friday’s reading event at Oregon State Penitentiary. It’s an event I’ve been working to make happen for close to two years, a public reading for “my” writers, the men in the Lifers’ Writing Group I started more than four years ago. They are powerful writers with something to say. They are thoughtful, determined, hard-working, committed to their craft. And they are, most of them, in prison for life.

Because of two wonderful human beings at the prison, Steven Finster and Karuna Thompson, the event is finally finally happening this Friday. That’s why I’m reviewing the invitation list. And why, looking at the scores of people on that list, I feel compelled to write about Right Livelihood. About the community-building, socially conscious, soul-enriching choices these scores of people (and so many others) have made. The way they have chosen to spend their working lives. Their extraordinary commitment to volunteer efforts. Their in-it-for-the-long-haul work for social welfare and social justice.

These folks who will come on Friday to listen to the writers speak truth to power work to feed the hungry, house the homeless, care for the indigent, advocate for those behind bars, work for reform, teach, mentor. They “harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart” as this wonderful Marge Piercy poem puts it.

To be of use

The people I love best
Jump into work headfirst
Without dallying in the shallows
And swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight…

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
Who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
Who strain the mud and the muck to move things forward,
Who do what has to be done, again and again…

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
Has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
But you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
And a person for work that is real.

May you jump headfirst. And keep jumping.