Category — prison

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.

Ten tables, ten minutes at each table. Around these tables sit my favorite people: Book lovers. But not just book lovers. Professional book lovers. Bookstore owners and staff, librarians. The people whose lives are about connecting readers with writers. On Monday I was one of those writers. It was Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s (PNBA) fall trade show, and I was invited to participate in what I thought of as a “literary speed dating” event but the organization called “Signature Dish.” Either way, it was a literary marathon. I had ten minutes to engage ten different groups of six to eight people, tell them about my book, A Grip of Time, and communicate my passion for the work. I didn’t just want them to order copies for their stores. I wanted them to care.

I was on my fourth table when I felt the need to re-caffeinate. I was on my sixth table when I guzzled two glasses of water to stave off a scratchy throat. I was on my seventh table when I worked up a sweat. I was on my ninth table when I forgot what I had just said. I was on my tenth table when I thought: Gee, it’s over already?

It was an exhausting. And I loved every moment.

And no I didn’t love every moment just because I got to talk about my work. Sure, there was that. But I loved yesterday evening’s event, and the trade show itself, because it was a celebration of the renewed health of Indie bookstores.

A few decades ago, independent bookstores were supposed to disappear, crushed by Barnes & Noble. A decade ago, independent bookstores were supposed to disappear, crushed by amazon. Ha.

Today it’s Barnes & Noble on the chopping block, part of the retail apocalypse currently blighting American malls. And while amazon, the world’s biggest retailer, commands 72 percent of adult new book sales online, and 49 percent of all new book sales, independent bookstores are doing just fine. In fact, better than fine.

According to a recent report from the American Booksellers Association (the national trade group for independent bookstores), the number of U.S. independent bookstores is up 31 percent since 2009. And book sales at independent bookstores grew nearly 7.5 percent over the past five years. The ABA itself has grown to 1,887 members in 2,524 locations.

Indies are part of the community, our communities. Here in the Northwest, where the PNBA is the regional trade group, Indies from Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho and Alaska are offering what amazon cannot: book clubs and author readings, themed evenings, conversation circles, kids’ events, music, a place to sit surrounded by books. Indies offer carefully curated selections with shelf tags to pique your interest and passionate, informed staff to make suggestions.

The folks who own and run and work in these stores love books. They love authors. And we love them back. All hail the Indies.

These stories are about the growth and health of independent bookstores, should you want to read more.

With local connections and quirkiness, indie bookstores thrive
Bookstores Find Growth as ‘Anchors of Authenticity’
US Independent Bookstores Thriving and Growing

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).

Politicians are finally talking about prison reform. So yay for that. But what are they talking about?

Beto O’Rouke, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker have focused on ways to reduce our 2.3 million prison population by reforming drug laws and drug sentencing. Great. But it’s a myth that millions of people are behind bars for low-level, nonviolent drug offenses and that finding other ways of dealing with these offenses would solve our incarceration crisis. Eighty percent of those in prison are not there for low-level, nonviolent drug offenses. They are behind bars for committing violent crimes.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders want to eliminate private prisons. Yes, good idea. But that accounts for only 8.4 percent of the incarcerated population.

President Trump’s much heralded First Step Act reform bill resulted in the early release of 3,000 federal prisoners (with already impressive good behavior records). Good. But that’s .001 percent of the prison population. And, in case you didn’t know, 90 percent of U.S. prisoners are in state prisons not federal penitentiaries.

Any reform is good reform.

But this all feels like that cliché: rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

What we desperately need to do is rethink our entire notions of “punishment.” Yes, we  need to hold people accountable for doing harm. But is our current system of incarceration the way to do this? We sentence people to very long prison terms (far longer than other western countries). The conditions in which they live are harsh, toxic, unhealthy, rob them of any decision-making power and teach them to trust no one.

If this system of punishment worked, that might be one thing. But within three years of release, about two-thirds (67.8 percent) of released prisoners are rearrested. Within five years of release, about three-quarters (76.6 percent) of released prisoners are rearrested.

Real prison reform needs to deal with not just the proven, well documented failure of our current system but with our own attitudes towards those who do harm, sometimes very serious harm. We need to ask ourselves tough questions: Are people who do bad things “redeemable”? Can they change? How should they be made accountable? How much punishment is enough? Given that 95 percent of those we put behind bars return (at least for a time) to their communities, how can we create a system that helps them become good citizens? Think on it.

When you awoke this morning, light streaming in through your bedroom window, what was your first thought?

What does a man, in prison for the past 30 years, think about when he first wakes up, shifting his body on the thin vinyl-coated mattress on the top bunk of his two-man cell?

“When I woke up this morning, I…” was a recent prompt I gave to my Lifers’ Prison Writing group at Oregon State Penitentiary. I’ve been running the group for four years now, beginning each twice-monthly session with a prompt, watching the ten men I have come to know so well bend their heads over lined paper as they write, by hand, their stories. I’ve prompted them with words like trust, power, friendship, dreams, food, fear, hope.

When they write, they exercise the one freedom they have not lost, the freedom of expression. When they write, they process experience; they struggle to make sense of the lives they are living. They look for meaning. They become, for just a short while, writers. Not numbers. Not prisoners. Not convicted murderers. Just men writing.

When they write, make their incarcerated lives visible. I think it is important for us on the outside to know about these lives. With more than 2 million men and women behind bars, with our country claiming the highest rate of incarceration in the world, we need to know, don’t we, where we put these people and what kind of lives they live?

The writing of prisoners allows us into this world. I’ve created a small window into this world with this site, TruthtoPower, where I publish the prompt responses and other short pieces by men in the Lifers’ Writing Group. Longer pieces we’ve worked on together for months, through many revisions and much thought, have made their way to the Pen America Prison Writing Contest, winning two first place awards (2018) (2019), one second place , and one honorable mention these past two years.

I write about the lives lived by those behind bars, the lives of those for whom prison is a permanent home, in my book, A Grip of Time.

I hope you will read their work and mine, not because you know someone in prison, but because you don’t.

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.

I don’t care about Jeffrey Epstein.

I care about the other 600+ men and women (mostly men, mostly—and this may surprise you—white men) who took their own lives behind bars last year. I care that suicide is the leading cause of death in local jails.  Yes, you read that right.

The most recent comprehensive study of deaths behind bars (state and federal prisons, local jails) comes from two reports released by U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and covers more than a decade of mortality data ending in 2014.

In this report we learn that from 2013 to 2014, the number of suicides among state prisoners increased by 30 percent. Suicides made up 7 percent of all state prisoner deaths in 2014, the largest percentage since 2001. Between 2001 and 2014, whites had a suicide mortality rate of 28 per 100,000 prisoners, compared to 8 for African Americans and 16 for Hispanics. (For comparison, the overall suicide rate in the US is about 13 per 100,000.)

The suicide rate for those in jail (not prison) was much higher: 45 per 100,000 prisoners. For whites, it was 95 per 100,000; compared to 19 for blacks and 23 for Hispanics. On average, a prisoner who committed suicide had been in jail for 9 days. About half of the suicides occurred in general population housing areas, while around 20 percent were in segregation or special housing units. Suicides among jail prisoners in 2014 were up 13 percent from 2013.

I don’t care if that sick, rich, revolting pederast hanged himself or if one of his sick, rich teenage-screwing buddies paid someone to do it. I care about the incarcerated men and women—some serving time for crimes committed, others just awaiting trial—who choose to take their own lives. I care about the deplorable and degrading conditions in jails, the overcrowding and constant threat of violence and sexual abuse in prisons. I care that we lock up people with mental illness and serious addictions. I care that we pay no attention to them. Yet the national media are falling all over themselves to report on Jeffrey Epstein.

When I read the suicide statistics, and read the exposés of jail conditions, and then I experience the dread and emotional deadness of prison life, I don’t wonder why so many people behind bars commit suicide. I wonder why so few do.

I once lived in a migrant worker camp. I was a member of VISTA (now part of AmeriCorps), which was essentially the domestic Peace Corps. Along with two other college-age women and an extraordinary group of nuns (the Teaching Sisters of Notre Dame), we followed the “migrant stream” throughout the agricultural Midwest as families caravanned from sugar beet fields to cherry orchards to vegetable farms, picking crops and trying to live their lives. We ran programs for the kids while the parents worked. Kids under the age of twelve were not supposed to work in the field, although many did.

I mention this because just down the dirt road from our Wisconsin migrant camp “home” there was a company store. It was where everyone bought their groceries because there was no other place. The shelves were stocked with canned goods, convenience foods and junk food. There was no fresh fruit or vegetables. The store was owned by the same people who owned the orchards. And the workers would pick all day, get their buckets of cherries weighed, make their wages and then go spend most of that money at the company store.

Welcome to the world of the prison commissary. For many people in prison, their meager earnings (in Oregon from 5 to 47 cents an hour) go right back into the prison system when they buy goods from the only place they can, the prison commissary. It’s not unlike the migrant families we VISTAs lived with, or sharecroppers, or coal miners.

Prison commissaries sell hygiene and health necessities (soap, toilet paper) you would imagine the prison would provide but often doesn’t. (In some prisons, a person is allotted a roll of toilet paper a week.) Commissaries also sell candy bars and ramen noodles (the two most popular “food” items) plus instant coffee, Slim Jim’s, Doritos and other unhealthy snack and ready-to-eat foods you’d find on the shelves of your local 7-11.

When the Prison Initiative studied sales in the prisons in Illinois, Massachusetts and Washington, their report found that prisoners spent more money a year in the commissary than they made at their prison jobs. When their wages were not enough, they relied on family members to transfer money to their accounts — meaning that families were helping to subsidize the prison system (in addition, of course, to the taxed we all pay to support the system). Others in prison who lacked such support systems couldn’t afford the commissary at all.

Prisoners were not buying “luxury” items for themselves at these commissaries. They were buying the “food” that was available to supplement a sometimes inadequate, almost always tasteless prison diet (mostly high-calorie, low-nutrition junk food that would further erode their health). And they were buying anti-fungal cream to treat the athletes’ foot they got from the floor of the group shower. And paper and envelopes so they could write letters to their families. They were spending their wages, and their families’ money, at the company store.

More about the lives lived behind bars in A Grip of Time: When prison is your life.

Who is punished when we sentence someone to prison?

That seems like a silly question, right? The person in prison is punished. He or she did something illegal, harmful, maybe even horrific. In prison, behind bars, living in a cell, living a controlled and constrained life, they are being punished. They are learning that what they did has consequences, and that the consequences are not pleasant.

That’s the idea anyway. But we know that people in prison are also learning other things. Sometimes they are learning how to be better criminals. Sometimes they are learning that no one can be trusted, that being tough is the only way to be, that cruelty is normal, that the only way to feel you have personal power is to have power over others. That nothing ever changes. That they have no value.

We also know that it is not only the person behind bars who is being punished for the crime. It is their children. Children are traumatized–in extensively researched and measurable ways–when a parent is behind bars. Eighty percent of incarcerated women are mothers. More than half of the men in prison are fathers. The consequences (mental, physical, emotional, educational) suffered by their children is collateral damage. A lot of damage. Damage to those who have done nothing wrong.

We also know that entire communities are punished when we punish individuals. That’s because when these men and women return to their communities (and 95 percent of them do), they often return without the education, job skills, or physical and emotional health to live the kind of lives that would enhance their communities. They cannot find affordable housing. They cannot find secure, decent-wage employment. If they are returning to an already impoverished community (and many of them are), then they are adding to the poverty level. Those who go on to commit another crime after release (and many of them do) make their communities a more dangerous place.

When we incarcerate a person who has committed a crime, we are punishing their families, their children and their communities. Is the solution to not punish people who have done wrong? Of course not. The solution is to rethink, reform and restructure our “corrections” system so that it helps create healthy, functioning citizens who are able to parent healthy families and contribute to healthy communities.

If you don’t know much about life behind bars (not the Hollywood version), I write about it in A Grip of Time: When prison is your life.