A Funny Prison Story

One feature that I'll put up intermittently on the site are stories about terrible things, ranging from frightening and upsetting to crime against humanity (this is for you, Lexi). I was going to skip it for prison week because, well, the topic is dreadful enough and I had trouble coming up with material. But then I remembered this particular tale and it's too good not to share.

In the best tradition of third-hand hearsay, this is something that totally happened to a friend of a friend of mine (thanks Graeme!). This was a clean-cut young man, white, living in southern California. Like many other young people, he was very cavalier - insouciant even - about traffic violations, parking wherever he pleased and racking up considerable parking fines, which he then proceeded to disregard. Notices would arrive in the mail, each more sternly worded than the last, and he would immediately file them away with Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues and fundraising messages from the Sierra Club in his "take no action" stack (which I image as being a heap of paper next to moldering pizza boxes). Now, with traffic fines there comes a certain threshold - a magic number, if you like - which, if reached, triggers more forceful action than mere rebukes. I imagine the moment like this: while the number rolls up in some police computer, this young man is in a daze of cannabis smoke, reclining in a sofa while listening to Pink Floyd, when a sudden chill goes down his spine for no clear reason. At that moment, though he knew it not, he was IN TROUBLE.

I'm not clear on the details of how the law caught up to him. It likely wasn't a S.W.A.T. team busting down his door, attack dobermann hounds pouncing, men in heavy armor barking orders, but it would be funny if it were. No, I imagine him at some office - maybe renewing his car insurance, maybe taking some routine screening for a job application, maybe stopping by his college to sort out some administrative matter - and his name triggering a flag on the computer screen of an office worker. She adjusts her glasses to make sure she isn't misreading the file, and then looks at him with an "uh-oh" expression before calling it in, as she must. He gets taken into custody and charged with a misdemeanor - his infractions have piled high enough for this to be a criminal matter - and discovers that he doesn't have the means to settle his fines. Done with trusting him to cough up the money eventually, the system turns its gears and he's placed into custody at the county jail until some family member or collection of friends can ransom him out.

And so our nameless protagonist, the clean-cut white boy, goes to jail, in the same holding cells that house gang members, murders, rapists and thieves. He is terrified, and should be.

This is not real prison - turnover is high, with no one in there for more than a week or two pre-trial, and those inside haven't yet been convicted of anything. The outside world is close by, almost at hand, and he just has to bide his time. But these are real criminals, and they, much more than the guards, determine what will become of him, and they know softness when they see it.

He discovers that the jail is strictly segregated by race. It's small, and split roughly evenly between black gangs and Hispanic gangs, with a negligible number of inmates of other races (this was apparently the result of prison gangs, with the white skinheads sequestered at a different facility). Each gang (or perhaps federation of gangs) had its own hierarchy, with leaders and enforces. Upon arrival, he was greeted by two members of the Hispanic crew, a hulking giant and a small talker. The talker introduced himself, and asked if our protagonist would prefer to speak with him or the brute beside him. "I'd rather speak to you, sir."

Rules were laid down. The two bathrooms were divided up between the two camps. He was never to enter the bathroom claimed by the black gangs. He could use that controlled by the Hispanic gang, but only if it were empty and he had to leave if anyone else came in. He should eat separately from both groups, and refrain from small talk. Finally, he was asked if he had any money. What little he did have was claimed by the pair, and he was told to get more, quickly. And cigarettes. Then they left.

He passed the rest of the day either in desperate activity (trying to call friends to bring him cash, super quick) or anxious waiting. I imagine him lying prone on his bunk (bottom, of course), staring up at the quilt of wires supporting the upper mattress, trying to come up with some existential argument for why this couldn't actually be happening. It then became night, and he did not sleep.

The next day, he discovered his one and only advantage. Newspapers were distributed by race - one was given to the black gang, one to the Hispanic gang and, as a member of neither group, he was entitled to one for himself. The newspaper was valuable - everything is valuable under the condition of artificial scarcity created by incarceration - and he could barter the different sections in exchange for favors (the number one favor being, of course, don't beat me). This bought him time, enough time so that resources outside the jail were motivated and brought to bear on his predicament, and he was finally sprung from the prison.

Of course, seeing what terrible conditions prevailed inside the penal system, he decided that from that moment on his life would be dedicated to improving the welfare of inmates. No, just kidding, that didn't happen, but he did become much more careful about where he parked.

How they do it in Scandinavia...

The Scandinavian social democracies are always making the rest of us look bad with their humane, effective, egalitarian social policies and disproportionate prowess at hockey, and prison policy is no exception. The New York Times ran a piece on the Finnish prison system in 2003, and around the same time the BBC examined prison practice in Denmark. Perhaps the broadest introduction to Scandinavian penal practice actually comes out of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, where the protagonist faces a prison sentence for defamation, and spends the time getting in shape and learning some practical skills from his fellow inmates. But conditions are not cushy enough to satisfy everyone - apparently believing that jail should be less like the gulag and more like a vegan co-op, plans for a new prison in Denmark include programs for animal husbandry and gardening.

The sheep double as guard animals

In terms of practice, what the different prison systems have in common is a respect for the inmate, an emphasis on rehabilitation and an aversion to real or symbolic coercion. Relationships between inmates and jailers are cordial, with the Finns especially egalitarian - in "open" prisons, staff don't wear uniforms and are addressed by convicts by their first names. The whole approach is intended to make the transition to life outside as easy as possible and to develop attitudes among prisoners which will discourage them from reoffending.

Assessing the success of the Scandinavian model is a little tricky - different countries collect and code crime-related data differently, and the most pertinent statistic - recidivism, or re-offending, rate - is extremely difficult to compare given the diverse definitions used. One indisputable achievement is the low incarceration rates that come with the model - Scandinavian countries, by and large, imprison their citizens at one tenth the rate of the US, and about 30% lower rate than Canada. As for re-offending versus rehabilitation, there the results are less clean cut. The most often cited and thorough report on the topic, a report released by the American Bureau of Justice Statistics, using a three-year time frame, concluded that 67.5% of released inmates are re-arrested for a new crime and that 51.8% return to prison, either for a new offense or for violating terms of their parole. The Finnish Criminal Sanctions Agency released a similar report, and using a five-year horizon found that 59% of released inmates returned to custody. The comparison then falls on the favor of Finns, but only because of the extra two years in their time scale, with the results otherwise being a statistical wash. However, this is not to say that the two systems are comparable - remember, the proportion of those incarcerated in Finland is much lower, and conditions much more humane. Rather than finding an equivalence between the two, it would be fairer to say that to achieve the same results as the Scandinavians, US authorities need to imprison ten times as many offenders at great expense, and then subject them to much harsher, more arbitrary and more demeaning conditions. And when you put it that way, it's not much of a contest.

Prison-related culture

There's something fascinating about prison life, a combination of intense

psychological desperation and lurid criminal brio making it a great inspiration for art, high and low. Prompted by all the carceral rumination I've been doing as a result of these posts, I started asking people about their favorite prison movies, figuring I could compile a top ten list. It turns out that someone's beaten me to the punch (www.prisonmovies.net) and ranked 230 US and international films by quality, complete with snarky one-line reviews. I will let their list stand, but I make the following comments:

1. The Shawshank Redemption is a little over-exposed, but it's still pretty awesome

2. The list missed Blood In, Blood Out, which though a little over-the-top, made quite an impression on me as an adolescent. The main take home message: Californian pr

ison gangs are really scary.

3. Papillon got enough love so that I would remark upon it.

Prison has also been a great subject for music, with Nick Cave's Mercy Seat a personal favorite of mine. But, despite a life best described as "completely punk," his convict growl is a bit of a pose - he never spent an (serious) time behind bars, though it's not inconceivable he overnighted at a city jail after a particularly nasty bender. Johnny Cash is perhaps the best known prison bard, due partly to such classics as Folsom Prison Blues and partly because of a willingness to identify with convicts, as in his two prison records, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison and Johnny Cash at San Quentin. Though never in jail for long, he successfully cultivate an image as an outlaw, a badass, an all-American desperado type, and he certainly had more than enough grit to back it up.

But Lead Belly, for all Nick Cave's punk-rock posturing and Johnny Cash's country

-western swagger, makes them both

look like backup dancers for hair metal bands. A pioneering bluesman credited by some for innovating the beginnings of modern American music, he had the hardest history of the three, born a penniless black man in 1888 and coming up in the Deep South when segregation and white supremacy were at their most intense. He did not merely sing about prison, he spent all together 11 years in lockup, 4 in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison for knifing a white man, and 7 in Texas for murder. His musical talent became known to his captors early on, and the governor of Texas would occasionally bring guests to the prison to hear Lead Belly preform. It was only late in life that Leadbelly reached broader audiences, mainly through the efforts of folklorists who wanted to promote traditional American musical culture, and save it for future generations. On some of the early recordings, made while he was still behind bars, his clapping is accompanied by the jingle of his manacles as the he moves. So, despite my love for Cash and Cave, in the prison authenticity olympics the gold goes to Lead Belly.

The Prison-Industrial Complex

Prison week (because that's what it's become) continues!

Although the establishment of private, for-profit prisons is not part of the Conservative omnibus crime bill, there's been anxiety on left ever since 2007 about the potential for a shift in that direction. For Canadians used to penal issues being a strictly government matter, private prisons may seem novel and counter-intuitive, but the for-profit jail business has a long though inglourious tradition (Fleet Prison, one of London's most Notorious, was operated by subcontractors on a for-profit basis, charging prisons for food and board, with fees for removing irons and turning keys). In post-Reconstruction Mississippi, convicts could be leased out to private interests for their labour, and the state prison at Parchman farm, though government-run, turned a profit as a cotton plantation. It was only the progressive reforms of the late 19th and 20th century that brought those kinds of practices to an end.

Well, until the 80s. A side-effect of the "tough on crime" politicking of the post-Nixon Republicans was a massive surge in the inmate population in the 80s and 90s, creating an over-crowding crisis in state prisons across the US. These were the days of Reaganism, so rather than building up the government penal apparatus, the free market was unleashed to work its magic, creating the modern American prison-industrial complex, in which private businesses take government money in order to build, maintain and operate prisons. Every dime that can be saved by, say, reducing programs for inmates, or reducing their space allowances, or any other privation great or small, translates immediately into improvements in the bottom line. Likewise, the prison operators partner with other firms in order to make the most lucrative use of their unfree labor. Depressed communities, eager for the corrections jobs that come with a private-built prison, compete to house the jails, with local representatives serving as lobbyists in the state house for the private prison industry. The results are predictable - overcrowding, violence, and inmates unfit and unprepared for life after release. Predictably, they tend to reoffend, perpetuating the system, and supplying the private prison companies with a steady stream of profit.

Prison Travelogue - Louis Theroux goes to jail

In keeping with the topic of the last post, here is Louis Theroux in San Quentin Prison:

For those of you unfamiliar with him, Louis is the son of Paul Theroux, the travel writer, and a successful tv journalist in the UK, specializing in long-form documentaries on difficult personalities, difficult places, difficult communities, or all three at once. I recommend anything by him, but on this topic you can also check out his pieces on crime in South Africa, Philadelphia and the California super-prison for child molesters (for some reason available only in German).

Prison, Harper and the Carceral State

Given the Conservative majority in Parliament, the omnibus crime bill is virtually a done deal. It's ambition is hard to overstate - the reforms, taken together, represent both a vast expansion of the Canadian penal system and a shift in the principles that underpin it - we have both an estimated $1 billion per year increase in spending to pay for 2,700 new prison spots and the imposition of tougher sentencing requirements to fill them. It should be pointed out that these changes are not prompted by any uptick in Canadian criminality - indeed, after peaking in the early nineties, the violent crime rate has been on a 20 year decline.

The inspiration for these reforms comes clearly from south of the border. The American penal system is famous for having the highest incarceration rate in the world (more than twice that of the next Western country on the list, Latvia) and for its harsh sentencing procedures, to say nothing of the brutal conditions that prevail in maximum security prisons, where prison rape is a matter of course. For all its ferocity, the American penal system is simultaneously one of the least effective in the world, if effectiveness is measured in crime rates and recidivism. So why emulate what looks to be a failed model, and which has drawn the condemnation of no lesser a Canadian conservative than Conrad Black (who knows a thing or two about US prisons)?

There are two possible motivations underpinning that decision: either the reforms reflect a Conservative embrace of the ideas behind American penal practice, or they represent a cynical attempt to emulate Republican political gains through law-and-order posturing. I don't know which is worse.

At rortybomb, Mike Konczal has a series of posts outlining the main currents of American conservative thought about crime (here, here and here). You should read the whole thing, but here's the gist:

A lot of conservative energy, thought, money, infrastructure, ideology and worldview is built around the idea of a high prison population, harsh sentencing minimums, and a casual disregard towards the idea of “Rights” in the maintenance of order...

[One major school of conservative thought about crime] is Incapacitation Theory, a theory that says, in the words of James Q. Wilson: “Wicked people exist. Nothing avails except to set them apart from innocent people.”

In short, criminals - "wicked people" - are natural offenders, essentially different from decent people, and can only be kept from committing crime by "incapacitation," effectively incarceration. Note that since their problem is being "wicked," they are fundamentally incapable of reform or rehabilitation, and must always be the objects of state surveillance and coercion. In other quotes pulled from Wilson, a key conservative intellectual, Konczal makes it clear that he explicitly links "wickedness" with low socio-economic status. Incapacitation theory ends up justifying a law-and-order policy explicitly targeting a segment of the poor population for preemptive monitoring, profiling and, should they step out of line, harsh punishment, including complete separation from the broader community. This is a bleak vision, and something of a self-fulfilling prophecy - the harsh treatment meted out to American convicts renders them less and less able to transition to the legitimate economy (they are often explicitly barred by state law from dozens of professions) and more and more likely to return to crime once outside. Enough such individual stories and you create an entrenched criminal underclass, which must (under conservative theory) be met with even harsher repression. The theory is twisted, and so it also twists the world when applied.

The alternative view is that the reforms are motivated by cynical political calculation. Regardless of their failure to decrease crime or improve security for Americans, law-and-order policies have proven very effective at mobilizing support for conservative electoral campaigns ever since the sixties. Further, their popularity and salience is more or less perennial - once primed to fear ubiquitous crime, a large and electorally valuable chunk of the public stays scared regardless of the movement of crime statistics or the conclusions of penal policy experts, instead tuned in to the occasional sensational criminal outburst breaking out in the mass media. Further, once the issue is framed in terms of "criminals vs. law abiding citizens," the opponents of punitive criminal reform are effectively disarmed, risking association with child molesters and murdersome drug gangs through their opposition to tough-on-crime policies. Perhaps the whole law-and-order approach is all about creating this permanent winning conservative issue, and the $1 billion per year of extra spending and 4,000 more inmates nationwide are just a by product.