Category: Inside

Events which occur inside prison

Pain, Joy and Prison

A. ToutenthopLeave a comment

Someone sent me an inspirational song today and I ended up wandering the labyrinth of YouTube. I used to do this before I was locked up and often my kids would be sitting beside me egging me on. It was really so much better than television. I wonder if you do this too.

The person who sent the video wasn’t responsible for my travels in the maze of twisty passages, but I couldn’t help but look to my right and see the related videos just waiting to be clicked. Google knows I’m a sucker for the talent competitions, so many of the videos were of various Simon Cowell productions, America’s Got Talent, Britain’s got Talent or The X-Factor.

The Ten Best Auditions! Says one title that I couldn’t help but click. It was a compilation and the first to audition is a deaf girl who’s come to sing a song of her own composition called “Try.” I must admit that the young lady’s story and her honest song made me cry. (Try made me cry.) As in, tears were streaming down my cheeks. Then the next audition on the same video was of a young girl with anxiety disorder who was accomplishing something by merely being in front of the audience. Howie Mandel revealed that he also suffers from an anxiety issue – O.C.D. – in order to soften up the audience. He wanted the audience to relate to her pain and to understand how hard it was for her to even be present. He appealed to their emotions.

And isn’t it strange how when we want to get our way we often appeal to, some might say manipulate, the pain or joy of others? Or is it strange? Is it just what works? Its easy to stand back and judge people for using appeals to emotion to sell stuff and ideas. We’d all like knowledge to be king when it comes to politics, for instance, but we find that the thing that works is often an appeal to emotions.

In prison, it is rare to see pure joyful abandon. I’ve noticed how much I missed that kind of joy now that I am out. Music for instance, which is one of my passions, is not something that one can participate in Texas prisons unless you play in the church band or sing along with your twenty dollar radio. They don’t allow musical instruments outside special sanctioned events and locations. And inmates don’t get YouTube so they never get to see the sort of joyful revelry which could be witnessed watching Jeff Beck’s band (I dare you to suggest Tal Wilkenson, Beck’s bassist is not playing with pure joy) or the other videos I watched today including Mandy Harvey who said at her audition, “After I lost my hearing I just gave up. But I want to do more with my life than just give up.”

The lack of joyful expression in prison goes along with the lack of pain expression. This isn’t to say that they don’t exist in prison. Pain is everywhere. Joy is occasionally found but it seems so out of place that those who are discovered being joyful are often reprimanded by guards or other inmates. It just isn’t right to be joyful in a place like prison. Coincidentally, the majority opinion in Big Justice right now is that when people are sent to prison, they should just give up even if they want to do more with their life. They have been adjudicated failures. The script now must be adhered to by all the bit players. Everybody needs to play their part and anyone who goes outside the script is a danger. Even you non-felons have a part to play according to the script writers. If you’re reading this you may already be going off-script. Congratulations.

Prisoners are unwitting accomplices to the systematic suppression of their emotions. Take pain for instance. Genuine pain is dangerous to share. Showing pain makes one vulnerable. And vulnerable people are preyed upon. You can be extorted, raped or killed if you show vulnerability in prison. Not just by the inmates. In fact, it is in prison where the notion of vulnerability as a super power has to have originated. If you can be vulnerable in prison, Clark Kent ought to tremble at your feet. (If he was a real person that is). There really are men in prison who do not react to vulnerability with violence but it isn’t the norm and it is rarely anyone who works for the prison.

I have always had a hard time with pain. Not only sharing it but standing in place for somebody in pain. I had a a celly once on the Dalhart unit who I really liked. We were housed in the faith based dorm and one day he got called out to the Major’s office around Christmas. I wasn’t aware of this but I did notice he had been gone a while which wasn’t typical. He was what some call a “house mouse.” He didn’t like to spend a lot of time in the day room and stayed in reading or filling out workbook assignments required as part of the dorm’s educational activities. He came back late that afternoon with his head low, refusing to make eye contact. He sat on his bunk in silence.

I could feel tension like a thick blanket, a common occurrence in prison. Unable to withstand, I asked him finally what was wrong. He choked back a sob and tried to talk. “My mother and my brother-in-law both died last week,” he coughed. He had talked about both often. They were his sole means of support besides his sister, who was only marginally involved in his life. And now they were both gone. Within days of one another they had passed and letters of the news had been intercepted by the mail room and forwarded to the chaplain who was not available. The duty of informing the inmate had passed to rank.

I felt awkward and uncomfortable because I wanted to lose it myself. What a tragedy. The only thing to do was to sit there, offer a hug and listen. Yeah. A Hug. In prison. Not a fist bump or a pat on the back but a real live hug. I remember thinking how rare this was on several levels. I had heard of similar catastrophes happening but always to people far removed.

Yet, outside of our cell, my celly, I’ll call him Jose, remained guarded. He wasn’t eager to be vulnerable to the whole pod even if many of our neighbors were committed to the kinds of behavior that faith promotes: mercy, forgiveness and compassion. I wanted to help Jose overcome his fear of trusting others. But I also thought that I might not be doing him any favors by encouraging him to step out and share his grief. I didn’t think there was a lot of danger but I also didn’t know if I would have done the same were I in his shoes.

Prison is not designed for humans. It is ironic that our society wants to punish people for stepping outside what is deemed acceptable societal norms but it does not seek to improve or educate the punished person in what that would look like. (Figure it out, loser!) Instead, people are sent to warehouses to endure their sentences and cope with their feelings using the strategies they learned before being locked up. And they’re locked up with overseers who have been conditioned to believe that they are an integral part of the punishment regimen, rather than being there to ensure the safety of their charges.

I didn’t begin to write a screed decrying the faults of our prison system but to point out that our attitude about prison is due to emotional manipulation. Some of this is the pure emotion of having been victimized by crime. Not a fun feeling. Yet this pain is used as a weapon and a tool for demagogues. “Lock them up and throw away the key,” they say. “Prison isn’t supposed to be pleasant. ” If they wanted to go to a country club they should have victimized society the old fashioned way, by going to law school or running for office. Apologies to Bryan Stevenson and Barry Scheck who break the mold.

Now there are people who think that the incarcerated are human and that by improving the condition of the incarcerated it can only improve society once a rehabilitated prisoner is released. And one of the ways that many advocates are trying to change the system is to promote programs that reduce recidivism. They’re appealing to the facts and data because that’s what legislators and prison administrators claim to care about. But there is a problem with this approach because a good idea which improves opportunities for prisoners might not result in declines in recidivism rates. But what if it reduces the rates of rape and extortion? What if a program helps people in prison communicate their feelings and improves their mental health but doesn’t necessarily knock down the rates of re-offense? Does that make it a bad program? Is that program now worthless because we can’t measure it against recidivism rates and see a benefit?

What sort of system spends its energy re-enforcing the very errors in thinking which contributed to a person’s mistakes in action? The kind of system that is fueled by the emotions of those who assume that the outcome they’ve been promised is reality.

Yet, at some level a person has to realize that when you transform a victim into an avenger, you have not achieved anything other than to bring the victim down to the level of the criminal. It’s a base, selfish reaction to crime to want personal satisfaction over societal security. Merely locking people away may make society temporarily safer while the criminal is locked up. But without any accompanying education, you only result in releasing embittered societal rejects. So, to prevent more retaliation from these embittered rejects, we simply lock them up so long that by the time they do leave prison they require hospice.

It’s the same mentality which says we ought to just keep the innocent men locked up in Guantanamo forever because if they weren’t terrorists before we locked them up, they will be after we let them go. While fear is a terrible way to govern, it is an awfully effective tool for manipulation.

When do we stop listening to fear and pain, and listen to joy? Joy? You ask. Yeah. Joy. How radical is it to imagine it being OK for an incarcerated person to feel and express joy?

It only seems radical. Prisoners have families. They have adopters. They have triumphs. How likely is it for a person who is encouraged and allowed to experience joy to desire pain for others? Not very likely. So when do we stop allowing our emotions to be manipulated by people who have no joy in their own lives? Sometime around the moment when we encourage people to find joy even if they are in prison.

A.T.

Number Two Freedom – A Bastille Bathroom Biography

A. Toutenthop1 Comment

There are many things which are better outside prison walls but the bathroom has to be near the top of any comparative list. Just ask anyone who’s been to prison. You probably don’t know anyone like that. Good thing I’m around to sate your curiosity.

It was this morning that I started really contemplating this topic because I resorted to an old habit. After performing a critical function in the bathroom, I walked out of the bathroom with the roll of toilet paper in my hand. I was half-way back to my bedroom before I realized I had absconded with the precious four-ply stuff. Huh. As I walked back to the bathroom to return the roll, it dawned on me that the habit was worn into my psyche over a long period of time.

In the county jail, toilet paper itself is not such an issue. At least not in the county where I was detained. You could ask for and receive two or three rolls of toilet paper per day without much push back from the officers. The facilities leave much to be desired as compared to good old home, but at least toilet tissue is freely distributed.

Prison is different. The facilities are just as poorly provided but the staff are loathe to hand out the stuff that facilitates a clean bum. I suppose it must be a budgetary issue but I don’t understand why they are so much more frugal in Texas prisons than they are in Texas county jails.

Going to the bathroom in jail or prison is a humiliating affair already if you are a person who values their alone time in the bathroom. Some people don’t have any hang ups at all about going to the bathroom, whether it’s number one or number two, in front of witnesses. I’m not one of those people. I really don’t want to have a conversation with you if either one of us happens to be pooping at that moment. In fact, even if you’re hundreds of miles away and talking with me on your cell phone, I’d rather not know that you are pinching a loaf in the privacy of your own home. It sort of creeps me out though I will admit that I may have talked to you once while sitting on the toilet. I didn’t tell you because I assumed that you are, like me, content not to know the details of another person’s pooping habits. As long as we’re ignorant, it’s no matter. Hopefully I never gave myself away.

“Are you carrying barbells up to your attic or something?”

“Uh…something like that.”

If it makes you feel any better I am not composing this post while positioned on the porcelain.

Now, the reason that I got in the habit of carrying around toilet paper and why I pilfered the roll in my own bathroom this morning is that I have become used to being rationed out a roll of the precious stuff once per week. That’s one. As in just one roll more than zero and it had to last me an entire week. For a person who has a bowel movement now and again, this is not nearly enough one-ply paper to last. If you’re like me, you would have to supplement your supply through the prison commissary, assuming you have the good fortune to make commissary and the people working on your unit are amenable to the inmates. This is pretty rare – and the details of the problems would double the length of this post so we’ll forego them for now – and so what I tended to do was to hoard toilet paper and buy what I could off “the street.” Most of the guys who sold their state-issued toilet paper were truly desperate types who needed the fifty cents. I figured them to be either chronically constipated or less than diligent when it came to hygiene. I didn’t judge. I needed the tissue. (“Here’s two soups. Now, buy yourself some soap and a laxative pill.”)

An inmate housed in a dorm has a much better situation when it comes to toilet paper as those who are housed in a cell. Yes, he’s got to poop in front of thirty to fifty other inmates. But, he can walk over to his bunk at any time and grab his toilet paper should the need arise. An inmate who lives in a cell has a “private” bathroom but it is only useful if he’s in the cell (and his celly isn’t). If he’s stuck in the day room, he’s going to have to use the toilet in the day room. You get used to using the bathroom in front of other inmates but most of the time you’re peeing. “What’s the difference?” I imagine you asking.

Well, sure, it’s not optimum for privacy but at least you are facing away from the inmates while peeing (unless you’re a woman).

The first unit I was assigned to when I came to prison was the Holliday unit in Huntsville. The entire unit consists of dorms of a few different sizes but the main dorms house fifty-one to fifty-four inmates with the bunks bolted to the floor around the edges of the dorms. There is a huge glass and steel wall along the front of the dorm which gives the place a fishbowl effect. The officers are in a picket surrounded by glass and steel allowing them to see into any of the four dorms which surround their enclosure. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice was concerned about security rather than privacy so the officer can look straight out of his picket into the bathrooms at the back of each dorm to see who is showering, brushing their teeth or riding the porcelain chopper.

Apparently, in an effort to increase the entertainment value of the design, TDCJ mounted the day room television sets right over the bathroom entrance. Convenient for inmates who happen to be bored during the commercial breaks.

The point is, in most of the day rooms in TDCJ, when you have to number two, you are number one with the day room audience. Even in wings where there are cells, the day room toilet (only one toilet per day room) is arranged to offer the least privacy and dignity for the inmate. And this ensures that in a wing where there are cells, the inmates do their best to use the cell toilet when it comes time to go poop.

But the utility of having a toilet in your cell is limited by nature and TDCJ’s security policies.

See, if one is housed in a cell, there are several reasons why he might not have access to the toilet. For one, unless you are on a minimum security unit, the policy states that the cell door stays closed and locked except when the officers are performing “ins” and “outs.” These are specific times when they enter the day room and give inmates the opportunity to leave or enter their cells. It is a short window ( five to ten minutes maximum) where the entry and exit is facilitated and “permanent.” In other words, once you are in, you are in until the next time the guard comes back with an “out”.

These times are supposed to occur once an hour but it is the rare officer who keeps to policy. So you can get stuck in or out. Imagine being stuck in the day room when nature calls. You never want to be stuck out without toilet paper. The only thing less dignified than having to poop in front of a hundred people is having to poop in front of a hundred people without any toilet paper. It brings the term panhandling into a whole different light.

“Hey, celly. Got any toilet paper? I’ma haff to sit here until I gets me some wipage.”

The other thing is this: your celly might be using the toilet in your cell right when you have to go. That is a bummer. Sometimes I would just go in the cell and lay on my bunk while my celly pooped as I waited for my turn. I don’t care how many times you flush or how soon, if you poop in a ten by twelve room that has little ventilation and no “fart fan,” it’s going to stink the joint up.

So, to avoid as much embarrassment as possible, I always had a roll of toilet paper on my person. It sometimes made me a target for the unprepared but I just pretended that I was a county jail officer and made generous like. That mostly ensured reciprocity in times of emergency. Nobody wants to be that guy. The guy who can’t get toilet paper because he was such a douche bag when another inmate was in a bind.

Right before I was released, there was an incident which made my anxiety peak. About two weeks before I had even been given a release date, I caught chain and had to spend a week on the Huntsville unit, known as “The Walls.” If you are classified as “in transit” on that unit, they don’t hand out rolls of toilet paper. The guard on third shift will bring by about three rotations of toilet paper off of a roll. I suppose the rationale is that most people at the Walls are being discharged or paroled so let them buy toilet paper on the outside. The amount they give you each day isn’t even enough to go poop though. So definitely I was pulling my hair out that week. Thankfully, I was shipped to the Billy Moore unit for another week where I would make commissary and buy a couple of rolls to keep me flush.

So it was that on my last day, having given away a roll of toilet paper to another inmate in need, that as I packed up everything I was going to take with me into the world as a parolee, I packed my last roll of toilet paper. After all, what if I got to the airport, got into a stall and it was out of toilet paper? Who would I beg for toilet paper then? Some random stranger in the next stall? Seriously, that was what I thought about. And I was prepared for any toilet paper emergency even if the toilet paper I had on hand was mere one-ply prison supply.

The picture above is that actual roll of prison paper that I took with me along with two bibles and some important writings I drafted while in prison. Hey, if worse came to worse, I could write on it a civil rights law suit as one Texas inmate once did.