Monthly Archives: February 2009

 
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So many choices, not a right one among ’em


In Bill Bryson's book, In a Sunburned Country, he describes the harsh landscape of Australia's Outback. "It's almost not possible to exaggerate the punishing nature of Australia's interior. It's an environment that wants you dead."

To illustrate his point, he describes an incident involving a young Austrian couple. They had rented a four-by-four vehicle to explore off the beaten path (as if the entire Outback wasn't already off the beaten path). Soon they were hopelessly sunk to their axles in sand. The nearest trafficked road was about 40 miles away. I imagine they weighed every option, every possible choice before the woman decided to take nine of their twelve liters of water and set off into the punishing 140-degree heat, leaving the man to wait with the car.

Bryson notes that at temperatures that high "it is actually possible to begin to cook, rather as you would in a microwave oven, from the inside out." Sad to say, the woman only covered 18 miles in two days before she expired. The man, who had the availability of shade, was rescued and survived.

So it is with the same longing, if not the same torturous conditions, that I sit on the 2 train at Hoyt Street pondering the vaguest of all subway announcements: the dreaded "police incident."

There are three options given that the incident is at Chambers Street in Manhattan, each riddled with its own problems:
1. Wait it out.
2. Since there are no transfers to another train line at Hoyt, backtrack one stop to Nevins Street to try to catch one of the 2/3 trains now going express past Hoyt.
3. Exit the train and walk one stop to Borough Hall, pick up the R train to DeKalb, transfer to the B to West 4th Street and walk about 10 minutes to my office.

And it's already 8:55 a.m.

Then the conductor seems to eliminate option #1. "This train is out of service. Everyone out! No passengers."

We all move to the platform as the train speeds away empty and simultaneously stare down the tracks hoping to see a set of headlights through the dark tunnel. Nothing.

Another 2 train rumbles by on the express track, so I make my move — option 2. I have to go upstairs to the street and cross the road to get to the Brooklyn-bound platform. I have a gaggle of people with me, so I feel good about my decision. That is, until I reach the platform just in time to see a train pull in on the Manhattan-bound tracks, watch the people board, and get whisked away while I wait to go in the opposite direction.

At Nevins, I make my way to the correct platform and jump aboard a waiting train to find one of my co-workers already aboard. (This is one of those inexplicable things about NYC — how, of all the subway cars on all the tracks in all the city, if you'll excuse my borrowing from Casablanca, I can walk onto a train and run into the person who sits two feet away from me at work.)

We get underway to Hoyt, where the whole ordeal began, and move smoothly to Borough Hall. I've just finished regaling her with my poor decision to double-back when the conductor makes an important announcement: "There is a sick passenger on this train. We are holding in the station." What the hell!?!

It is now 9:20 a.m. and I'm not out of Brooklyn. We have three options:
1. Wait it out.
2. Transfer to the R train to DeKalb, transfer to the B to West 4th Street, and walk about 10 minutes to my office.
3. Transfer to the 4/5 train to Fulton Street to transfer back to the 2/3.

My friend says "Option 1." So we wait.

The conductor appears in our car. "The lady is refusing to be moved. We are here until EMS arrives." I'm going to sound like a brash New Yorker when I say, unless you're comatose or have some kind of spinal cord injury, please give the 1,000 people in the 10 cars on this train a break. This isn't a crime scene. If you'd kindly move the five feet to the platform, we'll all be on our way. Chop, chop.

Through a series of rock-paper-scissors wars, we go with option 3. After a decent walk underground, we hop on the 4 train and get to Fulton Street. My friend notes wistfully that now that we're in the city, if all else fails, we can walk to the office. Outer borough residents will understand that through blackouts, employee strikes, and terrorist attacks, the overriding feeling in situations like this is "just get me to the point where I can walk the rest of the way," i.e., over the East River.

As we're walking underground to the 2/3, which should be mighty crowded, we pass the platform for the A/C. It's now 9:35.

We have 2 options:
1. Wait for the C train to Spring Street.
2. Continue to the 2/3 to Chambers Street and transfer to the 1. Then it's a shorter walk to the office.

I think I'm done walking and transferring. "Let's just wait for the C," I say. My friend balks but agrees. The A express train pulls in and leaves. Then another A train pulls in and leaves. She points out that we could probably be on the 2 by now. I'm sure she's right. I'm exhausted and second-guessing myself and I haven't even gotten to work yet.

Then the C arrives. It's now 9:50. We exit at Spring Street and walk halfway down the block before we are turned around. Cranes are blocking the road and sidewalk to add something to the Trump Soho high rise.

So many choices, not a right one among them.

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Poetry in motion


On a frightengly cold morning (- 3 with the wind chill) I stepped into the sardine can they call the B train.

I haven't taken the B train in a while, but it was the closest to my doctor's appointment. (Oh I will never compain about you again, 2 train!)

These two poems were posted in the train car, one right next to the other. As my butt rubbed against the guy behind me (unfortunately he looked nothing like Johnny Depp), I read the poems and was transported.

Here they are. May you read them in a comfortable chair without having some lady sneeze on you.

For all of the aspiring writers out there:

Utterance
Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of everything that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence

~W.S. Merwin

An early Valentine's gift:

love is a place

love is a place
& through this place of
love move(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live(skilfully curled)
all worlds

~ e.e. cummings

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Commentary

Albion, New York

Best of In The Fray 2009. Portrait of a prison town.


America’s prison system is the biggest in history.

Of the roughly nine million prisoners in the world, over two million are in America (World Prison Population List). The United States incarcerates more of its own people (an estimate of 2,357,284 according to the incarceration clock on January 27, 2009, at 12:56 p.m.) per capita than any other nation. This rate is 6.2 times greater than Canada’s, 7.8 times greater than France’s, and 12.3 times greater than Japan’s.

Why?

The simple answer would be because of our crime rate, only this is not really true. America’s incarceration rates and crime rates do not correlate. The imprisonment rate does not reflect the general population growth either; population growth is a molehill compared to the ever-growing mountain of incarcerated Americans (Punishment and Inequality in America, 2006).

If imprisonment and the creation of prisons are not direct responses to crime, what are they? Marxist scholars say that the elites have seized upon the idea of mass incarcerations as a new answer to an old question: What shall we do with the poor? Political historians note that, after Nixon made drugs and crime his chief campaign issues, a “tough on crime” image became a political sine qua non. (Before the ’60s, crime prevention was an invisible, unglamorous political duty, like road maintenance. Then Goldwater and Nixon and Reagan, no longer allowed to comment directly on “the Negro problem,” used crime as a wedge issue to secure the white vote, and the Willie Horton age was born). Racial bias theorists see the “War on Crime” as a war on African Americans, and incarceration as an extension of slavery.

But prison is not merely a theory. A prison is a building. A building sited on 50 acres of flat farmland. It has towers, offices with shaded windows, surveillance screens, uniformed guards, lights along its perimeter. Penetrate further inside and the imagination grows dim; it darkens with every locked door, but even on the inside of the inside there are people. People playing Scrabble, trying to pray, outlining letters in their head, napping before class, eating three meals a day. And outside the prison compound there are people, too. Outside the prison walls there is a town.

Once a factory town

A lot of American towns are begging for some kind of stimulus — any kind. When a town is desperate enough and it has the right kind of flat, fallow land, the corrections people swoop in and mount a public relations campaign. They support pro-prison candidates for the county board. They woo the town fathers. They talk up the industry: clean, quiet, no slow season. The worse things get out there, the better things will get for you. Almost always, the town buys it.

New York state has built 43 prisons since 1976, all of them in small upstate towns.

Albion, New York is one such town.

If you’re driving into Albion from the east on New York State Route 31 (NY Route 31), the Orleans County Economic Development Agency (EDA) is on your right. You’ll have to squint to make out the blue EDA logo because the building won’t catch your eye; it’s one of those anonymous one-story office buildings with exactly three boxwoods, and coffee-brown trim. If you pass a row of bright orange tractors for sale, you’ve gone too far.

A lot of people remember when this whole part of town was all one factory, the Lipton canning plant. Everyone worked for Lipton back then. Now it’s hard to imagine the factory during the ’60s and ’70s, humming, clanking, chugging, growing, growing, still growing, running out of space, till Lipton had to ask the town to block off Clinton Street on both sides, and the factory spilled out into the street. It doesn’t hum now, doesn’t look like much of anything but broken glass and concrete and mud, and it has a stench so bad, the neighbors swear someone’s hiding bodies in the basement. The two factory smokestacks now fossil in Albion’s elegiac skyline. The smokestacks no longer smoke; they just sit, and late in the day they cast boxy shadows over sun-bleached brick walls, stacks of crates in the lot, unhitched trailers, dead dandelions, empty window frames. The rusted crane with the key still in it. Eerie how the workers, on whatever the last day happened to be, just left. Like Pompeii, only without the desperate rush; not a bang but a whimper — slow and nonchalant, like they just forgot to ever come back. But the people in the town still need to make a living.

Another mile west on NY Route 31 — past the Save-a-Lot, past the Family Dollar, past the new Wal-Mart Supercenter perched on a knoll — and you’ll come to two more signs you’re likely to miss. One says “Albion C. F.” and one says “Orleans C. F.” Take a right at the first one, galunk over the rusted train tracks, and as the road curves, you’ll come face-to-face with one of Albion’s stately historic buildings, dressed in brick and white wood. And ringing the perimeter of the brick building, between it and you, the ribbons of polished metal. Floating, sort of blinking in and out of focus like spokes, drifting alongside the road in two ethereal layers as you drive (slowly now), the thousands of tiny points glinting in the sun, silver wire stretched thin — you’ve never seen metal shine like this. Maybe you roll up your windows without thinking and turn on your air conditioning. And then a tiny green sign on a post, so small you almost have to stop the car to make it out: “Correctional facility inmate work crews. Do not stop to pick up hitchhikers.”

Like a nation within a nation

I asked around about the mayor of Albion, and was told that the mayor was an idiot and probably a cokehead. Everyone told me this, from all political camps, and no one seemed to care much about him as long as he didn’t screw up anything important.

On the afternoon of our meeting, Mayor Michael Hadick was 20 minutes late. He was a young man, maybe in his early 30s, with watery blue eyes and thinning hair. He walked into Village Hall briskly, blinking a lot, making fast small talk and slicking back his hair with his free hand, and placed his jumbo Iced Capp on the table. “Long line at Tim Horton’s,” he said.

During our conversation I asked him what he thought about prisons. Growing up in Albion, he noticed them occasionally.

“Well, you know when we used to walk, where we used to come in from Eagle Harbor, they used to have the numbers up. I never could figure out what it was, but we used to drive by and my parents used to say, ‘That’s where the bad boys go.’ Obviously it was a lot smaller then, but you always wondered what those [were], cuz they had big blue numbers on it. One through eight, if I remember, and you always used to go, ‘What did they do, the bad boys, that they put ’em in these cages like this?’ Almost looked like, uh … reminds me of … uh … like the boxes, for uh … greyhounds, now that I think about it. But they were a lot bigger. They musta been — what do you call ’em — garage bays. That’s what I’m thinking now it woulda been. But back then, I had no idea. And they put the fear in me.”

As an adult, though, he seemed to lose interest. Now, he doesn’t “really see the interaction or the tie-in to the village whatsoever. It is what it is. They’re on that side of the fence, we’re on this side. I don’t think about it much.”

Albion is a prison town — how could the mayor of the town not think about prisons? Following national census policy, the 2,500 prisoners are counted as part of the town population, even though they do not pay taxes or vote or actually live in the town. By reporting a total population of 8,000 instead of 5,500, Albion gains representation in state and county legislature, improves its chances for state grants, and makes itself more attractive to national chains like Wal-Mart. The prisons buy their water from the town every month. The prisons give contracts to engineers and plumbers, and free labor to the town through work-exchange programs. I did not see how any of this could be uninteresting to any Albionite, much less the mayor.

Apparently, prisons did not seem as weird to people in Albion as they seemed to me. I had assumed that asking about prisons in a prison town would be a delicate subject, like asking about the mafia in Sicily or Katrina in New Orleans. Instead, it seemed more like asking people in Manhattan about the hot dogs, or the sewage drains. Everyone in the town was both perfectly willing to talk about the topic yet already bored of it. I would stop people and say, “I’d like to ask you a few questions about the prisons,” and they would looked confused.

“Well, sure, well—I don’t know much, but … what do you want to know?”

I kept asking my interview subjects to go over the same ground with me, kept asking the obvious questions, because I couldn’t believe that you could drive your kids here for soccer, that you could look out your window and see the prison’s water tower always on the horizon, and not think it was strange.

I asked the state assemblyman from the district, Steve Hawley, whether he saw prisons as an opportunity for economic growth.

“Oh, absolutely. It’s good for the local people, it’s good for the county, it’s good for everyone.”

Everyone? So he wouldn’t prefer other businesses — factories, let’s say — to prisons?

“No, I don’t think so. Because, as I say, our citizenry around here has become accustomed and used to having facilities that … are meant to house … prisoners. They … no, I think that they’re fine.”

James Recco, a correction officer at Orleans who lived in Albion, underscored a point I’d heard again and again: Correction officers were good for the local economy.

“If you paid the correction officers with cash that’s tainted pink, you’d see most of all the retail stores, the gas stations, would all of a sudden be flooded with these pink bills.”

I asked him if Albionites appreciated this interdependence.

“Well, it’s … A prison is a part of the life of a town, but not … on an everyday level. Everybody knows it’s there, but it’s not a part of their lives. Is sort of like a sovereign nation — it’s like a nation within a nation.”

A revolving door

Yesterday, in another city hundreds of miles away — another world practically — someone found out her life was ruined, and tomorrow she will drive all night in a van, her hands locked behind her back.

Some of the incarcerated are violent and some nonviolent. Some of them didn’t do it, but some of them did. Some of them took the fall for someone else. Some of them took a plea. Some were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some don’t know right from wrong. Some of them molested little boys. Some of them stole medicine for their dying wife. Some of them killed strangers, for no reason. Many of them are mentally ill, and are not receiving treatment. Many of them cannot read, and are not receiving education. Many of them are drug addicts, and they will be drug addicts when their sentence is over. Tomorrow some of them will catch the next Greyhound back downstate, and many new bodies will arrive to take their place.

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This place is a prison


One of every 100 adults in the United States is in prison, the highest rate in the world, besting such global bastions of human rights as Russia, South Africa, and China. India, with more than one billion citizens, has only 281,000 prisoners total. Why are incarceration rates so high in the United States compared to the rest of the world?

Perhaps worse than the high incarceration rates in the United States is the racial bias that exists in the U.S. criminal justice system. A black male is nearly 10 times more likely than a white male to face a prison sentence. A Hispanic male is three times more likely than a white male to be imprisoned.

In our February issue, InTheFray explores what it is like to be imprisoned, both by the criminal justice system and by other forces. In The forgotten victims, Federica Valabrega tells the story of the families of death row inmates, people whose suffering is very real, but whose grief is often viewed as illegitimate, as it is on behalf of a convicted criminal. J.D. Schmid tells another untold story in A day in the life of a public defender, offering us a behind-the-scenes, first-person look at public defense in rural Minnesota.

In his review of Brother One Cell, the story of Cullen Thomas, James Card relates a bit of what it is like to be imprisoned in South Korea. Photographer Anna Weaver shares a series of images titled On the bricks again that tells the story of Tricia Binette, a recently released prisoner who is struggling to return to her former life while avoiding the dangers that previously landed her in prison.

Of course, those of us fortunate enough to escape imprisonment by the state often battle with the imprisonment of our own psyche. In her piece Craving freedom, Victoria Witchey tells her jailbreak experience, relating how she escaped from a prison of her own making. Christopher Mulrooney explores themes of imprisonment in his poetry series The luster of pearl and pico rat traps.

I suspect that the high incarceration rates in the United States can be largely attributed to the war on drugs. Many convicts and ex-convicts struggle with addiction to drugs and alcohol, and often terms of release dictate abstinence from chemicals. When they fail in their struggles with addiction, many find themselves back in jail. Treatment programs are available, but often underutilized or ineffective. The epidemic of drug use in this country is indeed serious, and must be dealt with in a serious manner, but it seems to me it is an inefficient use of resources to combat a disease by attacking the symptoms and ignoring the cause — the disease of addiction. There are no easy answers, but the human cost of the imprisonment approach to our drug epidemic seems too high to bear.

I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

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Photo Essays

On the bricks again

Life outside the prison walls.


[ Click here to view the visual essay ]

Tricia Binette, 26, has been waiting for this moment for over 36 months. Waiting to put on different clothes, waiting to take a bath, waiting to smoke a cigarette, waiting to eat at Pizza Hut — most of all, just waiting. Tricia has served a three-year sentence for robbery and for selling crack cocaine. Today she will be released.

Tricia grasps the handle of a Maine Correctional Center van door and slides it open. With a huge smile across her delicately featured face — and a hint of fear in her eyes — she steps down and looks back at a fence that she has not been outside of in three years. She made it. But this is just the beginning.

Life outside the prison walls won’t be easy as Trish tries to stay clean and piece together her life after five years of serious drug use. She was raised in foster homes and has been on and off the streets since she was 10 years old. The apartment that Tricia secured is next door to a crack house. Every time she goes to pick up food stamps, she will see old friends from when she was homeless, and customers in search of drugs will still recognize her — even after the 100 pounds she gained in prison.

But Trish is strong and determined, and she is in a promising position as she prepares for re-entry into what could be a difficult world: She has an apartment and a job lined up, and she is saving money to get the tools she needs to start her stained-glass projects again, to keep herself busy and away from temptation. Trish has sober friends. She has resolve. And she has hope. In a strange way, Trish says, prison saved her life; more than one of her friends overdosed while she was incarcerated. With her infectious warmth, Tricia affirms, "Every day, I feel lucky."

Photo essay by Anna Mackenzie Weaver; images courtesy of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.
 


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News

The forgotten victims

The families of death row inmates.


 

Celia McWee, 83, looked forward to Saturdays for 13 years. This was her favorite day of the week because she would use it to make herself pretty for her Sunday morning visit. But she wouldn’t go to church. She would visit the state prison. She would drive three hours from Augusta, Georgia, to Ridgeville, South Carolina, to visit her son, Jerry McWee. Jerry had been on death row since he robbed and killed John Perry, a grocery store clerk in rural Aiken County, in 1991. He was executed on April 14, 2004. He was 52.

“Saturday was an exciting day because it was my day to choose the outfit I was going to wear, to go to the beauty shop because I wanted to look my best for him,” she said, crying. “And Sunday going up there was exciting because it was something to look forward to. But on the way back, it was nothing but tears.”

For as long as her son was in prison, her weekly schedule kept her going, she said. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she would not leave the house until she received her son’s phone call. Tuesdays and Thursdays were her days to go grocery shopping, do the laundry, and vacuum. And then came Sundays, when she would share a ride with other inmates’ mothers to the prison. She would meet them at a gas station in Columbia, South Carolina.

Although her son was executed four years ago, not a day goes by that McWee does not recall the sound of his shackles dragging on the floor of the prison each time she visited him.

“The noise that most stands out in my mind is when they would bring them from one building to the other, and we could hear them walking with those chains around their ankles and around their waist and their wrists,” she said. “That is torture. I mean, to see your son being brought in worse than you do to a dog.”
 
McWee’s house is filled with pictures of her son. She proudly reminisces about the day Jerry got married and when, despite having only a high school education, he joined the police force. Then she shows a black-and-white print of Jerry in an emergency medicine technician (EMT) uniform. After two years as a police officer and five as a firefighter, Jerry had decided to make his life all about helping others in need. That is when he went back to school to study emergency medicine.

“He was the kind of guy that would go out of his way to help others,” she said. “He was a people person like me, used to helping the ones in need. Never would I have imagined this could have happened to my family. Everything was so nice and dandy, and it took so little time to turn things around. It is true he is in a much better place now, but I still feel he should be with me instead.”

McWee’s feeling is common to many relatives of inmates executed by the state. They are trying to recover from the trauma of waiting many years for their loved one’s scheduled death. But often their suffering is made worse because many people still do not recognize their pain as legitimate. 

Zipped wounds

Like McWee, Bill Babbitt had a tough recovery. His younger brother Manny, a decorated Vietnam War veteran severely affected by post-traumatic stress syndrome, was executed at San Quentin State Prison on his 50th birthday — May 3, 1999. He had been charged with robbing Leah Schendel, an elderly woman who died of a heart attack during the crime in Sacramento, California.

What makes Babbitt feel better is touring the country to talk about his brother’s “unfair” execution; Babbitt is a member of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (MVFHR), a group founded in Philadelphia in 2004. The group offers support and advocacy for victims.
   
He gives his testimony using what he calls “the power of remembrance,” letting his “zipped wound” open, and pouring out what he thinks needs to be said about Manny’s case. He is trying to educate the public about why the death penalty was unnecessary in his brother’s case. Yet many still consider his efforts to be those of a “second-class victim” who is defending a criminal, he said.

“My job is to educate and tell them, ‘Hey, you lose a rabbit or a dog or a cat, and you grieve over it,’” he said. “‘Manny was a human being. Why should I not grieve over him just as well?’ It is the unfairness of that I have to talk about.”
 

A trail of victims

The families who survive the state execution of their inmate relative are still not specifically referred to as “victims of abuse of power,” as defined by the United Nations General Assembly’s 1985 Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power.

Article 18 of the declaration defines a victim of abuse of power as a person “who, individually or collectively, [has] suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of [his or her] fundamental rights, through acts or omissions that do not yet constitute violations of national criminal laws but of internationally recognized norms relating to human rights.”

In some countries, including the United States, killing by lethal injection is not considered an abuse of power. The declaration does not include the death penalty as a “violation of internationally recognized norms relating to human rights.”   

“But these people [families of death row inmates] have, in many ways, suffered a trauma, and their experience, in many ways, parallels the experience of survivors of homicide victims,” said Susannah Sheffer, director of No Silence, No Shame, a project of MVFHR.

The problem is that people don’t think of the inmate as someone who might have a family who will grieve when he is executed.

“Families of the executed are invisible victims, hidden victims. People are not even thinking through the fact that when an execution is carried out, it’s going to leave a grieving family,” Sheffer said. “A lot of people hold the family responsible, [a] kind of ‘guilt by association.’ They think this [the inmate] is a monster, so the parents must have created that.”

Jerry McWee’s mother said she is haunted by the image of her son strapped on the execution bed, blowing her the last kiss. She also said she was not the only one to suffer from her son’s death.

“It is a horrible, horrible experience to have to go through for years. It not only punishes the inmates, it punishes so many people,” said McWee. “One of Jerry’s daughters, Misty, exactly one year after his execution, tried to commit suicide. She cut her wrists, because she said she had to be with her father and that she did not belong on this earth.”

The legacy of guilt

Babbitt has been battling feelings of guilt instead. Babbitt turned Manny in to the police, and later he was not able to stop his execution. Babbitt believed his brother’s death was particularly unfair because his brother suffered from a mental illness. It was out of desperation and fear that his brother would commit more crimes that Babbitt decided to collaborate with the police, who promised him his brother was going to be fine, he said. 

That is why he told Manny to go out to play some pool, when in fact the police were waiting outside of his house to arrest him. But Babbitt did not expect Manny to be convicted and sentenced to death. The hardest part of all was having to explain to his mother why he let that happen, he said.

“My mother loves me, and I know she has forgiven me for turning Manny in. The problem is I have not forgiven myself for promising Ma that Manny would not get executed,” he said. “I took a gamble with my brother’s life, and I lost.”

Since the day Manny was executed, Babbitt has not felt strong enough to see his family, even on holidays. He believes he is not “worthy of their love and trust anymore,” he said. He feels uncomfortable around them even though they forgave him for what he did.

“If it wasn’t for my faith in Jesus, I would have killed myself. But I didn’t want my family to have to go to another funeral. I had to be strong and live to tell that story,” he said. “I will see my brother again when my time is up on Earth.”

No Silence, No Shame

Babbitt and McWee know each other well now. They met at No Silence, No Shame’s first gathering for families of death row inmates in Texas in the spring of 2004. The conference was organized to allow people who share the same grief to share their stories with one another.

According to Renny Cushing, director of MVFHR, the project is now trying to “put a face with the name of the family of the condemned prisoners,” by bringing the testimonies of these family members into courts. Cushing said the hope is that juries judging a death row case will consider these testimonies before announcing their verdict.

Cushing is also a survivor. In 1988, his father, Robert Cushing, was killed through his screen door at his home in New Hampshire by two bullets fired by an off-duty policeman. Officer Robert McLaughlin Sr. had a dirty record: He had killed his best friend, had taken part in an armed robbery, and had arrested an elderly town woman for no good reason, according to Cushing in his testimony in "Forgiving the Unforgivable” on MVFHR’s website. Cushing and his brother had been keeping an eye on the officer ever since, and McLaughlin didn’t like that pressure, said Cushing. That is why McLaughlin went to the Cushing house that night — to settle the score, so to speak, but he shot the wrong person, said Cushing in the testimony.

“If the state is going to kill someone’s father, we would like to have the court think about what that would mean, and the people who are most effective [at] talking about that are individuals [whose] father was executed when they were children,” Cushing said.

On average, 50 to 60 people are executed every year by the government, and they typically have three family members each. That means 150 to 240 more victims are created annually, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

No Silence, No Shame is trying to reduce those numbers by making the public aware of these survivors’ experiences, to show the ripple effects of the death penalty.

Studying loss

Sandra Jones, a research sociologist and professor at Rowan University in New Jersey, released a study on the issues of grief and loss faced by the families with a relative on death row.
     
Jones spent years building relationships with families of death row inmates. She has taken it upon herself to bring kids of inmates to see their fathers in the Delaware County Prison in Pennsylvania when their own family members refuse to do so.

She became particularly close to Brian Steckel’s family. Steckel was convicted of raping and killing 29-year-old Sandra Lee Long. Jones witnessed Steckel’s execution in 2005. She is now writing a book about her personal experience with death row inmates’ families. She said the government ignores these families because it feels guilty.

“If the system gave these families the attention they deserve, it would come across [as] really hypocritical, because they are the very system that is killing their loved ones,” she said.  

She also explains that the reason death row inmates’ families are often forgotten is that the survivor victims themselves do not want to be put in the spotlight, since they feel guilty for and are ashamed of their loved ones’ mistakes.

“The family gets criminalized along with their loved ones, and stigmatized to the extent that they don’t feel comfortable coming out and demanding attention because they feel guilty. They have a lot of guilt and a lot of shame. They [ask] themselves what they could have done differently,” she said.

“Writer Elizabeth Sharpen sometimes refers to them as the ‘double losers,’” Jones said. “A lot of these guys on death row have murdered a wife or an uncle or somebody within the family, and so the surviving family members are put into this position where if they support and grieve the loss of the loved one on death row, they are made to feel they did not really love the one who was murdered.”   

Losing a child to the death penalty becomes a never-ending loss, one “similar to having a disabled child that you are grieving for every unmet milestone he misses throughout life,” said Jones. It becomes a “wound that never heals and keeps opening up with every failed appeal.” 

Between losing a child to a murderer and losing one to death row — as is the case for McWee — the latter seems to be the more painful of the two because of the “never-ending wait.”

Having to wait for your son to be executed is “horrible, because you know it is coming, but you don’t know when,” said McWee, whose son, Jerry, was executed 14 years after her daughter, Joyce, was murdered by Joyce’s husband on December 31, 1980.

“[My daughter’s murder] was a shock, but [it was] nothing compared to the death penalty hanging over your head for 13 years,” she said. “News of her murder came unexpectedly, [but] the wait is horrible. One day he called me at 12:30, and he said, ‘Mother, I have been served.’ I had no idea what he meant. All I knew was that lunch was served at 11:30. So I said, ‘What [do] you mean, you have been served? What did you eat for lunch?’ So he said, ‘Mother, you don’t understand. I have been served with my death warrant — they have given me my day of execution.’”

Murder is murder

Even murder victim families sympathize with state execution survivor families, finding it unjust that their pain is labeled differently from theirs.

The Rev. Walter Everett, a pastor at St. Jones United Methodist Church in Sunbury, Connecticut, lost his son, Scott, in 1987. Scott was murdered by Mike Carducci in Easton, Connecticut. The pastor has been part of MVFHR since it was founded. He said he feels close to parents whose children are on death row.
   
Everett said it is important to educate people about the death penalty without making a distinction about different victims. He travels around the country to speak about the experience he shares with many families whose loved ones have been executed under the death penalty.

“I see them just as much a ‘victim’ as I am. That person, regardless of what their son or daughter has done, or their loved ones, they still love them, so they become a victim when that person is killed,” he said. “Since I got to know several people whose family members were executed, I see the pain they have gone through, and I believe their story should be told as much, because their pain is just as deep as my pain.”

Everett took part in a vigil in California to stop the execution of Clarence Ray Allen, a 76-year-old, and at that point blind and in a wheelchair. Allen was put to death on January 17, 2006, for planning three murders from his cell while serving a life sentence.

“I went out there and I met his children. Lovely people. And they hurt, they pained as he went through that,” he said.

Former death row inmates who have been exonerated share the belief that their families’ grief rarely receives attention. Since executions now take place behind closed doors, the system has become “sterile,” said Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person on death row to be exonerated because of DNA evidence.

Bloodsworth served nearly nine years in a Maryland prison for the 1984 rape and murder of nine-year-old girl he had never met.

“They don’t want to show the ‘crying mother’ over the executed son. No matter what he has done, he is still paying for that, and they don’t show that part of it,” he said. “She has got no say. She raised a murderer. That is how they are looking at her, and that was not her fault, necessarily.”

Bloodsworth regained his freedom on June 28, 1993, but his mother, Jeanette, did not live to see him walk out of prison. She died earlier that year. Bloodsworth was taken in chains to see her body, but prison officials refused to allow him to attend the funeral.

 

“My mother went through hell watching me. I was her son, and I was going to be executed, and nobody cared about a word she said. I thought that was a terrible way to have to treat somebody,” he said.

Rob Warden is the director of the Center on Wrongful Conviction in Chicago, and has been a legal affairs writer for more than 25 years. He said that while the stories of inmates’ family members are not necessarily ignored, the focus is often on the person “walking out of the door.”

“The stories of relatives of wrongful conviction in general tend to be overlooked,” he said, “because they are so overshadowed by the poignancy of the innocent person or the person who was executed himself.”

This does not imply that these stories should not be told. On the contrary, they should not be forgotten, Warden said.

“We should understand that when we execute somebody, no matter how heinous that person might be, it is over for that person,” said Warden. “But the pain that is inflicted on parents, or siblings, or children, is permanent. It is everlasting. It will be there. It is ongoing.”

 

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Commentary

Craving freedom

Confessions of a relationship prisoner.


As I jumped from one man to the next, the end result was always the same. I’d settle into a relationship, only to be left feeling trapped and imprisoned by my partner. I would always end up looking for an escape, a means to bail out of what was otherwise a seemingly happy and healthy relationship. Craving my freedom and the world of possibilities outside of the union, I would fashion a mental prison from which I’d flee to singlehood with reckless abandon.

Perhaps I wasn’t meant to settle down. I’ve bailed out of every major relationship in my life after feeling smothered, sacrificing any future the relationship had.

But then, how is it that I ended up with this rock on my finger?

My constant musings about freedom and my lack thereof left my live-in boyfriend, a finance professional, with feelings of instability. Every other weekend I announced wanting to split, until I finally did so in dramatic fashion. This scene played over and over again, as I left a small army of broken men scattered across the globe.

These haven’t been unhappy relationships by any means. The men have been considerate, loving, genuine, and romantic. They’ve offered me the world and then some. But something within me always shouted, “Run! Get Out!” I’ve tried to quiet this inner voice over the years, with little success.

I’d find ways to ease my escape. I’d nitpick at his habits and perceived flaws until he’d almost beg me to leave. Oh, the egos I have crushed.

I had incessant nightmares, waking up in a cold sweat with images of white dresses and babies fresh in my mind. As I escaped to the next room to lie alone and contemplate in solitude, I’d feel a rush of relief as I left his side. His mere presence gave me anxiety.

To what can I attribute this fear of relationships? My parents have been happily married for 32 years, though they might argue about the “happily” part. All my aunts and uncles married their high school sweethearts, forming a 12-person coalition of long-term love advocates. With not a divorce in my family tree, where did this fear that gripped me so powerfully come from?

Some pointed to a fear of intimacy, while others explained my trepidation as a manifestation of my own discomfort with the idea of marriage. For years I took solace in the male propaganda that monogamy was an unnatural state. My beer-swigging buddies pointed to examples in the animal kingdom, and I wholeheartedly agreed, as did my female friends.

But as I grew older, those women shed their roaming tendencies and donned the gown in all its traditionally assigned glory. I watched these friends marry off, headed to the no-man’s-land of married folks, and I wondered, “Is there something wrong with me? Why do I always bail? Why can’t I stick around for the long-term love?”

Just as I jumped from place to place during my twenties, I jumped from man to man. In the same way I’d feel the need to go as soon as I became comfortable in a locale, I’d let my instinct for freedom take over as soon as I saw a future with a man.

Like a child who assumes that the world rides ponies and eats cake while in bed, I couldn’t help but wonder: Isn’t there something better?

And then I met *Kevin. He was everything I didn’t want in a man: blue-collar, simple, and incredibly masculine. But he fell for me and professed his love, to which I responded with utter horror. I shot him down instantly, wounding his confidence, no doubt.

But as we continued to spend time together as friends, I noticed something quite profound. He didn’t want to keep me from exploring or from seeking my freedom — he wanted to watch me do so. He pushed me to leave a career that I hated to pursue my love of writing. He encouraged me to head off on solo vacations and volunteer missions. Eventually his kind spirit and nonthreatening demeanor won me over, and we began to date.

Now I’d like to say that once I met him, my thoughts of imprisonment evaporated. But they were still present, and I voiced them liberally. I’d tell him I was leaving him, off to Japan to teach or to the District of Columbia to volunteer. And he’d calmly nod his head and proclaim he’d wait for my return.

Where all the other men had fought me, he agreed to give me my freedom.

All the men in my past had wanted to make a housewife out of me, to restrain me from all the world had to offer. In this new one, I found someone who took pleasure in watching me take on the possibilities and potential of my future.

Now we have made a home together, and he proposed this past Christmas Eve. For 10 years, commitment was a four-letter word.

But now the weight of those prison bars has been lifted.

*The name has been changed for this story.

Related: Victoria Witchey

 

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News

A day in the life of a public defender

Advocating for the indigent in rural Minnesota.


Editor’s Note: Names and details have been changed to maintain client confidentiality.


The sun was rising over the trees when I arrived at my office. I glanced at the five names that I had written on a yellow notepad, and then shoveled the files, calendar, and notepad into my briefcase. I grabbed a stack of business cards and a couple of pens, then walked two blocks to the courthouse, where I would spend the rest of the day.

The names on my notepad were all people I had been appointed to represent. Each of the five was poor, and each was, in one way or another, in trouble with the law. It was my job to help navigate them through the criminal justice system, to insure that their constitutional rights were vindicated, and to advocate on their behalf against what often seems like the limitless power and resources of the state.

I am a public defender. I primarily practice in a rural northern Minnesota county, which spans the eastern edge of Leech Lake Reservation to the southwestern portion of the Iron Range. In the two and a half years I have practiced here, I have been berated by clients who feel that I am incompetent or who feel cheated by a system that can be both unfair and unjust. Moreover, while most people seem to like the idea of public defenders, in practice their reaction can be much different. As an advocate for the same clients, I’ve been verbally attacked by judges and prosecutors alike. I’ve been called sneaky and underhanded by probation officers. I’ve been accused of lying, and I’ve had police officers ask me how I sleep at night.

Hurt feelings aside, I have also collaborated with many of the same people to achieve some very beneficial results for my clients. While familiarity can breed contempt, it is vital to the practice of efficient and effective public defense. Just as important as my legal training, my knowledge of local standards and the relationships I’ve forged with judges, prosecutors, probation officers, treatment providers, and law enforcement, though at times contentious, allow me to maintain a heavy caseload, zealously represent my clients, and focus my time and energy on those cases that need it the most.

When I arrived at the courthouse, I made my way to a conference room, where I was joined by the four other public defenders who would be handling the day’s cases. We discussed each item on the calendar and divided the previously unassigned cases. I wrote down the names of my new clients, and then went to the jail.

At the jail I met with George, and we discussed his options, which included trial, regular probation, or drug court. George lived in a town of about 800 people in the northwest corner of the county. Just days after his 18th birthday, George was sitting shotgun in his friend Bill’s SUV while Bill filled his tank at the local BP station. Resting under the seat was eight ounces of marijuana. When Bill saw the town’s chief of police walking toward him, he panicked, taking off in his truck without paying for the gas. Eight blocks down the road, the chief pulled Bill over. The chief was grilling Bill on the evils of gasoline theft when he caught a whiff of pot smoke from inside the vehicle. He searched Bill’s truck, found the marijuana, and arrested both Bill and George. George was released from jail the next day, with specific instructions not to use drugs. However, George found his freedom fleeting, especially when conditioned on chemical abstinence. Having tested positive for cocaine (George attributed this to his massive consumption of energy drinks), George was returned to jail seven days after his initial release. He would remain in jail as long as the case was pending, unable to afford the $5,000 bail.

George refused to point the finger at Bill, or anyone else for that matter, and he didn’t want to be subjected to the daily check-ins and frequent testing that came with drug court. More than anything, George wanted to get out of jail. Given his limited defenses, I told George that I would talk to the prosecutor about having him released from jail today if he agreed to plead guilty.

The next person I met with was Gabe. At 19, Gabe had been caught breaking into a gas station storage locker in order to huff propane. Although his affect resembled a Nebraska prairie, I liked Gabe. I had previously represented Gabe, both of Gabe’s parents, and Gabe’s younger brother. They never committed any serious crimes and, although they seemed to enjoy living on the fringes of the law, they were generally good-natured. Gabe’s most recent adventure with law enforcement involved using apple juice to fake a urine sample, and it had landed him in jail for 45 days.

Over the weekend, Gabe got into a fight with his cellmate. While I didn’t have any paperwork, Gabe informed me that there weren’t any defenses and that he just wanted to resolve the case as quickly and quietly as possible. I told Gabe I would try to negotiate a sentence that did not involve probation or any additional jail time. While Gabe never told me what precipitated the fight, I found out later that the fight started when his cellmate complained that Gabe wasn’t cleaning up after himself when he was done masturbating in the shower. When I heard this, all I could think about was that I wasn’t going to shake Gabe’s hand the next time I saw him.

The last person I needed to visit at the jail was Florence. Florence’s problems stemmed not only from her horrible addiction to pain medication, but from the myriad of mental health problems she had experienced throughout her lifetime.

Reading Florence’s psychological evaluation was like reading a how-to manual on the application of the DSM-IV. Still, the court-appointed psychological evaluator said that Florence was competent, and she had subsequently pled guilty to a low-level felony drug crime for changing the number on her Vicodin prescription from six to 60. Florence struggled mightily with probation, and she had just gotten kicked out of inpatient treatment. Her probation officer wanted Florence to go to prison and, while her mental health case manager opposed prison, neither she nor I had been able to secure funding for a treatment program that could meet all of Florence’s needs.

When Florence walked into the meeting room, she was surprisingly lucid, and she expressed how weary she was with treatment and probation. She had no interest in doing treatment, and seemed excited about the prospect of getting released from probation, even if it meant sitting more than six months in jail. Florence feared prison, telling me that she wanted to sit the remainder of her sentence in the county jail. I told her that we would continue her case until she had less than six months remaining on the sentence. (Under Minnesota law, people with less than six months remaining on their sentences are considered “short-term offenders.” When a short-term sentence is executed, the person serves the remainder of his or her sentence in the county jail as opposed to prison. Disclaimer: To anyone reading this article, this is not legal advice.)

After I finished meeting with Florence, a jailer buzzed me through the sally port, and I made my way to the county attorney’s office. Sitting in the office, I could tell that the prosecutor was preoccupied by other cases. I brought up Marylyn’s case. Not all public defender clients are created equal, and Marylyn is poorer than most. She shared a trailer several miles south of town with a mongrel Shih-Tzu/Pomeranian named Smokey, her most prized possession. Marylyn had no family aside from her sister Judy, and she felt betrayed by Judy. Three years ago, Marylyn and Judy had gotten caught lifting money from the cash registers at Wal-Mart, where they both had worked. Both had pled guilty, and both were on felony probation. Since that time, Marylyn had cleaned herself up, while Judy was still fighting a demon called methamphetamine. Now Marylyn was back in front of the court, charged, along with Judy, with presenting a forged fifty-dollar check at the local grocery store. Because of Marylyn’s record, the prosecutor charged her with a felony.

Marylyn maintained that both her innocence and the marginal evidence the state had against her provided hope that she would be acquitted at trial. Also, Judy expressed her willingness to testify at trial that she had led Marylyn to believe that the owner of the check, which was already signed, had given the check to Judy, and that Marylyn had no way of knowing the check was stolen or forged. Still, Marylyn feared jail as a fate worse than death, and the stress resulting from having to put her faith in the hands of 12 jurors was starting to take its toll.

I suggested to the prosecutor that he reduce Marylyn’s charge from a felony to a misdemeanor. He refused, and the best deal I could get him to agree to was a stay of adjudication, meaning Marylyn would not have a felony on her record if she successfully completed probation. He also offered to suspend all jail time, as long as Marylyn’s probation officer was agreeable. I also asked about George, the young man in jail on drug charges. The prosecutor agreed to suspend all future jail time if George agreed to plead guilty, meaning that if George pled guilty, he would be released from jail today and he would not be required to serve any additional jail time unless he violated the terms of his probation.

When I left the county attorney’s office, I found Marylyn sitting among the people lining the hallway outside of the courtroom. We found a meeting room and I told her about the new offer. Marylyn seemed willing to accept the offer as long as she didn’t have to do any jail time. I racked my brain to think of viable sanctions besides jail. Marylyn couldn’t afford the fee of $5 to $15 per day for the ankle bracelet, and she didn’t have consistent transportation to get to and from community service. Nonetheless, I made these suggestions to her probation officer as alternatives to jail. I also stressed the weaknesses in the state’s case and Marylyn’s success on probation up until now. The probation officer agreed that there were some mitigating circumstances, but she told me that she would not be agreeable to any less than 15 days in jail.

When I told Marylyn about the probation officer’s request, she began to weep. I reminded her that we could still go to trial if that’s what she wanted, but she didn’t know what to do. She told me that she wants to go to trial but she doesn’t want to risk a longer jail sentence should she lose. Also, because Judy was in a treatment program, Marylyn had no one to feed Smokey, and she couldn’t afford to board him. I tried twice more, in vain, to convince Marylyn’s probation officer to allow community service, monitoring, or some combination of the two, and to reduce or eliminate the jail time.

By the time I finished speaking with Marylyn, the jailers had escorted my clients up to the courtroom. I quickly read the one-page police reports that had been filed in each of my new cases, and then talked to the prosecutors that were handling the cases. We were able to resolve Gabe’s case quickly, when the prosecutor agreed with my proposal to sentence Gabe to an executed 10-day jail sentence. I then negotiated with the prosecutor to have one of my driving while intoxicated (DWI) clients sentenced immediately so that he would be eligible for the jail’s work release program. Another new DWI client would be released from jail today with a number of conditions, including the condition that he not drink or enter establishments selling and serving alcohol.

Walking into a conference room adjoining the courtroom, I saw several of my clients, dressed in orange and handcuffed to one another. I told George that if he pled guilty, he would be released from jail and that unless he violated his probation, he would not have to do any more jail time. I told Gabe that if he pled guilty he would have to sit 10 days in jail that would run concurrent (at the same time) to the sentence he was already serving. I then explained the concept of release conditions, as well as the consequences of a guilty plea, to my two new DWI clients.

It was now my turn to go in front of the judge. I called Marylyn’s case. I told the judge that we had not resolved the case, and that the court should set the matter for trial. A trial date was set. Next, I called George, who pled guilty and admitted to the judge that the marijuana belonged to him. The judge agreed to release him from jail until sentencing. Gabe also pled guilty. Florence’s hearing was continued two weeks. Court dates were set for several of my new clients.

Back at the office, I processed paperwork from the day’s court hearings, returned phone calls, and started to prepare for a contested hearing that I had set for Wednesday. The contested issue in Wednesday’s hearing was the prosecutor’s attempts to send Charlie to prison. When Charlie was 17, he and three of his friends — Joe, Adam, and Nate — assaulted Nate’s sister’s boyfriend with a golf club. Though the assault was serious, Charlie’s role was more that of a bystander than actual participant. Nonetheless, Charlie pled guilty to the assault and was sentenced to a hybrid juvenile-adult sentence. As such, although Charlie was only 17, he had a 60-month prison sentence hanging over his head.

As part of his original sentence, the judge had sent Charlie to a long-term treatment program. Charlie excelled in the program and when he was done, he returned to live with his aunt and uncle, who had raised him. During the next eight months, Charlie became a true success story. He found work, he graduated from high school, he earned a scholarship for college, and his probation officer raved about his accomplishments. When he wasn’t in school or at work, Charlie was at home, helping his aunt and uncle with their bough-picking business.

In January of 2007, Charlie’s aunt and uncle were killed when their car hit a patch of ice and slid into an oncoming grain truck. Having already lost both of his parents — his mother had committed suicide when Charlie was 11 and his father overdosed just last year — Charlie was devastated. He started drinking heavily, and stopped going to see his probation officer. Fifteen months later, Charlie was arrested for domestic assault after he got into a fight with his younger brother. The fight took place in another county; Charlie pled guilty and was sentenced in the other county without knowing what his consequences would be in my county.

Now, despite all of the tragedy Charlie had experienced over the past two years, the prosecutor wanted to send Charlie to prison. The prosecutor wanted Charlie to go to prison even though Charlie’s probation officer said that prison was not appropriate, even though we had gotten him into a six-month alcohol treatment program, and even though Charlie’s fiancée said that she needed him with her to help care for their eight-month-old child. I thought the prosecutor’s position was ridiculous, but I was nervous because the judge had just sent Charlie’s friend Adam to prison under very similar circumstances. I wanted to make sure that all of my arguments and questioning were prepared prior to the hearing.

Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals once wrote, “[a] bare-bones system for the defense of indigent criminal defendants may be optimal.” How pleased he would have been watching me practice on that day. I didn’t make any special demands on the prosecutor or the judge, I didn’t contest anything, and, with the exception of Charlie, I didn’t spend more than a half hour on any given client. Still, I had worked a full day, and when I left the office just before 8:00 p.m., I was spent.

Like many other public defenders, my goal is to provide my clients with representation that is as good as, if not better than, the representation they would receive if they could afford a private attorney. While I owe this duty to each one of my clients, a heavy caseload and lack of funding makes it impossible to dedicate significant time and resources to each case. Instead, effective public defense requires a triage approach: quickly identifying which cases have legal or factual issues, and which cases are more likely to go to trial, then focusing time and resources on those cases. The tricky part of this approach is making sure that those clients whose cases do not receive a significant amount of time and attention still have their constitutional rights vindicated and receive a disposition that is acceptable to them.

When I tell people about my job, I often hear “How can you defend those people?” We are “those people.” Every time a legislator utters, “there ought to be a law against …,” the line between what is criminal and what is not is blurred. Moreover, “those people,” just like us, have constitutional rights, not the least of which is the right to counsel. More than a formality, the right to counsel provides the most effective means through which all other rights are enforced. As a public defender, I hold this right dear to the protection of liberty, not only for “those people,” but for all of us. Though I know it not to be the case, I can only hope that Marylyn, George, Florence, Gabe, Charlie, and anyone else who is unfortunate enough to be poor and charged with a crime, feel the same way.

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Reviews

Brother One Cell

A look at life behind the bars of a South Korean prison.


 

Every expatriate in Asia has known this guy. He is the one that cultivates a patch of marijuana in the hills near Lake Biwa. He smuggles condom-wrapped ecstasy tablets up his ass from Ko Samui. He buys magic mushrooms in a Cambodian bar for resale in Singapore, or horse-trades cheap methamphetamine in a Seoul nightclub. And now and then you hear of these guys getting busted, and later you wonder what ever happened to them.

While teaching English in Seoul in 1994, Cullen Thomas made a plan to visit a remote mountain village in Luzon, buy bricks of hash on the cheap, mail them to himself in Seoul, and to sell them to the expat crowd. The first brick arrived safely, and he was a 23-year-old cosmopolitan outlaw: “Like many of the other foreigners, I fooled myself into thinking that I could operate alongside Korean society and yet not have to answer to it.”  He signed for the second brick poste restante, and was quickly surrounded by drug agents. 

Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea’s Prisons (Viking) is his memoir of prison life and his journey from youth into manhood. The early chapters are a cautionary tale for any foreigner sucked into the South Korean criminal justice system. In a Kafkaesque scenario, he deals with a con artist Korean lawyer, bratty and bungling translators, and a prosecutor that uses him to practice his English.

South Korean police work often depends on forced confessions rather than investigative work to make a case. He recalls a “short, fat man who still has the grease of lunch on his face and the smell of liquor on his breath” approaching him with a cattle prod-like device:  “All I can think is What the hell? before he casually presses it against my upper right thigh and triggers it again with a smile. A painful blast of electric current shoots through me, shoots me right out of my chair into the middle of the room.”

Thomas was sentenced for three and a half years with no appeal. During that period he served his time in three different prisons, and his compatriots were Pakistani killers, Peruvian thieves, an American child murderer, smugglers, and Korean draft dodgers. Inside his cell and inside his head, he rages at his shame and predicament, he worries for a girl he left behind, and he gains wisdom into his own nature and human nature.

He adapts with a monk-like acceptance and finds work in the prison’s shoe factory to pass the time. In the prison yard, he becomes a basketball hero and earns some respect in no-rules dirt court games organized by gangsters. Back in his cell, he bides his time by keeping a surreptitious diary with a stolen pen. He learns of friends that are denied visits and of confiscated care packages from family members. He is not allowed to write about the prison, so he learns to write letters in a roundabout narrative to avoid the censors.

Some of his observations of Korean society are so accurate they could be equally applied to life in Korea outside the prison walls: He describes an unappetizing diet that is not much different than what most Korean day laborers eat everyday. The drab, cold cement walls in unheated buildings could be any rural Korean elementary school. The petty prison bureaucrats are equally contemptible as those at city hall, and throughout his story, Thomas describes the inane pissing contests of Confucian hierarchies.

It is important to note that Thomas harbors no animosity for Korea from his hardening prison experience. Back home in New York, he eats bibimbap and is asked by Korean acquaintances if he will ever return. He writes, “I had a lot of love and appreciation left in me for Korea. She had taken me to the edge and let me look over, but she never let me go and didn’t leave me there too long. She didn’t feel the same about me. I don’t know if I can ever go back.”

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Fiction & Poetry

The luster of pearl and pico rat traps

Five poems exploring themes of imprisonment.


Luster of pearl

the bamboo mirage in the gravel garden
faints dead away

at the howls in the dining room
springing up at the fairway moon

Observation pit

and the western horse shall lie down with the ground sloth
and the dire wolf
the western camel
the mastodon
all for a space of thirty millennia
the saber-toothed cat
the ancient bison
and their bones be roofed charmingly
while the decades of fashion go right by
one after another
and the ground shake
and the precipice of history
at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
 
a figure of Orpheus left outside in the back where smokers go
and the Burgher with the key
and the other backward-looking with despair
and Eve
The Shade
all wrapped in plastic on pallets
Bourdelle’s archer
Balzac

Pico

in the city
no longer a city
college
across the street
an agreeable old motel
blue as the Pacific Ocean
now a rat trap

marron glacé

he talks about the weather
of this crisis and that

a nincompoop
a poltroon
they say

but he strikes back
outlawing the light bulb

Wilshire Boulevard

we had to sit right in the by
your leave temple while the sit
right there leave nothing behind
temple went down and then we said
all of us we said to ourselves
they can’t we think again

but ourselves think little and that
with a certain sort of greed
that came of plastics and regurgitated music
so they said and took it up
the proverbial flagpole and sang the pledge of allegiance to it

all night long we hear the singing
night that is violet with stars and planes
and the golden sunrise you see
in California Impressionists

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Blog

Those who suffer


I’ve been acting silly lately. I’ve spent my time thinking about the people out there who have lost their jobs, their homes, their healthcare, even their health. I’ve thought about those who sleep in their cars, on relatives’ couches, or on park benches. I should’ve been thinking about the people in this country who are truly suffering: bankers’ girlfriends and Brown University students.

I’m always a bit late to the game, so I just discovered Dating a Banker Anonymous, a blog written by the wives and girlfriends of Wall Street’s finest (the financial rats who, in the absence of the regulation cat, destroyed our economy) who are learning to go without the necessities. That is, go without jewelry, opera tickets, facials, weekend trips to Europe, decent sex, and large allowances. These women thought they had attained their goal — you know, relationships based on the exchange of sex for money. If they can’t be distracted by shiny things, they might have to face the fact that they serve no real purpose in life.

Initially, I thought, like many others, that this was a joke. As the days go by, it appears that these women are very real and very serious. A beauty writer (Seriously? Beauty writer? Could you be more useless?) in New York told The New York Times: "One of his best friends told me that my job is now to keep him calm and keep him from dying at the age of 35," Ms. [Dawn Spinner] Davis said. "It’s not what I signed up for."

That whole sickness-health/richer-poorer thing…who knew you were supposed to mean it?

The media has mentioned a "feminist backlash," but I have no doubt that behind every foot-stamping girlfriend is a pouting, empty-handed banker.

The suffering is not limited to Wall Street. It extends all the way to Thayer Street…in Providence, Rhode Island, home to Brown University. Brown students are best known to my fellow locals for blindly walking straight into oncoming traffic on a daily basis. I guess a high SAT score means never having to look both ways before crossing the street. Anyway, Thayer Street is the trendy, crowded shopping center of the college hill universe. Vintage clothing stores, an art house movie theatre, and, of course, a Starbucks line the busy one-way road. All was right in the Brown world…until two pizza joints opened too close to each other. And now, like, ohmygod, the young are lost. A freshman writer in the Brown Daily Herald student newspaper complains,

The war between Antonio’s and Nice Slice is affecting thousands of Brown students…the central location of Antonio’s and Nice Slice on Thayer and their close proximity to one another makes choosing one pizzeria over the other particularly grueling.

The unemployment rate in Rhode Island has reached ten percent. A few weeks ago, a homeless man froze to death while sleeping under a bridge. But…too many pizza options…what’s a boy to do? Surely not volunteer, or fundraise, or even be aware of the world around you. When the tough gets going, take to the blog! Take the student newspaper’s editorial page! You’re spoiled as hell, and you’re not gonna take it anymore!

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