This week the magazine is featuring a trio of articles about prisons, real and psychological. In Freed, but Scarred, Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald describes the post-prison lives of three men who spent, among them, forty-three years in New York penitentiaries for crimes they did not commit. After proving their innocence, Jeffrey Deskovic, Kian Khatibi, and Fernando Bermudez have returned to a changed world of broken relationships and lost identities, struggling to find the assistance and understanding they need to overcome their pasts. In an accompanying photo essay, Life after Innocence, Dana Ullman presents intimate portraits of the three men and their families, still scarred by absences and regrets.
Finally, in Across Oceans, Haunted by Memories, Susan M. Lee reviews the novel The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, a tale of two Vietnamese families flung across the globe, chased by their war-era remembrances of traumas endured and wrongs perpetrated — at times, on each other. This debut novel by Aimee Phan (disclosure: Phan is a friend) reminds us of the tensions inherent in our strivings to remember the past, and yet overcome it — to seek truth, and yet find peace.
Among them, Jeffrey Deskovic, Kian Khatibi, and Fernando Bermudez spent forty-three years in New York prisons. All were eventually exonerated—freed by DNA evidence, confessions, and recanted testimony. Their photos before and after incarceration speak to lives transformed, years lost.
This photo essay is a companion piece to Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald’s article, Freed, but Scarred. Click on the links to Flickr below to view the captions.
Dana Ullman Dana Ullman is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn. Her photography is focused on social engagement: chronicling everyday epics, investigating subjects crossculturally, and humanizing faceless statistics through storytelling. Site: ullmanphoto.com
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Best of In The Fray 2012. When he is feeling overwhelmed, Fernando Bermudez lies down in his son’s bedroom. After spending eighteen years in prison for a murder he did not commit, he finds the confined space soothing. For exonerated prisoners like Bermudez, the struggle to rebuild their lives goes on, long after the reporters and cameras are gone.
By Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald Photos by Dana Ullman
Fernando Bermudez at his home in Danbury, Connecticut.
It was dark when Fernando Bermudez stepped off the Metro-North commuter train in Connecticut. He had spent a long day in New York visiting friends and family. As he walked through the parking lot of the Danbury train station, Bermudez looked around with growing horror. He didn’t recognize the street names. The storefronts and intersections were foreign to him.
He was lost and confused, with no idea where to go, sweating and growing more anxious each minute.
It was not because Bermudez had gotten off at the wrong stop. He was less than ten minutes from home. He had walked home from this very train station many times. But tonight he couldn’t remember the way.
Several months earlier, Bermudez had been released from prison after serving eighteen years for a murder he did not commit. Even now, after being exonerated and released, walking alone down the street terrified him. Prison had conditioned him to believe that his freedom did not belong to him.
Half an hour passed. Bermudez was panicking. But he didn’t want to stop a car on the street and ask for help; people might think something was suspicious and call the cops. He was afraid to ask a store clerk for directions; they would be skeptical about why he was walking aimlessly around downtown Danbury.
Finally, Bermudez called his wife, Crystal. He broke down. Here he was, a forty-year-old man, helpless in a place where he had lived for months. Crystal knew he couldn’t have been more than ten blocks away, but he wasn’t able to tell her where he was.
After an hour of being lost in his own city, Bermudez reached a recognizable street sign. His wife walked him home over the phone.
Before he went to prison, Bermudez was a different kind of man. Tall, with amber eyes and a striking smile, he had an easy confidence. Growing up in the Bronx, he was chased by girls, revered by peers, and doted on by his mother. When he was twenty-one, he enrolled in Bronx Community College to study medicine.
In August 1991, one month before he would have started class, detectives arrived at Bermudez’s door. They arrested him for the murder of a boy he’d never met, killed at a nightclub he’d never been to. Bermudez was convicted and sentenced to twenty-three years to life.
Doubts about his conviction remained. Five of the witnesses to the shooting of sixteen-year-old Raymond Blount later recanted their testimony, saying in sworn affidavits that they had been pressured by the police and prosecutors to identify Bermudez as the shooter. After ten failed attempts to overturn his conviction, Bermudez’s lawyers finally succeeded in 2009. In his decision, Justice John Cataldo wrote that there was “no credible evidence” connecting Bermudez to the murder. He was a free man.
The day he walked out of Sing Sing prison, Bermudez was ecstatic. “What was going through my body was an exorbitant amount of palpitations,” he told a New York Times reporter, “joy and happiness to a level that I’ve never known before in my life.”
But Bermudez and his wife Crystal did not anticipate just how hard his transition from prison to ordinary life would be. Like many families of exonerated prisoners, they figured the worst was over. “You had a lot of lawyers who were excited he’s out, you have family members that were excited that he’s out,” Crystal says. “Everyone thinks the problem is over.
“No, the problem’s not over. It just got started.”
Making Up for Lost Years
Fernandoz Bermudez plays with his ten-year-old daughter Carissa and six-year-old son Fernando after picking them up from school.
Since 1989, 289 people have been exonerated using DNA evidence. (Many more have had their convictions overturned through other means.) Their average length of incarceration is thirteen years. These years have been lost. Exonerees are released, but prison has left them incapacitated.
Even getting compensated for the state’s mistake in imprisoning them is far from certain. A report by the Innocence Project, a New York-based legal clinic that exonerates wrongfully convicted individuals through the use of DNA evidence, notes that 40 percent of DNA exonerees do not receive any compensation. Depending on their state, exonerees may have to sue, and the many legal hurdles to overcome, such as proving that intentional government misconduct landed them in prison, mean that only 28 percent of DNA exonerees have won lawsuits.
Even in the twenty-seven states that have enacted laws to offer financial assistance to exonerated prisoners, the process can drag on for years, and the amount of compensation varies wildly — from a lump sum of $20,000, regardless of the time spent in prison, in New Hampshire, to $80,000 per year of imprisonment in Texas. (Under New York’s law, a court decides the amount of compensation on an individual basis.) Only five states routinely give awards that match or exceed the federal standard of up to $50,000 per year incarcerated, and only ten states offer social services targeted at exonerees.
Yet the need is great. “Nobody’s situation is the same,” says Karen Wolff, a social worker at the Innocence Project. “Each exoneree is different. Each exoneree’s needs are different, each exoneree’s state is different, each exoneree’s family situation is different …. So it’s very difficult to figure out what a fix is.”
Nonprofits have tried to compensate for the lack of government help. The Life After Exoneration Program, a national organization, focuses on advocacy and outreach to help exonerees after their convictions have been overturned. Similar groups scattered across the country include Life After Innocence in Chicago, Resurrection After Exoneration in New Orleans, and the Wisconsin Exoneree Network. Exonerees can turn to caseworkers at organizations like these for help with finding jobs, housing, and health care, applying to schools, obtaining driver’s licenses and insurance, and setting up bank accounts.
But the few programs that do exist to help exonerated prisoners tend to be understaffed and underfunded. The Life After Exoneration Program, for instance, had to start turning away clients in 2008, as their funding, which came solely from individual contributions, was too low to support the large pool of exonerees seeking help. “Funding just became impossible,“ says Dr. Lola Vollen, founder of the program. While the program still offers emergency financial help and advises the groups treating exonerees, it no longer provides social services, she says.
Meanwhile, many exonerees are struggling to rebuild their lives. In 2005, the Life After Exoneration Program surveyed sixty exonerees around the country. About half found it difficult to afford basic living needs such as food and housing. Twenty-five percent were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and two-thirds were not financially independent.
Exonerated prisoners cope with the trauma of not only their years in prison but also their abrupt release into a changed world. In telling their stories, I decided not to describe their time incarcerated — a continued source of pain for them, even years later — but instead focused on their reintegration. Like Bermudez, many of these men and women at first underestimate the difficulties they will face adjusting to their newfound freedom, and they are slow to seek help. Sometimes their symptoms appear in the weeks right after their release. Sometimes they show up after months or years.
A Bittersweet Homecoming
Jeffrey Deskovic in the Manhattan office of the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice, which he established after his exoneration.
Jeffrey Deskovic remembers sitting in a courtroom in 1990, his mother’s arm around his back, his hands folded in prayer, as a jury read his verdict. The seventeen-year-old had been charged with the rape and murder of Angela Correa, a friend and classmate at their high school in New York’s Westchester County. Under police interrogation, he had falsely confessed to the crime.
The blood drained from his face as the jury pronounced him guilty. Deskovic was sentenced to fifteen years to life.
In 2006, Deskovic was exonerated, cleared by DNA evidence and the jailhouse confession of the real killer. On his last day in Sing Sing prison, Deskovic cleaned his four-by-four cell, packing up the belongings he had chosen to keep, giving away the rest to his fellow inmates when the guards looked away. He walked out of prison, his home for half his lifetime, with two bags holding everything he owned.
Sixteen years older, Deskovic had a long beard and mustache. The hair on his head had thinned.
Deskovic’s first night home was not what he had expected. As he talks about it, his eyes become glassy and he takes many long pauses. “I wish I could say that I came home to a huge party with all my relatives, and lots of food and lots of dancing,” he says. “But that would not be the truth.”
Home at last, Deskovic sat at a table with his mother, aunt, and cousin. This was their first real chance to talk, an opportunity to start renewing the relationships that had frayed over those years of incarceration. But no one had anything to say. Deskovic realized that he knew his fellow inmates better than he knew these people.
In the back of his mind, Deskovic heard a faint voice telling him, “You don’t belong here.” He stood up from the table and walked out to the backyard. “I had wanted to sit down and feel the air and not have someone tell me to go back in,” Deskovic recalls. He lay down on a bench and went to sleep. “And that was how I spent my first night.”
After several days, Deskovic had to leave his aunt’s home and find his own place. The initial elation of being out of prison had given way to the anxiety of being without a home, job, or car. Deskovic immediately applied for compensation from the state of New York, but there was a long wait. Meanwhile, the stress was getting to him. He felt he was going to have a breakdown. Desperate, he called the Life After Exoneration Program. He told them he needed therapy. The woman on the other end of the line informed him that they couldn’t help him. The program had stopped taking new cases.
Had Deskovic been an ex-convict, rather than an exoneree, he may have found it easier to get help, advocates say. For felons released on parole, state parole systems keep watch to ensure that their reentry into the outside world is smooth and efficient. Government grants go to nonprofits that assist ex-offenders, such as the Fortune Society, a New York-based social service and advocacy organization that helps former inmates find housing, job training, addiction counseling, and psychiatric services.
The availability of these programs for ex-convicts makes a difference in terms of reduced rates of recidivism and other positive outcomes, advocates for exonerated prisoners say, and they would like to see the same levels of government funding extended to their programs. Some reentry programs for former inmates cover exonerated inmates as well, but the wrongfully convicted need their own programs, Vollen argues. Her organization’s nationwide survey of exonerees found that exonerees did not want to be treated like ex-cons. “They wanted to be acknowledged for what their experience was,” Vollen says. “And they wanted services with people that were confident with dealing with the type of circumstances that they had.”
To pull himself out of his financial hole, Deskovic eventually turned to another program for exonerated prisoners: the Innocence Project’s Exoneration Fund, which assists exonerees in need of immediate income assistance upon release — which is most of them. The fund covers necessities such as food and utility bills, and provides a stipend to help pay for medical or psychological treatment. Currently, the fund is able to provide each exoneree with $10,000 to $15,000 during their first year after release, and a lifetime of counseling assistance. While he waited for the state of New York to compensate him for his wrongful conviction, Deskovic lived off this financial support.
A Stolen Identity
Kian Khatibi at Manhattan’s Dorian Gray Tap and Grill, where he works as a server and event promoter.
Yet private-sector efforts can only go so far in filling the gaping holes in the safety net for exonerated prisoners, advocates say. Karen Wolff of the Innocence Project argues that government could do more to meet the needs of people who were in jail for no fault of their own — for one thing, by offering them housing, health insurance, income assistance, and food stamps immediately upon release.
On an even more basic level, many exonerees leave prison without the kind of official paper trail they need to restart their lives in today’s society. “Some of that stuff can be done for them by the government right away, so they have it and they don’t have to wait months and months and months without, literally … an identity,” Wolff says. Yet because of bureaucratic carelessness, many exonerees end up unable to open a bank account right away, she adds, because they don’t have any identification other than their prison ID.
Some of them don’t even get that.
Kian Khatibi served nine years in prison for a near-fatal stabbing, framed by his brother, who later confessed to the crime. In 2008, Khatibi’s conviction was overturned and he was released from the Hudson Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Before they put him on the bus home, corrections officers stripped him of his prison photo ID. They told him that it was “state property.”
Back in his hometown in Westchester County, Khatibi visited the local welfare office. He explained his situation, but the staff there demanded some form of identification before they could help him. Khatibi went to the DMV to apply for a driver’s license, but he had no way of proving his identity there, either. All the other benefits and services he needed — Medicaid, bank accounts, credit cards — required a photo ID.
After his release, Khatibi spent weeks tracking down old files and painstakingly reconstructing his legal and financial identity. Meanwhile, he walked around with whatever cash he had in his pocket, storing it under his pillow at night. (One thing Khatibi didn’t have to worry about was housing: his sister let him sleep on her couch.)
The stress and frustration of the constant bureaucratic battles only aggravated Khatibi’s state of constant anxiety — the psychological scarring that had accumulated over almost a decade of being locked up. “Many people come out and say ‘I’m not angry,’ and this and that,” Khatibi says. “But there are certain days where the world is just overwhelming.”
Exonerated prisoners like him “pretty much need therapy,” he adds — “just like people that are coming back from war.”
Khatibi’s caseworker at the welfare office suggested a place to get counseling. It quickly became obvious that group counseling wouldn’t work in his case — how many other people know what it’s like to be wrongfully convicted? — and so Khatibi started seeing a therapist individually.
In therapy, Khatibi learned that he was struggling not only with post-traumatic stress disorder from his prison experience, but also with resentment toward relatives for not supporting him during his incarceration. “We agreed that he had this inner core of anger that he needed to extinguish … to be able to gain some balance in his life,” says Dr. Ross Fishman, his therapist.
Khatibi also needed to shake off his “prison mentality.” Upstate in Hudson, he had developed a hypersensitive survival instinct, which pushed him to react to any perceived danger with an immediate attack. In prison, if someone looked at you the wrong way, the expected response was to assert your dominance — “Let’s settle this” — or face the grim consequences of being perceived as weak. This mentality made perfect sense in the prison courtyard, but it was now making Khatibi impatient and agitated in harmless, everyday situations. One day, he was in a neighborhood deli when the man behind the counter looked at him in a way he didn’t like or trust. It was actually an innocent look, but it triggered an aggressive response from Khatibi. “Is there a problem?” he barked. The store clerk, alarmed, said nothing.
Incidents like this one pushed Khatibi to seek anger management counseling. With his therapist’s help, Khatibi has made substantial progress over the past four years. He graduated from New York University in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in communications. He is currently working toward a law degree at Yeshiva University.
These days Khatibi seems optimistic and at peace with himself, his outward appearance betraying no sign of his incarceration. On a recent visit to his home, a single-bedroom apartment filled with books in the East Village, Khatibi is dressed smartly in jeans and a collared polo shirt. His dedication to exercise has kept him toned and fit. He walks with a calm, steady gait — another goal he has worked steadily to achieve. (When he first left prison, his sisters taught him how to lose the “prison strut”; he knew it wasn’t good for social situations or meeting nice women.) If he tells new acquaintances about his experiences in prison, he is often forced to back up his claims with newspaper articles.
Khatibi recognizes that he is one of the lucky ones. Unlike other exonerees, he is only in his early thirties and has been able to salvage his social life. He dates and socializes with friends old and new. He claims to have made at least one great friend in every one of his college classes.
“I’ve been really blessed,” Khatibi says. “But at the same time, not everybody is like me.” When he left prison, he was lucky enough to link up with effective organizations like the Innocence Project and Innovative Health Systems in Westchester. Other people lack the knowledge or wherewithal to seek out the right kind of help, he adds. “These are the people that are probably really getting lost when they get let out of jail after all this time.”
It makes Khatibi mad that the state hasn’t done more to help exonerees like him. After all, they bear some blame in all this, he says. “It’s not like a freak accident — it’s not like you just got hit by lightning.” The state erred and caused great harm, he points out; they should make up for it. “Why do they kick you out the back and close the door?”
Yet then there are the people like Jeffrey Deskovic, who have suffered so much damage in prison that psychological services and financial boosts don’t seem enough to help them. Khatibi has spoken with him many times, and he worries that Deskovic will continue having a hard time breaking out of his funk.
‘Not Really Participating’
Jeffrey Deskovic on the day of his release in September 2006, surrounded by family and his legal team from the Innocence Project. Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Deskovic.
In a small diner underneath the Parkchester subway stop in the Bronx, Deskovic orders his breakfast in an authoritative tone. “I’ll have the corned beef hash and scrambled eggs, no toast, and bacon. I want the bacon on the side.” Since leaving prison, Deskovic has learned that he must be confident and straightforward to avoid confusion. But even simple interactions can exasperate him. He reminds the waiter, pointedly, of his order. “You heard me say no toast? And I want the bacon on a side plate.” At the end of the meal, he appears frustrated with the service. “This waiter is not going to get a good tip, I’ll tell ya that much,” he grouses. “Service was horrible.”
In some ways, things are looking up for the ex-Sing Sing inmate. After five years of waiting, Westchester County finally agreed to settle his federal civil-rights lawsuit, paying him $6.5 million in compensation for his wrongful conviction. Deskovic is currently working toward his master’s degree at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has launched his own organization to advocate on behalf of exonerated prisoners, the Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation for Justice.
But today Deskovic finds it hard to put up a façade of positive thinking. He is agitated and curt, fixated on his tight schedule of meetings and appointments in the city. As Deskovic talks over breakfast, it becomes clear that more is bothering him than his workload. He is thirty-eight years old, and his life isn’t working out the way he hoped. He is exhausted with the unhelpful therapy sessions, tired of constantly going home to his apartment, feeling all the more discouraged and lonely.
“Sometimes I get really depressed and frustrated just thinking, and I ask myself, you know, ‘Where’s my life going?’” He pauses for several long moments. “Sure, I have my advocacy work and my nonprofit, but my personal life’s a mess. That’s what is really debilitating.”
During the years that he was locked in his cell, most boys and girls his age were falling in love for the first time and forming lasting relationships, he points out. Had he not been imprisoned, “my life would have developed in the normal cycle of life,” Deskovic says. “I would have friends from college, and friends of friends.”
He asks many people, sometimes strangers, what they would suggest he do. He has tried bars, chess clubs, ping-pong clubs, gyms, sports teams, and dating websites. He feels he has exhausted every option. “I still want to throw a ball around, go to a water park,” he says. But no one wants to go with him. “I am trying to put a social life together. How do you do that from scratch?”
On some days the anxiety and depression weigh down on him so much that he can’t bear sitting in his living room alone. He retreats to his parked car, where he will brood for three or four hours, just wondering if he should turn on the ignition. If he does, he is not sure where he would go. There is no place for him to go.
“There’s going to come a time that I’m significantly older and I’m going to realize that there’s not really that much more time to live,” Deskovic says. “And I’m going to regret the amount of time since I’ve been home … that I wasn’t really participating.”
Overwhelmed by the World
Fernando Bermudez with his son Fernando. When he is feeling overwhelmed, Fernando lies down in his son’s bedroom, the smallest in their home. It reminds him of his prison cell.
The transition to civilian life has been hard on Fernando Bermudez, too, but at least he has his family. In the weeks after his murder conviction was overturned, everything was exciting for him. He could finally lie in bed next to his wife, feel the warmth of his young son’s body cuddling on the couch, eat a home-cooked meal.
Eventually, Bermudez and his family moved from New York to Danbury, Connecticut. It was a smaller, more tranquil community, an hour-and-a-half drive from the city. Here, Bermudez would be able to focus on his advocacy work and finish his college education.
Three years after his release, Bermudez does not have a regular job. He completed his bachelor’s degree in behavioral science last December at Western Connecticut State University, and is considering returning for his master’s degree. In the meantime, Bermudez continues to do public speaking about his wrongful conviction at colleges and law schools around the country. He works hard at marketing himself and occasionally brings home checks from his speaking engagements, but it is not a career. He has filed a lawsuit seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction, but is waiting, too, on that outcome.
Bermudez contributes to the family in other ways, such as driving his ten-year-old daughter Carissa and six-year-old son Fernando to school in the morning, washing the car, and shoveling the front walk when it snows. But it is rare that Bermudez can manage all those things in one day. The stress and anxiety accumulate throughout the day and often leave him exhausted. He is not used to the speed of technology. The intricacies of simple household appliances fluster him. He doesn’t understand his children’s infatuation with texting. Driving often makes him very tense, and so Crystal drives for him. She has noticed that even small things, like composing an email, can sometimes push her husband to need a nap. Crystal recalls a family outing to the mall shortly after his release. “We went to Macy’s and he became overwhelmed by trying to find a shirt,” she says. “He didn’t know how to use money.”
His years in prison clearly traumatized Bermudez, who to this day cannot let go of the regimented prison routine. On some days, he leaps out of bed at 5 a.m., ready for the morning count. Wide awake, he paces the room endlessly, just as he used to do in his cell. The only way he can fall sleep again is by placing a T-shirt over his face, just as he used to do in his prison bunk. If Crystal is able to coax him back into bed, she rubs his back and reminds him he is home now.
Because he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Bermudez has difficulty controlling his emotions. Crystal says that at times the confusion and frustration build up to the point that her husband, a grown man, will cry in front of her.
It took Bermudez several months to starting seeing a therapist. “I needed psychological help at first, and nothing was forthcoming,” he says. He didn’t have health insurance and was piggybacking on his wife’s plan to receive temporary counseling. It wasn’t until he became a student that Bermudez qualified for an individual health plan. He still suffers from the same symptoms of PTSD, and occasionally sees a therapist. He says he finds the therapy helpful, and now that he has finished school, he hopes to attend sessions more regularly.
There are days that Bermudez feels great. But on other days, the panic attacks return. Crystal knows when her husband is feeling overwhelmed. He goes to his favorite spot in the apartment, his son’s bedroom, to lie down. “Fernando likes being in that room because it’s small,” Crystal says.
“It’s like he has a prison room with a window — like he’s fortunate enough to have a window.” The confined space soothes him, his wife notes. “He’ll lie here for hours.”
See Dana Ullman’s companion piece, Life after Innocence, for photos of the three men profiled in this article.
Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald is a freelance journalist and recent graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Currently, she is living in her hometown of Philadelphia.
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Best of In The Fray 2005. Transgender prisoners face discrimination, harassment, and abuse above and beyond that of the traditional male and female prison population.
Story and photos by Emily Alpert
Tanya Smith experienced sexual harassment and medical neglect while incarcerated in California prisons.
In Idaho, inmate Linda Patricia Thompson wanted a transfer to a women’s prison. A male-to-female transgender woman, or MTF, she had been living as a woman for several years, had changed her name legally, and was taking black-market estrogen when she could. Thompson had never been able to afford sex reassignment surgery, nor could she obtain hormones legally: the signatures of two physicians and a psychiatrist were required, and she couldn’t afford the visits. Still, Thompson was assertively feminine, even in handcuffs. At the time of her arrest, she wore a dress and high heels.
But prison officials refused to transfer Thompson or to provide her with estrogen. Inmates are housed on the basis of genitalia, they told her, and in their eyes she was incontestably male. So Thompson took matters into her own hands — literally. In two separate incidents, she amputated her own male genitalia, nearly bleeding to death in the process.
“I thought she had to be nuts,” recalls attorney Bruce Bistline, who handled Thompson’s case. “But apparently that sort of self-mutilation is not extraordinary in the transgender prison population. The level of desperation is just that high.”
“I’ve been raped, physically beaten, extorted, pimped out/sold, intimidated, manipulated, threatened, humiliated, [and] harassed by both officers and inmates,” writes transgender prisoner Meagan Calvillo of her experiences in various California prisons since 1999. Calvillo’s description is not unusual. Outside of prison, transgender people are among the most marginalized in the United States; inside it, they confound a system that’s ill-prepared to serve them, or even to decide where to put them.
“There’s no real legal standard” for determining the placement of transgender prisoners, says Chris Daly, director of the Transgender Law Center in San Francisco. At present, most California prisoners are assigned to male or female prisons on the basis of their genitalia, the same method applied by most states. “There’s a state-level mandate that prisons be segregated by sex, which they’ve interpreted to mean genitalia. Every prison we know of has interpreted it the same way.” As a result, transgender people who choose not to undergo sex reassignment surgery — or lack the means to do so — are housed with people of their birth gender.
“For instance,” says Daly, “someone who’s male-to-female, if she hasn’t had surgery or hasn’t been able to access it yet, will be housed with men — regardless of how long she’s lived as a woman, or what her gender presentation is like.”
One such person is Dee Farmer, an MTF whose landmark 1994 Supreme Court case, Farmer v. Brennan, found that prison authorities are liable for “deliberate indifference” to inmates’ safety, including situations of likely sexual assault. Farmer brought the suit in 1990 after she was brutally raped and beaten by another inmate in an Indiana prison. The assault occurred two weeks after she was placed in the general male population, despite her breast implants and longtime use of estrogen.
When housed with male prisoners, MTFs rapidly become the targets of sexual assault, as Farmer’s case illustrates. Some, like Farmer, have developed breasts from surgery or years of estrogen treatment. Others, though male in appearance, are immediately relegated to the bottom of prison’s social hierarchies by virtue of their feminine self-presentation.
As for female-to-male transgender people, “while they don’t face the same type of violence [from fellow prisoners], they face a lot of oppression on the part of guards,” explains Judy Greenspan, cofounder of the Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee (TIP). “When they’re strip-searched, many FTMs who have had their breasts removed or take hormones are put on display. It’s psychological brutality … They’re demonized.”
Everyday humiliations for both MTFs and FTMs include verbal harassment, frivolous strip searches, and gender-stereotypic “grooming standards,” which set requirements for men and women’s hair length, facial hair, and use of cosmetics. “Prison guards refuse to call them by their chosen names or use their correct pronouns,” says Greenspan, exasperated. “They look at trans- and gender-variant prisoners as deviant.”
Attorney Alex Lee directs the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, based in Oakland, California.
Protective custody for so-called vulnerable inmates, including those who are HIV positive, offers a modicum of safety to transgender prisoners — at least from assaults by other inmates. Another, more common option is to confine transgender prisoners individually, in what is known as administrative segregation.
“It’s pretty much standard throughout California — except for San Francisco — that housing tends to be separate” for transgender prisoners, explains James Austin, a physician affiliated with the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department. “So most of the facilities are single cells. We don’t have any ability to accommodate them otherwise.”
However, when assaults come from prison guards, as they frequently do, administrative housing isn’t safe, either, and may even be worse. Many individual confinement pens are intended for short-term punitive stays, or for highly aggressive, violent prisoners.
“Administrative segregation is basically punishment,” explains attorney Alex Lee, director of the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP). “In prison, people call it the jail. It’s much more restrictive, and a lot of trans folks in prison get put there … simply because the prisons don’t know how to take care of them, and they’d rather err on the side of being more restrictive than not.”
In 2004, a Wyoming judge ruled that prison officials violated the constitutional rights of Miki Ann Dimarco, a person with an intersex condition, by placing her in an isolated high-security lockup for over a year. At the time of her conviction for check fraud, Dimarco was placed at the Wyoming Women’s Center: an unintentionally appropriate choice. Born with genitalia that might either be classified as a microphallus or an enlarged clitoris, Dimarco identifies and lives publicly as a woman.
However, when medical staff saw Dimarco’s genitalia, flustered officials decided to hold her in complete isolation in the prison’s maximum-security wing. Though a prison evaluation placed Dimarco at the lowest possible risk level, and doctors concluded she posed no sexual threat (she was “not sexually functional as a male,” according to staff), she was subjected to the same living conditions and restrictions as the Center’s most dangerous prisoners.
Administrative segregation “may ostensibly be a safer place,” Lee remarks, but “where are they going to put you to be away from the guards?” Many of Lee’s own clients won’t report abuse from other prisoners for fear of being placed in isolation. Or, as in the case of Tanya Smith, they’ll endure abuse to avoid it.
In 1995, when Tanya Smith was first incarcerated, she was immediately isolated as “a threat to the safety of the jail population, as a transgender,” she recalls. Smith is a tall African American transwoman with warm, dark eyes and a dainty silver nose ring. Recalling isolation, she purses her lips. “I couldn’t access any visitors. The mental health ward would not come see me at all.” Smith suffers from borderline personality disorder and requires a steady hormonal regimen. After six months, she was finally released to the general men’s population, a situation she found far preferable to isolation, which she refers to as “the hole.”
Three years later, when Smith returned to prison, a prison guard came on to her, saying “‘Ooh, you’re a real woman. Do you fuck?’” Smith says she sometimes stripped for officers to get medical attention, but this guard wanted more. “He threatened that I’d go back to the hole if I didn’t have sex with him — or oral copulation.” In exchange for sex, claims Smith, the guard kept her out of administrative segregation, protected her from other prisoners, and provided her with food, medicine, and clothing, even alcohol and drugs. When asked how she felt about the officer, Smith merely shrugs. “It was a way of survival,” she says simply. “Why complain when I’d get thrown into the hole?”
In California, the most notorious isolation facilities are known as Security Housing Units, or SHUs. Antoine Mahan is a board member of California Prison Focus, which opposes the use of SHUs. He is also a former prisoner who spent two years in a SHU at Corcoran State Prison. Mahan’s rounded face is both feminine and masculine at once: he wears his hair long, and favors women’s blouses and headbands. “People think I’ve taken hormones,” he divulges, “but I never have. That’s just my androgynous features.” He identifies as an African American gay male cross-dresser, but in prison, he says, “I was seen as transgender.”
Homeless, drug-addicted, and HIV positive, Mahan ricocheted between prison and the street from 1991 to 1997. Like Smith, he was approached by officers and prisoners for sex, regardless of his HIV status. Some assailants may have been HIV positive already; others may have wanted oral sex, which has a relatively low transmission rate. At a reception center for HIV-positive inmates, an officer began courting Mahan with food and gifts, hinting that he wanted sexual favors. Later, at the California Men’s Colony (CMC), Mahan says, “I had a lot of guys getting at me, and a lot of officers harassing me sexually. I was what they call in prison terms ‘fresh booty.’”
But the SHU, says Mahan, was far worse. In 1997, following a scuffle with another CMC prisoner, Mahan was transferred to Corcoran State Prison, one of the few California prisons equipped with an SHU. There, he says, “I went through more hell than I’ve ever been through in my life.” Mahan describes the SHU as “a nine-by-five cell — nine by five by six, that’s the length, the width and the height. It was a box. No ventilation whatsoever.” According to California Prison Focus, SHU prisoners spend at least twenty-three hours a day in their cells, have no phone access, compromised medical care, and no work training or educational programs.
It is unclear whether transgender prisoners are routinely assigned to California’s few SHUs, but California Prison Focus alleges that inmates accused of gang affiliation are regularly assigned there, regardless of their behavior, in a “draconian” effort to wipe out gangs. If transgender prisoners are perceived as making trouble — or provoking it — a similar rationale might apply.
“There were a lot of queens in jail,” Mahan mentions offhandedly. Transgender and gender-variant people, as a population, are incarcerated at even higher rates than the general population of African American men, although the majority of those incarcerated are also people of color. In San Francisco, a 1997 study conducted by the city’s Department of Public Health found that 67 percent of MTF respondents and 30 percent of FTM respondents had a history of incarceration. Almost a third of MTF respondents had been jailed in the past year. The numbers are staggering: among U.S. adults, only 3 percent are or have been incarcerated. Overall, “unless they’re rich, [most transgender people have] spent a little time in jail,” says Judy Greenspan.
TIP volunteer Nedjula Baguio, an MTF, offers one explanation: employment discrimination. Trans people are at a disadvantage in today’s service economy, she says, regardless of whether they can “pass.” Trans people who pass are more easily recognized as their presented gender: they may have taken hormones for many years or opted for breast implants or removal. Those who don’t pass are less easily categorized. Some are mid-transition, some lack the funds for hormones or surgery, and others feel at home between — or across, or beyond — the categories of male and female.
“I don’t think I ever pass,” says Baguio, despite her lean figure and softly curving mouth; she recalls a tense stop at a rural diner while en route to Vacaville, and winces. Her light skin is patterned with evocative tattoos: a heart being sewn up, a marionette cut from its strings.
Trans people who don’t pass “freak people out,” Baguio says simply, and in a service economy, that’s fatal. “Most people don’t want to have anything to do with you as a potential employee, for all the obvious reasons. Your gender presentation is going to be perceived as ‘freakish,’ and nobody will want to deal with you, period. You’re seen as interfering with moneymaking.”
Smith agrees. Drug-free and out of prison, her job search hasn’t been easy, as a former inmate or as a transwoman. “There’s not a lot of people willing to hire us,” she complains.
But finding work is no picnic for trans people who pass, reports Baguio. When supplying references or a work history for employers, they face another dilemma. If a prospective boss calls a former employer and asks about Susan — only to hear all about Sean — their reaction may not be charitable.
Consequently, a disproportionate number of trans people engage in sex work. Many turn to drugs to cope with the degradation they experience as transgender people and as sex workers, and are eventually incarcerated for prostitution or drug-related offenses — what Lee calls “survival crimes.” Others develop mental illness, another risk factor for landing in jail. Because employment discrimination, arrests, and sentencing patterns fall hardest on low-income people — predominantly people of color — transwomen of color are the majority of the trans prison population.
“It affects queer and transgender people across the board,” explains Baguio, “but for those communities [low-income people and people of color], you’re dealing with a double whammy.” Baguio offers her own experience as a multiracial transwoman for contrast. “I’m perceived as lighter-skinned. I’m not targeted a lot. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of hip artists; I’m not living in Lincoln, Nebraska. I have a job where they’ve been accepting of my transition, and it’s not an issue. I make a decent wage and have been able to spend a fair amount of money on my transition, including electrolysis, health care, and access to hormones.”
Baguio also transitioned after college, insulating her from the hazards of the service economy. She hasn’t needed to engage in sex work, and hasn’t been exposed to its attendant health risks.
Dr. Lori Kohler is the founder of California’s only health clinic for trans prisoners, located at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. The dominant health issue among trans prisoners, she reports, is HIV/AIDS. “Anywhere from 60 to 80 percent [of transfeminine prisoners] at any given time are HIV infected,” she says. “And many are also Hep-C infected. The next greatest problem is addiction.”
Most of the prisoners Kohler sees are transwomen of color, incarcerated for nonviolent offenses related to drugs or sex work. Like Baguio, she cites the cycle of unemployment, sex work, and drug addiction. “These are not women that are working to pay for their drugs — these are women who are working for their lives, and end up using drugs to tolerate the life they’re forced into.”
Kohler has been working with transgender patients since 1994, when she took a job at the recently founded Transgender Clinic of the Tom Waddell Health Center in San Francisco. In 1999, the chief medical officer of the Vacaville facility approached Kohler and asked her to establish a clinic for the prison’s trans inmates. At the time of the clinic’s founding, the chief medical officer estimated that Kohler would be serving a total population of ten to fifteen patients. Six years later, Kohler says she’s seen roughly 3,000 unduplicated patients, and that there are about sixty trans prisoners at CMF at any given time.
Kohler says that her exposure to trans health issues is unusual among health professionals. “Care of trans people is not something that most medical people understand,” she says, and sighs. This ignorance is manifested most clearly, she says, in the issue of cross-gender hormone provision.
“As far as I know of, CMF and now CMC [California Men’s Colony] are the only two prisons in the country that actually have a physician who’s dedicated to providing good care, including cross-hormone therapies,” says Kohler. “In all other California prisons, access to cross-gender hormones is not guaranteed. It’s sporadic and inconsistent, and only given to very few people.”
In 2003, a U.S. District Court in Boston ruled that transgender prisoner Michelle Kosilek was entitled to hormone therapy; in the same year, New Hampshire ruled in favor of similar claims by state prisoner Lisa Barrett. Courts have generally recognized the responsibility of prisons to continue hormone treatment and psychological therapy, in compliance with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, which courts have interpreted to include the deliberate withholding of medical treatment.
However, prisons have often been reluctant to provide hormone therapy if inmates do not have an existing prescription. Because low-income transwomen of color usually acquire hormones through the black market, few can furnish legal prescriptions.
As a result, explains Kohler, “most transwomen who are incarcerated end up being taken off of their hormones unless they can get a court order — they have to use the legal system to have access to their appropriate medical care.” And in other states, she adds, “it’s virtually impossible for them even to get a court order to access care.” Side effects of hormone deprivation can include depression, heart problems, and irregular blood pressure.
Undeterred, Kohler prescribes cross-gender hormones to any trans-identified prisoner: a renegade position among prison medical staff, who routinely ignore her prescriptions. “I’d say about half the medical staff will refill my medical orders if I’m not around, and the other half will not recognize my recommendations,” she says. “But I don’t think that’s any different than the medical community outside the prisons.”
Photos of female and trans prisoners cover the walls of Lee’s Oakland office.
After her life-threatening self-mutilation and the lawsuit that followed, Linda Thompson was eventually transferred to Kohler’s Vacaville facility in California. She was also granted a cash settlement contingent upon a confidentiality agreement about the suit. However, Bruce Bistline’s cocounsel, Lea Cooper, says that Thompson chose to violate the terms of the settlement agreement, foregoing most of the settlement money.
“Linda decided that she wanted to get the word out,” says Cooper. “That meant more than money to her.”
In California prisons, Thompson was finally able to access estrogen. Because her genitalia are not readily identifiable as female or male (something of a conundrum for prison assignment), she was housed in a small facility with other transwomen and gay men. After her release, Thompson sought jobs in Oregon, Wyoming, Los Angeles, and Washington, but couldn’t find paid work — not even sex work.
“She said she was too masculine to turn tricks,” Cooper explains. Eventually, at a loss for what to do next, Thompson got arrested for stealing copper wire from a construction site. “She told the judge she did it [got arrested] on purpose, because she didn’t have any more options,” Cooper says. Thompson is currently incarcerated at the Monroe Correctional Center in Monroe, Washington; on the basis of her birth genitalia, she has been housed in the men’s facility. As Cooper describes it, “Linda jokes, ‘What do I have to do, start menstruating to be considered a woman?’”
Though both do work that benefits trans prisoners, neither prisoners’ rights groups nor transgender advocates have specifically taken up their cause. “Transgender issues are not on the radar screen of most prisoners’ rights groups,” says Judy Greenspan, “and the transgender movement may not be prioritizing prisoners’ issues because they’re involved in trans survival and support services on the street.”
The Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee, cofounded by Greenspan, and the Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, founded by Alex Lee, are two notable exceptions. Greenspan identifies as a gender-variant white woman: biologically female, she doesn’t conform to societal expectations of female behavior or appearance. She wears men’s clothing, cuts her hair short, and is occasionally taken for a man. For twenty years, Greenspan has worked with transgender prisoners, including Dee Farmer of Farmer v. Brennan. Lee is an FTM Asian American attorney who became interested in prison issues during law school and sought to connect them to transgender advocacy.
Lee believes the void in advocacy results from mainstream queer organizations’ “assimilationist politics … They want to pretend that we are all law-abiding citizens, that we’re perfect angels who want to be just like ‘normal’ straight people.” In doing so, he says, such groups jettison trans prisoners, who are predominantly low-income people of color.
Both TIP and TGIJP advocate for trans prisoners who are currently incarcerated, but Lee says that the long-term change needs to happen “before people go to prisons.” As Greenspan explains, “prison mirrors what’s going on in the outside, so-called free world. There are really no rights in the community, unless you’re living in San Francisco.”
But even in San Francisco County Jail, reports Tanya Smith, trans people are reviled. “You’d think the officers out here would think outside the box, in this liberal city, but they don’t. It’s horrible.”
In light of this reality, Linda Thompson’s choice to be rearrested makes sense, despite the harassment she continues to face as a prisoner. For many trans people, all the world’s a prison — on both sides of the bars.
UPDATE, 3/8/13: Edited and moved story from our old site to the current one.
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Prisoner with conscience. Ibn Kenyatta, a celebrated writer and artist, has been imprisoned since 1974 for the attempted murder of a police officer. Kenyatta maintains that he is innocent of the crime and has repeatedly and publicly refused parole since he was first eligible in 1988. This photo was taken in 1977 at the prison school of Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York. Peter Sinclair
spirit: the first step
take heart. don’t be fool’d.
don’t seek after the seemin’ly easy
way out.
being onese’f is conscious hard
work. life is still gooddd.
Even tho there are people who
try to make thangs awfully bad.
but after the deluge, the sun
always shines.
and trouble, lahk water,
also moves on.
—ibn Kenyatta
The prison system of the State of New York has a website entitled Inmate Population Information Search.” By entering the name ibn Kenyatta, I can confirm that he resides at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York, that his prison number is “74A3701,” and that he was born on November 1, 1945. I can confirm that he’s black and that he was convicted of attempted murder in 1974.
If I were to add to the state’s database, I would say that ibn Kenyatta is one of the few prisoners in the United States who repeatedly and publicly refuse parole. I would add that he’s also a writer whose essays and poetry have been published in several anthologies and Harper’s Magazine. He has won a PEN prize for prison writing. His charcoal and pencil works have won acclaim at exhibitions in New York State. He renamed himself years before his incarceration, for African revolutionary leader Jomo Kenyatta and the Rev. Charles Kenyatta, the Harlem street orator. He met his fiancée, Safiya Bandele, in 1969. She has visited him throughout his incarceration.
Yet this broad sweep of facts barely addresses the complexity of the man, nor the standoff that has developed between the State of New York and a single prisoner. His continued parole refusals come at a time when state governments across the nation have enacted stringent get-tough policies to keep inmates behind bars longer and reduce or even eliminate parole. Kenyatta’s message has become perplexing to some and incomprehensible to others.
On January 29, 1974, Kenyatta jumped a New York City subway turnstile and soon found himself in a fight with a transit police officer. It was a time of great hostility between African Americans and the city’s police force, and for what easily could have been a matter of assault—both the officer and Kenyatta were slightly injured—Kenyatta was charged, and convicted, of attempted murder. Ever since then, Kenyatta has been protesting his conviction, maintaining that the officer attacked first and he only fought back in self-defense. He has been eligible for parole since January 24, 1988, and has nearly twice served the fifteen-year minimum of his fifteen-to-life sentence. But he has repeatedly refused to attend parole hearings and makes it clear that he is outright refusing to deal with any aspect of the parole system.
Few understand why Kenyatta refuses parole. Some suggest he must be mentally unbalanced. Kenyatta counters that he is compelled to take this stand because he is innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. To accept parole carries an inherent admission of guilt, Kenyatta says; the only way he will leave prison is unconditionally, with no admission of guilt. (Such a response by a prisoner is “rare,” says New York State Parole Spokesman Tom Grant, who adds that parole commissioners do not determine innocence or guilt—they assume that the inmate has already been found guilty.)
Kenyatta’s protest has brought him close to death. The New York State prisoner database doesn’t mention that Kenyatta won more than a million dollars in a suit against the State of New York’s Department of Correctional Services in 2001, for the state’s medical “failure to treat.” In December of 1994, Kenyatta developed a bladder infection, which went untreated and progressed to renal failure. He was hospitalized, and is permanently disabled. He must self-catheterize several times each day. Two-thirds of the settlement monies are established in a trust for his medical care following his release from prison. If he dies in prison, the state saves a considerable amount of money.
In November of 2002, ibn Kenyatta is scheduled to once again appear before the state parole board. Although he will again refuse to appear, the parole board will act as if he stood before them and the commissioners are again expected to render their parole decision: “Parole denied due to the nature of the crime.” The board will likely give the date for his next parole board appearance as November 2004. (Even if he decided to request parole at his hearing this November, the answer might well be the same. Under the Pataki administration, lifers or those convicted of violent crimes are routinely denied parole. But had Kenyatta requested parole in 1988, when he was first eligible—and when Mario Cuomo was governor—he would have had a better chance of obtaining it.)
Like many of Kenyatta’s friends, I sometimes held his parole refusal position at arm’s length. I didn’t fully understand why anyone would choose to remain confined when he merely had to tell parole officials what they wanted to hear. This was precisely the point, Kenyatta would explain. In his view, a social system like parole rewards dishonesty and crushes the individual expression of integrity. He chose parole refusal, not merely to make a point about his own case, but also to raise broader social issues.
Today, the situation remains at a standstill. Now and again attention is paid–there was an article in the Village Voice in the 1990s, and two documentaries have told Kenyatta and Bandele’s story. Money from the court settlement will be used to establish a production company, which will showcase Kenyatta’s art and writing.
Last year Kenyatta and Bandele worked closely to draft a will. They contacted me to request that I serve as literary executor if he were to die in prison.
Over the years that Kenyatta has fought his one-man battle, the New York State prison system has only grown, locking more people up and holding them for ever longer sentences. The total number of prisoners in New York State is 70,000 and climbing. When I first met ibn Kenyatta in Green Haven prison twenty-five years ago, he was one of only 15,000.
Unsafe haven. Green Haven Correctional Facility, circa 1977. When ibn Kenyatta resided here, Green Haven was the home of New York’s electric chair. People would say that the streaks on the top of these walls were “tears.” Marguerite Kearns
Kenyatta’s Kind of Crazy
How’d you hear about the Communications Workshop?” I asked the tall, thin man behind me, sitting apart from the group. He shifted in his seat and stared out the window beyond me for a second before focusing on my question.
It was spring of 1977. I was teaching communication skills in the prison school at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York, an adjunct to my job as a reporter and editor at the Woodstock Times, a community weekly in the Hudson Valley. On most Fridays we worked on projects—this day it was the prison newspaper.
Every week at least a half-dozen new prisoners visited to consider participation. This man was one of this week’s newcomers. He seemed different from the rest. Most other prisoners who participated in the prison workshop wore bright or colorful shirts with their green state pants. This inmate had the regulation prison white shirt and a full Afro haircut packed close to his head. His eyes shifted away from me, toward the door, as if prepared to bolt at any second.
“I’m someone who checks out these prison programs to see if they’re any good,” the prisoner replied.
“But who are you?” I asked.
“Ah black man,” he replied.
“I know,” I told him, swallowing hard.
“You don’t know,” he answered firmly.
I couldn’t figure out where to take the conversation next, so I also glanced out the window. There wasn’t much in the immediate vicinity that wasn’t institution gray.
“My name’s Kenyatta,” the prisoner finally admitted. “I’m here at Green Haven on the road through life. Most recently by way of Attica.” Any mention of the prison at Attica back then inevitably drew a hush over the room. The notorious rebellion there in 1971 claimed forty-three lives and was in large part responsible for the fact that programs like the communications workshop existed in Green Haven’s prison school. The post-Attica era was an era of hope, grounded in an optimistic vision that crime stemmed from social conditions and “rehabilitation” was not only possible, but it had never been given a decent chance.
But the relaxation of discipline at Green Haven after the Attica rebellion had other, less positive consequences. Approximately 80 percent of the prison’s correctional officers had less than two years of on-the-job experience. Morale was low. The institution was believed to be unstable on both sides of the bars. The state transferred almost as many prisoners into Green Haven back then as it transferred them out to prison facilities around the state. Kenyatta’s transfer to Green Haven was part of this policy.
I spoke to this visiting prisoner about the work of the Communications Workshop, just enough so I didn’t feel as awkward as before. Then, almost in passing, I added, “I live in Woodstock.”
“I suspected you’se were nuts,” he replied.
I raised my eyebrows. “It depends on your perspective, I guess,” I replied. He wasn’t the first person to confuse the town of Woodstock, in Ulster County across the Hudson River from Green Haven, with the 1969 music festival. I wasn’t in a mood for explanations, so I gathered up my papers and attempted to move on to the next activity.
“You know what I mean,” Kenyatta said. “My kinda crazy. You’re crazy, and I’m off the wall to be here at Green Haven after Attica.”
I would discover later that this man always said precisely what was on his mind, without hesitation.
“You’re just learnin about the whys and wherefores of these cagelands. You’ll find out,” he went on.
“Was Attica different?” I asked.
“Are you for real?” Kenyatta responded, as if peering at me from behind a wall. It was as if he used a pair of invisible binoculars and occasionally he squinted to adjust the focus.
“I’m asking you about prisons because I want to know. Be patient. I’m relatively new behind these walls.” It was true. I was young. But it was the innocence and idealism of my youth that helped me get beyond my insecurity about being a white person in a room filled with brown and black faces.
“I’m not tellin you anything when I say all state joints are breedin grounds for rebellion. All them big jails got Orange Crush teams—two-legged mutts wearin orange suits, plastic masks, carryin clubs and guns, with four-legged dogs on leashes, all the time invadin the prisons—tearin up shit. Beatin and terrorizin prisoners.”
I’d seen them and smelled fear in the air on several occasions as the CERT squads rolled through Green Haven’s hallways. Many prisoners called them “goon squads.”
“Is Green Haven an improvement?” I asked.
“This place blew me away. Attica is/was racist, so somethin was always happenin. Green Haven is somethin else entirely. Wide open. Wild. Uptown Saturday night. Riker’s Island moved upstate. I could hardly b’lieve my eyes and ears with all the bedlam and excesses I found my first few weeks here. After Attica, I wasn’t prepared for the madness of ‘The Hav’.”
“Are you saying it’s a pleasant place to be?”
“That’s not what I’m sayin.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since last September.”
“So tell me more about Attica,” I continued, my reporter nature getting the best of me.
“Uptight. Low-down. I was in D-Block—you know. The infamous D-Block of the Attica massacre. Good thing I got there four years after it was over, or I’d probably be dead now. Didn’t have an easy time at Attica. Just came off ah protest strike right before my transfer to Green Haven. Supportin the ‘good time’ bill in the legislature and airin a list of grievances. The joint was always being locked down for three days to ah week or more for shakedowns so the Orange Crush could come in and search n destroy. We’d wake up at 2:30 a.m. with the sounds of all hell breakin loose.”
“Glad you’re here, huh?”
“This may sound peculiar, but I didn’t wanna leave Attica.”
I’d heard this perspective before. Many prisoners believed the predictability of institutions such as Attica were preferable to the loose-one-day, tight-the-next, unpredictability of Green Haven.
“There’s good programs here at Green Haven, despite the disorganization,” Kenyatta added. He explained that prior to Attica, prisoners were never allowed to design, organize, and teach themselves anything, let alone something with the radical potential of communication.
“You probably can’t see it as clear as I can, since you haven’t been locked up as long as the rest of us,” Kenyatta noted, and then he smiled. As Kenyatta spoke, he had moved his chair closer toward mine. I didn’t notice it at first. Increments of a half-inch bridged the distance until he faced me directly and spoke as if we were the only people in the room. He lowered his voice and its tone became more intense.
“You know and I know the Haven is the hub for most of the political action goin down by prisoners all over the state. So there’s overwhelmin negative activities and tremendously positive elements counteractin in ways that give this place a wild, political, unique flavor.”
“Sounds to me like you’re the nutty one for wanting to stay at Attica.”
“It took me forever, but I finally got my respect there. I established myse’f as not being their average inmate. It ain’t easy startin over—dancin from the bars into one fantasy dream or another.
“Check out the relative freedom at Green Haven compared to Attica,” he noted. “There, all movement is rigidly controlled. Here, there aren’t many gates in the corridors. The heavy gate is where y’all enter the prison to git to the blocks and where we go for the visits—A and B Corridors. When I got here, I’d leave E-Block and carry on all over Green Haven without being stopped or challenged by a guard, and ah lotta times I didn’t even have to show ah pass at the electric gate by the package room. I’d just appear, and the guard would buzz me in one side. I’d go into the package room area, come back out, and be buzzed through the gate to the other side and return to E-Block. I often got ‘lost,’ kinda, during my first week or two here.”
“Freedom is relative, isn’t it? Still feelin’ lost?”
“I’m a runnin man. Runnin from this and that. You’re runnin too. I can tell.”
Of course, he was right.
One Jumped Turnstile, Two Trials, and Many Long Years
When you spend time inside a prison, you quickly discover that it’s not polite to ask directly about a prisoner’s crimes. Kenyatta wasn’t shy in this regard, however, and anyone who demonstrated even a vague interest would hear about not only the crime that landed him behind bars, but also his views about race and social policy in the United States.
In 1974, ibn Kenyatta was twenty-eight, a young man steeped in the Black Power movement. He was determined to share the plight of African Americans with the world, and so he became a writer, working odd jobs in New York to support himself. At the time of his arrest, he had produced thousands of pages of an autobiography in addition to essays on “The Black Condition” and a volume of poetry entitled Requiem for a Black Dog.
There were no telling indicators that this particular young man might end up in state prison. Then, on January 24, 1974, he slipped through a New York City subway turnstile without paying the 35-cent fare. A transit police officer approached Kenyatta, who said he had paid the fare. In the argument that ensued, the officer grabbed Kenyatta’s arm and they fought. Kenyatta was unarmed. He claims the officer beat and shot him, after which Kenyatta took one of the officer’s guns and returned fire.
The scuffle and shootout left the transit officer and Kenyatta with minor injuries. (A scar is still visible today on Kenyatta’s forehead where the officer hit him with a billy club.) Interestingly, the arresting officer who booked Kenyatta wrote down “assault.” But the charge was later ratcheted up to attempted murder: It was the seventies, and the country’s law enforcement establishment, decrying the “war on cops,” was out for blood.
Kenyatta chose not to participate in the criminal proceedings right from the start, convinced the trial would be stacked against him. When the judge insisted he appear in the courtroom, he arrived wearing pajamas. He told the judge, “This is a hypocritical, racist, corrupt, and unjust system that has endured nothing but misabusing and misusing the people of this country.” He refused to give authorities any information about himself except his name, ibn Kenyatta, which could not be confirmed since he had chosen it years earlier.
The first trial ended in a hung jury. Kenyatta’s legal counsel was of the opinion that the second trial’s jurors wouldn’t have been able to agree if the judge had not insisted they continue deliberations. The trial transcript suggests some members of the jury believed the charge of attempted murder was too harsh, and that a lesser charge of assault would have been more appropriate. Kenyatta was sentenced to twenty-one years to life for the attempted murder of a law enforcement officer. Years later on appeal, a judge reduced the sentence to fifteen years to life, as the defendant had not been in trouble previously with the law.
History, Herstory
When ibn Kenyatta introduced me to his “woman friend” Safiya Bandele in the visiting room that summer of 1977, it was like most everything I have come to know about the pair—utterly unpredictable. When the tall, beautiful woman rose from her chair and embraced me, I was stunned. I’d never witnessed a black woman embracing a white woman behind Green Haven’s thirty-foot walls. They called me “Sister,” and over the years their letters to me have always been addressed to “Sister Marguerite.”
Here are the facts on Safiya Bandele: She and Kenyatta met in 1969. She coordinated his defense committee for his two trials. Today, she is director of the Women’s Center at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. She is well-respected in New York City as a community activist, an advocate for women’s issues, and frequent commentator on the criminal justice system. She and Kenyatta are now planning to marry.
Through visits and letters, I learned even more about this extraordinary couple. Kenyatta was born in rural Alabama in the countryside outside Mobile, one of eleven children born to Emma Lee. He never knew his father, and never heard him referenced. He was named “Class Artist” when he graduated from high school. Shortly after, his mother died, and Kenyatta joined his older sister and her family in Harlem. He began to write and seriously study African American history. He was living with his high school sweetheart when he met Bandele.
Over the years I also told Safiya and Kenyatta about myself. I was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and earned my badge of honor—an arrest record—at demonstrations. An eleventh-generation American from Philadelphia, I have Quaker ancestors on both sides of my family who served as conductors on the Underground Railroad. For a good part of my life, I lived under the assumption that my hands were clean of any stain of slavery.
Then, when I was researching my genealogy in the 1980s, I came across an inventory from the early 1700s, which listed the possessions of one of my ancestors after death. Listed along with farm livestock, tools, and other possessions was “one negro man.” It seems that even among the Quakers—a group that would later play a vital role in the abolitionist movement—there were some who held slaves.
I told ibn Kenyatta about this in a letter. He was surprisingly lighthearted about my discovery, suggesting that he might be the living spirit of this “one negro man,” who in my life would personally represent the issues of the African American experience in these United States.
By then, I was used to unexpected twists and turns in the story of ibn Kenyatta and Safiya Bandele. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when Kenyatta first told me that he had decided to refuse parole.
Inmate ibn Kenyatta stares out the window of his prison.
The Right of Refusal
New York state prisoner ibn Kenyatta has served time under three governors—Hugh Carey, Mario Cuomo, and George Pataki. For nearly three decades, he has been a witness to their legacies as writ in the state prison system. Kenyatta has seen the total number of prisoners in New York state grow from 15,000 to over 70,000. He has watched as new get tough” policies reverberated through the prison system. Fixed sentences, rarely invoked compassionate release laws, and a mandate to grant parole only sparingly mean that, though crime in the state has dropped dramatically, prison population growth has more than made up for the decline in new recruits. That means more prisoners are dying behind bars than ever before.
Also while Kenyatta was behind bars, prisons became big business in New York. In 1988, the state spent twice as much on higher education than on prisons. In 1999, prisons came out $100 million ahead. Some critics of the state’s “prison industrial complex” fear that, as a key component of the state’s economy, prison bloat has come to stay. Others even suggest that the state’s criminal justice policies encourage populous prisons for other reasons—like the thousands of jobs busy facilities bring to economically depressed areas. The inmates of the Mid-Hudson Valley’s “prison belt,” say critics, lie perilously close to the surface of the region’s economy and the awareness of any who care to look closely.
Kenyatta simply doesn’t fit into the current scenario. He has refused parole since he became eligible in 1988, as he will not accept the assumption of guilt that accompanies it. At a time when inmates are far more likely to protest the rarity with which the state parole board releases prisoners, Kenyatta flatly refuses a privilege for which many are fighting. His message of parole refusal is one few people—fellow prisoners and parole officials alike—want to hear. And his protest has been largely drowned out by the persistent drumbeat of political rhetoric that grows louder as the prisons grow larger.
Though Kenyatta, who is fifty-six, keeps a low profile at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York, his writings and art work shake the perspectives of many who encounter him. And both supporters and detractors recognize one basic fact about the man, even if they don’t agree with him. He is standing up for what he believes is right. He has chosen to label himself a “U.S. Constitution Slave,” in reference to the Thirteenth Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Kenyatta believes imprisonment is slavery redefined for the twenty-first century. In its latest American incarnation, he says, slavery has manifested as the highest incarceration rate on Earth. The United States boasts 5 percent of the planet’s population and one-quarter of its prisoners. Many young people of color are given an unacceptable choice: a lifetime of poverty, or a lifetime of crime (with prison a likely outcome). He refers to correctional facilities as “Prison Plantations.” And these plantations, he says, are “no longer just black and no longer just male.” There are also “whites, Latinos, blacks, women, children, old people, all of them locked up.”
For Kenyatta, parole requires an act of ultimate submission: the admission of guilt. Kenyatta maintains that he is not guilty of attempting to murder a law enforcement officer in 1974. He insists that he acted in self-defense. He accepts the possibility that continuing to deny any guilt may mean dying in prison. Several years ago, it almost did. His brush with substandard prison healthcare in 1994 won him more than $1 million in damages, and permanent disability.
Even death in prison is a divisive subject in New York. Despite the existence of a compassionate release program, the death rate in the state’s prisons is much higher than that of most other states. Between 1992 and 1998, only 215 of more than 2,000 who died in custody were released for medical reasons, suggesting that these laws are not invoked as often as they could be. Critics assert that medical parole remains a political, not humanitarian, issue.
Parole of any sort is first and foremost a moral issue for Kenyatta. “Some people would try and convince me it’s in my best interest to say I’m guilty when I’m not and accept parole,” he writes. “But getting out in the streets is not freedom to me. My burden is that of being black. And when I thought of the fact we are born dying, it hurt me for such a long time. I felt betrayed. But there is no escape. We’re not going to live but for so long and I’ve come to terms with this. I’ve realized my life and death can be used in the service of making a point about life in general and specifically about life here on the Prison Plantation. I love life, but everyone I know dies. I won’t be an exception to the rule, but I have a choice. Yes, my journey is perilous. But I’m on loan to the struggle. It’s my destiny to dance this particular dance.”
Relatively few have heard about this prisoner’s unusual stance. He has been dismissed as unrealistic, a dreamer, a self-appointed martyr marching to the beat of a different drummer. Responds Kenyatta: “Maybe that’s true, but I like the drummer I hear. We’re in tune and have perfect rhythm. If others don’t hear my drummer, at least maybe they can hear their own.”
His Life, and His Life Sentence
It was late afternoon when I laid my head to rest against the seat on the train headed toward New York’s Grand Central Station. I’d just spent six hours with Kenyatta, on my first visit in years. It was mid-February of 2002, twenty-five years after I first met Kenyatta at Green Haven’s prison school, and his fiancée, Safiya Bandele, shortly thereafter. The sun was setting over the Hudson as I reviewed not only the day but also the long years of knowing Kenyatta and Bandele. I had witnessed their struggle from afar, and here I was back again, passing through the Hudson Valley landscape I’d loved but hadn’t enjoyed like this for years, rolling on the rails south to the city.
Bare trees streaked by the train window as I was carried past marinas, warehouses, and people waiting at stations. Back at the prison, time had stood still. Even Kenyatta appeared in a perpetual state of waiting.
When Kenyatta first told me about his decision to refuse parole, I knew better than to argue. It was his life, and his life sentence, after all. I said something like, “I suppose you know what you’re doing.” Soon thereafter, I recall remarking in jest to a friend that Kenyatta had the most unusual freedom committee requirements I’d ever encountered. There were no letters to write in support of his release from prison, no public officials to convince. My participation was simple. I didn’t have to do a thing.
In 1988, when Kenyatta was first eligible for supervised freedom, he made it clear he wasn’t interested in cooperating, stating his intent to the parole board chairman. Kenyatta wished to be unconditionally released to the African American community in New York, from whence he came and to which he intended to return and make a significant contribution. He made it clear that he would leave prison on his terms, not theirs.
Then came the year from hell, 1994. Kenyatta fell ill. At the same time, he was scheduled to appear before the parole board, and had declined to cooperate. A guard cited him for refusing a direct order to leave the cellblock and report to the parole board. Kenyatta argued that parole was a privilege and therefore not mandatory, but that didn’t prevent him from spending two days in solitary confinement—a.k.a “the box,” “the hole,” or “segregation.” Bandele and a group of close friends in New York bombarded the warden’s office with phone calls. Kenyatta was removed from “the box,” but the calling campaign continued until he was finally sent to a hospital ten days later.
Bandele’s wrenching account of Kenyatta’s illness describes a man within days of death. Yet he showed no signs of retreating from his parole refusal position. More than one person in Kenyatta and Bandele’s circle of acquaintances dropped their support of what they considered a crazy position. Some hung on. “I don’t like to speak about Kenyatta refusing parole,” says friend and former inmate Trevis “Spiritwalker” Smith. “Not because he’s wrong, but because my place is to be his brother and support him, no matter what choices he makes. He believes in something. So many people don’t believe in anything.”
In 1999, Kenyatta finally appeared before the state parole commissioners—but only to explain why he continued to refuse parole. He wasn’t permitted to read the formal statement he’d constructed. He left with no resolution. His next parole hearing is in November 2002.
“When he saw the eyes on the wall, he jumped back.” Former inmates said Kenyatta’s artwork had the power to inspire—or startle.
‘Sit Up Straight and Exercise’
Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon is housed in the same buildings as the former Matteawan State Hospital, an asylum for the criminally insane. The place conjures images of old brick buildings, straitjackets and shrieks, tranquilizers, shock therapy, and confinement in dark holes from which there is little likelihood of return to the ordinary world. It is a crazy man’s world.
The accoutrements of insanity are long gone, and Fishkill looks like any other prison. Some of the inmates here, however, leave touched with a certain kind of crazy that the prison can’t suppress—Kenyatta’s kind of crazy. Though his influence over the prison system remains frustratingly insubstantial, the effect he’s had on the lives of individuals—directly and through the telling and retelling of his story—are not. “Among people on the inside who are conscious,” says Smith. “Kenyatta is a hero. I am among the people he has taught. He leads through action and life experience.”
Former inmate Vernon “Giz” Giscombe was searching for what he wanted to be—when he met Kenyatta. Giscombe had just taken a class in commercial art at the prison, and his teacher had forced him to enter a piece of his work in a prison art contest. “I did,” he says, “and the piece was stolen by some officers. I was thrilled, almost as if it had been sold.” One day Kenyatta walked by Giscombe’s cell, checked out his work, and told him, “You need to stop playing and apply yourself.” Every night thereafter, Kenyatta gave Giscombe feedback. He in turn watched Kenyatta’s progress on a self-portrait, of his eyes. “One day an officer walked by who hadn’t been on the block before,” says Giscombe. “When he saw the eyes on the wall, he jumped back. That’s how real they looked. I could literally see his hair stand up on end.”
“I thought about who he was and what his art meant and somewhere along the line, I just took off in my art. After I learned more about him, it hit me how he’d lost everything but he’d lost nothing. He taught me how to turn the negative into positive. He never told me what to do, only he’d talk about what was going on, in the present. After I got out, I continued working with art and now I’m a teacher at an after-school center. I use art and sports to identify with kids—forty-two of them. Of that total, thirty-two are fatherless—in prison, dead, or strung out on drugs. I use art work with them, in the same way Kenyatta taught me.
“His example always fascinated me inside the walls. I just couldn’t keep myself from examining who he was and what he was doing,” says Giscombe. “He never lifted weights in the prison yard like a lot of the guys. But I watched him, lift his leg vertical and stretch. And then one of the other guys in the yard told a story about him—some guy who was at Attica with Kenyatta. He told me about how there had been two short poles in the outside prison yard. They had no obvious use and had been there a long time.
“Kenyatta figured out how to do seventy-five exercises with those two poles. He’d go outside and just work on the exercises he made up. Then one day some officers took the poles away. Kenyatta asked why and the guys in the yard speculated it was because he’d found a positive use for them. That story stuck with me, like the story of the eyes. It was another example of making something positive out of what was available. Through his example I’ve learned how to stand and walk upright, just like I’m teaching the kids. Kenyatta once told me, ‘Sit up straight and exercise.’ Now I walk upright because of knowing ibn Kenyatta.”
Meddling with the Course of the World
The situation as it stands today offers some hope that Kenyatta will be released, though perhaps less hope that he will accept the terms. Bandele has been working with African American politicians like New York Congressman Major Owens to negotiate Kenyatta’s release, and several Brooklyn elected officials have taken an interest. Lennox Hinds, the prominent lawyer who handled Kenyatta’s medical suit, is committed to seeing his client released.
All this is true, says Kenyatta. But there are no assurances, because no mechanism exists for his release that does not involve parole. Even an executive clemency application before the governor isn’t acceptable—clemency is merely a shortening of the sentence in which the prisoner is then handed over to the parole board for supervision. And no New York governor has issued a pardon, which erases guilt, since 1945. Nor does parole guarantee freedom. There is nothing on the other side of the prison door to support the slaves, he says, many of whom are broken and damaged, returning to the streets without jobs and running with hearts full of rage. As for himself, Kenyatta says he wouldn’t be completely honest if he didn’t admit to a small reservoir of bitterness held against the injustices of the world—though he resists it.
“I am like the peasant that the Greek writer Kazantzakis describes, who leaps on the stage to meddle with the course of the world,” says Kenyatta. “I don’t need much to be happy. When I speak to other prisoners, it is in this same spirit—of finding happiness and not hurting other people in the process. As far as me going home is concerned—well, the system can do what the system wants to do. The powers that be—they’re able to do what’s needed. It all depends on how much pressure is applied, whatever is expedient. And some people say that the state is not going to budge because I’m a black man and what I’m asking for—to be returned to the African American community through a process of unconditional release—has never been done before.”
“This doesn’t scare me. This doesn’t depress me. It doesn’t make me feel less energetic, less committed. This situation is much bigger than me.”
Author’s Note: Special thanks to Will, the taxi driver who specializes in delivering people to the Hudson Valley’s prisons, and to the men and women of the New York State Department of Correctional Services who made my visit to ibn Kenyatta possible.
Click here to go to Kenyatta’s letter to Marguerite Kearns.
This article was originally published in two parts, on February 7, 2002, and March 7, 2002.
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Statement of February 25, 1999, which ibn Kenyatta attempted to present to commissioners of the New York State Division of Parole:
Parole Commissioners:
A free man in chains. A free man defined by the bars, steel and cages of the New York State prison system. For ten long years i have turned my back on your parole system. Refused to get down on my knees and beg for what is already mine.
There are those among you who say i am crazy. That such a position requires the attention of the state’s most clever psychiatrists. But what would they find, my friends? And what they find, would they then tell that truth to the world? That i am a man, an Afrikan man, who is determined to stand tall on the firm ground of what i know to be right and truth. i stand on my conscience.
You may be puzzled why i call you “my friends.” i do so because we are here together facing a crisis. That dramatic shift in our national economy some years ago so that people of color are now most hard-hit …
—by industry bailing out and going overseas, what they call “capital flight”
—by new businesses locating in suburban areas
—by de facto residential segregation
—by increased rates of minority unemployment or employment in service sector jobs where low pay rates are notorious
This isn’t your personal policy decision or your fault any more than it is mine, but it is the responsibility of all of us to face what is happening. And this cold-hearted reality steels my decision and determination to refuse parole all these years.
It was necessary to get your attention. To bring this critical matter to the attention of everyone to take a closer look.
We can solve the problem of “capital flight” with “capital punishment,” and more of the same of what you have been requested to do—keep prisoners in prison for longer and longer periods of time.
i know the Governor of this state has instructed you to teach us a lesson. What is termed the “6/7 = 85% sentence-served” parole release date. Or George Pataki’s proposed elimination of parole for all felons entering the system (and there’s this sick prison joke which says it would then be even more in your self-interest to hit the rest of us to “save” your jobs).
Still, it is understandable how the manufactured fear of crime makes ordinary citizens want to demonstrate a show of force with law-breakers. It reinforces how force is an acceptable way of educating people. But lawmakers and parole commissioners cannot easily squeeze underneath that mantle of ignorance.
And how can you be so happy in learning that the only way to get crime statistics down is through incarceration? The incarceration of Afrikan and Latino Amerikans, the poor and other minorities? Why should such grim statistics draw applause? And if the recidivism rate points to 40% of nonviolent parolees returning to prison after three years, locking them up has always been the easiest part of the social contract. But where is the necessary social infrastructure in place for them in the community, so that they won’t have to resort to criminal activities?
What ever happened to wise and compassionate government? None of us are all bad or all good. “Felon,” “criminal” and “parolee” have become such dirty and fearful words in Amerikan society. But shouldn’t government also be about the healing of society, not just the enforcer of some of its most draconian laws?
Freedom from slavery is still sought in this country. Slavery continues in our land with incarceration rates the highest on Planet Earth. Did someone actually say 1.8 million and counting? And, thus, the 13th Amendment is alive and well.
The descendants of slaves, most Afrikan men like myself, still go to bed at night with the ring of chains and leg irons in our awareness. Generations of black children are matter-of-fact about seeing their parents in bondage. And lynching has been updated to take place in electric chairs and hospital beds.
i stand here today to remind you that force is counterproductive. Sooner or later someone like myself will say “No.” This is not the way. And others like myself will increasingly turn their backs on a system that is horrified when people beaten down by a shattered economic system become dysfunctional, violent or use drugs to create their own version of The Amerikan Dream.
And it’s not universal when we hear all the colorful talk about a great economic upswing in the Amerikan economy, or see the full-page “Help Wanted” ads in the daily papers, because within the Afrikan and Latino communities there has always been a recessed and depressed, down-sized economy.
i am not apologizing for criminal activity. Mine. Yours. Or the criminal activity of the state and federal government.
We all have to hold ourselves accountable.
i am guilty of jumping a turn stile in the New York City subway system. It was foolish and a rash act of youth. i regret having done it.
But i was supposed to have been issued merely a summons (for “theft of service”) back in 1974, not nearly have my life taken. i stand responsible for defending myself against an officer of the law who viciously attacked me with three of the four weapons he carried. i was unarmed. He had two guns, one nightstick, and a billy club (with lead in the tip). i am fortunate to be here alive to tell this story.
For two trials, during which i entered a plea of not guilty, i refused to participate in what i believed was a travesty of justice. i had nothing. No money to defend myself. No friends in government or the corporate world.
i had nothing but my conscience and a strong sense of what was right.
i went to the courtroom in my underwear to protest my innocence, just like i, over TWO DECADES later, make an equally defiant statement by refusing to get down on my knees before a parole board, accepting guilt and supervision by a flawed and complicit state bureaucracy.
i still insist i am not guilty of the charge. To be on parole would fly in the face of my own conscience and humanity.
You might wonder why i’ve come before you today. Because the time has come for you to hear from my own mouth why we must face this human rights crisis together.
i am not here to ask for mercy or parole, but to speak for myself, as well as for those whose voices have been shattered or muffled. Who does it serve for the great-grandchildren and great great grandchildren of slaves to grovel before you? To get down on our knees, wail and moan about an economic system which has given us a bad check of freedom, as Dr. King would say, for which there are insufficient funds to collect?
When you wave your magic wand of parole, you are merely sending people broken by your prison and criminal justice system back to the plantation fields of Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx, and inner cities all over the nation.
These same thoughts linger among the wives, girlfriends, children, and extended families who stand in lines outside these state prisons, for 100 years that the state prison system has been in place, as they pass through locked doors and accept handcuffs and cages as part of their ordinary reality.
The longer i stay here, the more people will become clearer about the need for us to face this human tragedy together. i am already free and clear in my own mind. And that freedom/self-freedom of mind means far more to me in this lifetime than the possibility of accepting parole supervision on the street.
It ultimately comes down to this perennial face-off of self-interest vs. best-interest. i am ready to face the challenge. Are you?
The following is a transcript of the Kenyatta’s appearance before the New York State parole board on February 25, 1999: STATE OF NEW YORK EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT DIVISION OF PAROLE ———————————————————————————- In the Matter of IBN KENYATTA INST. # 74-A-3701 NYSID ————- ———————————————————————————- TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS at a hearing held in the above-entitled matter by the … Continue reading Before the Commissioners→
The following is a transcript of the Kenyatta’s appearance before the New York State parole board on February 25, 1999:
STATE OF NEW YORK
EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT
DIVISION OF PAROLE
———————————————————————————-
In the Matter
of
IBN KENYATTA
INST. # 74-A-3701
NYSID ————-
———————————————————————————-
TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS at a hearing held in the above-entitled matter by the State of New York Executive Department, Division of Parole, on the 25th day of February, 1999, Fishkill Correctional Facility General, Fishkill, New York.
BEFORE:
COMMISSIONER VANESSA A. CLARKE
COMMISIONER MARIETTA S. GAILOR
PRESENT:
ALEXANDER YANUKLIS, S.P.O.
EDAPPARA MATHEWS, F.P.O. I
ROBERT MROCZEK, F.P.O. I
LINDA W. WHITMORE
COURT STENOGRAPHER
Q: You are Ibn Kenyatta?
A: Yes.
Q: Mr. Kenyatta, I am Commissioner Gailor. With me today is Commissioner Clarke.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Good morning to you.
THE INMATE: How are you doing?
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: All right.
Q: You are reappearing before the Parole Board serving a 15-year-to-life term for attempted murder, A-1, and a seven-year definite term for criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree; is that correct?
A: Yes. That’s right.
Q: You were found guilty of these offenses after trial.
A: Yes. I was found guilty.
Q: Did you appeal these decisions?
A: I appealed, and I also am not guilty of these charges.
Q: What is the status of your appeal?
A: Well, I am still working on it.
Q: So, you have a pending appeal, right, open?
A: Well, yes.
Q: The reason that I say that is because we make a record of our interview here with you today, and that record could be subpoenaed by any court. Now, we wouldn’t want you to say anything on the record that could jeopardize your appeal. Do you understand?
A: Yes.
Q: Now, you initially saw the Parole Board–
A: I never saw a Parole Board. This is 10 years. I decided to come because I wanted to. I thought that you should get a chance–
Q: You refused in 1996.
A: From ’88 to ’98.
Q: Okay.
A: I decided to come today because I felt that after a decade I should see who I am–who was administering over me. And I have a message that I would like to put on the record.
Q: Okay.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Okay, Well, you know, you waited 10 years, more than that. This is your opportunity to say what you would like to say.
A: It is a written statement that I would like to read.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: How long is it?
THE INMATE: Three pages.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: We don’t want you reading anything into the record. If you want us to review that document and make copies of it, we will review it.
A: Well, it is a statement to the February of 1999 Parole Board.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: This is the Parole Board, you are here now, so tell us what you wanted to tell us.
THE INMATE: I have it here, I would like to–
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You can refer to it. Just let us know. Talk. This is a conversation.
THE INMATE: Conversation?
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: We are having a conversation, talking back and forth.
THE INMATE: Basically, it is just dealing with–
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: We are talking to you and you are talking to us.
THE INMATE: It is, basically, dealing with why I have been refusing parole to appear–
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Okay.
THE INMATE: –all of this time. I think that after 10 years, I should have permission to at least acknowledge why I have not been here.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Okay. You are here. Tell us whatever you want to tell us.
THE INMATE: Well, it is a statement. February of 1999 Parole Board. Dear Parole Commissioners, a free man in chains, a free man confined by the bars and the cages of the New York State prison system. For 10 long years I have turned my back on your parole system, refused to get down on my knees and beg for what is already mine, that those among you who say I am crazy, that such a position requires the attention of the State’s most clever psychiatrists.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: All right, Mr. Kenyatta, that’s it.
THE INMATE: You don’t want me to finish the statement?
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You are not going to be allowed to read this, your personal journal, into the record. No, you can’t do it. Tell us whatever you would like to tell us. If you think that you shouldn’t be, as you say, on your knees before the Parole Board, I don’t know where you would come up with such a thing, but if that’s your opinion, then that’s your opinion. You don’t have to–
THE INMATE: It is not just my opinion, you don’t understand the terror that the Board has on the men and women that have to come before you. I mean, they, these are guys, women, are very bad in the street. When they come to this, they are out there trembling. For what? I mean, it is unfair the way that the Governor has set it up that there is six, seven, 85%, most of the guys know when they come in, they know that they are not going to go home.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Well, that’s also the opinion of maybe yourself, maybe others.
THE INMATE: Well, since I’m not allowed to read my statement to the February of 1999 Parole Board–
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Just tell us what you want to tell us. I mean–
THE INMATE: I prefer–it took me a good while to construct this.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Give us your written statement, let’s have the statement.
THE INMATE: Thank you.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Okay. I said that before if you wanted us to read it we will certainly read it.
THE INMATE: As a matter of fact, I don’t think that–if I can’t put it on the record, then I don’t think that I should have anything else to say. I am not looking for parole. I didn’t come here for parole.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Now, you realize that you have to be interviewed before a decision could be made to release you.
THE INMATE: I am not interested in that. I am interested in conditional release. I am interested in the charges of that I was convicted of–
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You realize that you are serving a life sentence, sir?
THE INMATE: I understand that.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You said, conditional release.
THE INMATE: Unconditional release.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You are saying “unconditional release?”
THE INMATE: Unconditional release.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Because there is no conditional release in your case.
THE INMATE: No. No. Got no CR.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Do you want this back?
THE INMATE: No. I want you all to keep it.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: All right.
THE INMATE: So, I think that that’s about it.
Q: That’s all you want to say to us?
A: I wanted to put the statement on the record, but since I’m not allowed to read it, I will just go back to my cell and wait for another two years.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: The inmate has submitted a document, statement to the February of 1999 Parole Board, basically, a personal–
THE INMATE: I think it is important.
COMMISSIONER GAILOR: It is a summary of his feelings toward–
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: The system.
COMMISSIONER GAILOR: Yes.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You are, basically, railing against the system and you feel that being incarcerated constitutes slavery–
THE INMATE: I think it is an important document, personally.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You can have a seat, Mr. Kenyatta.
F.P.O. I. MATHEWS: Sit down.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Unless you would like to leave.
THE INMATE: I am free to go.
F.P.O. I. MATHEWS: They didn’t give you the order–
THE INMATE: If I can’t read it into the record, then I am going to leave. I appreciate, you know, the time that you all gave me.
COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Thank you.
Q: Thank you.
(Whereupon the inmate was excused from the hearing room at this time.)
(Off-the-record discussion between Commissioners at this time.)
DECISION:
Denied, 24 months, 11/2000.
Parole is denied due to the serious nature and circumstances of the instant offenses, attempted murder, criminal possession of a weapon, third, wherein records indicate that you shot a transit officer four times, resulting in his incurring serious physical injuries. A complete review of your record and your statement to the Board, dated 2/99, has been reviewed and considered. This Panel believes that you are an unacceptable candidate for release to parole supervision.
Parole boards across the nation routinely refuse parole to prisoners, but prisoners rarely refuse parole when it’s offered. There are cases on record, however: In Colorado in 1996 and 1997, more than 2,500 prisoners refused to attend parole hearings to protest what they considered harsh parole guidelines. Often prisoners choose to serve their maximum sentence … Continue reading Parole Refusal→
Parole boards across the nation routinely refuse parole to prisoners, but prisoners rarely refuse parole when it’s offered. There are cases on record, however: In Colorado in 1996 and 1997, more than 2,500 prisoners refused to attend parole hearings to protest what they considered harsh parole guidelines. Often prisoners choose to serve their maximum sentence rather than be subject to parole supervision. (With a five-to-ten-year sentence, for example, they would prefer to serve the full ten years rather than accept parole and be out on the streets after five.) These examples amount primarily to silent protests behind the scenes, and on many occasions involve individuals who maintain their innocence.
I have always been interested in ibn Kenyatta’s artwork and poetry. They help me grasp, in small measure, his perspective and experience of living in a black skin. In his view, race was merely a matter of which of us was sprinkled with the most pigment at birth. Throughout his prison years Kenyatta has used … Continue reading Kenyatta’s Artwork→
By Marguerite Kearns
I have always been interested in ibn Kenyatta’s artwork and poetry. They help me grasp, in small measure, his perspective and experience of living in a black skin. In his view, race was merely a matter of which of us was sprinkled with the most pigment at birth.
Throughout his prison years Kenyatta has used his art, writing, and other creative pursuits as a distinctive form of commentary, one filtered through the prison experience. Both his drawings and poetry address the human condition, oppression, and the power of the individual in social change. Curators of his works use “social justice themes” when describing his art.
For example, “The Judicial Lynchin of Eve” is a 24 x 28 charcoal drawing of a silhouetted young African American girl, Eve Postell. In 1978, at age fourteen, she was sentenced to 114 years in prison for murder. The image includes prison bars, shackles, and an earring forming the letters 114.
A drawing of the late Billie Holiday has the lyrics to her song “God Bless the Child” sketched over her beautiful, ravaged face. A 1979 drawing of Safiya, “Black Graffiti,” includes dozens of “terms of endearments” surrounding her face.
"… it was a special day. i had gone to the library on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn where i often went durin the week to study. it wasn't far from our apartment. on this particular day back on 29 January 1974, the whole day seemed strange."
By ibn Kenyatta
September 30, 1993
8:25 p.m. Wednesday
dearest M.—
… it was a special day. i had gone to the library on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn where i often went durin the week to study. it wasn’t far from our apartment. on this particular day back on 29 January 1974, the whole day seemed strange. i discovered this book by John H. Williams, The King God Didn’t Save. it was on the assassination of Dr. King. in it Williams described how when the bullet hit Dr. King it tore into his chin and goin down penetratin into his chest and explodin. it was as if i could actually see the bullet as it travelled down inside of his body as i read. when i left the library at about 3:30 P.M. or so the sun was bright, so bright with its accompanyin sharp dark shadows. the brightness was almost blindin to my eyes. people of the street who i didn’t even know were speakin to me as i made my way to the apartment.
when i reached the apartment there were two guys there with B. one i knew from my days in D.C. with the organization. the other guy i would later learn was merely some cat he’d met on the street and got the guy to take him to my apartment. the guy i knew from D.C. was rollin up reefer on the livin room floor. the other cat cut out as soon as i got there. i took ah joint and got high myse’f. the guy from D.C., Marlowe, asked me to go back to his hotel with him where he was stayin off 42nd Street. he told me that he didn’t know his way back to the hotel. it was his first time to n.y. city. i just wanted to go to the dojo and workout. but i left with him anyhow. ‘gainst my own better judgment.
as he and i walked up Sterling Place toward Utica Avenue , there was this lil boy i used to always play with each day, sittin in the middle of the sidewalk. he looked at me so strange. he stared at me. his eyes were big, full, and focused, as tho he was seein ah ghost or somethin. his stare made me feel strange, uncomfortable … scared. he knew me, but he looked at me as tho i was ah total stranger to him. as i got close to him i stepped over his body, touchin his head with my hand as i passed. he continued to look up into my eyes without sayin ah word. i smiled ah weak smile at him. i wanted to stop right there and run. just run. run back to the apartment out of fear. somethin was wrong. i had kissed B. at the door, tellin her that i would return in ah lil while.
i haven’t been back since that day, Marguerite.
i went to his hotel with the bro from the street and he took out ah hit of mescaline (acid). i was already high from the reefer earlier at my apartment. now after droppin the mescaline i began trippin. i lost faith in Man that nite. he & i boarded the subway together headin uptown to Harlem to see another brother who was also in D.C. with us. this guy abandoned me on the train – i was trippin. i woke up some time much later, somewhere in the Bronx.
by the time i hit 149th Street & 3rd Avenue, where the shootout took place in the subway, i had stopped trippin, i was just tryin to git back home to Brooklyn. i just wanted to git back to my bed and sleep. i had carfare & ah train token when i approached the subway turnstile. i also noticed the transit cop on the platform with his back to me talkin to someone. i walked thru the turnstile without payin. i heard this loud, seemin’ly death defying screech from my back: “He didn’t pay his fare!” the transit cop turned around as i was passin thru the turnstile. i was thru. but i left the damn thang cocked in ah way that chu could see that it was still in the open position. i rushed off to the edge of the platform, waitin for the come down.
the black woman in the token booth told the high sheriff that i had beaten the fare. after ah few disagreements between us as to the status of my bein there on the platform – the transit cop attacked me on the head with his night stick. he is “white.” i am Black. it is approximately 2:30 a.m. on 30 January 1974. i was knocked unconscious. i only came to after repeated blows to the head from his nightstick & billy club (… leather strap with the metal at the end).
i took one of his guns and shot at him, hittin him in the legs, as he ran away. i couldn’t really see him b’cause of the amount of my own blood in my eyes. he hid behind ah solar can on the platform and fired two shots at me from his second handgun he carried in ah leg holster. i fell on the platform, blood shootin outta my skull. i came to with two cops kickin on my body to see if i was alive or dead. there was ah small grayish-red mound of blood, the shape of an anthill, on the platform in front of my eyes as i lay there contemplatin the rest of my life. actually i was thankin that it was my brain i saw before my eyes and i thought about how i wanted to die.
the two cops picked, jerked me up and as they were takin me out towards the steps, we were met with about eight other “new york finest” runnin down the steps to git me. i was thrown into ah corner of the station and they, all ten of them, tried to stomp my brains out. i fought them lyin on my back, lahk Bruce Lee, to ah stand still. i landed on my back with handcuffs on and i was kickin at them so fast and strong that they couldn’t git close enuf to me to hurt me. i was lyin there lookin at my feet moving and they jumpin back and tryin to git near me … it was lahk it was all happenin in ah dream. “take me to fuckin jail!” i said to them. they stopped. grabbed hold of me and drug me up the steps. when we got to the top, my head emergin from the subway, i saw all of these bright headlights to the po-lice cars.
i thought to myse’f: who are they after? my feet hit the last step from the top. and the rest, as they say, Marguerite, is history …
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