Berlin and Me

I am reading the works of Isaiah Berlin at the moment. I began rereading his famed essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" last night in the bath. I really understand him. It is one thing to follow a phiosopher's arguments--to grasp what he is saying, to place his thought within the history of ideas, etc. But it its quite another thing to truly understand one. To understand a philosopher is to find that there is a part of one's own perspective that squares with his own. It is to recognize affinity, a kind of unity of vision. Nevertheless, this is a troubling thing for me because I am reasonably sure that Berlin has been rather misused in the history of ideas. Because he argued for a prevailing philosophical understanding of the world in a time when this understanding was acheiving fame and success in the social and political world wherein he lived and thought (in contrast, for example, to the New Left, whose philosophy, while popular and deriving force from the socialist/communist world, was nevertheless a critical, oppositional philosophy), his insights have been cheapened and streamlined in order to reflect the state of the world as is. My commitment, aboveall, is to change the present state of the world--and yet here I am looking into the soul of Isaiah Berlin and fnding a part of my own there.

Obviously, I can simply claim that Berlin is misunderstood. But that would be dishonest. In a real sense Berlin was a proponent of the liberal-democractic world of which I remain at best a skeptical critic. However, in a real way I need Berlin to remain a good skeptic, a critic committed to building up rather than simply tearing down. I really think that intellectual maturity consists in the simple ability to read and to understand disparate intellectual traditions, and to begin to think their concepts at the same time.

A Note to Self

A week ago I was sitting in a cell. Two days ago I was riding on this bicycle with Mer. Today...

Back in the USSR

In June of 1976 the Beatles released "Back in the USSR," a parody of Chuck Berry's tune, as well as of the Beach Boys, but actually referring to a particularly bad flight the band took from Russia back to Britain. When I was working at a sheet metal shop in prison I used to hear it a lot on the radio for some reason. Ironically, I have frequently described to people asking me what prison is like by drawing an analogy between the Soviet system and the prison facility.

Prison has it all--the Gulag, Big Brother, a tight, centralized, top-down, authoritarian government, a strictly regulated economy and repressive social and cultural system, as well as a thriving black market. It is also bleak and metallic ("Stalin" means "Steel"), homogenous and sparse--the product of an idolizaiton of sheer, raw power at it's most explicit.

Most of the time, responding to my friend's questions, I felt sort of like George Kennan, writing my long telegrams from this totally alien place, grasping for analogies that a member of the "free world" would understand.

Because it is not until one has lived in a totalitarian-authoritarian system that one fully understands it. Not until it begins to work on your identity, eroding away one's intrinsic sense of individual significance, that one begins to grasp the gravity of what it means to be controlled by a system.

When I got out I felt agoraphobic for a week. Men in black suits, or Crown Victorias were under-cover police folloowing me, waiting for me to slip up. Although these feelings were brief, and I immediately recognized them as silly and irrational--the fact remains that I actually experienced them. What were perfectly normal reactions in prison were silly and irrational in the "free world." This has been both profound and disturbing at the same time.

Coming back into the world of "freedom" has been an immense shock. More shocking however, for me, has been the realization of how consensual I had been to the state of the world before I was so abruptly rended from it.

An Occasional Glimmer of Light

On 28 December 1944, Dietrich Bonhoffer was permitted to write his mother a letter from his prison cell at the Gestapo prison on Prince-Albrecht-Strasse. He told her he had to write quickly, as the post was about to go out.

"Dear Mother, I want you to know that I am constantly thinking of you and Father every day, and that I thank God for all that you are to me and the whole family. I know you have always lived for us and have not lived a life of your own. That is why you are the only one with whom I can share all that I am going through...Thank you for all the love that has come to me in my cell from you during the past year, and has made every day easier for me...My wish for you and Father...and for us all is that the New Year may bring us at least an occasional glimmer of light, and that we may once more have the joy of being together."

There are some, in the inscrutible will of God, who are vouchsafed those occasional glimmerings of light, and those who are not. I remember first reading these beautiful and simple words of Bonhoffer to his dear Mother in juvenile hall, then again in County Jail, and again in prison. They have always meant much more to me than a simple expression of a son's maternal devotion. They resonate in my soul in a special way that I have never really been able to come to terms with.

I wrote a letter the day before my release, a release which was by no means certain, wherein I tried to express what those glimmerings have taught me over my long captivity:

"My hand trembles as I write. The anticipation, the longing, the fear. I pour my soul out to God this night--in gratitude as much as in supplication. I had this realization today--it fell out of the sky. Blessing amidst the pain. Joy in the midst of sorrow. Today, tonight, this last night, the words are all gone. I am rendered speechless by His Face. He has been teaching me this moment, what it means to love as He loves. The love of God--as simple as that. To live amongst, share the plight of, the very life of, the unlovable, in order to see wahat love means and how it feels in His eyes, in His heart...in the Dark Face of God there is joy, limitless joy..."

The ecstasy of light. Light swallowed up by the Dark Face of God. Why me? Why have I been spared? Why am I spared while others are sacrificed to Evil?

The depth of this question...so deep it threatens to swallow the light from those glimmerings that have ignited my soul and have kept it burning through a very dark night indeed.

Disorder

Prison authorities call it maintaining accountability consistent with a structured environment. This defines prison—the perpetual prevention and suppression of disorder.

“The leper and his separation; the plague and its separations. The first is marked; the second analyzed and distributed. The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies—this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.”

It is fashionable to call prisons, ghettos, and anything blighted or depressed areas of social exclusion. But exclusion implies a throwing away, a pushing aside, but also a turning aside. It implies a kind of disregard, a removal from the map of modern knowledge and study. This is ironic, since prisons, ghettos and places of blight and depression are some of the most studied, monitored, and observed areas of society. Foucault, then, is right to call them places of social discipline. But he doesn’t make an absolute distinction. He synthesizes the two:

“to the space of exclusion of which the leper was the symbolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) [was applied] the technique of power proper to disciplinary partitioning. Treat ‘lepers’ as ‘plague victims’, project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the confused space of internment, combine it with the methods of analytical distribution proper to power, individualize the excluded, but use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion—this is what was operated regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning of the nineteenth century in the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school, and, to some extent, the hospital.”

Isn’t Foucault intense? The active and passive aspects of power, of the power-ful, driven by the social fear of all forms of disorder, including, of course, criminality.

Apollonius locking down the Dionysian districts of society.

Total disorder is never good; but neither is total discipline.

The Jungle

Quid Pro Quo

Prison culture would be fascinating if it weren’t so deeply disturbing. The shallow stereotypes don’t even begin to explain the complexity. This is not surprising, considering the long list of disincentives for social scientists or cultural anthropologists to engage in the kind of participatory studies necessary to illuminate the minute complexity at work within prison subcultures.

Prison culture is unique because it is completely synthetic. It’s a pre-fab culture, a function of the criminal justice process, its landscape and macrodynamics wholly determined by a centralized authority external to the cultural participants. The culture precedes the people. It is a little bit monastery, a little bit colony, a little bit Soviet central planning, but unique in that its unifying characteristic is what criminologists call antisociality—the cognitive-behavioral departure of the individual from the norms dictated by a given social system, enshrined in it’s code of law.

What this means, among other things, is that prison culture bears on its surface that which most other cultures keep hidden deep beneath the surface. Prison culture is the inside-out boy of cultures. The honesty begins with their formal titles: “Correctional Institutions.” The candor has never ceased to amaze me. It’s everywhere. I remember recently seeing a staff member proudly displaying his favorite California Correctional Peace Officers Association T-shirt to some of the wards under his charge. It boasted a large print on its back depicting a Panther or Cougar with large, blood red eyes, growling behind the bars of a cage. Under the picture a commentary was offered: “It’s a jungle in here.”

We, of course, are the fearsome beasts behind the cages with the blood red eyes living in the “jungle.”

Tocqueville, it will be recalled, came to America to study its prison system. He was perhaps one of the first to draw conclusions from his observations, not merely on the antisociality which is ostensibly the raison det re of the prison, but on characteristics of American society. He definitely saw that studying the prison provides insight not only into the prisoner, but into the jailer as well. Foucault famously tried to do this by defining society through the prison and prison terminology.

“Hey, shoot this next door dawg. Good lookin’ out.”

I take the small scrap of paper from the narrow crack in the electric door and pass it through an identical crack in an identical electrical door immediately to my left. I have just engaged in a vital cultural practice of prison life—which might be called, if anyone cared to study it, the quid pro quo system. This is a curious practice that cannot be accurately defined according to the usual scholastic stereotypes utilized to elucidate prison culture.

Let me summarize the complex dynamics underlying the practice. First of all, the note was passed from a Hispanic to a Black by way of a White ad hoc courier (these color distinctions are absolutely basic in prison). The Hispanic ward initiated the quid pro quo fully aware that his request would commit the White ward to breaking a prison law infraction, although only sporadically enforced and carrying minor repercussions. The White ward was also fully aware of the minor illegality of the favor being requested of him. But, after observing that the object to be passed was innocuous and neutral (a small drawing, probably a tattoo pattern), he calculated that, in this instance, the benefits clearly outweighed the risks. Ordinarily he would not have thought much at all about this simple task, especially had it been a neutral transfer, that is, if he had been asked to pass the object from one Hispanic to another, intra-racially.

What is interesting about the quid pro quo phenomenon is how it resembles, in an inside-out kind of way, the complex race relations that govern society in general. Whereas in prison segregation is an open secret, all but enshrined in the structure itself; in society it is no less a reality, but it is a concealed reality, an unspoken status quo.

We are deeply disturbed when we SEE the overt segregation and accompanying cultural practices in prison culture. But we slumber on in blissful disregard about the covert segregation that defines our own communities, precisely because it remains unseen.

Why? Why are we so chronically unconcerned about the “jungle” that is our own society?

Then and Now

Are youthful offenders today fundamentally different than they were 20, 30 years ago? Much ink has been spilled on this question, and many an editorialist has met a deadline with stories sensationalizing the leaner, meaner youth criminal. Neologisms have been constructed (think “supercriminal”); panels assembled; laws reinforced (think proposition 21 in 2000, or Jessica’s law in 2006). But what of it?

The question came up recently. I was engaged in a discussion with a couple of retired juvenile justice system administrators, two Latino men in their early 60’s. We were discussing the current challenges facing the reforms (a favorite subject lately), and they were rightly pointing out the two biggest obstacles facing the system: cultural resistance to change among the staff population, and ubiquitous violence among the ward population. I responded, “Yeah, but what’s new? The system has known this for years, through several reform cycles. What makes you think there are now real solutions? What in the current reforms (which are conventional enough) makes us think that the system will respond differently?”

One of these elder statesmen of system shuffled in his seat, obviously riffled, and replied thus to my admittedly dismissive objections, “What we need is respect between staff and wards. A respect initiated by the staff and reciprocated by the wards—we used to have that in the ‘70’s, but this generation of staff and wards are different. (At this point he went on a lengthy tangent about the identically immature behavior of staff and wards. “They just wear different uniforms,” he said.) There is less respect. The wards are more violent, more fearless. They don’t respect human life.”

This is a common enough perspective, despite the fact that juvenile crime has actually hit record lows in the last decade or so (though recent data indicates a rise, especially in middling cities like Oakland and Baltimore).

I responded, “ But what’s the difference between a youth in the ‘70’s and a youth in 2006? Fundamentally, nothing…” I was immediately cut off by the other retiree, who interjected, with a wisp of aged condescension, “I personally disagree. Like my partner said, these guys are really different from the guys I dealt with thirty years ago. Drive-by shootings didn’t exist back then. You would have innocent children being killed by stray bullets back then (referring to a recent shooting that killed a three year old girl in Pomona, CA).”

I never got a chance to develop my argument. But as I sat there, silenced by forced veneration, I began to question my own opinion. Have youthful offenders really evolved as criminals over the past 30 years? The system has certainly changed. It has become prisonized to a degree unimaginable in the ‘70’s, and the average ward has indeed become younger, meaner, angrier, more reckless. The streets seem to have become meaner too, more disorganized, more brutal. But has a fundamental change occurred, and if so, would we even be able to detect it?

I still think there is no fundamental change—social conditions have perhaps become more acute (think the crack baby phenom of the ‘80’s as one example, the swelling of the underclass as another); but this seems to be a quantitative change, one of degree that has not, as yet, effected a more basic change in quality. But that said, the old solutions may nonetheless be obsolete (or perhaps they always were).

Youth criminals are more intense today, expressions of a more desperate social condition, but not different. Drugs, especially hard drugs like Meth play a huge role, as do guns. These factors change the face of crime and the criminal, and raise the stakes exponentially—but they do not, or have not as yet, changed the kid.

The question we need to be asking ourselves is not the qualitative one. In fact, to go down that road, I am convinced, would be perilous. I am sure that it would lead to the dissolution of the Juvenile System altogether—something we might already be seeing (the juvenile system is now literally a mere department in the adult corrections system). In all of our discussions, we must be careful to constantly reaffirm the fundamental difference between youth and adults. That, in fact, should be above all our greatest interest.

Over the Wall

I am looking out my small wedge-shaped window—inmate proof window, a product of the increasing specialization of prison-building developed over the course of the past 20 years. (Some have called the 20^th century in America the century of incarceration. The Economist published an article recently referring to America as the Land of the Unfree.) The window is of the fashionable neo-medieval, an archers slot reborn as an escape-proof window.

I am looking out, beyond the razor wire, at the sparkling lights on the hills, suburbs about a half-mile away. They might as well be a thousand miles away, though. I look out at them every night, and they have become painful symbols of all that I am not, all that I cannot have, all that I have been forcibly removed from.

I have a German friend that remembers peering over the wall dividing East from West Germany as a child. She remembers seeing, from time to time, women just like herself, peering back at her, bags or children in their arms, with longing and resignation in their eyes. She remembers feeling sorry for them. She understood, even as a small child, the deprivations they endured on the Eastern side of the wall, only a few yards of concrete and razor wire between them. But she too felt that short distance represented a huge existential gulf.

I am staring again now, imaging myself to be one of those women, peering back with a torn spirit—longing, yet deeply resigned (the most painful docility). Is anyone peering back at this moment, thinking about the deprivations endured on this side of the wall?

My friend has frequently spoken of that experience as formative—teaching her the brutal absurdity of man-made divisions. Perhaps it was the immediacy of her encounter, her proximity to the wall, the fact that she could see the women’s faces and read their eyes; perhaps it was this immediacy, this contact, that taught her the lesson.

Or rather, forced it upon her mind. We must never forget that we build walls, in part, to forget. To shut out. To ignore. Ignorance is blissful because it has very high walls.

Walls, in this sense, are a failure of the human spirit. We build them so that we cannot see the woman’s face, or read her eyes. If we do not see, we do not care.

Walls are necessary I guess. Yes, they’re necessary, just as long as they are not absolute. Walls can indeed be beautiful. So long as they have doorways…

People and Productivity

The first time I heard the phrase, I was probably in the womb, my Mother probably watching the latest criminal justice sensation story on TV. That's how immanent the concept seems to me anyway.

It is one of those phrases that slips continuously into social consciousness, an unconscious mechanism in liberal-democratic societies (a-la-Borat, read repressed) that controls widespread social panic , euphemistically addressing a society's carefully hidden doppelganger--the antisocial.

Nevertheless, it took me years of incarceration, of crossing into the forbidden territory itself, to come to a full understanding of its meaning-in-use.

It usually comes as a great rhetorical flourish ending an inspiring speech made by someone in authority. To these people, it is the last word par excellence--the essential message to the enemy, the basic Gospel to the benighted heathen, the critical freedom message of Voice of America. It is to them like the musical flourish--a twitter really--to the Baroque Symphony; like celebratory gunfire to sub-national third-world militias; like the Aaronic Benediction to the Catholic Mass.

"...so that they might become productive members of society."

There it is in all of its anti-antisocial beauty. If I could I'd embark on a great etymological dig to uncover the first use of this blessed phrase, and its first benevolent application to the benighted criminal. Like Foucault, I would excavate the historical record and find where it all began, where the public mind initially contracted its peculiar viral strain.

There is no doubt some great mystery about the whole of human society hidden in that archaeological record---a deep and all-pervasive essence that has contributed a part to the very fabric of the contemporary social system.

Reducing the role of criminal rehabilitation to social productivity reveals, apart from an all-pervasive capitalist thought-world, the cynical nature of of the current correctional regime. A productive member of society, in this view, and which is borne out by reality, can be a subsistence wage earner who never finished high school, and lives the entirety of his life in a disorganized, disadvantaged community. This is a legitimately productive rehabilitated criminal in the system's view. Productivity, thus, is exposed as a euphemism for benign underclass.

Nevermind that subsistence wages, lack of education, and underclass status are all leading factors in criminality. That's clearly not important--what's important is reducing crime!

Incredibly, the authorities do not see the connection, nor the contradiction here...

More on this later.

Rule by Nobody

Hannah Arendt once defined bureaucracy thus. And she said of it, "If we identify tyrrany as government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done." What she says next is as striking as it is relevant to the basic dynamic of prison society: "It is this state of affairs, making it impossible to localize responsibility and to identify the enemy, that is the most potent causes of the current (written in the 1960's but just as relevant today) world-wide rebellious unrest, its chaotic nature, and its dangerous tendency to get out of control and to run amuck" (Arendt in her essay "On Violence").

"I want a grievance right f--ing now!" Bang, bang, bang. "Get the grievance clerk down here now ^&5@$!" Bang, bang, bang. This is a daily routine here--the default response whenever a ward feels that he has been treated unjustly. The cards are always stacked against him of course; and I have seen an equal amount of frivolous and legitimate grievances, all following this precise pattern. Welcome to the first step in the bureaucratic process of the youth prison grievance system.

In theory, a polite and helpful staff is supposed to send a competent ward grievance clerk to deliver a numbered grievance form to the ward grievant. He is then supposed to fill out the form, and return it to the clerk who logs it and then submits it to the living unit Senior Youth Correctional Counselor. She is then supposed to exercise all of her competence and training to weigh the merits of the grievance, and deliver the preliminary finding. If the grievant is not satisfied, an appeal process is enacted that basically climbs the bureaucratic ladder of the institution.

In practice, literally anything can happen. The grievance clerk is never sent, or more frequently, he is instructed not issue the grievance. Or the grievant is offered some small pittance (I have seen anything from doughnuts to electronics) in exchange for withdrawing his request. Or the grievance gets “lost” (usually thrown away). Or perhaps its most frustrating fate, it actually makes its way along the prescribed bureaucratic track—and the grievant is patronized, the issue is evaded or ignored through the masterful use of technicalities, staff are defended, and the grievance is finally “resolved”, that is, a higher, ostensibly more competent bureaucratic official proclaims, ex officio, a last and final judgment, whether in accordance with policy or not, and the whole matter is dropped. Usually by that time the grievant is either pacified to his satisfaction, so disillusioned that he gives up with no further objection, or has further demonstrated his immaturity and “acted out”, usually violently, and the issue is therefore transformed into an issue dealing now with the wards own behavior. The buck gets passed endlessly in the process. The faces change, the only consistency being certain favored clichés, taught I think in a top secret ministry for bureaucrats deep underground---“I’m just doing my job.” Or, “I’m just following policy.” Or, “Well, you’ll have to take that issue up with my boss.” Or dozens more instantiations of the same oxymoronic expression of bureaucratic responsibility.

Prison Rule by Nobody is the leading cause, in my experience, of tension, anxiety, and violence in prisons. It underlies every other problem, taints the whole superstructure, and is therefore partially responsible for them all.

Forever Young

"Hey Nasty, your boy C-Loc says what's up, cuz."

"Heeey, what's my boy doin out there Capone?"

"Gang-Bangin!!"

So the conversation goes, night and day. Delusions of grandeur in the minds of socially disadvantaged, developmentally stunted young adults in the California Division of Juvenile Justice. These guys are rapidly budding into adults, at least legally and physically (state jurisdiction delays their legal development into full-fledged adults until their 25th birthday...unless of course they do something really bad).

Beyond physical and legal maturation, however, there is little or no progress. All the trappings of adolescent immaturity--the idolization of Rap stars; unrealistic delusions of impending fame and wealth; unrestrained hypersexuality; utterly self-centered notions of social expectations and responsibilities; oppositional-defiance syndrome-esque perspectives of normative modes of social participation and authority--mixed with histories of abuse, broken homes, drug abuse, delinquency, antisocial attitudes, and frequently, violent crime, reinforced by a youth prison culture that turns these characteristics into a full-blown identity.

Meet the typical ward of the California Division of Juvenile Justice.

Sometimes it amazes me that these are the same kids that California has become so frightened of. A kid that calls himself Capone (after the famous Mobster) is a gang member, but can barely read or write, sings rap songs at the top of his lungs thinking he's the next rapper-cum-entrepreneuer, and whose plan B is to somehow buy an apartment complex in Watts and "sell it for big money to Section 8."

Another who tattoos racist symbols on his arms with pen ink and a staple in his cell ("I just do it dot to dot, you know."), thinks himself a part of a neo-nazi race of ubermench, but who comes to me when nobody's looking to ask for help to pass his GED exam so that he can "get a high-power (that means really good) job when I get out."

These guys, these kids are frightening when they have a gun in their hands. Have we ever really stopped and asked why they don't even believe the hype themselves?

Living among them, being identified as one of them, I know that for most, they turn to criminality, paradoxically, because its the easiest option. Their fears are the fears of children--they don't want me because I'm too different; they think I'm stupid; I don't have what it takes. Many of these thoguhts I had when I was 6 or 7 years old.

I frequently wonder what kind of hell it is to simply lack the socio-psychological (or, as the system likes to call it, cognitive-behavioral) equipment to grow up, to think adult thoughts, to develop a truly mature sense of self. I have read about patients with severe brain trauma, who can no longer recognize the human face qua human face. Is something of the sort also the case with these eternal youth? Have they lost the ability to recognize, identify with, the face of society? What do they see when they look in the mirror? Is acquiring social norms like acquiring language--the older you get, the harder it becomes?

Throwing Carrot Wheels

Sometimes it is nice just to sleep the day away in here. Pull the covers over your head and seal yourself up from this god forsaken land of the caged. The vernacular phrase for this is 'sleeping your time away." It's the tacit, elliptical way in which prison culture acknowledges periodic bouts of depression.

I get depressed whenever I face the prospect of having to stay in my cell all day long. This is the bitter lot of the majority where I am incarcerated, and so I have had the opportunity to watch up close the various ways in which these young guys, most of them just kids, deal with the maddening idleness of day after plodding day of restless inactivity.

Today was just one of those days. For me, it's rare to be marooned on the living unit, so I am mostly glad for a day here and there to myself. I use it to sleep in, read, write, listen to NPR. But today isn't working out--mild depression has set in. So I went back to sleep. I dreamed lucid dreams, about trees and the ocean, non-incarcerated dreams that raised my spirits considerably. About 2:30 PM I woke up again, no longer depressed, though dazed from over sleep. Eyes still closed, I swung my legs off the bed, determined to be productive with the latter part of my day. Stepping down, I feel something strange beneath my feet. Wet. Circular. Cold. Did I spill something last night? I open my eyes and look. I laugh. Reaching down, I pick up a pen and paper, and now here I sit, writing about the dozens of carrot wheels strewn across my floor.

It would be funny if it weren't so sad, irritating if it weren't so indicative.

Now picture this. Some poor 19 year old kid, locked all day in a tiny, filthy cell, too poorly educated to occupy himself with writing or reading, too developmentally stunted to see the sheer juvenility of sitting on his floor, slinging carrot wheels out of his door and into my room across the hallway. Meet my neighbor across the way.


He is undergoing the rehabilitative program of the California Division of Juvenile Justice.

Now ask me why, when this kid finally gets out of his cell, he picks a fight on the way to school. The first guy he meets, just wham, its you today buddy.

He doesn't understand his anger, his frustration. He just knows its there. Just like the guy walking towards him that he's about to attack.

The Adjudicated Vote

I stayed up late on election night, listening to the voter returns. What an incredibly disconcerting experience listening to an election in prison. Why? Apart from obvious reasons, I would wager that a majority of the hundreds of guys here were simply unaware that an election was taking place. True, that’s not much different from society in general—a majority of Americans, though probably aware that an election was taking place (who can escape the TV ad’s?), did not even bother to vote.

The real difference is that there were also many guys in here who would have liked to vote, but neither had the means nor the will to violate institutional regulations to get registered, procure, and then send in an absentee ballot.

De jure, as adjudicated minors, wards of the state are eligible voters. But de facto, they are disenfranchised voters, denied the power of the vote by the failure of the DJJ to promote and facilitate voter registration and absentee ballot availability.

I don’t think it’s a grand conspiracy to suppress the adjudicated vote. Frankly, I don’t think the system is that smart. Nevertheless, elections have come and gone here, and nothing is said or done to advertise the fact that these guys could vote if they wanted to.

This is very sad indeed. There is nothing that exemplifies more the value of the citizen, the power of the individual, the right of the person, than the power, the right, the responsibility, the privilege of the vote. The right to the vote proclaims the right of the individual to claim a place in society, and to expect to be held to account, and hold society to account, for that place.

And so what better exercise can youthful offenders engage in to learn social responsibility, and to be invited into the rights and responsibilities of the social body?

This should be the thought of a truly rehabilitation-oriented system. It is foolish to hope for thoughts from a system such as this…and that is the truly disturbing thing: I am the only one thinking these thoughts.

What have I become?

We get the occasional surreptitious look at newspapers in here, and yesterday I was able to procure the A section of the Los Angeles Times (the November 6, 2006 edition). “A City Strains to Arrest a Deadly Trend” caught my eye immediately. The story featured the recent murder of a 12 year old boy in the city of San Bernardino. It addressed all the classic issues of a city grappling with violent crime and gang activity. But it really got me thinking…

Living in here, completely isolated from the normal rhythms of social life, it is easy, far too easy, to lose touch with what I guess one can call ones sense of social identity. In this enclosed, highly regimented, artificial environment, social identity—which is already pretty eroded in many offenders by their prior antisocial, criminal histories—is further eroded by the total disconnection that takes place—social and psychological--in the carceral process.

I could not believe that I had felt, albeit just for a second, a sense of absolute distance from this mainstream representation of social identity conveyed in the article—the expression of a city wounded by violent crime. I was taken aback by this brief feeling of dislocation, of displaced identification if you will, in large part because I have worked so hard (and have become very proud) to maintain and grow a sense of identification, of belongingness, with my community, and with society. Early in my incarceration, I resolved to consciously resist adopting the prison vernacular and the prison mentality it fosters and sustains (which is characteristically anti-social, and revels in the very de-indentification with the social that I have at great pains worked to maintain). For this decision, I have lived as a vagabond and an outcaste here (a prison social position usually assigned through anti-anti-social conduct, and which is usually hard and very vulnerable), fiercely maintaining my non-affiliation with prison associations (like prison gangs) at considerable personal risk. It is a dangerous thing to remain a non-affiliate in prison—but I considered it more detrimental still, a betrayal of my own social identity no less, to pursue any other course, despite the benefits (safety, mostly).

And so the momentary horror I felt at my reaction to the article--I felt sympathy, but only a thin, emaciated sense of empathy—put me into a brief panic, and caused me to immediately reevaluate the entire progress of the six years of my carceral life.

I calmed down eventually, and began to think clearly. I had not, after all, become an institutionalized prisoner (a ‘docile body’ in Foucault’s phraseology). But I had neglected something. I had neglected, partly due to purely structural reasons, but partly because of personal bitterness at having to live in prison—I had neglected considering the authentic, nonreplicable, perspective of the Other of the carceral process—the very social identity, ironically, I had worked so hard to maintain: the mother, having lost her 12 year old son in a senseless act of brutality; a community afraid to let their youth venture more than a few blocks from their homes; a young boy, missing his murdered friend, barely old enough to comprehend it. I had neglected this perspective, the perception of the community’s Other—which can only be described as me.

I had been so busy in the negative element of the task, fighting off institutionalization, that I forgot the vital constructive element—maintaining an actual identification with society. I had fallen into the old fallacy of thinking resistance a form of construction.

To be sure, much of this can be attributed to the structure of the carceral process itself. How is one to maintain an identification with the social, and with general social values, when one is kept isolated from society? The problem is compounded by the fact that many offenders, when incarcerated, haven’t yet developed fully formed social identities, or worse, have developed distinctly anti-social identities. Sadly, for many youthful offenders, these structural factors are simply too great to overcome. They are caught up unawares, and develop under the influence of the system identities radically antithetical to society, and suited only for prison society—caged selves, literally formed through interaction with the core feature of the prison milieu—the cell.

But youthful offenders must bear some responsibility. And I especially must bear it, having understood my predicament, and in full knowledge of what is needed to maintain an empathic link to society. Still, it is frightening to think that even I am prone—despite my efforts—to moments of capitulation to institutionalization. If anything, it reveals the awesome negative power of social isolation—which is something we must all bear in mind, because every one of these guys will go home eventually. As such, it is in the best interest of society, and it is the responsibility of people like me who have ears to hear and eyes to see, to devise ways of reintroducing to institutionalized youthful offenders the face of society, and urging them, inviting them, to re-identify.

Superman

Superman

Walking around this place, you are always wondering, “Is this guy going to attack me? Am I going to have to defend myself?”

One incident in particular stands out as a particularly instructive case in point.

I was walking from the living unit on my way to college one day, and as I looked across the large field in the center of the institution, I saw another inmate, charging as fast as he can across the field, heading right for me. They call this stunt a “superman”, probably because you’d need that kind of kryptonic speed to actually reach ones intended target. At the same instant, I look over and see the security patrol realize what’s happening, and also start charging through the field on foot and in vans, in an attempt to cut superman off before he can reach me and the crowd I was walking with. Knowing this place, and seeing that superman is Latino, I quickly calculate that, I, being white, am not the intended target. The target is walking directly behind me, a group of African-Americans, also making their way to college. They see superman too, but, simply wanting to get to college, they just keep walking, shifting their books in case superman succeeds, but clearly banking on the security patrol to intercept him before he reaches them. Between his target and superman is a row of bleachers and a low masonry wall, which slows him down, allowing the security patrol to easily intercept him. They knock superman to the ground, dousing him in the face with pepper spray, and tackling him and putting him in cuffs. And all the while, all we can do is keep walking…there’s no sense in doing anything else, nor much of an incentive.

If you defend yourself, you’re likely to find yourself, like superman—hemmed up, sprayed, and sent to a “holding room”, which is a kind of isolation cell-block in the bowels of the regular living units. Though a lot of the guys will tell you that the holding rooms “ain’t nothin”, meaning they aren’t afraid of spending time in them, I think everyone for the most part is afraid of them—they are a powerful tool used by the institution to punish offenders through isolation. The holding rooms are absolutely dreadful places; dark, filthy, and depressing. Before the reforms began, offenders would languish for weeks in these cells.

Such is life in a youth prison. It is a life where anxiety and fear become permanent parts of ones own personality. Despite the fear of being a target from an unknown predator—whether it be a superman or a staff—you just keep on walking, keep on living as best you can a normal life, hoping someone or some turn of events will continue to intercept the threats, real or imagined, before they bear down on you.

After awhile, after years, the anxiety and fear normalizes. But in brief moments of safety and familiarity—like visits with family—the normalcy of your former life comes rushing back. And then you remember where you are.

Little Frankensteins

Since the passage of proposition 21 in 2000, California’s youth offender population has been shrinking. Prop 21 was a tough on crime law passed which enabled juveniles as young as 14 years old to be tried and convicted as adults, and sent to adult prison. Since its passage, most violent juvenile crimes have been prosecuted under prop 21, and many youth now fill California’s adult prisons---many with absurdly long sentences, including life sentences.

The gutting of the California youth prison system has been spun as a success by the Division of Juvenile Justice. But the real story is that prop 21 has effectively reduced the role of the juvenile system to that of serving only those juveniles convicted of lesser crimes—like property crimes. The whole top-tier of juvenile criminals have now, for all intents and purposes, become adult offenders.

This has created a curious new juvenile prison environment---ironically, one characterized by increased violence, chaotic living environments, and the birth of a brand new youthful offender prison mentality.

My time in the system has coincided with this transition from the old youthful offender mentality to the new, leaner and meaner version. When I entered the system in 2003, the average age for youthful offenders in the older institutions (housing offenders between the ages of 18-24) was 21 or 22 years old. This majority set the tone for the older institutions, which was for the most part ordered and relatively mature. These older guys exerted a controlling influence over the younger guys, and kept them from running amok---which was the status quo in the younger institutions (housing offenders under the age of 18).

But as these older offenders went home, and as the new generation of younger offenders with less time moved into the majority, the environment became increasingly chaotic. Before, while the population still affiliated along race lines and gang membership was standard, there existed a chain of command that enabled conflict to follow ordered channels and manifest itself in predictable patterns (staff would work with the older offenders to address conflict, many times preventing prison riots). In this environment, non-affiliated people like myself could do their time with much less worry—could go to college and school without fearing random outbursts of violence, and count on a consistently stable living environment.

But as these older guys became a minority in the system, they could no longer exert the kind of control necessary to restrain the younger, more violence-prone generation. This younger generation began to exert its majority influence, and lacking the maturity and organization of the older more seasoned offenders, chaos began to become the defining characteristic of youth prisons. Racial tension, once checked by older, more rational offenders, began to spill out in chaotic spurts. Riots occurred at random, staff assaults increased, and the youth prisons became extremely violent---much worse because of their chaotic nature.

Now the transition from the old to the new is pretty much complete. And living in this brave new world is everyday becoming more and more impossible. Utterly random acts of racial violence are the norm, and one cannot exit their room without feeling in some degree of peril. It’s nothing like the streets of Baghdad, where such random acts of violence are usually fatal; but the stress that such constant fear produces has taken its toll on many of us---and the worst affected has been the non-affiliated offenders (like myself), who absolutely deplore the racial divisions, the violence, the gangs, etc. We’ve become easy prey in this new environment where it no longer matters whether you simply want to get your education, complete your Parole Board orders and get on with your life. Now, just the color of your skin can mark you as a target.

It has truly become the jungle.

The prison authorities have tried to reign in the chaos by segregating the units, school, and prison work positions by race, and staggering institutional movement so that offenders have only minimal contact with one another if they are of a different race. It has become commonplace to hear the staff on the other end of the phone ask when I move out from my living unit to work “What race is your ward?”

This segregation has only exacerbated things. Now tension builds up to a critical mass in multiple areas all at once---and when it erupts the prison descends into a kind of chaos I never thought was possible.

State of Emergency...

One issue that can be raised by the Governor's declaration of a state of emergency in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation this month (see the L.A. Times article on 10/5/06) is the problem facing the Department's parole services.

Why is the system fixating on out-of-state transfers as an answer to overcrowding, when the overwhelming number of parole violations that send criminal offenders back to prison are of a technical nature? If the majority of criminal offenders are not breaking the law to be returned to prison, then why not restructure parole to deal with technical parole violators with various community corrections sanctions regimes, including community service, electronic monitoring, drug treatment, restitution and fines, and intensive supervision?

The short answer is that the old solution—early release based upon a fixed formula, e.g. 85%, 50%, etc.---has failed. Incorporating parole into the structure of criminal sentencing across the board, without any consideration of parole readiness, spells massive parole failure. Parole, as a transitional supervision and support mechanism, only works on a discretionary basis. But as can be observed in the Juvenile System, it all depends on who is given these discretionary powers. The Youth Offender Parole Board (YOPB), comprised of political appointees, have no experience in correctional treatment, and cannot properly evaluate parole readiness because they are outsiders to the juvenile rehabilitative process. In this situation, YOPB parole discretion has become a tool to be held over the heads of offenders in order to coerce them into complying with institutional treatment. But since YOPB cannot evaluate treatment progress, and DJJ treatment is a mixture of incompetence and failure, it is clear that discretionary parole has its shortcomings as well, especially when tied to a flawed institutional structure.

Sad but true, only a restructuring of the parole system around a discretionary model that focuses on parole revocation prevention through services designed to support returning offenders will be able to permanently reduce the prison population in the only really viable way possible—through actually reintegrating offenders back into society.

In the meantime, of the approximately 170,000 inmates in the adult system at the present, many are parole violators that have not committed new crimes. In the juvenile system, nearly half of all commitments in 2005 were for parole violations. Re-releasing these people to the community would not be rewarding criminal offenders by early release. It would simply be releasing those offenders who have already served their sentence handed down for their commitment offense, but who are now taking up badly needed space because they failed to report to parole, turned in a positive drug test, failed to go to their treatment group, or could not find a place of residence. This hardly raises to the level of releasing early dangerous criminals who have yet to serve their time for crimes against society.

The devils advocate objects: hey, why can't these guys accomplish simple parole conditions? This exhibits a trend of irresponsibility that seems to be the underlying reason why criminal offenders can't be trusted and ought to be returned to prison.

I would reply: Parole conditions as they presently exist are ineffective and unnecessary. Parole conditions should be designed to prevent the recommission of crime, but also ought to be realistic about the limitations of criminal offenders, and establish conditions that seek to benefit and support parolees, rather than simply monitor and control them. If parole was responsive to the needs of returning offenders, its resources could be directed at ways to keep offenders out of jail, rather than on methods designed to send offenders back to jail for the slightest misstep. If parole services do not support offenders and make it their mission to keep them out of jail, then why have parole services at all? Why are we wasting our time and money?

Social Exclusion

The significance of contemporary spaces of social exclusion to the face of modern de-territorialized Muslims in their many contemporary cultural expressions and locales, as outlined in Olivier Roy's book Globalized Islam, got me thinking recently. My thoughts were further focused by Mike Davis' recent book Planet Slums, wherein he outlines with his signature starkness how spaces of social exclusion—from Baghdad to Los Angeles—have become one of the most formative elelments in the political, social and cultural landscape of the contemporary world.

Spaces of social exclusion are not new phenomena. The powerless, the have-nots, the marginalized, the Third World, the urban underclass, and the modern inmate all provide testimony to the multiple forms of social exclusion zones. Their histories, in fact, run deep and wide.

Michel Foucault's seminal work Discipline and Punish on the origins of the modern prison and its representation of the carceral nature of modern social structures, is an excellent example of an historical-philosophical excavation of modern forms of social exclusion, and in particular, of the way in which power/knowledge operates in the complex process of exclusion built into the institutions of the modern world.

I, of course, live in one of the most recognizable of these social exclusion sites—the modern prison.

As a lover of most things moderate, I have had a very hard time coming to terms with this very radical, though disturbingly accurate, representation of the social ecology of the modern world. I find it problematic to approach the subject along the lines of a Foucault or a Davis—Apocalypticism and nihilistic pessimism have never really appealed to my sunny humanistic tendencies. But I have come to learn to listen to jeremiads when their prophesies amount to real depictions of social phenomena.

The incomprehensible nature of the criminal is one of those perennial mysteries that seem to have plagued humanity from time immemorial. And yet, I have a hard time believing that any of the great sociologists and criminologists of the past and present have ever really taken a hard look at durance vile, the last of the great colonies, the subaltern within, the final resting place of the convicted.

Sure, they've identified its ecological profile and primary fauna—the poor urban-underclass minority. But they don't seem to really understand what they are looking at.

This profile should be a deeply disturbing fact. Crime has become a function of poverty and ethnicity (primarily Latino and African-American). The deep contradiction between the idea of criminality as antisocial conduct, and the reality of the criminal as a poor ethnic minority, ought to outrage us. Poor ethnic minorities are not congenitally predisposed to criminality—even the thought is abhorrent. But if crime is primarily a function of socioeconomic status, then is not the fact that the U.S. has the largest criminal class in the world an indictment of the most advanced, prosperous society on earth?

And how can a nation so concerned with the health of its economy, especially with respect to job-growth, continue to bear such an extremely wasteful, ineffective, economically unprofitable system for administering justice and controlling antisocial behavior?

With the nation focused domestically on the health of the economy vis-a-vis Mexican and Latin American immigration—the link between immigration, the socio-economic profile of the California inmate, and the health of the California economy is not being understood. The hidden costs of bad immigration policy is wrapped up in the cost of incarcerating poor ethnic minorities from overwhelmingly immigrant communities, especially in California. Disenfranchising immigrants from American society creates the conditions for urban-underclass criminality...not in first generation immigrants to be sure, but in their children.

Closing the border, building a wall and criminalizing and evicting illegal immigrants is definitely the wrong answer to this problem. Seeing the link between bad immigration policy and criminality focuses attention on the real issue, and points to a potentially viable solution—increased enfranchisement and economic assimilation can mean socio-economic opportunity for immigrant children—which is the surest way to prevent poverty related crime, and provide real incentives to buy into society and play by the rules.

The same solution can be applied to the oldest unassimilated immigrant group in America—the African American community. Indeed, the history of African American's in America since reconstruction is a case study in the wrong way to deal with immigrants (in this case, forcibly appropriated immigrants), and the consequences of a deeply flawed socio-economic assimilation strategy of exclusion and control.

The key to controlling criminality in America is a good immigration policy focused on socio-economic integration. A well adjusted immigrant family, whether first generation or fifth, addresses urban-underclass crime at its root, where socio-economic disenfranchisement breeds an antisocial response.

The Will to Reform

Reading the proposed reform plans recently published by the CDCR-Division of Juvenile Justice (look up the Safety and Welfare Plan, filed on December 1, 2005, which in the DJJ’s own view, is one of the most comprehensive of the Farrell Vs. Hickman inspired remedial plans, and outlines the department’s commitment to fundamental change), is a lot like reading a State Department plan on democracy promotion and the development of free trade in the developing world. The challenges and proposed solutions are nearly identical, since at question is the same basic problem: Institutional failure. Administrative inefficiency and incompetence, rampant corruption, fiscal irresponsibility, etc., are enumerated as the core problems to be tackled by a ‘fundamental’ re-structuring of the administrative and bureaucratic process, mainly through enhanced oversight and funding.


Prisons are indeed much like developing nations in many of their core characteristics, not least in the absence of respect for the rule of law. The irony of this statement, I hope, will be grasped immediately.


Recently I finished reading a book on the subject of rule of law promotion in the developing world, Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge, ed. Thomas Carothers. I was struck by the similarities between institutional development and reform in the developing world, and institutional development and reform in the California youth prison system (DJJ).


In Thomas Carothers’ view (founder and president of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment), historically, the biggest problems facing rule of law promotion have been “political and human. Rule of law reform [succeeds] only if it gets at the fundamental problem of leaders who refuse to be ruled by the law. Respect for the law will not easily take root in systems rife with corruption and cynicism. Since entrenched elites cede their traditional impunity and vested interests only under great pressure…Western nations and private donors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into rule of law reform, but outside aid is no substitute for the will to reform, which must come from within” (pg. 4).


This is an extremely astute summation of the core problem that confronts rule of law reform both in the developing world and in the prison system.


I am sure many of you saw the movie Shawshank Redemption. In my case, I was able to see it both before and during my incarceration. The second time around, sitting there in a prison classroom, I was amazed at how differently the film impressed me. Whereas I had focused on “Andy” before my incarceration, when I saw it a year ago, I became fixated on the prison warden. On a slightly different reading, the warden could be the main character of the story. Nearly every turning point in the main portion of the film hinges on the warden’s activities. His corruption and cynicism become the focal point of Andy’s covert subversion of the criminality of the prison-a criminality most apparent in the lawlessness of the prison authorities. Indeed, the irony the story weaves, of criminals guarding criminals, narrates the sad reality that, before I came to prison, I could hardly have believed was true.


Although the day seems to have passed when a prison warden can orchestrate and temporarily succeed in exploiting his power for personal enrichment, that same kind of flouting of the rule of law that is supposed to ground correctional institutions is very much alive today.


Perhaps it is the extreme disparity in the nature of the power-relationship between prison authorities and inmates that are at the root of this seemingly irrepressible urge to overstep both the letter and the spirit of the law.


Whatever the deeper reasons, for a very long time this rule-above-the-law has operated as the status quo in the California juvenile justice system.


But, since the Ferrell vs. Hickman settlement, a fundamental shift has occurred. The administrative levels of the DJJ have mustered the will to reform. Their change of heart has been truly shocking. They have been truly humbled (nothing like a pro-reform governor and a whole lot of bad press), and now they are listening.


So, what’s the problem?


In Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad, Carothers makes the point that frequently institutional reforms are stymied, not because of a lack of will from the leadership, but because of an entrenched culture of corruption and cynicism at the lowest levels (most clearly observed in many para-military police forces of the developing world). The California juvenile justice system now reflects this state of institutional dysfunction. For far too long, corruption and cynicism have marked every facet of the system; and even a change of heart from above has not produced the kind of trickle down effect relied upon in the reform implementations.


As far as I can tell, the face of this institutional corruption and cynicism is the CCPOA.


As I write, adequate structural and institutional reforms are being implemented by motivated administrations. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the lower levels of the system (mostly prison guards and counselors), are not possessed of the same purpose and will.


There can be little doubt that the root of this resistance are the vested interests and lassitude that for many, many years has leached into the lower levels of the system through the inordinate influence and proxy-management of the DJJ (the former CYA) by the California Peace Officers Association.


CCPOA is not only independent of public accountability, but it represents the exclusive interests of prison guards and counselors in the DJJ (as well as the much larger adult system).


How would you feel if your political representatives were unabashedly more beholden to their campaign contributors than to their districts? If your doctor published on his office door the fact that he was more concerned with your insurance coverage of the medication you take, than its safety and effectiveness to heal? Or, if the judge appointed to your case proudly sported a municipal police badge on the bench?


What kind of political, medical, or legal system would allow for such a deliberate undermining of their most fundamental guiding principles, “service to the people”, “do no harm”, and “equality before the law”, respectively. These are, if you will, the respective “spirits” of the laws of politics, medicine, and the legal system.


It is ironic that each of these principles has been proclaimed in years past and in the present reforms, as guiding lights for the juvenile justice system. It is ironic because it brings to light the extreme fragility of the institutions of the modern world. They stand or fall based on the content of their respective cultures.


It’s the people, people.