“It struck me that day that kayaking on the lake was a good analogy for the way I wanted to live my life on this planet: powered by my own efforts,
gliding in harmony with the forces of nature, moving through water without leaving a heavy footprint.”
These are the words of Gordon Grilz, a prisoner in Arizona; his words, published in the magazine, Orion: Nature/Culture/Place, struck me as well. I liked these ideas about how to live one’s life. Orion had produced a special section devoted to creative works by prisoners, guest edited by Richard Shelton, a man who had directed writing workshops in prisons for four decades. The works—poetry, prose, photography, paintings—are excellent, poignant reminders of the human capacity that is wasted in prison.
Several events have brought prisons to my mind recently, and I remembered my youthful fascination with them. As a teenager, I was upset that the crime of rape was, at that time (1950s), punishable by life in prison or even death. Although I abhorred the crime, I did not think it warranted such a severe punishment. I went on to write a theme on capital punishment for a class at school. I researched the differing practices in the (then-only-48) states, emphasizing the various arguments against it: the possibility of error, the moral unacceptability of killing fellow human beings, the human capacity to repent and return to society a better person, the ethnically inequitable sentencing that occurred, and that still characterizes our system—conclusions I retain.
In college in the early 1960s, I began as a sociology major, a discipline in which crime garners significant attention. I learned more about the inequities of our legal and welfare system, about conditions in slums and prisons, and differential economic opportunities for different races and genders. I became more convinced that such inequities, such injustices, were a major factor in the incidence of crime. I was even spurred to try to visit the main jail in Portland, Oregon; it was on Rocky Butte (also a favorite hill where young people went ‘to park’, ostensibly to view the city lights, but more often a euphemism for the physical sharing of affection). However, I was turned away at the office; the guards said that seeing a young woman would be too disruptive for the prisoners, who were denied feminine companionship.
During most of my professional life, I have had no involvement with prisons, though I have sometimes had occasion to look at crime (prostitution in timber camps, illegal logging in national forests, the labeling of swidden agriculture as criminal by states—none of which led me to developing country jails). But in the last few years, I’ve regained some of my interest in our own prisons. My most consistent reminder has been my cousin, Dr. Nancy Koschmann, who goes every week to a prison in Auburn, NY. She teaches yoga, meditation, and various courses on social science. She is passionate about this work, struggling with unwilling and uncooperative prison officials, rigid and stultifying rules about what cannot be brought into the prison, the unpredictably of some key volunteers, no pay, and a shortage of books for the students. She even sometimes has trouble getting into the prison after all these barriers have been overcome and after driving the 37 miles from Ithaca to Auburn to teach her classes. There are periodic ‘shutdowns’, whenever any kind of trouble might be perceived to be in the works. Yet her pride in her students’ accomplishments is palpable; and their appreciation is equally obvious (see for instance http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=23339034&msgid=135882&act=019E&c=1393191&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fcpep.cornell.edu%2Fgraduation-gallery%2F).
At my mother’s church in Portland, Oregon, there is a group of women who teach prisoners how to knit, as a marketable skill to aid them in their transition to normal life. The church also has an art gallery, well known for the quality of its exhibits, that recently pulled together images created in Oregon prisons. Many were of beautiful butterflies, created using paints made by melting the colors off M&Ms! The prisoners had also made note cards, which the women sold for them as a fund-raising activity—perhaps to buy real paint!
As I read the Orion collection, my thoughts turned to a broader scale. I remember being horrified, as well as entertained by a pictorial atlas in the 1980s (perhaps called The State of the World?), which I cannot now find. But there was a section on prisons in the US, which showed our populace as disproportionately incarcerated, compared to other countries. This prompted me to check on the current state of affairs, and I was again horrified to read Paul Waldman’s 2013 opening statement in an article on prisons, in The American Prospect: “Why is the United States the world leader in sending citizens to prison?” Using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, he goes on to say, “In 1992, there were 1.3 million inmates in America’s prisons and jails; by two decades later, a million more had been added”.
Thankfully, the historical horrors outlined in Michel Foucault’s 1977 book, Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison, which compares recent approaches to those in previous centuries, no longer apply in these American jails. But a different kind of horror, that of the total institution, as described by Erving Goffman (1968, Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates), has replaced the earlier emphasis on physical pain with a more psychic form. The emphasis in these recent prisoners’ artistic efforts on natural phenomena suggest their longing for that connection, so absent in a prison. The increase in incarceration in recent decades suggests that we have made little progress addressing the underlying causes of injustice and inhumanity that spawn crime, allow an unfair police and justice system to thrive, and emphasize punishment over rehabilitation.
As I write these words, I am also struck by my knowledge that many countries deal with these issues even worse than we do! But my own passions are aroused, both because of the waste of human potential that prisons represent and by the injustice that we continue to allow to flourish in our society. The talents of the men who wrote for Orion and of those who displayed their art in the Portland church is undeniable. Can’t we come up with a better, more humane way to mete out real justice?