11.20.09
From the ferry: 11/19/09
It’s one of those nights when I am at capacity. How to let go of learning that a man in our group was sentenced to life–life–at the age of sixteen. What do you have to do to receive a sentence like that? I feel like I can imagine the answers, and still I think…life, sixteen, forever behind bars. Raised then, in essence, by the prison system. I can’t find peace with that sort of justice system. And yet, I imagine, the crime and the victims and I wonder if they feel like life is long enough? How can we ever bring two sides of a crime together? Should we? What choice do we have? This same man is now working with juvenile offenders, he tells us. Trying to help them stay out of prison, avoid his fate. I don’t know what else to do but pray that they listen. LISTEN. There are too many lifers in our group. Too many lives wasted. These men have served their time–forgive me any controversy that statement may cause for some. But they are doing us, society, the free world as they call it, no good behind bars. A man with a seventh grade education is one of the best writers in the class. He tells me tonight that he taught himself spanish and now works as an interpreter inside the prison. In the darkest place these men find a way to give something of themselves, to make something of a life that is so restricted you actually can’t imagine it unless you go there, meet them, listen.
We are letting lives go to waste. I understand the want for punishment, retribution. I get the pain of the victims. I grasp the idea to contain violence. I know it’s complex, so very, very complex. But I’m telling you, some of the lives in there are simply being wasted.
Small things tonight, like the men made sure we had hot water and brought us tea.
Small things tonight like the man who said on the first day of class that he was only there to pass the time, has started writing.
Small things tonight like S-, a lifer and gentle soul from the south, telling me that he is grateful this time of year that he has gotten to know us. And if he had one wish for me for Thanksgiving it would be that I gain a pound. What woman wouldn’t want to hear that–inmate or not?
Small things like thinking these men look to me with my MFA and think I know something, when every time I am up there it is they who teach me.
10.25.09
Know Thyself
Annual training today at the prison. I’ve heard the presentation three times now, and it doesn’t change much. Though the woman leading the training today, I thought, did so in a manner that was more true to reality, as well as more sanity and compassionate based than the others I’ve attended.
The first two trainings I attended seemed mostly to focus on scaring the shit out of volunteers. Maybe that’s a necessary step in the initiation process. First you fear them, then you understand how to work with them. It never worked like that for me. I don’t worry about the men manipulating me (though some of the trainers would say that’s a sign you are being manipulated). I don’t have irrational fears about the men finding me on the outside or asking their family or friends to find me. I don’t have nightmares about prison riots (though when they said today that our emergency contact would be the person they would call in case I a) had a heart attack while inside or 2) if a riot broke out — and I thought, crap, don’t call my mom if a riot breaks out!).
At these trainings manipulation by inmates is typically the topic we spend the most time on. Trainers go through a lengthy list of all the ways the men will try to manipulate us. First by befriending us. Second by being a star student, so as to garner our attention and admiration. Third by asking for favors. Fourth by asking to correspond with us outside of the program. And so on and so on. All of these things do, of course, happen. It can be difficult to know if an inmate is simply a good student or is in the process of trying to manipulate you. You never know, unless something obvious does happen (such as a request to call a family member and relay a message). Even if the obvious happens though, there’s a part of me that has always thought–can you blame these guys?
The prison culture is one of manipulation, power and control. That’s how you survive. It’s also how you entertain yourself in an extremely myopic universe. Their world on the inside is small. They have an abundant amount of time to think about what they want and how to get it. I never assume that any attempt to manipulate me is malicious or ill intended. I always assume this is how they have learned to survive (probably before they even arrived in prison). Which means it’s up to me to be clear about my boundaries.
Sometimes I think this issue of boundaries is part of my reason for working on the inside. I often struggle with boundaries on the outside. Saying yes to too many people. Rescuing friends and family in that way therapists always tell you not to do. Having too much empathy for people I barely even know. But on the inside I have no choice but to maintain boundaries of all kinds. It’s the professional way to run a program and to manage a classroom. Boundaries keep expectations and roles clear. I have to be able to say no at times, otherwise the guys would have me taking home entire novel manuscripts to read and critique and I don’t have that sort of time to offer. Boundaries let them know what I can do for them and what I can’t do for them. If I’m clear, then no one’s feelings get hurt, including my own. So far, it’s worked.
I’ve never wanted to rescue the men in prison. Maybe being a part of a program other than a religious group or AA makes that easier. I’m not out to redeem anyone’s soul, or forgive them their sins or cure of them of an addiction. I’m there to help them look at their life story and write it down. The work is their own and they can choose to do with our program what they will. Right now, for example, we have a guy who on the first night told us he was only there to watch (which basically means he’s trying to pass time, but isn’t all that interested. It’s happened before, we don’t mind). At the last meeting though (our third visit with this group) he was silent for almost the entire meeting and then, as another inmate discussed his story idea, this “silent” man was suddenly participating. Something had touched him and there he was giving feedback. We don’t make a big deal out of it in the group, but we certainly notice. It just works best to let them decide what they want from our program. While I hope that what they want is to re-examine their life and choices, putting them in a new context and thus experience some growth or enlightment about who they are (and can be) as human beings. I haven’t found it difficult to let go of any attachment I might have to that outcome for each of them. We are all a work in progress, right? And we are each on a journey. It’s not my job to rescue them from what they need to experience.
What I most appreciated about the trainer today was that she kept reminding us that manipulation is not a phenomenon unique to prison. People on the outside manipulate. None of the previous trainers ever pointed out this obvious fact, but in doing so she reminds us that inmates are human, using reliable survival skills that we all learn along the way. So, the message I took away today is, know yourself–both inside prison and outside. Know yourself and you will not compromise yourself or your program.
09.25.09
Last Words
Published in the New York Times Op-Eds on September 19, 2009. A listing of “last words” spoken by inmates before they were executed. The friend who sent it to me called it “pretty grim” and the man who forwarded it to her described it as a sort of “grim poetry.” I guess I don’t call it grim, as much as I call it a concise presentation of reality. We all come up on the end of life, one way or another, and there are atonements to be made, forgiveness to be sought, or final pleas to be rendered. The issue of whether or not executions themselves are grim (never mind morally or ethically right) is another matter. But for now I think I’ll let the listing of these last words stand on their own. Make of them what you will. At a minimum these quotes remind me that these are real men we are putting to death. Maybe what is grim is that up until this moment, we so easily dismiss them as nonhuman, or subhuman. Until they remind us of their mortality, and perhaps our own.
08.03.09
Endings and beginnings, part 2
Something ought to be said about moving our program to the Washington State Reformatory. Sometimes I think this move, more than anything else I might have written in the last posting, is the main reason I haven’t written here in so long. I do not like to write about goodbyes. Well, that is not true—my collection of short stories in fact titled, Leaving—so maybe it’s more that I’m tired of writing about goodbyes. Or maybe it is that I find this particular goodbye particularly difficult.
The last meeting we had with our group at TRU was to tell them we were thinking about moving the program after our short summer break. Our reasons for moving the program are valid enough. We’ve done a year of the program with the same group of men. Attendance is dropping as we cycle back through the material, and when a new guy does show up it is difficult to bring him into the fold when all of the other men are so far ahead. As program leaders we are growing anxious for new faces, new voices, new men to teach.
But regardless of the validity of any of our reasons, the simple fact is this: the men at TRU do not want us to go. And they told us as much. Remember, these men are nothing if not honest.
Even more difficult for me is now that we have made this decision there is no final meeting with the group at TRU. When we go back to Monroe in the fall we will begin our program at WSR. There is no final meeting with our original group of guys. No final goodbye. They simply won’t see our program advertised on their bulletin boards and they will know we are not coming back. It seems cruel to me. For there to be no real closure for any us.
The guys are used to this. Volunteers coming and going. Programs coming and going. Forming relationships with people from the outside and then never seeing them again. They are used to this, but I still am not. Maybe the longer I do this work, the easier it will get, these endings and beginnings on the inside. But for so many reasons I doubt it.
06.02.09
Most often the stranger is…someone you know
In his April 21 posting, Better Man writes about something close to my heart as a former advocate for victims of sexual assault and abuse. He writes, “That’s the truly scary aspect of all this—it’s the men you love that are offending your children.” This is such a difficult message to get out. Better Man is correct. It was a rare occasion (if I can even think of a single incident, which, off the top of my head, I cannot) when a victim of a sexual assault came to our office because she had been assaulted by someone she does NOT know. When I was working with victims it was most often a relative—a father, grandfather, uncle—or someone in a position of power—a teacher or babysitter—who was the perpetrator. Typically the assault was the culmination of months of “grooming”, a process by which an individual develops a relationship with the victim so that reporting the crime becomes more difficult. Who wants to send their father to jail? What child would want to say that the man who is supposed to love and protect her is also harming her? The process of grooming is meant to confuse and shame the victim. Perhaps Better Man can speak more to the process of grooming in an upcoming post as I’m sure it’s a topic he discussed in his own therapy.
I’ve been working on the lecture I will give on my experience working at the prison when I go back out to school in July. I want to speak to the reasons why it is easier for all of us, myself included, to be able to quickly deem people good or bad, but how such a system ignores the obvious. Good people can be responsible for terrible acts (and bad people are often capable of goodness). This is often the case with sexual violence. “Good” fathers are abusers. “Good” uncles are abusers. Think about how many times you have heard when a sexual perpetrator is exposed, “I never would have suspected him.” It is so much easier to perpetuate the myth that the man to fear is the stranger lurking in the bushes. It’s easier because in such cases it is much clearer who is good and who is bad. It is easier because it is also easier to point our fingers at strangers than it is to look within our own social circles, let alone our own families.
What the perpetuation of this myth of the stranger in the bushes really does is limit the conversation on sexual violence in this country. It makes the story of sexual violence more Hollywood and less reality, which alienates victims who think maybe they are the only one out there experiencing what they are being put through.
I thank Better Man for writing about this important subject.
05.20.09
It’s all story
Tonight I am prepping to go up to the prison on Wednesday. I’ll be presenting two archetypes found in a hero’s journey, the Threshold Guardian and the Shapeshifter. I’m chuckling about how both describe so well our encounter with the custody officer last time, the one who was so particular about our paperwork. As a guard, he is clearly a Threshold Guardian, a character who stands between the ordinary world and the special world of the hero’s journey, trying to convince the hero to turn back, give up, lose faith in his mission. As a Shapeshifter, he morphed from a guard who is typically welcoming and easy to work with to one who is controlling and penalizing, thus keeping us on our toes, adding tension to our story of being volunteers in the prison. It helps to be able to see the experience this way—as elements of a story. Wednesday night, when we return, we’ll know to be prepared for him to shift again. No experience is the same up there. No rule or procedure firm (as much as they’d like you to believe it is). It’s intriguing to consider that my own personality tends to be one that works to please, not make mistakes, follow the rules and receive praise for not being a trouble maker, so of course I was shook up by the guard’s dissatisfaction with our paperwork. And when our argument that “this is how we’ve always done it” failed (i.e.—reasoning with him failed) I felt as if I had personally failed. But it’s all a game. A constantly changing game. And, strangely, I think it’s good for me. Like the heroes our guys are trying to write about, like heroes who have walked this journey through the centuries, I have to learn to expect the unexpected, to be challenged just when I’m getting comfortable, to be knocked back when the road gets too easy and familiar. That’s tension. And tension is story.
05.16.09
An overdue “from the ferry”
It is time to start making plans to go up to the prison again this coming Wednesday. How do two weeks go by so quickly? At this moment, I am sitting outside, taking in some much anticipated sun and thinking, maybe I need to lock myself away for a few days. Disconnect from the constant hum that is my life as of late and have time and space to think, time to reflect on my evenings at Monroe, time read more books on the prisoner experience and time to work on my own essays about working with the guys at Monroe. It all feels so important and yet seems so impossible to get to. Perhaps this is just the typical whining of a writer — there’s never enough time. Or perhaps once I graduate in July I can truly reorganize my writing priorities and make a real decision about where the work at Monroe falls on the list. Perhaps I just put too much pressure on myself to be able to be everywhere and do it all. It is hard when I have a heightened awareness of the gifts my freedom grants me to feel at times like I am squandering those gifts. I read the postings by Better Man and think — what hell am I bitching about? You want struggle, Erika? Get locked up for two years and then try to survive your release. It’s all perspective, I know. And my experience with cancer taught me that you can’t really compare one person’s life to another’s. It is what it is, and right now mine is full and I don’t feel like I have 100% to give to the guys in our group and I am sorry for that. The work remains no less important to me. It’s just that no one seems to be willing to figure out how to get any more hours into the day, and so I must recognize my limits. Which is maybe one of the lessons of working at the prison. Learn what you can’t do and focus on what you can do.
Our last visit to the prison was frustrating. Or at least, getting in. Suddenly, it seems, we have been filling out our entry paperwork wrong and the guard at the second security station, who checks us through almost every week and knows exactly where we are going, almost refused to let us in because we had not checked one little box. It’s maddening sometimes how the rules change. And sometimes, it’s not even a rule but a particular officer who wants something done differently and apparently thinks you were supposed to read his mind and know it. The trick is, much like the inmates, volunteers are one down, at least, on the power ladder at a prison. If you argue with an officer he can easily tell the community services director that your group has become a problem and just like that your entire program can come to an end. If you don’t fill out your paperwork right (never mind that you’ve been filling it out the same way for a year and a half and no one, including this guard, has ever said a thing) they can deny you entry for the night or send you back to start the security process all over and thus delay your group. As a volunteer you have to make nice. If an officer says you filled out your paperwork wrong, you apologize. It’s frustrating. No one likes to feel stripped of their power, not me and not the guys in our group.
Gloria and I tried to let it the incident rolls off our backs, but there’s no denying we were upset. We work to do everything by the book because we know how the game is played and we want to be certain we can continue run our group. But if I had been anywhere else but in the prison and someone had treated me like that guard treated us I would have been asking to speak to his supervisor. When I read Better Man’s April 14th post in which he writes about the lights of a cop car and the panic attack he experienced simply trying to help a woman get directions I think of our incident last time with that officer. And then I think about safety vs. power and I wonder how much we sacrifice in order to have safety, or at least the illusion of it. Do I believe the officer that night was just trying to do his job? Yes. Do I believe he might have just been having a shitty day? Yes. And I also believe that with great power comes great responsibility (who said that?) and all too often I see those with power forgetting that their first job is to serve, then to protect.
04.29.09
Better Man writes from the outside
I’ve added a new page to the blog (see the column to the right). There I will post journal entries sent to me by a former member of our Hero’s Journey Writing Group up at Monroe. He has served his prison time and is now embarking on the next step of his sentence — probation.
He and I have discussed that he is taking a risk by posting here. While overwhelmingly readers of this blog are considerate in their opinions even if they disagree with me, I recognize that allowing an inmate to speak for himself might be difficult for some. Without me to filter the experience of being up at Monroe, what you are left with is the raw reality — what it is like on the inside and the outside. Better Man, as he’ll go by here, will chronicle, for as long as he feels up to it, what life is like for an inmate recently released from prison. Given that his crime requires he now register as a sex offender, you can imagine that the “outside” is not the easiest place to be. I note that he is a registered sex offender here in this posting because I am sensitive to the fact that some readers might want to choose to not read Better Man’s postings. That said, I hope most readers will choose to read on as I think you will be surprised and intrigued by the story he has to tell.
Posting Better Man’s writings here is in many ways the ultimate goal of my work at Monroe — to bring the stories of those on the outside and the stories of those who are serving or who have served time together. We don’t have to forgive Better Man, or even have sympathy for him, but we can read his postings and try to understand a little better, try to expand our own thinking, question our own beliefs, check in with ourselves when we find his words troubling. He is an honest writer, one of the best writers we had in the group.
I’ll be monitoring comments left on Better Man’s postings and will allow most to post, even if they disagree or take issue with something he has written. I will not however, allow hateful, intimidating or unnecessarily explicit comments. He is here to tell his story, and the only battle I want him to worry about winning is building a safe and productive life for himself. Questions? Ask them. Stories of your own to tell? Tell them. I will also, at times, write my own responses to things Better Man writes. This is how we come to understand one another — by talking.
That said, welcome, Better Man. I, for one, am glad you are here to add to this conversation. And thank you to my readers for taking this risk with me and him.
03.18.09
One year and counting…
March marks a year since I started volunteering at Monroe. A short list of the ways my life has changed since March, 2008.
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left a six year relationship
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house-sat for various folks for 6 months
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finally moved into my own apartment the beginning of this month, which required a move from the north end of the island to the south end
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started a new job, working full time
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finished my internship, which began this whole journey
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began my last semester of school
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continued with my various follow up appointments related to my 2007 cancer diagnosis
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received my first “clean bill of health” March 11, 2009
It’s been a full year indeed. More full than is probably good for one’s mental health.
But there is another list, and that is the list of ways I have changed since beginning the work at Monroe.
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I am more compassionate – for myself, and especially for others.
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I am more aware of the fact that there are multiple perspectives on every story and we are well served (as writers and as individuals) to explore them all.
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I understand there is nothing – nothing! – in life that can be considered as easy as “black and white”.
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I understand that being on the side of “right” is often dependent on the privileges and opportunities with which you were born and to be on the side of “wrong” is often (not always, but often) not a choice but a series of complex missteps and misinformation leading up to a tragic mistake.
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I understand that writing is as an activity most easily enjoyed by those who are “free” to write without censor. What the men in prison do is defy that censorship – at times at great cost to their personal safety. So if you are “free” and a writer, then damn-it quit whining and write!
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I now believe I am lucky, and a little bit blessed.
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I now understand that bad people can do good things and good people can do bad things. Most of the men in our group at Monroe are good people – believe it or not.
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I now believe my writing here on this blog and beyond will one day make a difference. I know that the writings of the man in our group have already changed my life.
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I now know I will do this work forever, if I can, in one way or another. I will always leave room in my life for those spending their nights in a cell.
02.14.09
Resurrection
I’ve spent several hours today reading some of the guys’ work. During the last workshop we gave the following prompt to the guys: When I returned [to the ordinary world], everything was different. Or was it me?
One man gave me the short paragraph he wrote while in the workshop. It is one of those pieces that says so much in the fact that it says so little. In it he writes about growing up and living his life in one place. He lives (lived, prior to prison) in the house is father lived in. His son still lives in the same neighborhood now. He says he’s traveled little. So, his biggest “adventure” away from home, has been his journey to prison.
He will not be able to return to his home upon his release. So, he writes that he cannot answer the above question about what it will be like to return home. He writes that he doesn’t know if everything will be different because he cannot go there.
And I wonder if imagining what he will not be able to return home to is painful? I think it must be. We all like to assume we at least have the option to go back, return. We don’t always, but we like to hold onto the illusion. This man holds no illusion though. His crime took him away from his home, and his crime will keep him from his home. I wonder if he cares then if he is different? Who from his previous life will be there to notice? To comment?
To go to prison, change and then upon release not be able to go back and at least see if you still fit into the world you left behind (or ifyou can, in some way, make yourself fit again) is the story of many of these men. For many, there are good reasons why they should not return home. Reasons that will make it more possible for them to succeed on the outside and reasons that might be better for their families. And yet to know you can’t go back…
Even if you have changed, “resurrected” as Vogler calls this stage of the hero’s journey, does it do you as much good if you cannot prove it to those you love and who, at least once, also loved you?
