 Want an e-mail when there's something new? Join the e-mail news list today! selected writing From Ramallah to Rikers Island (Part 4) FRUSTRATIONS AND SOLUTIONS
12 February 2007 — Everything simple is frustrated here. To find out what date it is, a trek to the guard booth at the end of the dormitory, to look at the visits calendar. There is nothing here and you have access to nothing. The "pen" I am writing with is the plastic insert from a rollerball pen, bending and difficult to write with.[1] Ballpoint pens are contraband, in case they are used as weapons. The paper I write with was begged from the Law Library, during a visit for no other reason than to get blank paper. The process of visiting the library required signing a sheet and waiting to the following day until a Law Library visit was called. Transfer around the prison from one area to another is complex and slow. It took me a day's pre-planning and two hours to get a few sheets of paper. Hours were spent over days just to collect the components required to write this, where a quick walk across a room would have sufficed. It took five days to get a cup when I first arrived and a week to get a blanket, toothbrush and toothpaste.
I learned to save everything. A discarded piece of plastic here could become a shower head tomorrow. Little is wasted, apart from your time, spent finding solutions to things that were not problems outside. It's not enough to deprive you of your liberty: the only thing that truly matters when all is said and done—dignity—must also be stripped from you at every level. Getting out of here is going to be weird. Lots of aspects of life that were existing comfortably at one level are going to have to be rebuilt from the ground up. This will be an intense struggle for a while, steps like the steps I've been taking in order to write this down. Extra work on every front. New medical bureaucracy, moving apartment, getting the Roo dog back from a friend who is looking after him in Nevada, reorganizing my bills and life yet another time. This is not the season of rest I so desperately needed.
The razor wire outside looks pretty in the sun, shining silver as planes from nearby LaGuardia Airport buzz overhead. Like the defunct Alcatraz, Rikers is a penal colony surrounded by water on all sides. Hopefully there will be some redemption from this strange period of life. God knows that I, and about five close friends who have been there for me, need it. Mostly, I pray for rest from all of this.
There have been some sheer moments of light in prison. In Two Main, the intake dorm I was in for the first week, I asked Payne, a Jamaican guy from my neighborhood in Harlem[2], who the woman was in the corner bed. It was a weird dormitory, surrounded by people detoxing from heroin, so I was ready for any answer. We had already decided, in accent terms, that Jamaicans were the Scottish of the Carribean: Nigel: Who is that woman in the corner? Payne: She got addict, man. Nigel: She got addicted to what? To smack? Payne: No, man! She got a dick! A dick! But it remains inescapable, looking around during this afternoon period between lunch and dinner, that I am forced to confront the sheer waste. Scattered conversations can be heard from many beds, the TV in the day room blares Court TV and adverts but mostly people lie down and stare at walls or sleep. Many people here are waiting to be shipped upstate to prison, or to building 6 on Rikers (C-76) to serve "City time", ie. less than a year. For those that move on, there is the "opportunity" of breaking up the monotony. The days of prison license plate manufacture and mailbag sewing are not gone. Both these activities are available in longer term facilities — ie. prisons, not jails — but a new corporate version awaits, detailed at prisonactivist.org.[3] Corporations such as McDonalds, Revlon, IBM and Honda hire prisoners across the United States, and pay them 95¢ an hour in an environment unencumbered by minimum wage and other workplace rights. A form of legal, indentured servanthood for those prisoners who want to make some dollars. In jail, with food and provisions intentionally very minimalist and many institutions banning visitors from bringing in food or any 'luxury items', the Commissary is a very important institution. And prices are no different to those found on the streets, or are higher. 35¢ Ramen noodles. 65¢ Snickers. Even in prison, there are "luxuries" and bling, and we will strive for them inside just like we do on the outside. 14 February 2007 — Out of the three "pens" I purchased in the Commissary for 40¢ each, two didn't work and the third ran out of its ink. I was looking for a solution, and someone brought me one after two days of frustration that stopped this narrative dead. The simple things that hold our world in place can be so easily dislodged. Yesterday, Doob, an African American inmate, told me how his parole violation (not returning home for curfew) had fired a missile at his family. His parole officer had attempted to argue his case — with his otherwise fine record — but the higher ups were not having it. And so, his newborn son has yet to look up and gaze into the eyes from which he came.
Families torn apart, ploughed up by legalism. Where are America's much touted freedoms in a system of law can wreak family-destroying power without any checks or balances? Doob committed a minor parole violation and he, his wife, his newborn son, and the wider social network they inhabit all paid together for that mistake. The Spirit brings life. The law brings death. For a while, I'm back from the brink. Yesterday was yard exercise. It was an hour of walking anti-clockwise around a running track in freezing winter wind, and I have few warm clothes, but it helped more than it hurt. Today there is an ice storm outside. Food has been bad, so little sleep. But a pen arrived, which saved today. Exercise, sleep, and writing are the troika that help me cope in here. Every day is another battle in an unending war. It never ends. There is no final "breaking free", just the feeling of endlessly treading water and not drowning.
THE SYSTEM AND THE SOLUTION  Some people left the dormitory, more arrived to take their place. Only the system stays the same. One new guy asked where he could get a cup and a fork. I handed him two spares that I had collected for this very purpose, not even getting into how long these two objects had taken to acquire. He's asking all the new jack questions, even though he's spent time here before, he says. It's amazing how irritating those questions can get, even though that was you a couple of weeks ago. But of course, I made it easy for him. Our kindness is what provides the cushion for that very cold reality that waits for people in here. On the outside, we call that kindness "society".
The homeless guy who gave me one of his sheets when I was sick and had no blanket. The ones who offered a T-shirt, or socks, when they saw I only came in with the clothes on my back. The person who shared precious coffee with me before a friend outside was able to go through a tortuous process of paying money into my inmate account. It's not the people who think their shit doesn't stink who you want as your friends. It's these people, the ones who have fallen hard and got up to try again, that you want in your corner when the shit goes down. There are many good people here. They have problems and they need our help, not this soul-destroying caging. [...] It is our ignorance and fear of what lies inside human hearts that makes us shrink away and want to throw away the keys. The solution is more intimate than that. GO TO "FROM RAMALLAH TO RIKERS ISLAND" (PART 5) Endnotes 1. I "designed" a "You're Inside A Prison Now, Dude" pen at some point to try to counter the excuse for a writing implement's obvious lack of function. It was made from one of these bending rollerball insets, wrapped with ripped pillowcase stripes—literally the only possible pen-stiffening medium available to me—in an attempt to give it bulk and make it less bendy. Bottom line: I was going to write even if it killed me. The pen worked a little better but looked like a small, wrapped, Egyptian mummy. This end visual of my utterly unavoidably pragmatic solution—remember what little was available—somehow said it all. [Back to where you left off] 2. Several of the people in the two dorms I was in recognized me from the streets of Harlem. "Hey, you're the guy with the two little red dogs, right? I know you." This was definitely a good thing. [Back to where you left off] 3. All of this text was written in prison where obviously—in a place where we couldn't even get proper pens to write with—there is no Internet access. After speaking with several prisoners about their experiences working in prison, I read an article in the Black Panther newspaper about prison labor, which gave this URL. Not only do corporations profit from prison labor, they also profit from supplying prisons with products, such as the virtually useless, bending rubber, anti-stabbing toothbrushes. See Prison Labor Links on prisonactivist.org's site, and scroll to the bottom of the long list of corporations for background articles. [Back to where you left off] GO TO "FROM RAMALLAH TO RIKERS ISLAND" (PART 5) more from this section  • Unreasonable Search and Seizure (Sunday, June 1st, 2008)  • From Ramallah to Rikers Island (Part 1) (Tuesday, April 1st, 2008) |
      
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