This is : Revisiting a question of guilt.

The second time I entered a prison was in July of 2001.  America was a nation at peace. The economy was swollen with the wealth of the dot com boom. A Republican had been declared the winner of the 2000 Presidential election after running a campaign that promised to teach every child in America how to read. Americans were concerned with stemming the global threat of climate change and not yet the threat of terrorism half a world away. People spoke of the “new millennium” like it was a glittery celestial promise—and yet it was more than America’s dreams that were inflating around this milestone. 

In addition to ballooning loan markets, dependency on foreign resources and international discontent with American interventionism, another reality skyrocketing into the year 2000 was the size of the American prison system. Decades of both political parties waging war for popular support over issues of crime, poverty and drugs, had resulted in mandatory minimum sentencing laws and “get tough” criminal justice policies that saw incarceration rates rise from under 100 people per 100,000 to over 700 through the last half of the 20^th century. I entered the Missouri State Penitentiary on that Missouribly hot day in Jefferson City, right in the midst of the American mass-incarceration boom.  

The outer walls of the MSP were built twenty-three feet tall and three feet thick in 1832. They are made from solid limestone and reflected back upon everyone who walks beneath them the hundred-plus years of brutality that they have witnessed.  Older than the Civil War, and thus once used to incarerate escaped slaves, those rock walls are oppressive and weighty well beyond their physical mass, making it clear to all who enter that they are crossing a militarized border between two worlds: one on the outside—Jefferson City, Missouri, America, Planet Earth; the other—prison. Prison, an environment where you are the element the world outside builds walls to protect itself from. 

By the time of my arrival, MSP was calling itself the Jefferson City Correctional Center, but history will remember the world behind that limestone wall as “the bloodiest 47 acres in America;” a name bequeathed by Time magazine in 1967 after a series of bloody riots and incidents of prisoner-on-prisoner violence. I walked into that dark and storied institution one of the lucky ones to do so. While my crimes have been many, some even legally so, I was marching past the gates of the Missouri State Penitentiary through the visitor’s entrance. 

‘Visitor’ is a neutral word in the English language. It expresses, conceptually, the identity of a person that is not of a place, without the friendliness of ‘guest,’ nor the hostility of ‘invader’ or ‘captive.’  Often, a person is labeled a visitor when the purpose of their visit is meant to be vague or distant. Even when used euphemistically, such as in the statement, “She is entertaining a visitor this evening,” the language of “visitor” implies an identity of a subject that will not linger—whether that visitor be romantic or monthly. Usually when we travel, we strive not to position ourselves as visitors in the place we are visiting. We decry tourists as an “inauthentic identity” rooted in economic privilege. We try to pass, if not as native residents, as people with a purpose and familiarity with place that prevents us from sticking out like a sore thumb, at worst admitting ourselves to be “vacationing” if we have no other purpose in a place than passing through. When we  tell some one we are “just visiting” a place, we are telling them and ourselves that we have no intention of forming an emotional connection to that place. I cannot imagine passing beneath the walls of the Missouri State Penitentiary and escaping without a lasting emotional connection to the place “visited.” 

The man I had come to visit at the MSP was not there that day as a visitor.  He and I had first started corresponding via the U.S. Postal Service. He was an important figure in a prisoners’ rights advocacy group that I had become involved with after volunteering to take on an editorial for the groups’ triannual newsletter. From the beginning of our professional correspondence, it was understood that any meeting between us was going to be under the auspices of me, as visitor, and he, as a visited incarcerated human being. 

Is the fact that I was there that day as a visitor—and he was not—a result of class and race privileges that existed to keep people like me (white and  middle-class) away from people like him (black and poor)? This is the question I was distracting myself with as I entered the first security checkpoint on the way into the visitation room. It is good to have a distraction from the process of being processed through security at a maximum-security prison. Because if you start to think about the experience you are experiencing you might start to worry about how certain both you and these prison guards are that you are, in fact, a visitor, and not an inmate to be visited.

***

In 2001, processing for visitation at the Missouri State Penitentiary worked like this:

You borrow a friend’s car to drive the 120 miles to Jefferson City. You park along Lafayette Street, which runs along the outside of the massive stone walls of the prison—like you are parking anywhere in small town America—like you might be running into a specialty store that they don’t have in your even-smaller-town America or the house of a friend across the street. You get out of your borrowed car and proceed to the large castle-like-keep that serves as the main entrance to the facility and push a large black button attached to a metal speaker box next to the deceptively solid bulletproof Plexiglas and steel door. The door is covered in a reflective coating, like a mirror, that allows the security guards to see you, but inside you can see nothing. While the door remains shut, it is like the world behind that mirror might not even exist. After a few nervous seconds pass like hours, a loud buzz emanates from the speaker box, followed by a click from the lock on the door, and a crackly voice commands: 

“Enter.” 

A small lobby lies beyond the entry door. Later in the day, you will not be able to remember if the lobby was painted and tiled in a sickly shade of yellow, or if it was a ghostly shade of green. Or maybe the whole room had been white, and it was the lighting that was somehow corrupted to make everything appear yellow, or green, or sick, or ghostly. A smell wafts up from the floor, mostly like bleach, but like something else possibly, buried beneath the bleach, something metallic. Maybe that is the smell of the rusty blue lockers along the left wall, but maybe it is something more like the smell of blood that has just been mopped off the linoleum beneath you.

The wall across from the building’s entrance is just another large bulletproof Plexiglas window over a steel counter. There is another loud buzz before another speaker box—this one just below this window—rings out curtly: 

“Why are you here?” 

There is no microphone into which to direct your response, so you speak out awkwardly into the space of the room, like you are speaking to a spirit or a divine entity: 

“To visit an inmate.” 

Silence follows, and so you continue to speak with the Plexiglas window in front of you, fairly certain that you are addressing the guard behind it, but the window is yellowed from age and scarred from vandalism, or poor cleaning practices. It seems possible that the guard’s lips are moving in synchronicity with the sounds coming out of the speaker box, but only possibly. Whether it is really the guard behind the Plexiglas or not, the speaker box asks with a cold detachment: 

“Identify the prisoner you are here to visit and then use the lockers to your left to stow all your personal items, including your wallet, your keys, your belt, and anything else that could be used as a weapon to harm you.”

In the back of your mind, you will question the intelligence of leaving every means of identifying your body in that lobby. This question will nag at you as you step back up to the window and tell the guard you are ready, but it will blossom—nearly into a panic—when the first reinforced door opens and you step into the narrow vestibule of a double-locked security checkpoint and you watch that door close behind you. The feeling of being disconnected from proof of who you are leaves you naked and vulnerable in the face of complete authoritarian control. You will think about how they could decide to keep you here in this vestibule forever, or encage you in a cell beyond it, and it could take days for anyone to know you are missing. You will think about how they could decide that you are actually someone else, some criminal that had escaped, and that you belong in their facility forever, because you now have no means of proving them otherwise. When they tell you that your name is Sam the Murderer, you will become Sam the Murderer and no one inside this facility will believe you when you plead otherwise, because nobody listens to a deviant prisoner like Sam the Murderer, against the good word of Bill the Prison Guard—protector of the law.

These are all irrational fears, but even in your rational brain, you will know that you are afraid because you have absolutely no control and no rights in this situation except those being conditionally granted to you by the guards on the other side of that Plexiglas, and in that moment, no one except those guards will be responsible for protecting your rights—you have entered their world—where they are gods and kings. Your ability to leave, to be a citizen of the United States of America, and not a prisoner, citizen of MSP, is determined by beings who know that their control and authority in this situation is absolute. You are sure there are rules and regulations about guards overstepping their responsibilities, but you are also fairly certain there are rules and regulations against speeding and drunk driving and that does not prevent either of those activities from being responsible for thousands of deaths a year.

These thoughts of death and imprisonment are interrupted as the door on the other side of the vestibule opens, and an actual physical guard—not a disembodied voice says: 

“Step forward, lift your arms.” 

He does not call you Sam the Murderer and so you obey his request in hopes that it will prevent him from realizing that he could. He pats down your arms, chest and legs, and finds the dirty Kleenex in your right front pocket. He is wearing gloves and has no qualms about handling your dirty snot as he tosses the Kleenex into a waste basket by his station. You are certain he would have no problem using those gloved hands to explore your entire body far more thoroughly if he suspected he had any reason to do so. But he does not.  Bill, the Prison Guard, protector of the law, likes the color of your skin, the fact you found a dress shirt to wear for your visit. He lets you go on through to the visitation room.

There is not a lot of difference between this visitation room and a food court at a mall (if those still exist when you are reading this) except that the stainless-steel tables and chairs are bolted in place and half of the occupants are wearing bright orange jumpsuits. Prisoners—other prisoners—less political prisoners—will be sitting at tables with their visitors, interacting more like human beings ought to. They will be sitting down, face to face with only a table between them. Some will be sharing a snack from the vending machine with their families, if their families brought enough loose change. You have left your lose change back with your ID and proof of personhood and not a prisoner’s hood because you know that the person you have come to visit won’t be allowed to be in the same room as you, much less share your snacks. 

You will be shown into the maximum-security visitation room. The one just like in the movies. He will be shown into a small metal broom closet on the other side of another Plexiglas window. You will be sitting at a desk, in a chair, facing a window much like a bank teller. He will remain cuffed, manacled and chained to his seat on the other side. You will have to speak to him through a phone, just like you always have to  talk to him—through speakers and wires—only this time you will be able to see the tears in his eyes when he hears your voice.

***

Well not quite.

 At least, not this time. 

This time, the human being I had come to Jefferson City to visit at the Missouri State Penitentiary, was not there. He was not at the Missouri State Penitentiary, nor anywhere close to Jefferson City. Without notice or warning, he had been transferred three days earlier to the facility in Patosi, Missouri—130 miles as the crow flies, in the opposite direction of your travels. In addition to being transferred without notice, he had been denied phone privileges and placed in solitary confinement at the Patosi Correctional Center for “engaging in disruptive behavior” over being transferred. 

It would be a week after my visit before I would know any of this though.  Instead, I would spend five minutes sitting in a chair, staring at that empty metal broom closet of a visitation room, before the guard that escorted me in would show back up and tell me, with no sympathy or explanation:

“The inmate you have come to see is no longer at this facility. Please come with me.”

***

The man I was going to visit that day—by his own admission—was not a good man.  Depending upon who was telling the story, he was in prison as a murderer, an accessory to murder, or at the very least, a black man who had put himself in a very wrong place at a very wrong time. As far as I have ever been able to discern, it is possible that all the above could be true.  Originally arrested in the late 70’s at the age of 17, he was a member of a group that was in the process of robbing a small business when a gun was discharged, and a person was shot dead. The only witnesses to the murder were the members of the group that were performing the robbery. Witnesses to the break-in identified the group and the direction from which they fled the scene. All of them were eventually apprehended, but the identity of the murderer was never proven in court. The three men were tried as adults and received 20-year sentences. 

I was told that two of the men involved served about 7 years of their sentences before getting released on parole. They kept low profiles and avoided the politics of the prison yard. The man I was there to see had not kept a low profile or avoided the politics of the prison yard. As he described it, the world behind bars had captured him, mind, body and spirit.

Just a teenager at the time of his arrest, it had already been a couple of years since he had dropped out of high school. At the juvenile facility he started his sentence in, there was an educational program, but nothing the prison schools had to offer were of any interest. In the yard, however, this man felt his first real call for learning. 

It is not easy for a class-privileged white boy like me to understand the appeal of the nation of Islam. As a Jew, it is even more difficult for me to understand the appeal of a minister like Louis Farrakhan. I don’t necessarily understand the potential impact of his message, because his message was never delivered for me to understand. Yes, Jews also have a history of persecution, but there is a generation between me and a world that was ready to throw my life away, and write me off as another lazy, no-good, typical representative of my entire race. 

By the early 80’s, the Nation of Islam was about the only large scale organization in the United States reaching out to black men in prison. There was no one else at the time speaking out publicly and saying that the reason black men were getting put behind bars at a socially disproportionate rate was because white society was afraid of them. With the help of Black Nationalists both in and out of the prison around him—and the repressive conditions he experienced daily—an ignorant child turned into a politicized man that was regularly taking it upon himself to improve the conditions of those around him. This man would write letters voraciously. He would write them to administrators within the prison and supporters outside, attempting to bring attention to every injustice faced by prisoners in the state of Missouri. No issue was too big or small to tackle, and every abuse, rotten sandwich, and unsanitary bathroom that was brought to his attention was going to be echoed out into the world.

Voracious advocacy didn’t win him the respect or admiration of his captors, but it did start to make some waves with his peers on the inside. Eventually, the idea of formally organizing came into discussion and a first-of-its-kind prisoner’s labor union, run by-and-for prisoners, was born.

This is his story. It is a good one, and to this day, I still mostly believe it. 

His version of the story is romantic and grabs the attention of outsiders sympathetic to the notion that the mass incarceration of people of color in this country is a continuation of slavery and injustice. His story is compelling and true enough, on a national and social scale, to inspire a nerdy white boy on the outside to action. It was enough to get me writing letters—first to the man himself, then as an outside collaborator of the man’s organization—and eventual got me traveling half-way across the state to see him. But it is not the only story.

***

In America, prisons serve many functions in the minds of those who advocate for them. From retribution to rehabilitation, people that have never been inside one like to believe that prisons serve as bastions of social law and order. Like landfills, they are always better imagined than experienced, but that is the point, right?

Prisons should be unpleasant places so that they can serve most effectively as deterrents to future crime. If they devolve into places where terrible things happen, well, they are happening to terrible people for the good of good people who will never have to worry too intently about conditions on the other side, right? There is a mystique to the violence that occurs in prison, a mystique that benefits the world outside, and thus, people on the outside of prison love to cultivate it. 

In movies, in television, in literature, we almost never see prison portrayed without focusing on stories of inmate violence, riots and rape. The behavior that most terrifies us into accepting the necessity of prisons, is the behavior that we secretly let occupy both our dreams and nightmares about prisons, because prison is where bad people get what they deserve. 

But prison is not a dream. It is not a theoretical construct. Every prison exists in metal bars and concrete, filled with real people, guards and inmates. The stories that we hear and the myths that we retell about shanks and dropped soap are repeated for a reason—are grounded in truths that feel far more sickening when we think about them happening to real people and not the monsters of our imagination.    

Prisoners who try to expose the violence of their environment or abuses of administrative authority do not often make friends with wardens or guards. The first prisoner to report an abuse or offense is often ignored or accused of making things up to get a disliked guard fired or rival prisoner in trouble. Prison administrators are not often rewarded for the careful and ethical handling of their incident reports. They are rewarded for not having incidents to report. Complicating this problem further is the fact that publicly reporting on guards and administrative abuse is one of the only ways incarcerated people have of getting sympathetic attention from folks on the outside, and everyone knows this. The prisoners, the guards, and the state authorities responsible for investigating and responding to abuse all know that public sympathy is the only way that the spotlight of criminal justice ever gets turned to the inside of the jail cell. These facts collude to incentivize prison administrators into making reporting a hefty burden for the prisoner who has experienced abuse.

Prisoners who earn a reputation for whistleblowing can suffer severe consequences, especially in an effort to keep their accusations from being investigated. For someone outside of prison, “severe consequences” probably invokes images of guards assailing prisoners with batons. However, when your entire world is defined by the privileges extended to you by your captors, your captors can be ingenious and excruciating subtle in their punishments. Little things, like access to books and recreation time, aspects of prisoner’s lives already under guards’ supervision, can easily be manipulated without drawing any administrative attention or recourse. Like so many other exercises in establishing dominance and control, rarely is the severity of the restriction the issue—it is the fact that there is nothing the prisoner can do about it. The line between “necessary demonstration of authority” and an “abuse of power” is very difficult to define, and prisoners, by nature of their circumstances, are always presumed guilty until proven otherwise. 

***

Over the years of writing and working with this man whom I had gone to visit, I had received numerous letters and reports of abuses that he had suffered at the hands of administrators. I received apologies for delays in writing because he had been getting moved into and out of solitary confinement and he didn’t have access to his writing materials. I read about how his block was being served rotten and maggot-infested food, and everyone was being told it was his fault. Almost monthly I’d read about how he was being denied access to medical, educational or recreational facilities. As the prisoner’s rights organization began to spread and our newsletter mailing list began to grow into the hundreds, I eventually started getting letters from prison officials attempting to discredit him as a violent dissident and gang organizer. 

We were working to abolish a justice system that favors mass incarceration over efforts to establish restorative justice. We called ourselves an organization of prison abolition. It is easy to see why representatives of the institutions we were naming as abusive and out of control were trying to disrupt our organization, and it was easier still just to ignore them when prison officials worked to discredit our leadership…But letters kept coming and, eventually, not just from prison administrators.  We, the outside editorial staff, began to receive letters from folks who had been locked up with him, and the letters did not paint a pretty picture of what was going on with our organization’s leadership.

At first the letters named vague offenses with phrases like “disruptive behavior” that sounded to us more like a badge of honor than a condemnation. Even accusations of activities like gang organizing were dismissible because he was in fact trying to organize a prisoner’s rights group, and it made sense that guards would be quick to attach the most damning label they could to such an organization.  

But the letters kept coming in and getting more specific about the accusations. 

Finally, I received a letter from another prisoner that I could no longer brush off with a clean conscience. This letter named the man I had been working with as the organizer of a “rape ring,” in which the opportunity to rape other prisoners was being traded for prestige and political support from the outside. It would be horrific if it proved true, but again, prison administrators would know this as well as we would and getting an inmate to write a letter in exchange for privileges is a commonly employed tactic. The accusatory letter came from a prisoner whom our organization had been warned about as a possible administrative collaborator by other members of the organization that had encountered him at other facilities around the state. 

What to do? No one putting their heart and labor into a prison abolition movement wants to be responsible for enabling sexual violence, but outside of prison, it was too difficult to tell who was trying to manipulate me and why. I was not involved in sending anyone money or other resources that directly benefited this man and had no connection to him outside of our work together on the organization’s news letter. The politics of the organization I was involved with, and its strong opposition to rape and rape culture, were publicly documented and repeated in all of our publications. Anyone looking to cause division within our group would recognize this as an obvious and effective point of contention. No other prisoners came forward to substantiate the accusations and even the person reaching out to us was not doing so as a victim, but as a person who had heard rumors. 

My guts were churning at the prospect that I could be working to maintain or even spread the power and reach of a serial rapist, but letting the organization be torn apart on hearsay was just as nauseating a prospect. I needed to meet with the man in person, so I could look him in the eyes—even if it were through a sheet of Plexiglas—and see his response when I asked him about these allegations.

***

It has been many years since I sat there, alone in the visitors’ room at the Missouri State Penitentiary, waiting for a man who wasn’t there. The visitors’ room, just like the prison it inhabited, was abandoned finally in 2004, putting to rest nearly 175 years of violent, repressive history. The facility and its premises have been turned into a tourist attraction, where former guards and wardens now walk tourists through cellblocks and death-penalty gas chambers.  Visitors are told about the prison’s more famous residents. Prisoners like:  

• Sonny Liston, who learned to box while incarcerated in the MSP and went on to become heavy-weight champion in 1962—a title he lost two years later to a 7-1 underdog then fighting under the name Cassius Clay. 
• James Earl Ray, who, in 1959, had been sentenced to 20 years in the MSP for robbing a grocery store in St. Louis. Ray escaped in 1964 and resurfaced publicly on April 4^th, 1969 to assassinate a black preacher in Alabama named Martin Luther King Jr. 

Visitors to the Missouri State Penitentiary today spend three hours walking through dark crumbling concrete halls, watching paint peel off into flakes in Missouri River valley humidity, imagining a hell larger than life—full of figures of legendary importance and horrific notoriety. They leave supportive comments about the quality of their experiences and the genuine hospitality they received from the tour guides and historians. They reflect upon the importance of preserving the history captured in sites like these, as if prisons like the MSP are inventions of the past—relics of a bygone era—that no longer exist in the consciousness of the real people who inhabit them—as if our ‘prisons’ are not rooted in the national identity of the most incarcerated population in the developed world. 

There are terrible people in this world and there are people accused of doing terrible things. Often, the difference between those two categories will never be knowable as more than speculation. That is why one man’s effort to ascertain the innocence or guilt of another, by staring him in the eye was, from the very beginning, a work of naïve and delusional fantasy. Some facts about the past will never be knowable—they will just exist as a gut-check or bad feeling. But the realities of prison, and the environments we have built into them, are physical constructions that are experienced daily by everyone that enters them, whether as visitors, as guards, or as prisoners.

It is important that we have means of dealing with the real and terrible things that happen in this world and the people responsible for doing them. It is just as important that we make sure we have looked carefully at the ways we think we are dealing with the monsters of our imaginations and remember that monsters are make-believe. Prisoners are people and do not sacrifice their humanity just because they have been convicted of a crime, no matter how horrific. 

The walls of prisons exist primarily for the benefit of people so far removed from the world of incarceration that they will never even enter them through the visitor’s entrance. Therefore, it is the responsibility of all of us living outside those walls to pay attention to what happens inside them, because we are the reason they exist.