Prison Time
The Seattle Times on February 21 brought news of the unexpected death of Gary Greaves. He was 57. Gary was living in Marrekesh, Morocco, with his wife, writer Frances McCue–there on a Fullbright scholarship–and their daughter Maddy, and died playing basketball–which somehow fits.
Gary was tall, athletic, energetic, and devoted to helping human beings in need.
In the summer of 2001, Gary invited me to go with him and a priest to visit the inmates at Monroe Correctional Facility, not far from where we live. Gary brought community writers into Monroe to meet with “lifers,” inmates serving twenty years or more, as part of a prison book group.
The experience was a true life lesson.
Entering Monroe requires being stripped of your formal identity–wallet, driver’s license, valuables, all are taken and stored for the duration of your visit. Searches are reasonably thorough. The guards are sober and not inclined to chitchat. You are not their friend.
Gary informed me that there were protocols to follow with the prisoners, for our own safety and for theirs. It was best not to ask what they were serving time for (you don’t want to know). If by chance you get invited to the cafeteria, and dessert is being served, if you don’t want yours, do not offer it to another prisoner. Divide it up precisely among all those at the table. Grievances and resentments can be petty. They can also be deadly.
The prison itself, once we were inside, reminded me of an older, somewhat run-down high school–but with bars, gates, and very strict routines.
The room where we met with the inmates was spacious and spare, no windows, with tables arranged in a square open in the middle. About twenty inmates attended the meeting. Inmates could freely mingle and shake hands, introduce themselves.
Getting down to the session, I quickly realized that the inmates were going to be the most focused, welcoming, and enthusiastically attentive audience I had experienced in a long time–perhaps ever. The programs and the speakers that Gary brought to this prison book group might form a substantial part of their intellectual existence. This was their break from prison routine for the day–perhaps for the week or the month.
I did not immediately realize it, but I was becoming unnerved. I was totally unprepared, emotionally, for their hard reality, and so my discussion with the Monroe lifers was wide-ranging; looking back, perhaps too wide-ranging, getting into matters of writer and character psychology, and then the limits of our personal behaviors, including anger management–not entirely appropriate.
I had never done this before.
Their questions were focused and intelligent. They were hungry for knowledge about all sorts of things–but especially about the life of a writer.
They were hungry for the outside world.
During our meeting, one young man–a Russian with longish dark blond hair, little more than a boy–put his head on his arms, flat on the table. He could not imagine ever getting outside again–perhaps he never would. His despair was palpable.
The discussion continued. The lifers were used to that.
I was not.
I liked these people. There were grizzled older men, handsome and fit young men, blacks and whites, a real mix. After the meeting ended, I signed books and offered to answer questions through email.
That was not going to happen, Gary told me later. These prisoners are not allowed to contact the outside world. The officials at Monroe are reluctant to give them much in the way of relief. Punishment is a real goal. Monroe is not the hardest of hard time–in our state, that might be Walla Walla–but there was definitely an atmosphere of disciplined and perhaps even righteous misery.
Observing guard behavior–male and female guards–I learned as much about the psychologically degrading aspects of prison as I did observing the inmates. It is not easy and it is not good to be placed in almost absolute charge of another human being. And yet, it is essential. A well-run prison must be grimly serious and predictable, for the safety of both the guards and the prisoners.
But there were stories of odd, tiny cruelties–family visitors bringing in snacks and having sealed potato chip bags crushed by guards. Necessary? Mandated by past experience? Or expressive of the wearing down of one’s own grip on humanity, year in and year out? Dealing with the unpredictable, the violent, the frustrated, the insane–some of the worst of the worst…
Corrections is an extraordinarily tough career. Prison guards–like most cops–have high rates of early heart attack. Stress is constant. Danger is real and ever-present.
Support groups and union groups had posted signs and banners outside Monroe, on the wire fences approaching the prison. The community of corrections officers and their families is tight-knit, largely blue-collar. There are newsletters and journals. Some are available online. A good prison guard–stern, predictable, even-handed, sympathetic but not a sap, slow to anger and immune to thoughts of vengeance–is a godsend to a prisoner, but how many of us would be up to that sort of challenge and responsibility?
Leaving the prison was like taking a gulp of fresh air after holding my breath. I got back my identity. I became real again. Or I left the hard reality behind, and returned to my illusions.
That night, late into the morning, I sat listening to music in my basement. I was haunted by faces. Many of the faces were not known to me. But they all seemed to silently beseech; they wanted their stories told. It was a creepy experience, like being haunted by people still alive–people I had never met.
Around one a.m., I cried like a baby.
I felt I had completely screwed up. Looking back on that experience, to this day I feel guilt. I would conduct another visit in a very different manner.
In the long run, my time at Monroe benefited me far more than it did the lifers in the prison book group.
Thanks to Gary Greaves for giving me that experience, and my condolences to his friends and loved ones–and the prisoners at Monroe, who will have to find another sympathetic soul to crack open their steel and concrete box and let in light from the outer world.
March 9th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Greg, that’s a very openly told and considerably powerful story.
I really appreciate your telling of it. Somehow my close brushes with deep poverty in the last year have brought more of that kind of empathy, which I thought was pretty present anyway.
When you consider how much trouble we get into with politics and other rule-based systems for dealing with our social presence, such a sense of solidarity could well help us, frightening as it can be for moments. And yet, as we consider just how to act out of those moments, I think we grow, and grow sensibly.
Each circle of life has its society, and its ways for persons to touch and to grow. Perhaps I first learned this during long times in Korea in the 1970s, when it was just beginning to build an answer to its own poverty. Maybe too, bunking in a shared house like any other young professional, while teaching design in a graduate school, I learned entirely too well how comfortable I could be with a room just large enough for a mat and a row of books against the wall, Siberian winter present to the point of snow through cracks.
The difference is, I didn’t have to worry about a salary, and while small, it was entirely comfortable in the Korean situation. This is the security we withhold from persons in the society we have been building, and the idea that there has to be that threat, much less the incompetence and fear-driven economic violence which brought our current state, is the largest mistake I think the ‘right’ side of culture makes. A terrible mistake.
You’ve dipped your pen into these subjects more than once before; so much of the surround of Queen of Angels, but particularly Slant is constant reminder of what comes if we don’t figure better how to change.
I think we can change, and build much better. Lipietz’s idea of a Third Sector would be a great place to start - a portion of the economy which is not business, but is not welfare, for those things which business thinks aren’t profitable enough. I thought to myself in the early 1990’s, how many persons in Britain where I lived would have taken their better educations and walked right across the street to be the leaders for such an enterprise. They are the ones who remember their fathers in the postwar social service.
Well, and prisoners themselves. We build such damage, beyond the damage they caused to get themselves into such positions. It is not sensible; and again, a way to work ones ’salvation’ out must be something of great value that we can discover.
Starting at the top, I guess we will be better able to do both such things, when we start to rearrange our ideas so that ‘middle class’ can be a new, vibrant, and possible goal for anyone who would want it - which would be many. I think it is possible, besides important. Stories are likely to have a enormous role to play, in degrees of those that instruct, and those that imagine.
Best regards,
Roald
March 10th, 2009 at 2:11 am
Years ago, as a new attorney, I spent too much time in jails and prisons speaking with my clients. I learned from my clients a way of being, an outsider’s dignity, that convinced me the system is broken.
I am so sorry for your loss, as distant as I am.
Thank you for this post.
March 13th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
It’s amazing what the death of a friend can do to hurl one down “memory” lane.
Soon after you posted this, I leanred that my friend “Professor Jim” had died…on the same day the paper reported the death of your friend. Jim died three days after a heart attack that came at the end of a great bike ride.
But I’d saw Gary’s Pivot-Event on your life was much more intense, much more “soul” churning than Professor Jim’s subtle effect on my life. While you got shown the harsh side of things, Jim just gently nudged me down different paths while appearing to do nothing at all.
Don’t know if you’ve had a memory for Gary yet…and I only found out about Jim’s death as I was about to call in a favor we had standing…only to find out from his sister that he was gone.
Spent Saturday night raising toasts to Jim and remembering him…imaging him bicycling off into the sunset along Adams Avenue.
Jim was the fifth person I knew who died already this year. We now have a sixth…and could add your Gary as a seventh.
The one that was a Suicide generated over 20,000 words in writing…
Mike
(mourning in San Diego)
May 31st, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Hi Greg,
Your story of your friend’s death and his prison-visit gift to you resonated with me. I was asked to discuss a book at a prison book club in Alto, Georgia a few years back, and my experience was much as you describe. I chose Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germ and Steel for them to read and wondered if many of them would actually read it. A dozen men certainly did, and they discussed it with remarkable insight. I came away amazed at the intellect that we have locked away in prison.
Diamond’s book posits that geography made a bigger difference in the fates of various races than did genetics. Near the end of the visit, I asked, “What do you think this book says about race?” After a long silence, one black man said he thought there were basic differences in the races, because, “No black guy is gonna think up the stuff that white guys do. Before I came here, I never would have dreamed there was 13 ways to make fire in prison without matches.”
This is a racial version of your description of the Russian man laying his head on the table in quiet resignation. The U.S. now has the highest total prison population and the highest per-capita rate of incarceration on the planet. It qualifies as an industry, and has broad psycho-social ramifications. It is a reflection of the season the U.S. is entering within its growth pattern.
You might enjoy watching a documentary film: “History’s Hidden Engine” at socionomics.net. We think crowd behavior is patterned in a hierarchical fractal, is endogenous and is not governed by exogenous events. It follows a law of patterned herding, an evolutionary survival behavior that unfolds in what we call waves of social mood. This view reverses the common assumption that events drive markets and affect collective mood. It opens a new view of how and why humans herd from extremes of optimism to extremes of pessimism, generating the events we call history.
Losing friends is never easy, but the gifts they leave with us linger.
Best wishes,
Alan Hall
December 17th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Hi Greg,
This is chris pickens again - long standing fan of your writing, now in Newport News, VA. Worlds largest fan of Queen of Angels.
After reading Prison Time, I just had to thank you for the post. It is personal, powerful and reflective - much like QOA. The hard reality of your experience really shook me, forced me onto an unfamilar street, yet
I felt like I was there before. I appreciate your courage to write it. Please accept my best wishes to you and to your spirit in healing. Losing friends is a very difficult thing.
Peace in all the world to you.
Cheers,
Chris