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The Catskills were just breaking into color last September when I drove up to the New York State Correction Facility at Woodbourne, a medium-security prison sitting on a hillside overlooking the village. It was built of red brick by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, and from a distance resembles a Catholic monastery, albeit one surrounded by a chain-link fence and razor wire. The inmates are mostly long-termers, many having spent their prior years in a maximum-security place like Attica or Dannemora, and were transferred to Woodbourne to get ready for their first parole hearing, although winning early parole from Governor George Pataki’s administration is a dim hope at best. These days even model prisoners can end up serving their entire sentences before being released. Woodbourne is considered pretty mellow compared to where they’d been — the correction officers are less abrasive, the prisoners older, not so quick to anger. And there’s little violence, owing partly to the fact that a third of the population is on antipsychotic medication.
I’d been invited to teach a semester-long course in journalism by the Bard College Prison Initiative. Started in 2001 with support from the Episcopal Social Services, the Bard program offers liberal arts courses — philosophy, English, history — that a select group of prisoners can take toward earning a bachelor’s degree. The chance for a higher education was another thing Pataki did away with when he barred inmates back in 1995 from applying for government school loans to pay for it. The Bard program is free, and it exists because of enthusiastic support from the wardens, who know that prisoners taking college courses are the least likely to get into trouble, and the least likely to return to prison once they get out.
Before being escorted through to the cell area, visiting professors must sign a paper saying they have been advised of the rules — don’t give out your address, don’t accept phone calls from inmates — and that they have viewed a twenty-minute cautionary video consisting of skits acted out by corrections personnel. It’s a solemn production, suggesting that, were it not for the video, we all might be thinking it perfectly okay to smuggle cocaine into the prison and engage in sex acts with inmates.
Unlike modern prisons, where the cellblocks radiate off a central control pod, Woodbourne was built with a maze of staircases and underground tunnels, with low archways and steam pipes you have to watch out for lest you crack your head. The classrooms sit along a basement corridor with the hallside walls made of glass so passing corrections officers can see what’s going on inside. When I arrived, at 1 p.m. on a Thursday, the guys were all there, fifteen of them, sitting at tables formed in a C shape, most in their mid-thirties, all black or Hispanic, and they were all smiling. The Bard classes were clearly the high point of their week.
They started by asking what I wanted to be called — Mr. Porter? Professor P? I settled for the latter, and we got down to the object of the course, which would be to make them into ace newspaper reporters. It wasn’t that they were likely to land a newspaper job. Eleven of the fifteen were in for homicide, after all, not an easy sell to the personnel department, never mind that by the time they got out they would be a little old to start off as cub reporters. On the other hand, learning to distinguish between facts and hearsay, and learning how to write clearly and to describe accurately and quickly the things they observed, would be assets in any endeavor, even in a prison setting, where a lot of things go down and where it’s important, sometimes vital, to get the facts straight.
We started off examining the U.S. Constitution and how this document was what afforded them the freedom to write anything they wanted to. “In prison?” one asked. Well, probably not in prison, I allowed. But regardless, they had a surprisingly thorough knowledge of the First Amendment, and also of Jefferson’s battles with the Federalists, something Columbia journalism students are pretty hazy on. Bard professors had done a good job with history.
Okay, next let’s talk about facts, I said. What’s a fact? “Something somebody tells you that happened,” said a guy named Carlos, who you could see by his white jacket had come from kitchen duty. Oh, really? I said. If the police tell you they shot a guy because he had a gun, does that make it so? That got a quick no. “It’s something you read somewhere,” suggested another. Oh, really? I said. You believe everything you read in the newspapers? No, again. Finally, we got down to it: A fact in a news story was something the reporter could prove existed. But prove how? You have to witness it yourself? they asked. That’s one way, I said, whereupon they looked at each other and nodded in self-approval. We were off and running.
For the next several weeks we practiced writing news stories. I’d acquired fifteen Olivetti portables from eBay for about twenty dollars each, and we set them up around the tables. It took a few minutes for the guys to get the hang of them — set the margins, do the tabs. But pretty soon the room was clattering with action, all of them pounding like demons, as if deadline were a minute away. One of them, Manny, with aquiline features and a close-shaven head who turned out to be the class clown, kept ripping sheets of paper out of the roller and balling them up, throwing them over his shoulder and littering the floor. “Hey, Professor P, that’s the way they do it, right? Just like in a real newsroom!”
The place erupted in laughter; a corrections officer passed by the window and shot us an odd look. As I would learn, prisoners can laugh louder and longer and get more of a kick out of things than any group I know. The loudest laugher was a fifty-one-year-old black prisoner with a braided ponytail and the nickname “Whisper,” for his breathy way of talking, who has spent twenty-eight years of his adult life behind bars. He got to laughing so hard at a story about me being a bumbling white reporter trying to cover the 1964 Harlem race riot that tears were rolling down his cheeks. Their craving for funny stories made me think of the Preston Sturges movie on the Great Depression, Sullivan’s Travels, where a film director posing as a tramp learns that hard-luck people — hoboes, prison inmates — don’t want movies with a social message; they want to be made to laugh.
The guys also liked being jerked around by the professor. I’d pretend to send them out to accident scenes. It was raining, blowing hard, I told them. A tree had fallen on the top of a car, two teenagers sent to the hospital. I’m the traffic cop, how would they get the story? “So what happened?” they asked the cop. “An idiot could see what happened,” he barked at them. “The tree fell over on the car.” Lots of laughter. “Were the injuries serious?” they asked. “What do I look like, a doctor?” More laughter. They called the hospital, asked about the victims’ condition. “I’m just the operator, how on earth would I know?” This laid them out.
Find out who you’re talking to, for God’s sakes, and ask precise questions, I told them. And be aggressive. Jefferson wanted the press to challenge authority. “Hey, Professor P, you’re asking us to be aggressive?” said Julian, with tied-up dreads, doing fifteen to life. “They told us that’s our problem.” They all laughed again.
Soon they got more proficient at nailing down the details. And, whether or not it grew out of their prison experience, they all demonstrated a healthy skepticism when it came to buying what people said. One news story involved a man found lying in his car with stab wounds, who’d told the police he’d picked up a female hitchhiker who’d tried to rob him and then knifed him after she discovered he had only two dollars. Writing that story, Columbia students tend to put down whatever the guy said as fact. At Woodbourne, there was major doubt as to whether he was telling the truth. Maybe he’d done something to get stabbed for, maybe the guy tried to assault her, suggested Anthony, a sharp Hispanic prisoner doing ten to twenty years for manslaughter, who was learning the carpenter’s trade for when he got out.
Six or seven weeks into the course, snow now thick in the hills, they’d really begun to get the hang of it, to the extent that probably half of them could walk into a small paper and do the job as well as anyone, maybe better with a little practice. Dwelling on their newfound capacity invariably made for a sad drive home, as I imagined how things might have turned out differently for them. I didn’t know much about their murder charges, other than what was on the corrections department Web site — that in each case it had been in the second degree, the unpremeditated variety. So probably it was an impulsive act, maybe committed in the face of provocation, and they’d been nineteen or twenty at the time. Yes, I told myself, the other person had died. Nonetheless, I still felt exceedingly sad thinking that here these guys had finally found a real vocation, one they liked and that they could be pretty good at. But it was too late for them.
For the second half of the term I wanted to have them report on their lives in prison. But how? Inmates tend to rank up there with police officers and public school teachers when it comes to complaining, and I didn’t want a lot of griping about overcooked food or administrative screw-ups. Thanks to a novelist friend, Emily Prager, I got the idea: Have them interview their pals on what they liked about prison. This, of course, fairly threw them. But, Professor P, we hate prison, why can’t we write about that? Because everybody knows that story, I said. You’re news reporters, and the news is, you know, new.
Reluctantly, over the next week they hit up fellow inmates in this regard, with trepidation in some cases, because they knew these guys weren’t going to like the question either. Here’s one of the leads. “Animal stands out among most inmates. His 6-foot-9-inch, 250-pound muscled frame was the result of years spent lifting weights. He has an array of ghoulish tattoos and a gnarled razor scar that runs down the right side of his cheek. I could not help but feel a bit uneasy as I approached the front of his cube, where he sat preparing a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.” Nice touch, that sandwich, I told the writer.
In the end they persuaded just about everyone to talk. One inmate, Jose I’ll call him, told one of my reporters that he liked Woodbourne not for any program, but for how it had turned out to be a “gangster’s paradise.” “For Jose,” the story said, “prison is like a jail shopping network, where profiling, signifying, and slick talking purchase the company of hustlers, thugs, and killers. Caring very little about the overall expense of perhaps coming back to prison or being killed, he associates affluence and success with such a crowd. As Jose says, ‘Watch, Cuz, I’m a push a Lexus, have a phat crib, I’m connected with some real ballers now.’ ”
On the other hand, a number of inmates credited prison with saving their lives. One was Fast Freddy, six feet tall, weighing 130 pounds, a high school track star before he got addicted to crack cocaine. He was interviewed by a thirty-three-year-old student named Lino, one of my best reporters. Lino was tall, well-muscled, and fairly fierce looking himself, with a deadeye stare and a scar down the side of his face — fierce, that is, until he broke into a smile, seeing how well he could do this stuff. “ ‘I was out there snatching purses from old women, even stole from my mother,’ ” he quoted Fast Freddy as saying. “ ‘And one day I snatched a purse from an old lady who had a son that was being sought by police for three homicides. I became so scared I ran straight to the police precinct and turned myself in.’ In Freddy’s perspective, if it were not for prison he would have been hunted down and killed. Freddy has taken the time here to acquire a GED and is currently a teacher’s aide in the vocational welding shop and is seeking to complete his apprenticeship as a certified welder.”
The last story they’d write would be about Christmas in prison. There’s no tree or presents, of course. At Woodbourne, a Catholic charity furnishes them all with Christmas cards to mail, and the Salvation Army gives out “Care Bags” containing a toothbrush, tube of toothpaste, comb, shampoo, and a wash cloth — a prosaic collection that doesn’t elicit much enthusiasm. The day itself usually starts off fairly grim, they reported. The guards are grumpy, because they have to be in prison, too, not home with their families. And, as Carlos the kitchen worker wrote, “Most of the guys wake up feeling depressed and agitated because they may not have gotten any mail, or they may have been expecting a food or clothing package that may not have arrived. Someone always seems to get into a beef on Christmas morning. If it’s not over the shower, it’s over the phone; if it’s not that, then it’s over the TV, but either way a fight always takes place.”
The prisoners tend to wake up thinking about home, about when they were little boys, the age when their happy memories generally come to a halt, what with the teenage years spent in and out of trouble, until the big thing happens that lands them in prison. And in recalling the early years, they understandably feel a little sorry for themselves. “From the cell the snowy world beyond the barred windows is less a harbinger of good news than a reminder of opportunities lost,” wrote Julian, the one with the gathered-up dreads. “I’m a little put out by how much the scene below looks like a postcard, not unlike the picture postcards I used to get from U.S. relatives as a boy in Jamaica. As a youngster, the snow always represented something far away, mythical. Now, that’s how I feel about Christmas, which I no longer experience.”
Food looms large on Christmas, because it’s tied to the same memories. Normally, the meals at Woodbourne get cooked twice, once at a central facility, where the food is then put into freezer bags and trucked to the prison, and again when it’s dumped into kettles of boiling water before serving. On Christmas, however, the administration goes out of its way to provide something nice, and enough of it so the inmates can eat all they want. This year it would be roast beef, rice, fruit juice, and cake with icing for dessert. “In comparison with the other meals served here,” Lino wrote, “this particular meal tasted like something out of a four-star restaurant.”
Food and childhood were also on Lino’s mind when he woke up that day. “I can picture my family at Christmas preparing to put the finishing touches on the multiple-course meal they have been preparing for the past day or two,” he wrote. “Deep down, I can smell the roast pork, rice, and pigeon peas, candied yams and apple pie. My parents’ entire home with a warm and cozy feeling . . . . The person who I miss the most is my fifteen-year-old son, who I only spent one Christmas with. Whenever I speak with him during this time of the year, I can hear the sadness in his voice.
“Christmases in jail are mostly like any other day. Just when I begin to feel the Christmas spirit, there is something that reminds me of where I am. I remember Christmas 2004 clearly. I was watching a Soul Train Christmas special. There were rhythm & blues stars singing Christmas carols. Half way through the show the correction officer called for the count. We were directed to return to our cubicles. On this particular day the count was not correct, and by the time we returned to the recreation room the show was over.”
To read the articles in the May/June 2006 issue, click here.
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