Prison Nation - Building Prisons, Neglecting Education 

by Joe DeRaymond  

On February 28, the Pew Center on the States through their Public Safety Performance Project released the results of a study called "One in a Hundred Behind Bars". The study revealed that for the first time in the history of the nation, more than one in 100 adults in the United States are in prison. The study is concerned with the immense costs to State budgets of this high level of incarceration. Pennsylvania, for example, spent $2.015 billion on prisons in 2007. This is 81% of the amount spent by the State on the Higher Education General Fund.

In Northampton County, there is a perpetual prison crisis. After just spending over $20 million on a prison expansion under the management of the Reibman administration, the County is looking for a location to spend tens of millions more for a bigger, newer place to cage the population. Pennsylvania’s prison population was 46,019 as of the end of January. Plans are in the works for two new state prisons, with a price tag of over $200,000,000 each. It must be noted, also, that Pennsylvania maintains a world class death row, with 231 currently facing execution.

The Pew Center Study points out some interesting details about who is behind bars in the Land of the Free. One of nine black males between the ages of 20 and 34 is in prison. The ratio is one in thirty when all men are in the sample. Of people in their 20’s, one in 53 is in jail, while of those over 55 only one person in 837 is looking through bars, or glazed glass. It is a national disgrace, the war brought home, as military veterans become prison guards, and prison guards serve in the hells of Abu Ghraib and other torture palaces of the USA.

In 2006, I spent three months in prison, for protesting torture policies at the Western Hemispher Institute for Security Cooperation, at Fort Benning, Georgia. I spent two weeks in the Segregated Housing Unit in a federal prison, in a small cell with one or two other men, locked down 23 or 24 hours a day. I spent a week in Lehigh County prison, which was more difficult than the segregation unit in the federal prison. I spent the rest of the time in a minimum security federal prison camp, where we were herded from dormitory to meaningless work detail, to meals, for the daily counts. It is a dreary, monotonous existence punctuated by poor food, poor living conditions – it is punishment, designed to do nothing more than restrict humanity and deny life.

Here is an account of that time in prison, written for a collection of prison experiences by School of the Americas prisoners of conscience. Tear down the walls!

3 Months in Prison Nation, Schuylkill FCI  

On some days, at about 330 in the afternoon, the range would be rockin’- dancing, singing, rapping, laughing, wrestling, raucous. The workday was done, we all had to be at our bunks for the 4 PM count, it was 44 men in a small space trying to break out.

The guards walk by, brisk, military mannered, no eye contact, counting us, inventory, units of production. Often they have to count twice.

Then, the 20 minute dinner line, should you choose to take it, for a heavy helping of starch, canned vegetables, white bread, prana served by fellow prisoners, under the alert eye of the police.

Prison nation takes you to the various levels of deprivation, sooner or later. I started out in the hole, with two young men from DC, A and M. They had been down for months, in the process of transfer, with no disciplinary issues. Each had lost a sibling to the streets, M’s arm had been shattered in a driveby, now he needed an elbow replacement, but could still knock out hundreds of pushups a day. Locked down 23 hours a day, with an hour out to a cage 5 times a week, 3 showers a week, one phone call a month, frosted opaque window in the 7 X 9 cell, toilet just inside the slotted door. Through the slot came food, and cuffs for every time the door was opened. Tough conditions for week after week, but they were holding up, writing songs, doing pushups, horsing around, bouncing off the walls.

Transport to County in shackles, for a hearing, for trespassing in another public space. Body and cavity search. Different prison clothes, same lockdown in a transitional unit, out of the cell only for a prison video warning of harsh treatment, threatening many years for having a gun or even a bullet – it must have been strange to my cellmate, who was facing many years for having a gun. Bizarre otherworldly environments, a hundred men living in a gym under artificial light, a space capsule highly controlled all male society.

Back to the hole at Schuylkill. Four more days, then a transfer to the minimun security population, the "overflow", packed into a room that had been a TV room, now filled with 17 bunks stacked three high, with barely room to walk between the beds. But there was a quarter mile track to walk, bocce, basketball, softball, bridge, chess, television, radio, work in the garden. My obligatory work was on the landscaping crew, a desultory group of weedwacking inmates, often mowing fields of wildflowers. The warden had destroyed the landscaped areas of the grounds, bulldozing gardens and grass in favor of crushed stone, "it was too much like a college campus". The work is just another form of control, of keeping track, of counts and meaningless tasks.

There are over 2.1 million in prison nation USA, there are over 2 million US children with a parent in prison. No other nation on earth incarcerates at this rate, punishes with such corporate efficiency.

We "POC’s" are viewed with amused curiosity by the inmates, and with understanding, for there are many doing time for standing up for their rights, for speaking truth to a Judge, for testifying on their own behalf. These are all acts that result in more time at sentencing – our Justice Department wants a Guilty verdict, and trials mean retribution, not justice.

Time is a drug, the prison system is the pusher; it converts lives to profits and jobs in the twisted economy of Prison Nation.

The days go by, reading, talking, TV when available. It was a time of reflection on the Middle East, as I read Robert Fisk’s "The Great War for Civilization", and various accounts of the ongoing vicious occupation of Iraq. Our leaders embrace cycles of violence without critically understanding the past, the people, the region.

And the letters! The spectacular flow of correspence I received, of sincere good wishes, prayers, thoughts, books, magazines, articles was a source of strength. To know that there is a community that understands and respects what we are doing, and that has often shared the experience, was a source of strength, and produced a fascinating series of exchanges. Thanks to all who wrote, accepted phone calls, and visited.

The time in prison haunts my experience "outside". The inhabitants of prison nation, workers and inmates, are a forgotten class in our nation. The challenge of converting the energy of Prison Nation to a decent, human way of assessing crime and attaining justice and accountability is part of our struggle.

I write this with full consciousness of our SOAW brothers and sisters still in prison, and of the thousands and thousands doing time for smoking pot, or being Black Panthers, or Native Americans, for living in the wrong neighborhood, or being the wrong color, for standing in resistance in so many different ways to this system we will change. Tear down the walls!

-Joe DeRaymond