Wednesday,
December 24, 2014
CHRISTMAS EVE
They let us watch
the news on TV before they call “Work Call,” and I was touched by a boys’ choir
on “Good Morning America” singing a
medley of Christmas carols at the end of the program. Eighteen or twenty
pre-teen boys neatly dressed in matching dark blazers and red-and-white
mufflers silenced a dozen prisoners who would normally be chattering while a
few others strained to hear the newscasters. My eyes went from the singers on
TV to the viewers in prison. Several men wiped their eyes while listening to
the boys sing, as touched as I was.
So happy, joyful
and innocent the boys seemed, focused on performing the old favorites. It struck
me then, wondering what the future would bring to each of those children in the
next few years. Would they return to loving homes with fathers and mothers?
Would they attend good schools, move on to high schools, then college, earn
degrees, marry, raise their own children, and happily live to old age? Or would
some of them become addicted to drugs, fall into lives of crime, and serve long
prison sentences like so many men surrounding me, living wasted lives?
Although there was
no way to know, seeing the clean-cut boys performing on national television,
with music teachers, mentors, and other professionals working with them, I
doubted that they would face the desperate challenges that had broken down my
fellow prisoners. Leading sheltered lives, for the most part, would protect
them, although there are no guarantees.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2014:
CHRISTMAS DAY
About fifty
prisoners, out of 1500 or so in this prison, crowded into the visiting area
this morning. Barely three percent of the total population had family and
friends willing to share their Christmas inside a prison. That sad statistic
bodes ill for the latest Florida Department of Corrections motto, “Changing Lives to Ensure a Safer Florida.”
Without a support group of family and friends willing to help them adjust to
life in a free society, the 40,000 or more prisoners released back into their
neighborhoods don’t stand a good chance of having changed lives, making that
motto a hollow promise. If ninety-seven percent of prisoners do not have loved
ones who care enough to visit them in prison, what will become of them when
they get out?
My wife, Libby,
was one of the first people in the visiting room this clear Christmas Day. We
were allowed our “brief kiss and embrace,” as specified by prison rules. Any
other contact is expressly forbidden, except holding hands, the only exception
being that fathers are allowed to hold their small children.
Watching young
families enter the visiting park, then excitedly greeting fathers in prison is
both heartwarming and heartbreaking. A three-year old girl breaks from her
mother and races across the room, crying, “Daddy,
Daddy, Daddy!” The father lifts her up and holds her, tears running down
both their cheeks. Three pre-teen boys, little different from the boys’ choir
members we’d seen the previous day, raced across the room to embrace their
father, who waded past them to kiss his wife, virtually ignoring his young
sons. That lack of affection bothered Libby and me. “Look, Daddy, look, look,” one little boy cried, begging his father
to pay attention to the blocks he’d stacked, to no avail.
Another young
mother with three daughters greeted her husband, and all of them embraced.
Later in the day, outside on the lawn, all five sat together and played games.
That scene made our hearts glad. The
contrasting behavior of imprisoned fathers made me wonder what disappointments
those three boys felt when their father paid scant attention to them, leaving
them to play games with each other.
A young woman
holding her nine month old daughter sat on the grass in the sun with her
husband, who had been imprisoned before his daughter was born. At least he held
her and showed affection to mother and daughter.
About twenty
pre-teen children raced around the outside visiting park during the course of
the day, mostly entertaining themselves. Only a couple of fathers spent time
playing with their children, holding them, throwing them into the air, laughing
with them. Can there be anything more heartwarming than the joyful laughter of
young children? What bothered Libby and me, something we discussed many times,
is how those inattentive, unemotional and unaffectionate prison fathers condemn
many of those children to lives of drug abuse, crime, failure and despair, very
likely fates they suffered from fathers they emulated.
At a criminal
justice seminar at Union C.I., Raiford, sponsored by University of
Florida professors over
thirty years ago, one of the “experts” claimed that close to one-third of the
children who visit fathers in prison, will one day become prisoners themselves.
I have no reason to doubt that figure. That would mean that seven children
visiting their fathers this day will one
day serve time, too.
I can’t tell you
how many young men I’ve met in prison over the past thirty-six-plus years
followed their fathers to prison. Just last week a forty-year old prisoner
housed with me asked me if I’d ever known his father, who was at Raiford, “The Rock,” during the same years I’d
been there.
“What’s your father’s name?” I asked.
He told me. I told
him I’d known his father well, years ago. He told me his father was still in
prison, for over forty years. Father and son. He’d visited his father as a
child. Now he had a son in the juvenile system, most likely matriculating to an
adult prison in a few more years.
What a waste —
three generations in prison. What can be done to interrupt that cycle of
generational incarceration? We know that prisoners’ children are a high-risk
group, and tax money used to intervene in their lives at six years old, to
address the causes, would be much better spent than the $25,000 a year spent to
incarcerate them at eighteen, for the next twenty or forty years. Instead of
looking at the short terms politicians focus on, four-year increments between
elections, we must look to solving these problems in the long term. The
problems are not going away. Ignore them if you dare.
I’ve done a lot of
thinking on this subject over my decades of imprisonment, and hope that at some
point we will have far-thinking people in charge of the public’s trust, who
will come to the prisons and talk with those who know this system best, not
entrenched bureaucrats interested in protecting and preserving their pensions.
Otherwise, the societal problems embodied in the thousands upon thousands of
wasted lives will only grow.
Charlie
