Dateline: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 DAY SIXTEEN IN SOLITARY
BRIGHT LIGHTS IN THE DARKNESS
In the midst of all the adversity I’ve been faced with the past month or so over my prison diary writings, I’d like to report two interesting and positive developments that have resulted from my literary work.
If you’ve been reading my messages since March 16, 2010, and following the censorship and confiscation issues surrounding my memoir, “To Protect The Guilty,” this will seem ironic, especially since one memoir landed my butt in disciplinary confinement.
A few days before I went to solitary, the mailroom received and delivered a copy of the “Journal Of Prisoners on Prisons,” (Volume 19, No.1, 2010 – www.jpp.org) published by the University of Ottowa Press, edited by Bell Chivigny. Included in the Journal was my 2008 PEN award-winning memoir, “Fighting the Ninja,” about AIDS in prison, with the photo I took in 1985 of “Mama Herc,” a legendary chain gang homosexual, along with powerful works by men and women prisoners nationwide.
No issues, no official complaints, no confiscation of a story about prison homosexuals and AIDS, but only a few weeks before, the “authorities” blew their tops over a memoir about Ku Klux Klan prison guards. Content-wise, the “…Ninja” memoir, to me (but what do I know? I just write the stuff that I have lived), was a much stronger, more raw, and potentially more controversial work than the more humorous KKK memoir. What’s the difference? Perhaps they learned a lesson the first time around, though I have my doubts.
Today I received a nice letter from Maureen McNeil and Cynthia L. Cooper about a book they are doing. Here’s what they said:
“March 15, 2010
Dear Participants in Anne Frank Prison Diary Project,
We are writing a book about the Prison Diary Project and would like to have your permission to include your diary. Please see the enclosed form and envelope, which must be signed and returned if your wok is to be included.
As currently planned, the book is about the remarkable journey of Anne Frank’s diary, read and replicated by contemporary inmate-writers participating in the Prison Diary Project of the Anne Frank Center in NYC since 2008. Built upon central themes in Anne Frank’s diary, we anticipate that this book will reflect on Loneliness, Hardship, Love, Loss, Confinement, Nature, Small Pleasures, Writing, New Beginnings, Self-knowledge and other topics. For you, as for Anne, diary writing became a personal travelogue. While locked inside, you dug into your inner self, learning to live in the moment and find richness in spare surroundings.
“I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart,” Anne writes at the onset of her diary excursions. Anne’s words are an enduring testament to the human spirit. This book brings her inspiration to a contemporary audience, offering a guide for all to overcome the barriers and walls they encounter through the search for personal freedom.
Cynthia L. Cooper is an award-winning journalist, playwright and author, whose books include, Mockery of Justice (Penguin), Who Said It Would Be Easy, (Arcade) and the soon-to-be released book of her play, Silence Not, A Love Story (Gihon River Press). Co-author Maureen McNeil, author of Red Stories Hook, is the Director of Education at the Anne Frank Center.
The book is a work in progress, so it may take awhile to complete, but a percentage of the proceeds will go to the Anne Frank Center to help with the upkeep [of] the Prison Writing Project and its archives.
Thank you for your help in making this book possible. We look forward to receiving your signed release form.
Sincerely,
[signed]
Maureen McNeil
Cynthia Cooper”
I hope they choose something other than my recollections of the KKK in prison!
The Anne Frank Prison Diary Project has spurred a ton of literary work from me the past almost two years, and I am grateful to the folks at the Anne Frank Center USA for their encouragement and support. It is a very worthy project to which I hope to continue to contribute. Of course, I would prefer to do that in freedom.
Two memoirs, two publications, two far different results. How can that be explained? I can’t.
Charlie
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Saturday, April 3, 2010
HOLY WEEK AND EASTER IN THE “MODERN” PRISON
Dateline: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 DAY FIFTEEN IN SOLITARY
HOLY WEEK AND EASTER IN THE “MODERN” PRISON
Today is Passover. In a few days we’ll celebrate Good Friday followed by Easter Sunday. I take that back—you may be celebrating Holy Week, but there is no celebrating in “disciplinary confinement.” We are the forgotten ones. Today, being Passover, seems fitting, since we have definitely been “passed over” by those charged with our care, custody, and control. Yesterday, the prison chaplain made his obligatory rounds through “the hole,” passing by us so fast that for a moment I flashed back to the Vancouver Olympics, watching the speed skater, Apolo Ohno, zoom past the finish line for the gold.
In a few minutes I’d like to tell you about a memorable Easter experience in prison, in another time and place, but first I must comment on my appeal of this egregiously retaliatory “disciplinary report” that resulted in my letters from solitary the past fifteen days.
When I first learned on February 22, 2010, that mailroom clerk, Ms. T. Gronik, had intercepted, read, and arbitrarily decided on January 28, 2010, that my memoir, “To Protect The Guilty,” published in the anthology, “Wordsmith 2010,” was a “threat to security,” I put aside the crucial legal research I was doing on my criminal case and focused on the law pertaining to mail, censorship, prison writings, the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and other applicable laws. Little did I know that the content of my story about my factual experiences with retaliatory Ku Klux Klan prison guards many years before at an unnamed prison would trigger reprisals by prison higher-ups in 2010.
I soon realized that like jungle predators they had been “lying in wait” (operative word: lying, in verb form) for an opportunity to get even with me, to teach me a lesson for the contents of my other writings, specifically formal written grievances seeking redress of wrongs committed by them in their heavy-handed misapplications of state laws and rules. Kill the messenger. Ms. Gronik’s actions gave them the opportunity to slam me and silence my protected writings on two fronts: to punish me for telling the public about another one of the prison system’s “dirty little secrets,” rampant racism and tension among many prison staff (not an isolated problem), and to hinder, intimidate, and otherwise retaliate against me for bringing up their mishandling and abuses of their absolute discretion over our lives in formal complaints. In their minds, the state laws and rules don’t apply to them, and Heaven help anyone who calls them on it.
Because they screwed up the initial paperwork (it is still screwed up), requiring them to rewrite the D.R., I had more time than usual to research the law on the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech. What I found is that there is a huge body of law, much of it decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, that protects prisoners’ rights regarding mail, correspondence, permissible reading materials, and their own creative works. I also found that everything the “authorities” did in this instance was not only dead wrong, but violative of a plethora of state and federal laws, so much so that the first question I had to ask myself was, “where do I start?” Two quotes that apply:
“A prisoner’s allegation of being punished in response to the exercise of First Amendment rights to free speech and redress the government states a claim. An inmate who proves that he was retaliated against for filing an administrative grievance establishes a violation of his First Amendment rights.” (See Wildberger v. Bracknell, 869 F.2d 1467, 1467-68 (11th circ.1989)
And
“The gist of a retaliation claim is that a prisoner is penalized for exercising the right of free speech.” (Mitchell v. Farcass, 112 F 3rd 1483, 1490 (11th cir.1997), quoting Thomas v. Evans, 880 F.2d 1235, 1242 (11th cir.1989)
One of the landmark cases, Procunier v. Martinez, (416 U.S. 396, 1974), offers a tremendous lode of wisdom from the U.S. Supreme Court. One brief quote is on direct point for what the authorities at this prison did concerning, “To Protect The Guilty,” and sounds like it was written for them: “These regulations fairly invited prison officials and employees to apply their own personal prejudices and opinions as standards for prison mail censorship.’ (416 U.S. 415)
Over the years, the courts have let the prison systems nationwide get away with many violations of law, justifying their inactions at times by saying that since running a prison is so challenging, the courts must allow administrators “considerable deference” and latitude in how they do their jobs; however, another landmark case sums up so accurately the situation I am dealing with that I want to close this part of my letter with a revealing quotation: “The ‘considerable deference’ to prison officials does not apply to prison officials who are so inexperienced and unaware of constitutional rights and law that they allow their personal prejudices and feelings to override existing regulations, in violation of well-settled law…Prison regulation which impinges on inmates’ constitutional rights cannot be sustained as ‘reasonably related’ to legitimate penological interest, where logical connection between regulation and asserted goal is so remote as to render policy arbitrary or irrational, or where goal is not legitimate and neutral one.” (See Turner v. Safly, 482 U.S. 78,89,107,s.ct.2254, (1987).
What is even more amazing is that the rule I was sent to solitary confinement for allegedly violating does not even exist! If you have your computer or volumes of the Florida Administrative Code handy, which contains “Chapter 33,” the rules governing much of the Department of Corrections, look up Chapter 33-201.101, (9) (12) and (13). Look hard! Can’t find it? I couldn’t either. It is not there. It does not exist. But there it is, plain as day, on assistant warden Angela Gordon’s D.R. statement of facts, “a direct violation…as stated in Chapter 33-201.101, (9) (12) & (13).” The law is clear. The D.R. is defective and void. Yet here I am.
Back to Easter celebrations in times past.
The prison system experienced a veritable renaissance in the theory and practice of how to run a prison fairly and smoothly in the mid-1980’s. This enlightened period came about when mature, responsible prisoners worked together with experienced and knowledgeable wardens to improve the overall prison conditions, giving the prisoners the chance to show they deserved more privileges. The Easter Sunrise Service at Zephyrhills C.I. in 1986 serves as an excellent example of what could be accomplished by everyone working together for a common goal.
At four a.m. a work crew of prisoners began taking all the folding chairs from the building and setting them up in a large paved area by the chapel, at the front of the prison. A wooden stage had been set up, and a large wooden cross built by prisoners was erected behind the stage.
At five a.m. prisoners’ visitors from the outside, families and friends, began entering the visiting park, where coffee urns, orange juice, and milk for the kids were ready and waiting. The chow hall bakers made cinnamon rolls and snacks for the early risers. Jaycee members handed out carnation corsages to the women and girls.
After check-in and processing, over one hundred visitors joined two hundred fifty prisoners outside, within the prison, for the Easter Sunrise Service.
At five-forty-five a.m., an outside church choir joined with the prison choir and band to sing several hymns. An outside minister opened with a prayer. As the sun rose to the east, State Senator john Grant, a devout Christian and attorney from Tampa, gave a moving and enlightening sermon concerning the trial and execution of Jesus from a legal point of view. That got everyone’s attention.
In light of our own laws and procedures for accusing, trying, convicting, and executing a condemned man, Senator Grant went step-by-step through the entire process endured by Jesus, and showed how many legal violations and errors occurred. In spite of all that, Jesus never protested, but let it continue on. An innocent man was tried, convicted, and executed based on false evidence and false witnesses. I could identify with that. It gave us all a lot to think about, in God’s plan.
After a few more songs, we had an Easter egg hunt. It wasn’t easy. I wrote the memos weeks before, made all the arrangements, got all the permissions from the top dogs, but on Good Friday, I got called up front. The warden and his subordinates had the schedule and memos I’d produced spread out on a table, seriously contemplating them. He spoke.
“Norman, you’ve done an excellent job putting all this together, but we have one major concern.”
“Let me guess, sir, the Easter egg hunt.”
“That’s right. It’s never been done before. How many children do you expect?”
“Between twenty and fifty. We have enough baskets and eggs to cover more, if necessary.” (Actually, twenty-nine children participated).
“Do you know how many child molesters we have at Zephyrhills, Norman?”
“Quite a few.”
“That’s right. And we can’t afford to have one of them harm a child. I’d lose my job. How are you going to deal with that? We don’t have enough staff to isolate and watch all the perverts.”
“We’ve got that handled, sir. You don’t have to worry about it.”
“You have? How?”
“We’ve already identified every Chester the Molester, we’ve talked to them, and told them we will have a line set up that they can’t cross. They can’t come within a hundred feet of the area marked off for the Easter egg hunt, or they will suffer serious consequences.”
“How are you going to enforce it?”
“We have our own security crew of volunteers, a dozen large men, convicted murderers and armed robbers, no sex charges, who have pledged to guard those children with their lives. No perverts will be in the vicinity.”
The warden broke out laughing. “Murderers and robbers are gong to guard against the child molesters. That’s brilliant. The lieutenant here will be on duty Sunday, so get with him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Norman, I’m going to stand way back out of the way. If you need any assistance, give me a wave.” The warden had one more question. “I’ve been looking over these work assignment lists. You’ve got over eighty inmates working on this project in their off-duty time for weeks, and they’ll be up at four a.m. working their butts off Sunday morning. I have a hard time getting anyone to work around here. We have to threaten them with lockup to get cigarette butts picked up. You have crews picking up trash and cigarette butts all weekend, to make the place look good. How do you get so many men to work voluntarily when I can’t?”
“Don’t you know, sir? That’s why they call it, ‘organized crime.’ ”
We didn’t need any assistance from security. Everything went like clockwork. A blessed time was had by all. We even gave the molesters the leftover cinnamon rolls after the visitors returned to the visiting park.
That will never happen again in prison. Where once our families could attend prison church services with us, thereby strengthening our bonds, in their infinite wisdom, all those programs have been shut down. Meanwhile, I pray you have a nice Easter celebration of your own. I’ll do the best I can.
A Note: One thing about being in lockup is that it gives me time to catch up on my Bible studies. It is easy to get behind. If you have trouble with that, too, let me recommend an excellent free publication by Rev. Charles Stanley, “In Touch” Magazine. Besides inspirational stories, it has a section that will help you read the Bible in a year, with a daily calendar and lists of verses to read each day of the month, an easy task, with explanations of the reading.
Go to www.intouch.org to subscribe. Tell them Charlie sent you.
Charlie
HOLY WEEK AND EASTER IN THE “MODERN” PRISON
Today is Passover. In a few days we’ll celebrate Good Friday followed by Easter Sunday. I take that back—you may be celebrating Holy Week, but there is no celebrating in “disciplinary confinement.” We are the forgotten ones. Today, being Passover, seems fitting, since we have definitely been “passed over” by those charged with our care, custody, and control. Yesterday, the prison chaplain made his obligatory rounds through “the hole,” passing by us so fast that for a moment I flashed back to the Vancouver Olympics, watching the speed skater, Apolo Ohno, zoom past the finish line for the gold.
In a few minutes I’d like to tell you about a memorable Easter experience in prison, in another time and place, but first I must comment on my appeal of this egregiously retaliatory “disciplinary report” that resulted in my letters from solitary the past fifteen days.
When I first learned on February 22, 2010, that mailroom clerk, Ms. T. Gronik, had intercepted, read, and arbitrarily decided on January 28, 2010, that my memoir, “To Protect The Guilty,” published in the anthology, “Wordsmith 2010,” was a “threat to security,” I put aside the crucial legal research I was doing on my criminal case and focused on the law pertaining to mail, censorship, prison writings, the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and other applicable laws. Little did I know that the content of my story about my factual experiences with retaliatory Ku Klux Klan prison guards many years before at an unnamed prison would trigger reprisals by prison higher-ups in 2010.
I soon realized that like jungle predators they had been “lying in wait” (operative word: lying, in verb form) for an opportunity to get even with me, to teach me a lesson for the contents of my other writings, specifically formal written grievances seeking redress of wrongs committed by them in their heavy-handed misapplications of state laws and rules. Kill the messenger. Ms. Gronik’s actions gave them the opportunity to slam me and silence my protected writings on two fronts: to punish me for telling the public about another one of the prison system’s “dirty little secrets,” rampant racism and tension among many prison staff (not an isolated problem), and to hinder, intimidate, and otherwise retaliate against me for bringing up their mishandling and abuses of their absolute discretion over our lives in formal complaints. In their minds, the state laws and rules don’t apply to them, and Heaven help anyone who calls them on it.
Because they screwed up the initial paperwork (it is still screwed up), requiring them to rewrite the D.R., I had more time than usual to research the law on the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech. What I found is that there is a huge body of law, much of it decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, that protects prisoners’ rights regarding mail, correspondence, permissible reading materials, and their own creative works. I also found that everything the “authorities” did in this instance was not only dead wrong, but violative of a plethora of state and federal laws, so much so that the first question I had to ask myself was, “where do I start?” Two quotes that apply:
“A prisoner’s allegation of being punished in response to the exercise of First Amendment rights to free speech and redress the government states a claim. An inmate who proves that he was retaliated against for filing an administrative grievance establishes a violation of his First Amendment rights.” (See Wildberger v. Bracknell, 869 F.2d 1467, 1467-68 (11th circ.1989)
And
“The gist of a retaliation claim is that a prisoner is penalized for exercising the right of free speech.” (Mitchell v. Farcass, 112 F 3rd 1483, 1490 (11th cir.1997), quoting Thomas v. Evans, 880 F.2d 1235, 1242 (11th cir.1989)
One of the landmark cases, Procunier v. Martinez, (416 U.S. 396, 1974), offers a tremendous lode of wisdom from the U.S. Supreme Court. One brief quote is on direct point for what the authorities at this prison did concerning, “To Protect The Guilty,” and sounds like it was written for them: “These regulations fairly invited prison officials and employees to apply their own personal prejudices and opinions as standards for prison mail censorship.’ (416 U.S. 415)
Over the years, the courts have let the prison systems nationwide get away with many violations of law, justifying their inactions at times by saying that since running a prison is so challenging, the courts must allow administrators “considerable deference” and latitude in how they do their jobs; however, another landmark case sums up so accurately the situation I am dealing with that I want to close this part of my letter with a revealing quotation: “The ‘considerable deference’ to prison officials does not apply to prison officials who are so inexperienced and unaware of constitutional rights and law that they allow their personal prejudices and feelings to override existing regulations, in violation of well-settled law…Prison regulation which impinges on inmates’ constitutional rights cannot be sustained as ‘reasonably related’ to legitimate penological interest, where logical connection between regulation and asserted goal is so remote as to render policy arbitrary or irrational, or where goal is not legitimate and neutral one.” (See Turner v. Safly, 482 U.S. 78,89,107,s.ct.2254, (1987).
What is even more amazing is that the rule I was sent to solitary confinement for allegedly violating does not even exist! If you have your computer or volumes of the Florida Administrative Code handy, which contains “Chapter 33,” the rules governing much of the Department of Corrections, look up Chapter 33-201.101, (9) (12) and (13). Look hard! Can’t find it? I couldn’t either. It is not there. It does not exist. But there it is, plain as day, on assistant warden Angela Gordon’s D.R. statement of facts, “a direct violation…as stated in Chapter 33-201.101, (9) (12) & (13).” The law is clear. The D.R. is defective and void. Yet here I am.
Back to Easter celebrations in times past.
The prison system experienced a veritable renaissance in the theory and practice of how to run a prison fairly and smoothly in the mid-1980’s. This enlightened period came about when mature, responsible prisoners worked together with experienced and knowledgeable wardens to improve the overall prison conditions, giving the prisoners the chance to show they deserved more privileges. The Easter Sunrise Service at Zephyrhills C.I. in 1986 serves as an excellent example of what could be accomplished by everyone working together for a common goal.
At four a.m. a work crew of prisoners began taking all the folding chairs from the building and setting them up in a large paved area by the chapel, at the front of the prison. A wooden stage had been set up, and a large wooden cross built by prisoners was erected behind the stage.
At five a.m. prisoners’ visitors from the outside, families and friends, began entering the visiting park, where coffee urns, orange juice, and milk for the kids were ready and waiting. The chow hall bakers made cinnamon rolls and snacks for the early risers. Jaycee members handed out carnation corsages to the women and girls.
After check-in and processing, over one hundred visitors joined two hundred fifty prisoners outside, within the prison, for the Easter Sunrise Service.
At five-forty-five a.m., an outside church choir joined with the prison choir and band to sing several hymns. An outside minister opened with a prayer. As the sun rose to the east, State Senator john Grant, a devout Christian and attorney from Tampa, gave a moving and enlightening sermon concerning the trial and execution of Jesus from a legal point of view. That got everyone’s attention.
In light of our own laws and procedures for accusing, trying, convicting, and executing a condemned man, Senator Grant went step-by-step through the entire process endured by Jesus, and showed how many legal violations and errors occurred. In spite of all that, Jesus never protested, but let it continue on. An innocent man was tried, convicted, and executed based on false evidence and false witnesses. I could identify with that. It gave us all a lot to think about, in God’s plan.
After a few more songs, we had an Easter egg hunt. It wasn’t easy. I wrote the memos weeks before, made all the arrangements, got all the permissions from the top dogs, but on Good Friday, I got called up front. The warden and his subordinates had the schedule and memos I’d produced spread out on a table, seriously contemplating them. He spoke.
“Norman, you’ve done an excellent job putting all this together, but we have one major concern.”
“Let me guess, sir, the Easter egg hunt.”
“That’s right. It’s never been done before. How many children do you expect?”
“Between twenty and fifty. We have enough baskets and eggs to cover more, if necessary.” (Actually, twenty-nine children participated).
“Do you know how many child molesters we have at Zephyrhills, Norman?”
“Quite a few.”
“That’s right. And we can’t afford to have one of them harm a child. I’d lose my job. How are you going to deal with that? We don’t have enough staff to isolate and watch all the perverts.”
“We’ve got that handled, sir. You don’t have to worry about it.”
“You have? How?”
“We’ve already identified every Chester the Molester, we’ve talked to them, and told them we will have a line set up that they can’t cross. They can’t come within a hundred feet of the area marked off for the Easter egg hunt, or they will suffer serious consequences.”
“How are you going to enforce it?”
“We have our own security crew of volunteers, a dozen large men, convicted murderers and armed robbers, no sex charges, who have pledged to guard those children with their lives. No perverts will be in the vicinity.”
The warden broke out laughing. “Murderers and robbers are gong to guard against the child molesters. That’s brilliant. The lieutenant here will be on duty Sunday, so get with him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Norman, I’m going to stand way back out of the way. If you need any assistance, give me a wave.” The warden had one more question. “I’ve been looking over these work assignment lists. You’ve got over eighty inmates working on this project in their off-duty time for weeks, and they’ll be up at four a.m. working their butts off Sunday morning. I have a hard time getting anyone to work around here. We have to threaten them with lockup to get cigarette butts picked up. You have crews picking up trash and cigarette butts all weekend, to make the place look good. How do you get so many men to work voluntarily when I can’t?”
“Don’t you know, sir? That’s why they call it, ‘organized crime.’ ”
We didn’t need any assistance from security. Everything went like clockwork. A blessed time was had by all. We even gave the molesters the leftover cinnamon rolls after the visitors returned to the visiting park.
That will never happen again in prison. Where once our families could attend prison church services with us, thereby strengthening our bonds, in their infinite wisdom, all those programs have been shut down. Meanwhile, I pray you have a nice Easter celebration of your own. I’ll do the best I can.
A Note: One thing about being in lockup is that it gives me time to catch up on my Bible studies. It is easy to get behind. If you have trouble with that, too, let me recommend an excellent free publication by Rev. Charles Stanley, “In Touch” Magazine. Besides inspirational stories, it has a section that will help you read the Bible in a year, with a daily calendar and lists of verses to read each day of the month, an easy task, with explanations of the reading.
Go to www.intouch.org to subscribe. Tell them Charlie sent you.
Charlie
Sunday, March 28, 2010
AWARD-WINNING MEMOIR ABOUT KKK PRISON GUARDS LANDS FLORIDA PRISONER IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT
Dateline March 26, 2010
"AWARD-WINNING MEMOIR ABOUT KKK PRISON GUARDS LANDS FLORIDA PRISONER IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT"
Prisoner Charles Norman claims retaliation and First Amendment violations by prison officials offended by his writing the truth.
Florida prisoner, Charlie Norman, has served thirty-two years on a life sentence for a 1975 murder in Tampa. For the past twenty-five years, he has won numerous state and national writing awards for his poetry, short stories, plays, essays, and prison memoirs. Now a published excerpt from his 2008 prison diary about encounters with Ku Klux Klan prison guards at a North Florida prison years ago have landed Norman in solitary confinement. Prison officials claim he committed mail violations. Norman says it is harassment, retaliation, and censorship of protected speech, clear violations of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
According to Norman, this latest round of harassment started in 2008, when the Anne Frank Center in New York asked him to participate in their Prison Diary program, along with around one hundred other award-winning prison writers from across the country. Most of the prisoners invited to share their prison diaries have been participants in the Prison Writing Program sponsored since 1972 by the PEN American Center in New York, an international literary group dedicated to promoting writing and literature at every level and founded on the belief that free expression is an essential component of every healthy society. Past presidents of PEN have been such acclaimed literary figures as Arthur Miller, Larry McMurtry, and Salman Rushdie, who suffered his own literary persecution for his book, The Satanic Verses, which drew the ire of the ayatollahs.
As reported in a December 6, 2008, Associated Press article by Jessica Gresko, the Anne Frank Center sent blank journals to the prison writers for them to fill in. Norman quickly filled up the ninety-six page journal and a couple hundred more pages over the next two months, a period that included the brutal murder of a female correctional officer, Norman’s punitive job assignment to the prison kitchen by a hostile guard who claimed he didn’t know his place and needed to be taught a lesson, and other day-to-day events of prison life. Norman also wrote pages about his lengthy imprisonment from his months in the Hillsborough County Jail in Tampa, during which time he first read Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, through his years at Raiford, and his later encounters with racist, white prison guards who bragged to him, a prisoner, about their Ku Klux Klan membership and activities. Excerpts from his continued prison diary writings have been widely published.
Norman believes this latest run-in with assistant warden Angela Gordon at Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach began around January 28, 2010, when prison mailroom clerk, Ms. T. Gronik, read the book, Wordsmith 2010, an anthology of poetry, short stories, and essays published by the Tampa Writers Alliance. Although Florida law requires that any incoming publication confiscated by prison staff must be subjected to rules spelled out under “Admissibility of Publications” in the Florida Administrative Code, including filing a “Notice of Rejection or Impoundment” within 15 days of receipt, Tomoka officials neglected to do that. Further rules require any impounded publication be accepted or rejected by the Department of Corrections Literature Review Committee. This rule was not followed either.
On February 22, 2010, Norman asked mailroom clerk Ms. T. Gronik if she’d seen the book, that it was a month late. According to Norman, Ms. Gronik told him, “I read that book. I felt that a story you wrote was a threat to security, and I sent it to Mr. Hodgson.” Mr. C. Hodgson is the assistant warden of operations at the Daytona Beach prison. Angela Gordon is the assistant warden of programs.
Norman asked where his receipt and notice of impoundment were, that it had been much longer than 15 days, and the rules required him to attach a copy of the notice to his appeal of the confiscation of the book. By not issuing the form required by law, Norman claimed in a grievance, he was denied due process, and couldn’t legally request a full review of the original rejection.
Norman filed the required grievance paperwork challenging the confiscation, stating that it was not a threat to security. Mr. Hodgson told him he’d returned the book to the mailroom “to be returned,” which was not in accordance with state administrative rules. After filing the paperwork, a prison sergeant notified Norman that assistant warden Angela Gordon had written a disciplinary report accusing him of “mail violations” at 9:30 A.M. on February 24, 2010, the day before. Norman denied the charges, claimed Gordon’s actions were in reprisal and retaliation for filing grievances and pursuing his Constitutionally-protected Freedom of Speech rights under the First Amendment.
Norman claims that Gordon was offended by his memoir of his experiences with retaliation by Ku Klux Klan prison guards years ago, “To Protect The Guilty.” Gordon claims that Norman committed “mail violations” on the statement of facts, “It is apparent that inmate Norman has been entering contests and using the Tampa Writers Alliance web site has a means of directing people to his web site to solicit donations. This is a direct violation of (9-14) mail regulations violations as stated in Chapter 33 – 201.101 (9), (12) and (13), which states in part…inmates shall not use correspondence privileges to solicit or otherwise commercially advertise for money, goods or services…no inmates may establish or conduct a business through the mail during periods of incarceration…inmates shall be prohibited from entering contests or sweepstakes through the mail while incarcerated. Inmate Norman has been incarcerated continually since 07/25/1979 and is therefore in violation of (9-14) mail regulations violations by entering contests and soliciting donations. This report was re-written due to discrepancies in time between infraction and time written.”
Norman denies the charges as a baseless ruse and smokescreen to justify the reprisal for writing about prison guards and the Klan. “The word ‘mail’ appears in the disciplinary report four times while ‘website’ is repeated six times. According to Department of Corrections Secretary Walt McNeil, inmates do not have internet access,” Norman said.
Further, Norman explained that he does not have a laptop computer, wi-fi, a Blackberry, or a website. He has never accessed the Internet. The website Gordon claims to be Norman’s, www.freecharlienow.com, is sponsored by The Norman Partnership, Inc., a registered not-for-profit Florida corporation, with the mission of educating the public on the issues of wrongful imprisonment, according to Elizabeth Dobbin, president. Norman has long proclaimed his innocence, another in a series of wrongful prosecutions and convictions in Florida.
Angela Gordon should be facing her own disciplinary charges soon. In a letter to Tomoka warden Steve Wellhausen, Dan Faulkner of Issaquah, Washington, states that he is the webmaster for www.freecharlienow.com, that he is the only person responsible for the website content, that he installed the “Donation” link on the website, and Charles Norman has nothing whatsoever to do with soliciting donations or running any business.
In addition, Faulkner filed a complaint to the Department of Corrections alleging that Gordon violated federal copyright laws by making unauthorized copies of his website and distributing them. On the website’s home page, prominently posted, appears the notice, “Copyright 2007 by The Norman Partnership, Inc. All rights reserved; may not be used without express written permission.”
According to Faulkner, in a telephone conversation with him, Warden Wellhausen admitted that Gordon had made unauthorized copies of the website, but had good intentions, implying that intention negates an infraction of laws.
Other letters sent to the warden by witnesses on Norman’s behalf challenged Gordon’s allegations of any wrongdoing by Norman.
In his official appeal of the Disciplinary Report to the warden, Norman asserts that Gordon’s accounting is riddled with false statements, a violation of state law, and errors that render the charges defective and invalid. “The state (Gordon) has failed to comply with several sections of Chapter 33 rules, including allowing only one violation per charge (she listed three), providing no evidence of any ‘mail violation,’ since everything Gordon alleged involved websites, and even charging the violations under a nonexistent statute, ‘Chapter 33 – 201.101 (9), (12), (13).’ ”
Further, on the Disciplinary Report, Gordon states, “On Wednesday, February 24, 2010, at approximately 0930 hours, while assigned as assistant warden of programs, I was given a book…,” yet, on the belated “Notice of Rejection or Impoundment,” dated March 10, 2010, A. Gordon signed that she received the book on February 25, 2010. In actual fact, the book, Wordsmith 2010, was at the prison mailroom on or about January 28, 2010, weeks before Gordon received it.
In spite of these false statements, Norman was convicted and sentenced to thirty days in solitary confinement and 30 days loss of gain time. Norman claims that the entire disciplinary proceeding was the very definition of a “Kangaroo court,” and was conducted by an openly hostile classification officer who has harbored a grudge against Norman for years. At the first hearing, 03/11/10, this same officer illegally confiscated Norman’s legal documents while Norman’s hands were cuffed behind his back, and only returned the documents when the officer’s supervisor received complaints from citizens.
Norman says, “I was not given a fair and impartial hearing by unbiased members. I made a formal request that the biased hearing members be replaced. They refused to call my witness list at the hearing, as permitted by law, and would not read the evidence. They refused to make a record of the hearing, and considered neither the mitigating evidence contradicting Gordon, nor the ‘statement of witness relevance,’ which clearly showed that everything I’ve done was approved two years ago. ‘The Constitution ain’t in effect in prison no more,’ as they say.”
Meanwhile, Charlie Norman sits in solitary confinement, writing still, until his ink runs out.
His latest poetic offering, entitled, “Solitary” by Charles Patrick Norman, March 21, 2010:
I hear the cry of a hawk
through my window obscured
though I see it not.
and here is the Anne Frank Diary Project entry that was one of 3 Charles Norman pieces published in Wordsmith and whose content brought about another round of harassment for him:
TO PROTECT THE GUILTY
I have to be careful how I say certain things. This is prison. Silence is the best policy. Don’t throw rocks at sleeping lions, they say. The only problem is, these lions aren’t sleeping, but are roaming, ravening beasts seeking to feed on any prey who attracts their attention. Some are kitty cats, purring, doing their eight hours and going home, while others actively seek victims from the teeming masses of prisoners who move past them like gazelles, antelopes and wildebeests on the Serengeti Plain, oblivious in their ignorance to the threat.
Keep moving, keep your eyes straight ahead, fixed, or down at the ground, when one of them selects you.
“Inmate! Come ‘ere. Yeah, you. Whatchu lookin’ at, inmate?”
Backtalk or smartmouth at your own risk. Lower your I.Q. quickly—fifty or one hundred points if you’re smart. Get stupid. They like stupid. Yes, sir, no, sir.
You don’t know rednecks until you go to prison. Prisoners compare notes. It’s that way all over the South. I am in Florida, and in Florida, the farther north you go, the further back in time you recede.
In North Florida exists an area called, “The Triangle,” a hotbed of porkbelly politics that led to a prison building boom unparalleled in any other geographic region. If you build it, they will apply for jobs. All you need is a GED or high school diploma, eighteen years old, two arms and two legs, pass the physical, no felony convictions, and you’re good to go. Join the family business, as did their pas and grandpas before them.
It’s either the prison, the chicken farm, the hog farm, or cutting pulpwood. Even in North Florida that is a no-brainer.
Besides being in prison for life for a murder I didn’t commit, I have a couple of problems. One is my name. About one hundred-eighty years ago according to family legend, one of my distant great-grandfathers, Jeremiah Bryant Norman, and his fertile wife produced twelve sons. Those boys were fruitful and multiplied and populated much of South Georgia and North Florida with what would become a farflung tribe of latter day Normans, of whom I am a descendant. Many of the local rednecks see my name and automatically assume I am one of them. I am not one of them, nor will I ever be.
My second major problem is that I am intelligent and educated. Blame it on my parents, genetics, the roll of the dice, whatever, God blessed and cursed me with a highly-functioning brain. For that, the rednecks cannot forgive me.
We will change the names to protect me from the guilty. They may be stupid and prejudiced, but they have long memories. Years later something I forgot I said ages ago will ripen and bear fruit. I’ll get off a prison transport bus and some resentful clown who’s been harboring a grudge over something I said about him in a federal lawsuit will smile, spit, and say, “Well, well, well, Mr. Chaingang lawyer, we meet again,” and I will be screwed. It happens more often than you’d think. We will change the names to keep me from being pepper sprayed, stripped, beaten, and tossed into solitary, hopefully, although there are no guarantees.
Prison has changed in many ways since I came into the reception center and had my head shaved thirty years ago. Now women are taking a more prominent role in the ranks of prison guards. In my last foray into North Florida, one day I was sitting in the visiting park waiting to see the property sergeant when all the night shift guards began drifting in for the roll call before shift change.
I was amazed at the dichotomy—blacks on this side, whites on that side, completely natural and at ease, talking among themselves, totally ignoring the ones across the room. Then I realized that the whites had split into gender groups, males here, females there. Most of the females were white, but a couple of black women joined in the repartee.
A prisoner janitor stopped next to me, leaned on his broom, and made a comment I didn’t quite catch. When you’re a tasty gazelle in a den full of lions you don’t talk loud and draw attention to yourself.
“What was that?” I asked.
“When we came to the joint, who’d a’ thought a men’s prison would be full of lesbians, huh?”
It hadn’t occurred to me, but on second glance I realized he was right. I knew a few female officers who were way out of the closet with their sexual preferences, but I’d never seen it delineated like this. It seemed very strange to me that these prison guards, all wearing the same brown uniforms could be so separate and different, like three opposing street gangs, totally ignoring each other. These dynamics would come into play later.
The stark differences in physicality among the guards suddenly struck me, seeing them divided up like playground teams. The white men were either young, strong, muscular softball player-types, or older, softer, fatter smokers who’d gone downhill on lazy diets of beer, biscuits, pork chops, and gravy. The black men were fairly similar to their white counterparts, though generally fitter with more upper body development. A majority of both white and black men either smoked or spit snuff or chewing tobacco. It seemed incongruous to see a young black prison guard with his cheek distended like a chipmunk with a large wad of “chaw,” like his redneck brothers.
Many of the older female guards, both black and white, mostly sergeants, were morbidly obese, with huge pillows of blubber, like they’d been inflated with helium. I grinned, recalling an incident the previous week, when some altercation on one end of the compound resulted in most of the guards trying to run to the scene from the other end. Some waddled a few steps, slowed, walked, waddled some more. One waddled twenty yards, stopped, bent over, breathed hard, sat down on a nearby bench, gasped, then got up and continued on. A handful of younger men raced like sprinters eager to get there in time to get their licks in. The younger, thinner, shapelier, sexier female guards, sheltered, protected, and coveted by both the men and the older women, either walked or didn’t bother, knowing that no one expected them to jump into an altercation.
Obviously the competition for the same few highly-prized females by men and women caused conflicts and friction among the factions, and it seemed like the various losers would take out their anger and frustrations on us, convenient targets. Psychiatrists would have field days if they got their hands on some of these people.
To some extent the state prison system acts as an entry level position for jobs as county deputies and city police. At the bottom rung of the “law enforcement” ladder, many guards aspire to become “real” police with a pistol, badge, a car with lights and siren, and powers of arrest. The best candidates are skimmed off the top eventually and move up, but most aren’t qualified to advance and are stuck, frustrated and angry, in the tar pit of prison. We, the prisoners, are stuck in here with them.
At this really bad prison in the “Triangle” I had a fairly good job in the prison laundry. My first prison job at Raiford was pressing shirts in the laundry, and I advanced quickly to a clerk job. You go to work early, before breakfast, get all the dirty clothes going into the washers and dryers, fold them, take them back to the dorms, and you have the rest of the day off. I spent many hours in the law library, off-duty, researching.
Then one day I got called into classification and told they were changing my job to the kitchen.
“Kitchen?” I asked. “Why?”
The man told me I was educated, I’d taught college computer classes to prisoners and staff, I could type, and the kitchen was desperate for a clerk to operate their equipment, do all their paperwork. My choice – go to the kitchen or go to jail. I went to the kitchen.
Usually prisoners are put in the kitchen as punishment. The pot room—hot water, steam, grease, huge pots and pans, long hours, soaked and grimy all day—is the first stop. I went to work in the office—two glass-enclosed office cubes in the middle of the kitchen, one for the food service manager, one for the clerk and the officers. A desk, a typewriter, word processor, and a computer. Over one hundred prisoners on three shifts, from 3:30 AM till 7:30 PM, serving 1200 prisoners three meals a day. Maintain all the work rosters and attendance sheets. Do all the gain time sheets. Do the time sheets for the guards. Keep track of 50 – 100 special diets prisoners. Place all the food orders, 80 fifty-pound bags of potatoes at a time, all the vegetables, the meat, 1320 pieces of chicken at a time, eggs, milk, bread from the outside vendor. We served more meals than any restaurant in the county and much of the administrative work was dumped on me. All the boss would do was sign orders.
“You take care of it, Norman, or we’ll get someone else,’ he said.
“Why don’t you get somebody else, then?”
“We don’t have anybody else.”
Too bad. I’m stuck. Oh, well. I have a policy that has served me fairly well. I try to avoid contact with the guards. Out of sight, out of mind. There were times when I maintained so low a profile that most guards had never heard my voice or knew my name. That’s how I liked it. But now I was surrounded by guards, trapped in a goldfish bowl, all day. No way out.
There were some advantages, though. I’d come in at 6:00 AM, grab a few eggs, some cheese, go over to the grill, and make an omelet the way I liked it. Get a cup of grits from the bubbling eighty-gallon cauldron, grab two half-pints of milk, and I was good to go.
The grudges, beefs, and personality conflicts among the guards and the sergeants frequently put me in the middle no matter how hard I tried. One would give me an order, the other would countermand it, then the first would be on me. No-win situation. If one took the attitude that you were “his inmate,” working under his orders, an opposing guard might target you for abuse when the first one wasn’t around. Farmer Brown couldn’t kick Farmer Jones’ ass, so he’d kick Farmer Jones’ dog. I was the dog.
The big boss was BIG—350 pounds, at least, a head the size of a buffalo’s. Rumor had it that he owned a restaurant in town, and a lot of supplies got funneled there. He denied it. That man could eat, though. It took a restaurant to feed him.
“Norman, go get me a tray full of that fried chicken. Pile it up. Put some bread on there. And some potatoes. Hurry up.” And he meant full!
“Yes, sir.”
One Sunday morning early I was typing a list at my desk when this goofy guard sat at the other desk eating a tray of French toast.
“Guess where I went last night,” he said, smiling conspiratorily, smacking, dripping syrup.
“Where?” I asked.
“A Klan meeting.”
“Congratulations.”
He looked at me blankly, not understanding.
“Congratulations. Your name has been added to the FBI’s list of subversives and members of subversive organizations.”
“No!”
“Yep, it’s a fact. I read it in a magazine. Every KKK group in the U.S. has been infiltrated by the FBI. You just go to the meeting, they record every truck tag number, photograph every person, identify them, and open a file on them if there isn’t one already.”
“No shit!”
“No shit. And not only that, but every grand dragon, imperial lizard, whatever you call them, if they’re not active FBI informants, they’re most likely undercover FBI agents.”
He cut his eyes nervously to the other office, where the big boss man briskly shoveled about a dozen fried eggs, a quart of grits, and half a dozen biscuits down his maw.
“No, he ain’t,” he said, staring at his boss through the glass.
“Oh, well, believe what you want, but don’t be surprised if you ever flunk a federal background check.”
“Huh. How do you know so much about it?”
He was looking at me now with a weird expression on his inbred face. I should have picked up on it quicker, but at the moment I didn’t care. I hate such ignorance, and to go one-on-one with one of them was just too tempting to pass up.
“How do I know about the Klan? What do you think? I grew up in the South. I’ve been in prison since the Seventies. You have no idea how many morons, prisoners and guards, I’ve met in prison who wore pillow cases over their heads and burned crosses. You guys love to brag.”
“You don’t like the Klan?” He was getting hostile now, eyes squinting, forehead wrinkling and getting redder.
“Like the Klan? What’s there to like? Any white person who joins the KKK, I guarantee you, has got to be one of the dumbest, most ignorant cowards there is. They give white people a bad name. For fools who claim they are superior, they are the most inferior idiots and shitheads on the planet.”
Now he stood up, pointing his finger at me, losing control, spittle bubbling and spewing, stuttering, his primitive little brain overloaded with emotion at the insult to his social club.
“You ought n-n-not be t-t-talking all that shit about d-d-decent white folks who’s trying to save the-the-the world from going to hell in a handbasket, all the n-n-niggers trying to t-t-take over.”
“Let them have it, I say. You guys haven’t done a very good job of running the world so far. Hell, you can’t even run a kitchen.”
He stormed out. That wasn’t the end of it. They had their plans for me, a smart-ass white boy with a slick mouth. Hey, is it my fault I have a difficult time resisting a debate with a racist who has a double-digit I.Q.? I guess it is. And so I would suffer the consequences.
THE END
"AWARD-WINNING MEMOIR ABOUT KKK PRISON GUARDS LANDS FLORIDA PRISONER IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT"
Prisoner Charles Norman claims retaliation and First Amendment violations by prison officials offended by his writing the truth.
Florida prisoner, Charlie Norman, has served thirty-two years on a life sentence for a 1975 murder in Tampa. For the past twenty-five years, he has won numerous state and national writing awards for his poetry, short stories, plays, essays, and prison memoirs. Now a published excerpt from his 2008 prison diary about encounters with Ku Klux Klan prison guards at a North Florida prison years ago have landed Norman in solitary confinement. Prison officials claim he committed mail violations. Norman says it is harassment, retaliation, and censorship of protected speech, clear violations of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
According to Norman, this latest round of harassment started in 2008, when the Anne Frank Center in New York asked him to participate in their Prison Diary program, along with around one hundred other award-winning prison writers from across the country. Most of the prisoners invited to share their prison diaries have been participants in the Prison Writing Program sponsored since 1972 by the PEN American Center in New York, an international literary group dedicated to promoting writing and literature at every level and founded on the belief that free expression is an essential component of every healthy society. Past presidents of PEN have been such acclaimed literary figures as Arthur Miller, Larry McMurtry, and Salman Rushdie, who suffered his own literary persecution for his book, The Satanic Verses, which drew the ire of the ayatollahs.
As reported in a December 6, 2008, Associated Press article by Jessica Gresko, the Anne Frank Center sent blank journals to the prison writers for them to fill in. Norman quickly filled up the ninety-six page journal and a couple hundred more pages over the next two months, a period that included the brutal murder of a female correctional officer, Norman’s punitive job assignment to the prison kitchen by a hostile guard who claimed he didn’t know his place and needed to be taught a lesson, and other day-to-day events of prison life. Norman also wrote pages about his lengthy imprisonment from his months in the Hillsborough County Jail in Tampa, during which time he first read Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, through his years at Raiford, and his later encounters with racist, white prison guards who bragged to him, a prisoner, about their Ku Klux Klan membership and activities. Excerpts from his continued prison diary writings have been widely published.
Norman believes this latest run-in with assistant warden Angela Gordon at Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach began around January 28, 2010, when prison mailroom clerk, Ms. T. Gronik, read the book, Wordsmith 2010, an anthology of poetry, short stories, and essays published by the Tampa Writers Alliance. Although Florida law requires that any incoming publication confiscated by prison staff must be subjected to rules spelled out under “Admissibility of Publications” in the Florida Administrative Code, including filing a “Notice of Rejection or Impoundment” within 15 days of receipt, Tomoka officials neglected to do that. Further rules require any impounded publication be accepted or rejected by the Department of Corrections Literature Review Committee. This rule was not followed either.
On February 22, 2010, Norman asked mailroom clerk Ms. T. Gronik if she’d seen the book, that it was a month late. According to Norman, Ms. Gronik told him, “I read that book. I felt that a story you wrote was a threat to security, and I sent it to Mr. Hodgson.” Mr. C. Hodgson is the assistant warden of operations at the Daytona Beach prison. Angela Gordon is the assistant warden of programs.
Norman asked where his receipt and notice of impoundment were, that it had been much longer than 15 days, and the rules required him to attach a copy of the notice to his appeal of the confiscation of the book. By not issuing the form required by law, Norman claimed in a grievance, he was denied due process, and couldn’t legally request a full review of the original rejection.
Norman filed the required grievance paperwork challenging the confiscation, stating that it was not a threat to security. Mr. Hodgson told him he’d returned the book to the mailroom “to be returned,” which was not in accordance with state administrative rules. After filing the paperwork, a prison sergeant notified Norman that assistant warden Angela Gordon had written a disciplinary report accusing him of “mail violations” at 9:30 A.M. on February 24, 2010, the day before. Norman denied the charges, claimed Gordon’s actions were in reprisal and retaliation for filing grievances and pursuing his Constitutionally-protected Freedom of Speech rights under the First Amendment.
Norman claims that Gordon was offended by his memoir of his experiences with retaliation by Ku Klux Klan prison guards years ago, “To Protect The Guilty.” Gordon claims that Norman committed “mail violations” on the statement of facts, “It is apparent that inmate Norman has been entering contests and using the Tampa Writers Alliance web site has a means of directing people to his web site to solicit donations. This is a direct violation of (9-14) mail regulations violations as stated in Chapter 33 – 201.101 (9), (12) and (13), which states in part…inmates shall not use correspondence privileges to solicit or otherwise commercially advertise for money, goods or services…no inmates may establish or conduct a business through the mail during periods of incarceration…inmates shall be prohibited from entering contests or sweepstakes through the mail while incarcerated. Inmate Norman has been incarcerated continually since 07/25/1979 and is therefore in violation of (9-14) mail regulations violations by entering contests and soliciting donations. This report was re-written due to discrepancies in time between infraction and time written.”
Norman denies the charges as a baseless ruse and smokescreen to justify the reprisal for writing about prison guards and the Klan. “The word ‘mail’ appears in the disciplinary report four times while ‘website’ is repeated six times. According to Department of Corrections Secretary Walt McNeil, inmates do not have internet access,” Norman said.
Further, Norman explained that he does not have a laptop computer, wi-fi, a Blackberry, or a website. He has never accessed the Internet. The website Gordon claims to be Norman’s, www.freecharlienow.com, is sponsored by The Norman Partnership, Inc., a registered not-for-profit Florida corporation, with the mission of educating the public on the issues of wrongful imprisonment, according to Elizabeth Dobbin, president. Norman has long proclaimed his innocence, another in a series of wrongful prosecutions and convictions in Florida.
Angela Gordon should be facing her own disciplinary charges soon. In a letter to Tomoka warden Steve Wellhausen, Dan Faulkner of Issaquah, Washington, states that he is the webmaster for www.freecharlienow.com, that he is the only person responsible for the website content, that he installed the “Donation” link on the website, and Charles Norman has nothing whatsoever to do with soliciting donations or running any business.
In addition, Faulkner filed a complaint to the Department of Corrections alleging that Gordon violated federal copyright laws by making unauthorized copies of his website and distributing them. On the website’s home page, prominently posted, appears the notice, “Copyright 2007 by The Norman Partnership, Inc. All rights reserved; may not be used without express written permission.”
According to Faulkner, in a telephone conversation with him, Warden Wellhausen admitted that Gordon had made unauthorized copies of the website, but had good intentions, implying that intention negates an infraction of laws.
Other letters sent to the warden by witnesses on Norman’s behalf challenged Gordon’s allegations of any wrongdoing by Norman.
In his official appeal of the Disciplinary Report to the warden, Norman asserts that Gordon’s accounting is riddled with false statements, a violation of state law, and errors that render the charges defective and invalid. “The state (Gordon) has failed to comply with several sections of Chapter 33 rules, including allowing only one violation per charge (she listed three), providing no evidence of any ‘mail violation,’ since everything Gordon alleged involved websites, and even charging the violations under a nonexistent statute, ‘Chapter 33 – 201.101 (9), (12), (13).’ ”
Further, on the Disciplinary Report, Gordon states, “On Wednesday, February 24, 2010, at approximately 0930 hours, while assigned as assistant warden of programs, I was given a book…,” yet, on the belated “Notice of Rejection or Impoundment,” dated March 10, 2010, A. Gordon signed that she received the book on February 25, 2010. In actual fact, the book, Wordsmith 2010, was at the prison mailroom on or about January 28, 2010, weeks before Gordon received it.
In spite of these false statements, Norman was convicted and sentenced to thirty days in solitary confinement and 30 days loss of gain time. Norman claims that the entire disciplinary proceeding was the very definition of a “Kangaroo court,” and was conducted by an openly hostile classification officer who has harbored a grudge against Norman for years. At the first hearing, 03/11/10, this same officer illegally confiscated Norman’s legal documents while Norman’s hands were cuffed behind his back, and only returned the documents when the officer’s supervisor received complaints from citizens.
Norman says, “I was not given a fair and impartial hearing by unbiased members. I made a formal request that the biased hearing members be replaced. They refused to call my witness list at the hearing, as permitted by law, and would not read the evidence. They refused to make a record of the hearing, and considered neither the mitigating evidence contradicting Gordon, nor the ‘statement of witness relevance,’ which clearly showed that everything I’ve done was approved two years ago. ‘The Constitution ain’t in effect in prison no more,’ as they say.”
Meanwhile, Charlie Norman sits in solitary confinement, writing still, until his ink runs out.
His latest poetic offering, entitled, “Solitary” by Charles Patrick Norman, March 21, 2010:
I hear the cry of a hawk
through my window obscured
though I see it not.
and here is the Anne Frank Diary Project entry that was one of 3 Charles Norman pieces published in Wordsmith and whose content brought about another round of harassment for him:
TO PROTECT THE GUILTY
I have to be careful how I say certain things. This is prison. Silence is the best policy. Don’t throw rocks at sleeping lions, they say. The only problem is, these lions aren’t sleeping, but are roaming, ravening beasts seeking to feed on any prey who attracts their attention. Some are kitty cats, purring, doing their eight hours and going home, while others actively seek victims from the teeming masses of prisoners who move past them like gazelles, antelopes and wildebeests on the Serengeti Plain, oblivious in their ignorance to the threat.
Keep moving, keep your eyes straight ahead, fixed, or down at the ground, when one of them selects you.
“Inmate! Come ‘ere. Yeah, you. Whatchu lookin’ at, inmate?”
Backtalk or smartmouth at your own risk. Lower your I.Q. quickly—fifty or one hundred points if you’re smart. Get stupid. They like stupid. Yes, sir, no, sir.
You don’t know rednecks until you go to prison. Prisoners compare notes. It’s that way all over the South. I am in Florida, and in Florida, the farther north you go, the further back in time you recede.
In North Florida exists an area called, “The Triangle,” a hotbed of porkbelly politics that led to a prison building boom unparalleled in any other geographic region. If you build it, they will apply for jobs. All you need is a GED or high school diploma, eighteen years old, two arms and two legs, pass the physical, no felony convictions, and you’re good to go. Join the family business, as did their pas and grandpas before them.
It’s either the prison, the chicken farm, the hog farm, or cutting pulpwood. Even in North Florida that is a no-brainer.
Besides being in prison for life for a murder I didn’t commit, I have a couple of problems. One is my name. About one hundred-eighty years ago according to family legend, one of my distant great-grandfathers, Jeremiah Bryant Norman, and his fertile wife produced twelve sons. Those boys were fruitful and multiplied and populated much of South Georgia and North Florida with what would become a farflung tribe of latter day Normans, of whom I am a descendant. Many of the local rednecks see my name and automatically assume I am one of them. I am not one of them, nor will I ever be.
My second major problem is that I am intelligent and educated. Blame it on my parents, genetics, the roll of the dice, whatever, God blessed and cursed me with a highly-functioning brain. For that, the rednecks cannot forgive me.
We will change the names to protect me from the guilty. They may be stupid and prejudiced, but they have long memories. Years later something I forgot I said ages ago will ripen and bear fruit. I’ll get off a prison transport bus and some resentful clown who’s been harboring a grudge over something I said about him in a federal lawsuit will smile, spit, and say, “Well, well, well, Mr. Chaingang lawyer, we meet again,” and I will be screwed. It happens more often than you’d think. We will change the names to keep me from being pepper sprayed, stripped, beaten, and tossed into solitary, hopefully, although there are no guarantees.
Prison has changed in many ways since I came into the reception center and had my head shaved thirty years ago. Now women are taking a more prominent role in the ranks of prison guards. In my last foray into North Florida, one day I was sitting in the visiting park waiting to see the property sergeant when all the night shift guards began drifting in for the roll call before shift change.
I was amazed at the dichotomy—blacks on this side, whites on that side, completely natural and at ease, talking among themselves, totally ignoring the ones across the room. Then I realized that the whites had split into gender groups, males here, females there. Most of the females were white, but a couple of black women joined in the repartee.
A prisoner janitor stopped next to me, leaned on his broom, and made a comment I didn’t quite catch. When you’re a tasty gazelle in a den full of lions you don’t talk loud and draw attention to yourself.
“What was that?” I asked.
“When we came to the joint, who’d a’ thought a men’s prison would be full of lesbians, huh?”
It hadn’t occurred to me, but on second glance I realized he was right. I knew a few female officers who were way out of the closet with their sexual preferences, but I’d never seen it delineated like this. It seemed very strange to me that these prison guards, all wearing the same brown uniforms could be so separate and different, like three opposing street gangs, totally ignoring each other. These dynamics would come into play later.
The stark differences in physicality among the guards suddenly struck me, seeing them divided up like playground teams. The white men were either young, strong, muscular softball player-types, or older, softer, fatter smokers who’d gone downhill on lazy diets of beer, biscuits, pork chops, and gravy. The black men were fairly similar to their white counterparts, though generally fitter with more upper body development. A majority of both white and black men either smoked or spit snuff or chewing tobacco. It seemed incongruous to see a young black prison guard with his cheek distended like a chipmunk with a large wad of “chaw,” like his redneck brothers.
Many of the older female guards, both black and white, mostly sergeants, were morbidly obese, with huge pillows of blubber, like they’d been inflated with helium. I grinned, recalling an incident the previous week, when some altercation on one end of the compound resulted in most of the guards trying to run to the scene from the other end. Some waddled a few steps, slowed, walked, waddled some more. One waddled twenty yards, stopped, bent over, breathed hard, sat down on a nearby bench, gasped, then got up and continued on. A handful of younger men raced like sprinters eager to get there in time to get their licks in. The younger, thinner, shapelier, sexier female guards, sheltered, protected, and coveted by both the men and the older women, either walked or didn’t bother, knowing that no one expected them to jump into an altercation.
Obviously the competition for the same few highly-prized females by men and women caused conflicts and friction among the factions, and it seemed like the various losers would take out their anger and frustrations on us, convenient targets. Psychiatrists would have field days if they got their hands on some of these people.
To some extent the state prison system acts as an entry level position for jobs as county deputies and city police. At the bottom rung of the “law enforcement” ladder, many guards aspire to become “real” police with a pistol, badge, a car with lights and siren, and powers of arrest. The best candidates are skimmed off the top eventually and move up, but most aren’t qualified to advance and are stuck, frustrated and angry, in the tar pit of prison. We, the prisoners, are stuck in here with them.
At this really bad prison in the “Triangle” I had a fairly good job in the prison laundry. My first prison job at Raiford was pressing shirts in the laundry, and I advanced quickly to a clerk job. You go to work early, before breakfast, get all the dirty clothes going into the washers and dryers, fold them, take them back to the dorms, and you have the rest of the day off. I spent many hours in the law library, off-duty, researching.
Then one day I got called into classification and told they were changing my job to the kitchen.
“Kitchen?” I asked. “Why?”
The man told me I was educated, I’d taught college computer classes to prisoners and staff, I could type, and the kitchen was desperate for a clerk to operate their equipment, do all their paperwork. My choice – go to the kitchen or go to jail. I went to the kitchen.
Usually prisoners are put in the kitchen as punishment. The pot room—hot water, steam, grease, huge pots and pans, long hours, soaked and grimy all day—is the first stop. I went to work in the office—two glass-enclosed office cubes in the middle of the kitchen, one for the food service manager, one for the clerk and the officers. A desk, a typewriter, word processor, and a computer. Over one hundred prisoners on three shifts, from 3:30 AM till 7:30 PM, serving 1200 prisoners three meals a day. Maintain all the work rosters and attendance sheets. Do all the gain time sheets. Do the time sheets for the guards. Keep track of 50 – 100 special diets prisoners. Place all the food orders, 80 fifty-pound bags of potatoes at a time, all the vegetables, the meat, 1320 pieces of chicken at a time, eggs, milk, bread from the outside vendor. We served more meals than any restaurant in the county and much of the administrative work was dumped on me. All the boss would do was sign orders.
“You take care of it, Norman, or we’ll get someone else,’ he said.
“Why don’t you get somebody else, then?”
“We don’t have anybody else.”
Too bad. I’m stuck. Oh, well. I have a policy that has served me fairly well. I try to avoid contact with the guards. Out of sight, out of mind. There were times when I maintained so low a profile that most guards had never heard my voice or knew my name. That’s how I liked it. But now I was surrounded by guards, trapped in a goldfish bowl, all day. No way out.
There were some advantages, though. I’d come in at 6:00 AM, grab a few eggs, some cheese, go over to the grill, and make an omelet the way I liked it. Get a cup of grits from the bubbling eighty-gallon cauldron, grab two half-pints of milk, and I was good to go.
The grudges, beefs, and personality conflicts among the guards and the sergeants frequently put me in the middle no matter how hard I tried. One would give me an order, the other would countermand it, then the first would be on me. No-win situation. If one took the attitude that you were “his inmate,” working under his orders, an opposing guard might target you for abuse when the first one wasn’t around. Farmer Brown couldn’t kick Farmer Jones’ ass, so he’d kick Farmer Jones’ dog. I was the dog.
The big boss was BIG—350 pounds, at least, a head the size of a buffalo’s. Rumor had it that he owned a restaurant in town, and a lot of supplies got funneled there. He denied it. That man could eat, though. It took a restaurant to feed him.
“Norman, go get me a tray full of that fried chicken. Pile it up. Put some bread on there. And some potatoes. Hurry up.” And he meant full!
“Yes, sir.”
One Sunday morning early I was typing a list at my desk when this goofy guard sat at the other desk eating a tray of French toast.
“Guess where I went last night,” he said, smiling conspiratorily, smacking, dripping syrup.
“Where?” I asked.
“A Klan meeting.”
“Congratulations.”
He looked at me blankly, not understanding.
“Congratulations. Your name has been added to the FBI’s list of subversives and members of subversive organizations.”
“No!”
“Yep, it’s a fact. I read it in a magazine. Every KKK group in the U.S. has been infiltrated by the FBI. You just go to the meeting, they record every truck tag number, photograph every person, identify them, and open a file on them if there isn’t one already.”
“No shit!”
“No shit. And not only that, but every grand dragon, imperial lizard, whatever you call them, if they’re not active FBI informants, they’re most likely undercover FBI agents.”
He cut his eyes nervously to the other office, where the big boss man briskly shoveled about a dozen fried eggs, a quart of grits, and half a dozen biscuits down his maw.
“No, he ain’t,” he said, staring at his boss through the glass.
“Oh, well, believe what you want, but don’t be surprised if you ever flunk a federal background check.”
“Huh. How do you know so much about it?”
He was looking at me now with a weird expression on his inbred face. I should have picked up on it quicker, but at the moment I didn’t care. I hate such ignorance, and to go one-on-one with one of them was just too tempting to pass up.
“How do I know about the Klan? What do you think? I grew up in the South. I’ve been in prison since the Seventies. You have no idea how many morons, prisoners and guards, I’ve met in prison who wore pillow cases over their heads and burned crosses. You guys love to brag.”
“You don’t like the Klan?” He was getting hostile now, eyes squinting, forehead wrinkling and getting redder.
“Like the Klan? What’s there to like? Any white person who joins the KKK, I guarantee you, has got to be one of the dumbest, most ignorant cowards there is. They give white people a bad name. For fools who claim they are superior, they are the most inferior idiots and shitheads on the planet.”
Now he stood up, pointing his finger at me, losing control, spittle bubbling and spewing, stuttering, his primitive little brain overloaded with emotion at the insult to his social club.
“You ought n-n-not be t-t-talking all that shit about d-d-decent white folks who’s trying to save the-the-the world from going to hell in a handbasket, all the n-n-niggers trying to t-t-take over.”
“Let them have it, I say. You guys haven’t done a very good job of running the world so far. Hell, you can’t even run a kitchen.”
He stormed out. That wasn’t the end of it. They had their plans for me, a smart-ass white boy with a slick mouth. Hey, is it my fault I have a difficult time resisting a debate with a racist who has a double-digit I.Q.? I guess it is. And so I would suffer the consequences.
THE END
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Regarding Charles Norman and the latest round of punishment
Dateline: St. Patrick's Day 2010
Regarding Charles Norman and the latest round of punishment:
The Disciplinary Report hearing that was postponed from Thursday, 03/11/10, was held on Tuesday, 03/16/10, at 6 AM. This kangaroo court found Charles Norman, #881834, guilty and gleefully sent him to confinement for 30 days. In spite of all our written witness statements refuting every phony charge against him, Charlie was still found guilty of unspecified mail violation, running a business from prison, and entering contests, just as the warden predicted before any hearing was held.
We believe the exercise of this entire process is in retaliation against Charles Norman that is predicated on an essay he wrote about the actions of Ku Klux Klan guards at work in Florida prisons, and that it is specifically designed to not only effectively deny him his First Amendment rights, but also to severely hinder his efforts to obtain parole and his access to due process.
What can possibly be gained by this harassment of a man already wrongfully incarcerated for over 32 years? Who profits by silencing a gifted writer and able witness to the human condition?
If this action by Florida D.O.C. overweening despots offends you as much as it does me, please make calls, send faxes, and e-mail to the following expressing your support of Charles Norman and asking for this entire Disciplinary Report and the hearing to be investigated. Charles Norman should be released from confinement, the Disciplinary Report removed from his record, and he should be immediately transferred to Sumter C.I., a move which has been approved since June, 2009. Further, no additional punitive action should be taken against Charles Norman.
Contact information:
1) Warden Steve Wellhausen (Tomoka C.I.)
Phone # 386 -323-1070 fax 386-323-1006
2) D.O.C. Gen. Counsel Kathleen Von Hoene
Phone 850-488-2326 fax # 850-922-4355
3) Dept. of Corrections Secretary Walter A. McNeil ( Tallahassee )
Phone # 850-488-7480 fax 850-488-4534
4) Inspector General D.O.C. Gene Hatcher
phone 850-488-9265 fax # 850-414-0953
5) Regional Director Gerald Abdul-Wasi
Phone # 352-989-9111 fax 352-989-9113
6) Florida Gov. Crist e-mail Charlie.Crist@eog.myflorida.com
Fax # 850-487-0801
7) State Senator Gary Siplin e-mail siplin.gary.web@flsenate.gov
8) State Senator Al Lawson e-mail lawson.alfred.web@flsenate.gov
Thank you.
Libby Dobbin
Friend of Charlie
Regarding Charles Norman and the latest round of punishment:
The Disciplinary Report hearing that was postponed from Thursday, 03/11/10, was held on Tuesday, 03/16/10, at 6 AM. This kangaroo court found Charles Norman, #881834, guilty and gleefully sent him to confinement for 30 days. In spite of all our written witness statements refuting every phony charge against him, Charlie was still found guilty of unspecified mail violation, running a business from prison, and entering contests, just as the warden predicted before any hearing was held.
We believe the exercise of this entire process is in retaliation against Charles Norman that is predicated on an essay he wrote about the actions of Ku Klux Klan guards at work in Florida prisons, and that it is specifically designed to not only effectively deny him his First Amendment rights, but also to severely hinder his efforts to obtain parole and his access to due process.
What can possibly be gained by this harassment of a man already wrongfully incarcerated for over 32 years? Who profits by silencing a gifted writer and able witness to the human condition?
If this action by Florida D.O.C. overweening despots offends you as much as it does me, please make calls, send faxes, and e-mail to the following expressing your support of Charles Norman and asking for this entire Disciplinary Report and the hearing to be investigated. Charles Norman should be released from confinement, the Disciplinary Report removed from his record, and he should be immediately transferred to Sumter C.I., a move which has been approved since June, 2009. Further, no additional punitive action should be taken against Charles Norman.
Contact information:
1) Warden Steve Wellhausen (Tomoka C.I.)
Phone # 386 -323-1070 fax 386-323-1006
2) D.O.C. Gen. Counsel Kathleen Von Hoene
Phone 850-488-2326 fax # 850-922-4355
3) Dept. of Corrections Secretary Walter A. McNeil ( Tallahassee )
Phone # 850-488-7480 fax 850-488-4534
4) Inspector General D.O.C. Gene Hatcher
phone 850-488-9265 fax # 850-414-0953
5) Regional Director Gerald Abdul-Wasi
Phone # 352-989-9111 fax 352-989-9113
6) Florida Gov. Crist e-mail Charlie.Crist@eog.myflorida.com
Fax # 850-487-0801
7) State Senator Gary Siplin e-mail siplin.gary.web@flsenate.gov
8) State Senator Al Lawson e-mail lawson.alfred.web@flsenate.gov
Thank you.
Libby Dobbin
Friend of Charlie
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
“CRUEL AND UNUSUAL?” FLORIDA PRISONERS FEAST ON “KIBBLES AND BITS”
Dateline February 9, 2010
“CRUEL AND UNUSUAL?” FLORIDA PRISONERS FEAST ON “KIBBLES AND BITS”
Surely you’ve seen those “Chik-Fil-A” commercials where the cows steal the hamburgers and hold up signs saying, “Eat Mor Chikin.” Sometimes the cows parachute into a football stadium and knock down the vendor selling hamburgers. The message is clear—don’t eat beef.
Someone in power in the Florida Department of Corrections took that message to heart, eliminating all parts of cows from the state prison menu and replacing it with “Kibbles and Bits,” or something remarkably like it, also know as “Texturized Vegetable Protein,” or “T.V.P.” According to some prisoners, however, the T.V.P. actually stands for “turkey vulture parts,” although turkey vulture might be safer to eat, or so says the Weston A. Price Foundation.
According to a recent notice on the Foundation’s web site, http://www.westonaprice.org/Cruel-and-Unusual-Punishment-Soy-Diet-for-Illinois-Prisoners.html, since the Illinois prison system switched to a soy diet (read, “Kibbles and Bits”) in 2007, lawsuits have been filed claiming alarming adverse effects from prisoners consuming a diet high in unfermented soy protein.
Complaints include chronic and painful constipation alternating with debilitating diarrhea, vomiting after eating, sharp pains in the digestive tract, especially after consuming soy, passing out, heart palpitations, rashes, acne, insomnia, panic attacks, depression, and symptoms of hypothyroidism, such as low body temperature (feeling cold all the time), brain fog, fatigue, weight gain, frequent infections, and enlarged thyroid gland.
Since the soy protein is also a source of plant estrogen, a.k.a. the female sex hormone, other side effects, such as enlarged breasts in young men, have been recorded. Since estrogen consumption is used as an anti-fertility drug in women, experts say many young prisoners may be unable to father children after their release from prison.
I know what some people are going to say. I’ve heard it before. They are in prison, they violated the law, screw ‘em, they don’t deserve decent food, give them bread and water, like the “good ole days,” chain them to the dungeon wall, let them rot. That’s one argument. Heaven help those people if their son or daughter winds up in prison, left to the mercy of abusive guards and rapacious prisoners, sick, no medical care, starved, dirty, hungry. Heaven help those poor Baptist missionaries caged in an inhumane Haitian jail suffering conditions you don’t even want to imagine, worse than anything in our country.
Someone said that prisons are microcosms of society. How our society treats its captives reflects the morality and humanity of us all. This isn’t Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Saudi Arabia, Guantanamo, or Haiti. We believe in basic human rights, and are signatories to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners. Those of us who have been victims of crimes, or whose loved ones have been, are naturally more averse to treating convicted criminals with decency, including feeding them healthful diets. We are not a brutal third world country, however, and subscribe to standards of treatment of prisoners similar to other civilized countries. Medical care and decent food are two of the responsibilities our government takes on when it strips its citizens of their liberty, right or wrong.
Back to the Florida prison menu and the switchover to the risky soy diet, or “Kibbles and Bits.”
When I first entered the Hillsborough County Jail in the 1970’s on this bogus murder charge, I was amazed at how good the food was. My first meal had chunks of actual beef stew on rice, green beans, two hot biscuits, and a cooler full of iced tea that we served ourselves. Breakfast ws eggs and grits one day, large pancakes another, and an extra tray slid into the cell for whoever swept and mopped afterwards.
A Tampa Tribune food editor wrote an article reviewing the jail food, pronouncing it better than some restaurants she’d eaten in. The otherwise ascetic and humorless sheriff, Malcolm Beard, a hardcore law-and-order type if ever there was one, explained that hungry prisoners caused trouble, got in fights, stole weaker men’s trays, assaulted his guards, whereas prisoners whose bellies were full did not. Consequently, it was wiser, safer and more economical in the long run to spend a little but more on food and run a more peaceful jail.
I can attest to the wisdom of that philosophy, having experienced food riots in another county jail when they tried to serve rotten fish and other unpalatable items. It wasn’t funny. Too bad the prison system is unaware of those lessons. Times have changed. The “old timers” who ran the prison system thirty years ago are long-retired, and the new breed of “administrators” seem otherwise clueless to what it takes to run a prison.
They used to serve actual meat in prison. At Raiford, where I spent my first four years, they also served beef stew, hamburgers, and meat loaf, along with pork chops, fish and chicken. The Lake Butler Reception Center chow hall had a prominent sign posted, “Take What You Want, Eat What You Take.” And they meant it. A guard stood by the swill barrel at the chow hall exit where we dumped our trays. There’d better not be anything edible on your tray, or you’d be sent back to eat it. If you didn’t like spinach, don’t put it on your tray.
Nowadays, they have swill contracts with pig farmers and have to provide so many barrels of uneaten food to feed the hogs. When the food is tasteless and inedible the swill truck drivers are happy. The pigs aren’t talking.
One reason the prison system used to serve beef was because they raised their own cattle, along with hogs and chickens. The state owns over 11,000 acres of land in the area around Florida State Prison, and even more in Union County, much of it cow pastures. Right outside the fence beyond my Southwest Unit cell window grazed some of the prettiest Black Angus beef cattle I ever saw.
I know cows. Spending the first nine years of my life in Texas, moving to Florida and spending several teen years working for legendary cattleman, P.D. “Pal” Stokes, I learned firsthand most of what there is to know about cattle and beef. Something that I couldn’t understand, though, was why, with the herd of prime beeves grazing outside my window, steers that would be welcome in Omaha, why was the meat served in the chow hall the toughest, most gristly beef I’d ever eaten? Something was wrong with that picture. Your jaws got a workout chewing the shoe leather beef stew, at odds with the huge, shiny-coated cattle feeding on state land.
I asked my friend, Howard Magid, the prisoner who did all the clerical work in the slaughterhouse office outside the prison, why that was so. Easy. They were stealing.
Modern day prison cattle rustlers don’t round up steers and drive them to Abilene, changing the brands on the way. The prison staff who got rich on the state beef did it in a much subtler way.
Howard told me that industry-wide the percentage of beef to waste in cattle slaughtering was fifty-five percent beef to forty-five percent waste. A thousand pound steer, on average, produced five hundred fifty pounds of beef and four hundred fifty pounds of waste—hide, bones, blood, and guts. In contrast, the prison slaughterhouse, on paper, produced only four hundred fifty pounds of beef per thousand pounds of steer, an automatic hundred pound bonus of prime beef available for sale off the books. It didn’t stop there. No prisoner got so much as a quarter-pounder from the prime beef they tended on state land. Instead, a thousand pounds of prime beef would be sold for top dollar, and a thousand pounds of scrawny, stringy “grade” beef would be purchased at a much lower cost, in substitute. The numbers came out right, if the quality didn’t. A great hustle, or “rustle,” for those on the inside.
Who knows how many years that went on? They’ll have a much harder time selling the soy “burger patty,” “country patty,” “BBQ,” or “dinner stew,” as they label the Kibbles and Bits, “texturized vegetable protein,” that took the place of meat.
A perfect example of the evolution of prison food is found in what used to be known as “S.O.S.” Originally, that breakfast serving was called “chipped beef on toast,” some sort of preserved meat similar to corned beef was sliced very thin, cooked in a large kettle with milk and flour added to make a gravy, salt and pepper to taste, then a large serving ladle poured the mixture over a couple slices of toast. I can still recall the flavor. No one missed that meal. From the U.S. military came the derogatory name of “shit on a shingle,” or “S.O.S.,” even though everyone ate it.
For years it was known by “S.O.S.” The chipped beef was eventually replaced by ground beef and gravy, which was still pretty tasty for a while. Then the age of processed turkey products arrived and everything changed. Turkey hamburger, turkey patty, turkey salami and pastrami, turkey hot dogs. Who knew turkey could be so flexible? The “turkey gravy” replaced the ground beef, only to find itself replaced by “T.V.P.,” texturized vegetable protein, or turkey vulture parts, take your pick—your guess is as good as mine. Now the menu calls it “breakfast gravy,” as generic and anonymous a term as can be found, not a molecule of meat to be found in it.
They used to serve half-pints of milk at breakfast, too, but replaced that with “breakfast drink,” a concoction of some type of non-dairy coffee creamer mixed with water. The few ounces of “fruit juice” has evolved into a toxic-looking red liquid that won’t wash out of your clothes if spilled. Jim Jones would be proud.
And let us not forget the elimination of salt from prison food! Where they used to put salt and pepper shakers on the table to season the unsalted food, now you’re lucky to find one tiny salt packet on the corner of your tray, usually water-soaked, often empty, never enough to season the dried beans and rice that that comprises most meals.
Not that I’m complaining! I love unsalted pinto beans and gummy rice. It beats bread and water any day. It is a shame, though, that the prison system has become “penny-wise and pound foolish,” cutting back on a crucial category—food—that comprises less than five percent of the corrections budget.
What item takes the biggest bite out of the $2.5 billon in taxes Florida’s citizens pay each year for their prisons? Salaries! Payroll! Health costs come in a distant second, but is still a sizeable chunk. Perhaps they could spend a little more on improving the food quality that would result in a reduction in the mounting health care costs. Surely lawsuits complaining about the dangerous soy diet will only put the prison system deeper in the hole.
Charlie
“CRUEL AND UNUSUAL?” FLORIDA PRISONERS FEAST ON “KIBBLES AND BITS”
Surely you’ve seen those “Chik-Fil-A” commercials where the cows steal the hamburgers and hold up signs saying, “Eat Mor Chikin.” Sometimes the cows parachute into a football stadium and knock down the vendor selling hamburgers. The message is clear—don’t eat beef.
Someone in power in the Florida Department of Corrections took that message to heart, eliminating all parts of cows from the state prison menu and replacing it with “Kibbles and Bits,” or something remarkably like it, also know as “Texturized Vegetable Protein,” or “T.V.P.” According to some prisoners, however, the T.V.P. actually stands for “turkey vulture parts,” although turkey vulture might be safer to eat, or so says the Weston A. Price Foundation.
According to a recent notice on the Foundation’s web site, http://www.westonaprice.org/Cruel-and-Unusual-Punishment-Soy-Diet-for-Illinois-Prisoners.html, since the Illinois prison system switched to a soy diet (read, “Kibbles and Bits”) in 2007, lawsuits have been filed claiming alarming adverse effects from prisoners consuming a diet high in unfermented soy protein.
Complaints include chronic and painful constipation alternating with debilitating diarrhea, vomiting after eating, sharp pains in the digestive tract, especially after consuming soy, passing out, heart palpitations, rashes, acne, insomnia, panic attacks, depression, and symptoms of hypothyroidism, such as low body temperature (feeling cold all the time), brain fog, fatigue, weight gain, frequent infections, and enlarged thyroid gland.
Since the soy protein is also a source of plant estrogen, a.k.a. the female sex hormone, other side effects, such as enlarged breasts in young men, have been recorded. Since estrogen consumption is used as an anti-fertility drug in women, experts say many young prisoners may be unable to father children after their release from prison.
I know what some people are going to say. I’ve heard it before. They are in prison, they violated the law, screw ‘em, they don’t deserve decent food, give them bread and water, like the “good ole days,” chain them to the dungeon wall, let them rot. That’s one argument. Heaven help those people if their son or daughter winds up in prison, left to the mercy of abusive guards and rapacious prisoners, sick, no medical care, starved, dirty, hungry. Heaven help those poor Baptist missionaries caged in an inhumane Haitian jail suffering conditions you don’t even want to imagine, worse than anything in our country.
Someone said that prisons are microcosms of society. How our society treats its captives reflects the morality and humanity of us all. This isn’t Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Saudi Arabia, Guantanamo, or Haiti. We believe in basic human rights, and are signatories to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners. Those of us who have been victims of crimes, or whose loved ones have been, are naturally more averse to treating convicted criminals with decency, including feeding them healthful diets. We are not a brutal third world country, however, and subscribe to standards of treatment of prisoners similar to other civilized countries. Medical care and decent food are two of the responsibilities our government takes on when it strips its citizens of their liberty, right or wrong.
Back to the Florida prison menu and the switchover to the risky soy diet, or “Kibbles and Bits.”
When I first entered the Hillsborough County Jail in the 1970’s on this bogus murder charge, I was amazed at how good the food was. My first meal had chunks of actual beef stew on rice, green beans, two hot biscuits, and a cooler full of iced tea that we served ourselves. Breakfast ws eggs and grits one day, large pancakes another, and an extra tray slid into the cell for whoever swept and mopped afterwards.
A Tampa Tribune food editor wrote an article reviewing the jail food, pronouncing it better than some restaurants she’d eaten in. The otherwise ascetic and humorless sheriff, Malcolm Beard, a hardcore law-and-order type if ever there was one, explained that hungry prisoners caused trouble, got in fights, stole weaker men’s trays, assaulted his guards, whereas prisoners whose bellies were full did not. Consequently, it was wiser, safer and more economical in the long run to spend a little but more on food and run a more peaceful jail.
I can attest to the wisdom of that philosophy, having experienced food riots in another county jail when they tried to serve rotten fish and other unpalatable items. It wasn’t funny. Too bad the prison system is unaware of those lessons. Times have changed. The “old timers” who ran the prison system thirty years ago are long-retired, and the new breed of “administrators” seem otherwise clueless to what it takes to run a prison.
They used to serve actual meat in prison. At Raiford, where I spent my first four years, they also served beef stew, hamburgers, and meat loaf, along with pork chops, fish and chicken. The Lake Butler Reception Center chow hall had a prominent sign posted, “Take What You Want, Eat What You Take.” And they meant it. A guard stood by the swill barrel at the chow hall exit where we dumped our trays. There’d better not be anything edible on your tray, or you’d be sent back to eat it. If you didn’t like spinach, don’t put it on your tray.
Nowadays, they have swill contracts with pig farmers and have to provide so many barrels of uneaten food to feed the hogs. When the food is tasteless and inedible the swill truck drivers are happy. The pigs aren’t talking.
One reason the prison system used to serve beef was because they raised their own cattle, along with hogs and chickens. The state owns over 11,000 acres of land in the area around Florida State Prison, and even more in Union County, much of it cow pastures. Right outside the fence beyond my Southwest Unit cell window grazed some of the prettiest Black Angus beef cattle I ever saw.
I know cows. Spending the first nine years of my life in Texas, moving to Florida and spending several teen years working for legendary cattleman, P.D. “Pal” Stokes, I learned firsthand most of what there is to know about cattle and beef. Something that I couldn’t understand, though, was why, with the herd of prime beeves grazing outside my window, steers that would be welcome in Omaha, why was the meat served in the chow hall the toughest, most gristly beef I’d ever eaten? Something was wrong with that picture. Your jaws got a workout chewing the shoe leather beef stew, at odds with the huge, shiny-coated cattle feeding on state land.
I asked my friend, Howard Magid, the prisoner who did all the clerical work in the slaughterhouse office outside the prison, why that was so. Easy. They were stealing.
Modern day prison cattle rustlers don’t round up steers and drive them to Abilene, changing the brands on the way. The prison staff who got rich on the state beef did it in a much subtler way.
Howard told me that industry-wide the percentage of beef to waste in cattle slaughtering was fifty-five percent beef to forty-five percent waste. A thousand pound steer, on average, produced five hundred fifty pounds of beef and four hundred fifty pounds of waste—hide, bones, blood, and guts. In contrast, the prison slaughterhouse, on paper, produced only four hundred fifty pounds of beef per thousand pounds of steer, an automatic hundred pound bonus of prime beef available for sale off the books. It didn’t stop there. No prisoner got so much as a quarter-pounder from the prime beef they tended on state land. Instead, a thousand pounds of prime beef would be sold for top dollar, and a thousand pounds of scrawny, stringy “grade” beef would be purchased at a much lower cost, in substitute. The numbers came out right, if the quality didn’t. A great hustle, or “rustle,” for those on the inside.
Who knows how many years that went on? They’ll have a much harder time selling the soy “burger patty,” “country patty,” “BBQ,” or “dinner stew,” as they label the Kibbles and Bits, “texturized vegetable protein,” that took the place of meat.
A perfect example of the evolution of prison food is found in what used to be known as “S.O.S.” Originally, that breakfast serving was called “chipped beef on toast,” some sort of preserved meat similar to corned beef was sliced very thin, cooked in a large kettle with milk and flour added to make a gravy, salt and pepper to taste, then a large serving ladle poured the mixture over a couple slices of toast. I can still recall the flavor. No one missed that meal. From the U.S. military came the derogatory name of “shit on a shingle,” or “S.O.S.,” even though everyone ate it.
For years it was known by “S.O.S.” The chipped beef was eventually replaced by ground beef and gravy, which was still pretty tasty for a while. Then the age of processed turkey products arrived and everything changed. Turkey hamburger, turkey patty, turkey salami and pastrami, turkey hot dogs. Who knew turkey could be so flexible? The “turkey gravy” replaced the ground beef, only to find itself replaced by “T.V.P.,” texturized vegetable protein, or turkey vulture parts, take your pick—your guess is as good as mine. Now the menu calls it “breakfast gravy,” as generic and anonymous a term as can be found, not a molecule of meat to be found in it.
They used to serve half-pints of milk at breakfast, too, but replaced that with “breakfast drink,” a concoction of some type of non-dairy coffee creamer mixed with water. The few ounces of “fruit juice” has evolved into a toxic-looking red liquid that won’t wash out of your clothes if spilled. Jim Jones would be proud.
And let us not forget the elimination of salt from prison food! Where they used to put salt and pepper shakers on the table to season the unsalted food, now you’re lucky to find one tiny salt packet on the corner of your tray, usually water-soaked, often empty, never enough to season the dried beans and rice that that comprises most meals.
Not that I’m complaining! I love unsalted pinto beans and gummy rice. It beats bread and water any day. It is a shame, though, that the prison system has become “penny-wise and pound foolish,” cutting back on a crucial category—food—that comprises less than five percent of the corrections budget.
What item takes the biggest bite out of the $2.5 billon in taxes Florida’s citizens pay each year for their prisons? Salaries! Payroll! Health costs come in a distant second, but is still a sizeable chunk. Perhaps they could spend a little more on improving the food quality that would result in a reduction in the mounting health care costs. Surely lawsuits complaining about the dangerous soy diet will only put the prison system deeper in the hole.
Charlie
Saturday, February 6, 2010
“FOXY KNOXY’S” ITALIAN INJUSTICE REFOCUSES ATTENTION ON AMERICA’S ILLS
Dateline: December, 17, 2009
“FOXY KNOXY’S” ITALIAN INJUSTICE REFOCUSES ATTENTION ON AMERICA’S ILLS
Does anyone really believe that American college student, Amanda Knox, slit her roommate’s throat because the girl complained about Knox’s being a slob and not picking up her clothes? Come on, people!
The Italian justice system is so screwed up that if they’d tried O.J. Simpson there, they’d probably have ruled that Ron Goldman hacked Nicole Brown Simpson to death and then committed suicide! They had no better evidence that the twenty-two year old girl from Washington State joined her Italian boyfriend and an African-American guy in gang-raping and butchering the English student than they’d have had against poor Ron Goldman.
So how did it happen?
AMANDA: “Hey, fellas, my roommate dissed me. I left my panties on the bathroom floor. Big deal. Let’s teach her a lesson. We’ll hold her down, rape her, then we’ll slice her throat from ear-to-ear, got to your place, and I’ll discover the body tomorrow!”
Sorry, but that’s not how it went down. With millions of Americans watching “CSI,” “CSI New York,” “CSI Miami,” “NCIS,” “Bones,” “Criminal Minds,” and all the other modern crime/murder shows, we’ve grown into a nation of armchair forensic scientists. Prosecutors are complaining that juries are demanding DNA tests, fingerprints, and chemical analyses to convict defendants, not being satisfied with the old-fashioned techniques of coerced confessions, perjurious jailhouse snitches, and misconducive prosecutorial shenanigans that have been mainstays of American injustice for generations.
They must not watch “CSI” in Italy. If they did, the jury would never have convicted Miss Knox when not a scintilla of forensic evidence connected her to the murder. No fingerprints, no DNA, no pubic hairs, no video.
Perhaps one side effect of the Italian injustice concerning “Foxie Knoxy” will be a refocusing of attention on the same kinds of prosecutorial misconduct in America. Does it take the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of a sexy, young college student in Italy to outrage the American public to the point where they say, “What about cases like this in our own country?”
Do not say, “It couldn’t happen here,” because it has been happening all along. Corrupt prosecutors like the now-disbarred Mike Nifong of Duke University lacrosse team infamy and state attorney Mark Ober, formerly best-known as the tireless advocate of notorious rapist and serial killer, Oscar Ray Bolin, who terrorized the Tampa, Florida, area, are just two examples of unscrupulous men who “do whatever it takes” to get a conviction.
In Mark Ober’s case, I know firsthand what it feels like to be accused of and framed for a murder I didn’t commit. I’m sure that Amanda Knox’s prosecutor has already used her case to promote his overweening political ambitions, as Mark Ober did to me.
Just like in “Criminal Minds” each week, all the evidence is right there in front of us in the Amanda Knox case. Unfortunately, Miss Knox doesn’t have the benefit of Hollywood experts to solve the case and clear her in the last five minutes.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the black guy did it!
Charlie
“FOXY KNOXY’S” ITALIAN INJUSTICE REFOCUSES ATTENTION ON AMERICA’S ILLS
Does anyone really believe that American college student, Amanda Knox, slit her roommate’s throat because the girl complained about Knox’s being a slob and not picking up her clothes? Come on, people!
The Italian justice system is so screwed up that if they’d tried O.J. Simpson there, they’d probably have ruled that Ron Goldman hacked Nicole Brown Simpson to death and then committed suicide! They had no better evidence that the twenty-two year old girl from Washington State joined her Italian boyfriend and an African-American guy in gang-raping and butchering the English student than they’d have had against poor Ron Goldman.
So how did it happen?
AMANDA: “Hey, fellas, my roommate dissed me. I left my panties on the bathroom floor. Big deal. Let’s teach her a lesson. We’ll hold her down, rape her, then we’ll slice her throat from ear-to-ear, got to your place, and I’ll discover the body tomorrow!”
Sorry, but that’s not how it went down. With millions of Americans watching “CSI,” “CSI New York,” “CSI Miami,” “NCIS,” “Bones,” “Criminal Minds,” and all the other modern crime/murder shows, we’ve grown into a nation of armchair forensic scientists. Prosecutors are complaining that juries are demanding DNA tests, fingerprints, and chemical analyses to convict defendants, not being satisfied with the old-fashioned techniques of coerced confessions, perjurious jailhouse snitches, and misconducive prosecutorial shenanigans that have been mainstays of American injustice for generations.
They must not watch “CSI” in Italy. If they did, the jury would never have convicted Miss Knox when not a scintilla of forensic evidence connected her to the murder. No fingerprints, no DNA, no pubic hairs, no video.
Perhaps one side effect of the Italian injustice concerning “Foxie Knoxy” will be a refocusing of attention on the same kinds of prosecutorial misconduct in America. Does it take the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of a sexy, young college student in Italy to outrage the American public to the point where they say, “What about cases like this in our own country?”
Do not say, “It couldn’t happen here,” because it has been happening all along. Corrupt prosecutors like the now-disbarred Mike Nifong of Duke University lacrosse team infamy and state attorney Mark Ober, formerly best-known as the tireless advocate of notorious rapist and serial killer, Oscar Ray Bolin, who terrorized the Tampa, Florida, area, are just two examples of unscrupulous men who “do whatever it takes” to get a conviction.
In Mark Ober’s case, I know firsthand what it feels like to be accused of and framed for a murder I didn’t commit. I’m sure that Amanda Knox’s prosecutor has already used her case to promote his overweening political ambitions, as Mark Ober did to me.
Just like in “Criminal Minds” each week, all the evidence is right there in front of us in the Amanda Knox case. Unfortunately, Miss Knox doesn’t have the benefit of Hollywood experts to solve the case and clear her in the last five minutes.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the black guy did it!
Charlie
Sunday, January 31, 2010
STAND-UP CONVICTS—“THE HIDDEN NOBILITY”
Dateline: January 31, 2010
STAND-UP CONVICTS—“THE HIDDEN NOBILITY”
Old Convicts Versus “The New Convict Code”
Tex McClain had nothing but his word. Old and sick, having outlived anyone in society who might help him, he had to live by his wits to earn coffee and cigarettes. Old Tex’s word was good. If he told you a certain prisoner was a bad credit risk and wouldn’t pay back a loan, you’d be a fool to give him a dime. If he told you he’d hide your knife in his cell for a week for a carton of cigarettes, and the guards discovered it, he’d go to solitary confinement for months before he’d tell who the shank actually belonged to. If he considered you “good people,” he’d do anything to help you. And if he thought you’d cheated him or snitched him out to “The Man,” he’d kill you and suffer the consequences. That’s why he’d spent most of his life in prison, and why he’d die there, his word and honor intact.
Tex McClain and many old-time convicts like him adhered to “The Convict Code.” The Convict Code wasn’t written down anywhere, you wouldn’t find it in the Department of Corrections rules or the inmate handbook. They didn’t teach it in Life Skills class, or explain it in orientation. If you were “all right,” someone might tell you about it. That’s how I learned The Convict Code.
When you come to prison you are observed and judged by everyone around you: are you weak or strong, poor or rich, gay or straight, a snitch or not, “good people” or “a piece of shit?” How you are judged, how you respond to an initial testing period, how you exhibit your manhood, character, or lack thereof will determine to a considerable extent how difficult or hard your time in prison will be. One’s reputation often becomes a matter of life or death.
There are several terms that have become fraught with confusion and misinterpretation that need defining and discussing.
The words convict, inmate, and prisoner are often used interchangeably, although their meanings and connotations have implicitly greater differences than their explicit definitions.
The dictionary defines convict as somebody serving a prison sentence, such as, “an escaped convict,” from the Latin, convincere, “to prove wrong.’ Up until the 1960’s, or thereabouts, anyone convicted of a crime and imprisoned was a convict. Stand-up refers to somebody who faces danger or obligations boldly or bravely, who confronts adversaries fearlessly. Stand-up convict.
Inmate is defined as somebody who has been confined within a prison or a psychiatric hospital, from the late 16th century, formed from IN + MATE “companion.” This definition coincided with the rise of institutionalizing “insane” people— “an inmate of an asylum.” Prisons for people convicted of crimes did not become prevalent until many years later. There is no such thing as a stand-up inmate.
A prisoner is somebody confined in a prison as a punishment for a crime or while awaiting trial, or somebody who has been captured and is held in confinement in a place. A prisoner of war is somebody who has been captured and held captive by the enemy during war.
The word, prison, arose in the 12th Century via Old French, from, ultimately, the Latin stem, prension, ‘seizing,” from prehendre, “to seize.” “Seize him!” Book him, Danno.
Interestingly enough, that Latin word, “prehensile,”- able to grasp something, like a prehensile tail, is derived, is also the source of the words, apprehend, apprentice, comprehend, comprise, depredation, impregnable, predator, prey, prisoner, reprehensible, reprieve, and surprise. How they link together!
In contrast to prison, an institution is a place where people who are, e.g., mentally or physically challenged are cared for. In our modern times, sadly, no one cares anymore.
Alongside that term, “institutionalized,” has two definitions: 1. established as normal—having become an established custom or an accepted part of the structure of a large organization or society because it has existed for so long, and, 2. dependent on the routine of institution—lacking the will or ability to think and act independently because of having spent a long time in an institution, such as a psychiatric hospital or prison. With the widespread dispensing of psychotropic drugs, longer terms of imprisonment, and a growing percentage of sick, aging prisoners nationwide, institutionalized zombies not only tax the straining prison systems, but also become helpless prey to young prison predators.
To our society’s shame, the “system” is set up not to “fix” or repair or rehabilitate prisoners, preparing them during their imprisonments to rejoin society as people who can be useful contributors, but rather to break them down, make them compliant, in a word, institutionalized.
In the classic movie, “Papillon,” Steve McQueen portrays a prisoner on the French prison exile colony off the coast of South America, “Devil’s Island,” a man who is determined to survive on his own terms, the brutal imprisonment conditions that either destroyed the other men, turned them into animalistic beasts, or broke their spirits entirely. Modern prisons are not nearly as heavy-handed as their turn-of-the-century counterparts inflicting the Napoleonic Code, but the process of long-term institutionalization of prisoners is no less effective as a means of control.
While we are at it, we may as well define a few more terms that are subject to misuse and misinterpretation in this context.
“Corrections” is the system of dealing with criminals by imprisonment, rehabilitation, parole and probation. “Correctional” means of or involved in the system of dealing with criminals by imprisonment, rehabilitation, parole, and probation. A “correctional facility” is a prison or other institution where criminals are held and treated.
“Guard,” as a verb and noun, has at least a dozen lengthy definitions in the Encarta World English Dictionary, (copyright 1999 by Bloomsbury Publishing) the source of all the definitions used here. Definition 2— prevent escape of—to watch over and prevent the escape of somebody held captive, as a verb— “Two MPs were guarding the prisoner,” and as a noun, definition 2—a person or group that protects, watches over, restrains, or controls somebody or something— “The prisoner broke away from his guards.”
On the other hand, “officer,” has several definitions, none of which are associated with “prison guard.” The primary meaning refers to somebody of rank in the armed forces. “Officer” can also refer to an elected or appointed official, a police officer, or somebody who has a specialized or responsible post in authority on a ship.
A euphemism is a word or phrase used in place of a term that might be considered too direct, harsh, unpleasant, or offensive. The prison system uses “correctional officer” as a euphemism for “prison guard,” although it is more than that. The negative connotation of “prison guard” does not infer the so-called inflated status of “correctional officer,” a prouder term that elevates a historically lowly position.
In contrast, use of “inmate” as opposed to “prisoner” or “convict” denigrates the person, to deliberately make somebody appear less important, mentally deficient, disparaged, and belittled. These usages embody strong psychological overtones designed to build up the self-esteem of the guards at the expense of the convicts or prisoners. Name it and claim it—old-time convicts will tell new men that if they call themselves “inmates,” and answer to that sobriquet, that’s what they are. An old-timer is quick to correct a guard who refers to him as an inmate. “I’m a convict, not an inmate.”
When I came to prison, after spending close to two years in the county jail awaiting trial for murder, I was already known to many prisoners who’d met me in the county jail and preceded me in prison, so I was already a step up on many men newly-arrived in prison.
An old man named Bill O’Quinn gave me some of my first lessons in the convict code at Raiford.
“You make a few big decisions that will eliminate a lot of little decisions. Are you a man or a woman? A straight person or a homosexual? If you are a man, and someone approaches you in a sexual manner, your response is automatic. NO. What are you?”
“I’m a man,” I said. “I’m old-fashioned. I like women. I don’t like men.”
“Good,” Bill said. “I don’t, either.”
Are you going to be a good guy or a bad guy? A bad guy talks to the guards, snitches out others, steals, lies, cheats, is of weak character. A good guy is strong, keeps his mouth shut, doesn’t gossip, and minds his own business. A good guy can be trusted. He’s “got your back” if trouble goes down. He stands on his own two feet, doesn’t depend on others, doesn’t borrow money, and doesn’t go into debt. He doesn’t run in gangs. He is a stand-up convict.
A stand-up convict controls himself. He doesn’t fool around with punks, homosexuals. He avoids drugs and alcohol. Ninety per cent of prison murders involve homosexuality, bad debts, drugs, alcohol, or snitching. Eliminate those vices from your life, and your time will go much easier.
Of course, that is the ideal, the goal, and no matter how “stand-up” a convict might be, he is not perfect, and may not always attain the loftiest pinnacles of behavior. An alcoholic, for example, in the despair of prison, may brew prison wine and sell it, his only talent, and most likely will drink his product, with various consequences, and still be a stand-up convict in most ways. But he won’t rat out another man in competition with him. Even lost, broken, abandoned men can retain shreds of dignity by being stand-up convicts, resisting.
“Back in the day,” as they say, if a prisoner talked to the guards he was viewed with suspicion. Don’t get me wrong—prisoners and guards have always talked, had conversations about various things. But stand-up convicts always had one or more convicts with him when he talked, as insurance, so nobody got the wrong idea. He might be complaining about the food, or the mail not being passed out, or the canteen being closed, but he was definitely NOT talking about who was making wine or selling pot. Those types of issues were none of his business. Let the guards do their jobs without help from him.
If a prisoner was known as a snitch, a bad risk, or fooled with homosexuals, he was shunned by stand-up convicts. They didn’t talk to him. They didn’t “see” him. Times have changed.
As the prison system has changed, as prisoners have changed, as the old-timers have died out, a “new convict code” has arisen.
The average age of today’s prisoner is increasingly younger, he is more drug-addicted, more violent, with more “mandatory” sentences, less chances to ever get out, more “L-WOP,” life without parole, less hope, more despair. The rise of crack cocaine in the inner cities has filled the prisons with angry, young black men, robbers, carjackers, murderers, who just don’t care. Crystal meth addiction has had a similar effect among the poor whites. The same goes for Hispanics, especially with the rise of street drug gangs.
These violent addicts have no regard for themselves or others. Prisons have become increasingly dangerous places as these young men form and join gangs, running wild inside. Assaults, robberies, and thefts from each other increase tensions and turmoil. There is no more “honor among thieves.”
Nowadays in prison, you’re just as likely to find a big, strong muscular young man unashamedly and openly partnered in a homosexual relationship, selling drugs, setting up other prisoners for theft, and snitching out some of his drug customers so they will flunk urine tests, go to jail. He will build up points with the guards as a “good inmate.” This same “good inmate” will have a visit on Sunday with a young lady, a girlfriend, or a wife, perhaps a child or two, and she’ll never suspect that her “man” was involved in unprotected sex last night with that HIV-infected man sitting at the next table with his mother. It happens all the time.
Under the “new convict code,” none of the “inmates” involved in such activities feel like they are doing anything wrong. The old moral codes have been tossed out the window. In the new convict code, someone who is capable of doing all those formerly taboo acts is a role model, respected by his peers. If he can tell on a few others and get his homosexual lover moved into the cell with him, he is admired as somebody who has influence and can get things done. If he can juggle male and female lovers, in prison and outside, his status is elevated even higher by those who subscribe to the new way of life.
Why has this happened? There are many reasons. Newspaper columnist Thomas Sowell wrote that we are raising a generation of barbarians in our inner cities. Since he is an African-American, he can make that statement without being accused of racial overtones. Black, white, or other, our society is in decay, the moral fiber has frayed, and our prisons have become the canaries in the coal mines to warn us about this impending disaster. It is already burning here in prison.
The guards searched old Tex McClain’s cell one afternoon and discovered two ounces of marijuana under his mattress. Someone “sent the man,” snitched him out. The guards knew the reefer wasn’t Tex’s. He had nothing, certainly not a stash of valuable drugs. On the front deck of our building, several “goon squad” guards surrounded the frail, sickly Tex and questioned him. Listening to the exchange was a lesson in the convict code. Tex suffered from emphysema, could scarcely breathe, hacked and coughed almost continuously, but wasn’t nearly as sick as he pretended to be to the guards.
GUARD: Now, Tex, we know this pot ain’t yours. You tell us who you’re holding it for, and we’ll let you go.
TEX: (coughing) Y-You know I can’t do that.
GUARD: C’mon, Tex. Give us a name. Who gave you those 2 ozs.?
TEX: (head down, hesitant) I wish I could. You know I do. But if Old Tex told you who that mari-ju-wana belonged to, I’d get in so much trouble.
GUARD: No you won’t, Tex. Work with me. Give me a name. You ain’t afraid, are you?
TEX: Hell, yeah, I’m afraid. I can’t tell you. My life wouldn’t be worth shit if I ratted ‘em out. You wouldn’t (cough, hack) believe me, anyway.
GUARD: Yeah we would, Tex. I promise you we’ll protect you. Give us a name. Just the name.
TEX: (thinking about it) I really wish I could.(cough, wheeze, hack, spit, cough) But you’d just call me a liar, and you’d lock me up anyway. I can’t trust ya’ll. You ain’t gonna let me go. I’ll get in worse trouble if I tell you.
GUARD: No you won’t, Tex. We’ll believe you. Give us a name, and we’ll let you go.
TEX: (cough, wheeze, looking up, cocking his head, eyeing the guard skeptically) You will? You promise?
GUARD: I give you my word, Tex. Whose reefer is it?
TEX: (takes a deep breath) Okay, I’ll tell you. Before he went on vacation, Sergeant Dragline gave me the reefer and told me to sell it for him and give him the money when he got back!
(NOTE: “Dragline” was the prison nickname of the huge guard sergeant over the goon squad. One leg had been damaged in a motorcycle accident some years before, and “Dragline” dragged the stiffened leg behind him, like an injured Frankenstein monster. A notorious brutalizer who hated prisoners, he was also intelligent and cunning and considered himself to be on a holy crusade in which anything he did was justified. He was eventually fired to placate the feds.)
GUARD: You lying son-of-a-bitch! You’re going to jail!
The guards manhandled Tex, pulled his thin arms behind his back roughly, handcuffed him, and with guards grasping each arm, hustled him down the steps.
As he was being led away, he shouted, “I told you. You didn’t believe me. You lied to Old Tex!”
Outnumbered, surrounded, with no hope for escape, Tex maintained his dignity, manipulated the guards, reversed the situation on them, and led them on a merry chase for awhile. I could only admire his hidden nobility, his refusal to violate the convict code, and like the Russian aristocrats who had lost everything, captured by their enemies and facing death, refused to give their executioners the satisfaction of seeing them beg for mercy or humiliate themselves. By all measure of the world that confined him, Tex McClain was a failed person, an elderly, burned-out alcoholic, the ultimate loser who would be buried in a prison graveyard, with no trace of his life except for a small, metal plate stamped in the auto tag plant with his prison number. But to me and those others who watched him perform that day, he was a real man, a stand-up convict, the proud equal of any man, his dignity intact.
A week later, Dragline came back from vacation and walked up to Tex’s cell in confinement, staring at the old man lying on his bunk.
“So I gave you some reefer to sell for me while I was on vacation, huh?”
Tex laughed, coughed, mumbled a few words. Dragline unlocked the cell door and held it open.
“Get up, you crazy old bastard.”
“Where’m I going, Sarge?”
“You’re going back to the compound, dumb ass. Now grab your bag and let’s go, unless you want to stay in lockup.”
For an instant, Tex was surprisingly spry, hopped out of the bunk and headed for the door and daylight.
Charlie
STAND-UP CONVICTS—“THE HIDDEN NOBILITY”
Old Convicts Versus “The New Convict Code”
Tex McClain had nothing but his word. Old and sick, having outlived anyone in society who might help him, he had to live by his wits to earn coffee and cigarettes. Old Tex’s word was good. If he told you a certain prisoner was a bad credit risk and wouldn’t pay back a loan, you’d be a fool to give him a dime. If he told you he’d hide your knife in his cell for a week for a carton of cigarettes, and the guards discovered it, he’d go to solitary confinement for months before he’d tell who the shank actually belonged to. If he considered you “good people,” he’d do anything to help you. And if he thought you’d cheated him or snitched him out to “The Man,” he’d kill you and suffer the consequences. That’s why he’d spent most of his life in prison, and why he’d die there, his word and honor intact.
Tex McClain and many old-time convicts like him adhered to “The Convict Code.” The Convict Code wasn’t written down anywhere, you wouldn’t find it in the Department of Corrections rules or the inmate handbook. They didn’t teach it in Life Skills class, or explain it in orientation. If you were “all right,” someone might tell you about it. That’s how I learned The Convict Code.
When you come to prison you are observed and judged by everyone around you: are you weak or strong, poor or rich, gay or straight, a snitch or not, “good people” or “a piece of shit?” How you are judged, how you respond to an initial testing period, how you exhibit your manhood, character, or lack thereof will determine to a considerable extent how difficult or hard your time in prison will be. One’s reputation often becomes a matter of life or death.
There are several terms that have become fraught with confusion and misinterpretation that need defining and discussing.
The words convict, inmate, and prisoner are often used interchangeably, although their meanings and connotations have implicitly greater differences than their explicit definitions.
The dictionary defines convict as somebody serving a prison sentence, such as, “an escaped convict,” from the Latin, convincere, “to prove wrong.’ Up until the 1960’s, or thereabouts, anyone convicted of a crime and imprisoned was a convict. Stand-up refers to somebody who faces danger or obligations boldly or bravely, who confronts adversaries fearlessly. Stand-up convict.
Inmate is defined as somebody who has been confined within a prison or a psychiatric hospital, from the late 16th century, formed from IN + MATE “companion.” This definition coincided with the rise of institutionalizing “insane” people— “an inmate of an asylum.” Prisons for people convicted of crimes did not become prevalent until many years later. There is no such thing as a stand-up inmate.
A prisoner is somebody confined in a prison as a punishment for a crime or while awaiting trial, or somebody who has been captured and is held in confinement in a place. A prisoner of war is somebody who has been captured and held captive by the enemy during war.
The word, prison, arose in the 12th Century via Old French, from, ultimately, the Latin stem, prension, ‘seizing,” from prehendre, “to seize.” “Seize him!” Book him, Danno.
Interestingly enough, that Latin word, “prehensile,”- able to grasp something, like a prehensile tail, is derived, is also the source of the words, apprehend, apprentice, comprehend, comprise, depredation, impregnable, predator, prey, prisoner, reprehensible, reprieve, and surprise. How they link together!
In contrast to prison, an institution is a place where people who are, e.g., mentally or physically challenged are cared for. In our modern times, sadly, no one cares anymore.
Alongside that term, “institutionalized,” has two definitions: 1. established as normal—having become an established custom or an accepted part of the structure of a large organization or society because it has existed for so long, and, 2. dependent on the routine of institution—lacking the will or ability to think and act independently because of having spent a long time in an institution, such as a psychiatric hospital or prison. With the widespread dispensing of psychotropic drugs, longer terms of imprisonment, and a growing percentage of sick, aging prisoners nationwide, institutionalized zombies not only tax the straining prison systems, but also become helpless prey to young prison predators.
To our society’s shame, the “system” is set up not to “fix” or repair or rehabilitate prisoners, preparing them during their imprisonments to rejoin society as people who can be useful contributors, but rather to break them down, make them compliant, in a word, institutionalized.
In the classic movie, “Papillon,” Steve McQueen portrays a prisoner on the French prison exile colony off the coast of South America, “Devil’s Island,” a man who is determined to survive on his own terms, the brutal imprisonment conditions that either destroyed the other men, turned them into animalistic beasts, or broke their spirits entirely. Modern prisons are not nearly as heavy-handed as their turn-of-the-century counterparts inflicting the Napoleonic Code, but the process of long-term institutionalization of prisoners is no less effective as a means of control.
While we are at it, we may as well define a few more terms that are subject to misuse and misinterpretation in this context.
“Corrections” is the system of dealing with criminals by imprisonment, rehabilitation, parole and probation. “Correctional” means of or involved in the system of dealing with criminals by imprisonment, rehabilitation, parole, and probation. A “correctional facility” is a prison or other institution where criminals are held and treated.
“Guard,” as a verb and noun, has at least a dozen lengthy definitions in the Encarta World English Dictionary, (copyright 1999 by Bloomsbury Publishing) the source of all the definitions used here. Definition 2— prevent escape of—to watch over and prevent the escape of somebody held captive, as a verb— “Two MPs were guarding the prisoner,” and as a noun, definition 2—a person or group that protects, watches over, restrains, or controls somebody or something— “The prisoner broke away from his guards.”
On the other hand, “officer,” has several definitions, none of which are associated with “prison guard.” The primary meaning refers to somebody of rank in the armed forces. “Officer” can also refer to an elected or appointed official, a police officer, or somebody who has a specialized or responsible post in authority on a ship.
A euphemism is a word or phrase used in place of a term that might be considered too direct, harsh, unpleasant, or offensive. The prison system uses “correctional officer” as a euphemism for “prison guard,” although it is more than that. The negative connotation of “prison guard” does not infer the so-called inflated status of “correctional officer,” a prouder term that elevates a historically lowly position.
In contrast, use of “inmate” as opposed to “prisoner” or “convict” denigrates the person, to deliberately make somebody appear less important, mentally deficient, disparaged, and belittled. These usages embody strong psychological overtones designed to build up the self-esteem of the guards at the expense of the convicts or prisoners. Name it and claim it—old-time convicts will tell new men that if they call themselves “inmates,” and answer to that sobriquet, that’s what they are. An old-timer is quick to correct a guard who refers to him as an inmate. “I’m a convict, not an inmate.”
When I came to prison, after spending close to two years in the county jail awaiting trial for murder, I was already known to many prisoners who’d met me in the county jail and preceded me in prison, so I was already a step up on many men newly-arrived in prison.
An old man named Bill O’Quinn gave me some of my first lessons in the convict code at Raiford.
“You make a few big decisions that will eliminate a lot of little decisions. Are you a man or a woman? A straight person or a homosexual? If you are a man, and someone approaches you in a sexual manner, your response is automatic. NO. What are you?”
“I’m a man,” I said. “I’m old-fashioned. I like women. I don’t like men.”
“Good,” Bill said. “I don’t, either.”
Are you going to be a good guy or a bad guy? A bad guy talks to the guards, snitches out others, steals, lies, cheats, is of weak character. A good guy is strong, keeps his mouth shut, doesn’t gossip, and minds his own business. A good guy can be trusted. He’s “got your back” if trouble goes down. He stands on his own two feet, doesn’t depend on others, doesn’t borrow money, and doesn’t go into debt. He doesn’t run in gangs. He is a stand-up convict.
A stand-up convict controls himself. He doesn’t fool around with punks, homosexuals. He avoids drugs and alcohol. Ninety per cent of prison murders involve homosexuality, bad debts, drugs, alcohol, or snitching. Eliminate those vices from your life, and your time will go much easier.
Of course, that is the ideal, the goal, and no matter how “stand-up” a convict might be, he is not perfect, and may not always attain the loftiest pinnacles of behavior. An alcoholic, for example, in the despair of prison, may brew prison wine and sell it, his only talent, and most likely will drink his product, with various consequences, and still be a stand-up convict in most ways. But he won’t rat out another man in competition with him. Even lost, broken, abandoned men can retain shreds of dignity by being stand-up convicts, resisting.
“Back in the day,” as they say, if a prisoner talked to the guards he was viewed with suspicion. Don’t get me wrong—prisoners and guards have always talked, had conversations about various things. But stand-up convicts always had one or more convicts with him when he talked, as insurance, so nobody got the wrong idea. He might be complaining about the food, or the mail not being passed out, or the canteen being closed, but he was definitely NOT talking about who was making wine or selling pot. Those types of issues were none of his business. Let the guards do their jobs without help from him.
If a prisoner was known as a snitch, a bad risk, or fooled with homosexuals, he was shunned by stand-up convicts. They didn’t talk to him. They didn’t “see” him. Times have changed.
As the prison system has changed, as prisoners have changed, as the old-timers have died out, a “new convict code” has arisen.
The average age of today’s prisoner is increasingly younger, he is more drug-addicted, more violent, with more “mandatory” sentences, less chances to ever get out, more “L-WOP,” life without parole, less hope, more despair. The rise of crack cocaine in the inner cities has filled the prisons with angry, young black men, robbers, carjackers, murderers, who just don’t care. Crystal meth addiction has had a similar effect among the poor whites. The same goes for Hispanics, especially with the rise of street drug gangs.
These violent addicts have no regard for themselves or others. Prisons have become increasingly dangerous places as these young men form and join gangs, running wild inside. Assaults, robberies, and thefts from each other increase tensions and turmoil. There is no more “honor among thieves.”
Nowadays in prison, you’re just as likely to find a big, strong muscular young man unashamedly and openly partnered in a homosexual relationship, selling drugs, setting up other prisoners for theft, and snitching out some of his drug customers so they will flunk urine tests, go to jail. He will build up points with the guards as a “good inmate.” This same “good inmate” will have a visit on Sunday with a young lady, a girlfriend, or a wife, perhaps a child or two, and she’ll never suspect that her “man” was involved in unprotected sex last night with that HIV-infected man sitting at the next table with his mother. It happens all the time.
Under the “new convict code,” none of the “inmates” involved in such activities feel like they are doing anything wrong. The old moral codes have been tossed out the window. In the new convict code, someone who is capable of doing all those formerly taboo acts is a role model, respected by his peers. If he can tell on a few others and get his homosexual lover moved into the cell with him, he is admired as somebody who has influence and can get things done. If he can juggle male and female lovers, in prison and outside, his status is elevated even higher by those who subscribe to the new way of life.
Why has this happened? There are many reasons. Newspaper columnist Thomas Sowell wrote that we are raising a generation of barbarians in our inner cities. Since he is an African-American, he can make that statement without being accused of racial overtones. Black, white, or other, our society is in decay, the moral fiber has frayed, and our prisons have become the canaries in the coal mines to warn us about this impending disaster. It is already burning here in prison.
The guards searched old Tex McClain’s cell one afternoon and discovered two ounces of marijuana under his mattress. Someone “sent the man,” snitched him out. The guards knew the reefer wasn’t Tex’s. He had nothing, certainly not a stash of valuable drugs. On the front deck of our building, several “goon squad” guards surrounded the frail, sickly Tex and questioned him. Listening to the exchange was a lesson in the convict code. Tex suffered from emphysema, could scarcely breathe, hacked and coughed almost continuously, but wasn’t nearly as sick as he pretended to be to the guards.
GUARD: Now, Tex, we know this pot ain’t yours. You tell us who you’re holding it for, and we’ll let you go.
TEX: (coughing) Y-You know I can’t do that.
GUARD: C’mon, Tex. Give us a name. Who gave you those 2 ozs.?
TEX: (head down, hesitant) I wish I could. You know I do. But if Old Tex told you who that mari-ju-wana belonged to, I’d get in so much trouble.
GUARD: No you won’t, Tex. Work with me. Give me a name. You ain’t afraid, are you?
TEX: Hell, yeah, I’m afraid. I can’t tell you. My life wouldn’t be worth shit if I ratted ‘em out. You wouldn’t (cough, hack) believe me, anyway.
GUARD: Yeah we would, Tex. I promise you we’ll protect you. Give us a name. Just the name.
TEX: (thinking about it) I really wish I could.(cough, wheeze, hack, spit, cough) But you’d just call me a liar, and you’d lock me up anyway. I can’t trust ya’ll. You ain’t gonna let me go. I’ll get in worse trouble if I tell you.
GUARD: No you won’t, Tex. We’ll believe you. Give us a name, and we’ll let you go.
TEX: (cough, wheeze, looking up, cocking his head, eyeing the guard skeptically) You will? You promise?
GUARD: I give you my word, Tex. Whose reefer is it?
TEX: (takes a deep breath) Okay, I’ll tell you. Before he went on vacation, Sergeant Dragline gave me the reefer and told me to sell it for him and give him the money when he got back!
(NOTE: “Dragline” was the prison nickname of the huge guard sergeant over the goon squad. One leg had been damaged in a motorcycle accident some years before, and “Dragline” dragged the stiffened leg behind him, like an injured Frankenstein monster. A notorious brutalizer who hated prisoners, he was also intelligent and cunning and considered himself to be on a holy crusade in which anything he did was justified. He was eventually fired to placate the feds.)
GUARD: You lying son-of-a-bitch! You’re going to jail!
The guards manhandled Tex, pulled his thin arms behind his back roughly, handcuffed him, and with guards grasping each arm, hustled him down the steps.
As he was being led away, he shouted, “I told you. You didn’t believe me. You lied to Old Tex!”
Outnumbered, surrounded, with no hope for escape, Tex maintained his dignity, manipulated the guards, reversed the situation on them, and led them on a merry chase for awhile. I could only admire his hidden nobility, his refusal to violate the convict code, and like the Russian aristocrats who had lost everything, captured by their enemies and facing death, refused to give their executioners the satisfaction of seeing them beg for mercy or humiliate themselves. By all measure of the world that confined him, Tex McClain was a failed person, an elderly, burned-out alcoholic, the ultimate loser who would be buried in a prison graveyard, with no trace of his life except for a small, metal plate stamped in the auto tag plant with his prison number. But to me and those others who watched him perform that day, he was a real man, a stand-up convict, the proud equal of any man, his dignity intact.
A week later, Dragline came back from vacation and walked up to Tex’s cell in confinement, staring at the old man lying on his bunk.
“So I gave you some reefer to sell for me while I was on vacation, huh?”
Tex laughed, coughed, mumbled a few words. Dragline unlocked the cell door and held it open.
“Get up, you crazy old bastard.”
“Where’m I going, Sarge?”
“You’re going back to the compound, dumb ass. Now grab your bag and let’s go, unless you want to stay in lockup.”
For an instant, Tex was surprisingly spry, hopped out of the bunk and headed for the door and daylight.
Charlie
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