SPECIAL VISIT FROM OLD FRIENDS FROM FAR AWAY

Dateline: August 10, 2011

A four-decade-plus friendship was renewed Sunday, July 31, 2011,  when my dear friends, Sombat, Keila, and their son, Andy, made a trek from the other side of the world to visit with Libby and me at Wakulla Annex C.I. Homeland Security has nothing on the Florida D.O.C. when it comes to bureaucratic red-tape and paperwork. It was easier to travel 12,000 miles from Bangkok, Thailand, to Tampa, than it was to get to and into this place, but they persevered.
I met Sombat at the University of South Florida in 1968, through a mutual friend from the Yucatan, Mexico, who enrolled in King High School, not speaking any English. Since I spoke Spanish, I helped Tony Puerta learn to speak English well enough that he graduated from King, enrolled at USF, and eventually became a rocket scientist at Sperry-Rand. He repaid the kindness by introducing me to Sombat, who was studying engineering, thus beginning a life-long friendship.

Sombat and his beautiful wife, Keila, were there for me during some of the worst times of my life, offering non-judgmental friendship when I had nowhere else to turn. I hope I was able to do the same for them.
During college, Sombat played on the USF soccer team, and I was in the martial arts business, tae kwon do and Karate schools in Tampa and Lakeland, and tournament promotions. We played golf at the USF golf course, but I didn't know Sombat had been a champion kick boxer in Thailand until he offered to be a sparring partner for Florida black belt karate champion Ron Slinker, one of my partners in Martial Arts Institute, Inc., who was training for a professional kick boxing (PKA) match with the American kick boxing champion. After Sombat put on a "Muay Thai" kick boxing exhibition against the hapless Slinker, sending him to the hospital, Ron decided kick boxing was not for him. Slinker went on to become a professional wrestler with Vince McMahon's WWF. His biggest claim to fame was teaching "The Rock," Dwayne Johnson, to be a professional wrestler. "The Rock" is now known as a highly-paid movie star. In his biography, "The Rock" talked about Slinker, calling him the baddest fighter he's ever met. Obviously, "The Rock" never went three rounds with Sombat.

I was there when Andy, Sombat's and Keila's first child, was born. Until 1989, when they moved back to Thailand, Andy and his sister, Adrie, grew up visiting me in a sucession of prisons, dragging their parents along.

It was a very emotional time for all of us when my old friends and their now-grown son, who towers over all of us, entered the visiting park to hugs and tears. The years in between truly fell away. Afterwards, Libby, who had met them for the first time at the visit, said she felt like she'd known them all her life and was humbled in the presence of such special, loving people, whose feelings and words were so obviously genuine.

In the midst of such repression and negativity omnipresent in here, it was an incredible boost to my sinking morale to be in their presence for a few precious hours. Truly I am blessed and thankful for such purely good people in my life, who validate my own worth as an individual.

Charlie

CANADA GEESE MAKE A HOME IN PRISON

Dateline July 18, 2011


Early one subfreezing January morning in North Florida, eighty state prisoners lined up outside to march to the chow hall for a breakfast of two pancakes and a cup of hot oatmeal.

I was one of those prisoners. In the predawn darkness, glaring orange security lights mounted on tall concrete towers illuminated two Canada geese nibbling on the brown grass blades of the exercise yard. The anomaly of the wild goose pair juxtaposed with the razorwire fence beside them struck me. I couldn’t take my eyes off them as we headed for the chow hall, craning my neck to catch a last sight of them. I hadn’t seen a Canada goose in decades, since my imprisonment, and I didn’t know when I’d see one again, let alone two. It wasn’t that long a wait─just until the next day.

On the way to the law library to do legal research the next morning, there they were again, nibbling at the dry, dead grass in a different exercise yard adjacent to the prison school, oblivious to the activity around them.

Twice in two days! My lingering memory of Canada geese went back to my childhood in Central Florida and a group of children gazing skyward at a large V-shaped formation of honking wild geese migrating southward, far overhead. The image epitomized freedom, unrestrained by time, place, or national boundaries.

The following day the geese treated me to the sight of them taking to the air, their six-foot wingspan lifting them easily over the high steel fences that encaged the humans below. The continuing daily proximity to the wild creatures prompted me to find out more about them to satisfy my curiosity as to why, with all the Western Hemisphere to choose from, they’d selected a maximum security prison for their winter vacation.

The National Geographic Field Guide to Birds informed me that although Canada geese prefer wetlands, grasslands, and cultivated fields within commuting distance of water, they have adapted successfully to man-made habitats, such as golf courses and farms to the extent that they will chase off other nesting waterbirds. National Geographic can add prisons to that list now.

I also discovered that the Canada goose winters in the Northern Panhandle of Florida, from the Atlantic Coast to the Gulf Coast. That explained it. I also found that they were closely related to the endangered Hawaiian goose, or néné, best known as a crossword clue, and had become so prolific in the last few decades that they are considered pests in some areas. Not in my area, they aren’t.

My paternal feelings of regard for the pair (mated for life─no divorce for geese) became conflicted, however, after I read an article with a recipe for roast Canada goose, said to be the tastiest of all geese. After a deprived bland prison diet of daily beans and soybean patty substitutes, my visions of the majestic birds with their black heads and white chin straps interspersed with the enticing image of a roast goose and all the fixins’ as the centerpiece of Christmas dinner at home with my family. I shook it off.

After several weeks of almost daily sightings, I realized that I hadn’t seen the geese in awhile. I speculated that they had relocated to (literally) greener pastures. Then one day a friend informed me that the geese were nesting in the prison farm field west of the law library. I surveyed the area from a window in the library, and lo and behold! There they were, the female sitting on a ground-level nest, the male a few feet away on guard duty, black neck stretched high to observe any possible threats.

Over the next few weeks I learned from prisoners who worked the farm plot of cabbages, squash, and collards, that the female sat on a clutch of four eggs. The prisoners kept a small drainage pond in the field filled with water, which the geese took turns visiting, the nest never left unprotected.

One morning I put down my legal documents on a table in the law library and hurried to th window to see “my” geese. They weren’t there! The nest was abandoned. What could have happened? Across the field in the distance, I spied a long black neck extended above a height of unmowed grasses by the drainage pond. A few minutes later, another Canada goose appeared, then I noticed a movement of something brown and small following the mother. A baby!

The geese headed across the farm field, the mother followed by the tiny gosling, the father maintaining a vigilant watch at the flank. But where were the other three? All I saw was one baby goose.

The farmworkers informed me that only one egg had hatched. After a couple of days the mother abandoned the cold eggs, focusing her attention on the survivor.

In the days and weeks ahead, the baby bird grew quickly. It went from timidly following the parents around to racing ahead for some tidbit. When a curious crow flew over the field the father launched himself into the air for a direct intercept of the surprised predator. No F-16 Air Force jet took off so fast with such singleminded purpose as that protective male.

Before long the gosling had lost its immature brown camouflage coloration and looked more like a slightly smaller version of its parents. The trio is inseparable as I watch from my window today, none of them ever more than a few feet apart. I thought that humans could learn some parenting lessons from geese, whose attentiveness to their young’s needs and protection never wavers. Scientists say they operate on instinct. Perhaps we’ve lost some of our important instincts along the way. The only geese I’ve ever seen in prison were there by choice, and could leave whenever they decided to take wing.

I haven’t seen the young goose fly yet. It is approaching full size, so it won’t be long. I do know that mom and dad aren’t going anywhere until their offspring can go with them. Perhaps ne day a V-shaped formation will appear overhead, and the wild geese will answer the honking calls of their kind, flying away home. Would that I had wings, and could join them, free at last.

Charlie

Postscript: They flew!

TAKING A HIT FROM THE FLORIDA PAROLE COMMISSION

DATELINE: 06/12/11
The Ku Klux Klan prison guards are still getting their punches in, for over ten years now, since I had my first run-in with them. They don’t all fit into the popular stereotype of the ignorant, tobacco juice-spitting rednecks with pick-up trucks. The most dangerous and treacherous of their breed got “eddicated,” majored in “criminal justice,” got good jobs at the prison, clawed their way up through the ranks, and now wear white shirts and ties in their higher ranks. When a guy like me comes along though, their masks slip and their slips show, and every now and then they will reveal themselves. Their power and influence extend far in the South.

Thursday morning, June 9th, at 11 AM, I got called up front to the classification office, ostensibly to have an interview with a secretary. I was sitting outside the offices on a stainless steel bench, when two people came through the gate from the outside: a thirties-something white male wearing a dress shirt and tie, and a much younger woman who might have just stepped out of “Cosmopolitan” magazine. Russ Gallogly and Alexandra Campbell from the Florida Parole Commission, here to conduct my “parole interview.” Thanks for giving me notice that you were coming, I said. I could have brought some paperwork I wanted them to consider. Didn’t matter. The verdict and decision had been predetermined before I showed up. Like jaded old married couples contemplating divorce, we were just going through the motions.

The man asked the secretary for my prison file. The secretary brought him a photocopy paper box filled with my files going back over thirty years, and added an inch-thick packet of documents consisting of my most recent paperwork, a summary of “new information” to be considered by the parole commission, my parole release plan, list of accomplishments, literary body of work, my PEN World Voices keynote speech from April, etc. When we sat down in the tiny “interview room,” the guy absently flipped through the pages (not even Elaine Powers could read that fast) while I talked, then opened one of the thick “inmate files,” left it lying there on the table. According to law and rules, the parole people are required to review and consider all information, new and old, before making an informal decision concerning what is best for the prisoner and society. R-I-G-H-T. As my New York friends say, Fuhgeddaboutit.

The law says that there are two things the parole people are supposed to consider in deciding when to release someone─can this person live a law-abiding life and can he support himself and not be a burden on society? If you compare my case with dozens of others who have been paroled, been out on the street for years, served much less time than I have (over 33 years now), and accomplished far less, the question is why? The opposition of the corrupt state attorney, in a few words.

This time, I had to deal with the specter of the KKK prison guards haunting me.

You know the story. I’ve told it all before. The Anne Frank Center USA Prison Diary Project in 2008. Associated Press interview by Jessica Gretsky and Suzette Laboy. 3,000 media outlets. Thousands of web sites republished excerpts. A 2400 word excerpt from a couple hundred handwritten pages title, “To Protect The Guilty,” recounted my experiences with retaliation by KKK prison guards at an unnamed North Florida prison years before. That was in 2008. That memoir, a short story, and a poem I wrote were published in a book. In January, 2010, a copy of the book was sent to me and confiscated by a vengeful prison mailroom clerk who held a great deal of personal animosity toward me. She declared it a “threat to security.” Three months later, the Literature Review Committee in Tallahassee, consisting of educated, intelligent library types, reviewed the book and said it was not a threat to security, and ordered them to give the book to me.

The mailroom clerk failed to follow the rules, failed to give me a confiscation form, just took the book. She’d sent it to the assistant warden, Hodgson, who wanted nothing to do with it. He didn’t file the confiscation paperwork, either. Finally, she and her boss lady took the book to the warden. “Look what that Norman’s sayin’ about yo’ kinfolks, warden. Let’s git that sumbitch.” And they did!

After I filed grievances seeking the delivery of my book, the book I’d never seen, the warden directed the other assistant warden to write a disciplinary violation for “mail regulations violations.” Since she must have come straight from her college basketball team to a good job in prison administration (it’s hard to find a white woman as tall as Shaq, especially in the piney woods), she didn’t have a lot of practice writing “D.R.’s” as they are called, and made enough mistakes to fill up several pages of grievance appeals. Didn’t matter. A sergeant told me, “The warden wants your ass in jail.”

When I went to the kangaroo court hearing, it was a “fait accompli.” Thirty days in solitary, thirty days loss of gaintime. All appeals summarily denied. Since last August, I’ve been fighting head-to-head against state lawyers and all their resources with a lawsuit I filed in court in Tallahassee.

It was all retaliation for pursuing my First Amendment rights, even though a guard once told me, “The Constitution ain’t in effect in Columbia County.”

Back to the “parole interview” on Thursday, the 9th. I covered all the bases, my parole plan, going to the “Prisoners of Christ” program in Jacksonville. Outstanding record of accomplishments. I told them the whole tawdry tale of the KKK prison guards and me that resulted in the retaliatory D.R., solitary, the punitive transfer from Tomoka.

I asked him to hold the D.R. penalty in abeyance, since it was in court, being appealed, unwarranted, and to penalize me for it by jacking up my date would be unfair, not allowing me to pursue my due process. Besides, I’d already been wrongly penalized with an incorrect and improper “death penalty aggravator” that tacked ten extra years to my parole date, anyway. Taking off that wrongful ten-year aggravation would have made my release date 2004, not 2014.

Didn’t matter. Gallogly smashed me with an extra “36 months” because of the KKK D.R. giving me a “July, 2017” release date, next hearing, April, 2017. Wrong, wrong, wrong. All I can do now is prepare the best I can for the actual parole commission hearing in Tallahassee in 90 days─sometime around September, for what it is worth.

I still need letters of support, and to find out who wants to attend the hearing, to make the arrangements for September. We are still working on putting documents together, like the updated photo exhibit. Expenses are mounting. Miracles do occasionally happen, though.

If the commissioners rubber-stamp the parole examiner’s adverse release date, I am preparing for a court appeal, on that issue. Meanwhile, I just hope all the KKK members take their sheets and crosses deep in the woods somewhere far away and leave me alone.

Charlie

CHARLIE’S NEW YORK PEN SPEECH RECEIVES “THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE”

Dateline: May 6, 2011



I couldn’t be there, but I heard about it from Libby, Stephanie, my literary mentor/editor, and others.

On Thursday, April 28, 2011, John Lonergan, read my keynote speech, “The State of Prisons and Prisoners in America,” at the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival at the Desmond Tutu Center Refectory in New York City.

Mr, Lonergan was an interesting choice to read my work, as he retired in June, 2010, as governor of Ireland’s Mountjoy Prison after 42 years working in service to the prison system. He has written a book, The Governor, about his experiences in a very hard place. He had some comments of his own that had the ring of truth in them. Here is a link to his web site http://www.johnlonergan.ie/

Salman Rushdie, award-winning author, had some introductory comments before the presentation of my speech:

“Charles Norman is unable to be with us as he is in jail. He says in a message, ‘I survived over thirty years in Florida prisons for the wrongful conviction of a murder I did not commit. He says he has poetry, short stories, essays, memoirs, and plays that have won numerous national writing awards…  He says, ‘I love the elasticity of English, how words can be pulled, shaped, and re-formed to express the thoughts and feelings in my mind. I view the good folks at PEN as benevolent hacksaw-wielding elves who’ve been steadily slicing through the cage bars that confine me, setting me free.’ ”

I’m taking the liberty of sharing excerpts of my friend, Stephanie’s, comments:

“… an update on Charlie's speech. Well....it was spectacular. His words took on so much meaning when I heard them live. Though I know it wasn't Charlie himself, I felt nevertheless like he was speaking to me. …

He received a thunderous round of applause...It was so special.”


We also heard from Shaun Randol, editor in chief of The Mantle web publication at www.mantlethought.org

This is an excerpt of what he had to say:  “…Among other things, we covered the PEN World Voices Festival.We heard your statement, as delivered by John Lonergan, and we would like to publish your text on The Mantle. Will you be willing to share your story with The Mantle and our global leaders? It would be our honor to publish you.”
I gave my permission for the publication and the story is at http://mantlethought.org/content/pen-2011-working-day-panel-discussion
It has been a great honor to have been included with such lofty literary figures in the World Voices Festival. Perhaps something positive will come of it. In approximately a month or so─sometime in June─a parole examiner will come here to the prison to interview me prior to my parole in Tallahassee. He will wnt to know what accomplishments I’ve had in the last five years, since my last hearing, and what I have to say for myself. I continue to cast bread upon the waters.

If you’d like to hear my speech delivered by Mr. John Lonergan in his fine Irish brogue, there is a recording for an mp3 file at   http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5694/prmID/2126

Click on “John Lonergan” next to the heading, “Clips.” To listen to all the keynote speakers, click on “Listen.”

The text of my speech is below if you’d just like to read it.

I welcome and appreciate any and all comments. Thanks.

Charlie



THE STATE OF PRISONS AND PRISONERS IN AMERICA

My name is Charles Patrick Norman. I am a prisoner of war, a political prisoner of America’s war on crime. I live in a world far different from the one you live in, but you may find that our worlds are becoming more and more alike. My words come to you from inside a maximum security prison. The warden refused my request to travel to New York to give my speech in person, even though I promised to return.

Let me take an informal survey, by a show of hands.

If you are thirty-two years old or younger, please raise your hand. Now look around you at how many of the upraised hands you see. Thank you.

I ask that question for a reason. For those who raised their hands, I have been serving this life sentence for a murder I did not commit since before you were born. I have served your entire life, and over half of mine, in prison—one-third of a century.

If you did not raise your hand, take a moment and think how old you were and what you were doing 33 years ago, when I came to prison. Jimmy Carter was the American president. Jim Jones had not yet poisoned his followers in the Jonestown Massacre. Some of you were little children. Some of you were teenagers. Some were adults and had families—husbands, wives, sons, daughters.

Think about how your life has changed in the past 33 years, how different you are now from who you were then, and think about me as a man, a fellow human being with hopes and dreams, a 28-year old who woke up that Wednesday morning of April 5, 1978, never suspecting that was the last time he would awake in freedom, in his own bed, lying next to a woman who loved him.

I am 61 years old now, and have been in some of Florida’s worst prisons over the last 33 years. I have endured and survived horrors you do not want to imagine. The corrupt prosecutor was thwarted in his efforts to electrocute me, but was overheard saying, “Norman will never survive a life sentence.” I am determined to prove him wrong.

I am not the same person I was in 1978. I have changed. I have seen good men and bad men die, some easily, giving up the ghost, relieved to be free of this life at last. Others died hard, fighting to live and breathe, to stay a little longer in this world, but nevertheless, die they did, as each of us is destined to do one day.

You might ask, “what kind of person are you, Charlie?” As hard as it may be to believe, I am a better man now than I was then, better in virtually every way. Rather than allow the monolith of prison to crush and destroy me, I entered the flaming furnace and emerged, refined, purified, the base metals burned away, against all odds. I am stronger in mind and spirit, if not body. I refused to let them break me down, as they do to so many.

I am not the only one. Others, extraordinary women and men, have survived long imprisonments and emerged with their humanity intact. Even before his release from 27 years confinement, Nelson Mandela was one of my personal heroes. If he could do it, I could do it.

A dead man named Tex McClain told me once that we (prisoners) were defective, like automobiles that came out flawed from the factory, and each of us had been recalled to prison to be repaired. Imagine a long line of broken people on a conveyor belt entering a huge building, and another line of people being cast out on the other side.

The problem, said Tex, a chain gang philosopher who had served what seemed like an unimaginable twenty years at the time, was that when we got inside the factory—the prison—we weren’t being repaired, but damaged worse. If we’d been thousands of cars with faulty transmissions or fuel lines returning to the factory, when we emerged we were missing wheels, with sputtering engines and clouds of smoke coming out of the exhausts. If prisoners were cars, when they were released from the factory, many would run off the road and end up in the ditch, while others sped up and crashed into trees or veered across the double yellow line and hit some innocent drivers head on. Perhaps half could keep it in the lane, make it through all the stop signs, red lights, and obstacles in their paths, and make their way home. That’s not a good statistic.

I once went on a tour of a General Motors factory in Detroit. The number of autoworkers on the assembly line amazed me, bolting on bumpers, attaching doors, doing their jobs quickly before the vehicles moved to the next stations. Now I see the modern auto factory assembly line on TV, but I see no humans. All I see are machines, robots, welding, bolting, assembling, like a futuristic scene from “Terminator.”

Prison has changed in much the same way as our factories. When I came to Raiford, “The Rock,” a notorious penitentiary in North Florida immortalized in “Cool Hand Luke,” and other stories, the Florida prison population was only one-fifth what it is today. As bad as it was, Raiford was better then than prison is today.

If life in prison can be called good, amidst the ever-present threats of being stabbed, raped, murdered, or shot, life in prison then was good for those who knew how to serve their time, to be strong, to mind their own business, to not get involved with drugs, alcohol, gambling, or loansharking, or other deathtraps guaranteed to bring men down. One could go to school, earn a high school equivalency diploma, study college correspondence classes, take vocational classes and learn a trade, take self-improvement programs to learn to be a better person, go to religious services, attend AA, learn how to create works of art to earn spending money through classes in arts and crafts, share relaxed visits on weekends with loved ones, behave themselves, and earn their release on parole. They could go home. The reality today is far different.

The war on drugs began our destruction. The cartels flooded our shores with cocaine, and found a willing market among our nation’s youth. How do you convince a sixteen-year old inner city youth he should stay in school and get his high school diploma, hope to get a full-time job that pays above minimum wage and has healthcare benefits, when he can stand on a corner in the ‘hood for a few hours and make a thousand dollars selling crack rocks? When he winds up in an adult prison in a year or two with a mandatory sentence, selling the same drugs he sold on the street that were provided by a corrupt guard, what message is he receiving? Crime pays. Over two million prisoners nationwide are receiving the same message.

Prisons began administering psychotropic drugs strong enough to stun a mule, chemical Tasers, resulting in prisoners looking like walking cadavers.

As the politicians cranked out harsher penalties for every type of crime, they had to fund a prison building boom to hold the backlog of convicts in jails. Build them, and they will fill them. Find people to work there.

The prison population doubled, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled. Society was no better for it. The poverty, economic conditions, joblessness and drugs that fueled the crime wave only got worse. No one thought to intervene with the children, the collateral damage, to divert them early on from the path to crime, addiction, and prison. It did not occur to the politicians that the money eventually spent to incarcerate the children after they became adult criminals could have paid for college educations. Instead, after getting shuffled through a failing foster care and juvenile justice system that inflicts even more damage, the courts ship the disadvantaged, drug-addicted youths off to prison for a decade or two.

Then came September 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda entered our vocabulary. The Twin Towers fell. We went to war. The world will never be the same, and neither will the prison system.

We learned new words: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo. Waterboarding. Rendition. I.E.D., TBI. It was only natural that the same labor pool that drew prison guards would be tapped to fill the increasing ranks of soldiers, sailors, and Marines. Guards joined the services, and the Reserves were called up. When they came back to the States, they were different, changed. The experience damaged them.

Is it any surprise that those involved in the Abu Ghraib prison brutality scandal were members of a West Virginia National Guard unit composed mostly of state prison guards? Apparently, they applied the lessons learned in their prisons to the Iraqi detainees. Then we get the benefit of their experiences over there when they return to civilian life.

The prisons are filled to bursting. Like the auto factories in our economic heyday, production is up. And like the auto factories, it’s hard to find any humans working there. The robots have taken over. At least, they act like robots. They have been trained to show little human emotion. As the conveyor belt whisks us along the line, the robots don’t see humans. They see inventory, serial numbers, not names. My serial number is 881834. My human name is superfluous. Ask any ex-con you meet who has been free for twenty years what his prison number is, and he will rattle it off without hesitation.

How do we change the dysfunctional prison system? First we must change the “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality that dominates society’s fears of crime and violence. We must close prisons, not fill them. We must stop using prisons as warehouses to store the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, the addicted. We must stop dehumanizing the disadvantaged.

In today’s prisons, the dehumanization process is complete. Strip someone of their humanity and you no longer have to treat them humanely. Dehumanize a group or race of people and you can commit genocide with a clear conscience. It’s okay, they’re not human.

Once someone has been dehumanized, how do you get them back, restore them to their human condition? That is a more difficult problem. All I can do is speak for myself, from my own experience, and perhaps provide some insight.

A good friend asked me recently, considering all that I’ve endured and suffered through over the past 33 years, how have I resisted the damage, maintained my character, integrity, and sanity in the face of this barbaric treatment? A lot of people, she says, marvel that I haven’t thrown in the towel at this point. How have I been able to survive, seemingly unscathed, continuing to be creative and productive, writing, reading, educating myself, helping others? Able to share my thoughts with groups of people who have little conception of harsh prison realities beyond “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” without embarrassing myself or them? I did not do it alone.

It will take a book to fully explain how I became the man I am, but I can give you the short answer in one word—love. The act of loving and being loved—feeling and experiencing love in a world of hate has kept me alive, has helped me prosper, has kept me human, given me the strength and resolve to resist the corrosive effects of dehumanization that have eaten away at so many of my fellow prisoners, as well as the guards.

To love and be loved—that is to be human. I have been blessed to have felt the love of fellow humans. Love has protected me, guided me, inspired me to write, to reach out, to communicate with the outside world despite attempts by officials, who put me in solitary confinement for my writings, to silence me, to share my thoughts and feelings, to become a better man.

Over the past twenty-five years a succession of people from PEN have helped me, encouraged me, taught me things that have changed my life for the better, as they have done for countless other prison writers aspiring to have their voices heard above the din.

Beginning with the late Fielding Dawson, who became a true friend, Jackson Taylor, Susan Yankowitz, Bell Chevigny, Hettie Jones, William “Chip” Brantley, and the amazing Stephanie Riggio, have reached through the razorwire, extending their gifts of knowledge and love to me. They are people I have never met, yet I feel closer to some of them than I do to members of my own family. They have read my thoughts, my words on paper, and still they accepted me. That is love.

On a closer front, for the past eleven years, I have been loved by a remarkable woman who taught by her selfless example, committing herself to seeing me free. Without her love I would have been silenced, my voice unheard, and I would not be sharing my thoughts with you today. Libby Dobbin. Please applaud her for me.

For all that and much more, for the opportunity to remain human in the face of great opposition and adversity, to be one of you, I thank you and salute you. I ask only that you continue the fight, to help and love others—many who may seem unlovable—to save their lives, to reach out to those less fortunate than yourselves.

I include myself in that category. Although I remain strong, resolute in mind and spirit, if not body, it has been a long battle against the odds. I have incurred damages, and I am tired. Prison is a young man’s game, and this old man is ready to go home.

* * *

Charles Patrick Norman                                    PEN World Voices Festival

#881834                                                           Thursday, April 28, 2011

Wakulla Correctional Institution Annex

110 Melaleuca Drive

Crawfordville, FL 32327

PRISONER INVITED TO DELIVER SPEECH IN NEW YORK

Dateline: 04/11/2011


PRISONER INVITED TO DELIVER SPEECH IN NEW YORK

No, the Department of Corrections isn’t likely to let me attend in person, even though I promised to return.

The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature will be held in New York City April 25 – May 1, 2011, featuring more than 100 writers from 40 countries meeting to celebrate the power of the writer’s voice as a bold and vital element of public discourse. If you’d like to read more about the festival events, visit www.pen.org/festival.

I accepted an invitation to deliver a keynote speech on Thursday, April 28, 2011, at 9:30 AM at the Desmond Tutu Center Refectory. I am the third speaker, right after the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Toni Morrison.

Acknowledging my prisoner status, the PEN Festival organizers are seeking approval from the Department of Corrections to set up an internet webcast so that I can deliver my speech live. Considering how paranoid the DOC is, I’m not holding my breath on that issue. My speech is written, and “Plan B” involves one of the international writers reading it on my behalf.

Whatever happens, it is a great honor, and I am humbled to be included in such an accomplished group. What is it about, you ask?

“In 1986, Norman Mailer PEN American Center’s then-president organized a legendary conference titled,
The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State. In it he asserted that not only did writers use their imaginations naturally and gracefully to speak to one another across national boundaries, but that governments, too, were capable of using their visions to improve the world’s troubles. To mark the 25th anniversary of this event, the PEN World Voices Festival will hold a Working Day to revisit similar questions while addressing urgent issues facing writer-intellectuals in 2011. This workshop will begin with panel discussion, including keynote addresses. It will be followed by five breakout sessions, each addressing topics related to how writers can respond to current predicaments and help find peaceful solutions. At the day’s end, the participants will release a joint manifesto, drafted by one and signed by all – the first of its kind in the festival history.” (From the PEN.org web site)

My area of expertise is prison, of course. Tuesday, April 5, 2011, marked my 33rd year of continuous imprisonment – 12,055 days. I am speaking on how prison has changed in the past 25 – 30 years. If you’d like to read my speech, I will post it after the festival.

Meanwhile, Libby and I are working hard on my updated parole release plan and “LIFE IN PRISON – A Photo Exhibit.” A parole examiner is scheduled to interview me here in June, and a full parole commission hearing will follow in Tallahassee 60 – 90 days later. Hopefully, my PEN literary festival participation will be looked at favorably.

Charlie

PRISON CHANGES REFLECT CHANGES IN OUR SOCIETY

Dateline: 03/10/2011


Someone once said that prison is a microcosm of society. In thirty-three years of life in prison, I’ve found that axiom to prove true.

Generations overlap in prison. When my incarceration began in the late 1970’s, I met men who’d been locked up since the 1940’s and ‘50’s. As “newcocks,” we younger prisoners listened raptly to the old timers’ stories of what prison life had once been and how it had changed since they came in decades before. Little did I know that over thirty years later I would be where they’d once been, telling newcocks how “real prison” had been “B.C.,” before crack cocaine.

One of the greatest differences between then and now is the educational and intelligence level of prisoners. I tell men who ask, “the quality of the prison inmate has gone downhill.” Don’t get me wrong! There were plenty of candidates for ‘America’s Dumbest Prisoners” in those days, but there was also a layer of intelligent, educated prisoners then that is absent now.

When I arrived at the Lake Butler Reception and Medical Center in North Florida after spending almost two years in Tampa’s Hillsborough County Jail dungeon, one of my first stops was the prison law library. I needed legal advice and didn’t trust the lawyer I believed betrayed me in court.

Everyone told me to go see Judge Joe Peel. I did. Judge Joe Peel ran the law library. His was a famous case from the 1950’s, the Chillingsworth Murders, in which Judge Peel supposedly paid Floyd Holzapel to murder Judge Chillingsworth and his wife. Floyd took them out into the Atlantic Ocean, wrapped them in chains, and threw them overboard. The case was famous not only because a judge contracted a murder on another judge, but also because it was the first time someone was convicted of murder without a corpus delicti, a dead body.

Besides the judge, a former prosecutor worked in the law library writing appeals for prisoners, along with another disbarred attorney and a couple of self-taught “jailhouse lawyers,” long-term prisoners who were just as legally talented as the law school graduates.

Judge Peel didn’t get me out, obviously, but in thirty minutes, he gave me more valuable advice than I’d received from my lawyer. Those men helped many prisoners with appeals, had convictions overturned, resulting in numerous people freed from prison.

That doesn’t happen any more. Lawyers and judges are still going to prison—one of my judges went to prison for bribery and corruption—but I haven’t seen any in years. One of the “status” jobs in prison is law clerk, and the Department of Corrections has a training program in which prisoners who meet the minimum educational requirements watch hours of video tapes, take a test, and become certified law clerks. Sadly, most of those prisoner law clerks are incompetent, and have trouble helping write a request form or a grievance. If you find one who actually has some legal ability, he is so bedeviled with pleas for help from mostly lost causes that he becomes burned out and gets a job change. Others who are too successful in pursuing court appeals and lawsuits often find themselves in lockup, transferred, facing trumped-up charges to dissuade them from being too helpful.

When I came to prison, Tom Brokaw’s remnants of “The Greatest Generation” and beyond still dominated the prisoner mentality. I met men who had fought the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II, the Chinese Communists and North Koreans in the Korean War, and the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War.

Those men were a different breed. They were serious. They were “stand-up,” and lived by the convict code. Mind your own business. Be a man. Don’t snitch. Don’t cross them! They might kill you. Many of these men were victims of the wars they fought in, plagued by alcoholism and PTSD, and had not adjusted well to life in a peaceful society, but they ran the prisons, maintained a semblance of order that the guards couldn’t.

Something I miss from those days are the intelligent conversations. There were some very smart, educated prisoners serving time then, and they tended to congregate together. Besides former college professors, I knew an actual NASA rocket scientist, an astronomer, a nuclear physicist, and a U.S. Marine Corps general. If you had a difficult question, someone could answer it. We had jet pilots, doctors and dentists. We had three chiropractors at Raiford who were constantly being called upon to crack backs and adjust necks. There were men with life experiences, successful businessmen, old-time bank robbers and safecrackers, jewel thieves, professional athletes, football and baseball players, a man who’d won two Super Bowl rings, who fell to the siren song of cocaine.

You don’t see those men in prison anymore. Perhaps they are in federal prison. Today 70% of Florida prisoners are functionally illiterate, a number I can attest. The Department of Corrections bragged recently that 2,500 prisoners were awarded G.E.D.’s in 2010, which sounds good, but when you realize there are over 103,000 people in Florida prisons, that comes out to less than 2.5%.

Prisoners have gotten younger and dumber. They are getting hooked on drugs at a younger age, become more desperate and violent, the juvenile system can’t hold them, and they graduate to “the Big House.” Mail call is very sparse nowadays. Only some of us get correspondence. Another prison axiom is you have to write letters to get letters, and if you can’t read and write, you won’t send or receive much mail. And those who do write can’t spell. Just yesterday a young man laboring over a letter home asked me, “How do you spell ‘o”?” “O?” I asked, confused, “What do you mean, ‘O’?” He explained that he was trying to tell his mother he was in debt, and needed her to send him money. “Oh!” I said, “You mean ‘owe!’ ” “That’s what I said.” “O – W- E.” “Thanks. How do you spell, ‘coffee?’ ”

Prison as a reflection and microcosm of society is also seen through our economy. In the Clinton nineties when the deficit was reined in and taxes filled state coffers, prisons went through a boom time of full funding. Real school teachers and vocational instructors taught full classes. College courses were available. Chapels had full staffs and outside religious groups coming in for services days and nights. Recreation departments offered organized sports leagues, hobbycraft and art programs that kept many prisoners occupied and out of mischief. Libraries were well-stocked and always open. The prison food was good, and they served adult portions. No one went hungry. I haven’t seen a pork chop, a fish with bones in it, or beef stew in fifteen years. Programs are virtually nonexistent now.

Then came September 11, 2001. Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda entered our vocabulary. The Twin Towers fell. We went to war. We are still at war. America will never be the same, and neither will the prison system.

We learned new words: Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Waterboarding. Rendition. I.E.D. It was only natural that the same labor pool that drew prison guards would be tapped to fill the increasing ranks of soldiers, sailors, and Marines. Guards joined the services and the Reserves were called up. Thousands took tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, and developed an “us and them” mentality. If you weren’t one of us, you were one of them, the enemy. When they came back to the States, they brought back new, harsher, angrier attitudes. They were no longer eating sand and worried about getting blown up walking through a village, but now they were entering cell blocks and looking at us as though we were their enemies, terrorists, and not fellow Americans, who, “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”

Now when the guards come in their squads for “routine shakedowns,” one would think they are looking for AK-47’s or roadside bombs. Ransack. Trash. Pull out the pepper spray, and use it. Lock up eighteen men because one made a wisecrack. Pepper spray them, ship them. Disrupt their lives and that of their families. That didn’t happen twenty years ago. Now it happens all the time. One old man who has served time off and on since 1964 addressed the issue of the new, harder, meaner prison guard. “The only difference between these guards today and the Nazi SS is these haven’t been ordered to gas us yet.” “Do you think they would do that?” I asked. “In a minute,” he said. I shudder to think that could be true.

The housing mortgage collapse—AIG—bank failures—mass bankruptcies—the recession (don’t say Depression) —Bernie Madoff. Don’t tell anyone, but if Bin Laden’s goal was to bring down America, he’s come close to succeeding. The burgeoning prison population is proof of that.

The economic stimulus has not trickled down to the prisoners. Most prisoners’ families—those that have families still supporting them—are in the hardest-hit economic class, and struggle to maintain a roof over their heads and food on the table. The prisoners are left to fend for themselves, their families unable to spare but a pittance, if that, for bare necessities only available for sale in the canteens. This results in more robberies and thefts as the “have-nots” prey on the “haves,” which leads to more violence, an escalating breakdown of prison society, reflecting our greater society. Where will it end?

Charlie

IT’S TIME FOR A NEW “RESPONSIBLE INMATE-TAUGHT EDUCATION (R.I.T.E.) PROGRAM” IN PRISON

DATELINE: January 31, 2011

Above photo: Libby stands behind Sister Ann Raymond Wood, Sisters of St. Joseph, and others at the St. Augustine Mother House on October 16, 2010, at the Jubilee Celebration recognizing Sister Ann’s fifty years of service. Sister Ann has been Charlie’s loyal supporter and friend for over fifteen years, since she taught the “R.I.T.E. Program” at Sumter C.I. in 1995



In 1989, while we were assigned as vocational air conditioning aides to instructor Art Rabon at Polk C.I., David Tal-Mason and I spoke frequently about the state of prison educational and vocational programs. At the time the FDOC emphasized such programs, which were fully-funded and staffed by professional, certified teachers and instructors who taught a variety of courses; however, we both saw the writing on the wall, and knew that times were changing.

The Polk C.I. school provided a full range of classes during the day, including G.E.D. College business and computer classes at night were funded by individual Pell grants. Vocational Plumbing, Air Conditioning/Heating, Welding, and Upholstery classes certified prisoner graduates, who were able to get decent jobs upon their releases.

Besides working for the vocational air conditioning instructor, a retired U.S.A.F. aircraft crew chief, I tutored other prisoners in reading literacy in the school and in the college computer classes at night. Those days are long gone.

Fast forward to 1994: now at Avon Park C.I., I worked as an aide to instructor Larry Hagan in the vocational graphic arts program, tutoring computer typesetting and desktop publishing classes to the students. Ten years before, at Zephyrhills C.I., I’d worked as an aide in the Graphics Arts Program associated with the PRIDE print shop, doing the same tasks.

One day Mr. Hagan came out of his office, beckoned to me, and told me I had a phone call. A phone call? Prisoners don’t get phone calls on state telephones. He assured me it was all right. Olive Atkins, a teacher at Sumter C.I., introduced herself to me.

She explained that I had been recommended to join the “Responsible Inmate-Taught Education (R.I.T.E.) Program” at Sumter C.I., starting soon. The DOC was recruiting college-educated prisoners statewide to enroll in the upcoming R.I.T.E. Program, anticipating budget cutbacks that would reduce the paid teacher staff. Trained inmate tutors would take the place of professional teachers, keeping the educational programs going.

I asked Ms. Adkins who had recommended me for the program out of the many thousands of prisoners statewide. My old friend, David Tal-Mason, she said, had written and applied for the federal grant that paid for the one-year pilot program. She put David on the line. He encouraged me to agree to the transfer, promising that it was a worthy program I’d approve of.

I was surprised that David had been able to put together a grant proposal that actually resulted in a fully-funded program that wasn’t looted by the FDOC bureaucrats in Tallahassee. In 1980, at Raiford, my friend and fellow prisoner, Steve Opella, worked in the substance abuse program, down the street from my job in the GOLAB Program, the acclaimed prisoner self-help program that was the model for many later programs. Steve put together a $40,000 federal grant to fund the expansion of the substance abuse program, and was thrilled when he was informed that the grant had been approved. His elation turned to anger when he received a letter from Tallahassee with an accounting of how the $40,000 had been spent before it got to him.

The FDOC grant office sent a list of expenditures. $10,000 for office expenses, $8,000 for convention expenses (must have been some party). $2,500 for telephone expenses. Thousands for printing costs. When the shooting stopped, the bottom line was that the entire $40,000 of the federal grant had been consumed by the central office, and not a dime trickled down to the actual drug program at the prison level.

Steve had an influential friend who called Tallahassee and threatened to go to the feds and the news media if the officials kept all the grant money. After much dickering, the bureaucrats agreed to return ten percent, $4,000, which Steve used to buy a Sony color TV, VCR, and video camera setup for the program. Years later, I’d told my friend, David, about that, and when he submitted his grant for the R.I.T.E. Program, he inserted safeguards that prevented the DOC from hijacking the funds. Apparently, that strategy had worked.

When I arrived at Sumter C.I. on the Bluebird, the rattletrap prison transport bus, with twenty or so fellow prisoners, we were greeted by a diminutive woman with a big smile who introduced herself as Sister Ann Raymond Wood, a Catholic nun in the order Sisters of St. Joseph. She would be the R.I.T.E. Program instructor. Catholic nun? In prison? What had I gotten myself into?

The next day I was called into Roger Smith’s office. Mr. Smith was the education program manager, in effect, the prison school principal. I’d known Roger Smith for several years, having met him at other institutions when he was in charge of installing education computer systems, and he knew my background. He’d approved my entry into the program.

Roger Smith advised me that he was assigning me multiple tasks. I would participate in the R.I.T.E. training program for certification, but I was also to be Sister Ann’s aide. What she was not to be told, to be kept between us, that I was to be responsible for her personal safety. There would be no incidents. Tallahassee had informed the warden nothing would happen, that if anything happened to the Catholic nun inside the prison, everyone’s heads would roll. Mr. Smith told me that when Sister Ann arrived at 7:30 AM each morning, I was to be at the front gate waiting to escort her to the school, and unless she was in the restroom, she was always to be in my sight. At 4:30 PM, I would escort her back to the front gate and wave goodbye. They did not have the manpower to give her a security escort all day, so the job was mine. Failure would not be tolerated. Thankfully, for the year she spent teaching the all-day classes, her safety was never threatened.

Sister Ann was an English teacher by training and years of experience in Catholic schools had well-equipped her to handle a classroom of prisoners. These weren’t your ordinary prisoners—they’d been screened, had far more education than the average illiterate prisoner, and ranged from a retired Marine gunnery sergeant, to an astronomer, a contractor, real estate man, a couple of former teachers, and, among others, a college student who’d gotten hooked on drugs and committed murder. That was just in the first class. Subsequent classes were equally diverse, marked by a common desire to help their fellow prisoners. Sister Ann ably dealt with them all.

Most of the men recruited for the R.I.T.E. Program had already been working in education programs in prisons across the state, and had been recommended by their supervisors to participate. Besides Sister Ann, other teachers and occasional outside experts taught all the subjects required in prison education, including classes on how to be prepared to teach every class, which meant they had to brush up on multiplying and dividing fractions, as well as science, social studies, English grammar, reading, and writing skills.

Not every session involved hard work. Sister Ann had initially come to Sumter C.I. in past years to conduct “Shakespeare Seminars,” an experiment to discover whether prisoners would respond to and appreciate Shakespeare’s plays. Her seminars were enthusiastically received and the sign-up was always quickly filled. Prisoners appreciated the lessons and story lines of “Hamlet,” “MacBeth,” and even “Romeo and Juliet,” just as millions of others had for hundreds of years.

In the R.I.T.E. Program class, a reading of Hamlet and a commentary by Sister Ann, explaining what those archaic words meant in Modern English developed into a class play that combined Shakespeare and “Star Trek,” that entertained and educated the participants and audience.

The program was a success. The graduates went back to their respective institutions and helped their fellow prisoners learn to read, write, and hopefully earn G.E.D. certificates, a basis for further accomplishments.

After the program ran its course, Sinter Ann went on with her service to the Church and society. For many years she served as a counselor to the young men at Jesuit High School in Tampa, Florida, and became a breast cancer survivor. She continued our friendship that had commenced in such unlikely circumstances and maintained a correspondence that continues to this day, always encouraging me, praying for me, and serving as not only a positive influence, but also as an inspiration in my life by her example of selflessness and service to God and others.

In October, 2010, Sister Ann sent me an invitation to a Jubilee Celebration recognizing her fiftieth anniversary as a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph, along with several other long-serving nuns. Of course, the officials at the prison would never have let me attend, even if I had promised to return afterward. I asked my dear friend, Libby, if she would attend in my place, which she happily agreed to do. The accompanying photo, among others, helped to document the event.

As for myself, the R.I.T.E. Program lives on and continues to pay dividends fifteen years later on the original investment. I continued to work in education at Sumter C.I. for three more years as an aide to Dr. Smith, tutoring the youthful prisoners in the Bootcamp Program in the G.E.D. essay test. In the years that I worked with those young men, their G.E.D. graduation rates were consistently the highest in Florida, both in prison and out.

Teaching “English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)” classes at Columbia C.I. followed, along with literacy tutoring for prisoners who could not read. Today I teach two classes of ESOL at Wakulla Annex C.I., consisting of mostly Hispanic students learning to speak, read, and write English.



With the economic crisis affecting every aspect of our society but the very rich, it seems, with the “prison crisis” being discussed endlessly as ways to cut the budget become more drastic, as education becomes a convenient target to hack away at, it is clear that the lessons learned in the “R.I.T.E. Program” fifteen years ago are applicable today.

No one disputes the fact that educational and vocational programs are important keys to prisoners getting out and staying out of prison, becoming law-abiding citizens, working at meaningful jobs, supporting themselves and their families, rather than continuing to be burdens on society.

It is also clear that out of the over 100,000 people in Florida prisons, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of educated, intelligent men and women willing to help educate their fellow prisoners if they had the proper training. This is a valuable resource that has been ignored for too long. A new “Responsible Inmate-Taught Education Program” is a cost effective way to reverse the downward spiral in prison education. Why don’t we give it a chance?

Charlie