Dateline: May 12, 2010
“SIMPLY BECAUSE…”
THE FIRST AMENDMENT FIGHT IN PRISON CONTINUES
Since my release from solitary confinement on April 14th, I’ve been focused on appealing the false disciplinary charges against me, with mixed results. I’ve spent many hours researching legal cases in the law library, and have discovered that the law is on my side, for what it is worth.
“I AM the law!” How many times have I heard that? One of the biggest problems facing a prisoner fighting injustice is the cavalier attitude of the prison “authorities” that the rules and laws don’t apply to them. They are in charge—they have the handcuffs, keys, pepper spray, and the gun towers. The Kangaroo Court is in session. Do you know how hard it is to fight kangaroos, with your hands cuffed behind your back?
One small victory—this incident began in January when mailroom clerk T. Gronik read the anthology, “Wordsmith 2010,” by the Tampa Writers Alliance. She liked it—or disliked it—so much that she kept it, neglecting to send me a “Notice of Impoundment,” as required by Florida law.
You should know that if the postman delivered U.S. mail to someone and you pawed through it, found a book you wanted to read, you couldn’t legally just snatch that book out of the mail and keep it. That is called “theft of mail,” and last time I heard, was a federal crime. Mail to state prisoners is still mail, and if a “prison official” decides to intercept and confiscate a prisoner’s mail, it can be done, but it has to be done right. There are procedures. That’s why the call it, “due process.” In this case, the law says they can take my book, but they must document it and have a valid reason. They have 15 days to send me Form DC5-101, “Notice of Rejection or Impoundment,” which kicks in a time deadline for me to appeal the confiscation to the “Literature Review Committee” in Tallahassee. Mailroom clerk Gronik snatched my book on January 28, 2010, but neglected to file paperwork or tell me about it.
Almost a month later, February 22, while picking up my legal mail (another sensitive issue), I asked the mailroom person if she’d seen the book. She took a deep breath and replied.
“I read the book. I felt the story you wrote was a threat to security [emphasis mine] and sent it to Mr. Hodgson.” Mr. Hodgson is one of the assistant wardens. I asked her about my confiscation notice, where was it? Duh! Sometimes they just don’t want to talk to you.
It’s almost impossible to talk to these people. It must be the “siege mentality.” They have a new thing in prison called “controlled movement,” in which they’ve installed millions of dollars worth of chain link fences, cages, and mazes across the prison yards, they march you through them in groups, like rats looking for the cheese in the psychology labs, while they are two or three layers of fences away from you, in their own little self-protective groups, watching. If you do somehow get closer to them, in their little pod of officials, it won’t do you any good anyway.
An old man once said, “Never approach a pack of wild dogs or prison guards by yourself.” Good advice. You approach a group of guards or officials, the mob mentality kicks in. No matter what you ask them, the answer is no. They must maintain their macho façade in front of their cohorts. If by some chance you encounter one alone, you have a better chance, but after 30 seconds their cell phone will go off, and they scurry away with the thing stuck to their ear.
Our only alternative is to “put it on paper,” to file a grievance, “administrative remedies,” they call it, which is usually about as satisfying as unzipping one’s pants and urinating into a 50 m.p.h. wind. The eternal optimist, I filed, asking for my book back. I’m not going to go into all the back and forth—you can read the court papers later—but the result was the D.R. from assistant warden Gordon for assorted “mail violations.” It took me until March 10th —41 days after confiscation, to get a receipt, and the reason the book was stolen—uh—confiscated.
“Book contains an article written by inmate Norman that won a contest (page 54-57)”
They have to put down the reason and the exact pages where the offending items appear. It just so happens that on pages 54-57 appears my memoir, “To Protect the Guilty,” which was an excerpt from my “Anne Frank Center USA Prison Diary Project” from 2008, approved by DOC officials all the way to Tallahassee and back. KKK prison guards. Hmmmm. And it didn’t win a contest, either. It came in third. What they didn’t mention was that I had two other works published in the same book, a poem, and a short story, but they didn’t mention KKK prison guards, so they let them slide.
Only one problem—the judicial rulings concerning the First Amendment and prisoners’ literary works forbid censorship for the “content of the writings.” In this case, it must have been “the content” that waved the red flag and got their dander up, since they ignored the poem and short story. Naughty, naughty!
While I spent thirty days in solitary from the kangaroo court, my appeal of the book confiscation wended its way to the Literature Review Committee, which is apparently that rare bird in prison officialdom, college-educated people with sense who go by the law.
On April 20th, the committee overruled the confiscation of “Wordsmith 2010,” stating, “Simply because a publication contains an article written by an inmate is not grounds for rejection.” Thank you. Eight days later, exactly three months after Gronik snatched it, I finally got the book. It is a nice one. I recommend it.
Meanwhile, I’m still appealing the false D.R. conviction. If I get turned down again, I have to file in court, Leon County, a “mandamus,” with a $400.00 filing fee. Justice is not cheap. More on that later.
A few comments on our blog readers. Webmaster Dan has been using an interesting web tool called “Sitemeter,” which is like caller ID for the internet. Sitemeter tells us where all the log-ons came from, and other interesting information. For instance, the blog has been accessed by readers in twenty-two countries, all the Canadian provinces, and many states. Most recently, we’ve added readers from Zagreb, Croatia, Ridderkerk Zuid, Holland, Brisbane, Australian, the City of London, Sweden, Singapore, The Russian Federation, Qatar, and many others in Europe, Africa, North America and Asia. Welcome to FreeCharlieNormanNow! Notice that I did NOT ask for donations! We would like to hear your comments.
It turns out, according to Sitemeter, that some of our most avid readers are employed by the Florida Department of Corrections. We’ve had lots of hits from Lake Butler, Florida, a hotbed for certain groups, Tallahassee, Daytona Beach (Tomoka), and others.
Sitemeter tells us our corrections friends do a lot of websurfing during working hours. Hmmm. I wonder if Attorney General McCollum has heard about that? Or what other websites have these public servants—or “surfants” —been visiting on the state dime? Might be grounds for a state audit of employee internet usage during working hours.
Anyone interested in that, to file a complaint, a form is available at myfloridalegal.com/19thstatewidegrandjury or
call the tipline at 1-800-646-0444. Check it out.
Thanks, Charlie
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
A MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 2010, DAY ONE IN THE HOLE
A MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
This is the procedure used by the Florida prison system to punish a prisoner for writing about something they would rather not be revealed to the public. First, they approve your participation in the 2008 “Anne Frank Prison Diary Project,” which inspired me to write hundreds more pages of prison memoirs beyond the 96-page blank journal the Anne Frank Center sent me, with the full knowledge and approval of prison officials, all the way from Tomoka C.I. to Tallahassee. Associated Press reporters, Jessica Gresko and Suzette Laboy, were so impressed they drove all the way from Miami and went through several fences and gates to interview me. The article went worldwide, to over 3000 newspapers and media outlets. The prison folks didn’t read my memoir about the KKK prison guards, but others did.
An excerpt from the hundreds of handwritten pages, about 2400 words, title, “To Protect The Guilty,” recounted how repressive guards can come back years later and retaliate against a prisoner for something he said. Talk about prophetic!
The Tampa Writers Alliance, a fine group that I have been a member of for years, liked the memoir and published it in their annual anthology, “Wordsmith 2010.” I was expecting my copy in January, to see what my words looked like in print, but it was not to be. The mailroom woman told me weeks later that she read the book, a story I wrote was a threat to security, and she’d sent it to the assistant warden over security, a man from North Florida, just like the ones in my memoir. Where is my confiscation receipt and notice of impoundment, required to be filed within 15 days of taking it, I asked. Uh…no answer.
I filed grievances to get the book. I studied Constitutional law, particularly the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and knew that I’d violated no rules, that my work was protected speech under the First Amendment. I even copied a passage from an excellent law book, The Rights of Prisoners, (4th Edition, Vol.2, § 6:18 IV), “Prisoner Writings,” (page 62) which stated it perfectly, in part:
“ A quintessential expression of speech is one’s own writings. It is well known that the isolation and frequent solitude of a prison setting have been fertile soil for inmates to write and compose music and art, and prisoners often have interesting and vital tales to tell, music to write, and art to compose…Moreover, the fruit of some prisoner literary efforts have become justly famous examples of world renowned literature.” (See e.g. John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress (1684); Henry Charriere, Papillon (1910); O. Henry, The Ransom of Red Chief in “Whirligigs” (1910); Martin Luther King, Letters From Birmingham Jail, (1963); Oscar Wilde, Ballad of Reading Gaol, (1898) )
That is an impressive short list of esteemed company I share my plight with now that I sit in solitary confinement, “the hole,” “the box,” as a result of exercising my First Amendment rights in prison. Before I go on, let me give you a few more lines from The Rights of Prisoners, continuing from the previous passage:
“These works not only add to the culture, but also have immediate benefits to prisoners as a means of rehabilitation and as a ‘nonviolent means to defuse tensions within a prison.’ ”
“The legal problems that an inmate’s original expression engenders depend on whether the inmate is writing primarily for a prison audience or whether, instead, the author seeks a wider audience for the work. This section will consider whether inmates may be punished for their writings.
“Without a specific factual record showing legitimate dangers that are reasonably related to an inmate writing for the outside world, they cannot be prohibited.”
Unfortunately, the people in charge of this concentration camp never bothered reading the Constitution, or the law, for that matter. When three white folks, all from North Florida and in charge of the prison, are offended by the truthful characterizations of KKK prison guards, what do you do? In Florida, you go to solitary confinement.
It took them three weeks. I kept demanding my legal rights, which 95% of the prisoners have no concept of, and they kept postponing the disciplinary hearing to figure out the best way to crucify me without a lot of noise. After decades of abuse, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the prisons to provide “due process,” and “fair and impartial” hearings. Nevertheless, that doesn’t happen in prison.
Despite all the legal maneuverings, demanding the process be legal (fat chance), letters of complaint and phone calls from lawyers and family, insisting that the deliberate retaliation be stopped, on Tuesday, March 16, 2010, I had my day in Kangaroo court. Old Judge Roy Bean said it best—“Give the man a fair trial, then hang him.”
The offended assistant warden wrote me a totally unwarranted “disciplinary report” (D.R.) for “mail violations,” although there were none. I called ten staff witnesses to verify all the prison diary approvals. Denied.
When you first go to the D.R. hearing (kangaroo court), they cuff your hands behind your back. Very degrading. Somewhere I read that some group used to do that before they put a bullet in the back of your head.
I had an envelope of legal papers, my statement, case citations, witness lists, and evidence, which I couldn’t hold or read with my hands cuffed behind my back. While they had me standing outside, they confiscated all my legal papers, including my appeal (I knew that guilt was predetermined). They postponed the hearing.
After my dearest friend made repeated complaints the next day, the person who took my legal papers was ordered to return them. He was pissed at having to do this! The following is a verbatim account of a conversation between that person and a guard he asked to bring me to his office. He told the guard he needed him to stay and witness a phone call concerning Charles Norman. A fellow prisoner standing nearby repeated the exchange to me.
GUARD: “Charles Norman? He’s a smart ass, a piece of shit.”
STAFF: “Charles Norman is a smart motherfucker, and you don’t want to get fucked up with him—at all.”
I’m not calling that a compliment, but it shows the mentality of these people. If you oppose them, they abuse their authority to break you down.
The second hearing was “pro forma,” going through the motions, verdict predetermined, false statements, no evidence, no witnesses. The previous week, the warden had told my lawyer, “Norman will have a D.R. hearing, he’ll be found guilty, and he can appeal to me.” That’s real justice in action. How much do you want to bet that the appeal to the warden (the same one who ordered the D.R. be written) will be denied, as will the one to Tallahassee? They make you spend hundreds of dollars in filing fees to go to court, for months, to overturn such abusive actions. At least this time I held onto my legal papers. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have this paper, pen, envelope and stamp to write this and mail it.
The first thing they do when you go to solitary confinement is lock you in a shower and strip search you. Tennis shoes, belt and watch—gone. Don’t want anyone to hang themselves! It happens more often than you’d think, but really, what recourse do some have after everything, including contact with “the outside” and any ray of hope, is taken from them.
Now I am in my socks, walking down a cold hallway to a cell. Feet hurt. Get inside the cell, they take off the handcuffs, you’re on your own.
First thing I do is make certain the toilet flushes. That’s mandatory. A tiny stream of water dribbles into a stainless steel sink. An extremely thin, hard plastic-covered mattress—no pillow—barely covers a narrow steel bunk.
Next, I shake down the cell—search it and clean it. Always search your cell—mattress especially—search every crack and crevice. If you don’t, and the guards find a razor blade, or anything contraband, you get another charge. The cell is dirty, but no visible evils.
Perhaps I’ll get some of my personal property later, if it’s not all stolen and disbursed. Someone in my old dorm has my fat mattress and pillow already. The guards are supposed to protect our belongings—sure they will. What I need are my flip-flops, soap, shampoo, washcloth, powder, stamps, something to read, if I’m lucky. They gave me “30-30,” thirty days of “disciplinary confinement” and thirty days loss of gain time. If I don’t get it overturned, it could affect my parole date. We have to fight it all the way.
It’s cold back here right now. At least it’s not July—these guys suffer in the sweltering heat. Lonely prisoners “stay on the doors” yelling down the hallway to their friends, like at the zoo. I’ve already cast my bread upon the water—turned in my appeal, going through the motions. Now I’ll wait, as best I can, and hope that my defenders will spring into action, make phone calls, lobby the warden to grant my appeal. Too bad I don’t have any KKK friends to intervene on my behalf.
Charlie
Monday, April 19, 2010
A CHILLING EFFECT ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH
FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 2010, DAY ELEVEN IN THE HOLE
A CHILLING EFFECT ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH
It’s not that I’ve been slacking off, returning to my prison diary three days later, but instead I’ve been trying to dig myself out of this hole in solitary confinement. If someone tosses you into a twenty-foot well, then fills it with stones and dirt until you’re buried neck deep, it’s not easy digging your way out. That’s the way it is in here. You need people “up there,” on the surface to throw you ropes (hopefully not looping the ropes around your neck) and rescue you, or you’re liable to be left at the bottom of the pit for the duration. A handful of people whose names I won’t mention have been doing just that, furiously moving the rubble of bureaucratic obstinacy and abuses of authority out of the way, trying to make a path for me to climb out. Hopefully, I’ll be freed soon. In the meantime…
Know your opponent. In a supposedly “free society,” things like this aren’t supposed to happen. One of the ways that our new country of the United States set itself apart from the oppressive “Mother England” was our Constitution and Bill of Rights, particularly the freedoms established such as Freedom of Speech. In England you spoke out at your own risk. They didn’t have freedom of speech. Say something someone in authority didn’t like and you might find yourself in lockup, like I am right now.
In the meantime, our courts have hammered out over the years the parameters of “free speech,” what it is and what it isn’t, so we’d know what is protected and what isn’t. Yelling, “FIRE!” in a crowded theater is not protected speech. There are many other examples that I don’t have the paper or ink to go into now.
Although some people don’t agree, our wise judges have ruled that there is no iron curtain separating the Constitution from the prison walls. Even prisoners, the lowest caste in our society, retain some freedoms, although often on a restricted basis. Freedom of Speech is one of them. There are only three areas of unprotected speech or communications involving prisoners, and those restrictions make sense in this environment.
First, if you write or speak out about planning an escape, as they say in New York, forget about it. You write a letter to Uncle Sid telling him to mail you a hacksaw blade and meet you outside the fence at midnight with a getaway car, they will stick you under the jail. You may not come out for awhile. Prisoners do not have the right to make escape plans, unless you are an American prisoner of war, which maintains that you have the duty to escape, evade capture, and return to your lines. That’s different.
The second area of unprotected speech in prison is the threat of riot, disruption, or insurrection. Think about Attica in 1971. They took over the prison, took hostages, and burned the place down. Why? The prison grievance procedures weren’t working, and after awhile, the prisoners got so fed up with not being able to redress their complaints they started setting fires. When Governor Nelson Rockefeller met their televised demands and appeared in person to hear their complaints, most of which seemed fairly mundane – food, medical care, visiting, and others – he asked them why didn’t they just say something before rather than do all that? They replied that they’d tried for years, but the prison authorities turned deaf ears to their grievances. Now they were listening.
You can’t advocate riots or destruction in prison, or they will mail you. You can’t stand in the recreation yard and urge everyone to engage in a sit-down strike or a hunger strike. You talk about organizing a prison union, they put you on the bus so fast your head will still be spinning when you wake up in a dungeon somewhere. That is not protected speech.
Neither is talk of criminal activities. If the mailroom trolls with their thick glasses down in their basement censorship office read your outgoing mail and you are discussing bringing in drugs, cell phones, weapons, or other illegal items, if you’re talking about bribing the warden to get a parole, or any other criminal act, so long. They got you. No freedom of speech involved in any of those areas. Don’t write Mama and threaten the life of the guard who took your contraband, either, or you’ll find yourself in a world of hurt.
The four-volume set of law books, “The Rights of Prisoners” (4th Edition, Vol. II Prisoner Writings, p. 62-68), exhaustively covers what prisoners can and cannot write about, with landmark case references. You’d think the prison system would get a set of those books and familiarize themselves with the law, rather than letting their personal prejudices and feelings guide their repressive actions. (Excuse me, they did buy a set – they’re in the law library – prisoners know the laws that the guards and officials are unaware of).
The following quotes (at 6:18 – 6:19) from this excellent work have close parallels to my own situation:
“The legal problems that an inmate’s original expression engenders depend on whether the inmate is writing primarily for a prison audience or whether instead, the author seeks a wider audience for the work. This section will consider whether inmates may be punished for their writing.”
“Without a specific factual record showing legitimate dangers that are reasonably related to an inmate writing for the outside world, they cannot be prohibited.”
“The first case involved Murmia Abu-Jamal, a journalist turned inmate, who was sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer, who was approached by National Public Radio to broadcast his commentaries to a national radio audience. When police organizations protested these contacts, prison officials began to inspect all of his mail, including his legal mail, and thereafter invoked a prison rule that prevented all inmates from engaging in “business” while incarcerated. In fact, this rule had not previously been enforced against another inmate who had written a novel while in prison. Mr. Abu-Jamal sued, claiming that the rule as enforced against him violated his First Amendment right to speak and write.
The Third Circuit agreed. It found that the rule was imposed on the plaintiff “in retaliation against the content of his writing.” See Abu-Jamal v. Price, 154 F.3d 128 (3rd Cir, 1998)
“Unlike the Rison case, the court noted that here there was no evidence that the plaintiff’s writings and broadcasts ‘had strained prison resources, contributed to unrest among the inmate population, or enhanced Jamal’s status as a prisoner, resulting in danger to himself or others.’ (at 134). The court concluded that while prison officials could validly prohibit a business operation that placed a substantial burden on prison staff, it could not prevent a First Amendment activity that did not threaten corrections officials or incite the inmate population.” (154 F.3rd at 134-135).
When I sent a request form to the mail clerk who’d originally censored, “To Protect The Guilty” as it appeared in “Wordsmith 2010,” I sought the actual date the book had arrived at the mailroom, which would be the initial date when all the time and deadline calculations would begin. I received the following surprising admission: [spelling and punctuation uncorrected]:
“After receiving the book in the mailroom and reading the first few pages of the story I determined it should be looked at to see if it could come in and sent it to Mr. Hodgson. I have no way of knowing the date the book was received a we do not log incoming mail except for legal. The day it arrived does not change the content of the story [emphasis added]”
The content of the story! How similar is that to what the federal court said about Abu Jamal? “…the rule was imposed on the plaintiff ‘in retaliation against the content of his writings.’ ”
I don’t know what Abu-Jamal writings were about, but I know that mine was a humorous account of a dark subject, Ku Klux Klan prison guards and retaliation I suffered for telling the truth about what I thought of them. Sometimes you have to speak out, and that was one of them. Taking it a logical step forward, I must agree with one of my reader’s comments that the only people who might be offended by “To Protect The Guilty,” would be KKK prison guards and their sympathizers. Either way, I should not be writing this from solitary confinement as a result of it. Case closed.
Prison systems copy the tired strategies, legal or otherwise, others have tried to invoke their will on their subjects. One way to suppress the writings and words of an outspoken prisoner is to label his efforts as “running a business,” forbid it, lock him up, and throw away his pens (they took six pens from me). That has what is called “a chilling effect” on Freedom of Speech. The message—express yourself and go to lockup, lose gain time, stay in prison longer. Keep silent and maintain the status quo, stomp on the Bill of Rights.
It’s not supposed to be that way. Would someone speak out, please? I’m outnumbered.
Charlie
A CHILLING EFFECT ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH
It’s not that I’ve been slacking off, returning to my prison diary three days later, but instead I’ve been trying to dig myself out of this hole in solitary confinement. If someone tosses you into a twenty-foot well, then fills it with stones and dirt until you’re buried neck deep, it’s not easy digging your way out. That’s the way it is in here. You need people “up there,” on the surface to throw you ropes (hopefully not looping the ropes around your neck) and rescue you, or you’re liable to be left at the bottom of the pit for the duration. A handful of people whose names I won’t mention have been doing just that, furiously moving the rubble of bureaucratic obstinacy and abuses of authority out of the way, trying to make a path for me to climb out. Hopefully, I’ll be freed soon. In the meantime…
Know your opponent. In a supposedly “free society,” things like this aren’t supposed to happen. One of the ways that our new country of the United States set itself apart from the oppressive “Mother England” was our Constitution and Bill of Rights, particularly the freedoms established such as Freedom of Speech. In England you spoke out at your own risk. They didn’t have freedom of speech. Say something someone in authority didn’t like and you might find yourself in lockup, like I am right now.
In the meantime, our courts have hammered out over the years the parameters of “free speech,” what it is and what it isn’t, so we’d know what is protected and what isn’t. Yelling, “FIRE!” in a crowded theater is not protected speech. There are many other examples that I don’t have the paper or ink to go into now.
Although some people don’t agree, our wise judges have ruled that there is no iron curtain separating the Constitution from the prison walls. Even prisoners, the lowest caste in our society, retain some freedoms, although often on a restricted basis. Freedom of Speech is one of them. There are only three areas of unprotected speech or communications involving prisoners, and those restrictions make sense in this environment.
First, if you write or speak out about planning an escape, as they say in New York, forget about it. You write a letter to Uncle Sid telling him to mail you a hacksaw blade and meet you outside the fence at midnight with a getaway car, they will stick you under the jail. You may not come out for awhile. Prisoners do not have the right to make escape plans, unless you are an American prisoner of war, which maintains that you have the duty to escape, evade capture, and return to your lines. That’s different.
The second area of unprotected speech in prison is the threat of riot, disruption, or insurrection. Think about Attica in 1971. They took over the prison, took hostages, and burned the place down. Why? The prison grievance procedures weren’t working, and after awhile, the prisoners got so fed up with not being able to redress their complaints they started setting fires. When Governor Nelson Rockefeller met their televised demands and appeared in person to hear their complaints, most of which seemed fairly mundane – food, medical care, visiting, and others – he asked them why didn’t they just say something before rather than do all that? They replied that they’d tried for years, but the prison authorities turned deaf ears to their grievances. Now they were listening.
You can’t advocate riots or destruction in prison, or they will mail you. You can’t stand in the recreation yard and urge everyone to engage in a sit-down strike or a hunger strike. You talk about organizing a prison union, they put you on the bus so fast your head will still be spinning when you wake up in a dungeon somewhere. That is not protected speech.
Neither is talk of criminal activities. If the mailroom trolls with their thick glasses down in their basement censorship office read your outgoing mail and you are discussing bringing in drugs, cell phones, weapons, or other illegal items, if you’re talking about bribing the warden to get a parole, or any other criminal act, so long. They got you. No freedom of speech involved in any of those areas. Don’t write Mama and threaten the life of the guard who took your contraband, either, or you’ll find yourself in a world of hurt.
The four-volume set of law books, “The Rights of Prisoners” (4th Edition, Vol. II Prisoner Writings, p. 62-68), exhaustively covers what prisoners can and cannot write about, with landmark case references. You’d think the prison system would get a set of those books and familiarize themselves with the law, rather than letting their personal prejudices and feelings guide their repressive actions. (Excuse me, they did buy a set – they’re in the law library – prisoners know the laws that the guards and officials are unaware of).
The following quotes (at 6:18 – 6:19) from this excellent work have close parallels to my own situation:
“The legal problems that an inmate’s original expression engenders depend on whether the inmate is writing primarily for a prison audience or whether instead, the author seeks a wider audience for the work. This section will consider whether inmates may be punished for their writing.”
“Without a specific factual record showing legitimate dangers that are reasonably related to an inmate writing for the outside world, they cannot be prohibited.”
“The first case involved Murmia Abu-Jamal, a journalist turned inmate, who was sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer, who was approached by National Public Radio to broadcast his commentaries to a national radio audience. When police organizations protested these contacts, prison officials began to inspect all of his mail, including his legal mail, and thereafter invoked a prison rule that prevented all inmates from engaging in “business” while incarcerated. In fact, this rule had not previously been enforced against another inmate who had written a novel while in prison. Mr. Abu-Jamal sued, claiming that the rule as enforced against him violated his First Amendment right to speak and write.
The Third Circuit agreed. It found that the rule was imposed on the plaintiff “in retaliation against the content of his writing.” See Abu-Jamal v. Price, 154 F.3d 128 (3rd Cir, 1998)
“Unlike the Rison case, the court noted that here there was no evidence that the plaintiff’s writings and broadcasts ‘had strained prison resources, contributed to unrest among the inmate population, or enhanced Jamal’s status as a prisoner, resulting in danger to himself or others.’ (at 134). The court concluded that while prison officials could validly prohibit a business operation that placed a substantial burden on prison staff, it could not prevent a First Amendment activity that did not threaten corrections officials or incite the inmate population.” (154 F.3rd at 134-135).
When I sent a request form to the mail clerk who’d originally censored, “To Protect The Guilty” as it appeared in “Wordsmith 2010,” I sought the actual date the book had arrived at the mailroom, which would be the initial date when all the time and deadline calculations would begin. I received the following surprising admission: [spelling and punctuation uncorrected]:
“After receiving the book in the mailroom and reading the first few pages of the story I determined it should be looked at to see if it could come in and sent it to Mr. Hodgson. I have no way of knowing the date the book was received a we do not log incoming mail except for legal. The day it arrived does not change the content of the story [emphasis added]”
The content of the story! How similar is that to what the federal court said about Abu Jamal? “…the rule was imposed on the plaintiff ‘in retaliation against the content of his writings.’ ”
I don’t know what Abu-Jamal writings were about, but I know that mine was a humorous account of a dark subject, Ku Klux Klan prison guards and retaliation I suffered for telling the truth about what I thought of them. Sometimes you have to speak out, and that was one of them. Taking it a logical step forward, I must agree with one of my reader’s comments that the only people who might be offended by “To Protect The Guilty,” would be KKK prison guards and their sympathizers. Either way, I should not be writing this from solitary confinement as a result of it. Case closed.
Prison systems copy the tired strategies, legal or otherwise, others have tried to invoke their will on their subjects. One way to suppress the writings and words of an outspoken prisoner is to label his efforts as “running a business,” forbid it, lock him up, and throw away his pens (they took six pens from me). That has what is called “a chilling effect” on Freedom of Speech. The message—express yourself and go to lockup, lose gain time, stay in prison longer. Keep silent and maintain the status quo, stomp on the Bill of Rights.
It’s not supposed to be that way. Would someone speak out, please? I’m outnumbered.
Charlie
Thursday, April 8, 2010
BRIGHT LIGHTS IN THE DARKNESS
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
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
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
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