Read & Riot

by Nadya Tolokonnikova

  The prison system I know can produce only two things: first, profits for bureaucrats or corporations; and second, masses of people who hate the government, who will never trust anybody from an official institution. If your goal is to increase crime, that’s the way to do it. I know my time spent in Russian prisons made me anything but apologetic, anything but obedient to the system.

  Since my Pussy Riot colleague Masha and I got out of prison, we have visited many prisons all around the world, spoken with prisoners and ex-prisoners, with activists and organizations whose goal is to create real resocialization for ex-prisoners. We have been amazed by how closely the Russian and US prison systems resemble each other. The Cold War made our countries similar in a lot of ways, not just in aggressive imperialism, militarism, and huge inequality, but in the attitude of our governments to those people who have no power, who are behind bars.

  We studied how Baltic countries, which used to be under Soviet rule, are exploring other ways of dealing with prisoners rather than those popular in the gulag, how the old type of prison is being replaced with new ones, which want to help a human being rather than destroy his or her will.

  We visited a former Stasi (East German security service) prison in Berlin and witnessed how they’re working with their past, remembering the torture and murder. There is a female prison in Berlin too with a very respectful attitude to inmates (good conditions, legal same-sex partnerships in prison, no obligatory jobs).

  We’ve seen Scandinavian prisons and their rehab centers, shelters for ex-prisoners, and social workers who help them find a job. We know it’s possible: a situation where an inmate sees a social worker not as an enemy but as someone who’s there to help. It’s not the case in a Russian prison. Or an American prison.

  The United States leads the world in a lot of areas. It has the largest economy, the top-rated universities, the most Olympic gold medalists. But it also leads the world in putting people in prison. The United States has not quite 5 percent of the world’s population but more than 20 percent of its prisoners. One in five of all people in prison in the world are locked up in the United States.

  One reason for this is the disastrous “war on drugs” that began in the 1970s. In 1980, the federal and state prison population was about 320,000. In 2015, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 1,526,800 people in federal and state prisons (a decrease of 2 percent from 2014), plus more than 700,000 in local jails (up from 182,000 in 1980), hundreds of thousands of them locked up for nonviolent drug offenses. Sentences for marijuana possession were often harsh and remain so in states like South Dakota and Indiana. Now that scientists are indicating that smoking pot is less dangerous than drinking alcohol and states are legalizing pot possession, the United States is in the absurd situation of having hundreds of thousands of people in jail for doing something that is now perfectly legal in many states.

  And prison policy is racist. African Americans are locked up at a rate five times higher than that of whites. Sentences for crack cocaine, a drug introduced into African American communities and heavily used in inner-city neighborhoods, were much harsher than those for the powder form, which was used more often by white people. The sentences were sometimes a hundred times longer for what is the same drug.

  How confused I was when I went to Rikers Island, the giant prison complex in New York City, and found out that all the visitors were people of color. “Why don’t you get put in prison in this country if you’re white?” I wondered. Interesting.

  There is a giant poster at the entrance to Rikers saying that you cannot wear extra-large pants and hoodies. Why? Perhaps because prison officials are ignorant enough to seed and spread the prejudice about that connection between hip-hop culture and crime.

  If you need to know something about inequality, ask Howard Zinn. “The poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up full of poor black people” (A People’s History of the United States). In the words of Eugene V. Debs, “As a rule only the poor go to prison. The rich control the courts and the poor populate the prisons.”

  Politicians long outdid each other being “tough on crime.” Bill Clinton interrupted his 1992 presidential campaign to sign a death warrant for a mentally challenged man convicted of murder. The man, Ricky Ray Rector, had shot himself in the head after committing murder, effectively lobotomizing himself. He could barely function, yet he was executed. Rector asked for the guard to save the dessert from his last meal so he could eat it later.

  Instead of realizing that the system wasn’t working, the authorities just kept locking people up and found a mind-blowing solution for managing the increase: privatize! Private correctional facilities were started in the 1980s—locking people up to make a profit. By 2015, at the peak, 18 percent of federal prisoners were held in private prisons. In 2016, Obama’s Justice Department announced it was phasing out private prisons. Of course, Trump reversed that policy. In anticipation, the day after the election, the stock price of the largest private prison company, now called CoreCivic, went up 43 percent.

  Like education and health care, if the main goal is to make a profit, actually teaching people or healing people or rehabilitating people, in the case of prisons, is secondary. No one gives a shit at all. Private prisons exist to punish. Because they make money from people being incarcerated, the corporations lobby for harsher sentences and support politicians who are toughest on crime, as do the 400,000-plus prison guards.

  Prison shouldn’t be a profit center. The whole system costs $80 billion a year. Wouldn’t most of that money be better spent on keeping people out of prison, not in it? On education and retraining, job creation, drug treatment, and so on?

  We should support any efforts at reform. Even some Republicans, like Rand Paul, support criminal justice reform. Some 450,000 people sit in jail because they are denied or can’t make bail, even when it’s a few hundred dollars, and lawmakers including Paul are trying to change that in Congress.

  The prison system does not help those who found themselves in trouble to return to society. It labels you an outcast and prevents you from being included. It’s been this way forever. “Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an emaciated, deformed, will-less, ship-wrecked crew of humanity . . . their hopes crushed. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as the only possibility of existence,” says Emma Goldman in the essay “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure” (1910).

  As far as drugs are concerned, some places have come to their senses. Cities like Seattle and Ithaca, New York, are looking at drugs as a health care issue and not a criminal justice issue. Some even provide heroin users with places to safely use as part of a comprehensive drug policy. Opioid overdoses kill more than a hundred people a day—providing treatment can help people come off drugs without going to jail or dying. Switzerland went this route twenty years ago and has succeeded in reducing drug-related crime, HIV infections, and overdoses.

  But there is not much enlightened thinking. Lock up drug users and make a buck if you can.

  * * *

  China is a good example of what can happen under a secretive government. There is very little information about incarceration in China. No one knows the real figure for executions—the low thousands probably. China’s prisons are filling up with dissidents and democracy reformers opposed to President Xi Jinping. China has its own war on drugs and executes smugglers.

  Chinese prisons are hellish. In pretrial detention centers, torture is common. Cells are overcrowded, and there are often no beds. Prisoners have to work long hours. In actual prison, inmates also work, but conditions might be better than in detention.

  What we know is that we don’t
know what goes on in China. We know about the United States, but prison reform is not a political priority. There are more votes for being tough. In 2015, when President Obama visited a federal prison, he was the first president ever to do so. He looked in a nine-by-ten room that held three men and talked about overcrowding. He sounded sympathetic. But eighteen months later, when Obama left office, little had happened.

  Under Obama, there was a movement against mandatory minimum sentences and the beginning of a national debate on drug policy. Funding for the “war on drugs” started to shift toward treatment, but under Trump, the government threatens to double down on the failed policy. Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, told federal prosecutors to seek the harshest punishments allowed under the law, which would send prison populations up again.

  The appointment of General Mark Inch, who managed US detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, to run the Bureau of Prisons jibes well with the general militarization of US police forces that has been going on for decades. As we have seen in countless tragic police shootings, there is no thought of deescalating a situation—go in hard, guns blazing, often in massed SWAT teams.

  The 2016 documentary Do Not Resist detailed the rise of militarized SWAT responses by police forces. In the 1980s, there was an average of about 3,000 such deployments a year; now it’s anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000. Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security has given police departments more than $34 billion to buy toys like Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) armored vehicles, Humvees, assault rifles, and so on. (Google “MRAP” and tell me if you think it makes sense to have these vehicles operating on US streets.) The Department of Defense has also given away billions of dollars in similar freebies.

  It appears that the authorities are waging war on underprivileged sections of the US population with militarized policing and ultraharsh sentencing and prison conditions.

  Why don’t we discuss how to eliminate prison systems as we know them today and their torture, terrible conditions, cruel punishments, and murder? You’re sending rockets to the outer cosmos, making clones of sheep, but you cannot reform a prison system? C’mon.

  * * *

  Eugene V. Debs knew how to do effective prison reform, and he wrote about it at the beginning of the twentieth century. It’s known. It’s doable. Here’s what he suggests (Walls and Bars, 1927):

  “First of all, it should be taken out of the hands of politicians and placed under the supervision and direction of a board of the humanest of men with vision and understanding. The board should have absolute control, including the power of pardon, parole and commutation.”

  “Prison inmates should be paid for their labor at the prevailing rate of wages.”

  “The prisoners themselves, at least 75 per cent of whom are dependable, as every honest warden will admit, should be organized upon the basis of self-government and have charge of the prison [and] . . . establish their own rules and regulate their own conduct under the supervision of the prison board.”

  “Feed prisoners decently and wholesomely, not extravagantly, but in a clean, plain and substantial manner to conserve their health instead of undermining and destroying it.”

  “At least 75 per cent of the inmates of every prison are not criminals but have simply been unfortunate, and every decent warden will admit that they would at once retrieve themselves if given their liberty and a fair chance to make good in the world.”

  * * *

  Bottom line: Prisons should not be connected with creating profit. Prisons should not be run by army-like, secret organizations that can do whatever they please. Prison officials should be accountable for what they’re doing. Prisoners should play a major role in their own management. There should be independent oversight boards to check how everything is going in prison. People will be interested in serving on such boards, because they understand that at some point, prisoners do go free, and rehabilitation is in society’s best interests.

  * * *

  I was about six years old, walking with my father around Moscow. If a cop walked toward us, we’d cross the road. I clearly remember the poker-face trick my father taught me: if you walk near a cop, don’t ever look at him, don’t look into his eyes, don’t draw his attention. I was six years old, and I was happy that cops didn’t have anything on me. What could we be scared of? Nothing. We didn’t rob banks or sell arms or drugs. There was just an irrational fear that something might happen.

  As I got older, I began learning to communicate with cops, always bracing myself. But if I don’t make myself confront them, the desire to cross the road, instilled in childhood, becomes so strong that it almost gives me hives.

  If we want people to stop being afraid of cops, we should equalize our rights and give an average citizen the ability to jail the cop (for a reason) the same as he has the ability to jail you. A cop should feel the power of a common citizen above him. That’s how we’ll deal with that fear.

  Deeds

  Prison taught me a lot of lessons. One of them is about time, how time works. How vital it is to look forward and imagine alternative futures. I was living in barracks with a hundred other women. We had a shared bedroom. Each bed had a sign with the inmate’s name, her photo, the number of her criminal article, and the beginning and end of her term: 2005–2019; 2012–2014; 2007–2022; 2012–2025. It’s like a time machine when you’re walking between those beds, being mesmerized by these years, fates, faces, crimes. You cannot escape thinking about time. As a prisoner you stay alive only by thinking about time. Imagining, dreaming: How will I build my life when I get out of here? The future has never seemed so full of and rich in wonderful possibilities as when I was in a labor camp and had literally nothing but dreams. Not only prison but also despair, grief, or on the contrary, inexplicable joy and unconditional love—basically any transgressive situation—opens in you this magic ability that is normally destroyed by adulthood: time when you can dare to dream and imagine.

  prison riot

  I was sent to a prison camp in Mordovia. Mordovia is a region of Russia renowned for the most terrible prisons and the puffiest pancakes. The mores in Mordovia are patriarchal and conservative. Women wear their hair long, often with a braid slung over their shoulder. They measure their life achievements in terms of the quality of their husbands and the number of their children.

  Mordovia is a land of swamps and prison camps. Here they breed cows and prisoners. The cows give birth to calves and produce milk, while the inmates sew uniforms. I encountered fourth- and fifth-generation guards. From the time they are knee high, the locals believe that a person’s only purpose in life is to suppress another person’s will.

  The toughest discipline, the longest workdays, the most flagrant injustice. When people are sent off to Mordovia it’s as if they’re being sent off to be executed.

  We worked sixteen to seventeen hours a day, from 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. We slept four hours a day. We had a day off once every month and a half.

  I was welcomed to my dorm unit by a convict finishing up a nine-year sentence: “The pigs are scared to put the squeeze on you themselves. They want to have the inmates do it.” Conditions at the prison are organized in such a way that the inmates in charge of the work shifts and dorm units are the ones tasked by the wardens with crushing the will of inmates, terrorizing them, and turning them into speechless slaves.

  “If you weren’t Tolokonnikova, you would have had the shit kicked out of you a long time ago,” say fellow prisoners with close ties to the wardens. It’s true: other prisoners are beaten up. For not being able to keep up. They hit them in the kidneys, in the face. Convicts themselves deliver these beatings, and not a single one happens without the approval and knowledge of the wardens.

  Perpetually sleep deprived and exhausted by the endless pursuit of production quotas, the inmates are always on the verge of flying off the handle, screaming their heads off, and fighting. A young woman was struck in the head with scissors because she had delivered police trousers to the wr
ong place. Another woman tried to stab herself in the stomach with a hacksaw.

  Thousands of HIV-positive women work with no rest, running down what is left of their immune systems. Near the end they would be taken to the camp hospital to die so their corpses would not spoil the penal colony’s statistics. People were left behind bars alone with the understanding that they were goners, that they were broken, crucified, and doomed.

  A woman died in the sewing factory one night. Her body was removed from the assembly line. The woman had been seriously ill. She should have been working no more than eight hours a day. But the camp wardens need thousands of suits. People fall asleep at their sewing machines. They sew their fingers together. They die.

  If a needle pierces your fingernail and slices through your finger, your mind cannot process what is happening for the first five seconds. There is no pain, nothing. You just do not comprehend why you cannot pull your hand out of the sewing machine. After five seconds, a wave of pain washes over you. Wow, look, your finger is stuck on the needle.

  That is why you cannot pull your hand out. It’s simple. You can sit alone nursing your finger for five minutes but not for longer. You have to keep on sewing. You’re hardly the first person to sew through her finger. What bandages are you talking about? You’re in prison.

  The mechanics tell me they don’t have the spare parts to fix my sewing machine and will not be able to procure them. “There are no parts! When will they come in? How can you ask such questions and live in Russia?”

  I mastered the mechanic’s profession involuntarily on my own. I would attack my machine, screwdriver in hand, desperately hoping to fix it. Your hands are scratched and pierced by needles, there is blood all over the table, but you try to sew anyway, because you are part of an assembly line and you must carry out your part of the job on a par with the experienced seamstresses. But the damned machine keeps breaking down.