Doing Time

  Release in 2003 presented Antworth with an identity crisis. He had to “invent a life from ground zero.” He has held a number of jobs, “mostly working as a social worker or cook.” He currently works on “being worth a damn to others,” and is edging toward writing again. He considers himself “truly blessed” with “a wife I love very much and a dog that is my closest confidant.”

  Jimmy Santiago Baca (b.1952) was born in Santa Fe to Chicano and “de-tribalized Apache” parents. His story is an emblematic tale of redemption in prison—and literacy is the liberating force. Even when he was in the hole, he read Emily Dickinson and Pablo Neruda. Writing gave him “a place to stand for the first time in my life.”

  His memoir, A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet, describes a wrenching pilgrim’s progress from loss, degradation, and crime, to literacy and spiritual self-discovery, which shares much with the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Writing, he claims, enabled him “to rise from a victim of a barbarous colonization to a man in control of his life.” Baca once said, “All of us who went to prison were lied to, and poetry is the only thing that didn’t lie. Everything that is not a lie is poetry. In order to bring order to our world, we were forced to write. Writing was the only thing that could relieve the pain of betrayal, the only thing that filled the void of abandonment.”

  In 1976 his poem, “Letters come to prison,” won an honorable mention. A few years later, with Denise Levertov’s help, he published Immigrants in Our Own Land. In 1988 his novel in verse, Martin, and Meditations on the South Valley, received the Before Columbus American Book Award for poetry. For more than thirty years he has made his living by writing, and has authored more than a dozen volumes of poetry and prose at the time of this publication. His many awards include a Wallace Stevens Yale Poetry Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the National Hispanic Heritage Award, the International Award, and he has been Champion of the International Poetry Slam.

  For many years, he ran his own school for writers; his students stay in New Mexico for a year or more, and study writing with Baca while also working in the community, painting, landscaping, or teaching lit-eracy. In 2004 he launched Cedar Tree, a nonprofit literary organization designed to provide writing workshops, training, and outreach programs for at-risk youth, prisoners and ex-prisoners, and disadvantaged communities. Baca has three sons and has said that he helps support “about ten adopted children.” His son Gabriel is planning to make a documentary called A Place to Stand.

  Allison Blake (b.1947) was born and raised in Manhattan. Incarcerated for a white-collar crime, she began to write creatively for the first time in Hettie Jones’ writing workshop at Bedford Hills. Her poem “Prisons of Our World” was published in Aliens At The Border. She also received her state legal research certificate, and later at Albion Correctional Facility, became the first inmate to teach the state legal research course; 90% of her students passed the state exam as compared with 33% previously. Her play “Jailhouse Lawyers,” born out of her own experiences, won third prize in drama in 1996. She published other poems in Concrete Garden and A Muse to Follow (National Library of Poetry, 1996). She now works for a lawyer as a paralegal and is involved in real estate development. Her impulse to write seeming to have expired with her sentence, she now makes digital art. She still lives with the man who stood by her while she did time. Allison Blake is a pen name.

  Kathy Boudin (b.1943) was raised in New York by social activist parents, her mother a poet, her father a civil liberties lawyer. Graduating from Bryn Mawr in the 1960s, she commenced a life of social commitments, participating in movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam war. She co-wrote a welfare rights manual and a legal self-defense guide. Incarcerated in 1981 at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, she received a Masters in Literacy Education from Norwich University, Vermont.

  Along with other women, Boudin created a program on long-distance parenting and published Parenting from inside/out: Voices of mothers in prison. She applied Paolo Freire’s principle of learning by analysis and action (fromJPedagogy of the Oppressed) to the teaching of basic literacy. The AIDS Counseling and Education Project, initiated by incarcerated women in the community, resulted in Breaking the Walls of Silence: Women and AIDS in a Maximum Security Prison, a collaborative history with a manual that was widely distributed in prisons. After the Pell grants for prisoners were abolished, Boudin and other prisoners collaborated to engage private colleges and the Westchester community to construct a new college program inside the prison.

  While Boudin was in prison, her son, Chesa, was a source of strength and inspiration for her work. “Writing in prison,” she wrote, “was a way of discovering self and of overcoming the isolation of prison, sharing knowledge and insights with those beyond the prison fences.” Boudin wrote in academic journals such as The Harvard Education Review, Women and Therapy, and several publications of the American Correctional Association on parenting and adult literacy. She participated in poetry workshops with Hettie Jones, and in 1999, she won the First Prize for the PEN Prison Writing in Poetry Award.

  Released from prison in 2003 after twenty-two years, Boudin works at the Center for Comprehensive Care at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center, where she is involved in the Coming Home Program that provides health care for people returning from prison. She continues her work with adolescents whose parents are incarcerated through the program Teen College Dreams, which was designed to strengthen their development and aspirations. And she supports those who, in spite of personal transformation, have little chance of being granted parole at the expected release date: she serves on a committee for parole reform and a restorative justice project with people inside. With others she researched the recidivism and life experience of long-termers in prison. She is a member of Our Journey, an organization for formerly incarcerated women and serves on the board of Citizens Against Recidivism.

  Boudin completed her doctoral degree in education at Columbia University Teachers College in May of 2007. Her doctoral thesis examined the challenges faced by adolescents with mothers in prison. She is currently the director of The Criminal Justice Initiative: Supporting Children, Families and Communities, based at Columbia University School of Social Work. She works to focus attention throughout Columbia University on issues of mass incarceration and reentry.

  Baltimore-born Larry Bratt (b.1943) writes, “I started conscious life as a student and progressed to soldier to criminal to writer.” While serving a life sentence in Maryland, he has worked as a literacy tutor and facilitator for the Touchstones Discussions Project, a program that teaches prisoners critical thinking. He has said, “There is no greater gift one can give to another than the power of reading and writing.” Bratt attributes the beginning of his self-rehabilitation to the discovery of yoga. He was drawn to Buddhism, later to the teachings of Sai Baba.

  Bratt reports that his activism has led to at least fifteen transfers over the years. But he and four other inmates succeeded in organizing Extra Legalese Group, Inc., a think tank dedicated to crime prevention policy. The five men have a combined total of 150 years of experience in the Maryland and federal criminal justice and penal systems. They recently developed a Peace Initiative designed to persuade gang members to drop their violent initiation rituals.

  Daughter of a white Episcopalian minister active in civil rights, Texan Marilyn Buck (1947–2010) became politically active when she was eighteen, awakened by movements to end the war in Vietnam and fight oppression of black people in the U.S. Later she actively supported anti-imperialist struggles and the black liberation movement.

  In 1973, convicted of purchasing handgun ammunition, she was given a ten-year sentence. Four years in federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, forged her lifelong identification with political prisoners, especially those from the Puerto Rican Independence movement. Granted a furlough, she went underground. Eight years later she was convicted of several politically-motivated conspiracies and acts, including the freeing of Assata Shakur (who has politic
al asylum in Cuba) and attacks on the U.S. military establishment. Later she was tried with five others of conspiring to bomb the capitol building; Buck and two others pleaded guilty in exchange for the government’s dropping charges against, and getting medical care for, Alan Berkman, who was battling life-threatening cancer. Her sentences added up to eighty years.

  “For prisoners, writing is a life raft to save one from drowning in a prison swamp.I could not write a diary or a journal,” she wrote. “I was a political prisoner. Everything I had was subject to investigation, invasion and confiscation. In defiance I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly.” At Dublin Federal Correctional Institution, she earned a B.A. in psychology from the New College, and an M.A. in Poetics.

  Buck’s essay “Censored Women Speak” tied for third prize in nonfic-tion (1992) and was published in Phoebe. “Clandestine Kisses” appeared with other work of hers in a special issue of Concrete Garden, devoted to women. Among her collections of poetry is Rescue the Word (2002). After winning first prize in poetry in 2001 and second prize in 2002, she earned a master’s degree in poetics. In 2008, City Lights published her translation of Estado de exilio/State of Exile, a volume of poetry by Cristina Peri Rossi, who fled the Uruguayan military dictatorship in the 1970s. In her introduction, Buck calls herself a “translator in exile of a translator of exile.”

  In 2009, she was diagnosed with aggressive uterine cancer. Surgery and chemotherapy came too late to save her life. Granted compassionate release in July 2010, she paroled to Brooklyn, New York, where she lived for twenty days surrounded by friends, calling herself “the most fortunate woman alive.” Large memorial meetings in her honor were held in Austin, Texas, San Francisco, and New York.

  In Brooklyn, New York, Judith Clark (b.1947) became deeply involved in social protest movements in her teens. “Unwilling to heed the moderating influences of aging, changing conditions, or even motherhood,” she says, she was arrested in 1981 for participating in an attempted robbery of a Brinks truck, in which three people were killed. She is serving a sentence of seventy-five years to life in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

  “In prison, faced with the deadly and destructive consequences of violence and group-think, and groping for a way to reclaim my humanity and sustain a relationship with my child, I discovered the power of the word, first through reading and then through writing.”

  Clark earned her B.A. and her M. A. at BHCF and helped to rebuild a college program when public funds were rescinded. She recently received her certification as a chaplain and currently works with the nursery mothers and raises service dogs for returning veterans in the Puppies Behind Bars program. She teaches pre-natal and parenting classes to pregnant women and new mothers who live with their babies in the prison’s nursery program. Her articles on mothers in prison have appeared in The Prison Journal and From Zero to Three.

  Much of Clark’s work comes from her attempt to reckon with and take responsibility for her crime. “To Vladimir Mayakovsky” won second prize in poetry in 1993. “Write A Poem That Makes No Sense” won first prize in 1995 and was published in Prison Life. “After My Arrest” was published in the New Yorker. IKON, Global City Review, and Aliens at the Border have also published her poems.

  Her scholarly work includes pieces in The Prison Journal and Zero to Three. She is co-author of Breaking the Walls of Silence: Women and AIDS in a Maximum Security Prison, about the AIDS Counseling and Education Program at Bedford.

  Her “Reflections on Prison as Community” appeared in The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2010.

  When Bronx-born Chuck Culhane (b. 1944) and two other prisoners were being transported from Auburn Prison to court in 1968, one prisoner killed a deputy and lost his own life. Culhane and the third prisoner, Gary McGivern, were convicted of felony murder and sentenced to death. After the Supreme Court abolished the capital punishment laws in 1972, Culhane and McGivern refused a plea to manslaughter and were sentenced to twenty-five years to life. Released in 1992 with a B.A., Culhane completed a Master’s in American Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and taught a criminal justice course there. He also conducted a writing workshop in Attica, and served as vice president of Western New York Peace Center’s Prison Action Committee, an outgrowth of Sister Helen Prejean’s visit to Buffalo.

  Since then, Culhane says, “I worked a year and a half at Prisoners Legal Services, did 39 months for two parole violations for smoking dope, edited an anti-war anthology of mostly local poets and song-makers (Waging Words for Peace) and a small book of poems called SHHHH by residents at a woman’s halfway house.” He serves on several boards concerning prisoners’ rights. “I currently work one day a week at my late friend Sister Karen’s halfway house for (male) parolees, and one day a week at Legal Aid Society. As I am one who has been rescued by others (from death and imprisonment), I am ready and willing to help in the rescue of others. At the request of Sara Kunstler I will help organize a local commemoration for the 40th anniversary of the Attica uprising and slaughter. I live alone with my two kitties, Inky and Dinky, and a bunch of little fish.

  “Initially writing was a defense against the crushing isolation and pain I was experiencing when I started doing time at 19. What partly inspired me was a fictionalized biography of Arthur Rimbaud, who ironically stopped writing at 19. I started when I was in the ‘hole’ at Elmira in 1964, when the state allowed prisoners in that situation to write one letter a week. I was given a pencil for one hour on a Sunday to write my letter, and after using the hour in a letter home I’d then scribble rhymey stuff on the back of envelopes. It was self-pitying, syrupy crap… Somewhere along the line I began to develop, often … as a result of reading the masters, like Whitman, Neruda, others.”

  Culhane won first prize in poetry for “Of Cold Places” (1987) and second prize for “After Almost Twenty Years” (1986). He also received prizes for drama (1990, 1988) and for fiction (1989), and nonfiction (1988). Published widely, his work has appeared in Prison Writing in 20th Century America, edited by Bruce Franklin, and The Light From Another Country, edited by Joseph Bruchac.

  Anthony LaBarca Falcone (b.1961) grew up in Gravesend, Brooklyn, and attended Kingsborough College. “I write for myself,” he says, “to try to understand why I am so sad and lonely, why I can’t seem to get out of my own way, why I chase away anyone who seems to get too close—and because I love words.”

  His poem, “A Stranger,” won a PEN honorable mention for poetry in 1996. He was released from prison in 2001.

  Born in Puerto Rico, Raymond Ringo Fernandez (b.1949) says, “I grew up in Brooklyn and kind of died in Vietnam 1968-69. I’ve always wanted to write, sing, entertain, but growing up Rican, not to mention being the oldest son, wasn’t exactly conducive to the arts. For many years I was macho just to please my father. I was a bad ass Brooklyn bum with a rep that led me to jail time and time again. Half my life has been spent behind bars.” But most of what he learned, he says, came from taking advantage of his incarceration. “Prison is a hard-edged life, authority is capricious. Thoughts are contraband, and writing is a serious, deadly business, which I love. Never mind all the time in the hole that prison writers get. To me it meant that my voice was a voice to be reckoned with.”

  Fernandez won first prize for drama in 1988 for If this is Serious, Why Am I Laughing? based on the exchange of prison “toasts” between Whitey, Indio, and Black. His play Looking for Tomorrow won an award from the New England Theater Festival. He has offered readings and has promoted AIDS awareness in the Save Our Youth program. “PEN takes the cake,” he says, “because it encourages an involvement between the prison, the writer, and the subject, perhaps because the folks at PEN realize that prison life does indeed force involvement and that that involvement is life-saving.”

  J. R. Grindlay (1949–1993), of Elizabeth, New Jersey, was educated in Westfield and Scotch Plains. “He was so bright,” his mother, Genevieve Grindlay, recalled, “tha
t teachers let him take over the class in grammar school.” Honorably discharged after serving in Vietnam, he was attending Livingston College of Rutgers when he was convicted of manslaughter.

  “Myths of Darkness: The Toledo Madman and the Ultimate Freedom” won first prizes in fiction in 1976 and was published in Confrontation. “In a bleak, unchallenging existence it’s all too easy for the mind and will to atrophy. A man needs to create his own goals and to consciously force himself to work toward them,” he wrote to PEN about the effect of the contest on prisoners. “For many men, writing serves to fill that need, and to provide a means of expression unlike any many of them have ever known.” The contest “gave me a focal point to direct my energies toward. I feel less isolated, more a part of the real world.” Upon release, he completed his B.A. in English. His poem “Steal the Dawn” was published in the Hudson Review in autumn 1977.

  The mother of Ajamu C. B. Haki (1969 –2007) died giving birth to him on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. He was raised by his great-grandparents until the age of ten, when he came to the United States. He grew up in Brooklyn. “That’s where my education began,” he wrote, “in school and in noticing the perils of urban lives.” He had started college and was a boxer training for the ‘92 Olympics when he was arrested. “All I had to keep me sane in prison was my typewriter and my mind,” he wrote. “Writing had to become my friend and lover, my guide and adviser.” Edgar Allen Poe’s work inspired him to emulation, until he found his own voice. His “Turned Out on 42nd Street” won first prize in poetry. Haki is an assumed name; his real name is Cecil Boatswain. He was indicted in 2008 for having conspired for seven years to import cocaine from the Caribbean to sell in Baltimore, but, reportedly, he had already been murdered months before on the island of Dominica.