Doing Time

  To be closer to her family, Metzger received a “hardship” transfer to the women’s prison in Delaware in 1995. She lived in a minimum security unit, in the “honor” pod, and enjoyed her jobs: paralegal in the Law Library, clerk in the Treatment Services Department, and prison photographer. When a new warden arrived late in 2010, Metger began receiving “bogus misconduct charges” and was put in solitary for three months. In June 2011, she was sent back to Pennsylvania and labeled “an escape risk,” though she had been found not guilty of a charge of attempted escape recently in Delaware.

  Vera Montgomery (1936–1962) was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, where she died. Beginning in her teens, she spent much of her life in Edna Mahan Correctional Institution for Women in Clinton. “No one could forget Vera,” Lois Morris, former assistant superintendent, says. “She was very bright and had a delightful sense of humor, though from the administrative point of view, she was a management problem. Her philosophy was that rules were made to be broken.” When the Supreme Court mandated that prisons have law libraries, Montgomery became a full-time jailhouse lawyer, helping other women with appeals and representing them in disciplinary hearings.

  Montgomery had “absolute integrity and fought like a fiend for what she thought right,” according to her attorney, Raymond A. Brown, who represented her successfully in a case involving escape and assault. Montgomery became director of the Inmate Legal Association. Jennie Brown, then a member of the State Advisory Board of Control, knew Montgomery well. “She developed herself in prison, she became a talented tailor and a leader. Being fearless, Vera was always prepared to help staff with an inmate in crisis.”

  “Solidarity with cataracts” won first prize for poetry in 1976. Albert Montgomery remembers his favorite aunt as “a good-hearted person and a loyal friend.” In Clinton prison, she was president of the women lifers’ group.“She was always creative,” her nephew recalls. Near the end of her life, she told him that she wanted to write a book.

  Robert J Moriarty (b.1946) was born in Schenectady and raised in the West. A former U.S. Marine fighter pilot, he flew 833 combat missions from July 1968 to March 1970 in Vietnam and was awarded three Distinguished Flying Crosses and forty-one Air Medals in addition to several citations from South Vietnam, including the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. He was also distinguished for being the youngest Navy/Marine pilot in Vietnam, having started flying combat as a twnety-year-old second lieutenant and becoming a captain at the age of twenty-two. Five years after leaving the service, Moriarty became a trans-oceanic ferry pilot and a part-time long-distance racer. His logbooks show twelve thousand hours total time, over 240 trans-oceanic crossings and first place in two New York-to-Paris air races flying his favorite Bonanza V-35. On a lark, he became the first person in history to fly through the arches of the Eiffel tower in March of 1984; Air-Space published his account in October, 1986.

  “Pilots in the War on Drugs” took first prize in nonfiction in 1989 and “Against the Prohibition of Drugs” won second prize in 1990. How did he become a writer? “I just sat down and started writing.” He has also published in aviation magazines and currently runs a successful business.

  Paul Mulryan (b.1954), born in Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and raised in Savannah, Georgia, was arrested in Batavia, Ohio, for aggravated robbery and gun charges in 1983. In prison in Lucasville, he studied printing and industrial electricity and took three years of college courses in liberal arts, focusing on art, writing, and music theory. Later apprenticing in the electric shop at Mansfield Prison, he painted and taught music theory for guitar. Mulryan says he has no favorite writers, though he has always been moved by Sylvia Plath’s poetry.

  “Eleven Days Under Siege: An Insider’s Account of the Lucasville Riot,” won first prize for nonfiction in 1995. It was first published in Prison Life, along with one of his paintings. His story, “My Sister’s Letter,” was published in The Right Words at the Right Time, vol. 2., edited by Marlo Thomas.

  He was released from prison in 2008.

  Patrick Nolan (1963-2000), of “Cabbagetown,” an Irish neighborhood in Toronto, grew up in boys’ homes and on the street, and at age sixteen went to prison for three years. After two years of freedom, he says, “I gave up on life. Instead of ending what I commonly refer to as my wretched existence I took the coward’s way out, taking the life of another.” At Folsom Prison (Sacramento) he spent two years in the hole, reading and writing essays about what he felt.

  “The person who changed my life was Victor Frankl—his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. I also fell in love with the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau. When I was finally released from the hole I had only one purpose—to transform my life.” Thanks to the California Arts-in-Corrections program, he took a workshop with a professional poet, Dianna Henning. “In poetry I have found a process to look inward and find meaning to what I considered an otherwise meaningless life.” he wrote. Among influences, he cites Robert Bly, Robert Hayden, Etheridge Knight, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. Eventually Nolan facilitated the poetry workshop himself. “If guys can get a taste for what poetry offers,” Nolan wrote, “it will stir the souls of those who secretly long to be heard.”

  “Ol’ Man Motown” was written in the aftermath of a race riot, in which Motown was attacked. During the lockdown following the riot, Nolan began to see race hatred as self-hatred projected outward. He persuaded the chaplain to co-facilitate gatherings of men of all races to share their thoughts and feelings as they never could in the yard. The men’s groups that Nolan founded continue to meet in Folsom to this day.

  In 2000, hepatitis C forced Nolan’s move to Vacaville Medical Facility. When he was dying, the Folsom prison chaplain was prevented from seeing him. But an extraordinary exception was made at Folsom, and memorial services were held in the two prison yards where Nolan was best known.

  Charles P. Norman (b.1949) attributes his storytelling to his grandmother, who told him tales of pioneer life in Texas, where he spent his early years. He studied at the University of South Carolina. After the deterioration of his marriage, he became involved in financial crimes, and later was convicted of a murder that had occurred three years earlier.

  Serving a life sentence in Florida prisons, Norman won a MENSA scholarship that allowed him to continue his college education. He also studied business, computers, printing, graphic arts, horticulture, and law, all of which skills he put to use. He taught classes in computers, writing, English for Speakers of Other Languages, and G.E.D. Prep, and he worked in a prisoner self-help program and a boot camp for young first-time offenders.

  “Pearl Got Stabbed” won an honorable mention in the prison writing contest in 1992. The Actors Studio in New York performed Norman’s “Tattoo Blues,” winning first prize in drama from Prison Life. Norman won many prizes in fiction, essay, memoir, poetry, and drama over the years, culminating in 2009 with the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Prison Writing Program. Most recently, his memoir, “Fighting The Ninja,” about AIDS in prison, won first prize in the PEN contest and was published in the Journal of Prisoners on Prison, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2010.

  Although confined for thirty-three years, Norman has embraced the Internet age and is featured on a web site, www.freecharlienow.com. Two of his essays were published on www.thecrimereport.org. As a contributor to the Anne Frank Center USA Prison Diary Project, Norman was interviewed by the Associated Press. Scores of his essays have been posted on a blog, http://charlienorman.blogspot.com.

  In 2010 Norman spent thirty days in solitary confinement after his memoir, “To Protect The Guilty,” about Ku Klux Klan prison guards, was published in an anthology. When he brought a lawsuit over this retaliation, he was punitively transferred to a unit far from his friends. He is currently fighting for his freedom in Florida courts and working on a memoir, “Chain Gang Mating Rituals,” a short story collection, and a novel.

  When Judee Norton was born in 1949 in an Arizona farm town, her father was a twenty-tw
o-year-old farm boy, one of ten children, and her mother was one of thirteen children of itinerant fruit-and-cotton pickers, “a fifteen-year-old beauty with the look of gypsies about her,” as Norton writes. Norton and her four siblings battled a legacy of “addiction, poverty, low self-esteem, and a general sense of bewilderment about the business of living.” But “when l read, I was somewhere else. I was no longer the oldest child in the most dysfunctional family in the universe. Writing was magic and I wanted to be a magician, to take people out of what was awful to another place.”

  Her own battles led her to Arizona State Prison, Perryville, to confront her demons. Instead of a demon, she writes, she found “a little girl cowering under the covers waiting for next blow to fall. All I had to fgure out was how to get her out of prison in one piece and I did that by writing.”

  She has won two first prizes in fiction, for “Summer, 1964” (1988) and for “Norton 59900” (1991). The two pieces are part of a larger work, Slick, “fctional reflections on how and why I made bad choices.”

  Norton has read her work and discussed the experience of women in prison in bookstores and universities in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Michigan, and New York.

  Now living outside Snowflake, Arizona, a small farming community, she has almost gotten off the grid using solar energy, well water, and a wood stove. At Northland Pioneer College, she is earning a degree in nursing. She intends to join the Peace Corps or Doctors Without Borders. She grows and cans her own food and spends her spare time reading, gardening, writing, and running with her dogs and her horse. I live the way I do,” she says, “because even after all these years, the stigma of being an ex-felon, and a female ex-felon, to boot—still follows me like a noxious cloud.” An ex-felon cannot work on the census or get food stamps, government assisted housing, or school grants. “Life is good, but because I make it so, in spite of being an ex-con.”

  The real name of William Orlando (1953-1999) was Orlando Askew. A war baby, black and Korean, he was adopted but ran away from a strict home in Los Angeles. “I had a criminal record before a mustache,” he wrote. “At seventeen, I strolled into the army. Saw Germany and next met heroin in Vietnam. Came back a dope-shootin’ bank-robbin’ fool. I’ve spent the shank of my life in prison. Those are the bare bones. The rest is apologia.”

  “Dog Star Desperado,” an excerpt from a novel, tied for second prize in fiction in 1997. Part of his second novel, Chino, was published in the North American Review in November/December 1997. “As a square peg kind of kid, I read for transport”—works like Beowulf and novels by London, Stevenson, and Twain—”until I learned to smoke and drink and cuss and fight and swagger in leather to a raucous dice game, and street life claimed me from the books.” In prison, he earned a B.A. in sociology, studied Spanish and German, and read omnivorously, finding “gems among the rhinestones” in prison libraries. “Reading made the writer. That, and the crucible of experience. Writing is all I have, a lament and a boast.”

  After serving eighteen years, he was released in 1999, with no contacts and no preparation for re-entry. From a half-way house he wrote, “I’m feeling beset—naturally, starting from scratch… . I plan to make myself free and to stay free. I’ll always take my chances—but I’m more a writer than an outlaw.” Within a few weeks, he was dead.

  Alejo Dao’ud Rodriguez (b.1962) was raised first in the Bronx, New York, then in East Los Angeles and Pomona, California. He is serving eighteen years to life for murder. While incarcerated he received a B.A. from Syracuse University and a Master’s degree in professional studies from New York Theological Seminary. “I daydream a lot so I guess I’ve always written poetry in my head,” he wrote. “Daydreams are hard to explain to people, sometimes hard to explain to myself. Writing them out is sort of like giving daydreams a life longer than a fleeting thought. Yet writing is a double-edged sword for me. I love to write, but I hate the rules of grammar—too restricting. That’s why poetry likes me. She encourages me to take liberties and sometimes they even turn out to be a poem, but most of the time, poem or no poem, writing is my way of sledge hammering these walls.

  “Parole Board Blues” tied for first prize in poetry in 2002; his essay, “Paralegal Training for the Formerly Incarcerated” won an honorable mention for essay in 2007. “Sing Sing Sits up the River” was published in The American Bible of Outlaw Poetry. He is the Administrative Law Library Clerk and Inmate Coordinator for the Alternative to Violence Project at Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, and with others created the Reality Awareness Work Project, a pre-reentry program of the Lifers and Long-termers Organization, which publishes The Raw Truth.

  When he was sixteen, Daniel Roseboom (b.1972) put his rural hometown near Cooperstown, New York, behind him to travel alone. After several arrests for petty crimes (“non-violent and non-drug-related— freedom was my high”), he was sent to a shock incarceration camp at seventeen. Escaping, he fled west, until caught in Missouri and extradited to New York. Months in solitary and keep-lock confinement to his cell as a consequence of his attempted escape introduced him to books and to writing. While in Auburn, he took Syracuse University courses. Compared to the “intense atmosphere” of those classes, his courses in the world seem “a shame.” Since his release, he has become a self-employed building contractor.

  His first experiment in writing, “The Night The Owl Interrupted,” based on a real experience, won third prize for fiction in 1993.

  An activist in the student anti-war and women’s movements in the 1970s, New Yorker Susan Rosenberg (b.1955) studied at City College of New York and Montreal Institute of Chinese Medicine, becoming a doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. Targeted by the FBI for her support of the Black Liberation Army, she went underground in the 1980s. In 1984, she was convicted of possession of weapons and explosives and sentenced to fifty-eight years.

  Spending almost eleven years in isolation and semi-isolation, she says, “I write in order to live in the most creative, productive, and challenging way I have available to me. Prison life is life stripped to the bone, and all the good and bad is held up in the sharpest light. I watch and listen and struggle with what I see in order to write about it. This forces me to remain conscious of the suffering around me and to resist getting numb to it. I write to keep my heart open, to keep pumping fresh red blood.”

  Winner of first prizes in poetry (1991), short story (1992), and memoir (1994), as well as getting two honorable mentions, Rosenberg’s work has been published in many anthologies. She has written about women casualties of the drug war, and earned an M.A. in creative writing from the McGregor School of Antioch University.

  After sixteen years in prison Rosenberg was pardoned by President Clinton on his last day in office in 2001. Upon her release, moving to New York City, she became an active member of the PEN Prison Writing Committee. She has worked as an adjunct professor teaching Prison Literature and American Literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She has served as director of communications at American Jewish World Service since 2003. She lives with her partner and her daughter. “We who swim to the other side of the river have to write about it,” she said, and after a decade of work, she published her memoir, An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in My Own Country, from which she is reading at events across the country.

  As a child, Anthony Ross (b.1959) wrote “butchered versions of Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel,” but his ambition was to be a cartoonist. Ross says that he dropped out of school mentally in fourth grade, physically in seventh. At twelve his life became entangled with the gangs of his native Los Angeles and “whatever could go wrong, did go wrong.” He was inspired by Stanley “Tookie” Williams, founder of the L.A. Crips, and at fourteen, Ross and others founded the Raymond Avenue branch of the Crips. In 1981, at the age of twenty-two he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death.

  Years later, finding himself the oldest among his gang locked up at San Quentin, he decided he had to provide leadership.“I
made some decisions about what I would do and what I would not do,” he said, and he held to his resolve. Ross and his co-defendant, Steve Champion, decided to turn their lives around, to study. Passing books and manuscripts back and forth, each became the other’s mentor.

  “Walker’s Requiem” tied for first prize in fiction (1995). As a child Ross was taken on a school trip to Griffith Park, where he could look down from the heights to the depths of South Central Los Angeles, the ghetto where he lived. As they returned home, he thought about the contrast between the park’s beauty and the grime and violence of South Central. “The keys to the observatory” came to him to be a metaphor for access to the world of knowledge and beauty from which people in South Central seemed locked out. When Ross received the PEN award, “Walker’s Requiem,” he said that it was like “being given the keys to the observatory.”

  Ross is now working on a manuscript with Steve Champion. And he plans to marry a woman in Germany’s Green Party, who is a member of Parliament in Frankfurt.

  Robert M. Rutan (b.1944) attended Catholic schools in his native Philadelphia. In prison from the age of twenty-four on, he garnered another sentence for manslaughter and was not released until he was forty-three. He took courses at the University of Iowa, dreaming of its famous Writers’ Workshop.The dream was deferred by conviction for unarmed robbery and escape.

  In 1978, “The Break” won first prize in fiction; it was published in Time Capsule. “Partners” won third prize in fiction in 1982. Then Rutan turned to writing poetry. “Love of language and literature drove my desire to write. I admire the nineteenth-century novel in the hands of Eliot and Hardy, and I like the poetry that came out of Spain during the thirties. But my real passion is Shakespeare.” As to why he writes, “The way out is the way in,” he says. “Writing provides the release that comes with disclosure.”