PRAISE FOR INCARCERATION NATIONS
“Offering historical investigation and myriad facts, and complementing that research with personal experiences and stories of human beings, Incarceration Nations captures the reader into more inquiry about this vast and critical subject. This is a great read for students of criminal justice, as well as citizens of the world.”
—DEBBIE MUKAMAL, Executive Director, Stanford Criminal Justice Center, Stanford Law School
“[Incarceration Nations] is a vital work—part memoir, part scholarly excavation—that manages to inspire even as it chronicles some of the world’s most horrific places. Dreisinger’s long history of work with the currently and formerly incarcerated is the perfect background and material for weaving an account that asks all of the right questions, setting us on a path while acknowledging that answers are really just the ground for asking anew.”
—GINA DENT, Associate Professor, Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Through trenchant and deeply arresting prose, Professor Dreisinger places a microscope on the now global phenomenon of American-style incarceration, forcing us to confront the collectively authored catastrophes we’d rather look away from. Through it all, Dreisinger places unflinching emphasis on prison’s greatest offense: the destruction of human life.”
—GLENN E. MARTIN, Founder and President, JustLeadershipUSA
“If you are asking yourself, How do we end the dehumanizing impact of prisons? How do we abolish, reform, or educate our way out of this twenty-first-century barbarism deceptively dubbed ‘criminal justice’? We definitely can’t do it without listening to those who continue to be kidnapped from our communities around the country and caged. But what if we take it a step further and give a critical look and listen to folks behind bars the world over? What can we learn about our own humanity—or lack thereof—from a global dialogue with Incarceration Nations? Just turn the page …”
—BRYONN BAIN, artist and Assistant Professor in Residence, UCLA, Founder of International Day of Action and Dialogue on Prison Activism
Also by Baz Dreisinger
Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture
Copyright © 2016 by Baz Dreisinger
Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
Text designer: Julie Fry
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Dreisinger, Baz, 1976- author.
Incarceration nations : a journey to justice in prisons around the world / Baz Dreisinger.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-59051-727-7 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-59051-728-4 (e-book) 1. Imprisonment. 2. Corrections. 3. Discrimination in criminal justice administration. 4. Criminal justice, Administration of. I. Title.
HV8705.D74 2016
365–dc23
2015018691
Disclaimer: The names of many individuals mentioned in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.
v3.1
For my Prison-to-College Pipeline students—my teachers, my inspirations, my family
Anthony, Carl B, Carl L, Craig, Dale, Devon, Domingo, Gerrard, Johnny, Joseph C, Joseph L, Joseph T, Juan, Justin, Kenneth, Kevin, Korey, Lenny, Lumumba, Marcus, Matthew, Melvin, Rasheen, Richard, Robert, Robert T, Rory, Rowland, Sean, Shawnon, Theron, Tomas, Vinicio, Will
Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard.
Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards. —Bob Dylan
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1 Revenge & Reconciliation | Rwanda
2 Sorry | South Africa
3 The Arts Behind Bars | Uganda & Jamaica
4 Women and Drama | Thailand
5 Solitary and Supermaxes | Brazil
6 Private Prisons | Australia
7 Reentry | Singapore
8 Justice? | Norway
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Introduction
Here there is a world apart, unlike everything else, with laws of its own, its own dress, its own manners and customs, and here is the house of the living dead—life as nowhere else and a people apart. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Mzungu!” The prison guard growls, beckoning me with the Swahili term for “white person.”
Shit.
I’d been trying to blend in, though that’s an absurd aspiration for a white girl in a Kampala slum. I’m poised outside the side gate of Luzira Maximum Security Prison, a rambling complex built to accommodate six hundred but currently home to an estimated five thousand men, women, children, and death-row prisoners. Strapping on my inner bulletproof vest, I approach the Uzi.
“What do you want here?” comes the growl again.
With a plastered-on smile, I string together a sentence involving the words “volunteer,” “please,” “sir,” and “thank you.” The growling guard flicks my words away with his wrist, shooing me off as if I’m a stubborn mosquito.
Five minutes later I am back, prostrated before him with my fellow volunteer. Having worked here for four months now, she, unlike me, actually saw her paperwork properly processed by the prison powers-that-be and was thus legal to enter Luzira. I’d been mostly slipping in on the sly, having been given unofficial permission to be here—in the form of a “you may enter and you may teach” from the head officer on duty last week—but granted no papers to prove it.
Two grovelers work better than one. With enough kowtowing and “please, sirs,” and “sorry, sirs,” we bow our way beyond the Uzis and into the prison complex, through the shantytown-like living quarters of the prison officers, past the military barracks and the central gate where the guards wave us inside, into the throngs of men milling about in sunshine-yellow uniforms, and through the concrete door of—a little library.
“Good afternoon, Professor Baz!”
It’s the best greeting I’ve gotten all day—no, all week. Uganda has proven to be many things but welcoming isn’t one of them; most days I am pleased to get a polite nod from even the hotel concierge, a professional at the art of service with a scowl. This greeting comes from a prisoner, Bafaki Wilson, aka Headmaster Wilson, aka Pastor Boma, all of which means that Wilson is a kind of peer-elected prison official. He’s pastor of the “Boma” block of Luzira and lord of this library, erected by the London- and Kampala-based NGO African Prisons Project.
“How are you today?” Wilson asks, grinning as he always does, and looking long and hard at me with those eyes, surely the kindest eyes in all of Uganda. At thirty years old, Wilson is an uncanny combination of frail old man and lively little boy. His small, slim stature, unfettered smile, and spirited stare, not to mention floppy sun cap, fashioned from the yellow prison-uniform cloth and much too wide for his narrow face, all of these scream “boy.” But the wizened old man shines through in Wilson’s slow, wounded gait and, most of all, in his style of speech. Every sentence emerges slow and studied, finely crafted with pronouncements, as if lifted from the transcript of a Martin Luther King sermon.
“Wilson, I am well,” I answer. Conjuring up my second smil
e of the day, this one genuine, I shake his hand. Then I make the rounds, greeting a dozen students with handshakes and broad hellos. They’re assembled around a wooden table in the center of the blocklike library, scribbling on loose-leaf paper or flipping through random books they aren’t really reading: Speaking Norwegian, Hamlet, A Traveller’s Guide to the English Countryside.
Creative writing class is under way. Wilson sits to my left and reads, with studied enunciation, from the Maya Angelou poems I’d handed out yesterday:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
During my first class in Luzira I’d assigned the men personal essays, and Wilson told his tale. From rural Uganda, he was born into a polygamous marriage that produced over sixty children. His mother died when he was a baby and he was abused by his stepmothers, so he ran away. He committed crimes; he was too poor to pay either the fine or the bribe that could get him off the hook for these crimes. So he became one of the 35,000 Ugandans behind bars, living in prisons at six times their capacity—prisons created almost a century ago by former colonizers who used them as a form of social control and intimidation. More than a year later, Wilson has yet to be tried; this is not surprising, considering more than half of Uganda’s prison population consists of pretrial detainees. Wilson took it in stride. He eventually found faith behind bars, transforming himself into Pastor Boma.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Applause. “Baz, I must tell you,” Pastor Boma begins. “This is indeed a beautiful poem. And indeed it speaks to our experience directly here, in this prison.” The other students nod solemnly.
We spend two more hours indulging in pretty words. The class gaily crafts and shares their own poems; Wilson’s, entitled “The Liberator,” is a lament about the dictators who have lorded over East Africa, followed by a declaration of faith in Uganda’s triumphant future. Another student writes a poem that begins, “AIDS, oh AIDS, why have you taken my family?”
When it’s time to go, I gather up my papers and give Wilson another firm handshake, wishing him a good night’s sleep.
“It is never a good night here, Baz. And there is no room to sleep.” He says this with a radiant smile.
I step out of the library and arm myself, emotionally, for the world outside. Crime is a reality in Kampala, but it’s the city’s omnipresent security that really rattles me. East African terrorist organizations, like the one behind a bombing in 2010 that killed seventy-six people, are a persistent threat, so the country can feel like a ticking time bomb, laden with armed guards and military checks. Daily life here often feels like a grand obstacle course. Prison guards, then the dreaded mzungu-walk through the slum. Hoping today’s taximan will show up and not leave me stranded; assuming he does show up, renegotiating a price we’ve already negotiated twice this morning. Kampala traffic, Kampala sweat, Kampala scowls, car-bomb checks, metal detectors. More guards growling and more Uzis and security checks, back at the hotel. Exhale.
No one said this global journey would be smooth.
———
I’d recently embarked on a two-year pilgrimage to prisons around the world.
When I told folks I was going to take this voyage, most found it curious. I’m accustomed to people finding me curious, given my peculiar blend of identities. I’m a white English professor specializing in African-American cultural studies, a Caribbean carnival lover who is also a prison educator and criminal justice activist, a freelance producer for National Public Radio, a reggae fanatic, an agnostic New York Jew. I’ve worked as a journalist, a music critic, and an academic, and have produced two documentaries about hip-hop and the justice system.
I am curious because I am insatiably curious—which is how I ended up immersed in such diverse worlds. When I become fascinated by something, I delve in, headfirst and with zeal. When I fell in love with Jamaican reggae, for instance, I couldn’t just be a fan; I had to become a sort of scholar of the music and frequenter of the country. And that fervent curiosity is what landed me in a Ugandan prison, armed with Angelou.
Growing up, prison was neither a fantasyland nor an everyday reality to me. I was raised in the Bronx, New York, bred, like so many others in my city during the 1980s and ‘90s, on hip-hop and reggae. I attended the City University of New York (CUNY), a massive public institution that’s also massively diverse—one branch boasts of a student body representing 160 countries and speaking 127 languages. Like New York itself, CUNY cultivated my identity as a global citizen, molded by the multiplicity of cultures around me.
When I pursued my PhD in English I focused on African-American studies, specifically the boundaries of race in American culture: how these boundaries get drawn, who draws them, who boldly crosses them. Why did I focus on this? Because the very fact of race didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand how our world could be governed in so many social and political respects by an entity that’s a construct and not a biological reality. There are more genetic similarities among so-called races than differences, so why does everyone seem to think these artificial categories are natural? Needing to explore this question led to my first book, a social history of real and fictional white people who passed as black.
Many of the book’s ideas about racial crossover, hip-hop culture, the question of cultural ownership, and what it means to “claim” an identity reached outside academia, dovetailing with pop culture and the racial-musical zeitgeist of the early 2000s, the Eminem era. Then, during a year as a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, for a New York Times Magazine cover story I interviewed nearly every rapper I’d ever wanted to meet and toured with Snoop Dogg; I convinced a Los Angeles Times editor who’d insisted that reggae had died with Bob Marley to let me write about contemporary Jamaican artists.
One of these artists was Jah Cure, a Rastafarian reggae star who’d become famous while serving an eight-year prison sentence for rape. I flew to Kingston, Jamaica, to negotiate with officials for interview access in prison, but was never granted it. My story eventually ran anyway because I couldn’t let it go; I became riveted by Cure’s case. He claimed innocence and said he was discriminated against because he is Rastafarian, which still carries a stigma in certain Caribbean class circles—but I also couldn’t reconcile how this man, who sings some of the most beautiful, spiritual love songs I’d ever heard, could possibly have committed such a vile act. If he did, should he have the right to release music from behind bars? Playing his songs over and over again, I grappled with big questions about the complexities of human nature and the purpose of prison. Was it about correction or punishment? If liberty is the only right lost when one lands in prison, shouldn’t Cure’s music be permitted to roam free? And if he is guilty, I reflected, might his breathtaking love songs be a kind of public apology—a form of reparation, even?
These musings gripped me. And they came up again in two more pieces I published, one profiling a New York Police Department detective who founded a unit to monitor rappers and became known as the hip-hop cop, and another a Los Angeles Times cover story about the rising trend of rappers releasing albums while incarcerated. While in Los Angeles I partnered with a filmmaker to turn these two articles into documentaries, which eventually aired on various cable networks. Both were pop films designed for mainstream audiences. But questions about fundamental justice stayed lodged in my consciousness, so my research—especially for Rhyme & Punishment, which is essentially Prison Studies 101 meets Hip-Hop Studies 101—started me on a serious and in-depth course of study.
As soon as I began looking, devastating statistics were easy to uncover. America is the world’s largest jailer, with 2.3 million people behind bars, or one in one hundred adults. With 5 percent of the world’s population, we’re home to near
ly 25 percent of its prison population. One in thirty-one adults, or seven million, are under some form of correctional control; up to 25 percent of the adult prison population suffers from mental illness. Swathes of our prisoners are serving long, hard time for drug offenses. In federal prison, that’s 51 percent—only 4 percent are in for robbery and a mere 1 percent for homicide—and in the state system, 20 percent, larger than any other category of offense. Some 3,700 Americans who have never committed a violent crime are serving twenty-five years to life in California alone. Our country considers juveniles too immature to vote or buy alcohol but mature enough to live in adult prisons, where one in ten is sexually assaulted. Fourteen states have no rule against trying those under fourteen as adults.
I found myself confronting the mind-boggling racial inequities. More African Americans are under criminal supervision today than were enslaved in 1850. Blacks are six times more likely to be imprisoned than whites; as of 2001, one in six black men had been incarcerated. By the time he or she turns eighteen, one in four black children will have experienced the imprisonment of a parent. Ninety-four percent of children in America’s family court system are black or Latino. Multiple studies have shown that blacks are treated less fairly than whites at all stages of the justice process, from pretrial detention decisions to prosecutorial judgments and decisions about community sanctions as opposed to prison sentences. A 2015 New York Times story reported on the “1.5 million missing black men” in America—“missing” because more than one in six black men aged twenty-four to fifty-four have disappeared from civic life, having died young or been sent to prison.
The length of our sentences also sets America apart. Just 20 percent of countries have life without parole sentences at all; the United States does even for single, nonviolent offenses. There are about 160,000 people serving life in the United States, as compared to fifty-nine in Australia, forty-one in England, and thirty-seven in the Netherlands. In 2005, Human Rights Watch counted more than two thousand Americans serving life without parole for crimes committed as juveniles; the entire rest of the world has only ever locked up twelve children without possibility of release. We are one of just nine countries who punish via both life sentences and the death penalty.
Incarceration Nations Page 1