Incarceration Nations

by Baz Dreisinger

  All apologies are promises, so-called performative utterances—words that are also actions. Their ultimate meaning thus hinges on the future, which is why the Jewish sage Maimonides defined true repentance as a scenario in which the sinner faces the same temptation to wrongdoing, yet this time resists it. I believe Gerswin’s apology and take his promise as sincere. I also believe many of the apologies I’ve heard all week long. But forgiveness rarely comes in one fell swoop, rather in fits and starts. So only the future will lend all of these words their true dimension.

  The day concludes with a climactic return. On day one of the program, Jonathan had sent one of the guards to purchase three chocolate bars from the shop and presented them to Gerswin, Yahiya, and Jerome. Would the three men in orange return the much-coveted chocolate on the last day? Could they be trusted not to eat or sell this precious commodity?

  Gerswin stands proudly on his chair, displays his chocolate, and speaks in steady Afrikaans. “I never allowed people to trust me. I came to realize how many people I hurt in the past. This—it looks like a simple chocolate, but the thought behind it has a lot of significance.” In English: “I feel, see, convinced about myself.” The room erupts into a standing ovation: three gangsters, standing on chairs and wielding chocolate bars as if they’re MVP trophies.

  PJ, the facilitator and former Pollsmoor prisoner, closes out the day with a hip-hop performance in Afrikaans. He then shares, in stolid tones, his story of abuse and murder, prison and religion and redemption. Jonathan embraces him and turns to the families.

  “I want you to look at him,” he says, “and see your son. This is a good man—and this is your son.”

  That afternoon Wilbert the hotel driver takes me home from Pollsmoor in the limo.

  “You will not go to Pollsmoor tomorrow, ma’am?” he asks.

  “No, today was the last day.”

  “Ma’am, I hope you don’t mind if I say that I have enjoyed taking you there every morning.”

  “Thank you, Wilbert.”

  “Ma’am, yes, it was inspiring to see you come in and out safely every day. See, ma’am”—he pauses and lets out a slight cough—“it is only this close that I did not end up there myself.” He holds two fingers up from the wheel.

  “The judge said he would give me a second chance. And ma’am, I have done well. It is two months I am on this job. No more crime. I am a new man.”

  And just like that, two universes collided.

  ———

  I hang around Cape Town for a week after the workshop ends. After all, I’d seen the prison and its uber-white antithesis, Constantia, but not the world beyond either fortress. I visit the one prison more infamous than Pollsmoor, Robben Island, where Mandela spent eighteen years. Even mass tourism could not dim the profundity of this place. Riding the tour bus I chant songs from Pollsmoor, which refuse to take leave of my consciousness. I am free, Lord, I am free.

  On my last day, I return to Constantia and knock on a glass office door marked by a small sign, African Prison Ministries: Serving the Forgotten Prisoners of Africa.

  “Come, let us go!” Jonathan rushes out. He wants me to see the whole of Pollsmoor, not just the area where the workshop takes place, so we take the five-minute drive to the prison for a full tour. I find it profoundly deflating. Restorative justice offers magnificent promise, but Pollsmoor itself offers nothing in the way of redemption. Nearly one-third of the prison population is on remand and the country’s recidivism rate is at 80 percent. We pass through the area known as “Afghanistan”—fighting here is sheer warfare, Jonathan explains—and through the next double hallway. “I spent nine months in that section, right there, downstairs,” Jonathan says.

  En route to Medium B, Jonathan sends the guard to produce Anthony and Ebrahim. They bring smiles and thanks; I wish them safety and blessings. But where is Gerswin?

  “Come this way,” says the guard. We amble down sterile halls resounding with echoes, congested cells and aging eyes peering out at us. And here’s Gerswin, sleeping on the top bunk at one in the afternoon. One of his forty-four cellmates prods him awake.

  He opens his eyes, leaps down from the top bunk, and buttons his shirt. Through the bars, he takes my hand. I remember my promise to you, Baz. I won’t forget it. I won’t forget you.

  ———

  En route back to America, Jonathan’s e-mail lands in my inbox:

  We had a very exciting and meaningful follow-up session on Thursday. We spent two hours just to debrief especially with a focus on Saturday. Yahiya stood up and said, “I am very involved with the Numbers gang inside prison. There is a lot of pressure on me after Saturday because I became quiet. I want to get out BUT”—we all thought he would make an excuse but he said, “I will need your help if I get out and move on.” Wow, the room was in silence.

  From my airplane window, I try to conjure up Anthony, Ebrahim, Yahiya, Jerome, and Gerswin, somewhere in the backwaters of the South African prison system, shuttled from Pollsmoor to a longer-stay facility and then, in all likelihood, from that facility to yet another one. With every transfer and every day that passes, their weeks of restorative justice work and emotional progress recede farther and farther into the distance. I ask myself a question that’s also a silent prayer, inspired by Rwanda and South Africa both. What would the world look like if restorative justice were not some ancillary to the justice system—but the very thing itself?

  3.

  The Arts behind Bars | Uganda & Jamaica

  Returning to New York City after my time in Africa, I check in with my Prison-to-College Pipeline students. Ray had been released while I was overseas and though I’d called him as soon as I’d heard his “I’m home!” voice mail, giving him a welcome-back hug is a joy. Like all students in the program, he visits campus within days of leaving prison. Like all of them, too, he stands wide-eyed before John Jay College of Criminal Justice, awed by the school to which he already belongs—he’s been taking classes in prison, after all—and which represents his new life, here on the outside. Ray’s goal is to start classes in six months, and thus far it seems a reasonable possibility; he’s calmly shouldering the bureaucracy of postprison life, from parole officer meetings to anger management and vocational training classes.

  But Ray, just twenty-seven, has also returned to the same Brooklyn neighborhood that steered him toward gangs and drug dealing in the first place. Seven years later it’s a more gentrified version of that neighborhood, yes—“I never seen ‘organic’ stuff in my bodega before, Baz,” he says, laughing—but beneath the hipster veneer of whiskey bars and artisanal cheese shops, the Bed-Stuy that paved Ray’s path to prison survives. I don’t know how to help him transcend the past. All I can do is encourage him to focus on the big picture, and his future, which involves a college degree.

  “I’m your English professor,” I tell him as he leaves campus for the subway back to Brooklyn. “I know your talent. I’ve seen your highest self.” I have glimpsed this higher self because I taught him writing, a creative art. I’ve seen the language arts work magic in my New York prison classroom. And since the 1970s it’s been an accepted reality in America, certified by projects like the international PEN Prison Writing Program, that verbal and artistic expression has profound cognitive-therapeutic impact, especially in a prison context. Organizations like Michigan’s Arts in Prison, for instance, have offered programs in writing, along with music, gardening, yoga, and visual and performing arts, for decades, and studies continue to endorse their value.

  But I wanted to assess their worth in a more intense, concentrated fashion. What sort of rehabilitative power do the arts really posses? And what might they accomplish in prison, outside the framework of a college program like the one I run? Rwanda and South Africa had allowed me to rethink the very foundations of justice, to reflect on revenge and forgiveness while glimpsing possibilities of what could be. They’d shown me their own versions of what corrections could look like. I came home eager to see how another
vehicle of correction, the arts, might also be used as a healing agent in exceptionally punishing conditions. For that I would return to Africa—to Uganda.

  Some 35,000 people are incarcerated in Uganda, about half on remand, all housed in a system built for 15,000. In 2004 the Uganda Prison Service’s self-assessment painted a gruesome portrait of these brimming infernos. Prisons designed for twenty-three people were home to 265; half of all prisoners had no access to safe water. This led to some reforms, but in 2011, Human Rights Watch declared conditions only slightly improved. According to the Human Rights Watch report, 41 percent of prisoners were being beaten, some by other prisoners at the warden’s command; those refusing to perform hard labor—including the elderly, people with disabilities, and pregnant women—were caned, stoned, handcuffed to a tree, or burned; others were stripped naked and thrust into cells flooded by ankle-deep water. HIV and TB were said to be almost twice as prevalent behind bars as in the general population, but as of 2011 treatment was available at only one prison in the country and just 63 of 223 prisons had any on-site health care worker.

  I’d been heartened to learn of the African Prisons Project, a London-and-Kampala-based NGO engaged in education, leadership training, and health initiatives behind bars. The organization, open to volunteers, was responsive to my ideas about coordinating something new for them and for Uganda: a creative writing class.

  ———

  After arriving at Entebbe International Airport and spending three hours in traffic, I reach the apartment I’d put down a deposit on. It turns out to be a dark, dusty cell in a crumbling compound, encased in barbed wire and shielded by a man with a scowl and an Uzi. I spend the night sleeping, literally, atop my suitcases in the sooty apartment. The next day I negotiate a decent rate at the Sheraton, the hotel where Idi Amin’s palace once sat, its sprawling green lawns host to many a bloody execution. Then I stop to change money.

  “No, ma’am, we cannot take this twenty dollars, it is a bad year.”

  “Bad year?” I ask.

  “Yes,” comes the explanation.

  I buy a SIM card for my cell and put fifty dollars of credit on it. I try to make a call; no credit.

  “That is because yours is an old corporate account, ma’am.”

  “How can that be, if I just bought it? So I just threw away fifty dollars?”

  “Yes,” comes the explanation.

  Finally, I head back to the hotel, where a bomb check awaits at the gates. Ever since the 2010 suicide bombings that left seventy-four dead in Kampala—a Somali militia with supposed Al Qaeda ties claimed responsibility—random checkpoints are de rigueur here. The stern stares from behind a gun, the popping of the trunk, the opening of the glove compartment, the waved hand for entrance: all of it leaves me skeptical about their ability to prevent a bombing, but they are effective at generating perpetual unease.

  “I will pick you up at 8:45 tomorrow,” the taxi man tells me.

  “But I don’t have to be at the APP office until eleven. Isn’t it only half an hour away?”

  “Jams,” he replies.

  ———

  Bright and early Monday morning, en route to the office in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I sweat through my dress. Even in February Kampala is blisteringly hot. Out of my open window I spy bustling crowds, cave-sized potholes, military uniforms, and Marabou storks, like drones in the sky. I take my phone out to snap a picture. My driver straightaway shuts the window.

  “Thieves,” he says. “They will pretend to be walking. And they will reach in and take your phone.”

  The APP office, a small cottage on a hill, is manned by a security guard who writes our names in a book. Handshakes go all around as I greet five team members. A map of Uganda hangs on the wall, thumbtacks marking each of the country’s 223 prisons. I craft a callout for my writing class, to be circulated behind bars: Are you a creative person? Do you enjoy stories and poetry? Do you want to express yourself through writing?

  My syllabus includes a range of genres, from personal essays to drama, fiction, and poetry. I make my assignments as general as possible and select readings from both classic African-American texts and Kenyan, Nigerian, and Ugandan works I’d discovered in the bookstore over the weekend. Then, as I await my taxi, my phone rings.

  “Yes, madam, this is David.” My taxi man. “I cannot make it. But I have sent another taxi. He is also called David. He is in a jam but he will be there soon.”

  “Soon” means an hour. Jams add another hour. I reach the Sheraton, pass through the metal detector rigmarole and, exasperated, make a beeline for the Paradise Grill. A sheesha pipe and a Nile Special beer later, I stroll down Nile Avenue, past a bar blasting Jamaican dancehall music. Beautiful prostitutes, dressed to the nines, have the run of the place; posted at every table, they survey customers like ornate owls.

  The next morning, one of the prostitutes shares the elevator to the lobby with me. On the way out the door, I scan the odd batch of books for sale in the hotel shop: Birds of Uganda, Eradication of Gun-Based Violence in Uganda, Sixteen Deadly Women: How to Recognize and Avoid Them.

  “People think just because you are in prison you are a sinner,” says David, my taxi man, narrowly avoiding a collision with a swarm of boda-bodas (motorcycle taxis). “I know this is not true, sure? Mistakes can happen.”

  At the gas station, Jean from APP picks me up. I haven’t been officially approved to work in Luzira Prison so she’ll be my escort, and the plan is to enter through the side gate and hope no one asks questions. We take a turn off the main road, into a vista of crumbling brick and rusty zinc roofs. The ground is swathed in scraps: wood chips, newspaper, dirty cardboard. Tire tracks produce rivers through mud and chickens dart out of the dilapidated Betterlife Medical Center. The scent of frying breadfruit and samosas tickles my nose.

  Jean stops to buy chapati from a vendor. She’s several years younger than I but seems twice my age; perhaps the powder-blue polyester suit adds years. As we walk, she tells me that she grew up in Kampala, went to university here, and used to be a high school teacher.

  “Now I live in prison,” she says.

  I nod. “It can feel that way sometimes, yes?”

  “No, I live there. Live, sure?”

  Jean’s husband is a prison officer and they, along with their two children, have a one-room hut on the prison grounds.

  After slipping through the gate, essentially a hole in the barbed-wire fence, Jean points out where officers live. Then, as we head down a rocky path toward the prison interior, we see the sunshine-yellow uniforms, like daisies in the dirt. Prisoners are tilling fields.

  “The head of the prison, his garden is looked after by the prisoners,” Jean explains.

  Luzira, which has units for convicted, remand, women, and death-row prisoners, was Uganda’s principal colonial prison, built in 1927. Throughout the colonial world such prisons served the aims of whites, extorting money by way of bribes to stay out of prison and obtaining free labor from prisoners for cotton production. Here, too, colonial powers adroitly manufactured reasons to put bodies behind bars. In the 1930s, about 60 percent of those in Uganda’s native authority prisons were convicted of tax default or adultery. African prisons thus became instruments of social control, often combined with corporal punishment, which lasted in British African colonies like Uganda until the 1930s.

  At the main gate, an elderly prisoner in yellow shorts and flip-flops sweeps the hedges with a makeshift broom. Jean and I are waved inside by an officer in a military-style uniform of red beret, khaki skirt, and bobby socks.

  “You may put your bags in there,” she directs, pointing to a small hut serving as an entrance tower. I hang my purse on a rusty nail, beside a stack of old, handwritten gate passes, crammed on a large skewer like shish kebab.

  Outside, a manicured garden full of verdant bushes is being tended by prisoners in yellow uniforms darting to and fro. I can’t help but be reminded of a scene in an American classic we’ll be reading duri
ng class, Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative, in which he describes his master’s Eden-like, bountiful garden as a dreadful source of temptation to hungry slaves, resulting in many violations and ghastly whippings.

  The officer in charge shakes my hand, takes out his badge, and sets it on the table before me. He looks me up and down, then mutters something about permission for the professor to work while her official permission is cleared. One more handshake and it’s agreed.

  We go through another set of gates and along a pebbly alleyway that leads to the ramshackle housing blocks at the gut of the prison. Pieces of yellow uniform are scattered about, drying in the sun—pants on the bushes, a top dangling off a branch, as if the barren trees have sprouted flowers. Eyes peer through windows of concrete huts; Jean explains that between 7:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. the incarcerated men can essentially roam free on the compound. We follow several men to the life-size concrete box that is our destination. They remove their flip-flops, as if entering a holy space.

  “And you are welcome to the APP library,” Jean pronounces.

  A wooden table rests in the center of the room beside three antiquated computers, and a dozen men sit on benches, the backs of their uniforms displaying stenciled-on words like REMAND, WARD 23, DEBTOR, CLEANER. Other men mill about, quietly shelving books. I spy Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a Star Trek cartoon, Mathematical Methods, and The Hotel Guide to Greece. Printed on the blackboard is one line, “Marriage Disadvantages: it can bring poverty.” Today is the last day of the Functional Adult Literacy program, and Wilson—Mr. Headmaster, as he’s known—is wrapping up the class. He’ll shortly be one of ten men certified to teach his fellow prisoners about finance, social skills, and family planning. Exhibiting the enduring patience and commanding presence of a veteran teacher, Wilson immediately impresses me as a leader here. He and the men in his “train the trainers” class will also be my creative writing students.