The women take their bows, and the class cannot stop applauding.
Our final exercise is “the gift.” We stand in a circle, hold hands, and present the person next to us with something we feel they’d benefit from. Lorraine begins by handing her neighbor one thing: hope.
“I give you the gift to go home soon,” says one prisoner to another.
I give you … to see your family soon. To forget about this hard time. To see your children. To care for your mother again.
The moon-faced officer stands in the circle with us. Her gift, to the prisoner who grips her hand tightly, is love.
My neighbor bestows her gift on me. “I give you success in your career,” she smiles. How sadly ironic, I think, clasping her hand. Everyone else gets love and family; I get work. “And to come visit us again very soon,” she adds, perhaps reading my mind.
What happens next is a new experience for me. Hugs. Long, gripping, family-style hugs, all around.
Many times in Otisville I have wanted to hug my students. The time Ron was denied parole for the fifth time, or the time Julio broke into sobs talking about the murder he committed twenty years ago, as an abused teenager filled with rage. Or the time Marc earned his first A and said he’d never believed he was good at anything until now. But of course there is no such thing as a hug from a female in a male prison. Hugs are postponed until homecomings.
The ladies grasp me tightly, one by one. Inevitably, tears come, from me, Lorraine, all of the women. I’m not quite certain why we’re crying—it’s only been two days, and I haven’t even learned all of these women’s names. It feels less like a tearful goodbye than a catharsis. Or perhaps a physical manifestation of the emotional bonding cultivated by our workshop. As a total-group experience, theater generates community in a remarkable way. And the experience of performing in a public space, being on display and witnessed by one’s peers and by outsiders—it’s a profound statement for an incarcerated person. I am seen. I exist.
Suddenly Chang’s enigmatic statement last week, about theater and Buddhism being one and the same, makes sense. Acting is reacting; to perform one’s own role one must feel another’s role. This, too, is a tenet of Buddhism, the notion that the connective fabric of humanity bonds “you” and “me” together. It’s a truth symbolized by the form of greeting here, not a waving-one-hand “hi” that is an “I” but a pressing together of palms that signifies you and me as an integrated entity, others as “extensions of ourselves—fellow facets of the same reality,” to cite one Buddhist scholar. The opposite of this looks like Ibsen’s potent description of a lunatic asylum: “Each shuts himself in a cask of self, the cask stopped with a bung of self and seasoned in a well of self.”
People in prison are part of our human network—they’re us and we’re them. To treat them badly is to treat ourselves badly. In three terse lines, Buddha articulated a criminal justice and prisoner reentry system that just about says it all: “See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?”
On our way out, Lorraine sighs.
“I could live here,” she says. It’s a ridiculous statement and she knows it, yet I understand what she means. This place is at its core a horror show, a warehousing of women, mothers, and daughters, torn from kin. Yet from the rubble of shattered families, Kamlangji has in some ways managed to piece together a sisterhood—a commune and community. It’s a fragmented family, rife with cracks and haphazardly glued together, but a kind of family nonetheless. And it’s exactly the opposite of the violent, animalistic, utterly unhuman portraits of prisoners promoted by pop culture, sensationalized portraits that make it easy to dismiss people behind bars as deserving of the cages in which they live.
“How was the yoga therapy?” Napaporn asks Sanyasa as we climb into the van. He beams.
That term again. “Therapy.”
It’s the week’s buzzword, clearly, but like its prison catchword twin, “rehabilitation,” it grates. I don’t know what all of the women I’ve been working with have been charged with or convicted of; I don’t know how many of them struggle with addiction, or carried their husband’s drugs. But I do know the statistics, thanks to Napaporn and team. Odds are that about a quarter of our students today were victims; 23 percent of women in Bangkok and 34 percent of women in rural Thailand have been abused by their partners, with 39 percent specifying it as sexual abuse. Odds are they come from economic, educational, and social disadvantage; they didn’t know the law when they broke it, then felt the impact of harsh laws in a society where even if they did fully grasp crimes and punishments, they can’t afford lawyers—just like the 80 percent of Americans accused of crimes who lack funds for representation. In one study, 74 percent of incarcerated Thai women had no lawyers during questioning; 40 percent of them said the police intimidated them with threats and 12 percent were physically assaulted.
Do these women need healing and therapy or does the law that governs them? Across the globe, draconian drug policy is packing prisons. Drug users and traffickers represent more than half of those in federal prison in the United States and Mexico, a quarter of all those in prison in Spain, and one-fifth entering prison in Japan; in Malaysia they constitute more than half of the nine hundred incarcerated people awaiting execution. And these are mainly small-time users, more than 83 percent of them, worldwide, convicted of possession.
All the yoga and drama in the world won’t heal away those harsh realities.
My mind runs back to the pretty empowerment mottoes that wallpaper prisons, from South Africa to America, twelve-step slogans about your power to change your life through positive thinking, and how the future is wide open in your hands—free yourself from the prison of the mind! Such slogans remove the onus from unfair social systems and structures and place it squarely and unfairly on the individual, who must be superhuman to overcome the odds and systems and structures stacked against her.
Together the team rides back to Bangkok. At the hotel bar that evening, smiling Thai women who serve Brian and me could be twins of the prisoners I’d said goodbye to earlier. It’s those hotel uniforms, the long purple dresses, just like the prisoners’ but crafted from expensive silk. I’m haunted by the ghost of “Lisa” sitting at the “restaurant,” demurely playing with her hair, or “John” typing away on that imaginary computer in the air. In the end I know these women only from their performances. But sometimes the performance can be just as authentic as the self, because it is more free than the self, especially when that self is locked away, buried behind bars.
———
Weeks later, when I’m back in New York, the invitation arrives in my e-mail. Will I return to Thailand in August, this time to meet the princess herself?
During our final meeting as a group, Napaporn had talked about bringing the whole “We Shall Find Our Way Home” team back over the summer, when HRH will visit and look in on Ratchaburi. I’d said yes at the time, but with some guilt, wondering why Thai professors weren’t the ones being tapped for this work.
I honor my commitment, at least in part because I’m avidly curious to meet HRH herself. And so as the end of summer draws near I find myself on the road to Ratchaburi and again in a sea of orange, as HRH’s color adorns banners, ribbons, tablecloths, and tents all over the prison. Hundreds of reporters, government figures, and official-looking folks in suits and ties mill about. The incarcerated women are, literally, marginalized, patiently seated in neat rows on the sidelines. I scan their faces, looking for some of my former students, but don’t recognize any demure smiles. I do, however, spy the moon-faced officer, seated with us in the royal tent, where a cushioned throne and a small podium have been erected.
Humidity descends with vicious tenacity. Beads of sweat trail down my arm, dampening my baby-blue dress—no wearing of dark colors around Her Royal Highness, an e-mail from her team had instructed.
We wait for the princess. And wait.
As we’re primed for the highly choreographed proceedings,
the day turns fantastic. At once I’m playing a starring role in a play I’ve not rehearsed for, with stage directions called to me in a language I don’t fully understand. Turn here! Bow there! Walk down this aisle, right foot first! Crawl to your seat! Yes, when the princess is seated you must crawl toward her—nonroyals can never be on a higher plane than she. Practice your curtsies, Lorraine and I are instructed. First upon standing, then put one hand out to receive the princess’s gift. No eye contact! Then, yes eye contact, as you curtsy a second time. Prisoners sweep the red carpet with homespun brooms; the minister of justice arrives and paparazzi snap away.
Finally, HRH appears. She walks with a humble gait, wearing a shy smile to match her powder-blue suit, designer pumps, and Chanel purse. During gift time, I miraculously get my curtsy right and resume my seat.
Lorraine and I eventually take our turns at the golden microphone, she giving a talk about the importance of theater in prison and I promoting the value of education behind bars. Napaporn speaks of honoring human dignity and calls for radical reform of Thailand’s judiciary and penal systems. The ladies in Sanyasi’s yoga class perform a mesmerizing routine, and line up to receive certificates from the princess; one by one come their elegant curtsies. Finally, from her gilded seat, the princess leans into the microphone.
“Prisons should not be dark corners of the earth,” she says steadily. The rest of her talk is, to me, lost in translation—except for what she says directly to the prisoners: “I wish you great happiness.” And with that she is gone.
Then the imprisoned women appear, as if from thin air, singing that haunting lullaby again, the one I’ve yet to banish from my mind. This time Chang’s translation is different, though. “Do good things and your reward will come to you,” he whispers to me. “Give hope. Do good. Do good.”
The day is done.
On our way out, Napaporn is ecstatic. Members of the university were present and are eager to pursue Prison-to-College Pipeline possibilities; the princess was vastly impressed. Before my flight home, we sit down for dinner at Lin Fa, a Chinese restaurant.
“You realize that we did put on a show for you, yes?” Napaporn says, rolling a Peking duck pancake.
“During all three prison visits? I imagined so,” I confess.
Indeed, Kamlangji has done excellent work in these prisons, she explains; the programs were no stunt. But this is the rare exception—most Thai women’s prisons are, alas, nothing like what we’ve seen. She grins.
“Have you seen the news clips? We are all over the media!” She whips out her phone and there we are, with Thai subtitles, on every TV news show in the country, on the newspapers’ front pages. It turns out this is a celebratory dinner. The headline of the week is “The Princess and the Prison.”
A revelation hits me. The real theater in my Thai experience has been not our workshops but the entirety of both visits. Kamlangji’s prisons are not so much representative of reality as performances of a possible reality, not what is but what might be. This does not diminish them. On the contrary, performance has power. A fake laugh can turn real, and a model prison can become all prisons.
Yesterday at Ratchaburi was a grand performance, too. And it also paves a path from the possible to the actual. Why did the Thai public suddenly pay attention to prisoners, and fix its gaze upon the dark, forgotten place where they reside? Because their beloved princess stood, Chanel bag in hand, right in the heart of it. And so did we, respected foreign scholars. Behold royal privilege—and white privilege—in its best possible incarnation, at work in the name of a greater cause, just as I’d seen it work wonders in Rwanda, when I obtained permission for Santos to launch his prison program. I now understand the real reason Lorraine and I were needed here. Not for our expertise or experience but solely for our foreignness and our whiteness, vital ingredients in one of the biggest public relations coups Thai prison activism has ever staged.
What is PR but elaborately crafted theater? And when it comes to prisons and the people inside them, what is more critical than PR? Politicians created the drug laws that incarcerated these women, and their policy moves are dictated by public opinion. Change public opinion about crime and justice, about the so-called criminals in prison—they’re not the evil monsters you think they are; they’re hapless victims of unforgiving drug laws; they’re ardent yogis, devoted subjects of Her Royal Highness—and the politicians will have to cater to their hearts and minds. America has proven this. In the seminal 1988 presidential race between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, a racially charged TV ad labeling Dukakis as “soft on crime” for his support of a weekend furlough program that allowed Willie Horton, a prisoner, to slip through the hands of prison officials and eventually rape and rob new victims is said to have propelled Bush’s victory and deeply impacted political discourse such that “soft on crime” became instant political death.
But if the public decries prison, the politicians will. If prison can be marketed to the public, so can antiprison. In other words, changing the performance, the presentation, is far from superficial. Quite the contrary, it has the power to radically alter the crux of the system itself.
5.
Solitary and Supermaxes | Brazil
In order to reform them, they had been submitted to complete isolation; but this absolute solitude, if nothing interrupts it, is beyond the strength of man; it destroys the criminal without intermission and without pity; it does not reform, it kills. —Alexis de Tocqueville
It is not good for man to be alone. —Genesis 2:18
Cascavel is Portuguese for “rattlesnake.”
Cascavel is also a small city in the Brazilian state of Paraná, close to the Argentine border. It’s two short plane rides away from São Paulo, and the hour-long drive from the mini-airport to my destination, an even littler town named Catanduvas, is flooded by charmed vistas. A fingernail of a leftover moon dangles in the morning sky. Opulent greenery is disrupted by odd-looking pine trees shaped like upside-down rainbows on matchsticks—Dalí paintings come to life.
My sabbatical is over, but I’ve managed to steal away for a few days from teaching English 101 to a newly enrolled cohort of students in the Prison-to-College Pipeline. Pulling up to my destination, I see something disturbingly familiar, from almost all my prison travels. The Penitenciária Federal de Catanduvas, Brazil’s first federal supermaximum prison, looks like a slice of the United States plunked down on foreign shores. I’ve come to learn more about this home to the so-called worst of the worst prisoners in a country making dramatic strides in mass incarceration.
Brazil’s 550,000-strong prison population is the fastest-growing in the Americas, having nearly quadrupled in the last twenty years or so. I want to take a hard look at the practice of solitary confinement in top-security “supermax” prisons, which in the last twenty-five years began proliferating all over the world but are still relatively new to Brazil. In America alone, it’s estimated that some 80,000 individuals live in solitary. If you include jails, immigrant detention centers, and juvenile and military facilities in the count, the total is more like 100,000. Parents who created solitary confinement cells in their homes would likely be prosecuted for child abuse, yet thousands of American juveniles spend time in solitary confinement. It’s a reality I find almost impossible to wrap my head around.
André, a white-collar-crime lawyer who volunteers in Brazilian prisons, has accompanied me here. “Strange,” he says as he unbuckles his seatbelt. “Last time two men with big guns were waiting for me.” Today there’s only a sea of metal and wire; the place seems sucked dry of humanity. A red sign on the fence indicates in Portuguese something about “attention” and “warning.”
André steps out of the car and speaks loudly into a standing intercom.
“Bon dia!”
I’d met André this morning, in a São Paulo taxi. Though technically we’d met months ago, online, after I read about him in the context of a unique program taking place here. “Rehabilitation Throug
h Reading” enables people to strike four days off their prison sentences, up to forty-eight days a year, for every preapproved work of literature, philosophy, or science they read and write a summary of. Over the course of our e-mail exchanges, André had organized my visit and agreed to join me as translator. My stay wouldn’t be long enough to allow for work in the prison, but I was promised two full days inside and the opportunity to engage with the men, in their cells and in classrooms, about both their experience in a supermax and with the books program, which struck me as an intriguing, and unexpected, progressive intervention.
I’d flown to São Paulo and spent a weekend there, absorbing the metropolis’s three prominent features: magnificent street art, divine samba tunes—and the omnipresent military police force, notorious for murder. According to the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, police officers nationwide killed 11,197 people between 2009 and 2014—as compared to some 11,090 killed by US police in the last thirty years. The secretary for public security in Rio once referred to police killings of innocent bystanders as the breaking of eggs to make an omelet.
———
Outside the prison gate in Catanduvas, a minivan finally appears, with the DEPEN logo on it. For a moment I imagine the word is missing its final D, but no—it’s an acronym for Brazil’s national prisons department. The van is escorting out a black Ford SUV containing the top brass at the prison, on their way to early lunch. A tinted window is rolled down and we’re invited to join them.
We follow the Ford to the dusty strip of paint-peeling storefronts that is the town center. The sun is blazing. Inside what feels like a Wild West–style saloon, we weigh plates of meat stews at the buffet and join our hosts. The prison director wears a black suit, and his piercing green eyes smile behind thin glasses; Mara, the head pedagogue, flicks her dirty-blond hair to one side and extends a manicured hand to me.
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