Never mind all of these realities. The whole of Catanduvas is a grand exercise in political theater, and human lives are its principal actors.
“The media say I am a monster,” says Fabio. “I’m not a monster. The people who created this evil place are monsters.”
The bars grow blurry and my headache intensifies. I try to serve up words of inspiration. Hear about one of my best friends, Kirk, I say, who earned a college degree behind bars in America and then a doctorate in social work from an Ivy League university. And my other students, who are guaranteed a slot in university upon release from prison. The prisoners’ eyes flicker.
“Let us share something with your students,” they say. “From one prisoner to another, across the world.”
What they share overflows with hope, emerging full force from the inferno.
Education frees us. The only bars are in my head and I have removed them through learning. Capitalism will destroy you, because life is not what you have but what you are. Learn. Don’t give up.
“You are blessed from Brazil,” Carlos Augustus calls to me as I gather my things and prepare to go. “Thank you for remembering us.”
Thank you for remembering us. What a peculiar thing to say while still alive. Then again, are they? Solitary, wrote Dostoyevsky, “drains the man’s vital sap, enervates his soul, cows and enfeebles it, and then holds up the morally withered mummy, half imbecile, as a model of penitence and reformation.” For these men, being seen and being captured by my pen represents a momentary disinterring: being unforgotten.
In Mara’s office, where we return at the end of the day, the staff is gathered around a computer screen, smiling. They turn the screen to me and reveal a phrase on Google Translate: “The men were moved.” Moved? Where? To another prison?
“No, no,” explains Mara. “The prisoners were moved by your presence. They said they were inspired by the stories of your students in prison. They were moved.”
I’m moved, too, though it’s small comfort.
André and I ride to the airport in total silence. André, because he’s inflamed with anger at his country’s grotesque investment. He has been here before and volunteers in the state system; his fiancée, too, is a public defender who works in women’s prisons. But knowing the system well cannot temper the horror of witnessing it at its worst. I am silent because between sobs I feel the emotional equivalent of the color sucked out of my face.
Back in America, weeks later, I’d ask my students at Otisville to write back to the Brazilian ones I’d told them about. They do, beautifully.
“I hope you are in good health and learning from whatever it is that you’ve done,” writes Richard. “The reason I call you my brother in arms is because even though we may be worlds apart, you are still a man, and spiritually you are my brother. I believe that education is the key to success. Just to give you a little about myself, I am a simple, loving person who likes to learn.”
Robert waxes reflective:
We are both physically incarcerated. However, despite the governments’ best attempts to keep us stagnated, they can never incarcerate us mentally; that is only something we can do to ourselves. I’m twenty-three years old today and I have been in prison since I was sixteen years old. I did not realize how important education was for me when I first came to prison, and as a result, I found myself in a lot of unnecessary trouble. Once I picked up a book, I was honestly amazed at how “free” reading made me feel. Even when I was on lockdown for twenty-three hours a day, I lost track of where I was at times because I was so caught up in my readings. I felt it was important to share that little detail because I heard you are in school and I want this letter to be a motivational tool to keep you going.
Moving words, hopeful words, gorgeous words—they are all these. But still it’s the first time I return from a prison odyssey without even a shred of hope.
For one, the candle in the dark here, the literature program, is so infinitesimal as to be irrelevant—it even feels like part of the grand public relations charade that is Catanduvas as a whole. And second, even as a number of American states have recently begun to rethink their use of solitary—in 2014 ten states adopted measures aimed at curtailing solitary, abolishing it for juveniles or the mentally ill, improving its conditions, or reintegrating isolated prisoners into the general population—Catanduvas tells a very different story. America’s baby has once again taken on new life beyond its shores. Supermaxes and solitary are not only a global reality, they’re a growing global reality: an American nightmare from which the world has chosen not to wake.
6.
Private Prisons | Australia
“Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” scrolls across the screen of a snazzy electronic immigration kiosk at Sydney Airport, welcoming me to Australia. I think it must be the third time Australia has asked me this in the last two days. I seem to remember it coming up twice on the electronic visa form I completed before flying.
Such a line of inquiry in the land of Oz feels both fitting and ironic. After all, the country was born as a penal colony, which means two centuries ago almost everyone arriving here had a criminal history. During the pre-prison era, when banishment was Europe’s preferred punishment system, colonizing countries shipped more than a quarter million people dubbed “convicts” to far-flung places like Singapore, French Guiana, Gibraltar, Bermuda, and Mauritius. Australia was added to the list after the American Revolution, when Britain could no longer dump its human refuse on US soil. Between 1788 and 1868, 166,000 men, women, and children were shipped from Britain to Australia, and by 1830 they and their children constituted 90 percent of the new colony’s population. It was about more than just punishment, because after the abolition of the slave trade in 1833, these colonial prisoners became Europe’s labor force, building infrastructures and economies. And well after the transportation of prisoners ceased, their economic value persisted. Following the US Civil War, for instance, local convict labor reconstructed the country, from railroads to plantations, with Alabama leasing its prisoners to the federal government until as late as 1928.
These are the roots of the prison industrial complex, a tangle of legal, business, and government interests that has existed for centuries.
I’ve journeyed to Oz during my winter break to grapple with this muddle: the modern-day conflation of capitalism and “convict” in the form of the $22.7 billion private prison industry. It dates back to 1985, when the first private prison opened in Marion County, Kentucky. The model and its profits soon proliferated, to the point that revenue for America’s biggest private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), recently capped $1.7 billion. Private prisons have cropped up in a dozen countries, from Britain and France to New Zealand, the Caribbean, and South Africa.
They’ve also taken hold in Australia, a country so physically far from America, yet when it comes to criminal justice policy, very close. Since the 1970s Australia has copycatted our tough-on-crime rhetoric and punitive policies. Despite its already low homicide and robbery rates—in 2011 these rates were one and four in 100,000, respectively, having decreased in the past two decades—its prison population is growing at 9 percent a year. The country holds the world’s largest proportion of prisoners in private facilities—about 19 percent of its 33,000 prisoners. It has a wholly private immigrant detention system, too, run by Serco, a British company that also operates two private prisons in Western Australia and has eight thousand people in its care.
“Serco? Is that an operating system? Like, the Matrix?” So I’d joked to Brian, the criminologist I’d befriended in Thailand, back when he first told me about the prisons he works in via Curtin University in Perth. Then I launched into a tirade against the private prison industry.
I was preaching to the choir. Because to anyone even a tad progressive, private prisons are anathema. Driven by bottom lines, they go to dramatic lengths to maintain control of taxpayer dollars and human lives. Because their business model depends
on keeping beds filled, they spend millions on lobbying and campaign contributions to ensure that policies remain punitive. CCA, for instance, spent $18 million on US federal lobbying between 1999 and 2009. It’s also heavily linked to the American Legislative Exchange Council, which promotes templates for tougher immigration and sentencing laws and has made offers to forty-eight states to purchase state-owned prisons and jails in exchange for mandatory 90 percent occupancy rates.
“I know, I know,” Brian had said. “Believe me, I was up in arms when this whole movement started here. I stood on the steps of city hall for days, protesting privatization. But then I realized the situation is more complicated than I’d imagined.”
“Really?” I’d asked, still skeptical.
“Come see for yourself,” Brian replied. Several months later, here I am.
———
“Looks like Phoenix,” remarks the American sitting next to me on the plane, peering down at Perth as we approach.
Today is Saturday afternoon, 112 degrees of arid summer sunshine. Where is everyone? The capital of Western Australia feels like a ghost town. After checking into my hotel, I hop on a free city bus, pass a pristine riverside park, transfer to a pristine subway, and finally reach a pristine beach. Ah, here’s everyone. The sand at Scarborough is jammed. Smiling blond women with deep tans dole out free lemonade; more blond people giddily jump waves so big, they seem to be giving clouds a high five.
Sitting in the midst of this clean, beautiful city, surrounded by surfers and beachgoers, it’s hard to imagine prison even existing here.
Yet Australia’s prison population has doubled in the past decade or so. And this state, Western Australia, boasts the country’s highest number of prisoners per capita. Nearly half of them are in for nonviolent offenses. And as in America, Brazil, and South Africa, they’re overwhelmingly poor minorities. Indigenous people make up around 2 percent of Australia’s population, but they’re 27.5 percent of its prison population. Western Australia has the country’s highest indigenous imprisonment rate, with ratios of Aboriginal people jailed that are, depressingly, even more astronomical than those for African Americans in the United States. They’re close to twenty times more likely to be jailed here—one in twenty-four is behind bars. An indigenous young person is fifty times more likely than any other Australian to be in sentenced detention.
“Welcome to Oz!” Brian says with a hug, picking me up at my hotel the next morning. It’s a joyous reunion, even if it’ll be spent mostly in prison settings. I’d bonded with Brian in Thailand, in part because we share an identical mission in life, and also because his zealous optimism intensely stirs me. It’s an optimism I share, but encountering it in someone in whom it ought not to exist, someone who’s been dealt extraordinarily bad cards in life, is especially inspiring. I try to keep such people close to me as reminders of just how deep and eternal hope can spring.
En route to Wandoo Reintegration Facility, a minimum security prison for males aged eighteen to twenty-four, Brian explains that the facility used to be a run-down juvenile remand center. He was part of the team behind its transformation into a facility for this vulnerable age group, legally old enough to be housed with adults, but also young enough to be victimized and dangerously impacted by them. Serco took over Wandoo’s management in 2012.
“You should see how it looked before the conversion. Simply awful,” Brian explains. “And smelled—unreal. Not for human beings. Rotten garbage.”
What I smell, as soon as we arrive, is lunch. Sans security check we’re ushered into the cafeteria, despite my jetlag-induced memory lapse.
“Forgot your ID? No worries, mate. Just hurry on in for some cut lunch,” says the smiling woman at the front desk.
At once I imagine I’ve landed in a TV ad: that recurring late-night one for a rehab center in Malibu, all green hills and cool breezes—is it Passages? Promises? Nausea begins to creep in; I’m conditioned to feel sick at the smell of food behind bars, mainly by virtue of association with wrenching memories. But my queasiness abruptly pauses and reconsiders. This food actually smells delicious.
“Artisanal Pizza” reads the sign at the buffet. “Organic squash and goat cheese.” We’re in a glass gazebo, and I’m seated beside a woman wearing slacks and a dark-blue polo shirt branded with Serco in red letters, by the collar.
“Where are the prisoners?” I ask her.
“You mean residents?” She waves her hand—they’re milling about freely. Since no one is wearing traditional uniforms, I can’t tell who’s staff and who isn’t.
“Many are at work, though, and won’t be back until later.”
“I’m confused,” I confess.
“So are many of the boys who get transferred here,” she laughs. “They expect traditional punishment. They’re used to the prison regime. Being passive, controlled. Here they essentially run the place.” She’s not a corrections officer; that term isn’t used at Wandoo. She’s a staff member. Her background isn’t in criminal justice, either, but psychology, and Serco may soon finance her PhD.
“Cuppa?” she asks, pouring my tea. I sip quietly.
“Wendy!” The residents call to the sprightly Scottish superintendent—no, “contract director”—as she leads us from lunch to the conference room. Vivid Aboriginal art wallpapers the bright, airy building.
“The focus at Wandoo,” Wendy explains, as lemon chiffon cake is served, “is on preparing residents for release. Providing them with life skills, education and training, and employment opportunities. The young men stay here for up to three years before release, and we give them intensive case management and a strong reintegration focus. They go to NA and AA meetings in the community—mostly we’re talking about drug and property crimes—and we have regular art and music workshops.
“But they”—Wendy gestures toward three young white men sitting at the table with us—“can tell you better than I can. Right, boys?”
They nod, all serenity and smiles. Their uniforms resemble soccer jerseys, in South African Springbok colors.
“I keep busy, is what I do, mate,” says James, nineteen. He has ginger-red hair and paint specks dot his green shirt. “I’m in the computer lab, the cardio-fitness suite, the library. Busy. When I’m here, that is. Mostly I work off-site, at the food bank. Until three-thirty every day. It’s our reparations, to the community,” he explains.
Wandoo, Wendy interjects, operates on restorative justice principles, which she calls “the relationship model.”
“It’s like a campus,” explains Mac, showing off the EER Support Team printed on his yellow T-shirt. He’s part of the prisoner cohort that coordinates volunteer work throughout the facility. “When there’s conflict, we work it out, like a city council. We are responsible for running things. You get asked, not told, to do things here.”
“I do think I tell, occasionally,” one staff member laughs. “But we’re all works in progress, eh?”
“I’m at the food bank, too,” Mac goes on. All the young men here are scheduled to work in the community on a daily basis, then return to Wandoo after the workday. “And when I go home, in four months, I’ll come back in to give talks and to visit here. I’m only just down the road. Do you have people do that, ma’am, in your prison?” I’d told them about the Prison-to-College Pipeline; they’d especially loved hearing about the learning exchanges, the interactions between incarcerated and outside students in a normal-classroom context.
“When the folks in the food bank, the customers, when they treat us normally, like mates—that’s what’s nice. To feel regular, normal, again,” Mac had said. What the three prisoners don’t grasp is my program’s name, a play on America’s “school-to-prison pipeline,” or the way in which dysfunctional schools become training grounds for and direct feeders into the criminal justice system. Metal detectors in schools? All three prisoners repeat my words, with blank stares. School-to-prison pipeline?
“I go out all the time, to check the surf, mate. During b
reaks from work,” says one of the prisoners. Indeed he looks like a surfer, tall and lean, with blond hair and green eyes, arms blanketed with tattoos.
On the way out of Wandoo, after goodbyes and good lucks, there’s a momentary scare. A small crowd of residents and staff have gathered on a grassy knoll, pointing and waving.
Snake!
“Never mind that,” says Wendy. “They’ll catch it.”
Clearly it’s the most dangerous thing here.
For the first time I leave a prison holding back tears of joy. There is humanity at Wandoo.
But thoughts of my students back in New York rain on my emotional parade. It pains me that many of them might have spent their time in a prison like Wandoo, had such a thing existed in America. Instead, because New York is one of only two states sentencing even sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to adult facilities, they landed in adult prisons, many of them for crimes that add up to little more than adolescent foolery or coming from deeply dysfunctional family settings. There they lose vital years, plus additional years spent reversing the psychological damage done behind bars at a hyper-vulnerable age.
Incarceration Nations Page 19