Incarceration Nations

by Baz Dreisinger

  Under a knotty tree is a designated yarning circle for indigenous prisoners, a kind of town hall meeting area. And there’s much planning for more enlightened programs and structures, including a family day fair, “greening” the place with gardens, biophilic walls, and therapeutic natural light, restorative justice week, and charity walks. Construction cranes are everywhere; soon a new education center and performing arts space will invigorate programs.

  “I want a rock opera. And an actor’s workshop, and an amphitheater,” says Brent, Acacia’s education manager and a bundle of enthusiasm. He and an on-site psychologist lead our tour. She sports funky tattoos down her forearm and, like Brent, wears a smart Serco uniform—button-down pinstripe shirt, pink-ribbon pin. They’re both in their thirties.

  We chat over a lunch of veggie wraps and Serco-branded water, tidily arranged on a glossy table.

  “It’s in my job description to be innovative,” Brent tells me, passing a tray of seedless watermelon. “Before Serco recruited me, I worked in a state hospital. I got almost nothing accomplished there—too much red tape. Here, I can make things happen. I’ve got collaborations in the works with the state, with arts organizations. It’s exciting. And it can happen quickly.”

  I witness this quickness for myself that afternoon in a classroom building, where sixteen members of the educational staff await my arrival. A slew of educational programs here range from business and accounting certifications to a mining course, university-level distance learning, and Aboriginal-style classrooms, privileging narrative-driven oral work over traditional pen-and-paper learning.

  Like Brent, the whole staff is, for the most part, lively and young, younger than any prison staff I’ve ever met. I brief them about the Prison-to-College Pipeline and they ask all the right questions. How many have enrolled in university since coming home from prison? About one-third, I reply. Does the school worry about getting a bad rap for educating those so-called criminals? How do you make special accommodations for indigenous students?

  We don’t have many indigenous students, I explain; our version of that—our overincarcerated, underserved community—is African-American and Latino/a. Eyes widen; heads nod. The zeal is tangible, and it intensifies during my discussion session with four incarcerated men, all of whom are thrilled by the prospect of a university program at Acacia. They share near-identical educational histories. Whether from boredom or financial need, they dropped out of school at a young age and now deeply regret that decision.

  “Time here, it’s dead time,” one of them tells me. “We need school so we stop killing time, mate.”

  “I’d be keen on studying sociology or psychology, but that’s illegal for us,” says another. Brent and Brian explain that certain subjects are entirely off limits to those with criminal records.

  “Where’s the logic in that?” I blurt. “Psychology? Who can be of better service to people impacted by the criminal justice system than people who’ve been there and done that?” I tell the men about my colleagues at various reentry organizations whose staff included formerly incarcerated individuals, many of them with master’s degrees and PhDs. I also tell them about Martin, my prelaw Prison-to-College Pipeline student, who’s definitely eligible for law school although he may be blocked from passing the bar because of a felony conviction at age twenty-two. Shouldn’t those in the system benefit from being represented by those who have the wisdom of personal experience with it?

  “We’d love to take your classes,” the prisoners sigh.

  “I’d love to teach here,” I tell them.

  “Why don’t you?” says Brent.

  It’s that easy. I’m approved to come back to Acacia next week and lead a one-day autobiography workshop, the perfect opportunity to delve more deeply into the place and contribute a little something to it.

  On the way out, Brian and I hand in our distress buttons. Many times today I felt distress, I think, but never once was this feeling connected to safety.

  “See, Baz. The picture is a complicated one,” Brian reflects. “No one hates the idea of a private prison more than me. But the reality is that the private sector is being monitored; the government is not. Look at how quickly they could schedule a program. When I was inside I went to every program available, every one. And there were barely any to go to. Here at least you have people innovating.”

  ———

  As I start prepping for next week’s class, my friend Craig gives me a hand researching local private-prison politics. There’s no shortage of scandals to deepen my dilemma around the issue, especially when it comes to detention centers, filled to the brim here on account of Australia’s severe mandatory detention laws. All such centers are privately run, either by Serco—the value of their contract stands at more than $756 million—or G4S, an Anglo-Danish company whose name connotes a missile factory.

  G4S has been faulted for lethal neglect and abusive use of solitary; in 2007, their drivers ignored the cries of detainees locked in a sweltering van, leaving them so dehydrated that one drank his own urine. The company was ordered to pay $500,000 for inhumane treatment, although three of the five victims had already been deported. Serco, meanwhile, is being threatened with a lawsuit by the workers’ union, complaining about pay and conditions. Riots, fires, and suicidal protests left millions of dollars in damage at Serco-run centers across the country in recent years, and self-harm by detainees rose twelvefold. A government inspection reported on hazardous overcrowding, inadequate and ill-trained staff, inadequate crisis planning, and lack of a requirement for Serco to add employees when population exceeds capacity. At one detention center, immigrants griped about insanity-producing conditions like long, open-ended detentions; another, in the outback, was shut down amid riots and hunger strikes in 2002. Even Western Australia’s former chief prison inspector has admitted, “These big global companies, in relation to specific activities, are more powerful than the governments they’re dealing with.”

  Such horror stories abound in the United States, as well. At the GEO-controlled Reeves County Detention Center in Texas, for instance, residents rioted in 2009 and 2010 after several detainees died in solitary. But then again, abusive treatment of incarcerated people abounds all over the world—in government-run prisons, too. After one massive riot at Western Australia’s only nonprivate juvenile detention center, for instance, over one hundred juveniles, the bulk of them with serious mental health problems, were transferred to an adult prison and locked in their cells for nineteen hours a day. Craig tells me about a state prison way up in the Northern Territory that’s said to be almost entirely filled with Aboriginal people, with atrocious conditions that are barely monitored. Perhaps, I muse, it’s not about private or public—it’s about accountability and process overall.

  I collect my readings for the autobiography class and send them to Brent, a bit haltingly. Will Malcolm X be approved by the powers that be? Will anything be approved in time? At Otisville, it can take weeks or even months before getting the OK on assigned texts for class.

  But after I return from a jog along the Swan River, through a park filled with happy cyclers and marked by a statue titled Peace Grove, an e-mail from Brent arrives. All readings are approved, printed, Xeroxed, and awaiting me at Acacia.

  ———

  “Tell me how it is that an American girl comes to have a German last name and a Bavarian first name?” The German guard at Acacia’s front gate asks as he scans my ID with his piercing blue eyes.

  “Actually, sir, the last name is Hungarian. And the first name, Hebrew. From the Bible.”

  “Hebrew? Hebrew?” He mutters under his breath. And to me: “No, ma’am, dis is German name. Drei: ‘three,’ singer: three singers, who vould sing every January 6, on Epiphany. That is you: drei singer. Epiphany.”

  “Well, actually, my great-grandfather—”

  Waving me off, he hands me a distress button.

  In the staff lounge, hipster-looking teachers pass around Cadbury’s cookies.
We chat about teaching in prison—one of the teachers’ high school–level class is working on a project asking students to engineer perfect worlds. Then Brent carries me to my classroom, where I rearrange the seats in a grand circle. Instead of infantilizing posters peddling self-help slogans, the concrete walls here are covered with graduation photos and relevant newspaper articles. “Education Can Add Years to Your Life,” reads one. A Serco water bottle rests on my desk.

  Students trickle in slowly.

  “Is this Business Management?” a head pokes in. Next door, I tell him.

  The four men I met last week are here. With the exception of a Sri Lankan prisoner, the whole class is white, and Brent would later explain why. He selected only college-ready students and the Aboriginal prisoners are victims of massive educational disadvantage. This hardly surprises me.

  So, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X land in a room of white Australian incarcerated men.

  As in Uganda, my students have never heard of a slave narrative. But unlike in Uganda, the more we read aloud from it, the more they’re visibly moved.

  “Segregation still exists today, mate,” asserts Sam from Fremantle, his bulky arms carpeted in tattoos. “Australia is one of the most racist societies on earth.”

  “Worse than America?” his classmate challenges him. “America is easily the most racist place on earth. Slavery and all.”

  “Look at our white-dominated world, mate,” Sam asserts. “The thing about Aussie racism, see, is that it’s not easy to shake because people don’t even see it. And for the Aboriginals, it becomes years of mental oppression.”

  I often wished myself a beast. Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!

  Frederick Douglass’s words about learning to read ring out in the prison classroom.

  “We know this feeling,” sighs Andrei. He’s chubby with black, spiky hair; the other day he’d told me he’s a musician, and his mother was a renowned ballerina.

  “Would you get rid of thinking?” I ask. “Is ignorance bliss?”

  “Why should it be?” Sam challenges. “Knowledge is power.”

  “But intellectually knowing the circumstances of your oppression and being powerless to do anything about it—that’s torture,” Andrei argues, pointing vigorously at the handout. “Like the man says, education makes one unfit to be a slave.”

  A man in a Serco uniform arrives with a camera, snapping away. Andrei goes on. “In these circumstances, I’d prefer to be a beast than a thinking human being in a cell.”

  “This Malcolm X fella doesn’t think so,” his classmate chimes in, reading from the next handout:

  I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive … Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

  “He’s definitely got less humility than the Douglass guy,” a fifty-something student wearing small round glasses says. “He’s in your face with it. That last line starts ‘you’—like he’s challenging the reader.”

  “That’s because a hundred years between ’em and not much has changed—there’s still the same kind of slavery only now it’s in the prison cell,” Sam argues. “Mate’s fed up. And the bar is set higher. It’s not about nicely asking for freedom. It’s about, ‘Give us full rights already.’ ”

  “He won’t be an Uncle—what do you lot call it?” a student chimes in. “Uncle Tom, is it?”

  It’s miraculous; the class teaches itself. I couldn’t have scripted it better, this attention to nuance, racial sensitivities, total immersion in the material and scrupulous note taking. When I return for part two in the afternoon—it wasn’t initially part of the plan, but after the men insist, Brent swiftly accommodates—we analyze a short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about a middle-class teen who ends up in a Nigerian prison. Not only do the men adroitly unpack the complex race, class, and gender dynamics of an African country they’ve barely even heard of, they transform the analysis into a weighty moral discussion about lessons learned and unlearned behind bars, and utilitarianism versus moral absolutes. The room becomes an echo chamber of self-referential questions. What does it mean to live comfortably in a deeply corrupt society? Can one ever be fully free of hypocrisy? Is it moral to sacrifice a few in the name of the greater whole?

  “We’re those people, right here in Acacia. Sacrificed for the good of everyone else. An example, deterrents. Scapegoats,” says Sam.

  Later he reads the start of his autobiography. “I am twenty-eight years old but I was only born about two years ago,” it begins. Two years ago is when he came to prison and lost his family’s love.

  It’s funny how a whole life can be defined by one singular moment, whether the body of this life was wholesome and filled largely by good, a single lapse of judgment, a moment of poor decision, can leave even those closest to you with the opinion that your whole life has been one giant slippery slope to destruction, to death, to jail.

  Sam goes on about his memories of a joyous childhood, his siblings arguing about who loves him more. Not anymore, he continues:

  As I sit in my cell and wonder what my family is up to, I can’t help but picture them sitting around arguing over who loathes me the most, who “saw it coming,” who was the most shocked, the most hurt. The irony is that if they could bring themselves to have some form of contact with me, they being my brother Ben and my two sisters Rebecca and Gabe, they would see that not only am I still their little brother that loves them, looks up to them and misses them, but that I have more to offer them as a person and a friend now than I ever would have had my life and lifestyle remained the way it was before prison.

  Like Sam’s, all of the other men’s essays are strikingly well written and thoughtful. Andrei details his childhood in England: he has seventeen years left in prison and was a renowned sound engineer until heroin led his life astray. “People don’t realize how easy it is to become us,” he declares.

  Another student writes of killing his dear friend in a heat-of-the-moment burst of anger; yet another lingers on memories of his father, who worked in Oz’s gold mines. “He was the quintessential miner and rail worker of historical Australia,” he reads aloud. “Big build, tough as nails, jet-black hair always slicked back with a handful of Brylcreem, and loved a can or ten of the cheapest beer he could find.”

  The man stops reading because he starts sobbing. “This was hard,” he says, burying a tear-streaked face in his tattooed hands. “I miss my dad. I really miss him.”

  The room stands still.

  Last week, when I asked the four men if they enjoyed writing, only one said yes. Today they all beg me to return and say they’re going to continue their autobiographies.

  “We were so hungry for this,” Andrei tells me.

  His words remind me of Uganda, where I taught much the same class in a radically different context; Luzira is, literally and metaphorically, as different from Acacia as black is from white. Yet the reception to writing was the same. Both sets of men tapped into wells of interred pain. Both expressed profound hunger for more and deep delight in discovering that expressing themselves on paper provides a momentary breath of freedom.

  Through the oven-dry heat, Brent walks me out of Acacia. It’s one of my easiest prison exits because given the structure in place here, I leave confident that any tiny impact I’ve made will last long after I’ve gone. Brent is all fired up, ready to bring in more college-level instructors and use today as a master class.

  “We’d better return this to the library,” he says, picking up a worn copy of The Art of War abandoned on the ground. He goes on, detailing his vision.

  “I can change the higher education here in under a year, and that’s what I’m go
ing to do. I’ll keep you posted on it.”

  ———

  He does. As soon as I get back to America, Brent writes to let me know that he’s tracking down the next guest lecturer for the Prisoner Brain Trust, the name he’s given to the collective of university-level students I taught.

  It’s not Wandoo or Boronia, with their therapeutic settings and restorative justice foundations. But Acacia is testament to one simple thing capable of revolutionizing even a traditional prison setting: people. Reading Brent’s e-mail makes me think of Mara in Brazil, laboring to make some sliver of a difference in a solitary confinement hell. I think of an officer in Thailand who told me that in his prison there is one officer per thousand prisoners and two officers have been stabbed in the past five months alone. And of some corrections officers at Otisville, who count down toward retirement in language that erases the line between the fences: five more years to serve, they tell me. “The guards are as locked in as you are as prisoners,” said one of the students who participated in the famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment, during which some played the role of prisoners and others, their captors. “They just have the run of the cellblock, but they have a locked door behind them which they can’t open, and so really you’re all together and what you create, you create together.”

  For months, Brent keeps me abreast of the programs he’s launching at Acacia: theater activities, a speaker series, a film festival. Band-Aids they may be, but as the director of Boronia had said, it takes a while to turn the Queen Mary around.

  Back in New York, I continue to mull over the vexed relationship between capitalism and “convict.” There’s a new buzzword in the world of prison reform: the social impact bond (SIB). The government sets a precise, measurable outcome that it wants achieved in a particular population, then vows to pay an external organization—which wants a return on capital but also seeks to do good for the community—only if the organization accomplishes that outcome. Investors provide working capital for the organization to hire and manage service providers, and a third-party evaluator determines whether the outcome has been achieved. If the project succeeds, the government pays the external organization, which then repays the investors with interest. If the project fails, investors aren’t repaid with public funds.