Conrad Black

by A Matter of Principle

  In theory, everyone works at this facility, but like most other aspects of this Ruritanian dictatorship, things are not what they seem. The real jobs, which pay tolerably well, are working in the Unicor furniture factory, or as an orderly doing the more challenging cleaning work. In fact, it is a Potemkin village, where most of the jobs don’t really exist, and most of those that do require a maximum of five minutes a day. One friend’s “job” was to write out on a blackboard in the recreation area an inspirational quote for the day, which he took from a book of famous quotations. I suspected him of testing the borders of philistinism in some of this by presenting gradually more outrageous or banal comments and improbably attributing them to famous people: a stirring martial tocsin from Mae West, complicated metaphysical deductions from Yogi Berra, Chauncey Gardener and Forrest Gump statements from Caesar, Napoleon, Lincoln, and Bismarck. (I must confess to a slight role of complicity by incitement.) Other friends spent two minutes a day emptying recycling bins.

  Occasionally the regime would flex its muscles and demand the presence of all registered yard maintenance people at the little hut in the middle of the compound, which squats contentedly under an aluminum flagstaff. The Stars and Stripes were lowered, in a pretentious little ceremony where a few inmates were dragooned into a clumsy simulation of a Marine colour party, at sunset and when a BOP official was killed in the performance of his job anywhere in the country. The death of an inmate passed unnoticed. On these occasions when the nominal ground staff was mustered, the public address announcer called repeatedly for up to half an hour, rousing them, as in the immortal Peter Sellers–Terry Thomas send-up of 1950s British labour and industry, I’m All Right Jack, from their beds, card games, showers, and leisure activities. Eventually, the stentorian summoning produced an astoundingly numerous host of ostensible compound maintenance workers, milling dazedly around the little hut. After a lengthy and chaotic roll call, the demobilized pseudo-workers repaired to their previous pastimes with the countenances of perplexed sheep. The regime, having noisily asserted itself, lapsed back into an inertia as comatose as that of most of its charges.

  I was advised that if I did not arrange a job for myself, the regime would produce one, and it might be unimaginably absurd or tedious. Because of the books I had written about Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, I was known to some of the library and education community, and recommended for a job as an English tutor for high-school-leaving candidates, in the vocational training department.

  This proved to be a turn of luck. There was initial skepticism that there was any need for a tutor, but I was given a desk and a comfortable chair and those entering the vocational training pavilion could see me at a distance, at the end of a room about a hundred feet deep. It was a little like a scene from The Great Dictators, as I watched people approach for half a minute before they reached me. Like anything in such a climate, it grew from a desk and chair to three tutors, a group of desks and filing cabinets, and a steady stream of students. Our success rate at helping people graduate from secondary school was high. The number of matriculants more than doubled because of the tutors, and we had the pleasure of helping some people seriously in need of it.

  At first there would be a few people straggling back and I would help them with essay writing, sentence structure, and spelling. I would start with light conversation to put them at their ease and to get a preliminary idea of how much of a challenge it was going to be. It quickly became obvious to me that even after desegregation the education of African Americans had largely been a mockery designed in many parts of the country to keep the blacks in ignorance and subordinacy. I had always disliked teachers, except for a few very good and stimulating ones I remembered with gratitude and admiration. But with this experience, I saw the joys and frustrations of teaching. Many of those entrusted to me started out surly and skeptical, but after a bit of jocularity and clear evidence that I was not part of the custodial apparat, but a victim of it also, things loosened up; we both made an effort and all my candidates graduated, though some required two or even three tries at the examinations. It was often important to make the point that we owed it to ourselves to make the most of the sojourn. I represented high-school graduation as opening up a possibility to develop a solid legally unassailable income, through higher education or a skilled trade, an alternative to drug-related law-breaking, which led straight back to prison with one denunciation, inevitable in that activity. I had some motivational success, and it was very fulfilling helping them to get a foot on the Up escalator. Because of the pride of successful students and their families, and the generous applause I received, the graduating ceremonies were among the more moving occasions I have attended.

  THE EXCITEMENT OF MY STUDENTS when they learned that they had graduated was affecting, and I shared in it. One of them – a twenty-nine-year-old African American with gold teeth and a shaved head who had the equivalent of perhaps a grade five education and had six children with five women, none with the antiquarian benefit of wedlock – turned up religiously every day and worked his heart out. The day he learned that he had matriculated, he risked being banished to the SHU by entering my unit, finding me at the computer, and embracing me. Rarely have I been so happy for anyone, or so happy to have been helpful to anyone.

  The essays I received from students were sometimes unexpectedly memorable. A three-hundred-and-fifty-pound man writing about his favourite sport explained in graphic detail his love of contact, especially of the variety that broke other people’s bones, which he described vividly. A lusty young southern lad wrote of his favourite and least favourite cities. He had been short-changed by call girls in New Orleans, which left him so disgruntled that he welcomed Hurricane Katrina because New Orleans “needed a good washing down.” But he had been so splendidly served in the Korean bath houses of New York that he revered the Big Apple as the “world center of creative perversion.” He seemed to be qualified to express such an opinion.

  One of my fellow tutors, who often worked at the front of the vocational training area, had the habit of screening out the most idiosyncratically sluggish learners and wandering back to the area I shared with my other tutoring colleague, a very pleasant and conscientious former U.S. Navy nuclear submarine torpedoman and graduate of the Navy’s nuclear propulsion course. The screener always wore a hangdog look of grief as he approached, as if his best friend had just died, to explain that he had to inflict “Will” or “Alphonse” on us. One of them believed verbs were just nouns with “to” in front of them and was not certain that General Washington had been correct “to revolution.” Another thought that any effort to persuade him to learn anything was a government conspiracy to dominate him, as he explained through narcotics-blackened teeth. Yet another was so sex obsessed that to hold his attention for more than a couple of minutes, it was necessary to resort to the most innovatively salacious, foul-mouthed language that had crossed my lips since I left Australia.

  Our efforts to help our assignees took place against a backdrop of the culinary arts instructor holding forth in a loud voice about every subject under the sun on the other side of a seven-foot partition, including, within earshot of the female supervisors, the inadvisability of allowing restaurant waiters to “scratch their balls” in the presence of paying customers. If we rose above a whisper he appeared like a rotund Prometheus at the door of his enclosure, complaining of distractions to his “important” work, vastly outdistancing our efforts to help people graduate from high school and become eligible for university. It was impossible not to overhear his stentorian pontificating about the French Revolution, the history of restaurants, and the eating habits of U.S. presidents, or conducting hour-long lamentations about the theft of a minuscule container of garlic powder. He was a very agreeable man, and was an able self-promoter. For giving his part-time cooking course, he was apparently paid more than the wages of two correctional officers annually. (He made wickedly good cookies.)

  It was impossible not to hear some
strange things at times. On one occasion, I was picking away at the emails when someone on the telephone, about twenty feet away, bellowed into the receiver: “I didn’t kill the mother fucker, but he deserved it! Don’t make me break out of this prison and come and give you a whuppin.” Street-level dialect is a cultural and acoustic challenge, but it has its rewards.

  One of the country bands that specialized in old-time Hank Williams, Merle Haggard songs reached an affecting state of vocal drama with prison songs: “Mama Tried” and “My daddy warned me, but I didn’t listen!” There weren’t many genuine cris de coeur in this place.

  One of many comical diversions of my life at Coleman arose from the libel suit launched by the owner of the London Daily Express, Richard Desmond, against the calumnious Tom Bower. Desmond sued over Bower’s claim, in his malicious novel allegedly about Barbara and me, that I had taken Desmond over the barrel in my lawsuit against him in 2003, referred to in Chapter 3. I sent him a supportive email and in his scatter-gun enthusiasm, Desmond flew from London to Orlando and bustled to the Coleman facility to concert with me, despite warnings from Barbara and Joan that gaining entry required certain formalities. I managed to get approval for him for the following day, but he returned to London, rebuffed by the impenetrable pettifogging of the BOP. He had nothing to show for his whirlwind excursion (but perhaps the obligatory Mickey Mouse cap from Disney World given to most Orlando visitors). Unfortunately, Bower won the case, but it was a pleasant, glancing reacquaintance with Desmond who is nothing if not an entertaining character.

  My schedule was not too uncivilized. On weekdays I normally got up at about 7:15 a.m., had some granola and tea in bed, washed, dressed, went to my tutoring functions, ate lunch about 10:30 in the dining hall with my colleagues, worked on emails for about two hours, returned to work from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., worked on emails and read the just-delivered mail and newspapers, took a nap from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., rowed 5,000 metres on a machine in the leisure centre, practised the piano for an hour, socialized over Colombian coffee until recall at 8:30 p.m., spent the evening reading, writing, and phoning (mainly Barbara), showered and so on just before midnight, and read in bed and did the USA Today or National Post crossword puzzle until between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. I usually had visitors on Monday and Friday, and on the weekends slept until 10 a.m. and spent the days as I pleased. There was always a heavy correspondence and columns to write and a lot of reading to do. Our Roman Catholic weekly service was on Sunday at the civilized hour of 12:30 p.m., and I was often a lector. The only television program I regularly watched was Damages with Glenn Close, on Monday nights. It was a fairly predictable but also productive routine, and it beat breaking stones.

  I sometimes stopped in my thoughts and reflected on what brought me to this singular way station, as when one of the senior officers, a sociopath who prorupted noisily around his little domain, started raving at me for taking too long to answer a recall to the units at night. (One of his early brainwaves was to remove an air-changer from the leisure centre because it might be used by inmates to launch a projectile at the captain’s and lieutenants’ office. The idea is not entirely without merit, but there are easier ways to accomplish it.) I stared at him quizzically, as I often did here, but generally I just soldiered on, making of it what I could, serene yet that “The night will end.”

  ROUGHLY ONE-FIFTH OF THE people in the Coleman low-security facility, discounting a good deal of fabulism, are, like myself, not guilty of anything. Approximately an equal number love it here, and if the gates were opened and the fences taken down, they would remain behind and cling to the sparse furniture like tree-huggers. They would be skidrow alcoholics or drug addicts on the outside, and at Coleman they have a roof over their heads, three meals a day, free medical care (of indifferent quality but better than they would receive on the outside), and companionship, and they watch television and play cards all day and have cheap access to email.

  The population of U.S. mental asylums has declined since 1975 from 600,000 to 50,000, so these unfortunates are treated as criminals. Their contingent at this facility are much in evidence, shuffling about in an almost comatose state. Most of the remaining inmates are guilty of some genuine offence but at least half have received draconian sentences. And many of the offenses, including almost anything to do with marijuana, are nonsense.

  The inmates who are grateful, resigned, or medicated into insensibility rush, or even run, to the dining hall and generally walk with a spring in their step (apart from those who are too sedated) that I have never observed in the confined members of any other species (a discouraging contrast to the hauteur of caged lions and tigers and the majestic indifference of confined bears and elephants). They adjust to close horizons; most have no interest in the outside except perhaps for some sports matches and bets, and juvenile, violent, and vulgar videos and films. They make appointments to see each other, shake hands whenever they meet a friend or acquaintance, even if it is just ten minutes since they had last met and shaken hands on parting. This is the result of living in a shrunken world, circumscribed by fences, endless instructions delivered by an ear-rattling public address system, or an even more acoustically irritating correctional officer screaming banalities at point-blank range. There is an eerie movement of people; men one has become quite friendly with are suddenly gone. There may be a letter or two after, but they vanish into the vast, seething underclass of America, remembered but unlikely to be encountered again.

  There is not one that left without my good wishes, but many will be back in a system that thrives on its recidivism rate and has every economic incentive to maintain it. The United States is alone among advanced countries in seeking an ever larger prison system, the longest possible retention of all incarcerated people, and the maximum possible likelihood of their return to custody. It makes only a token effort, entrusted in practice to the teaching inmates such as me, to assist the prison population in relaunching their lives. It is an evil system that awaits the millions of unwary, improvident, and felonious, after they have been crowded through the debased gauntlet of American justice, which in practice, as prosecutors win an implausible (and almost totalitarian) 95 per cent of their cases, is less a due process than a demonstration of the force of gravity by the operation of a trapdoor when an accused is frog-marched onto it.

  I had thought that the U.S. custodial system discouraged and despised the squealer, the snitch. But with the suffocating pervasiveness of the plea bargain, the prisons are full of people who have borne false witness, and of their victims, and of those who have been severely oversentenced to make an example of them. Like the whistleblower in the workplace, the squealer-plea bargainer has become the key figure in the contemporary American courthouse, the Minuteman of the new American Millennium. The Coleman Low facility, like many others around the country, is full of people who constitute a brimming information pool for the FBI centre at the complex, which endlessly dangles reduced sentences before convicts in exchange for incriminating testimony about others, whether accurate or not. Its informants honeycomb the inmate population, scouring for plausible scraps of damaging information or possible fabrications that might transpose some of their sentence on to someone else (a reduction in their sentence for a conviction or augmented sentence for someone else). The cancer of the plea bargain has spread through the prison system and jaundiced or otherwise afflicted everything within. Before and after the trial, it is a regime of unrelieved subornation. The prison is a seething mass of informers and fabricators, in what must be almost the greatest possible affront to the constitutional (Fifth Amendment) guaranty of due process. This atmosphere didn’t particularly affect me, as I am innocent and no one else here could plausibly claim to know anything about my case. But this cynical bartering of human souls – prisoner betraying prisoner – contributes to the systematic degradation of all inmates despite the human qualities of a reasonable number of the people here, both personnel and residents.

  Arriving visitors are harassed,
sometimes in an almost sadistic manner. When an old friend from Palm Beach in his seventies, now wheelchair-confined, arrived with his wife, he was sent to the WalMart store twenty miles away to change his trousers, which were not an admissible colour. When he returned, his wife was not admitted because she did not have the photo identification that they required, though she did have other photo identification. My friend’s driver could not push his wheelchair to the visitors’ centre because he was not an approved visitor, and the helpful correctional officers declined to push it, ostensibly because of legal concerns, even when the visitor offered to write out and sign a legal waiver right there. So my friend, who did not have the strength in his hands to turn the wheels, turned the chair around and pushed it slowly and painfully backward with his feet, until other arriving visitors took charge and pushed him the hundred feet or so to where I was waiting. He exited in the same way.