The Devil's Stocking

by Nelson Algren

  “It isn’t all that certain any longer,” Kerrigan reminded Calhoun. “Very few death sentences are now carried out.”

  “All the worse—now the man must live between living and dying, neither being able to feel himself alive nor knowing when he will be dead. Death isn’t merely a matter of the body ceasing to breathe. Death comes to many before the actual death sets in. I doubt, for example, that the professor has ever been really alive. Men who are truly alive possess sensitivity to death.

  “What I would enjoy seeing,” Calhoun reflected, cocking his head at Kerrigan like an owl sitting in judgment, “would be to see the professor in a cell and the death sentence upon him. I can picture him on his knees and he wouldn’t be Walter Mittying it anymore with Joan of Arc.

  “Joan of Arc chose death, the professor writes, in preference to imprisonment. No way. Joan of Arc chose imprisonment in preference to death. It wasn’t until she learned that the imprisonment would be solitary confinement that she chose death.

  “Joan of Arc wavered in the face of death, but the professor never wavers for a moment. He stands atop his desk and challenges death to take him.

  “What a complacement little humbug. He doesn’t know that, even in a campus sanctuary, death can still look in. He’s not as safe as he believes he is. And when death does, the professor will fall to his knees with tears in his eyes and plead for another day, another hour. ‘No! No! I’m not ready to go! Take the head of the department, not me!’

  “And to think,” Calhoun marveled sadly, “a man like that gets paid good money.”

  He and Kerrigan were seated in a corner of the penitentiary library with a guard stationed within hearing distance. Calhoun rose and, confronting the guard, asked him, in a courteous tone, to station himself out of hearing distance.

  The guard shook his head. No. He’d been instructed to stand where he was, and where he was standing was where he was going to continue standing.

  Calhoun tried again. Kerrigan couldn’t hear the words yet caught the tone of threat.

  Again the guard shook his head, No.

  For a long moment then the two men stood eyeball to eyeball. The guard then turned and walked to the back end of the library, out of hearing distance.

  Calhoun returned to his seat without showing any indication of having been, momentarily, disturbed.

  “I can’t let myself be treated like a criminal,” he told Kerrigan when Kerrigan commented on Calhoun’s dress: he was wearing a black dashiki and a headband, both against prison regulations. “If I let myself be treated like that, I’d begin to think like a criminal. Most of the men in here feel that what has happened to them ought to have happened. I don’t. Dressing in prisoner clothes would be to acknowledge openly that I belong here. I don’t.”

  “How are you getting on with the Muslims in here?” Kerrigan wanted to know.

  “I try to have as little to do with them as possible. They want me to play the part of a black nationalist hero, and I’m not a nationalist. Nobody’s nationalist.

  “This means, of course, I lead a lonely life, somewhere between the antiestablishment establishment and the prison establishment. It leaves me with nobody to reason with.

  “It’s like being the only sane man in a madhouse where the doctors are as mad as the patients if not more so. In here it’s a perpetual three-way war between an army of mourners, an army of cripples and an army of thieves. The mourners are our mothers, brothers, daughters and wives. The cripples are ourselves, because we have no power, no choice, not even names. The thieves are the administration. They give us everything we want but nothing of what we need. When a politician opens his mouth, saying he wants to improve our conditions, it’s like an alligator—you can’t tell whether he’s smiling in friendliness or preparing to swallow you alive. Chances are it’s to eat you.

  “Prisons have only one function: to break the prisoner’s ego. His own true function must be to hold onto it. Even though he is doing thirty-to-life, he has to hold on.”

  “I have to agree with you,” Kerrigan assured Calhoun, “that the prison is set up to guarantee the prisoner’s failure. Parole is good business for the prison and they aren’t about to give it up. When you guys get out you’re on a yo-yo; they can yank you back any time. And they will yank you back, because they need you. You get out just long enough to prove you can’t make it out there.”

  “The prison is set up to conceal the basic hostility between administration and inmate,” Calhoun assured Kerrigan, not being certain of how deeply Kerrigan’s perception may have gone. “This is the place where the man who has never had a chance to finish grammar school is made to feel he’s a Madison Avenue executive. He has an office, a staff of six, a title like ‘Personnel Counselor’ or ‘Editor’ or ‘Liaison Executive’—and a coffee percolator available only to himself and his staff.

  “This makes for the greatest possible security within the prison system: the warden owns these people body and soul. They used to be sulking in their cells or scheming in the yard.

  “Now all they want is to keep doing what they’re doing. They never had it so good. All their lives people been telling them what to do. Now they’re telling others. All their lives they’ve been unimportant—the most unimportant men on earth. Now they’re important. Now they matter. What they say goes. Wait till they get outside and find out they’re not important at all. Wait till the first day it rains. When the prisoner gets back on the street he’s been destroyed morally—which is what the prison system is aiming at. It’s easier for a man to become a shadow in prison, and to believe that shadow to be real, than it is to become a responsible human being.

  “That’s where the tension comes from,” Calhoun continued. “It isn’t, chiefly, between black and white. It’s between young and old. The old boys are the ones who buy the Madison Avenue image. They remember the time of the lockstep and this seems now to be too good to be true. To the young one, it’s no big deal that he doesn’t have to work fourteen hours a day in a quarry. Having a basketball hoop in the square doesn’t make him warm with gratitude. He’s not a criminal, in his own mind. He’s a victim. And when you tell him he doesn’t have a name, he’s only a number, he shuts up tight. Look out then: he’s dangerous.

  “The farther you remove a man from the real world, the more dangerous he becomes. Rehabilitation, in the sense the super means it, and rehabilitation, the way we mean it, are two absolutely opposed beliefs. To the super it means making the prisoner presentable: one who has adjusted himself to things as they are and as they always will be. This is the same prisoner who used to get his soul saved by Baptist do-gooders. Now he gets it saved by a visiting analyst whom he has conned into recommending him for parole. There isn’t a psychiatrist living who can outthink these dudes.

  “What we mean by rehabilitation is giving up booze, junk, punks and all the foolishness the prisoner plays at to make time pass. Because when he wakes up in the morning he’s always in the same old cell, facing the same routine, with all that time still to serve. To the super, the prisoner who is now willing to fink has been rehabilitated. To us, rehabilitation means a determination to become a man instead of a number.

  “We can make this a place where alley finks and old-time scumbags learn how to become men. We can put men to work who have never had an honest trade. We can guard ourselves better than the guards can guard us.

  “You can feel the tension in here. It comes from the administration’s realization that the prisoners can run this place better than they can—and that they might, one day, just try it. The administration has the old men on their side but they can’t reach the young men. The officers are scared of the young guys and I don’t blame them.”

  Kerrigan took Calhoun’s report directly to the super.

  Kerrigan began with small matters first. He worked up gradually to the question of the tension within the walls.

  “Prisoners complain about censorship of their mail,” he assured the super. “Can you tell me what
your method of censorship is? What are your guidelines?”

  “If I come on something objectionable I send the book or paper to Dead-Mail,” the super explained. “I never approve of books on psychology, physics or chemistry. We are here to teach the prisoner to rehabilitate himself; not how to become an amateur psychoanalyst or a bomb-maker. The book is marked, in Dead-Mail, for the prisoner upon his release.

  “Rehabilitation,” the super went on, “cannot be achieved at the expense of security. Security comes first here, Mr. Kerrigan. The more you do in security the less you do in rehab.

  “Security is what the people of this state, who pay me, want. I cannot go against the voice of the people.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by security,” Kerrigan told the super.

  “When I say security,” the super confided to Kerrigan, “I mean, first, no grab-assing with inmates. Because the first thing an inmate is going to do is ask you for a light. You give him a light and the next thing he asks for is a cigarette. Next he wants marijuana. Then cocaine. By that time he’s so far into you that, when he asks for a gun, you better get him a gun or he’ll report you to the front office. Prisoners are smarter than guards, you know—inside.

  “Outside, they have no brains at all. If you put a hundred of them out of the front gate and told them they were free, eighty of them would not have the faintest idea of where to turn. They would stand about waiting for someone to tell them what their next move ought to be. There would be a few who, when told they were free, would make a short dash for freedom. All the others would do would be to steal the officers’ cars and make it to the nearest bar.

  “There is a right length of time for each prisoner—but you must never let him know how long he has to serve. What is most essential to security in uncertainty. When he goes into isolation you don’t let him know how long he’s going to be in there.”

  Kerrigan wanted to hear the super tell him in the super’s own words, what isolation was.

  “Isolation,” the super told Kerrigan, “is a stripped-down cell, coveralls for the prisoner but no shoes or socks, a blanket but no mattress. Two plates of vegetables a day and a regular meal every seventy-two hours. Along with the possibility that, any day he is in there, he may be forced to begin his sentence all over again. He’ll come out straightened out.”

  “Isn’t there any other way, sir,” Kerrigan inquired courteously, “of straightening a prisoner out?”

  “The best way to straighten a prisoner out is to straighten the country out,” the super advised Kerrigan, “and that would be to post the same rules in every courthouse in the country and make them apply to every criminal, rich or poor, white or black, weak or powerful. Rape should be twenty years. Robbery should be fifty. Robbery using a weapon, the death sentence. No probation, no pardon. If this is applied, with force, without discrimination, and immediately after the crime, our crime rates would drop eighty percent overnight.”

  “Eighty percent, sir?” Kerrigan asking, keeping his face straight; outwardly marveling that a man so asinine was yet shrewd enough to draw a fat salary.

  The super looked pleased at having made a strong impression on this young fellow.

  “I am proud to tell you, young man,” he was proud to tell Kerrigan, “that the men are living better here than they did at home. They are better dressed and better fed. When a man is released here he is usually in better shape, physically, than he was when he came in. I have achieved this by banning contact visits between inmates and their wives or girl friends. Because that is how weapons and drugs are smuggled in here. I don’t believe visits by children are healthy either. Because it leads to emotional problems in the child. Investigators I have to bar because time after time they have lied to me. I believe that the public should be less concerned with the prisoners and more concerned with their victims.”

  All recreation at Athens takes place in a square a hundred yards long and a hundred yards wide, with a basketball court in one corner and a baseball diamond at the other. Thus an outfielder sometimes finds himself in the middle of a basketball contest.

  The hundred-odd men who report every morning for sick call don’t get physical examinations. Chronic physical or emotional disabilities are not assessed. If a prisoner appears seriously ill, he is sent back to his cell. If not quite sick to death, he is given a pill. He retains the privilege of complaining loudly and bitterly. So long as he does not sustain his complaint too long, too loudly or too bitterly, he is tolerated. He can be dispatched, at a doctor’s word, to Vroom City: the Bug Ward.

  Once in the Bug Ward, the Bug Ward is your home. For keeps. If you’re not a real bug when you enter, you soon will be.

  Two doctors try to minister to over a hundred men in the time it takes to minister to one. “If I get sick in here,” Calhoun told Kerrigan, “that’s it. Good-by. That’s all she wrote.”

  A white guard told Kerrigan: “You won’t find any racism in here.”

  “What about the self-segregation in the mess hall?”

  “Well, for God’s sake, you don’t want to sit down and eat between two coloreds, do you?”

  Two establishments were confronting each other at Athens: the establishment as represented by the Police Benevolent Association; and the antiestablishment establishment, represented by the Nation of Islam.

  Of the pitiful wage paid the hundred and twenty five metal-shop workers, half was held back against the day of their release. Calhoun was one of five prisoners appointed to request a higher wage, and full payment to the men on regular paydays. The shop supervisor passed the request on to the super and all five were keeplocked.

  Two hours later the super received a decision of the U.S. District Court apprising him that his prison was failing to afford due process to prisoners. It added a restriction upon the administration’s right to censor mail addressed to prisoners’ lawyers or to public officials.

  The grapevine carried the good news from cell to cell that night. The next morning more than three hundred men crowded into the metal shop and sat down.

  “We didn’t threaten anybody,” Calhoun told Kerrigan. “Our watchword was: No violence. We sat there the whole day and not once did anybody holler, ‘Pigs!’ And not one lick of work was turned out. We went back to our cells peaceably.”

  The district court decision seemed eminently fair in the councils of the court. Fair-minded, yet mistaken. Because it left the brunt of its enforcement to a tiny group of half-educated white country boys whose sole skill was to hold men in custody. They were men who were suspicious of the big city.

  They had not the faintest hazy notion of what the Black Muslims were all about. When they saw a New York City bus bringing wives, daughters and sisters to the penitentiary, one of them was certain to say, “The African Queen just pulled in. Watch the Zulus coming off.”

  “I intend no derogation of these officers,” the Prison Commission’s chief psychiatrist advised the commission about the prison guards, “but they are not skilled for this particular job—if this particular job is rehabilitation. If the prison’s purpose is simply to keep men off the streets, and to keep them from killing one another inside the walls, these men can do the job. But for anything more than simple custody, they are not fitted.”

  Supervisory positions, for prisoners, paid as high as eighty cents a day. But prisoners were not allowed to handle their own money. The chief psychiatrist suggested that, if the men were paid a realistic wage and allowed to handle their own money, the effect would be rehabilitative.

  Nobody heard him.

  The metal shop was a cavernous two-story barn. Its ostensible purpose was to teach prisoners a trade. Yet only a fourth of the men assigned to it actually worked at the fashioning of shelving and cabinetmaking. Three had to stand about while the fortunate fourth ran a machine. A dozen men were assigned to the print shop’s two presses, each of which required a single operator. The other ten stood and watched.

  The metal shop earned a quarter million dollars annuall
y. Whether they worked or watched, the men were paid thirty to forty cents a day.

  When the same crowd jammed into the shop the following day, the super called J. Pat Wilson, the commissioner of prisons, to speak to representatives of the Prisoners’ Council. Wilson granted the men an increase to a dollar a day across the board.

  For the first time in American penal history, prisoners had improved their living conditions without violence and without outside help.

  No greater error could possibly have been committed from the establishment’s point of view.

  Calhoun—it was to become increasingly clear—in his concern for prisoners’ interests, had not abandoned his own.

  He had obtained the interest of two energetic, effective people. One was the man with whom he’d once boxed in the Police League, Barney Kerrigan. The other was Adeline Kelsey, a mulatto woman of forty, who’d been bullied into prostitution in her teens. Before she’d reached twenty she’d gained domination not only over her first pimp—by the simple expedient of slicing him from forehead to lip with an ivory-handled springblade (which she still carried)—but also over every other pimp within reaching distance, black or white. She’d gained a name for being a dangerous whore.

  She’d gone legit by investing in a fleet of taxicabs. Before that year was out she was running a dry-cleaning establishment. By the time she was thirty she owned four dry-cleaning plants and still ran a fleet of cabs. Now, nearing forty, she was into bail bonding as well.