Today I spoke with a prisoner who I once considered a violent gang leader. Twenty years ago, we were both locked inside the walls of a high-security United States Penitentiary. We were both in our early 20s, and we both had long sentences to serve. He went by the name Boogie.
At the time that I knew Boogie, he was a leader of a gang known as the Pirus. The gang did not have as many followers as the Crips, but its members were just as committed to disruption within the penitentiary walls. Prison gangs were a part of life inside the penitentiary. The irony was that prison management set policies that appeased the gangs, and those policies had the unintended but inevitable consequences of encouraging them. It was the gang leaders like Boogie who received the single cells and coveted job assignments. Administrators did not concern themselves with prisoners who were striving to prepare for better lives.
Boogie is now only months away from release. Administrators dropped his security level last year, and he transferred from an East Coast prison to this camp at Taft. I recognized him immediately, despite more than a decade’s passing since I saw him last. He was tall, with a shiny bald head, a muscular build, and tattoos covering his torso, arms, and legs. Our adjustments were different during the early years of our term, though we had been assigned to the same housing unit in the penitentiary and our paths crossed. Choices he made in prison led to a more difficult adjustment than mine.
I asked Boogie how he liked the atmosphere here at Taft Camp. He said that he didn’t like it at all. Boogie said that he preferred the action of the higher-security prisons. His violent past, he said, precluded him from what he perceived were some of the benefits that came with camp placement. He couldn’t receive furloughs, for example, or participate in unescorted work programs in the community. He also complained that staff didn’t give him enough respect. “The only way I gets any respect is when I’m pushin’ a knife into someone or kickin’ some tail.”
Boogie expected release to come before the summer months ended, so he said that he would go along with the camp program. As I listened to him, I wondered why prison administrators ran this system the way that they did. I wondered why, for example, they would set policies that sent prisoners the message that the only way to distinguish themselves was through violence and disruption. I knew that the sentiments Boogie expressed were pervasive through the prison system. I felt the same way. Administrative policies did not encourage prisoners to pursue positive adjustment patterns by inducing such behavior with incentives. Yet those who led gangs or could cause disruption felt appeased.
To me, the management goals seemed misguided. I knew that my perceptions were framed over a long-term prisoner’s perspective. Though in all the years I’ve served, I’ve rarely felt as if the prison system supported or encouraged my efforts to reconcile with society or prepare for a law-abiding life upon release. The system placed its emphasis on the negative rather than the positive, and to me, that seemed the reason it fostered so many adjustments like Boogie’s.
I know that I have a few more years to serve, and I look inward for my motivation. I keep my focus on Carole. To that end, I woke this morning to begin writing before 3:00. I finished writing six blog articles before 7:30. I ran 10 miles and followed the run with 300 pushups. I have now logged 840 miles over the past 92 days.
Saturday, 14 March 2009
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