Living organisms are built of cells. Prisons are also built of cells—but if they’re organisms, they’re dying, not living. The nucleus of a prison cell is the human heart, a core of love, fear, pain, boredom and rage.
Call them cages rather than cells. They are schools for car-thieves, perverts, robbers and revolutionaries. After Attica and the
Take aspirin for fever, but if it’s pneumonia you’re dead anyhow.
Since the fall of 1969, I’ve taught college courses in composition and literature in all four “facilities” of the Missouri Department of Corrections: the main prison (
Also heard: footsteps echoing on concrete and stone; heavy steel gates clanging; voices made hollow by PA systems and bullhorns; the clatter of utensils; heavy rushes of showers and toilets flushing.
There may be, I’m sure there are, sadistic and opportunistic guards and prison officials. Someone has to bring in the dope and pornography and booze (I’ve heard it said, “You can get anything in here but a real woman”), and in handling such merchandise an inadequate salary is supplemented. However, I feel that most are not any better or worse than other poorly educated farmers (the guards) or politically sensitive public servants (the officials). Money would help. Pay the inmates decently for shoes and license plates and growing their own tobacco. Pay and train the guards better. Build decent prisons (decent? prisons??).
But there’d still be the nucleus, the human heart that animates that 6’ by 8’ cell. Let there be conjugal privileges, home furloughs, work and education release, no censorship of mail.
But there’s still the human heart, celled in steel and cement. A couple of years ago I told an inmate class I might write an article about prison teaching, to be submitted to a Christian magazine for college students. What, I asked them, would they like me to say? “Tell them,” one man replied, “tell them we’re human.”
A thief is someone’s child, a murderer someone’s parent, a rapist is a brother, a whore a sister, a junky is someone’s lover, The man who is desperate, anguished, sick enough to stick a knife in someone, to rob a bank, to shoot heroin—the man or woman who does those things, is convicted of them at least— doesn’t, when the steel gates clang shut, cease being human. The human heart survives the indignities of “orientation,” the stripping and searching, the mockery, the murder of all dignity.
The human heart survives these things. And bleeds.
To teach composition, you have to be critical. You have to be able to say, “No, this isn’t right, this doesn’t get it—fry this, do that.” But some of the papers I’ve got teaching in prison are such raw pieces of the heart that I can only lay down my red pen and weep. Literally.
One assignment I give is to write a descriptive-narrative paper that gives concrete, tangible substance to an abstract concept. An inmate student once wrote this paper on “contentment.” He described how he learned to be content under any circumstances after slashing his wrists with a piece of metal torn from the floor of a solitary cell. As he blacked out, he said, he realized he didn’t want to die, and after recovering, he found true contentment. Considered in cold, red ink, it was a poorly written paper. Considered as a human document, it was as moving as anything I have ever read—and impossible to grade.
Another convict, who has gained a good deal more fame, once wrote, “I have learned to be satisfied with what I have” (Philippians 4:11, TEV). The paper I just described has helped me understand what Paul meant when he wrote from prison.
It seems clear to me that, needed as they are, prison reform and rehabilitation of inmates will not do much good until society is rehabilitated and reformed. If our society continues to honor economic rape, political theft and mass escapism, no amount of “reform” limited to prisons is going to remove sexual rape, armed robbery and drug addiction.
I certainly do not expect the perfect society until the return of the Lord—but then, he was a condemned political criminal who said that to visit the imprisoned was to visit him.
I’ve been a Christian for about nine years. As I’ve grown in understanding how the Gospel fits life, I’ve become more radical. For three or four years I played at being politically conservative, a la The National Review. But as I continued to study the Bible, I found great discrepancies between right wing politics and God’s judgment on human beings and their institutions. Teaching in prison also helped to radicalize me. When I began there, I had little concept of what was involved in prisons; what I learned turned my head around.
If I’ve learned one thing from teaching in prison, it is this: convicts are human. Simple? Obvious? Yes, sure. I teach at the Rolla campus of the
Many people, including some more sophisticated, seem to feel that teaching in prison is dangerous: “Is there a guard in the classroom?” (No.) I was nervous at first, and was surprised and humbled when I realized I was dealing with human beings and not extras from an Edward G. Robinson flick. I’m in more danger driving the 65 winding miles to the prison than when I’m inside the walls.
I’m not offering answers. I don’t have them. But the Lord Jesus requires us to live out the Gospel in this world. We are to be carriers of mercy and forgiveness, and to be witnesses for justice and against inhumanity. An evangelical cliché has it that “Christ is the answer.” But let us beware of offering cheap consolation to those who suffer, rather than suffering with them. Too often our glib “witnessing” degrades both the Gospel and those we offer it to.
Yet Christ is the answer, and our task is to live that out fully in our lives, not using it as a buffer against suffering, but as love to bind us to those who suffer.
At the main prison, the men in vocational, GED and college classes get one “square visit” with their families a year. Each fall the prison has a commencement exercise, at which vocational certificates and elementary and high school GED certificates are awarded. Also, the college students can now earn an Associate of Arts degree.
I’ve attended these commencements each fall since 1969. They’re held in the prison gym, and inmates in the school programs may have their families—parents, wives, children, girl friends, brothers and sisters—attend. “Straight” people and cons are seated together in folding chairs on the gym floor while degrees and certificates are awarded. Not much attention is paid to the formal program. Hands are held, children dandled. The prison band, The Versatiles (who are good), play rock and jazz before and after the program. A few men dance with wives or girls. Cake, coffee and punch are served.
Finally the families leave. The men go back to their cells. The floodlights glare along the walls and into the yards. The prison cats fight and hunt roaches and rats (for some reason, there are a lot of cats).
The drains of the prison are clogged with the offal of rage.
The commencement over, the families gone, the inmates return to their cells:
The fathers, the husbands, the sons,
one and each step back to the cages
we all make and fill;
their children, their wives, their parents
step too back to cages with subtle bars
we all make and fill.
The cells’ key is cast
of bloody bent nails:
only wounds keyhold this cage.
These lines are the end of a poem I wrote about the first commencement I attended at the prison. I hope they express forcefully what I’ve been trying, to say: convicts are human— and we straight people have our own cages, are differently, but as truly, locked in as the convicts. Let those of us who know Mercy share it. Redemption is not easy—but it’s free. Rage, hate, frustration—and I feel these—may be redeemed by art, prayer, acts of mercy, justice and love.
“With his own body he broke down the wall that separated them and kept them enemies.” (Eph. 2:14, TEV).
Tear down the walls!
Eugene Warren taught English at the University of Missouri, Rolla, when this article appeared.
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