Broken Buildings, Broken People

Jerry stormed into his cell, shaking with rage. He threw his coat and gloves in a pile on his bunk and looked around for something to smash. It’s futile, and he knows it. The few items in his cell not bolted down were things he had to save for years to buy at his $0.42-an-hour job. He paces back and forth for a few minutes, letting the rage burn off a bit. All in all, it is just too much to take.

Suddenly, Jerry spots a set of folded sheets resting on his shelf. Calm washes over him as he makes a decision. He picks them up, walks to the back of the cell, puts up the privacy screen, and sits behind it on the toilet. Slowly and methodically, Jerry starts ripping the sheets into long strips.

It had been one of those days in prison where a dozen little aggravations create an internal pressure cooker. Jerry’s been down for a couple of decades, so this isn’t his first day like this. He’s a veteran of the old punisher-versus-punished game, and usually, he can navigate it pretty well. But today he slipped up.

For Jerry, the remedy for days like this is to go hit the weight deck, work up a hard sweat, followed by a long shower, and chill out to some music—usually old-school jazz like Thelonius Monk or Coltrane. So as soon as he was back from chow, he got into his workout clothes, stuffed the gloves he’d swiped from the trash at his job in the front of his pants where the guards wouldn’t see them, and zipped his beige canvas coat over the top. He stood at his bars waiting for recreation movement to be called, ready to fast-walk (no running allowed) to the gymnasium so he could be one of the first in and have his pick of the weights.

It’s about a quarter-mile walk, so he was nicely warmed up by the time he got there. When the guard said, “Jackson! Where’s your weight card?” Jerry looked down at his chest, and his heart sank. The weight card that’s usually attached to his prison ID card, hanging on his coat, was not there. He knew it was a lost cause, but he tried anyway. “Man, I’m sorry, I must have left it in my cell. You know I have one. You see me here every day. Can you cut me a break?”

As he slowly trodded back to the unit and climbed the stairs to his cell, Jerry debated what he was more furious at: the guard’s smug look when he replied, “I don’t cut breaks,” or the fact that he had given away the power by asking. Stupid fresh-fish mistakes.

By the time he got to his cell, he was mostly mad at himself.

After he had the sheets torn into strips, he turned around and stared blankly into his hands. Then, stepping over to the toilet, he began flushing one strip at a time.

Jerry knows it’s a bit impotent, bordering on pointless. But on days like this, it is the only way he can come up with to make the system pay. While the sheets don’t cost much, eventually the strips make their way to a P-trap that handles a couple of dozen cells. As the evening progresses and other prisoners flush their toilets, the piled-up strips back up the system and flood the tier with about an inch of stale sewage water. More than 20 guys will start shouting to get the attention of the officers so they can shut off the water and call a maintenance emergency.

This is where the real costs begin. It’s a Saturday, so a maintenance supervisor will have to be called in to snake the system. He gets paid double time for a minimum of four hours. Then incarcerated hazmat porters will come and mop up the water. They’re paid in pennies, but it all adds up. All told, Jerry’s little stunt cost the state several hundred dollars.

Now, at this point, there are a few things you should know. First of all, Jerry is our friend, and his name isn’t really Jerry Jackson. Second, he’s not a bad guy. He goes to his job every day, stays out of trouble, and always finds ways to help out. He’s just been beaten down by a system for 27 years. And finally, while we don’t agree with Jerry’s tactics for getting back at the system, we definitely understand why he feels the need to use them.

Most people are at least minimally aware of the massive cost associated with incarcerating record numbers of people for ever longer sentences. But what escapes many people is that a huge percentage of that cost comes from maintaining crumbling infrastructure. For instance, at the Washington State Reformatory, a prison where we were previously housed, the cost to maintain a facility that houses 800 prisoners was around $2 million a month. Guys like Jerry contribute a significant amount to that figure.

Most prisons in America are pretty easy to describe: aging, dilapidated buildings stuffed with a lot of broken people. Prisons are cruelly inventive in the way they break a person down. This is especially true for those who spend decades behind their walls.

It starts in the way people are decoupled from their past life. Prisons nearly always sit in sparsely populated remote areas far from the urban places most prisoners come from, making visits from family and friends difficult, costly, and infrequent at best. Expensive and restrictive communication policies compound the isolation. Chronic loneliness is an epidemic.

Next, it begins to break down the body and spirit by deprivation of basic needs. Contrary to popular belief, items in prison are not provided for free. Prisoners pay for everything from hygiene items like toothpaste and soap to envelopes, paper, and pens. While indigent prisoners receive poor-quality hygiene items, they accrue a debt that must one day be paid off. Even the meager health and dental services require a copay for each visit that is the equivalent of a day’s wages. Prisoners are forced to work for virtually nothing, purchase items from the prison commissary, and weigh healthcare needs against other material needs.

The final thing that breaks in a person is hope. Prisons have, from the beginning, been torturous places, but historically, prisoners had much shorter sentences and the opportunity to earn significant time off for positive programming. Yet in America, “truth in sentencing” and “mandatory minimum” laws have virtually eliminated parole and time off for good behavior. The result is that sentences in the U.S. have become some of the longest in the world. A guy like Jerry, with a 40-plus-year sentence, might be eligible for only a handful of months in reduction if he stays out of trouble for decades.

It is easy to see how hopelessness can overtake a person.

Meanwhile, broken people like Jerry have few ways to let the world know that what’s happening isn’t working. He grew up in the foster-care system and never did well in school, so his opportunities for a public voice are nonexistent. Any network of support he had outside of prison disintegrated years ago, and advocates for prison and sentencing reform primarily focus on low-level nonviolent offenses. He is utterly and completely on his own.

So Jerry resorts to destructive behavior. It comes at a massive cost to taxpayers. It ramps up the adversarial relationship between prisoners and staff and contributes to deteriorating prison conditions. Although prisoners like Jerry don’t make up the majority of the incarcerated population, there are enough like him to make a significant impact.

The remedy to a system that creates misanthropes rather than good neighbors is complicated, politically difficult, and requires systemic change. Yet the alternative is to keep building prisons and paying to incarcerate guys like Jerry. And Jerry is going to find ways to make that as expensive as possible.