Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America

Community Activists

238 Community Activists introduCtion No one feels the stakes of prison transformation more intimately than the prison’s inhabitants. The essays that follow witness how well located they are to effect the change required. These are essays by men who dare to make improvements that would turn the American prison into a more functional, safe, and socially constructive institution—for staff, inmates, and the public at large. But even as the incarcerated enter the frontlines of community activism, we see them paying the price for their efforts. Robert Saleem Holbrook represents a long tradition in American letters: from slave narrators like Moses Roper, Fredrick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, to imprisoned Black Power writers George Jackson, Nuh Washington, and Jalil Muntaqim. Holbrook is an African American man for whom legalized punishment has done less to wear down than to move his spirit into political awareness and action. Holbrook’s “From Public Enemy to Enemy of the State” looks back at his youth, when he was the face of the enemy targeted by the War on Drugs. Today he is a man thinking and organizing for prison justice; although he is less violent and disruptive in his behavior, because he writes and speaks up for himself and his fellow prisoners, he is perceived by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections as more dangerous than ever before. Corey John Richardson’s “The Convict Activist/The Convict Vote” lays an urgent charge upon other incarcerated people as well as those who have recently been freed. Richardson has learned to endure everything that’s wrong within men’s prisons. But what he cannot abide is the complaisance of his peers. In his exasperation, we get a glimpse of just how much political potential goes for naught,1 unorganized and ineffective, both behind prison walls and among those who leave them. Richardson knows too much to expect changes in prison policies until pressure from higher, civilian authorities is brought to bear upon them. And no one has better reason to bring such pressure to bear than prisoners and former prisoners. Larry G. “Rocky” Harris is a self-proclaimed jailhouse lawyer, using his skills to sue the state and the state employees who violate the law inside Illinois prisons. In “When Is It Enough?” Harris writes as a former taxpayer, angry about the costs incurred when the state covers the expenses of defending its employees. Like other writers in this volume, Harris bears witness to an institution that has eluded public accountability, becoming, to contractors and correctional officers’ unions, an archipelago of fiefdoms; these interested parties profit from prisons that damage their wards and thus do little to aid, and much to chip away at, the public’s physical and financial security. There are few incarcerated men or women in the United States with more experience of, or who can point to more success in efforts at prison reform than Kenneth E. Hartman. His essay, “The Trouble with Prison Reformers,” documents the formidable obstacles to reform presented by prison staff, their unions, politicians, and the images of prisoners entrenched in the minds of the public. Hartman presents a truth that would seem obvious were it not for decades of professional and popular complaisance with prisons that do no one any good: prisoners know Robert Saleem Holbrook 239 what prisons need to do to help them quit the lives that brought them to prison. And no one can stand in the place of incarcerated people to provide this vital perspective. This section of Fourth City represents a much larger number of men and women who might be empowered to make the changes that prisons need: the jailhouse lawyers, those who fight to create prisoner-grievance review boards (or make them effective), those pursuing the crooked path of legal redress for violations of basic rights, the program leaders trying to make existing structures work as well as they can, as well as those who have real organizing skills but have been stymied so often and so off-handedly by staff that they have returned to watching their own backs. The intellectual and organizational skills needed to transform Prison City exist today inside its walls. Once we see that they are not the monsters we like to believe they are, we might begin prison reform in conversation and collaboration with the incarcerated men and women who know best what to do and how to do it. notE 1. See Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza, “Lost Voices: The Civil and Political Views...