The post <i>The Marshall Project</i>’s Keri Blakinger appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event—titled “What Would the End of Mass Incarceration Mean for Prison Towns?”, which also was accompanied by a collection of essays on the subject—was held at Veterans Memorial Building, on Main Street in Susanville, California. Susanville has a population of 16,000, nearly 7,000 of whom live in its two prisons. The state of California has announced its intention to deactivate the older of the prisons, California Correctional Center, by June 30, 2022; the city has brought a lawsuit to stop CCC’s closure.

The panel—which brought together a leading scholar of prison towns, a former correctional officer and current mayor of another small California town, and the president of Susanville’s local community college—linked Susanville’s current predicament with national debates about criminal justice. In different ways, the panelists made the case that the challenges of ending mass incarceration are linked to America’s failure to invest in and develop its rural communities.

“There are opportunities in rural America,” said University of Wisconsin sociologist John M. Eason, author of Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation. “And we haven’t focused enough on giving rural communities enough attention to wean themselves off of caging people.”

The event was moderated by Marshall Project staff writer Keri Blakinger, who noted that she herself had served time in prison. She pressed the panelists on why towns become dependent on prisons, and how they might take a different economic or civic path in the future.

Eason, who also directs his university’s Justice Lab, said that while there is considerable attention on the inequality prisons create, we often overlook that prisons were built on inequality. Rural communities with high poverty rates are more likely to have prisons. At several points, he noted that the late-20th-century boom in prison construction has often been the country’s only public works program for rural places.

Eason detailed how he has mapped and created data sets on all state-owned prisons built in the United States—more than 1,600—and analyzed the towns where they are located. When you compare towns with prisons to similar towns without prisons, the prison towns see a rise in median home value and median income, and decreases in unemployment.

But that isn’t the whole story: “Rural communities are sending more people to prison than ever,” he added.

Eason called Susanville an “outlier” among prison towns for various reasons, including being whiter and more Republican than many such communities, and having unusual infrastructure strengths. But he also noted that Susanville was representative of communities that became dependent on prisons after losing major industries.

Historically, Susanville attracted a young male labor force to work in timber, mills, and farming, another panelist, Lassen Community College President Trevor Albertson, explained. But when the first prison, CCC, came in the 1960s, he said, the prison paid more than in the mills, which began to close. With the arrival of the second prison 20 years ago, prisons became dominant economically, at some cost to the town’s commercial vibrancy.

Albertson said that the state’s announcement of its intent to close CCC, and the litigation to stop the closure, had created uncertainty for the town and for prisoners. His community college, whose student body includes inmates, could lose about 200 full-time enrollments. They’ve been working to make sure that their students continue to receive education, whether they stay or are moved to other facilities.

Image by Soobin Kim.

“Where it has been troubling and really problematic with the closure … is the not knowing. I know it wears on folks in town, I know it wears on folks working inside the prison,” said Albertson. The inmates are not immune, either. “No one asks about the folks in that prison.” Those students’ concerns are particularly troubling, he added, because “when you can’t control your own life, how can you control your education?”

Another panelist, retired correctional officer Alma Beltran, is the mayor of Parlier, a city of more than 14,000 people in Fresno County. She spoke extensively about Avenal State Prison, where she said she took a job because of the good pay, job security, and opportunity for advancement.

She also detailed how the town of Avenal depended economically on the prison. Prison employees and sub-contractors drove home buying, apartment rentals, and retail sales. And the spike in Avenal’s population numbers, as a result of the growing numbers of inmates, made the city eligible for more federal and state funds based on population.

In response to questions offered in the YouTube chat room or by text, panelists addressed Susanville residents and their current predicament directly.

“You are very important because you are the first rural institution to close,” Beltran said of the CCC prison. But she added, it won’t be the last—she anticipated seeing Avenal on an upcoming list of closures. “Other cities need to look at what’s happening here, because they might be next.”

Albertson, the community college president, said that “there’s something next” for Susanville. There is economic development money to “reskill” people who need new jobs as well as the possibility of creating a new “center of gravity” that would draw people to the region.

He offered an idea for one such entity: Susanville’s beauty and location make it a strong candidate to be the home of a new national cemetery, which could draw visitors and help the local economy.

“There has to be something beautiful after there has been something ugly,” he said.

Eason, in addressing Susanville, said that many urban people don’t care about rural places, so Susanville has to do the work itself.

“My question is: what’s the local infrastructure that is compatible with growth industries?” Eason asked. “How much investment would it take? This isn’t something you snap your fingers or change overnight.”

Susanville needs a plan, and he offered personally to assist the town in putting one together—because its future is crucial for rural communities everywhere. “If you want to close prisons,” he said, “you have to give rural communities some options.”

The post After the Prisons Close, Where Does That Leave Rural Communities? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the predicament facing Susanville, a small town that is the seat of Lassen County in northeast California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration is righteously trying to close prisons, a historical reversal and acknowledgment that the state has incarcerated too many people for too long. But it is wrongfully targeting one of Susanville’s two state prisons, the California Correctional Center (CCC), for closure later this year. Shutting down CCC would reduce the town’s population, cost jobs, and weaken the town’s economy and healthcare infrastructure.

And state officials don’t seem much to care.

There is no discernible plan for mitigating impacts on the community. They have yet to offer a full accounting of the reasons for their decision, which came with little warning or justification. Indeed, before the state’s announcement last year of its intent to close CCC, the Susanville facility had not shown up on lists of California prisons that should close, whether compiled inside or outside of government.

In the absence of public explanation, it’s fair to wonder about the real motives behind the attempted closure. California’s rush to construct prisons in previous generations was driven by politics, not careful consideration of human impacts. Will the state, in moving to close prisons, repeat that same mistake?

What’s most puzzling about the decision is that there is an obvious alternative prison for closure: the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, in Riverside County. The Norco facility has been in such disrepair—reports have cited cockroaches, rodents, poor drinking water, terrible bathrooms, and dangerous electrical systems—that Gov. Jerry Brown tried to shut it down a decade ago. In 2016, it appeared all but certain to close, but the state gave it a reprieve in order to have the flexibility to stay below a complicated cap on populations in some facilities.

Even if Norco can’t be closed, there are other, better places to shut down than Susanville’s CCC.

Last year, Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), a coalition of groups working on criminal justice reform, put out a list of 10 prisons the state should close, based on five criteria (health conditions, overcrowding, costs, location, and homicide-suicide rates) and surveys of formerly incarcerated people and their families.

Norco was on the list. So was the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, California Medical Facility in Vacaville, California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, California State Prison Los Angeles County, and five prisons in the San Joaquin Valley (Avenal State Prison in Kings County, California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran, Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, and Kern Valley State Prison and North Kern State Prison in Delano).

CURB has welcomed the attempt to close the Susanville prison, noting that its remote location makes it hard for families to visit. (The report also suggests closing all 34 state prisons if possible). But the coalition has criticized the Newsom administration’s process for prison closings as arbitrary and confusing.

That’s an understatement. And the way Susanville is being closed has the potential to undermine the movement away from mass incarceration. The state needs to think about local context, and not just the prison system itself.

Compare the likely impacts of closing Norco’s facility versus closing Susanville’s. Shutting down Norco would likely be an economic boon, officials there have said; the prison site is in a busy part of the Interstate 15 corridor in Riverside County and could be redeveloped as a hotel, or for other business purposes. But in Susanville, geographically isolated in far northeast California, any closure would do real damage.

Correctional officers at the closed prison won’t lose their jobs, but they will be reassigned elsewhere, likely forcing their families to move. And that’s a body blow in a place like Susanville, both economically—officers are well-paid—and because it’s a community in which officers are leaders in civic organizations. Prisoners represent a significant portion of Susanville’s population, more than 6,000 of the town’s 16,000 people; losing one of the prisons means losing funding tied to population. And the town’s healthcare infrastructure, including its hospital, depends in part on serving the people who live and work at the prison.

But such local realities are taking a backseat to politics in this decision. Norco is in the populous and economically growing Inland Empire—a competitive region where Democrats have been making gains—while Susanville is small and on the wrong side of California’s political divide. Lassen County had the highest vote share in the state both for President Trump’s re-election, and in favor of the failed 2021 recall of Gavin Newsom.

Of course, the location of prisons has always been a political issue, with many communities preferring not to host. Lassen, which very much wants to keep the CCC in operation, knows this, and its leaders have emphasized the community’s devotion to its prisons.

In one extended community meeting on the Susanville courthouse steps that I attended last year, State Sen. Brian Dahle, a former Lassen County supervisor, talked emotionally and practically—in ways that did not satisfy the angry crowd—about how Susanville might convince Gov. Gavin Newsom to negotiate with the town, and to close a different prison instead.

“Let’s think like Democrats,” one local community leader declared as they strategized.

But it’s not clear if negotiated settlement is possible. Susanville has taken the fight to court, challenging the shutdown on the grounds that it violates the California Environmental Quality Act. The announced date for deactivating the prison is June 30, 2022, but the legal fight may extend beyond that.

And there is a new political dimension. Dahle, the state senator, has announced his candidacy for governor, and one of the pillars of his platform is public safety. With higher profile Republicans skipping the race, he is considered the leading GOP candidate. If he makes it through June’s first round election, as seems likely, the debate about prison closures, in Susanville and elsewhere, could soon become a statewide issue.

The post California Is Closing the Wrong Prison appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Otherwise, I never gave much thought to the place until the day my parents announced we were moving from the Bay Area to Folsom.

“The place with the prison?” I half-asked, half-accused. It was a refrain I’d come to learn that is, literally, repeated around the world. You can be having coffee in Paris’ Latin Quarter, and if you tell someone you’re from Folsom, they’re sure to say, “Oh, the place with the prison, right?”

We only lived in Folsom for about a year, but I came back as an adult in 1999, and it’s been my home ever since. Most people don’t know it, but we actually have three prisons here. The Folsom State Prison Johnny Cash made famous, California State Prison Sacramento, and Folsom Women’s Facility are all within a mile of each other.

When strangers ask me to confirm that I live in “the place with the prison,” I usually just say yes. But day to day, the prisons are invisible to me. Driving along the city’s streets, you could come and go without ever knowing the prisons are here. They’re set back, off the beaten path—albeit on what is arguably some of the most beautiful property in the region, among rolling hills, oak trees, grazing cattle, and wildlife. One single sign at the entrance to the aptly named “Prison Road” in the city’s northeast corner is the only clue that you’re in fact in a “prison town.”

But when I reached out to my neighbors to ask about the prison’s impact on our city, what I learned surprised me. It turns out that, in ways the naked and uninformed eye can’t easily see, the prison is deeply woven into the fabric of Folsom’s economy, culture, and community.

“It’s so ironic that the very prison that makes Folsom visible around the world is itself so invisible in the community,” Joe Gagliardi, CEO of the Greater Folsom Partnership, which includes Folsom’s Chamber of Commerce, Tourism Bureau, and Economic Development Corporation, told me. He sees that anonymity as a result of geography. Another city official told me that the local people who get closest to the prison are kayakers and paddle boarders on Lake Natoma who dare each other to go past the “No Trespassing: Prison Property” sign, and sometimes get warnings from the prison guards.

Folsom residents, Gagliardi said, see and talk about other entities and places when they talk about what defines their home town. Historic Sutter Street is the town’s center, the 1.5 million-square-foot Intel campus employs 6,000 people, California Independent System Operator (ISO) headquarters (which manages California’s power grid) is here, and the education technology company PowerSchool is also based here, along with the new (ish) Palladio Mall, and the growing “new” Folsom south of Highway 50. But the prisons remain very important as one of the largest employers in the area. They are also essential to our tax base and economy.

The ties are more than economic. Sarah Aquino, Folsom’s former mayor, chairs what is called the citizens’ advisory committee for Folsom State Prison and California State Prison, Sacramento. “The prisons are great community partners,” she said. Folsom non-profits benefit from food sales held at the prisons, she noted. During the pandemic, staff at both prisons held a food drive to replenish the Twin Lakes Food Bank, and hundreds of cloth masks sewn by Folsom State Prison inmates were donated to the school district.

“The prisons are certainly part of what some people think of when you say ‘Folsom,’” said city manager Elaine Anderson from city hall, one of the buildings closest to the prison “But I don’t think of that in a negative light. The prisons serve a critical purpose,” she said, praising their partnership with the city.

Justin Raithel, who chairs Folsom’s city planning commission, recalled serving on the steering committee for Folsom’s annual Community Service Day, and being surprised at the extent to which the prison population can play a role in the town. One example: in partnership with the Lions Club, community members donated old eyeglasses, inmates repaired and refurbished them, and the glasses ultimately got donated back to people in the community. A similar program, administered by the police department, has prisoners fixing donated bikes that go back to those in need of transportation. Dozens of these refurbished bicycles often get distributed to kids at Christmas.

Terry Carroll, publisher of Folsom’s Style Magazine, shared with me another way prisoners connect with the outside—one that stretches far beyond Folsom and is little known in town: a Braille program.

Since 1989, Carroll said, members of the prison population have translated books into Braille.

According to an account of the Folsom program published by the San Quentin News, inmate Layale Shellman earned six different Braille certifications and became arguably one of the most certified and skilled Braille transcriptionists in the world. “I once, during a drug-induced state, not making excuses, but I stole from a blind woman,” Shellman is quoted as saying. “In 1980, I became a Christian, and this is one of the ways you have to make amends.”

“Turns out he, and several other guys at the prison had a real knack for it,” said Carroll of Shellman and the work of translation. Carroll added that the Library of Congress tapped inmates to do Braille translations for all its music. “There were only 60 people in the world who could do it, and three of those are at Folsom Prison,” he said. “That has always impressed the heck out of me.”

If there’s one thing I took away from these discussions, it’s that those who understand the prisons’ role in the community don’t wish to get “far from Folsom Prison,” as Cash sang. They appreciate the positives of the proximity, the closeness, and the value of the connection between the town and the prison.

And that’s changed my own thinking about our “prison town.” I experienced that closeness personally recently when a prison “bake sale” financed the full cost of my son’s Boy Scout Eagle project. There is a virtuous circle to such funds, which can can finance free pancake breakfasts for local school kids, tutoring programs, mentoring, missionary work, and other activities that, God willing, will help keep young people from going to prison in the first place.

We all can wish that we didn’t need prisons, but we do. And since we have them, we shouldn’t see them as a blot on a city—but as neighbors and institutions that are part of communities. Now, when I walk down Sutter Street, I still can’t see the prison itself, but I can’t help but notice its impact all around me.

The post The World Calls It a Prison Town—And I Call It Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the start of my second year, however, I was arrested and jailed twice more.

During that fall quarter, while my peers attended graduate seminars and held discussions about this theorist or that method, my life descended into a blur of constant court appearances. Between them, I maintained my single-father duties and kept up with graduate work as best as I could. But when I was arrested a third time a few months later, I gave up fighting my cases and was expelled from my graduate program. I arranged for my son to stay with my mother, and I surrendered myself for a 180-day sentence which could be completed in 120 days with good behavior.

That might have been the end of my story, but I turned what began as a personal journal into a full ethnography of a Southern California county jail system that ultimately became the basis for my dissertation and a new book, Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail. As an academic who experienced jail with all my senses, I wrote Indefinite to toe the line between what scholars need to know about jail and what someone who’s done jail time needs to see to make the experiences I describe recognizable.

When I tell my colleagues that I conducted an ethnography in a county jail, they start talking to me about state prisons. I tell them how understudied jails are; they tell me about a recent article or book about prisons. When I tell my friends outside academia about my book, they start with congratulatory comments that evolve into concern. One of my bolder friends unmasked the rest: He wanted to know whether I’d seen or heard about “rapes in jail,” and by implication, he wanted to know whether I’d been victimized.

I told him that sexual assault is more common in prison than jail, and he revealed that he’d always thought “jail” and “prison” were completely interchangeable terms for the same place. It’s a common misapprehension; many of my colleagues are only marginally more aware that jails and prisons are different places.

In fact, justice advocates, punishment scholars, and many others hold folk knowledge about jails that alloy myth, sensational media depictions, and some measure of truth.

In some ways, the folktales are understandable. I never shared my jail experiences with friends or family. One of my close friends—who wondered but thought it rude to ask me about fights and sexual assaults in jail—is surrounded by family members who’ve done jail time: his father, an uncle, his two brothers, and his sister. None of them had described their experiences to him. (It’s worth pausing for a moment to ponder why Americans tolerate the expectation that going to jail means you’ll likely be raped.)

So what are the realities of jail time? At any given moment during the last 20 years, there have been over 700,000 persons held in jails in the U.S. Generally, several hundred thousand more persons are in custody in state and federal prisons, but jails are by far the more active organizations, with over 10 million admissions annually.

Jail time always comes first—that is, everyone in prison spent some time in jail, was convicted of a felony, and was given a sentence greater than a year. (Felony convictions with sentences less than a year are carried out in jails.)

Of course, not everyone in jail has been convicted of a crime. Most, in fact, are the “innocent until proven guilty”—at least in name. They generally constitute over 60 percent of the jail population.

As a rule of thumb, prisons are resourced for long-term holding, and jails are resourced for short-term holding.

In practical terms, this means jails are harsher environments than prisons. Anyone who has been to both will attest to this: jail facilities are far shabbier and under-resourced compared with prisons. Whereas the misery of prison time might be eased with a hotplate to cook, a radio, an MP3 player, a television, skill-building programs, time on the yard, the stability of a lower turnover rate, and better food, jail cells don’t have wall outlets. If there is a working television, it is perched on a wall in the dayroom, and who controls what is watched must be worked about among everyone in the housing unit. Skill-building programs are nonexistent. The food (e.g., skim milk, an ice cream scoop of peanut butter in the middle of white bread and an apple) is as likely to kill off an appetite as it is to satisfy one. The churning of new faces and frequent shuffling between and within jails and housing units makes instability a normal aspect of life. And it is possible to go weeks at a time without smelling natural air or seeing natural light. That’s jail.

Not every jail is the same, even within the same county system. Are there gangs? Is a person held in a podular housing unit with common areas or a dormitory-style unit? How old is the jail? How do custodial staff manage overcrowding? Many county jails regularly operate more than 10 percent above capacity. Across different jails, the only constant is the set of the problems that come with doing indefinite time while innocent until proven guilty.

Prison time comes with a release date—maybe 18 months, 18 years, or natural life, but knowing your “out date” creates a goal to achieve. The mind can be oriented toward the future, and where there is a future, there is hope. Jail, with its unknowable end time, robs most of its prisoners of that hope.

Like the presumption of innocence principle, the right to a speedy trial becomes a hollow statement in jail. Nationally, the average length of stay in jail is 26 days, but in every housing unit, there is a cadre of prisoners who spend years awaiting trial or any conclusion to their cases. Two years. Four years. Nine years! If in my research I had not seen the booking numbers, indicating the year and admission number in a long succession of annual admissions, I would not have believed it.

While I met some men who were delaying trial as a legal strategy, most were anxious to go to trial. Their hopeful emotions swelled before every court appearance, only for that hope to be turned against them after their “time in court” amounted to them sitting silently in the prisoner gallery while their public defender, the assistant district attorney, and the judge spoke in legalese before issuing a continuance.

More jail time means dealing with the constant cold. It means dealing with others who have temporarily lost the ability to endure the vagaries of the jail environment and are thrusting their breakdown at everyone.

And it means more evidence of guilt. One may be awaiting trial, but the jail uniform speaks for prisoners. It conveys to all who see it that the person wearing that uniform is a “criminal” and is, therefore, deserving of punishment. The cell lights never go off, so prisoners must learn to sleep under unrelenting institutional lighting or go mad trying. One prisoner is in for shooting a BB gun in an open field, and his “celly” is in for attempted murder. Race relations and gang politics restrict where a prisoner can walk and with whom he can talk, and these conditions are more or less understood as appropriate because you are in jail.

There are more uncertainties in jail than the mind can handle. There is the indefinite nature of jail time. But also an unexpected transfer to a new jail or housing unit in the dead of the night; an unexplained lockdown; a fight; a miraculous release; canceled clothing exchanges and commissary; mealtimes moved two hours ahead or three hours behind; canceled mail and visiting hours. All jail prisoners suffer such unplanned and unexplained events, but a prisoner with a release date can reason that all this mess is temporary.

Prisoners doing indefinite time, however, have only an undefined expanse of time ahead of them. This produces a gnawing need to tie yourself to something real and knowable. In the end, the innocent until proven guilty concern themselves only with the present—the only real thing that can be controlled. For many, jail time is done moment by moment. The future is too uncertain.

To be unconvicted and in jail counts among the most demoralizing kinds of penal time a person can “do.” But let me give you the wisdom a guy gave me while in a holding cell. “In prison, you’re home. You’re just home. They try to make it comfortable for you. Jail is punishment. Prison is like working for the government. You’ll be taken care of. You just do your job, and you’ll be OK. Jail is like working at McDonald’s. You could be fired. The pay sucks. The whole thing sucks.”

The post What I Learned From Being Sent to County Jail appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s my best attempt at describing the separation between the rest of the world, and the inmates here on C-yard at the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison (SATF), one of the highest security yards in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The prison’s design erects huge barriers between the inmates and the city of Corcoran, which lies outside the second “box.”

SATF opened its heavy door in 1997. Three years later, the 2000 U.S. Census found that Corcoran’s population was less than 14,500. In 2010, that number reached nearly 25,000. By 2020, the population had dropped down to 22,000. The ebb and flow largely represents the changes in the number of people who reside here inside the boxes: SATF’s inmate population reached 7,500 in 2005 and hovered around 4,500 in spring 2021.

Despite that increase since the prison’s opening, Corcoran remains a small town by California standards—a status that sets it further apart from C-yard prisoners. We rarely get to see the place. Inmates with county legal matters must travel outside the city to find a court. For medical procedures beyond SATF’s capability, prisoners are taken to hospitals in Fresno, Tulare, and Kern counties. Network affiliates are located in Fresno and Bakersfield, so the only regular reporting on TV that inmates see about Corcoran itself comes from the weather crawl listing the day’s expected temperatures. Daily life in other cities around the Central Valley is more familiar to C-yard inmates than that of the actual town in which they reside.

Over recent years, though, a connection has been slowly forged between Corcoran and some of its resident maximum security inmates. The rather benign force responsible?

Food sales and charity fundraisers.

Local vendors, C-yard’s administration, and the Inmate Advisory Council (IAC)—an elected body of inmates, by inmates, and for inmates—have partnered to make food sales to the inmate population regular events over the last four years. The food sales provide major payouts for the vendors and also benefit local community organizations. Every sale has a designated charitable recipient, which receives a percentage of the money raised.

From start to finish, each food sale requires about a month to organize. Much of the legwork falls upon the IAC representatives. Just some of their tasks include: requesting the desired food vendor; passing out, picking up and submitting food sales slips for approval; and delivering each individual order to inmates on the day of the sale.

The administration handles contact with the vendors, processes the sale slips, and determines the charity recipients. Local restaurants and franchise chains alike—offering Mexican food, Asian food, BBQ, pizza, hamburgers and ice cream—have participated. The charity recipients are rotated with every sale, though an organization called Corcoran Emergency Aid has been selected multiple times. The September 2021 sale benefited the Corcoran Kiwanis Club.

Inmates who participate in the sales know they will pay a steep price for the food. During the August 2021 sale, for example, pizzas were priced between $14 and $21. Burgers in the September 2021 sale cost $7 to $13. There is also the 13 percent obligatory donation fee, added to the top of every order.

Despite these costs, the sales are popular among inmates. The August 2021 sale generated over $19,000 in sales and $2,500 in donations, about average for these fundraisers. Considering that these sales occur nearly every month (perhaps two a year are canceled for various reasons, and five more were scrapped in 2020 due to the pandemic), the scope of the funds pumped into Corcoran and surrounding communities is staggering.

The sales also represent a significant transfer of capital from urban to rural areas. Most inmates on C-yard come from big cities in Southern and Northern California, and receive their spending money from friends and family back home.

The frequency of these food sales surprises inmates newly arrived on C-yard; such events are less common in many other prisons, where the biggest direct expenditures from inmates involve canteen and package purchases. Little if any of that money ends up in the surrounding communities. For Corcoran, where businesses and community organizations have suffered in the pandemic, the food sales supply an additional economic benefit to supplement the many advantages of SATF’s presence.

Earlier, I asked you to imagine a box within a box. Let me add some specifics. C-yard in SATF is a huge concrete warehouse anchored within a massive cage of razor wire and lethal electric fencing that puts the “State Prison” into the institution’s otherwise progressive-sounding name. Among maximum security yards in California, C-yard is exceptional for its lack of inmate jobs and outdoor recreation time. It was designed for warehousing, not programming.

Other SATF yards have afforded inmates opportunities to make a positive impact on the community through mentor and juvenile diversion programs. For years, C-yard offered essentially no rehabilitative activities of any kind. This began to change, slowly, in 2016. Self-help and educational classes increased little by little, until the pandemic shut down those programs for over a year.

Food sales only paused briefly with the arrival of COVID-19; they remain the closest thing to direct contact that C-yard inmates have with the community.

Does it matter that most inmates would rather not pay the charity donation? My own answer is to point out what is clear: that all interested parties gain from the sales. Prisoners get a needed break from prison food. Vendors receive a big dose of business. Community organizations collect critical funding gifts. Those are three big reasons why food sales are a good idea.

But food sales are only one small idea. Here’s an even better, bigger idea: every yard in every California prison, regardless of security level, should offer its inmates the opportunity to make a positive impact on the local community.

Indeed, given the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s present emphasis on rehabilitation, any project that instills in inmates the desire to help others, and the community at large, should be seen as a critical component of that process.

And, even with security dictating some limits, there is no shortage of possible ways to connect our prisoners and our prison towns. Volunteer work could take many forms, both virtual and in-person. Prisons could partner with community organizations to do work inside the prison and in the community. Certainly, the current debates in California communities about crime and punishment and related problems like homelessness would be well-served by including those who live in state-owned boxes.

In the meantime, food sales should and will continue here, until we muster the will and creativity to find better ways of transcending these prison walls.

The post Why Food Vendors Belong in the Prison Yard appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

David turns and jogs up the beach to rejoin his family, stooping to pluck a pair of new-looking white sneakers from the sand. “Man! It’s beautiful!” He’s breathless.

With the marine layer breaking up of its own accord, unhurried by any wind, and the morning gray Pacific turning afternoon blue, I see that Del Norte County has given David something special:

A beautiful day to get out of prison.

David has been living just five miles from the beach for the past seven years, but this is his first time here, exploring the far northwest corner of California along with his family and a handful of friends.

David steps into his shoes and pauses, looking at the waves. “Look,” he says. “As far as I can see, nothing but water. No concrete wall in front of me, nothing obstructing my view.”

David was the first prisoner I ever spoke to inside Pelican Bay—at a performance and art show put on by two Arts in Corrections classes in the B-Yard gym. I had just been hired to teach a new class, audio journalism, which would produce a podcast with the prisoners of Pelican Bay.

It was my first time inside a maximum-security prison. As I stood under the basketball hoop taking it all in—the guards, the cage suspended from the ceiling, the rundown middle school feel of the gymnasium—an inmate with a pen and notebook stepped out of the middle distance and introduced himself.

David Nguyen, from the Pelican, the prison newspaper.

His notebook, I saw, was filled with tiny, exact writing, every margin filled. My hand cramped just looking at it. When he learned I was going to be the audio journalism teacher, David’s eyes lit up. Could I maybe get permission, he asked, for one of those portable digital recorders? I glanced again at his notebook and told him I’d see what I could do.

Spoiler: I could do nothing. It took two months for the equipment I wanted to bring inside—a laptop, a mixer, two mics, a field recorder—to be approved. Meanwhile, I became acquainted with Pelican Bay, both physically and bureaucratically. I signed blank forms. I got two tuberculosis tests. I learned why I couldn’t wear dungarees inside the prison. I was issued chits and keys and an alarm that looked like a garage door opener. I learned what a sally port is.

And I learned that, even inside the concertina and chain-link, you were still in Del Norte; the hump-backed hills of redwood and spruce peering over the concrete walls into the yards were as much a reminder of place as the familiar faces I saw behind bulletproof glass.

Del Norte is not big. I already knew many of the corrections officers (COs) and administrators at Pelican Bay—they are parents and coaches and members of local bands. As I stood one morning with my notebook waiting for a gate to slide shut behind me so that another could open in front of me (a sally port!) a familiar face leaned out of the guard tower to ask if my father is enjoying his retirement.

But Pelican Bay looms large in our small county. When the fishing and logging industries collapsed in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the economic drivers that had sustained Del Norte for more than a century dried up. Unemployment swelled to Great Depression levels. Growth stopped.

Then, in the mid-1980s, the state proposed building a maximum-security prison here to house the “worst of the worst” of California’s incarcerated—the gang leaders and other inmates deemed the most violent and dangerous.

Some locals fought the building of Pelican Bay; Sacramento tried to placate them with promises of a forested buffer, a margin of trees to hide what was, at the time, the highest security prison in the free world.

For better or worse, by the time it opened in 1989, Pelican Bay had already saved Del Norte, giving the community its largest single employer and an economically stable base. Crescent City, which just a few years prior had removed a stoplight from its deserted downtown business district, was now building elementary schools.

But as the ‘90s progressed, life inside, for both prisoners and staff, became more and more deadly. The prison built to house the “worst of the worst” lived up to its reputation.  Riots were routine. Violence was expected. The community immediately outside the prison learned to gauge the severity of an event by the sound of the sirens along Lake Earl Drive.

In an effort to decapitate the various prison gangs, in 2006 the state segregated all the biggest leaders out of the general population, placing them side-by-side-by-side in Pelican Bay’s secured housing unit, the SHU.

What happened next will probably be in history books (or their equivalent) someday, but the first time I heard the story was in my very first audio journalism class in 2019.

I found my two students waiting patiently for me one morning in the A-Yard gym. It was April, and the bright sun crowded through the gym doors. After introductions, I asked them, “What do you want to talk about in this podcast?”

Daniel, a tall, stringy man in glasses, neck tattoos snaking across his jugulars, sat up.  “We could talk about ‘The Awakening,’” he suggested.

Those men gathered in the SHU, Daniel explained, had started talking with each other, trading books, and making plans. Together, they wrote and signed the Agreement to End Hostilities, instructing their subordinates to stop killing each other, to stop feeding the violent environment that kept the entire system-wide prison population perpetually locked-down.

The “worst of the worst” called themselves the Short Corridor Collective, and their next action was to orchestrate hunger strikes that spread from prison to prison across the state, protesting indeterminant SHU sentences and solitary confinement. They argued for the re-introduction of educational and vocational programming designed to rehabilitate inmates for possible release.

It worked. The Short Corridor Collective and the Agreement to End Hostilities resulted in major reforms. The Department of Corrections went on to change usage of the SHU, revamp inmate healthcare, and bring back rehabilitative programs.

I’d had no idea. “That all happened here?” I asked.

“Yup,” Daniel answered, “and it’s still happening.” He went on to tell me about sentencing reforms that had been invigorated by the work of the Short Corridor Collective. Prisoners who had been convicted as young men of 19 or 20 were now having their sentences reconsidered and, in some cases, were being released.

“’Course, none of these things apply to me,” Daniel said. He had been sentenced to life without parole at the age of 23. So why, I asked, did he take part in programming, if there was no chance to come before a parole board and show how he had been rehabilitated?

Daniel cocked his head and smiled, and his response made me question everything I thought I knew about prisoners and prison, while reaffirming everything I thought I knew about humans.

“I gotta keep moving, growing,” he said.  “If I don’t, I die.”

Over the next couple of months, the audio journalism classes filled up with students, the equipment got approved, and we started producing “Pelican Bay UNLOCKED.” My students—up to 15 of them—recorded segments about their time inside, the changes and transformations they’d undergone, their hopes for the future.

When our first episode came out at the end of 2019, a local online news service interviewed me for an article about the podcast. I said something about how these prisoners were part of Del Norte County, too. The comment section caught fire, split pretty evenly between positive messages of support and messages along the lines of, “These men are animals who don’t deserve to be a part of any community.”

Though David was not part of the podcast, I’d often see him on the Yard and we’d catch up, my laptop slung over my shoulder, while David juggled his notebook and college materials.

After COVID shut down all classes inside Pelican Bay, I lost touch with David.  The podcast continued production, though, thanks to permission I’d gotten to record phone calls with my students. During one of these calls I heard that after 15 years inside, David was coming up for parole thanks to sentencing reforms.

And then, months later, I find myself at the beach with David, his family, and his friends. We finish the day like tourists, at the Crescent City harbor, watching the noisome sea lions that spend the day lolling on the docks. As we lounge among the barking animals, David shakes his head and smiles.

“It’s funny,” he says.  “I keep catching myself thinking, like, where’s Pelican Bay? It’s this way or this way…”  He waves an arm vaguely northward. “Like I can’t stop orienting myself to the prison. I wonder when that will stop.”

His words make me laugh. David and his family have a long drive ahead of them, back to Southern California, where his life awaits. But in that moment on the dock in Crescent City, he sounds just like a true Del Norter.

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