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The success of Positive Parenting served as a bargaining chip, or edge , in a scheme to implement a new orientation program at MICC. Associate superintendent (now superintendent) Alice Payne and then education director Tom Rabak (their real names), the two professional colleagues who enticed me to the island to coordinate the program, had a far reaching project in mind: confront inmate attitude and rattle the foundation of the convict code.
Employees who would do the implementing groaned. They're burdened with an intensified case management program developed at DOC headquarters and an inmate population explosion. Someone said, "Enough, already." Alice, a petite, attractive blonde with Scandinavian determination, extensive corrections experience, and a look in her eye, pointed the forefinger of her right hand upward: she meant business.
When Tom introduced the program that he and Alice named Project Social Responsibility to the education team, he met similar resistance. Instructors and office personnel balked at the logistics: teachers' time, classroom space, increased paperwork. Tom who'd grown accustomed to dissenters among his staff listened to their arguments for a time, turned on his boyish smile, and said, "Just do it!"
The MICC superintendent, William Callahan (now retired), known for saying, "I will not warehouse men," had already signed off on the project and declared it mandatory for every man who arrived at McNeil Island. We went ahead, preparing to confront attitude.
Attitude, the old convict code, is the stuff prison movies use to let audiences know who really runs the joint. Old cons don't do ,'mandatory," they're doing prison: get out of their way, leave them alone, but make sure the chow's good, there's plenty of yard time, the phones are working, and mail gets delivered six days a week. "Orientation?" they said. "Man, this place sucks."
In some cases, dealing with old cons routed through Project Social Responsibility to their new confines in what was yet another old prison was easier than coercing DOC and education staff to participate in the program's delivery. Their comments regarding the system were more printable, but no less contemptuous. I faced a complex challenge.
But change was in the air. After problems in Washington state's prison system in the seventies and eighties, including three highly publicized heinous crimes committed by men on work-release status and one serious riot at the state penitentiary, the media inspired taxpaying populace demanded that the Department of Corrections get tough on crime now. Washington, like most states, saw its prison population double during the nineties. Old cons accustomed to running prisons rubbed elbows with young, streetwise toughs from low income inner city areas where they sold drugs and generally did the rip and run. They joined forces with their homies inside. They were a different breed, with a different attitude.
Sprinkle in some white collar offenders, some domestic abusers, some vehicular homicide convictions; stir them up and transport them to a medium custody prison on an island in Puget Sound; and keep them in lockstep on chain day (Thursday) and orientation day (Friday) while they hone their attitude. Warn them to stay cool over the weekend, round them up again on Monday morning, deliver them to the education department, and give them one week to figure out how they're going to make prison work toward release and reintegration into a society that would just as soon throw away the key.
Therein rested the crux of my job: show all of them how to use prison time to prepare for successful reintegration into the real world. I was no longer just the parenting teacher, my favorite role. I was now Project Social Responsibility coordinator and chief confronter of attitude at McNeil Island Corrections Center. I met every chain on Friday, right behind the sergeant who said, "Listen up. It's mandatory. You mess up, you go to the Hole; when you get out, you go to PSR. Simple as that."
I met them again Monday morning and delivered eight hours of the twenty they spent in the week long program. I earned a reputation early on as being tough but fair minded, opinionated but interesting, old but not bad looking. Looks are relative anywhere, especially in prison. Some called me the teacher with white hair; others the silver fox. No matter their games and cons, they didn't get much past me. I'd taught female felons for eleven years, a good training ground. Every corrections officer I met who had worked with both female and male felons said dealing with men was "a piece of cake" after coping with "the ladies."
I had help: twenty nine DOC and education staff members, plus inmate teaching assistants (TAs) chosen for their prison moxie, test scores, and ability to translate for the growing Spanish-speaking population. Inmate TAs are critically important in prison classrooms. Many could do the teaching, and with education dollars tightening, they may take over more of those responsibilities. My first PSR teaching assistant, Rafael Gomez, was a decent and gentle man who spoke fluent Spanish and English and knew his way around the system. Inside the fence there are some things only inmates can accomplish. He served as a role model for new inmates without losing the respect of the old cons, and he often kept me from going into orbit.
Mr. Gomez was doing time for domestic violence, stabbing his wife in a fit of jealousy. He was respected by other inmates for "being the man," and for "keeping his woman in line." In the months he served as the PSR TA, I never saw or heard a whisper of violence, and I wouldn't have known his crime had he not chosen to tell me. He's Hispanic; I would have guessed drug related crimes, a stereotype, I admit. Outside the fence our paths would not have crossed. We lived in different worlds; I had little understanding of his, and I weighed cultural expectations in my evaluation of him. Domestic violence is not something I slough off as insignificant, but it didn't prevent me from liking, respecting, and relying on Rafael Gomez.
If I were to meet him now, in the free world, I'd give him a big hug.
In Washington state, all male inmates enter the system at Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, a dying lumber town. There they go through intensive testing and review for classification before being assigned to the prison where they'll start serving their time. Classification is the point system process that determines an inmate's custody status. They start with points based on their crime, earn points by programming, lose points if they get infractions. If an inmate has too few points, custody is closed, and he is sent to an intensive management or close custody prison with fewer privileges, closer surveillance, and little movement within the facility.
Many of the men who went through PSR started their time with medium custody status for short to mid range sentences of three to seven years, but there were a fair number on restricted-minimum status: their points were high but they still had too much time left to qualify for an honor camp placement. They'd been convicted of more serious crimes, had done time at a close-custody institution, and were getting closer to release. Some of them had been around and seen it all, and after verbal expressions of displeasure, employed nonverbal tactics meant to intimidate mere mortals such as teachers. When they couldn't stare me down, they turned and stared out the windows. I left what some presenters considered the safety of the lectern and made my way to their chair desks, to make eye contact and start some nonthreatening dialogue.
"What do you see out there? Deer browsing Just outside the fence? Lucky deer, they come and go as they please."
Invariably someone snickered. A snicker beats a sneer every time. I prowled the room, looking at badges and making comments that included DOC numbers, posture, and attempts to push chair desks through the back wall or drag them out the door into the hallway. All my antics and delays were designed to give the teeming testosterone time to settle.
Sometimes, to rouse curiosity, gain empathy, or get their eyes off the clocks, I told them one of my early MICC experiences. "I was in the main corridor waiting to go through key control when someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Let me see your badge.' I turned, expecting a security officer, and found a man in civilian clothes, reeking of cigarettes and glowering. 'I thought so,' he said. 'Yellow badge, bleeding heart, nose wiping do gooder. You ought to go back to teaching kindergarten.' Actually, he said 'kiddie garden.' Then he postured for a group of onlookers. He discounted my worth without knowing me. just for the record, I don't wipe noses, but Mr. Gomez does keep toilet paper in the classroom in case any of us need it." They generally laughed, and someone almost always said, "Dude in the story's a dumb fuck." I'd agree, ignoring the language or sometimes frowning, and we'd carry on.
Most of the men newer to the system were more cooperative than the old cons. New inmates had Just suffered the inertia of jail, and then the restrictions of Shelton's receiving unit, where they went through psychological tests and health probes done with army like sensitivity. They were ready to settle somewhere and make the best of a bad situation. Getting settled meant more privileges, including visitation and phone calls, recreation, education, and possibly a job that would let them buy "store": tobacco and papers; candy, chips, and soda; better quality personal hygiene items than those provided by the state.
I'd been dancing to the concertina's tune long enough to have invented a few steps, and I learned new ones as the PSR program evolved. Rigidity does not succeed in education, parenting, or any viable relationship. We were trying to lay a foundation with the men to garner their cooperation, a process DOC's case management required. Abandonment, rigidity's opposite, was another problem we needed to counter in PSR to make the program succeed. Prison is a rigid environment where many feel (and frequently have been) abandoned by society at large, and all too often by family and friends who find maintaining a relationship too emotionally taxing.
Imagine someone you love is in prison. Imagine a relatively short sentence of sixty months, with one third off for good behavior. The person will do forty months in a corrections facility. How many of the approximately twelve hundred days will you subject yourself to the stress of prison visiting? How many collect phone calls will you accept? How often will you write a letter?
I've seen the pain, not just the anger, of those locked away. I've shielded crying men from others' eyes. Still, I never forgot that my students came to the classroom and program via criminal acts. It was my job to help them change, not to coddle them.
After the first two hours with a new group, the entire PSR team met to discuss behavior patterns I'd observed, possible problems that might occur back in the cell house or in other facets of the program, what parts of our vast curriculum might be most helpful, what might meet the most resistance. We learned early on that even the toughest old cons were impressed by the number and the status of presenters who came to them: associate superintendents, correctional program managers, a security captain, lieutenants, sergeants, correctional officers, a prison job coordinator, a grievance coordinator, a disciplinary hearings officer, an education director, academic and vocational teachers, education support staff, living unit supervisors and counselors, a psychiatric social worker, a chemical dependency counselor, hospital staff, and chapel staff.
Most of us on the team gave it our all. We played up the star value" of those presenters who generally weren't seen on the education floor. We reminded those men they would return to their families and communities, where they'd need to integrate with all who'd never seen the inside of a prison, and who had little empathy for offenders.
Wind blew onto the island from the sound, hummed through the concertina wire, and set the rhythm for our work. Week after week we performed for a new crowd a new chain that gathered at the cell house sergeant's desk when the intercom crackled to life and a voice announced, "Period movement, period movement."
We danced as fast as we could.
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