As Long As There Are Bars

Twenty years ago today, I got out of prison. I had the shortest sentence of just about anyone I met on the inside, six months, but that was the max for a Class B Misdemeanor, and somehow in that brief season I was shuttled through three Georgia county jails, the maximum security transit facility at USP Atlanta, and then a minimum security prison camp.

At trial I represented myself, and my strategy was to demonstrate that the judge’s authority was based solely on the armed cops and guards who followed his orders. He didn’t like that.

There had been a big protest and I had several dozen codefendants, and he had promised all of us we would get to say our goodbyes to family and friends before being hauled away. He broke that promise in my case, and two armed guards grabbed me and took me in. I was 19 and wasn’t what you’d call a huge fan of life or society, so I felt pretty good about proving my point.

His name was Judge Faircloth, like this was some Thomas Pynchon novel, and his entire person was a caricature of laughably self-serving notions of justice. Everyone had assured me I wouldn’t be going in—in that circuit, no one had ever been given a prison sentence for trespassing as a first time offense—but I kind of knew I would be.

For the protest, we had broken onto a military base two months after the September 11th attacks, and a few weeks before the US government began a bloody invasion of Afghanistan that would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Some people engaged in symbolic civil disobedience at the gates of the base; a smaller group of us went in with a vague, improbable plan for shutting down the specific military school responsible for training death squads. Any actions were constrained in advance by a non-negotiable agreement to adhere to strict nonviolence, so there never really was a chance of accomplishing any material goals.

I met some amazing, solidaristic human beings at trial. Sue, the fastest buddy in the streets (how good it felt to meet again after prison, in more empowering circumstances, unencumbered by protest codes). We lost her a few years later to gender violence and the lack of support for mental health crises. Jerry, an old monk who had spent his whole life getting arrested and had the sweetest heart of almost anyone I’d ever met. When the judge had his temper tantrum and had his goons take me away, Jerry had volunteered to go in early too so I’d have company in the cell. Other folks had the option to self-report at the prison camps a few months down the line. We lost Jerry not so long after that, but to old age.

Despite our best efforts though, or because of them, the trial was a farce. And the protest, honestly, was theater. Many of us wanted to think about stopping the war, but the way the movement was structured—not just that yearly protest but the whole movement cropping up in opposition to the coming wars—meant that no one was actually engaging with the practical question of stopping war (minus the folks who pulled off a port blockade, a few isolated acts of sabotage and fragging…) And the linchpin of that estrangement between strategies and goals, as well as the obliviousness towards problems of white supremacy and the colonial dynamics that plagued that movement and the interconnected ones, was nonviolence, a topic I started paying more attention to around then.

I learned more than I could ever enumerate in those months in prison. In fact, getting locked up came at a convenient time, as it coincided with me dropping out of college. Dropping out was an option I’d been leaning towards for a while: my scholarship had run out; I wasn’t sure I’d be able to survive debt because... well, things; and college students were stupid.

I’ll never forget the day I woke up on a prison bus—a really long day starting at 4 or 5 with a strip search, the pug ugly nazi they break out for transfers promising you murder if you step out of line, the handcuffs boxed to the chain around your waist plus ankle shackles for the next twelve hours, the bus to a tarmac and Con Air, the flight to another part of the country you can only guess at based on the kind of trees you see when you land, and another bus (the one I’d wake up on) to take you to whatever your next facility was—blinked my sleepy eyes, and saw through the tinted windows a sports car on the highway next to us, flashing a sticker from the state college I’d just dropped out of. I imagined the alum, a douche bag for sure, driving along oblivious, ignorant and apathetic as to the inhabitants of the bus speeding along right next to him. I knew I was exactly where I needed to be.

I also know that’s much easier to say with a half year sentence. But it’s also easier to say when you’re fighting for something you believe in, when you’re a part of a movement that supports its prisoners.

In any case, when I came out on OR after the arrest and made it back to my dad’s house just in time for Thanksgiving, once I told him I’d probably be going to prison for a little bit he barely noticed when I also said I was dropping out of college, so that was helpful.

One of the weird things about prison was how normal it felt. I was already an anarchist at that point, so I knew that none of us were free, but in prison I learned this was not an abstract technicality.

It is absolutely horrible to be deprived of your loved ones and deprived of the open sky, the earth, the water. But beneath these things, all of them solvable by an eager prison reformer through better visits or gardening programs, at a fundamental level, prison did not feel qualitatively different from school or the psych ward at the hospital. And in fact, multiple times at every security level I passed through, there were distinct parts of the prison experience that recalled some of the insultingly pedantic things that would happen in a school or hospital.

It’s also interesting how those kinds of things became much more abundant in minimum security. That was “prison camp,” where you could get a job (had to), play sports, and walk under the sky, but if you crossed an invisible line, an automatic five years, and if you crossed a completely undefined line of behavior, you got sent back behind the fence. And not coincidentally, along with these greater “freedoms”—as a writer, I hate scare quotes, but even more so as an anarchist I can’t condone the authoritarian’s conflation of privileges with freedom—the guards fucked with you much more and the bureaucrats smothered you in infantilizing paperwork and counseling sessions that would feel condescending to a kindergartner and heavy handed to a baptist preacher.

I got a punishment work shift at the prison camp because I refused to sign paperwork that attested I had been given materials they hadn’t actually given me. It was systematic in minimum security that if you insisted on reading something before you signed it, you got punished. The work conditions there compounded a health problem that basically led to me walking around with an open wound for about five years, until I finally got health insurance and an operation.

It quickly became clear how prison camp was preparation for the real world, which many of us called minimum minimum security. That, in turn, made clear how the architects of the State’s law and order imagine we should be acting out in the real world. It also became comprehensible why so many people granted the privilege of minimum ended up throwing a punch to get sent back behind the fence.

Punishment in higher security levels looked a little different. At Crisp County Jail, I refused go into a shower cell that smelled like piss without shower slippers, so they threw some caustic delousing powder on me (the container said “not for use on humans or animals”) and locked me in the stall for an hour, then they took me by a cell of prisoners they said would rape me if I were in with them. That’s probably what would have happened if I’d been a state prisoner, but I belonged to the federal government so they were required to put me in with other federal prisoners (this same regulation led me to spend a week with folks awaiting deportation in the earlier county jail).

To make sure I knew they were serious, though, once the guards put me in the mandated cell, they brought another prisoner into the doorway to threaten to kick the shit out of me while they watched on, laughing. Wherever you go, there are cops, and there are also people (ish) who will act like cops in exchange for a few minor privileges. This dynamic, in fact, sits at the center of whiteness, though it also exists in other identities and relationships, as in the case of this prisoner.

I got off easy. Another prisoner at Crisp County staged some minor act of disobedience after his cell became infested with lice or bed bugs. The guards gassed him and locked the door and he suffocated. The local media reported the prisoner died of natural causes in the medical wing. Clearly, they had not come to the jail a single time in all their years of reporting, because it had no medical wing.

I know anarchists aren’t supposed to fantasize about firing squads, because—ahem—punishment, but on the harder days I definitely fantasize about sending up journalists along with the cops responsible for so many racist murders, or the doctor who wrote out that certificate for a natural death. And when I think about it, I’m pretty sure it’s true: neither the propagandists nor the technicians of this death machine deserve to live anymore than the pigs do.

But we do deserve to live. And if we become mass murderers for freedom, if we take lives based on nothing but the abstract certainty that we can judge good and evil, then we become, in a word, cops. Paradoxically, we have to let the mercenaries of this system live—once they’ve been defeated and totally disarmed—for our sake, not for theirs.

Freedom is not a goal. Freedom is every step.

I turned 20 in that county jail. I don’t think I told anyone. All my cellies had another kind of time on their minds. They were getting ready for some serious sentences. All of them were Black, all of them in for drugs or weapons offenses. Five years, ten years, twenty-five years. One of them was on the same bus that took me to USP Atlanta. I never saw him again.

Earl was the one I got closest too. Earl usually slept in instead of going to the exercise yard, but that one day he got up early. They had all been advising me not to go to the yard because that was the most likely place where the guards’ lackey would be able to catch me and beat the shit out of me, an outcome he vociferously promised every time he caught sight of me through my set of bars and his. After all, I only had another five months, and that was an easy amount of time to go without an exercise yard.

But I had a bit of a stubborn streak, and the first day it was our turn I lined up with the rest of them. Earl didn’t say anything, but he rolled out of bed and got in line too. Out in the yard, the snitch was hungry for a fight. He started with a salvo of insults. I ignored him and then Earl stepped into the yard right behind me. The snitch sized Earl up. Earl was fucking huge. I turned to walk laps on the outer track. The snitch opted for basketball.

I got out the 9th of January, 2003. The Appalachian air was crisp, but warm. A sign of times to come. My mom came to pick me up, along with a few close friends. Since then, every year, I try to remember. To think about our evolving practice of freedom, about how we’re doing, inside and out. I try to think about the people we’ve lost, and what it means to lose people, and how we can keep them with us even when they’re gone.

I think about Earl, who saved me from a lot of pain; I think about Greg, who stole me good food from the kitchen (I was still a veg in those days, see: stubbornness). I think about the people who wrote me letters and sent me books. I think about what I learned. How being in prison didn’t feel qualitatively different, because none of us are free anyway. Because there’s no such thing as “in front of bars”. As long as there are bars, we are behind them.

Until all of us are free, until all of us are healing, until all of us are walking. Every step.

If you can give some support:

Black and Pink

Anarchist Black Cross Federation

Books to Prisoners

Title image Blind Curve by Felix Lucero.