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Prisons Worlds Apart Connected By Attitude
April 5, 2010
A common defense against criticism of the treatment of prisoners under the jurisdiction of Maine’s Department of Corrections is to say, “Prisons in Maine are nothing like other prisons in the United States.” Yet, in response to my recent article on Maine’s Prison Secrets www.scribd.com/stanmoody , I received an email from Mwalimu Johnson, an alumnus of what is considered to be the bloodiest prison in America – Louisiana State Prison at Angola: “I could not help thinking of some of my personal experiences during my periods of incarceration,” he said, “especially my experiences while in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Louisiana.”
Could it be possible that there is a common culture shared by prisoners in the state with the lowest incarceration rate and those in the state with the highest? I determined to meet Mwalimu Johnson to determine what I, as a white, privileged Yankee, could possibly know about conditions at dreaded Angola, one of the last refuges for Jim Crow. Jim Crow laws, you will recall, legitimized anti-Black racism in the South. Officials at every level – church and state – believed that Blacks were intellectually and culturally inferior to Whites. Angola’s 5,500 prisoners, 95% of whom are lifers; 80% of whom are black, are “employed” as farm workers, picking cotton at pennies an hour.
Yet, it isn’t the cotton picking or even the disproportion of blacks in LA prisons that is at the root of the common prison culture between Maine and Louisiana. It is that we have created a class of inferior citizens. Prisoners, black or white, are believed to be intellectually and culturally inferior to the rest of us. Within every prison in the US, these living examples of our failures as a society, squirreled away from pubic view, are further divided into intellectual and cultural classes by crime, by race, by financial net worth, by sexual orientation, by physical bearing and by usefulness to staff. Talk with prison officials anywhere in the US, and you customarily will hear stories about process, policy and danger and rarely, if ever, about humanity. That is our common prison heritage.
I invited Mwalimu and activist writer, Jordan Flaherty, to meet with me at the posh Roosevelt hotel in New Orleans where I was staying. I was unprepared for the reality. In Mwalimu, who is confined to a wheelchair as the result of being shot in his lower spine by FBI agents responding to a bank robbery in which he was not involved, there was a peace and tranquility and authority that transcended race, culture and education. Mwalimu had somehow found Victor Frankl’s secret to “Man’s Search for Meaning” – that peace in this life is not in our circumstances but in our attitudes toward our circumstances.
To prison officials throughout the US, therefore, I would encourage them to stop dwelling on their circumstances (“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve Seen”) and begin charting a course toward raising human dignity wherever it can be found.
You can learn more about Mwalimu Johnson at the Forgiveness Project, http://www.theforgivenessproject.com/stories/mwalimu-johnson.
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