This is Kenneth B. Hartman, Executive Director of the Other Death Penalty Project, from inside California’s prison system. 35 Years Gone. I’ve now served more than 35 years in prison for killing a man in a drunken fist fight when I was 19 years old. While I’m not innocent, I was over prosecuted, a common occurrence in America’s criminal justice system. Prosecutors think it’s their duty to secure the most severe conviction possible, instead of securing a just verdict based on the facts of the crime. When I arrived at Folsom State Prison, the most violent prison in the country back then, I was a boy. I couldn’t grow a mustache, and I certainly didn’t understand the ways of the prison world. It was a baptism of blood and fire, and a crucible no human being should have ever been forced to endure. In those days, someone was killed every few weeks. Race wars raged back and forth, and all of us devolved into lesser beings fighting merely to survive. You’d think that after all the years between then and now, things would have changed. Sadly, California continues to have substantially higher homicide and suicide rates than the national averages, and remains locked in racial conflict. The only real change over the years has been the amount of money the guards and the administrators get paid to manage this ongoing tragedy. Whoever coined the term “crime doesn’t pay” never worked in a prison.
I’ve learned a lot of lessons over the decades, most of which came about through pain and loss, some through deep reflection. Here are five that every prisoner and every taxpayer, too, ought to know. It doesn’t matter how much money is poured into these places, the fundamental nature of prison never changes. As Professor Philip Zimbardo demonstrated many years ago at Stanford, even if you randomly select, out of a group of highly educated college students, who becomes a guard — in this setting, in the American way of running a prison, brutality and abuse will ensue. It’s in the nature of this environment. Read the Stanford prison experiment for yourself.
Along the same lines, if the purpose of prison is to humiliate and inflict suffering, no good will ever come of that. The problem is, if the guards and the administrators are given a green light to be just as harsh as they want, if they are designated as society’s proxies to enact some old fashioned payback, they will embrace that role with relish. Look at the history of this. Anytime one group is labeled the “out group,” put in special places, compelled to wear distinctive clothes and constantly berated by the government, bad things happen. Think Trail of Tears. Think Jim Crow. Think California’s own Chinese exclusionary rules. It’s in the nature of prison systems, no less than any other government agency of repression, to lie with a casual, “normal way of doing business” quality that’s breathtaking in its audacity. I’ve experienced this personally in civil proceedings, and I’ve watched it through their official action for all of my adult life. It’s as if the truth just doesn’t matter, or as if the truth is an irritant to be swatted away. Of course, this is the primary reason prison systems all over the country fight against allowing any kind of media scrutiny into the prisons. It’s the reason states like California bar reporters from walking the yard. It’s the reason Pennsylvania is blocking prisoners from talking to the media at all.
And, it’s also in the nature of all government officials to desperately desire to believe what their prison leaders are telling them; even the ones that appear to be trying to be fair come up against the simple fact that the prisons are maybe the fourth rail of America’s political system. By that, I mean the prisons are the flip side of the helping arm of the governments. They are the embodiment of the punishing arm, the fist that can, and will, come crashing down on the heads of anyone stepping too far out of line. The prison in America isn’t there just to punish the guy that robs the liquor store or the street corner drug dealer, it’s also there to quash dissent and project force out into the wider culture.
Finally, prisoners, all of us, are far too willing to help the prison suppress us, and we’re far too ready to abdicate our personal responsibility for our own lives to saviors and rescuers. We must create a reality in these places that fosters growth and awareness. We must educate ourselves and share what we’ve learned with our brothers and sisters. We must stop embracing the negativity and aggression of our captors. When Nelson Mandela was asked how he and his peers dealt with the outright racist guards at Robben Island prison, and radically changed them, too, he said, “We conducted ourselves with more dignity than them. We shamed them into change.” I believe that’s the heart of it. We prisoners must conduct ourselves with more dignity than them. That’s a tall order, I know well. It’s hard not to allow all the wrong around us to poison us and remove us from the good in ourselves. It doesn’t help that the prison system works hard to convince prisoners they aren’t good and they can’t be good. I believe we’re all capable of being better than our worst acts. After 35 years of this, I still believe that. I have to. This is Kenneth B. Hartman, Executive Director of The Other Death Penalty Project from inside California’s prison system.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio
