A former consumer of corrections services, John Nelson knows a thing or two about prison overcrowding—and the men who hope to find rehabilitation when they get there.
I’m often asked how I came to be known to LAPD detectives as the “Bookstore Bandit,” and the truth is I was simply a book lover with a girlfriend employed by a chain book retailer, who subconsciously absorbed deposit routines and open safe times. That I was able to recall those facts precisely when my financial woes were increasing is where things went wrong and my solution became worse than my problems. In other words, I became the Bookstore Bandit because I was dumb enough to act on my own worst ideas. In 1990 I was caught, convicted, and sentenced to serve eight years in California prisons.
I wound up serving four of those years, but I learned many valuable lessons along the way. First and chief among them was personal responsibility. Regrettably, a prison sentence is the first thing this ethically spoiled young man ever started and finished, but it instigated a preoccupation with building and maintaining relationships with delayed gratification that continues to this day.
Never one for making alliances that might later cause me to owe someone, when I began serving my time I nonetheless found myself more frightened of the general conditions of my surroundings than I was of riots, assaults, or gangs. Excepting, perhaps, the most mentally ill, men—predatory or not—can be negotiated with. Spinal meningitis can’t. Custody personnel are trained to keep an eye on congregating inmates, but when they’re packed like sardines it’s impossible to see what all is being passed around: germs, blades, shared needles, etc.
The conspiratorial idiom, “Prison Industrial Complex” up-sizes the problem to unmanageable proportions, giving many of us an easy reason to stop paying attention. But the phrase is a fiction.
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And it’s not just a lack of adequate medical care or the presence of septic doorknobs, spoons, and pillows that take away a man’s fighting chances inside: it’s a lack of educational programming and prospects for self-improvement. This, too, is getting worse in California prisons. Even without those fancy “extras” our state can no longer afford, inmates are literally forced to bribe, fight, or snitch their way into 22¢ per hour work assignments. I know first hand, having finagled my way into becoming one of the guys you had pay to get a job back in the early 90s. I was lucky enough to catch on early, to see that “rehabilitation” would exist only as a duty to myself. Not all inmates get that. In increasingly overcrowded prisons, nothing can be taken for granted, not even someone being there to tell you there’s a better way (regardless of whether the state has the resources to help you find it).
In 1990, Brown v. Plata was filed on behalf of mentally ill and suicidal inmates who were dying from failure to receive their medication, and I was a direct eye witness to the kinds of conditions that, it was later found, killed an inmate a week through misconduct or negligence. All we knew was that we were horrified by the “Care Technicians” who worked in our medical offices, and guys walked around in pain for weeks before signing up to see a prison dentist. At the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, a guy from my transfer bus got so fed up with the noise and the mooching of a dormitory filled with bored criminals that he slashed his bunkmate from elbow to ring finger just so he’d be moved to a higher level facility and have a better chance of being placed in a cell. Things like this occurred in the general population of every facility I was sent to, not in their dark corners. And still it took more than two decades for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide, on May 23, 2011, that California prison overcrowding constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment.
I was incarcerated 23 years ago, almost to the day, and I experienced or witnessed just about every constitutional insufficiency cited in the Court’s 5-4 decision. I have zealously observed the steady decline in effectiveness of the California penal system for all of those years and have held close every memory of every man I saw go down, a hard victim of the system’s unsustainable conditions. (Ever wonder what happens to a man with Tourette’s syndrome in a crowded prison?)
As a society, we’ve been taught to dismiss the problem of how to reform decaying and overcrowded facilities in the same way that Obi-Wan Kenobi dismissed the Mos Eisley spaceport as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy.” The conspiratorial idiom, “Prison Industrial Complex” up-sizes the problem to unmanageable proportions, giving many of us an easy reason to stop paying attention. But the phrase is a fiction. This isn’t the X-Files. “Prison Industrial Complex” is an excuse, a way to pass this all off ‘til later. Again.
The incarceration problem in America is complicated, but it’s not impossible to tackle. The only truly evil force here is the one that prevents the issue from remaining front and center, the one that distracts voters from being reminded that prison isn’t Vegas. What happens in prisons doesn’t stay there; it leaks out and affects us all.
Read more on Men in Prison.
The rallying cry is always the inmate returning to the community with an even worse criminal repertoire, but what’s worse than communities shouldering the cost of care for men released from prison sicker than when they were incarcerated?
Good piece. I see prison stuff on MSNBC, HBO, etc. all the time, but no one talks about what’s working and what isn’t. As taxpayers, we pay through the nose for this problem, too. Nice to hear from someone with experience and the ability to write about that experience in a compelling way.
With other societal problems pervading our communities and slapping us in the face every day, it’s easy to ignore prison-reform related issues: never has “out of sight, out of mind” been so applicable. The problem is that the doors to those prisons are opened every day to allow the rehabilitated AND the not-so-rehabilitated back into our neighborhoods. So it’s not an “out-of-sight” problem. With the possible exception of all you misanthropic hermits out there, we’re all going to come in contact with an ex-con or two as we make our way through our daily affairs. And when you do come… Read more »
With private prison corporations trying to secure naming rights for university football stadiums, I wouldn’t exactly call the prison industrial complex “fiction,” but with a law career in full swing, I’m more than familiar with the indifference you’re referring to. Parolee reentry issues and prison reform dialogue need humanizing.