Writing In Prison

 From Esquire's The Prisoner and the Pen:

It had been about a month since, in May 2023, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision surfaced this oddly titled "Creative Arts Projects" directive. When a New York Focus reporter asked me about it, I hadn't seen the directive, hadn't known it existed. But apparently, we were now required to send officials our work for approval before submitting it to editors, and even publications were required to ask permission to publish us. There were restrictions, too: no sexual or gang-related materials; any proceeds had to go to a nonprofit for victims; no negative portrayals of "law enforcement officers or DOCCS in a manner which could jeopardize safety or security” allowed; and no depictions of our crimes.

Robert was in prison for stabbing his girlfriend. After a night out in Poughkeepsie, he and his girlfriend were arguing. She stabbed him. He stabbed her. He almost died. She did die, and he was convicted of manslaughter. Last year, Robert transferred to Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum security in the Catskills where I live, and he sent a message asking me to come to the yard and meet him. I was by the pull-up bar a few days later when he introduced himself. He’d been in prison about 12 years. He’d read the chapter about me in The Sentences That Create Us, a craft book by PEN America, and it inspired him to want to be a prison writer. I told him I’d work with him if he promised to always be accountable, not only with his commitment to the work but also to account for his crime on the page.

A few visits ago, my PO asked if all the paper clogging up my room was written in prison. When I asked what else was I supposed to do, he turned away without an answer. I believe he has a phobia towards the printed. One comm on denominator among the people who turned to writing while in prison was their commitment to the work, and that we were the people trying to overthrow our old lives. With me, it was escaping the nihilism I had waded into and thought under my control when it was anything but, and to make something better than the ugliness I had tolerated, if not allowed to fester. Depression ran through our writing groups. Those who had other problems just could not write when they tried, or never tried.

When I first met my PO and told him I needed the laptop for my writing, he said that might be a problem if I was writing erotica. I knew then the mentality with which I was dealing. However, I had to get over the shock of being lumped into a genre I had never found interesting and which no one in prison chose to dabble in. It goes along with the persistent belief that I must suffer from a certain psychological condition when every diagnosis says the exact opposite. My therapy stories are several, they go to the issues of depression and what fed my depression. Take a look at “Passerby” to see an example (the link is over there to your right).

Without writing, I don’t know what would have become of me. I take up what’s around me, but I often write about myself and the people I know here. That personal writing can be cathartic but also tricky. How do I render my subject in relation to the issue that he’s trying to overcome and the crime that brought him to prison? Is his crime relevant? What about mine? If I don’t divulge, will the reader trust me? Editors help me see the idea of a piece, frame the narratives; they push and pull the best writing out of me. In successive drafts, I leave much behind: ugly phrases, clunky sentences, rationalizing sentiments. What if I were left to live with those thoughts and never challenged to develop them? Becoming a better writer has helped me become a better human being.

I realize that artistic growth doesn’t always parallel moral growth, but my entry point was convict, murderer. For me, becoming a writer was a way to overcome being a killer, even as I know I’ll never overcome it completely. With the personal parts of my writing, I feel like there’s always more desired, owed. It’s the journalism part — communing and connecting with my subjects, analyzing their actions — that helps me better understand the pain in their lives and in mine, as if we were a damaged team. It’s this kind of writing that helps me develop more of the thing that it seems I’ve always lacked: empathy.

People talk about rehabilitation. Well, here is how to go about it. Stories like this are all too common. I do not know that I lacked empathy; it may be I was too empathetic. Writing helped me control my feeling abut not being able to help those I empathized with. Those I mentioned above with other psychological problems not being able to write, I believe it was the inability to empathize with others that led to their inability. Which, I also suggest, lay behind their crimes.

I can verify what the writer says below about the federal system. I have had word from one writer still in prison that his portfolio was seized by a prison employee. I am still waiting on a fuller report.

I felt like New York DOCCs’ new directive was trying to reinstate the original Son of Sam law. “As more news outlets publish incarcerated journalists,” Brian Nam-Sonenstein of the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) recently wrote, “more departments will consider policies to control what information makes it out into the world.” While there is “a web of vague policies” that make practicing prison journalism difficult, according to PPI, none of the state penal systems explicitly ban prison journalism. The federal system, administered the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the agency housing the most people in the country, is the only one that does. The rule, which prohibits prisoners from “acting as a reporter,” went on the books back in 1979, when the feds were concerned about influential political prisoners rising to undue prominence. The BOP fear was that a prison journalist could become a “big wheel” or spokesman, and gain too much clout. I wondered, had the BOP ever invoked this rule against a prison journalist?

***

These writers were all in state prisons. Where were the writers in the feds? While the Prison Journalism Project has published nearly 2,000 stories, according to Yukari Kane, only a fraction of the 650 different incarcerated writers were federal prisoners. "It can be challenging to work with them on edits because the [BOP] is so restrictive," Kane told me.

Of the 21 prisoners who are part of Pen America's Incarcerated Writers Bureau, none are in federal prison. Of EA's thirty writers, only one was in the feds. When I called Aaron Kinzer from the yard in July, he had just finished up a thirteen-year stint for drug trafficking and was trying to hustle some of his writing as a freelancer. Home only a couple weeks, he'd landed pieces in Newsweek and the New York Times. While incarcerated, he had written a few essays in PJP and The Marshall Project's Life Inside section, but he wasn't aware of the rule that said he couldn't “act as a reporter.” Then again, he'd never met anyone in the feds who called themselves a prison journalist. “But I wasn't really writing grievance pieces,” Kinzer told me. “I was writing about how we cope.”

The people of this country need to start understanding they have brutalized far too many people. That education prevents more crime at a lesser cost than all of our prisons. That education in prison serves a better purpose than prison without education. 

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