Not too many years ago I used to visit Salinas Valley State Prison on a regular basis. One of my favorite former students dug himself into a deep, swirling whirlwind of hell at age 13. He’d ended up with 9 attempted murder convictions* and a life sentence. (Life sentence for a 13 year-old was incarceration until the 26th birthday)

  I had taught him chess in fifth-grade as I do all my munchkins. In prison, he sat in administrative seclusion (isolation) and he needed something to do. We played chess via the mail. Our one game lasted nearly three years.

   He started his road through incarceration in Tracy, then as he wrote, was transpacked to Corcoran Prison, finally sent to Salinas Valley, and was threaten with a sentence at Pelican Bay. Not a good resume nor much of a prospect for a future.

   After our first year of chess playing I requested permission to see him in person. That took another six months and finally after much grief and many hoops permission was granted.

   Since he was: a level 4 max security risk, a gang member, and violent, with many prison infractions I could only see him in the window. The window is the Plexiglas barrier between the visitor and the inmate. It’s known as a non-contact visit. Visitor sits on one side of the window with a phone. Inmate sits on the other side with a phone. Even in the window the inmate is still chained at the ankles and waist chained with a chain running up from the ankles to the waist. So when inmates walk they do the shuffle. Tear inducing for a visitor. Humiliating for the inmate. Safety for the correction officers. Everybody gets a little something out of it.

    Visiting lasts forty-five minutes. A light blinks on signaling the start of a visit and a light blinks signaling the end of a visit. On this visit, time went to fifty minutes, an hour, finally an hour and a half. Coooool I though as on many visits I’d been short changed time, even denied visits. One time I was denied a visit because I deferred to an elderly Latino couple. They were crotchety, bent over very very slow. They signed in with methodical confusion. When my turn came the sign in correction officer said I was late “three minutes.”

    “We have protocols here. If I let you abuse the rules. Then there is no order. What would other visitors think?”

      I had intentionally let the elderly folks go ahead of me to be polite. So my jaw dropped. Arguing and reason were beyond futile and useless. I received a lovely pink VISITOR DENIED form.  It took me forty-five minutes to drive one way. Then I had to wait between twenty minutes and three hours. All for naught.

    Another time the prison completely claimed I hadn’t been granted permission to come. My name was not on the list.  They screwed up because every Monday I had to step outside my class room and dial, dial, and redial until I spoke with a human, gave the inmates number and confirmed a visit. I hadn’t messed up, they did. But in the end I got another pink slip.  

     The most disturbing event occurred during that non-contact hour and a half visit. Remember they were only supposed to last forty-five minutes.

    At 1 ½ hours, a female correction officer rushed out from behind a door and yelled at the three visitors (me being one of them) in the windows. There were three windows with three inmates and three visitors in each. The C.O. said we, the visitors were in big trouble and that we had to leave immediately because we had refused to leave when she asked us to leave.

    This was all news to us, as we’d never seen this correction officer before. Absurd of course. Obviously she’d been doing something wrong somewhere else, and was putting the blame on us.

   Just an aside – I would never think of not doing what a correction officer required. The hairs on the back of my neck were up during my visits all the time. I thought the correction officers were the good guys and they would help ME if things went awry. Unthinkable on my part to not do as asked – completely totally unthinkable .

   So the other two visitors and myself were escorted back to the sign-in building. A Sargent came out and yelled at us. Telling us we had refused a command from a correction officer and that future visits by us would be in doubt.  “When a C.O. tells you you are done. YOU ARE DONE!” he said.

    Wow…but I knew to protest was a waste. If this is what they did to the public I could imagine what they were capable of doing to our inmates.  So I didn’t dare file a protest or complaint.

   After that, my exterior prison visiting shell hardened and I used what all visitors did with correction officers – the shit face. Slaves the world over have used it for centuries. On the outside you smile.  A big ass happy face. You act obsequies, with bowed head, and deferment the rule. But on the inside you simmer and wait to be hosed. You eat humility and crow by the ton, and slights build. It isn’t healthy.

     Not sure what the answer is, but writing this helped… a little.

     I’m smiling just thinking about it.

 

 

                 “He who allows the crime shares the responsibility”

 

                                                                                          Erasmus

 

                That smile of mine right now. It’s not a good one.

 

      

 

 

 * The student had been shot at by a gang. He knew who they were and burned down their house. Nine people were in the house. None were injured. Each person = an attempted murder charge.