prison | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

October 14, 2015

Women After Prison

Two weeks ago, we spoke to incarcerated men reentering society about lives full of panic and the hard road ahead. But women are the news of mass incarceration right now — so we’re following up. ...

Two weeks ago, we spoke to incarcerated men reentering society about lives full of panic and the hard road ahead. But women are the news of mass incarceration right now — so we’re following up.

Compared to 1980, seven or eight times as many mothers, sisters and daughters are serving time in American prisons — they’re the fastest-growing sector of that enormous population. More than a million American women are under the control of our penal system now: mostly on probation but including more than a hundred thousand behind bars right now.

Netflix’s series, Orange Is The New Black, has turned the incarceration of women into a headline by representing it as half-tragic and half-comic world, a M*A*S*H for the present moment, in which the women are menaced by male guards and plagued by addiction and mental illness, but keep on cracking jokes — saved by sisterhood and occasional sex.

Some of that may be true, though our guest, the formerly incarcerated activist Andrea James, wants to remind us that this particular problem isn’t especially funny. The others, Denise Lewis and Wanda Luna, speak of a heaviness in women’s prison: the pain of separation from children and partners. And women carry a battery of preexisting problems with them into lockup: a history of bad mental and physical health (often untreated), records of domestic violence, and near-universal substance abuse.

On top of that, only about 1 in 3 women is locked up because of a violent crime, compared to more than half of incarcerated men, leading James to argue that women, for the most part, are locked up for “hurting themselves.”

With the former newscaster and minister Liz Walker, we’re listening to three local women tell personal stories of trauma, abuse and separation, and to consider the gender gap in incarceration.

October 1, 2015

Life After Incarceration

We’re going inside the almost invisible world of American prisons, following President Obama and Pope Francis. This month we met and spoke to four survivors of mass incarceration — Azan Reid, Unique Ismail, Douglas Benton, and Marselle Felton — in a church basement in Codman Square, Dorchester. We asked them: what did prison do, or undo, in you? What do you see now that you didn’t see then? And what don’t we know about you?

It’s a story of ambient violence and neglect in Boston’s Mattapan and Dorchester neighborhoods in the 1980s and ’90s. Twenty years on these men are stuck in the fight of their lives — to beat the odds and stay out of the pipeline back to prison. Amid it all there’s anger, regret, and wisdom; they’re panicked and hopeful, too. As a bipartisan group of senators wonder how America might stop being the world’s runaway jailer, we’re looking at hints of an aftermath: what will happen when and if the 2 million Americans presently incarcerated come home?

Pastor Bruce Wall of Global Ministries Christian Church oversaw the discussion and joined us in studio with his impressions.

This Week's Show •

After Attica

We’re revisiting the Attica prison revolt in 1971. It began as a civil rights protest and ended in a massacre when Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered his state troopers to teargas the prisoners and open fire. In the story only now coming clear, Attica marks the twilight of the civil rights movement and the dawn of mass incarceration. Two weeks ago we saw a two-day riot at the Willacy County Correctional Center, a privately-run immigration prison in Texas. And just last Sunday, Tom Robbins and the Marshall Project — the new outlet dedicated to criminal-justice news — surfaced the story of one prisoner’s violent beating at the hands of three guards. After pleading guilty, the guards responsible will lose their jobs, but not their pensions. They themselves avoid prison. Now that may just be taken as a sign of progress — state officials said it was the first time corrections officers had been tried for a nonsexual assault on a prisoner. Or, as Soffiyah Elijah and New York’s Correctional Association has it, it may be just one more reason to close Attica for good. The prison remains among the worst places nationally in terms of violence, both physical and sexual, perpetrated by guards against inmates and among inmates, too. We don’t want to speak of the place as curse, but the cry of “Attica! Attica!” (beyond being a much-repeated movie quote) remains a bloody reminder of the violent world behind prison walls. So, we’re with Heather Ann Thompson, who’s tracked the ghosts of Attica and asked just how the place haunts us. And it announced, by historical coincidence, a new boom in prison populations:

Mass incarceration is itself a force in communities that is destructive, that impoverishes people, that reduces their civil rights…rather than mass incarceration just being one of the many things that happens to people – because it is so comprehensive, because it is so devastating, when you incarcerate an entire community and take away their rights to vote and make it impossible for them to get jobs and orphan their children, you literally change the course of history.

The Sound of Attica, from Rocky to Richard Pryor

Some of the extended cuts from our show are available here: from Rocky and Nixon chatting amiably after the former gave his Attica report (next to none of it’s true), to Muhammad Ali’s amped-up poetic performance and our own wonderful guest, Azan Reid, talking about his experience of Mattapan in the 1980s and 1990s.

“General Contraband”

Photo: John Shearer

Our new producer Pat Tomaino has posted a short piece on the battle over the artifacts of Attica: hats, bats, helmets, clothes, and a Spanish-language version of the New Testament. Read the whole piece on Medium.

If the last century was a battlefield, which side gets to keep the spent cartridges and the shrouds of the dead? Do they belong to the victims, to the state, or to history? For more than forty years, Attica inmates, corrections officers, and their families have fought New York over those questions. Much of the physical evidence from the brutal raid that ended the Attica uprising is gone forever, allegedly destroyed by troopers sweeping the facility. However, hundreds of articles that were tagged and stored by Troop A of the New York State Police were only temporarily lost. As the Albany Times Union reported, those letters, weapons, badges, photos, and scraps of clothing lay nearly forgotten for 40 years until archivists at the New York State Museum convinced the police to hand them over in 2011. Once headed for the waste pile, suddenly the 2,100 objects were open to any historian willing to drive to Albany. Not anymore.