A Couple of Things about Prison

The other day, while unpacking the last few boxes from my (somewhat) recent move, I stumbled upon my yearbooks. Growing up, I attended public schools on or near major military bases. Those schools resembled prisons in a few ways: their cellblock aesthetics, authoritarian approach to discipline,1 and demographics—they were racially diverse, but uniformly working class. (Well, not uniformly—some of my classmates were outright poor—but you get the point.)

Almost none of our parents had gone to college, and the assumption was that almost none of us would. Because of that assumption, almost none of us did. We were being prepared for more likely futures.2

I flipped to the photo page of my eighth grade class and counted. There were twenty boys in it. We lost touch long ago, but last I knew, three spent time in jail. A few became addicts of various kinds. Two joined the Army. One—my friend Charlie, whom I’ve written about before—died young. As far as I know, I’m the only one who graduated from college.

That was largely luck. I spent a lot of my teenage years worried about going to jail.3 It seemed a lot easier than winding up in college; it certainly happened more often to the men around me. My uncle was in and out for years before he died. It also happened to my friends’ dads and stepdads, one of my Little League coaches, even some of our teachers—one frequent substitute used to regale us with instructions about how to use the restroom in the joint.4

By the standards of the poor and rural town where I grew up, I was only a small-time delinquent. But a few of my friends were the real thing, so occasionally I got in over my head. I was arrested for the first time in eighth grade, and charged with a felony that could’ve put me in juvie for years. While I was waiting for my court date, they sent me on one of those Scared Straight trips, where me and a few other miscreants were marched through the county juvenile facility while hardcases with bad tattoos threw gang signs and blew kisses. In the end, my charges were dropped, but not before I spent six months having stress dreams about being on the other side of those bars.

I wish I could say that set me on the straight and narrow, but throughout high school and after, I did a lot of things that could’ve put me in jail if I’d been less lucky. My friends and I were idiots: drag racing and drunk driving, breaking into buildings and abandoned mines, dicking around with guns and homemade explosives. And I worked at restaurants, where I was surrounded by ex-cons, who were always trying to get me to go in on dumb schemes and drug deals. When I was in community college, a friend and former teammate got caught trafficking and did a few years in Florence; not long before, he’d offered me a job driving a car from one place and dropping it off in another, which I had thankfully declined.

It still makes me uncomfortable to write about this, even all these years later, not so much for reputational internet-search reasons—that ship sailed some time ago—as because I don’t want to reinforce stereotypes about the working class, or, worse, come off like I’m trying to garner street cred with the suburban gentry who predominate in my professional worlds; in the life I live now, class-specific experiences like the threat of incarceration exist only to be commodified, and/or to leaven the elitism of academic and literary institutions. And I really cannot stress enough how bad I was at breaking the law—I was nobody’s idea of a real criminal. Still, if things had played out just a little differently, I could easily have gone to juvie or jail and become one.

I was thinking about that era of my life lately because my favorite film and book from the last month were both about prisons. The film is Brett Story’s 2016 documentary The Prison in Twelve Landscapes. I’d been wanting to watch it since I saw Union, one of my favorite documentaries of last year, which Story co-directed (and which I wrote about here.)

Landscapes seems to have been her debut. As is the case with most of my favorite documentaries, describing it is unlikely to do justice to the viewing experience, but it’s an essayistic film, comprised of vignettes or anecdotes related—sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely—to the role of prisons in American society. Story is Canadian, which seems significant, like it might allow her to properly notice what most Americans can’t or refuse to, the sheer strangeness of a society that locks up so many of its citizens, particularly the poor and people of color. Story’s eye for the oddness of prison culture, and even moments of humor, is one of the best things about the film. It’s also spectacularly shot, but I feel like I’m saying that about so many recent documentaries.

The book was Ted Conover’s Newjack, a work of radically immersive nonfiction. When corrections officials refused to let Conover into the prison to report a story, he applied to be a corrections officer, went through the academy, and became a prison guard at Sing Sing, where he worked for almost a year while secretly writing about it.

I was already a fan of Conover’s. I love his first book, Coyotes, because it’s one of the relatively rare books about the US/Mexico border that attempts to represent its subject accurately, based on years of direct experience with the people who live and work there, rather than taking the more common (and lucrative) approach of parachuting in and pandering to the paranoid preconceptions of a faraway white audience.

Conover stands out from the gonzo/stunt nonfiction crowd not only for his courage and commitment, but for his lack of ego on the page. He faithfully documents what he sees instead of what he wants or expects to see, including many of his own shortcomings, and although he can clearly write a sentence, I admire Conover’s resistance to the sort of performative pyrotechnics that make the reported nonfiction prose of DFW, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, et al so hard to take sometimes, especially in a full-length book.

Conover doesn’t act the part of the enlightened prison guard, or the authoritarian prison guard, or the writer pretending to be a prison guard. He just does the job, tries to do it well, and writes about it with no authority beyond his own experience, and an admirable empathy for everyone around him. I would read any book that wrote about work this well, but it helps that being a prison guard is such a fascinating and invisible job, and one that embodies all the hypocrisies and contradictions of our approach to crime.

Some other things I recently liked:

• Queendom, a Russian doc from last year about a young queer artist in Moscow. Some parts of this film feel like lyric, surrealist performance art. It’s also a tense, dramatic story of fighting and fleeing oppression, and a film that takes a remarkably unsentimental approach to portraying an artist risking their life.

• Leviathan. This 2012 experimental documentary captures the day-to-day existence of a fishing boat in the North Atlantic. Filmed entirely on GoPros and lacking any real story, it’s a beautiful and arresting film, but one that asks a lot of the viewer—the sound alone is enough to give you a panic attack, and it basically refuses to provide any information or context for what you’re seeing. Its relentless sensory portrayal of a gruesome line of work does feel like it’s honoring its subject, somehow. That said, I wouldn’t want to watch it again.

• Angel Sharpening Its Beak, Michael McGriff. Mike’s a longtime friend. He’s also one of my favorite poets, because his work is one of the few places I’ve ever seen rural poverty represented in a way that felt authentic and respectful, like the portrayal of it was of and for the place and people being portrayed. They’re also just amazing poems, startling and precise, haunting and weird in the best way.

• The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Season 3. I can’t stop watching this show, and can’t stop talking about it to people who just do not care. While binging the new season, I’ve started taking notes for an essay on why it’s actually a groundbreaking work of documentary and one of the defining cultural texts of our era. I wish I was kidding.

• What We Do in the Shadows. I loved the first couple of seasons of this show when it came out—I liked the movie it’s based on, and have been a fan of Matt Berry’s since the days of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. But I lost track sometime in the third season and may not have watched the fourth or fifth. Anyway, I just finished the sixth and final season, and it was so good. The Maysles Brothers bit in the finale is solid gold.

• Never been a big Bill Callahan guy, but maybe I’m aging into an appreciation of his bleak, deadpan baritone. His new single makes me think I might like the forthcoming album.