Archive for the ‘prison’ Category
October 15, 2010
All new residents come to see me in their first week, and yesterday I met Viva. Since Viva has her GED she won’t have to attend my class. But we talked awhile and I was struck by how many tattoos she has, often a sign of long-term incarceration. If you’re never getting out then it doesn’t matter how the “outside” world sees you. What’s unusual about Viva is that the tattoos are all over her face. Her eyebrows look like the stylized waves one might see in a Japanese ink drawing. Tattooed words that I can’t make out form a proper mustache and goatee. Women’s names are written in red and green on her cheeks. She told me she has started the long process of having the tattoos removed by laser. “I put them on to fit in, I put them on to keep people away,” she said of the tattoos. “It’s complicated.” Yet her friendliness and social ease belie all self-consciousness.
What does any of us put on to fit in, to keep people away? It’s an interesting question.
Posted in GED, parolees, prison, tattoos | Leave a Comment »
August 18, 2010
I gave a few students copies of the American Sign Language alphabet. I had no idea they make use of signing inside prison when they are in lockdown. They said they sign larger so someone else can see it from far away. These are the hazards of my job — any well meaning comment or teaching tool can be misconstrued. Soon every new arrival from prison will be asking me for the sign language alphabet. So for now I put the sign language worksheets away and go back to teaching long division.
Posted in adult education, math, parolees, prison, teacher | Leave a Comment »
June 3, 2010
Many of my students arrive at and leave our residential rehab with most of their worldly possessions in black-plastic garbage bags. Parolees are dropped off by parole agents with only the clothes on their backs and a few come direct from the jail in olive-drab jumpsuits. Here at the rehab they get to pick from bags of donated clothing. I’ve seen some wearing donated T-shirts with the anti-smoking message, “It’s Quitting Time,” as they walk out to have a cigarette.
Terry left yesterday. She had the best fashion sense, really anything she threw together — whether store-bought or donated — worked. I didn’t realize she left because she never came to say goodbye. I hope it all works out for her with Slim, her boy on the inside, and most of all I hope she can shelter herself from the world of intolerance, of narrow-minded mediocrity.
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April 13, 2010
While driving home from work today I noticed that the two lines between my eyebrows are becoming trenches. They are often called frown lines because they come along with concentration or worry. My friend told me about Frownies. Frownies are basically ways of taping your face to smooth out face wrinkles while you sleep. As I sit typing this, I have two small adhesive Band-Aids above my eyebrows as an experiment in decreasing the signs of aging. My students often look either much older than their chronological age due to drug use and a hard life, or curiously younger. I think this might be due to the effect of being locked up without exposure to sun, with an absolute regimented routine of daily sleep and nutrition. I hope I’m not going off the deep end here with this theory. Anyway, I think my students would approve of the use of Band-Aids as homemade Frownies.
Posted in aging, Frownies, parolees, prison | Leave a Comment »
April 5, 2010
We have all heard of homie, meaning from the same neighborhood but it goes deeper than that. Cellie is the guy or gal you shared your cell with. Crimie, that’s the person who was your partner in you guessed it, crime. Very often a parolee will come in and recognize a former crimie or even more exciting an old cellie. It’s like a reunion with lost family. Many of these guys have spent more time in their lives with their cellies than with their own family.
At work, two of the most unlikely students recognize each other, Edgar and Jeff. Both know one-armed Paul and one-legged Charlie from their time inside. They sit and reminisce for a bit about their stolen Harleys and one-armed Paul and one-legged Charlie. They sound like pirates, and it makes me laugh.
— from a 2004 journal entry
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March 23, 2010
(Trying something new here, what I’m calling a flashback. Going back to my journals for stories from my earlier days as a parolee educator.)
A student of mine is convinced that if I eat snake, all my skin problems will go away. Back when Ramiro was in prison, out in the desert, he was assigned to Level 1 where they let you work outside the prison doing maintenance and gardening. His cellmate had a serious skin condition and was putting up with a great deal of embarrassment. One day Ramiro was working outside the perimeter of the prison and killed a desert snake. “You have to kill the snake before you get it mad or it’s no good,” Ramiro tells me, making a swift motion with his hand, showing how he killed the snake quickly and quietly while it slept. He threw the dead snake over the prison gate and later took it to his dormitory where they were allowed a hot plate and pan to cook with. Like a good friend, Ramiro cooked the snake and served it to his cellmate. He says that after only one or two times of consuming snake, his friend’s skin condition cleared up completely. “Snake will heal your skin, Miss P.,” Ramiro says, urging me to try it. “It cleans the blood.”
— from a 2002 journal entry
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March 5, 2010
Aryan brothers, I could live without them in my classroom. The first time I saw the number 23 tattooed on a guy I asked him, why 23? He told me W is the 23rd letter of the alphabet, W for white power. I’ll never forget the time I saw a guy sitting outside my classroom with no less than five swastikas tattooed on his face and shaved head. I wondered to myself, “I hope he hasn’t been referred to my school.” He was just too extreme and frankly a bit scary. I’ve been trained not to talk about my religious affiliation so when a ‘brother’ asks me if I’m Jewish, I have to practice an almost ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy but sometimes I will say, ” yes, I’m Jewish.” I don’t sport a ’10’ on my forearm, you won’t find Moses holding the tablets on my back. I’ve had skin allergies my whole life and worry I would be allergic to the ink and then there is the history of so many Jews who were forcibly given tattoos during the Shoah. A student of mine once returned from being back in prison with a cross on his forearm. I saw the words, ‘God Bless’ and said, “you found religion?!” Upon further inspection I saw the words surrounding the cross said, “God Bless the Haters.”
Posted in gangs, parolees, prison, tattoos | 1 Comment »
February 15, 2010
Last Friday I put out art supplies for my students to make Valentines. I was struck by how busy the crafts table was. In prison, myriad art practices and ideas for homemade cards get passed on, especially amongst the men. One of my students made a half-dozen cards to sell to other residents at the rehab. Another student constructed cards with suspended photographs on hidden threads that spin inside a heart-shaped cut-out when you lightly blow on them.
The pest control man also came to spray the resident’s housing. Several of the women brought their fish bowls over to my classroom so the fish would not be exposed to the toxins. So today my classroom was full of big tattooed guys cutting on pink paper and colorful Japanese Fighting Fish swimming in faceted containers.
Posted in drug recovery, education, handicrafts, parolees, prison, students | Leave a Comment »
February 7, 2010
While surfing the web I ran into this announcement: “The Museum of Criminal Anthropology, dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, has reopened after years of restoration and access to specialist researchers only. The institution was founded by Lombroso in 1898 under the name ‘The Museum of Psychiatry and Criminology,’ documenting his beliefs and research into detecting criminality through physiognomy.” You can now see this collection for yourself but you will have to fly to Turin, Italy. How you feel about this kind of pathologizing is another thing. Here’s some history: “For many years, Lombroso’s text on the female criminal would have great influence. It described the female offender as worse than male offenders, contending that they had more masculine than feminine characteristics. Lombroso also popularized the notion of a ‘born criminal’ which represents an extreme statement of biological determinism which had great influence well into the 20th Century.” The Museum of Criminal Anthropology serves as a reminder of a past that must be known but never repeated.
Posted in Cesare Lombroso, crime, parolees, prison, psychiatry | Leave a Comment »
February 2, 2010
My school is inside a drug rehab for adults just out of prison. The entire community is in a week-long workshop. Some students will come to school to get out of the workshop and others will ask to get out of school to attend the workshop. Either is fine. I like to sit in on the gathering, drop in for fifteen minutes. Today they were showing a documentary on the big flat screen. They said for every 200 men in prison, there were approximately 700-900 children missing a father on the outside. I couldn’t stop thinking about this. Even when my students are on the outside they often fail to parent their children. The children are the forgotten victims of the criminal system, of drug use, of crime. I give my students clear-vue binders and they most often use them to display photos of their family and friends. It’s like a bunch of teenagers decorating their notebooks.
Posted in drug recovery, education, parolees, prison, rehab | Leave a Comment »
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