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From July 5th, 2007:
Dear Rolling Thunder readers,
Sometimes I think I am a hopeless romantic. I'm pretty sure my friends are certain I am one. I like telling stories that breed situations and evoke action; I often paint my words with a broad stroke of syrupy emotion. I love the Steve Miller Band for their song, "Space Cowboy," I love my mom, I love my partner, and I love fireworks in the sky. I wonder just how long of an "I love…" list I can make. I sometimes think it took me nearly drowning in prison hopelessness before I could be so amazed by the beauty of our existence. I just said "our" existence, not "my," because this applies to you and me.
Our lives are fucking remarkable and there is evidence of such everyday…
I love my Mom—she has shown me so much in this life. I distinctly remember when she took me to my first fireworks show. I remember being awestruck. My eyes were affixed; there was so much color. They were like big exploding flowers in the night sky. I didn't know what the fourth of July was; as far as I was concerned it was the day when the fireworks came out, nothing more. That could have been the best July 4th ever.
I spent this July 4th at Butner Federal Correctional Institution, and I got to see how the rest of America does July 4th. Holy shit! I have never seen such gluttony! There was some sort of cookout, presumably to celebrate our independence from mother England. Every inmate was given a ticket stub for their special July 4th meal. I drifted out of my cell to see what all the hoopla was about and conduct my own reconnaissance mission to seek out and retrieve any vegan options. What I found was some sort of morbid orgy of American eating. Each ticket got you a chicken breast and leg, two hamburgers, two hot dogs, two cans of soda, and a slice of watermelon. "Is this normal?" I thought to myself, can a single person eat this much food? Now don't get me wrong, I took my fare share of watermelon because it had been about a year since my last slice, but it was hard to eat in this sea of faces chewing and gorging. I started doing math equations in my head, "1100 inmates on this compound, five compounds on this complex, chickens have two breasts and legs so divide by two… =~2750 chickens died for this meal." I asked the man across the table from me how many federal prison complexes there are across the country. "One hundred and twenty," he replied. I have no idea how many animals went into those hot dogs or how many cows lost their lives for those two burgers, but including the chickens there were definitely tens of thousands of animals who died for that meal alone. When Americans do it, they "do it big.
"
I could not look away from this spectacle. This time it was not beautiful colors in the skies of my childhood, it was a train wreck of eating. I guess the "do it big" imperative is also why an American "single-serve" portion is enough to feed families elsewhere, and similarly perhaps why TV screens keep getting wider, or why chrome rims on cars keep getting taller, or why SUVs are becoming houseboats.
Americans "do it big!"
Hundreds of men around me were sucking meat off bones and pushing burgers down their throats in such volumes that they were actually making some sort of grotesque rustling noise. I thought to myself, this type of gluttony is not isolated to just here. This wanton disregard for the lives of animals did not begin here. This problem is one that is deeply rooted in our culture and predates all of us. It doesn't just apply to the gluttonous consumption of foods or animals. It traverses and consumes geographical borders—because more land is better; it absorbs resources—because more oil is bigger economic growth; it infiltrates military policy—because bigger armies mean you can get more of what you want when you want.
When America takes on foreign policy, America "does it big." Why use diplomacy when you can occupy? Why buy a portion of their oil, when you can take all of it? Why take only what we need to survive when we can factory farm, augment, and genetically alter our natural world and commodify it to make big money? Companies like Bechtel, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Carlyle & Telephonics stand to make big money off the forced policy in Iraq by providing logistics and provisions to forces, by providing ammunition and armaments, by re-routing oil trade, or by rebuilding bombed roads, bridges, and city infrastructure. Oil interests and a competitive US dollar stand to "go big" against the rallying Euro-dollar if they can re-direct control of oil out of Iranian hands and into the hands of US affiliates, thereby stunting the growth of China, the feared future "big dog" in the race to "go big," fueling the American "do it big" economy, and providing a Middle Eastern springboard for the big plan to "democratize" the Arab world.
American companies don't just "do it big" overseas, they "do it big" at home as well. Big houses, big cars, big things with big neon signs to advertise them. Big institutions, big police forces, big county courts, big state courts, big federal courts, and big prisons. In fact, recent research shows that the American "prison industrial complex" is the next largest growing industry in this country, second only to courier services like UPS, DHL, and Logistics. Both private and government-run prisons have found a way to jump on the "do it big" wagon by maximizing the profitability of captivity. By way of very old legislation, prisoners can be stripped of their original constitutional protections as citizens for the duration of their sentence and, as wards, be used for labor at what is legally considered slave wages. This has led to the increased privatization of prisons, because private companies see so much opportunity for profit when work that would otherwise cost upwards of $18-30 per hour per employee can be obtained for 12 cents an hour per inmate. Major corporate conglomerates are getting involved directly with prison policy, building facilities within the walls of prison compounds and creating profit for the prison, the state and federal government, and even more for the company and its client contracts.
Often the company will operate under a fake name and use a "holding company" name for a ticker symbol so that the public may invest. Such is the case in my cage, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, where a "private" company (whose name I cannot include in this article, grrr…)[1] operates many facilities that take on specific tasks (which I can't specifically name, grrr…), produces a variety of products (under different brand names, grrr…), at times caters to government or private contracts, and all the while trades on the open market under the "public" holding company name (whose name I cannot include either). Nevertheless, these companies "do it big." Just think of how "big" your profits can be if you don't have to pay workers. What happens when it is illegal to unionize, illegal to refuse work, illegal to be late? You get to keep your shop open around the clock, your workers keep coming in, and even when you give them bonuses like a pack of Nutty Bars from the prison store you're still saving $17-29 an hour. That's BIG savings! Size-wise these facilities are always big, like 10-acre concrete boxes filled with bustling people.
A friend of mine recently wrote me recounting her experience in accompanying our mutual friend as he voluntarily surrendered himself to the Bureau of Prisons. She said that these places are solid examples of "everything we hate." She recalled saying to herself, "what the fuck are we doing? what the fuck are we doing?" I remember feeling the same way when I walked myself in about a year ago. Her words were a spooky echo of the feelings that rang through me for over a week when I surrendered myself. My heart wept along with hers, and with our friend who surrendered himself. Those times evoked a feeling in me that I used to shudder at as it would leave the mouths of pessimistic folks. A feeling that there was too much evil out there, a feeling of being consumed, a feeling like drowning. I felt a tremendous weight on my shoulders and a fear that my efforts were noble but not more than a blemish on the face of evil. I want so much more in this life. I want more for others, not just me, not just humans, everything… Our lives are fucking remarkable and there is evidence of such everyday.
Every day has its ups and downs. This is true everywhere, but in prison it seems to be even more exaggerated. The July 4th meal helped me paint a picture of the "do it big" consumption that embodies everything that is wrong with our culture, right inside the theater of the prison chow hall. As a spectator, I can drown in my disgust and grow more pessimistic and jaded, or I can relish the good points on this rollercoaster ride. I remember one point so nice that as I write this I know it will just provide more evidence for my friends' position that I am in fact a hopeless romantic.
My job in the prison has me doing a bunch of silly tasks: mostly I sweep the sidewalks on the compound, sometimes I clean the tables and set up chairs in the visiting room, other times I move boxes into the prison industrial facility. Because this prison has only been open a year, it's not yet fully operational. One day my co-workers and I moved boxes into an industrial space the size of a shopping mall. It was empty and quiet. We had a cart to wheel the boxes in, a 6'x4' flatbed bottom with hard plastic wheels and a handle to guide it. After we unloaded the boxes, the other inmates and I got eerily quiet and a smile came over my face.
You see, this industrial facility is what makes the prison profitable, and here it sits, idle. When it was built it was supposed to serve as a "411 call center" for people who want to buy products from the distribution service provided by the private company that uses prison labor, but something happened… There was a previous failed attempt at a similar call center at another prison, and it appeared that I am not the only "hopeless romantic." Some inmates with lengthy sentences who enjoy the company of ladies had trouble getting off the phone with female customers. This apparently never made it into the BOP's calculations when building these prison call centers, and even today if you listen carefully in this empty 10 acre concrete box you can hear an echo from yesteryear saying "oops.
"
We all laughed as we unloaded the boxes. We were convinced big brother BOP was trying to make the space seem useful by filling it with cardboard cubes of great importance. We were black, white, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern—men with all of the racial tensions of the prison complex—and we laughed together and smiled together. The cart was now empty and one of my co-workers, a white man with swastikas on his arm, climbed aboard the cart and stood like Michael J. Fox atop the van in "Teen Wolf." A young African-American kid began to push the cart across this empty sea of concrete floor. He too jumped on board. The hard plastic wheels clicked as they rolled over the cracks that divided one section of concrete from another. Click-click, click-click. We all smiled, we all laughed, and in this moment we were free. Above us were the large plate glass windows where the corporate guys would have been supervising the hundreds of phone receptionists, below us and to all sides was a vast empty space now echoing with clicks and laughter.
I felt like I did when my mom took me to my first fireworks show. I was seeing "everything we hate" collect dust and become the space for box cart races and laughter—and a space to destroy a once tense racial dynamic. I stood there and took it all in: the echoes, the laughter, the dust bunnies on the floor. Because of the prior failed attempt to create a prison call center, the private company offering this service could not find another client. They haphazardly went ahead and built the space in hopes that another client would come along, but to no avail. I wondered what this famed Paul Bunyan of an inmate said while on the phone that struck a near-fatal blow to the revenue of the prison industrial complex? A laundry list of cheesy pick-up lines came to mind, and they fueled more laughter among us. I was reminded of the great power we have as individuals to change the whole world, and that's a concept that scares our oppressors beyond words.
This factory space could have been filled with despair, but now it is a sea of hope, and I'm going swimming…
Andy
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[1] Editor's note: We can only guess he's referring to UNICOR.
8:03 PM
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