“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
Joseph Campbell
I recently spent
two days at the Cleveland Unit with the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. PEP
teaches incarcerated men about how to run and start their own business. After arriving at the Cleveland Unit, about thirty men and a
few women dressed in a suit or modest business attire (no skirts, open toed shoes or tight fitting/revealing shirts) traded our driver’s
licenses for a first-name only badge. We
were then patted down by a correctional officer of the same gender and were
politely asked to walk through a metal detector. After milling about in a small holding room,
we were led towards the chow hall. As
instructed, we walked down the hallway between the yellow lines. A sprinkling
of men in prison blues stood back against the wall eyeing us as we passed by. I
could hear the roar of shouting voices and thunderous applause coming from the
chow hall. My breath quickened and my
heart raced with each step.
This was not my
personal experience of prison. In my early twenties, I had visited my brother at
Folsom several times. At Folsom, we were in the visitation room with at least
one hundred other people, but the room was oddly muted. We conversed in hushed tones as if we were in
a library. All inmates and their visitors faced the front of the room, while a
table of guards stared down at us like we were a herd of unruly cattle. Touching was not allowed with the exception
of a brief hug at the beginning of our visit.
As we stepped
into the chow hall, a line of men in blues (kind of like hospital scrubs)
high-fived us as we entered. They
greeted us by name. Some shook our hands
and thanked us for being there. We were told that they encouraged hugs in this
program, but not with women. The further I ventured into the room, I felt completely
undeserving of the enthusiastic reception.
I just showed up. We then had our picture taken
holding a sign that read, “I Got Caught Doing Something Good,” along with a
photo where we stood with a group of men from the program.
Then we were free
to mingle.
My other visits
to prison to visit Khristian Oliver at the Pollunsky Unit and Sonya Reed at the
Mountain View Unit were even more controlled and sedate. Both Khristian and Sonya were behind
glass. With Khristian, we spoke via a
black phone and with Sonya we spoke through a mesh wire. Physical contact was not allowed and we were
to remain seated at all times. It sounds horrible to say, but the only
time I got to touch Khristian Oliver was when he was dead on a gurney.
I am not
comfortable with large groups of people, so I approached a man standing alone
in the middle of the room. To get the
conversation flowing, I asked, “What’s your business plan?”
“Well,” he said,
“I’m a writer.”
“So am I!” I
interrupted. What are the odds? Out of 88
men, the first man I talk to is a writer.
“Non-fiction. How about you?”
“I write creative
nonfiction,” he said.
“Me too!”
I felt like I was
at an odd social function and I’d found a kindred spirit. This man was articulate, confident and
interested in my thoughts about publishing.
When he told me about his business plan to start a company that
published the written work of men and women behind bars, I was sold. Heck, I’d done the same for Sonya Reed on a
much smaller scale. The power of story
is strong and the men and women behind bars deserve to be heard. I learned later that he had
committed a murder at the age of fourteen, but at that moment in time the only
thing that differentiated us was our clothes and where we called home.
To be continued…