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Prison is like a foreign country: Its far away, selfcontained, operates by its I own rules and is largely ignored by the mainstream U.S. news media. True, occasionally someone writes an excellent investigative expose, but even activists are hampered by a dearth of reliable information about what really goes on in the big house. Among the crimespooked general population, misconception and indifference are the norm. Most of what we know about prison comes from the flat and flimsy press releases of mendacious prison officials, via lazy and illinformed. But there is plenty of news in prison, and some fine journalists there as well. Now with the release of The Celling of America, we can sample some of their reporting.Edited by Daniel BurtonRose, Dan Pens and Paul Wright Pens and Wright did much of the writing; both are serving long terms in the Washington State Reformatory for violent crimes, The Celling of America is indispensable reading for all those who wish to understand the great American lockup. Mostly written for and by prisoners, Celling covers a lot of ground, from conditions on death row, to official corruption in private prisons, to the real deal behind a wave of federal prison riots in 1995. It also serves as an introduction to Prison Legal News, the monthly magazine for and by prisoners that is to prison watchers what The Financial Times is to capitalists.Though closely followed by many prisoners, select lawyers, investigative journalists and even a few judges, Prison Legal News can be hard to appreciate. Typically an issue of P.L.N. has the look of an industry newsletter, deliberately wrapped in a cover of turgid legal articles and larded with arcanelooking case citations. While some jailhouse lawyers, with restricted access to law libraries, depend on P.L.N.s legal reporting, most prisoners and other readers find such articles hopelessly technical. But far from poor marketing, the legal covers are a subtle strategy for eluding prison censors. The editors reason that, if it looks boring, apolitical and legalistic, prison guards who routinely ban muckraking, antiprison and leftwing publications wont read and pulp P.L.N. Its a specific application of a general survival strategy that some prisoners call the lazy pig theory.But The Celling of America focuses on P.L.N.s investigative pieces, like its account of Microsofts use of convict labor. How can prisoners, with only their ballpoint pens, stamps and sparse pay phones, scoop the big boys? In part its because of the mainstream medias lack of interest in prisons, and partly its the result of prisoner tenacity and farflung cooperation. In the eight years P.L.N. has been publishing, the editors have built a sprawling network of journalists in public and private prisons around the nation. These unlikely reporters clip local papers, record firsthand testimony, copy discovery from obscure criminal and civil rights cases and send it all by way of third parties and the U.S. Postal Service to the cells of Dan Pens and Paul Wright.From this farrago of horror, fact and occasional fantasy, Pens and Wright have molded the countrys most impeccably professional source of prison news. The best parts of the book are those surreal and brutal insights that can come only from prisoners themselves. For example, Adrian Lomaxs Prison TV: Luxury or Management Tool? sketches a terrifying picture of the Box as psychic meat grinder. Politicians may rail against TV but prison administrators mince no words in asserting that they need television in the big house, television is the superdoping device. Prisoners who spend most of their waking hours staring at the tube, as an embarrassingly large number do, pose no threat to the keep... Its no coincidence that TV privileges have grown during the same period when everything else has been cut back. Prison officials gave us more TV precisely for the purpose of keeping prisoners pacified while the DOC took everything else.When the dubious privilege of TV is removed through punishment time in solitary confinement an older, more radical prison culture reemerges. Prisoners of different races and rival gangs will listen in rapt attention as someone in solitary reads aloud. Reading material is like gold in the seg units. All books and magazines that make it into the hole are eagerly devoured and passed from prisoner to prisoner. Ive seen convicts perform astonishing feats of fishing, skipping lines from tier to tier and even around comers in order to retrieve printed matter.Often politicalprisoner writing can be somewhat hyperbolic. But Celling keeps the rage and horror of prison on a tight and precise leash, as when Ray Luc Levasseur reports from the quiet concrete hell of a federal control unit. There is no Imam for Muslim prisoners. Every morning, I go through my own ablution. Every morning there is a layer of chalky dust settled about the cell. It comes through the single air vent. It never stops. Each morning I busy myself with a wet rag mopping up all [the dust] that is not in my lungs.To say that the bad news is sketched with detail, not bluster, doesnt mean Celling sanitizes prison. Essays like Prison Legal News Top Ten NonFrivolous Prisoner Lawsuits are almost too searing to finish. Cases include: open pit toilets and cells that routinely flood with sewage in Massachusetts; massive overcrowding in Harris County, Texas, where scores of prisoners sleep on the floor; the perennial cases of unprovoked, nearly homicidal beatings by guards that lead to civil fines but no real disciplining of corrections staff; ghastly, preventable death in prison hospitals for lack of basic care; a quadriplegic inmate in Indiana, permanently confined to a prison hospital bed and denied all rehabilitative programming and educational opportunities for years upon years.But not all the news is bad. Theres still inmate resistance and politics, despite the repression. In the L.A. County jail, prisoners staged a hunger strike when authorities restricted access to law libraries, In federal prisons, what were billed as race riots with no coherent demands were in fact riots marked by unprecedented racial solidarity protesting disparities in sentencing guidelines that punish crack crimes 100 times more severely than those of powder cocaine.Nor is Celling confined to reporting matters of life on the inside. One of the best investigative pieces details the rise of Washington States Three Strikes ballot initiative. After several failed attempts, the initiative was catapulted to victory by a clique of superwealthy mavericks and the National Rifle Association. Without vital N.R.A. cash the initiative probably would not have passed and public concern about crime might have been more focused on preventive measures like gun control and less on the vindictive, moralizing politics of punishment. Another fine story deals with corruption and indictments among some of the top brass at Corrections Corporation of America, the worlds largest private jailer [see Eric Bates, Prisons for Profit, January 5 P.L.N.s record of watertight reporting and measured tone has won it fans like journalists Ken Silverstein and William Greider. At times the writing, Dan Penss in particular, is marked by a dry and tightly coiled wit that, one suspects, comes from living in a social powder keg. One wishes there were a bit more of that, and a few more overview pieces. For example, the important and barely constitutional Prison Litigation Act of 1996 goes unmentioned, as do the questions of racial politics and prison rape, except for sexual abuse of female prisoners.Ultimately, one of the most important contributions of The Celling of America is the lesson that prisoners must be allowed to speak and write if society is to understand the realities of incarceration. With states like California, Pennsylvania and Virginia making it illegal for the press to interview inmates, the need for prisoner journalism is more pressing than ever.

 

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