Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (12 page)

For the first time, I’d decided to heed the prison’s “Dress-Down Friday” policy. (A policy for staff—if inmates dressed down any further, they’d be wearing loincloths.) I was sporting jeans, a Red Sox T-shirt, and chucks on my feet. This apparently lent me the look of an overgrown tween. It would be the last time I’d be observing Dress-Down Friday.

But the wheezy woman in the sallyport wasn’t alone. I was one of the youngest, and greenest, staff members. People seemed to enjoy reminding me of this. After about the seventh person had told me to be careful—to not trust anyone—I began to wonder if there was something particularly naïve looking about me.

I needed to gain some prison respect. Yet, try as I might, I couldn’t escape the impulses of my education: that the world’s problems demanded the old college effort. Yes, I would do this the Harvard way. I would
spearhead an initiative
.

I spliced some glossy magazine photos of Hurricane Katrina refugees and designed a nice propaganda poster with it. There had been a good deal of outrage among the inmates at the government’s indifference toward poor black communities in New Orleans. I would challenge inmates to do something beyond complain. To donate money to hurricane relief and to command respect for having done so.

When I proposed the idea to Patti, she balked. It hadn’t occurred to me that raising money from inmates, especially as a collective, was actually a radical concept, not to mention a potential logistical nightmare. But these, I insisted, were mere technical problems.
I’ll stay on top of it
, I assured her, supremely confident. I could tell she didn’t feel comfortable with the idea. But, probably not wanting to dampen my enthusiasm, she gave me the green light. Or rather, the yellow light, which in Boston means slam on the gas.

Up went the poster. I rigged up a special consent form with which an inmate could authorize the transfer of money directly from his prison account to the Red Cross Katrina Fund. The consent form was photocopied as a receipt. I made up lists of inmates by prison unit. I perfected my pitch and made flyers that were to be dispersed throughout the prison.

Everything was going well until a senior staffer, a jolly linebacker-sized caseworker with a heavy black leather jacket, a thick curly mop, and even thicker Greek accent, walked into the library, clutching one of the flyers. His smile beamed through his gum-chewing.

“Eez theez for real?” he asked, lifting up the flyer.

I confirmed that
theez
indeed was quite real.

“Ho boy,” he said shaking his head, laughing. “Goo’ luck, my friend.”

He gave me a friendly slap on the shoulder that almost knocked me square out of my Rockports.

The reaction from staff was nearly unanimous. Another caseworker, on his daily newspaper break in the library, asked me what inmate donors would get in return.
A sense of agency
, I theorized. A faint grin crossed his face as he awaited the punch line. When it didn’t come, he burst out laughing.

“That,” he said, “is
priceless.”

After the caseworker left, still chuckling to himself, Coolidge appeared. Sitting nearby, poring over a volume of the
Massachusetts General Laws Annotated
, he had overheard this exchange.

“Don’t listen to them,” he said. “You know you’re doing a good thing.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I can help you, you know. I can go into the unit, get people to sign. No problem.”

“That’s okay. I’m all set.”

“No, really, I can help you. I know how things get done in here.”

“No, really,” I said. “All set.”

And I was. Despite the skepticism of my coworkers I’d actually begun attracting a few donors. Even a few who were almost broke themselves. I was feeling good. If it was radical to raise money from inmates, then I guess I was a radical.

The truth is, I’m nothing of a radical. I wouldn’t be caught dead displaying a picture of Che. And though I was amused by a Wesleyan student I once met who told me that she funded a prison education program with the proceeds of her swift drug dealing business, I wasn’t one for revolutionary action.

But I did have fits of ambition. Though the goals for fund-raising were modest enough, once the project was under way I wanted to do it right. To make as much money and reach as many inmates as possible.

Coolidge’s offer intrigued me. He was right. He could reach those people who never came to the library and speak to them in a way that would be more persuasive than I, a fourteen-year-old-looking white boy. With his help, I could double (or more) the reach of this effort.

After a week of watching the donations continue to trickle in, fewer every day, I decided to give him a shot. I approached his “office,” the back reference/computer room. Coolidge caught me hesitating at the entrance, wondering whether it was wise to proceed.

“Please come in,” he said. “I’m not too busy.”

“Right,” I said. “I’ve got a job for you.”

This was the formulation I’d chosen over
I need your help
.

“Oh really?”

“I thought about your offer to help with the Katrina thing and I’ve decided that I want you to collect signatures in the units.”

“I told you.”

And with that, he opened up a folder and pulled out smudgy sheets full of signatures.

“Already started,” he said. He was pleased to the point of nausea. “How do you like that?”

I didn’t like it at all. He’d gone behind my back. But I had to admit he’d secured an impressive number of donors.

“Good,” I said, “keep it up.”

Prison Doors: A Brief History

The prison occupies a former dump and incinerator site. It is nearly impossible to reach by car. You must first navigate an Escher-like labyrinth of streets, in which a turn west lands you east, and a turn east lands you nowhere. To get onto Bradston Street, where the prison is located, you must make a sudden, impossibly sharp right turn. If you miss the turn, you’re sent directly onto the interstate. It’s as if the city planners are warning you:
Trust me, you don’t want to turn here, get away, far away, from this place
.

Not that I drove. I took the Mass Ave. bus line, which ferried me from the gates of Harvard Yard, near where I was living at the time, to the Boston Medical Center. From there, I walked fifteen minutes across the giant highway interchange, into the netherland of South Bay.

A street sign identified the area as Newmarket Square—though I’d never heard anyone call it that—an industrial zone sandwiched between some of Boston’s toughest and fastest gentrifying neighborhoods: Roxbury, Dorchester, the South End, and South Boston, or Southie. Most of my friends and neighbors in Cambridge had never heard of South Bay even though it was a twenty-minute drive down the road.

It turned out the common metaphor of prison as a warehouse was actually not a metaphor. South Bay was a warehouse district. There were auto-body shops, mason depots, a methadone clinic, sundry bombed-out buildings, the headquarters of the Boston Fire Department, the Transit Police. But mostly just streets of warehouses and a chorus of beeping, produced by the backing up of delivery trucks. Sometimes it felt as though the entire place was inching backward.

And in a way, it was. South Bay is rumored to be sinking into the sea. Although a landmass for generations—having been filled in a century ago—seagulls still swarmed the skies. Perhaps they sensed the rising tide.

Signs of the End were everywhere. In a large storage lot in front of the prison, an urban cemetery: street signs—some from familiar city thoroughfares, Commonwealth Ave., Beacon St.—twisted into tortured poses. Splintered telephone poles strewn about in haphazard mounds, battered streetlights, busted-up traffic signals, a perfectly new Fisher Price Talking Chef Magic Kitchen set.

The area around the prison didn’t do a good job concealing its former use as a shipping yard. Antique train tracks asserted themselves at odd intervals all along surrounding streets. The streets themselves appeared to have sustained a mortar barrage. You had to drive around the prison at a respectful pace. There were no quick getaways.

The current facility was designed in “pods”—smaller cell blocks, or “units,” organized around dayrooms that allow the inmates to interact—and replaced the old Deer Island prison’s Auburn architectural model, the notorious linear design of long corridors stacked into tiers intended to maximally isolate inmates. When this new, “state of the art” prison was built in 1990, William Weld campaigned against it.

“This Taj Mahal of a jail,” then candidate Weld declaimed, “is an obscene symbol of everything that is wrong with state government and stands as a permanent insult to the taxpayers of Massachusetts. I’d like to reintroduce our inmates to the joys of busting rock.”

He was taking a traditional perspective of prison architecture. An encyclopedia entry from the early nineteenth century explains that a prison’s design should involve “an effectual method of exciting the imagination to a most desirable point of abhorrence … the exterior of a prison should, therefore, be formed in the heavy and somber style, which most forcibly impresses the spectator with gloom and terror.”

To Dr. Benjamin Rush—who in addition to signing the Declaration of Independence was also a prison reformer, and a bit of a drama queen—the door wasn’t just a visual but an auditory feature: “Let the avenue to this house be rendered difficult and gloomy by mountains and morasses. Let the doors be of iron, and let the grating, occasioned by opening and shutting them, be increased by an echo that shall deeply pierce the soul.” At the time, this was a progressive position. Piercing souls was a more humanitarian approach than carving up bodies.

The designers of the South Bay prison had a different perspective. During the initial stages of design, architects at Stubbins Associates—the firm responsible for the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, the Citicorp building in New York City, and the Reagan Presidential Library—posted various images of old prisons in their sunny offices in Cambridge. All were too depressing. One stood out. The highly mythologized Bridge of Sighs in Venice. As a senior architect told the
Boston Globe
, the Bridge “connects a public building to a prison in the back of the Doge’s palace and it points to the civic role of buildings like this … a bridge between the public face of justice and the reality of incarceration and punishment.”

Though they disagreed on the purpose of the building’s design, both the governor and the architects did share an old assumption: that a prison’s architecture should affect the citizens on the outside as much as the prisoners on the inside. Both agreed that the prison’s exterior matters, that it’s an essential public symbol of … 
something
.

One day before my shift started, I stood in front of the prison, looking at the façade. Probably hoping to put off work for another few minutes, I decided to do a little experiment: to close my eyes and open them, to allow the architecture to work its magic on me, to produce some emotional reaction, some sensation.

Here are my findings: nothing. No gloom, no terror. No echo. My soul was not pierced deeply. It wasn’t a Taj Mahal of a jail, an obscene symbol, as the governor had quipped. Nor was it the architect’s highly conceptual Bridge of Justice. There was no “effectual method of exciting the imagination” in any direction at all. The structure repelled all imagination. It was two cereal boxes. It left no impression, and asked to be ignored. It was purely functional. But what function—this was not made clear.

It wasn’t always like this. In “The Prison Door,” the memorable first chapter of
The Scarlet Letter
, Hawthorne describes, or imagines, how this very same institution, the Boston prison, appeared in its earliest incarnation, the very first prison in the New World. These are the opening words of the book (which sits on both the Classics and Fiction library shelves in the prison’s latest incarnation):

A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.… Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era.

The prison’s door, the most ancient-seeming entity in the brand New World, was such a potent symbol that Hawthorne began his story about the nature of sin and punishment by focusing the reader’s attention on it, even before introducing his main character. The prison door itself is the protagonist as much as the criminal who walked through it.

From a dreadful symbol of sin, the prison had evolved into this: a building that doesn’t say anything coherent, does nothing to announce its function, a prison designed to blend in, to be sped by on the highway. Was that progress?

In today’s prison, there are no spikes, no grim iron-work, no castellated towers. And no ponderous door. Hawthorne’s prison door, it would seem, exists only in words on the shelves of the prison library. The space where this actual prison door used to stand is now a hollow entryway into a lobby.

In the absence of a symbol as concrete as Hawthorne’s prison door, everyone is free to fill this hollow space with private meanings. The literacy teachers and “re-entry” counselors, like Yoni, had their resource books. The officers and support staff had their retirement funds. Jessica, it turned out, had family drama. And what did Coolidge have? He filled the empty space left by the prison door with, as usual, conspiracy theories. Like many inmates, he wondered aloud what this place was
really
about. He would mock the American penal system’s vaguely Orwellian nomenclature of “corrections”:
Department of Correction, House of Corrections, Correctional Facility
, and his favorite,
Correction Officer
.