The New York City Board of "Education" has made a cottage industry out its long cherished technique of tracking. This originally meant placing students in either "slow" or "accelerated" classes based upon age and learning modality.
The idea has its origins in the writings of Roger Ascham back in the Sixteenth century, where he categorizes students as either "hard" or "soft" learners in The Scholemaster.
Like the legendary rabbits this perfectly innocent beginning has ramified into a Balkanization of the student body by the construction of "disability" labels which seem to have the characteristics of a witch hunt for deviations from an imaginary norm.
Theoretically the number of disabilities could one day reach a critical mass, whereby the notion of norm disappears. Pathology would then be universal. Can we imagine a society so wealthy that it could afford to educate anyone at all in the face of such an absurdity?
The breakdown of the very idea of a common education has resulted in the breakdown of the intuitive relationship between subject and object. With that the intuitive relationship between cause and effect goes out the window.
The babies having babies phenomenon in the lower economic echelons piles on another devastating dimension. These young women become pregnant despite all the birth control indoctrination that has been provided over the last quarter century. The biological fathers are nothing better than sperm donors in all too many instances. The children who result have no effective parents at all. They can only be expected to sustain this corrupting cycle.
Add to this the number of students who have been born under biologically brutalized circumstances, drug addicted and/or self absorbed parents, pollution, television, and the notion of a common public education disappears. Communication based upon critical individual thinking and reasoned debate evaporates right along with it.
The population coagulates into a toy box for advertisers and demagogues: non-productive expendable cannon fodder who only contribute to the economy by means of the profits generated when they spend the miserable allotments provided by Welfare and other entitlements.
With each year new texts grow larger and more expensive, yet every metric indicates decline in what American students actually learn. Teenagers rapidly assimilate the technology of the internet, and still far too many are more globally ignorant than ever. It appears that there has been an insufficient assimilation of the power of the internet as a tool for learning.
Like the Television, which scientists originally projected would become a magnificent tool to advance knowledge and civilization, the net may become a stupefying agent, petrifying independent thinking and eroding the individual will which is its agency. They may be sent to fight and die in places they cannot even find on something as rudimentary as a globe without even taking the opportunity to verify whether they are engaged in a just or unjust war.
We finally need to re-examine the people who have made careers out of re-examining the educational process in the light of the radical, and doubtless traumatic displacements which have resulted in the last fifty years of technological change.
Their jargon filled, pseudo-scientific approach has proven unsatisfactory in terms of results, and incoherent in conception. Given the twelve years allotted, there really is not that much that needs to be learned. Reading, Writing, and basic arithmetic.
I have never taken any education courses. When I was in college I took the either overly arrogant or overly diffident position that I was too busy getting an education at the time.
I have found that the best teachers simply are filled with a desire to teach and will use the knowledge and experience already at their disposal to get the job done and tailor the approach to the circumstances.
I cannot help but wonder if our nebulous conceptions of education are somehow connected with our nebulous conceptions of art because so much of art has didactic components and the educational process albeit painful also requires components of delight.
Judging by the statistical results of the application of this method, we can only draw the conclusion that it has been wrong-headed, unless we desire a graduating population whose bottom twenty per cent is unemployable and by extension, disposable. Those who have abandoned hope express the opinion that the behavior of the "professional" educators borders on either institutionalized idiocy or unbridled greed.
I'm not quite that optimistic. There are a lot of administrators driving expensive cars while teachers on the front lines are at each others' throats, overwhelmed by the frustrations of trying to teach an ever mutating "standard curriculum" to students under extraordinarily substandard circumstances.
I don't know how many exceptionally accomplished young people have complained to me "I wish they figured my art/music/gymnastics (fill in the blanks) into my goddam average." And I've gotten this from a highly screened population of tutorials. These are the students whose parents have made a commitment far above the average one to their children's' betterment.
It seems to me that a simple cost effective solution to this "problem" would be cross-disciplinary tracking. There is no reason in the world that if children should prefer to study Renaissance art to algebra that they should not feel encouraged, as opposed to feeling stupid. There should be no "ninth grade algebra." Some people develop appreciation of abstract relations at a later time in their life. Why should they feel punished for that? Often when a student learns something a little later, s/he learns more quickly. I know this. I have witnessed it in my capacity as a mathematics tutor for clients as diverse in age as twelve to forty-five. Unfortunately, due to the stigma attached to this kind of work, I have never been able to make even half a decent living at this, despite the fact that most of my clients report that I am quite good at it. In fact, I have even spent several brief, but miserable periods of my life homeless, which I am determined never to allow to happen again. Thus, I must work in other capacities as well. Rikers
If you ever want to feel like a criminal, without the benenfit of either wearing handcuffs or a position in government, visit Rikers Island as a civilian.
You ll be getting hairy eyeballs from the moment you ask directions. The first question upon exiting the subway at squalid, motor exhaust tormented Queens Plaza is, where do I get my bus?
Out of the thirty odd buses that wriggle their way through the chronic traffic congestion from the Fifty Ninth Street Bridge to and from Manhattan, there are two buses with the same number. Only one of them goes to Rikers Island. So where does it stop, and how will I recognize it?
Making matters even more complicated is that Queens Plaza is the rather inapt title for a huge subway hub married to a failed shopping center development dating back to the eighties. If one were to ask me the dominant color I associate with the region, I would immediately say Carbon Monoxide Ecru.
A labyrinth of dead end side streets wrinkle out from its sphincter like center. Their shadows shelter ancient nineteenth century warehouses, weed ridden vacant lots, and an occasional hold out Dickensian tenement building.
The owners cling to these properties in the dimming hopes that the area will finally join in with the rest of the Queens real estate explosion. No doubt some day it will. But that day is not today.
Buses to nowhere idle in front of empty storefronts, disconsolate discount variety stores, and several miserable old man bars with names like Touch o’ The Blarney. There’s even a topless joint called Erin Go Bra, which the owners arrived at by simply removing the gh from the original hard core alky joint, Erin Go Bragh. The strippers themselves are either black, Latino, or underage Eastern European.
Queens and/or Queens Borough Plaza also offers several transient fast food establishments to brighten up the atmosphere and darken the colon. At least one establishment folds and then grand opens under new management every other month.
After sunset, hookers, pimps, and drug dealers have traditionally run the territory and seen to its legendary sleazy stability.
Once in a while the city cracks down on the neighborhood by arresting the evening’s homeless men with filthy rags, who offer to clean the windshields of drivers caught in the hanging noose of traffic bottlenecking its way to and from the bridge. The Post makes headlines out of these victories.
As a quintessential expression of Zen urban planning, the Plaza is a Coney Island for the connoisseur of the absurd. The most infamous of these attractions is that there are two separate subway stations together serving ten vitally related train lines.
No one who moves to Queens will escape paying an extra subway fare at least once for failing to distinguish between the Queens Plaza and the Queensborough Plaza stop. They are practically on top of each other, and an untrained inexperienced eye will assume they are the same station on the Transit maps.
Stupefied by the heat and gagging on the smog, I am disoriented to the point of near panic. I need to get to my first day of work on time. Desperate, I ask a couple of the Brownies, our benevolent Traffic Control Officers and municipal cash cows who produce a righteous quota of parking summonses per month. Since they occasionally direct traffic perhaps they might know. However since they are universally despised by New Yorkers, they are also as wary as rabbits in a kennel.
Each of them gives me a nothing more than a shrug and a smirk that seems to ask, "What did you do wrong that would make you have to inquire?"
I finally find information from a sweet voiced, squat, overweight, young black woman who is carrying a six month infant. She is a negative advertisement for the virtues of skin tight pink shorts. Her thighs are bursting out at the seams like overcooked sausages. Nevertheless, she’s the closest thing to civilization we have here.
"It’s right over there by the donut shop."
It can’t help but make me wonder at the extraordinary consistency of the subtexts in our society. Damn, it's deja vu all over again, cops, prisons, and donuts.
Naturally the stop is deserted, because in the course of my meanderings I have succeeded in just missing the thing.
I go to a newsstand on the corner and purchase all four daily newspappers (slop for the mentally toothless).
An unintentionally wise move. I will have ample time ahead to catch up on the cunningly diluted slop that passes for recorded current history and opinion in late twentieth century New York.
In addition, I get to read all the comics and Horoscopes. Perhaps the closest thing to objective journalism I will get.
Entering said dingy donut shop I wonder who has the contract on the stained black and white linoleum which is sufficiently foot worn and speckled with the grime of the ages to be neither color. The Tao of junk food. The white bears the seeds of the black, and the black is abraded in places where there appears to be white below.
I am greeted by a surly pot bellied giant of a Greek, whose tee shirt looks like a stranger to detergent, but matches the linoleum. Hairy biceps pop out of the urine yellow sleeves.
His Aquiline nose extends like an indignant mountain out from the brown vale of pock marked flesh below. A mouth dotted with stumps for teeth speaks through thick lips tensed in a chronic sneer. The tone is unexpectedly courteous and friendly.
"What‘ll you have, my man?" Just a trace of an accent.
"Large coffee light no sugar, and a whole wheat donut."
"Skip the whole wheat, bro. They‘re stale. Get the regular old fashioned. They just came out of the oven. Trust me."
"You‘re on man. Sounds good. Hey, the bus to Rikers stops here, doesn‘t it?"
"Yeah, the zoo express. What are you doing over there? You a lawyer? You sure ain‘t no Correction Officer."
"Nah, I‘m supposed to teach there."
"Good luck over there. That‘s the place where they never seem to learn if you know what I mean. Here‘s your change. Enjoy."
Well, the donut is delicious and bakery warm. I hope that’s a good omen. Let’s check the horoscope. Hmmm. Aeries. Air head more apropos. You are in a cycle where if you want to change anything around you, the best course is to do nothing. The moon in your opposite sign signifies that this is a poor time to try to force issues in your usual headstrong way. Sit back Aeries. Smell the roses. Don’t try to change the colors.
Well, that was about as informative as a Washington press conference. I wonder who writes this stuff anyway. Let’s touch base with the funnies.
I have always found the comics to be utterly engrossing. I completely forget where I am in a rapture of fresh donut, coffee, and the latest predictable adventures of Dilbert and Calvin and Hobbes. Thank God for the Greek.
"Hey man, your bus is coming. Don‘t miss it. There won‘t be another one for at least an hour."
In the time it took for the next one to creak in, a considerable crowd has formed. Many of them people who already know each other. I hate being a stranger among micro cliques. And I can’t for the life of me figure out who are the law abiding ones.
The bus itself looks like a factory reject made on a Friday by workers on the verge of going on strike. The front fender is held in place with twine, and it’s spewing enough cloying black smoke to fill Sloan Kettering with caner.
If I weren’t absolutely positive that I was in the middle of a transit node in the Greatest City in the World, I could swear I was in the middle of Managua. The only thing my fellow passengers are missing are chickens under their arms.
I’m even treated to a foreign language immersion program.
"Whassup?"(With a pronounced serpentine stress on the doubled esses.)
"How ya feeling?"
Spoken by a morbidly overweight Latino man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with devils, flames, pitchforks, and the motto "Somebody Has to Work in Hell, but why did it have to be ME? Rikers Island."
These prove to be common expressions in Rikersese for "get ready to have a miserable day." Incarceration has a sub-language all it’s own.
The ride in is a twilight zone hybrid of the scenic and the squalid. It is as if you are being punished for going there. We are packed in standing room only. The screaming of a baby in the background reminds me that despite a growing sense of isolation, I am not alone. The future is my co-rider and it is screaming in agony.
I go into classic urban ostrich mode. I break open the New York Times and get to work on the crossword. I don’t know if I’m paranoid, but I could swear people are glaring at me for doing this. This is not a Times crowd, but I’m sure some of them wish they were.
The squeal of brakes and a sudden pitching motion on the weak springs of the bus pull my face out of four letter word for Avian domicile. Third letter g. We have reached the bridge over the river and into the Island of the jailed.
To my left is the symbolically located Astoria Sewage treatment center, and to my right I can watch the great metal birds of Laguardia airport taking off for parts unknown. I express my problem with the contrasting impact of these images by being unable to keep my hands from shaking when I exit and follow the herd through the massive ten door entrance to sign in.
The experience fragments into incoherent luminous images. Of course, it is my first day on the Job, and I don't even really know what The Job is yet. The movement through double locks, "gates" (iron bars), and card check points.
Without them you can't get out. They're not really cards, I just call them that. Actually they are squares of plastic with a clip provided for attachment to any convenient part of my clothing. When one enters a specific facility I will find that this card, as well as my photo ID must be surrendered for another considerably more deteriorated card with a number, which I will record when I sign the ALL PROGRAMS BOOK.
And let us not forget the numberless cigarette butts on the stone floor. Rikers Island, where work is folly and folly is religion. You forget where this life is sometimes.
The guards flying past me through the Clearance check point wear t-shirts with slogans like "Hired in my twenties/Retired in my Forties. An enormous number are black, big, and sometimes discuss the virtue of various gyms. Gold's is the preferred deal. They are a very athletic and intimidating looking bunch. Many of them look better than professional athletes, which I am sure they would rather be.
Entering Rikers Island entails more formalities than an Imperial Ball. Unfortunately they forgot the caterer.
First one stands in lines for check points to enter. Expected. On my first day it turns out to be an extraordinarily long line. Unexpected. There is a large number of the recently released ahead of me who are applying for their PROPERTY. Clothes and other existential flotsam which have not yet been returned to them despite their release. They leave bearing hefty bags full of unwashed laundry and half used bars of soap.
Why anyone would return here to pick up anything that reminded them of their stay baffles me. However, many of these folks have spent so much time incarcerated that everything, no matter how minute, is worth making an issue out of. It constitutes a perversion of a perversion: the legal practice.
I learn about the incredibly important concept of "Clearance" because I do not have it at the first checkpoint, redundantly named "Clearance."
A large red sign with white letters which lists contraband, and potential security problems teeters above a check point consisting of a ramshackle folding card table and battered metal chairs. These stand in front of a double gun metal gray door. To the left is a metal detector leading to a large open area with benches seating a maximum of 200 to accommodate people who have issues. I hope to god I don’t end up there.
Behind it is an office whose door is windowed with pebbled glass. To the left is a bank of vending machines and heavily employed male and female lavatories.
Standing in line with about 100 other unfortunates I contemplate this introduction to jail and its rules.
NO CAMERAS
The "logic" behind many of the following rules is based upon the fact that Rikers is full of "jailhouse lawyers" who barrage the civil justice apparatus with frivolous suits in re the "invasion of privacy." Although how a man or woman who may be strip and cavity searched at any time can have any sense of privacy at all utterly eludes me.
NO RADIOS
They may conceal "contraband," such as drugs and pornography.
NO RECORDERS
There are a number of suits pending regarding inmates who sued over the "unlicensed use of voice." Nevertheless, there is also scuttlebutt expressed by the teachers to the effect that "they" do not want the public to know "what's really going on."
As far as this author can tell, who "they" are is elusive. And as for most of the teachers, I have learned to doubt that they would want the public to know how arrogant, ineffectual, and incompetent we are.
NO BEEPERS
I guess we don’t have any doctors who might get an urgent call.
I wonder why they don’t synopsize it in the form of
"NO NOTHING!!!" AHHH! You are ALONE here. We got Sartre, Kafka, and Bozo the clown all rolled into one.
My lack of clearance is equally unexpected. Fortunately this is resolved with the arrival with my boss, tweed jacketed tie free button down collar Juan Festivus. He has arrived on the next bus. He is a soft spoken scholarly looking man with no scholarly credentials.
Slight of build, and about five foot seven, Juan has a tendency to slouch, making him look even smaller. Slim pink manicured fingers which look like complete strangers to physical work radiate from hands dangling like ornaments beneath his flaccid unmuscled arms.
On rare occasions he raises them to gesticulate his way through a point he thinks needs emphasis. This will turn out to be a clue to the initiated to pay absolutely no attention at all.
A thick black ribbon of a mustache hangs at unwavering anchor beneath the mainsail of his narrow triangular nose. It seems preternaturally motionless, whether he is silent, speaking, or in rare panic stricken full shout. Gold rimmed glasses frame deer like empty brown eyes, and his unlined forty five year old rectangle of a face is crowned with a full tiara of meticulously dyed brown hair.
Juan is a rehabilitation success story. He developed the idea for his program while doing a thousand hours of community service work at Rikers as part of a suspended sentence on charges of business fraud and low end money laundering.
Having convinced the state that somehow we will be able to get the "Program" implemented, Festivus got a research grant from the City University, and a Federal endowment for his book, which he endlessly reminds us is a "process, not something as static as a text."
During our first meeting he gave me some nebulous ground rules. All of the policemen are to be referred to as "Officer."
As it turns out the gate "Officer" involved is not the usual. That is my CLEARANCE problem.
After three phone calls, suddenly there is no problem. I am presented with my first card, now properly referred to as a "tag," and I finally go through the first check-point, which is nothing but a turnstile guarded by two "Officers."
Once clear of "Clearance" I walk past a third metal detector which I am not required to pass through. I thank God for that, since I am wearing steel toed boots and have not changed my socks in two days. If I had to take them off to pass through that gate without setting it beeping, no doubt I would be required to register my feet as deadly weapons.
Despite my slothful nature, I suffer from Athlete's Foot of epic proportions. Road kill would be a nostril improvement on the horrors that waft between my toes after even a scant three hours shod.
I proceed through a mezzanine on an approximately thirty foot walk, and find myself back outside, although now technically "inside."
There is a crowd of people waiting for as yet countless different buses that go to each of the many different facilities, none of which I as yet know anything about.
A guard reads my disorientation and comes up to me and my boss.
"What facility?"
"North Facility," he responds. Now I know what N.F. on my tag means.
"Take bus number 16, whenever it gets here."
Summer is not a vacation time at Rikers Island, population approximately 30,000. Everyone is miserable. From the guards to the inmates, and any of the many caught in between.
These include Social Workers, Drug Counselors, teachers, an unspeakable collection of ineffectual experts, Religious Ministries, Medical Staff, and God only knows what else. The only missing elements are dogs and ponies. I am one of the in-betweens. I am a teacher.
Of course, my position had a job description as abstract as a Monday morning horoscope. But the money was good, and I was so anxious for regular work that I figured I’d ask questions later.
From now on, every time I go through that first checkpoint, my entire interview flashes before my eyes in an unmediated, fragmentary form.
"You will be directing the inmate tutorial program.....Of course, since the program is being initialized, we are still in a transitional process of defining the goals..."
It seems to me that the goals should be simple. Educating the ignorant. It is the means that are conundrums.
"Since the funding is from a research grant, you will not be able to be paid for eight weeks. If only you had come in a day earlier, we could have had your paper work done in time for the next payment cycle, but unfortunately that's not possible now."
I read, "We don't know how long you're going to last."
"And whatever you do, under no circumstances should you give out your address or telephone number."
You mean I won't be inviting any of them over for my regular afternoon tea and crumpet parties for the Ladies Bridge Cotillion?
"I hope that you understand that there will be certain inconveniences involved with dealing with an incarceration facility."
It's going to be a real pain in the ass. Just how much of a pain in the ass I will have no way of knowing until my first day on the job. The Job. The Joint.
"Many of the inmates have had unpleasant impressions of school, and also suffer from poor intellectual self-esteem, so it is important to present the material in a tactful and sympathetic way.
"You should also bear in mind that since Rikers is a transitional facility, your student body will not necessarily be able to attend on a consistent basis. This is due to court dates, meetings with lawyers and family, and if the case goes badly, the inevitable transfer to an upstate facility."
In other words, we’re not going to be doing much of anything except paying your salary.
I read kiss a curriculum goodbye. So it’s the same as the public schools. But just what the hell am I supposed to be doing?
"What material shall I use?"
"That will be left to your discretion. There is a pretty broad variety of needs you will need to address."
"Ah, I, ah, wonder how security is."
"There will be an Officer with you at all times."
It is on my first day of The Job that I acquire a clearer picture in the form of the Great Paper Clip Incident.
Any first day on a job is intrinsically stressful. One is getting to know the ropes by which life will probably hang you. Although a long trm New York resident, I had no idea of the extent to which Rikers Island is a little name for a huge enterprise.
I am amazed that Donald Trump has not investigated this place. There is more building going on here than in Japan after World War Two. No matter where I look around the island I see construction in full swing.
Bus sixteen finally arrives to take us to our particular Correctional Center. And what a bus it is. Each one has its own unique set of graffiti, based upon its driver's predispositions.
This is because everything is always done according to strict routines punctuated by random alteration. The same driver drives the same rattle trap bus at roughly the same time everyday. The routine is that the schedule cannot be too routine, lest that be used to support an escape scenario.
The most popular form of graffiti is "Don't buy the Post." A significant majority of the Officers hate the Post because of its alleged racist slant.
My primary complaint with the Post has always been its stupid slant. However, stupidity is a concept broad enough to embrace racism, as well at its many other equally mutant siblings.
For a small island surrounded by water, Rikers is steel bending hot in July. It is a palpable heat. As soon as I get onto the bus I suffer a panic attack. I feel like I am suffocating and my heart is racing. Imminent death sees like an optimistic scenario. My rib cage presses against my light jacket as I force feed it more air and struggle to keep a nonchalant demeanor while sweat rivulets down from my pony tailed shoulder length hair and bathes the front of mu heaving chest.
Consciously I know that this is as more a psychological than a physical reaction, but hands, please stop trembling, and brain, please stop feeling like fainting. And to think we like to call prison "the cooler."
If panoramic views of razor wire is anyone's idea of a pleasant vista then the mayor should open this place up as a tourist attraction. It is so redundantly abundant on every twenty-five foot fence and wall that I am surprised that it is not around the marigold beds in the occasional islands in the center of the roads.
The officers are equally stressed, if not more so. They simply have had more practice maintaining an eminent façade.
Even men and women with shotguns and arms the size of my head. There is a lot of that. If one took off the uniforms the guards would look exactly like the inmates. Right down to the swagger and the earrings in the lobes.
As a teacher, I assume that one can safely assume I will actually get to meet a small upper percentage of the population.
Despite the projected attitude around me that "this is about as real as it gets," it feels as if everyone around me is dramatizing self authored theatrics of what they think they are expected to be heard saying. A constant condition of performance prevails, even if the audience is only oneself.
This tacit theatre feels like some miserable, identity dissolving psychic ooze, seeping from every pore of every one of us. It manifests its stench in the willful abuse of language.
Employees express camaraderie with a forced percussion in even the most trivial of utterance. The inflections mimic the miserable diction of their charges.
"Hey! Whassup? How ya feeling?" There is a stress as palpable as the heat. It is the fear of those whose identity and integrity are slipping away. Those who are as numbered as the inmates. Those who feel as guilty as those accused.
No one ever asks "how are you doing?" The answer is understood.
Like a Jew in European history, a teacher is a target because the activity implies identity lacking in the remaining population.
The more I witness, the more I will know I do not see. After two more stifling check points we arrive at the gated sphincter in the fence of the apartment building sized cinder block Facility, a term that seems to constitute an unspeakable perversion of language.
I stifle another urge to gag. The driver is driving the bus so quickly that he clips the by now usual razor wire fence. He never even hits the brakes as the bus jolts through.
I look up at the "Don't read the Post" graffiti and observe that he is white. I can already see that white people are a very insecure minority at Rikers.
An enormous majority of the people I see at here are those fashion refers to as African-Americans. Personally I find this to be an appalling term, albeit a better one than "negroes."
What an astonishing plethora of creation is under-represented by this hyper-syllabic term for an inevitably growing population of American Citizens bearing a tremendously variegated set of beautiful physical appearances. In theory this should constitute hybrid vigor at its best.
Every feature of every face and body is unique. It is a glorious mixture of African, Spanish, Asiatic, and Irish blood (Europe‘s oldest mongrels). It is a mixture with its roots in our country's experiential, rather than recorded, history.
Every culture must decide which lives are cheap. Those so deemed find themselves living side by side, experiencing cultural conflicts, as well as sexual attractions. Slaves and indentured workers were transported all over the globe in ever larger groups. Suddenly people with broadly disparate geographical and cultural backgrounds interbred.
Technology has accelerated this process at an accelerating rate across the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The trend towards labeling oneself in terms of some kind of minority is a form of grasping for straws of atavistic identity and synthetic fellowship.
For centuries the human animal has established and maintained group identities as a means of facing the conditions of nature which the individual cannot meet alone. Nature in the form of predatory animals and famine has long been conquered.
The external globe has been explored and is an object of exploitation. Suddenly the interior world is the great unknown. Thus the advent of psychology, modern mysticism, ideologies, and semi-literate religious extremism.
In the most modernized environments, individual experience has been catapulted into the driver’s seat. Language can no longer be trusted because every text and utterance is subject to individual interpretation. It starts with the high school essay on the student’s interpretation of a poem and ends with graduate essays deconstructing Hamlet as a repressed lesbian.
This consequent technologically dependent, solipsistic, non-tribal human has no effective extended family or religion, as they were once known. This isolation is an inevitable result of the cocooning effect of the stimuli from the advances of electronic media, which destroy the primal experience of an imperceptible Natural Law, above and beyond political law.
For example, despite the fact that millions may watch a popular television program, each viewer enjoys the impression that their impressions are subjectively unique. Advertisers and propagandists take advantage of conflating subjectivity and identity, generating predictable mass behaviors from ersatz individualities.
We are all vulnerable to the fraud of minority, because each of us is force fed our illusory minority of one. Media iconography reinforces this ruthlessly and relentlessly. We have an inexhaustible supply of two dimensional, anti-social action heroes from Rambo to Batman and a slew of mediocrities to numberless to count.
The scripts and characterizations are so predictable as to be on the verge of being software products themselves. There is no escape from this pathology. Look at the antics of sports heroes as they go through the rehab and wife beating dance.
Mystics teach us that malignant subjectivity is guaranteed to erode our sense of our own humanity, and obliterate our individuality. Still we persist in finding the electronic enhancement of the subjective irresistibly attractive. Just as pollution is only beginning to make the world less fit for humanity, not life as a whole, he projection that "I am my world" only detracts the self, not the world.
As we form ourselves into sub-groups, whether based upon geography or economic class, perhaps we require rule by appearances. This allows the formation of the siege mentality of "us" versus "them."
"We" are those who have mastered a "superior" set of formalities. For example, many Anglicized Irish behave far more "British" than native-born English.
The decay of religion into economic warfare exacerbated the My God is Bigger Than Your God syndrome. Judaism lost integrity cutting deals with the Romans, even going so far as to allow an idol in their highest Temple. The Ancient Christian Religion lost its Christianity once it allowed secular power to devolve upon it in the fifth century. Nuclear weapon hungry Islamic theocracies have little to do with the teachings of Mohammed‘s forgiving God.
Formalities and gestures are an expedience more eminent than the truth once the godly evaporates in the vacuum left by the absence of purity of heart.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise to anyone with teaching instincts that anyone interested in the pursuit of truth itself will be either a profound minority or even non-entity at Rikers Island.
My ears perk up at a conversational fragment between two chuckling ebony bears of officers about four seats behind me. It’s funny how fear kicks up the old intuitive radar.
"-bastard was whimpering under the desk. That was the end of that shit."
"Speaking of shit. He was wearing whites, or maybe not so white anymore. His butt looked like a big ol’ brown bull’s-eye."
"How long had he been left alone with them?"
"Ten minutes tops. I just had to take a dump myself. Didn’t feel like doing it in my pants though."
Then these two six foot behemoths, together approximately four hundred fifty pounds of very heavy muscle with slight layers of the lard that comes with good living, break into squeals of high pitched school girl giggles and clap their shovel sized hands on tree trunk thighs.
"Well, goes to show ya. Civilians don’t belong in here. They just don’t get it."
I courteously allow them to pass by before collecting my paraphernalia to exit. I could swear they both eyeballed me with that last crack. I wonder if that whole thing was for my benefit. I wonder if this whole experience is making me paranoid. But most of all, I wonder what paranoia is, when there are people out to see you get hurt or fail, and the odds look to be in their favor.
Disembarking on jellied knees onto the cracking asphalt, I pass by an olive drab three foot square rectangular metal receptacle about the height of an average mail box. It is topped by a square steel hood with one facet open. The inside is full of sand. It squats on six inch legs like an ancient enigmatic idol in front of a narrow flight of ten concrete steps that lead to the double steel doors, each paned with wire reinforced pebble glass.
I want to take one last look around before finally entering with Festivus, so I buy time and a disapproving look from Juan, by putting down my satchel and guitar case and opening my faithful pack of Marlboro Reds. I watch a sparrow flit from branch to branch of a huddled pock marked oak tree besieged by a circular concrete curb in the dark ocean of the fenced in parking lot.
My heart starts pounding triple time again, and I want to just call the whole charade off. But, hey, God only knows, that might subject me to arrest. I feel a fresh trickle of sweat itch its way down my ribs even as a hot gasp of a breeze plays with some of the feebler leaves dangling from its emaciated branches.
The building itself was once a large six story, school sized cinderblock shithouse. Now it’s a shithouse labyrinth in progress. Rectangular annexes are attached, and they in turn wear cinder blocks and aluminum two by fours with wires hanging out.
These annexes multiplying into ever more chaotically attached annexes are surrounded by dingy white aluminum sided trailers. These act as offices for the transient contractors, although one houses a medical facility. A blast of searing air conditioner exhaust blasts me as I walk past one towards the concrete steps and the locks ahead.
Here several Officers, including the two bears, are unloading their automatic pistols and removing the magazines. It turns out that all Officers are required to possess and carry pistols which they must surrender on entry to the Facility. They put the bullets in several numbered film canisters.
Only then do they ascend the concrete steps. pass through the first pair of blood red doors, and surrender both weapons and bullets to the facility property clerk.
I correctly assume from this that no Officer is permitted to carry a weapon inside the prison, and feel even less reassured. I wonder why they carry them in the first place. Prison breaks? Riots? Paranoid idiocy? It has all the logic of a carpenter bringing a scuba suit to work on a tree house.
My cigarette reprieve over, I pick up the guitar and satchel. Festivus gives me a wan smile and attempted humor.
"Are you ready to go to jail?"
"Ready as anybody ever is, I guess."
Which is to say not at all. But that’s already understood. As I enter the first thing that strikes me is the color of the walls: unlaundered police uniform powder blue.
I pass by the aforementioned officers who are now surrendering their weapons and ammunition to a sullen officer clerk who is in a squalid looking teller’s cage. But a steel grid reinforced Plexiglas squalor nonetheless.
They speak the already routine discourtesies to him with tones of veiled contempt, stooping to drop the weapons in a steel drawer that extrudes three feet above the floor. I find out later that this officer’s clerk job is considered easy duty, and a result of being a well connected but incompetent homosexual who made too many passes at inmates.
Built along the dimensions of a narrow country road, there are two lanes, one in and the other out of the facility vestibule. A battered fifteen foot treadle driven x-ray machine divides them.
A stocky five foot ebony female officer with a butt that looks like two basketballs smashed together banters with any and all through thick sensuous lips, glow in the dark teeth, and a slab of a pink tongue.
Her badge bears the name Shakur. I try not to notice how her tight blouse displays her cupcake breasts and the flat abdomen of a track star. Her pants are painted on tight enough to reveal a vulva that could be two perfectly matched Vienna sausages.
So I study the linoleum that might have been designed by Jackson Pollock, while I submit to a rather cursory "search" of my attache case, and drop it, along with my guitar case, on the rolling tread of the machine.
She snickers hostility.
"Hey Festivus! What you bringing in today? John Lennon?"
"No, Officer Shakur. He also happens to be a private music teacher. He has classes right afterward."
I had already expressed my doubts to Festivus that my guitar case would be an issue. No problem according to him at the time of the interview. I’m starting to develop an inkling that this Program of his probably has a credibility problem because it has a warm body problem.
Predictably, the case has to be opened up and carefully inspected. I earn a look of unveiled contempt from Shakur and a feigned What Were You Thinking look from Festivus for Shakur‘s benefit.
I wonder if this conniving weasel of a wimp for a boss has the hots for her Nubian love cannonballs. The visual on that will prove to make me laugh later, and almost gets a giggle out of me now. I repress it into a simper.
"What the hell are these?"
She brandishes a package of spare strings with the manner of a medieval executioner waving a freshly severed head at a howling mob.
"This is contraband. Inmates can use these as garrotes. Register them with PROPERTY."
While I surrender my six deadly weapons with the master of the cage, she and Festivus have a muttered discussion as to whether I might be considered a compromise to security.
With chocolate fingers radiating disdain, Shakur finally waves me through the final pair of red steel doors at the end of the x-ray machine. I am now in the jail itself.
The first thing I think of is how much this reminds me of many a public high school corridor. Except it is full of people in police uniforms.
The walls are murky yellow tiles with maroon trim. Fluorescent lights buzz like drunken flies, rendering white skin chalky and black various shades of corpse gray. The few oriental looking officers are mostly Filipino, and they have pock marked faces that look like rotting tangerines.
Voices gabble inchoately with the urgency of second rate football coaches. We pass a bulletin board thumb tacked with social announcements. Christian Choir rehearsal. Labor Day Barbeque. A collection for an officer who died in the line of duty at a local saloon. They have about six such martyrs per year.
Festivus nudges me.
"If you need to use the bathroom, I would advise you use this one we’re coming up on."
I nod affirmation, and he follows me in. I don’t even want to know why this is good advice. I drop my gear by the sinks whose mirrors portray my ungracefully aging horse face in cadaverous hues of sagging horror.
Eyes trapped at the bottom of black circular baggy pits. My God, I didn’t know I could look this ugly. Hell, I didn’t know ugly could look this ugly.
We step to adjacent urinals for a safety hose. If dinginess were an art form, the place would be the Pieta. Somehow the walls are a darker yellow than the tiles outside. And I don’t know how they managed it, but the floors are somehow dirtier, perhaps because they are punctuated by the butts of forbidden cigarettes. It has a wall of ten urinals facing a wall of ten stalls.
Two of them are occupied, and emit a stench so thick as to be tactile. I keep my eyes focused on the grouted intersection of four of said tiles. I’m done almost before I started because I had almost nothing in my bladder in the first place. Any extraneous fluids have already been committed to evaporating sweat. But fear can make an ounce of urine feel like a keg’s worth of beer pressing on the bladder.
As I zip up there is a roaring fart coming from behind me that sounds like a Harley Davidson starting up. This is followed by a long bass groan that sounds more animal than human. Get me out of here.
Breathing a little easier back in the high school Feng Shui. The best thing about worse is it sure makes bad look better.
More offices for the countless Captains, Counselors, assistant wing annex wardens, and all the forgotten various and sundry. More bulletin boards. More clutches of police bureaucracy chit chatting about whatever in intense tones of voice.
Whoa! Here’s a big twelve foot display case filled with water colors that look like the stuff you see in old age homes. I already see what’s coming.
"This is one of our program’s biggest success stories. The inmate art program."
I know what I have to do now. Time to stop, smell the roses, and sling some bullshit. I stare at the centerpiece of the display, some workmanlike Monet meets Disney water lilies.
Almost palatable if the artist had not gone for enough mauve to induce nausea. It is surrounded by other routine still life studies in vases, fruits, flowers, and tabletops. A blandness to make toast an adventure.
"This is wonderful stuff, man. Have you considered presenting them to a gallery for a showing?"
Especially one that’s a front for a terrorist cell. People will stay away in droves. It’s not that this stuff is so bad. But it’s not any good either.
"We’re dialoguing with the Zinfandel Gallery down in SoHo, and we have some pieces hanging on consignment at Harlem’s Atomic Dog chicken Wings. Three pieces have even been sold. I can’t begin to tell you how much that does for the inmate’s self esteem."
"That’s great, Juan. It’s stuff like this that’s what we’re here for."
First day on the job, and already I do not believe a single word of what I’m saying. I see my future. It is shovels. Correct that. Bulldozers.
Of course the stuff’s non-descript. Who wants to truly self express, if the self can be used against you?
"This is what we need to communicate not only to the inmates, but to the system, that the program needs much more money to implement its goals, which are process oriented nd in a constant state of self correction. Can you imagine what we could do here with ten times the money?"
"Juan, it would be wonderful. I’m honored that you let me on board. There’s great things ahead here."
No soap made could wash the taste lingering in my mouth. I need to keep remembering that this is only the beginning. Maybe working within the system can help the system work. But I don’t need to be psychic to read the Festivus mentality, "Who’s got the water color and paper contract?"
Just as this labyrinth of corridors melts into uniform mediocrity of the surreal, we hit the big check point pod. And this is intimidating.
The ceiling is fifteen feet higher. Dead ahead is a massive electronic gate. To my right I see a wall lined with riot shields and emergency helmets. Teeth in the jaw of the beast. I look up at a large office space whose floor begins about eight feet above where we are standing.
The Master Pod looms at the right hand corner where our corridor ends in a massive electronically driven red door endowed with thick bars. Beyond this are two corridors set at ninety degree angles: right and left. Each of these corridors is served by separate but equal electronic gates.
The Master Pod is wrapped in one hundred odd feet of Plexiglas on each of its two sides facing corridors. Officers at desks man computers, video display screens, and telephones. In addition we have the all important keepers of the three gates.
Suddenly I want to urinate again. No wonder prisoners complain so much about chest pains. I’m feeling some myself right now, and I’m only passing through.
"Show the officers your badge."
NO problem there. I remind myself not to lose it either. She’s a dowdy thirty something Latino with a pasty face dominated by a pair of overly red lips set in perfectly circular O of boredom.
"And whatever you do, don’t lose it. The biggest threat to the success of the program is the integrity of security. An inmate an use a badge to try to escape."
The hell with that, I just want to be sure to be able to get the hell out of here. So don’t worry, Festivus. I got that one covered.
"And don‘t forget to be patient when you wave your badge to get their attention. They don‘t like to be interrupted if they are in a key stage of one of the video games they sneak in to ease the boredom."
With a hum to which my imagination adds creaks and clanks, two of the three gates open.
Festivus redundantly tells me to go to the right. Left is another locked cage altogether. Here there are no decorations at all. No bulletin boards. (Thumb Tacks!) And certainly no display cases with the even more unsuitable glass.
The hallway is a twenty foot wide study in yellow tiles, maroon trim and Pollock linoleum. It is punctuated only by a twenty foot pane of Plexiglas the into the enclosed inmates recreational courtyard.
Four forlorn basketball hoops slouch over about eighty inmates busy doing push ups and lifting enormous weights. My God, there’s a man with the biggest biceps I ever saw in my life. His bullet head is shaved and I an make out even under his sweat suit a pair of thighs almost as wide as I am.
But the truth is that these pathologies are merely a small but memorable per cent. Some of them look positively frail, and most are simply undistinguished.
I hear a sharp voiced Corrections Officer snap "Eyes straight ahead assholes," and look up to see a line of about twenty inmates being marched somewhere in our opposite direction.
They walk past and all wear the invisible jail uniform I will get to know very well. The body language. Shoulders thrown back. Arms kept in a tight radius to the body. Eyes looking at nothing. Lips locked in an enigmatic Mona Lisa simper of unfocused contempt.
As we continue we cross the path of a cheerful mop wielding inmate swabbing Jackson Pollock‘s mutant linoleum stepchild. Nowhere is a man more happy to have a mop than a man in jail. He has the body of a middle aged basketball player under a sleeveless tee shirt and gray sweat pants.
His circular clean shaven amber head nods at us as he passes by pushing a yellow bucket on wheels. His pencil mustache almost achieves the angle of a smile. But the eyes are vacuous. The scent of generic cleaning fluids hangs lightly in the air.
"From here we go to the Law Library in the Programs section, as soon as you sign in the ALL PROGRAMS BOOK."
When I arrive at the Law Library at the ABCC,Arbitrary Bailiwick for the Caring Challenged introduced to my hosts, Officers Sinewave, Secant, Cosecant, Cosine, and Cotangent.
There are several references to an Officer Tangent, who is somehow MORE INVOLVED with the program, but he happens to be absent. I take out my attendance roster which lists about thirty students and ask Officer Cotangent to call them down.
At the same time I do this I notice that there is a black line painted across the threshold of the entrance to the library on the non-descript ecru linoleum tiles.
Cotangent is a medium built, middle-aged Caucasian running slightly to fat. He has small closely set eyes which are complimented by his gold-rimmed aviator glasses and short brown hair. He, like myself is not very much to look at in the muscles department.
I wonder if he, like myself as well, feels some envy of those so much better endowed, as well as resentment of a system which cultivates it at our own expense. He picks up the phone next to his desk and calls each of the dorms in which they are housed in a mumbling voice bearing a tone somewhere between indifference and hostility. He hangs up and gives me a look which reeks of "you're not going to make a difference anyway, so enjoy being another parasitic leech on my taxes."
In an effort to compensate I throw back my shoulders and pitch forward my skinny chest.
"So where is my class going to be?"
"You'll find out when they get here."
He delivers this in a tone poised somewhere between irony, sarcasm, and despair. The hollow ring of a chronic imposter. A coward acting tough.
The inmates trickle in. I have all of seven from a roster that numbered twenty five. I shall find out that this is a high number. Most of the students on my list are "ghosts," who never show up at all.
I think I am beginning to understand where Cotangent's attitude is coming from.
Thus I find myself arriving at the Great Paper Clip Incident. I am in my classroom at the ABCC. One wall has a blackboard, and three others have bookshelves sparsely lined with non-descript library seconds. I can feel the randomness of the titles before scrutinizing even one.
It is my first day, and so I am "sharing" this class with one of my more "experienced" colleagues. Festivus reports her to have an excellent rapport with the inmates. She is large "African-American" who speaks with the grating nasal intonations of a twenty something TV wannabe.
She figures that willfully bad grammar and sloppy street usage in a wheedling, nasal, and condescending tone lends her credibility among the inmates and explains her high attendance records.
With breezy condescension she tells me she has a specific Lesson Plan and asks if I would mind using the "black board side of the room."
I say, "No problem." Although I have to wonder why one teacher would ask another whether they objected to the use of a blackboard. I don't see any sticks and wet sand handy in a bleak room composed of cinder blocks, vinyl tiles, buzzing florescent lamps, and ubiquitous steel bars.
I use my time to begin to discuss grammar, especially as it relates to usage and function interacting with the parts of speech. This is teacher argot for "I am going to show you the difference between the use of a and an, as well as other problems I see you have that I find personally fascinating."
You are the result of my tax dollars at work for at least the last twenty years. You have my attention. To my surprise, I have the attention of some of you as well. Two inmates ask me to repeat myself on several occasions while I am outlining my goals so that they can write down what I am saying.
"Formal English is the only social equalizer" is one, and the other is, "If you think this society is so dehumanizing, why do you think so many people are falling over themselves trying to come here?" is the other.
I also get a linguistic insight into the origins of the degenerate -t into -s contractions, such as "whassup" instead of "what's up," the "this" into "dis" corruption, and my own favorite, "'sappening" in place of "what s happening."
A very large portion of this population has no front teeth! Kiss those dental consonants goodbye!
When I teach I often become so involved in what I am doing that it is as if I have erected a psychic wall around myself and my student or students. At an arbitrary point near the beginning of my presentation, I look up and happen to observe what said more experienced colleague is doing.
She is playing Jeopardy
I might also add she is doing a very admirable job. No doubt it took her at least an hour to figure out what obscure fact to put on one side of an index card, and to assign a dollar value on the other. Organizing the materials into categories, must have been equally if not more daunting. She took the trouble to collate the material with paper clips.
At the time I happen to notice what she is doing, she has finally managed to begin the game.
The index cards are in exquisitely neat rows, Scotch taped to the yellow cinderblocks on the wall. She has left the paper clips on the seat of a nearby desk. She is endowed with astonishingly ample flopping breasts. Whenever she bends down to uncover one of the index cards in lower positions on the wall, all her inmates jut forward like undulating ripples on a stream.
I return my focus to the process of improvised group teaching. Although I settled on a rather non-descript grammar lesson, the kind I can do in my sleep with a death hangover, I am surprised to find that the inmates seem genuinely interested, writing assiduously, and asking both necessary and intelligent questions.
Nevertheless, some of my inmates have their predictable ax to grind with "the system," and they use that rhetoric opportunistically.
The myth of any directing system remains a popular and deeply revered Late Twentieth Century chimera, optimistically positing that there is any control at all. Like many great works of fiction, its meaning is contingent upon the percept and varies tremendously, revealing more about the percept than itself.
However, so do the officers. My job is assumed to be a handshake, and perhaps rightfully so. That thought hurts me, and it probably hurts them as well.
In one and the same class there is an enormous variety of need. One student has found God, and his primary instrument of literacy is the Bible. He has an annoying habit of crying out "praise God," that sounds more like "praise me."
However, it is a necessary stage in the painful process of personal growth. He is a muscular young man with biceps the size of large grapefruits. He resided about four blocks from me in the Woodside Housing Projects until his incarceration. I remember having noticed him hanging out on my local drug corner, which is conveniently located near a take-out Chinese restaurant, a supermarket, and a check cashing outlet(!). He stood out as being very charismatic and in control of the local marijuana action.
He is a light-skinned "black" with reddish hair and a bullet shaped head. I remember when I first saw him, it was a cold day in February, and he was wearing a top of the line shearling coat. It turns out that his name is Sean Determinant, and he is twenty one years old.
I wish I was in the kind of shape he is in, but I wouldn't trade it for the place he is in. Among all the inmates he has the greatest need for basic educational skills. He writes from his emotions, and though his usage is sloppy, I feel a potential for decency.
Nevertheless, he tested at little better than the fourth grade. Our work is clearly cut out for us, should this work last long enough to occur at all.
I proceed with the lesson and after about an hour and a half, "Jeopardy" is over, and my colleague asks whether I would mind switching sides of the class, so that she could "Use the board."
I have no problem with that either. I have gotten to the point in my lesson where I have the students doing rewrites. As a teacher I can appreciate her perceptive observation that I have no need for it at this time.
But, as any teacher and any student knows, a brief period of anarchy reigns. Students rattle desks, shuffle papers, and begin moving into randomly selected seats.
I say a silent prayer that no one jostles anyone. It's like grade school with grotesquely inflated children. However, I notice a small but somehow significant subset of my group flying like iron filings to a magnet towards desks very close to the paperclips.
Being an experienced sixth grade substitute teacher, I already sense danger and finesse all but one of the paper clips of interest into my experienced palm.
The lone paper clip was already in the hands of a five seven muscle bound inmate shaped like a fifty five gallon drum.
Despite bearing several large scars and a broken nose, who had already displayed both cunning intelligence and what the politically correct might call "attitudinal difficulties."
He intrigued me by writing his sample essay about how the IHD, Institute for Harmonious Development, a prison wide program which provides the institution with cheap labor, and which is also regarded to be a privilege.
It is the umbrella under which Festivus’s Program gets funding. Even more specifically, he wrote that he thought my "Program," is nothing but a waste of money, or possibly worse, a consciously pre-conceived pork barrel.
Such candor was unique among essays full of "the things I think I am supposed to say to get me the Hell out of Hell."
Every student can correctly spell "remorse," "rehabilitated," "response," "revival," "rewarding," "right," "respect," "reverence," and numerous other words from the R section of the dictionary. How well we put reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic to shame.
With a body language that seems formally ritual in character, he is paper clipping together two pieces of his writing in his portfolio. I give him an unambiguously questioning look.
"I need to collate these papers."
He delivers this in avery deep and ominous voice and gives me a "so what are you going to do about it" look. He flexes his biceps, and I have got to hand it to him, they are huge. If I were to use them for legs, I would be putting on weight.
I let a significant moment pass, quietly take a very deep breath, and speak to him in my most amicable and soothing voice possible under junkyard levels of stress.
"Well, Mister Ampere, here at The IHD at the ABCC we're chronically short of materials, so we need to keep track of our MATERIALS very closely. However, if you think you NEED a paper clip, I know that Officer Cosine over there would be glad to give you one."
It was as if I had turned into some automobile scrap yard electromagnet. The paper clip was politely returned to me with starship speed. The rest of the class proceeded without incident, other than that I thought I was going to suffocate on the spot about twenty three times across the next two hours.
As I leave the class at the end of the session, I pass the paper clips to Officer Secant, a pleasant caucasian of Irish descent with a medium build, an easy smile, crew cut, and red mustache.
"I happened to find these on a desk, and I thought that you might like to have them. Secant looks at me with grateful and mildly widened eyes.
"Thank you."
I am so excellently anesthetized by exhaustion at the end of my time that the handshakes of getting out are barely noticeable. I am back outside standing on cracking concrete curb edging the unpainted parking lot asphalt shimmering in the relentless mid afternoon heat.
It's waiting time for the first bus, presumably numbered sixteen. The outside of the facility is an enormous flurry of activity. Steel reinforcement rods reach like disembodied fingers through half story high cinderblocks interlaced with moist concrete.
The facility is under expansion. Looks like the Civic Hotel business is booming. Leona Helmsley, where are you when we need you most? Behind bars, of course.
I finally realize that one of the constant invisible sources of stress has been the relentless yammer of the jackhammers. The earth has been beaten as efficiently as possible with iron and covered with concrete. Urban development in a hellishly busy concentrated microcosm. It probably used to be a lovely island.
The segregation of male and female into separate populations solves one contradiction to create a plethora of others. One of the many theoretical purposes of a prison should be to unify the individual with a society full of an enormous variety of erotic options.
Instead, an inmate's erotic options are limited to their own sex. And they take them with elements of sadism. This punitive approach to one form of behavior only promotes another.
"If you think you're going to spend twenty years in the joint and not have anal sex, you're crazy man."
The words of Flip, a twenty year Attica resident. One can almost smell the horniness of both the inmates and the officers. Here Freud is right. Repression is the opposite of sublimation. The more the id is repressed, the greater is its power over the percept behind the veil of receding consciousness.
The inmates are full of thoughts and/or fears of homosexual rape. In the classroom their behavior is tightly controlled, but there are references expressed by tone of voice.
One common inmate remark is,"Yeah, how would YOU like to spend TWENTY FOUR hours here?" Delivered in an "I could make a girl out of you faster than a politician can lie" cadence.
The bus arrives, numbered fifteen, and my fellow more experienced colleague has arrived for it right on time. We exchange smiles and hellos. Since it is my first day on the job, I feel stupefied, and so I act stupid."Say, do you have any idea of why an inmate might find paperclips valuable?"
Of course, this expert immediately barrages whatever tatters are left of my brain with the explanation that the "inmate in question" could sell the paper clip in question in General Population , unless he wanted it for himself.
General Population: The "middle way" in prison. It lies somewhere between residing in the dorms and confinement in solitary.
For about ten dollars a clip, so to speak, one could make oneself a little money. The clip in question is opened up, sharpened against Correctional Facility walls, taped to an improvised handle, and used as an ice pick in the back of someone’s head.
So much for Maximum Security. So much for experienced colleagues. BACK TO THE CONTENTS