For nearly fifteen years I taught at the California Department of Corrections. Recently, I took an early retirement because I no longer wanted to be a part of our burgeoning Prison Industrial Complex, and I resolved to try to do whatever I could to help put a stop to it. For fifteen years, I have stood by and watched as the CDC has given up virtually all pretexts of rehabilitation in favor of policies that amount to nothing more than the warehousing of these human beings we call criminals.

These are people I was afraid of when I first started teaching in the prison system because I believed the rhetoric that we are all fed by the media; rhetoric, which tends to demonize the very word: criminal. Still, as I got to know these men, these criminals, my fears were replaced by admiration for what most of them endure so stoically.

I have seen more unnecessary suffering in that gruesome institution than I imagined possible. The first month I was there, one of my young students was shot in the lungs by officers who routinely used bullets to break up fights. On more than once occasion my students came into the classroom with rashes and stomach disorders which they matter-of-factly told me were caused by the food, and I saw the lunches degenerate to two pieces of floppy bread with a single slice of rancid baloney. I have read the health department statistic that incarcerates are more than 2550 times as likely to catch a disease as anyone else. I have heard of suicides and fatal shootings by guards that I never saw in the papers. I have seen the clock roll back to the Sixties as prisoners have been made to cut their hair and shave their beards, regardless of religious beliefs or inclinations.

Prisoners have also lost the right to have relatives send or bring in foods and personal items, which they now have to buy from the State canteen or vending machines. Prisoners now have to pay $5.00 every time they want to get even an aspirin from the medic, and only a tiny fraction of them ever get care for Hepatitis C, which infects over 40% of the population. I had one student who was made to sit in the classroom in a straight-back chair for nearly three months after he suffered a stroke. He died the night after I sent him to the medic who had sent him back to his cell.

But of all the inequities I have witnessed, the cruelest is inflicted on the lifers. These are people with what are called term-to-life sentences. This means that after approximately four-and-a-half years a man sentenced to five-to-life is supposed to be eligible for parole if he has proven himself to be a model prisoner and a non-violent individual.

The first privilege that these offenders lost was their option to have private family visits, including visits with their wives or husbands, children, or parents. This right is granted sparingly to all prisoners, but was taken away completely from the lifers. Once in a meeting with the associate warden and some other custody staff, I inquired about the family visits. In response, I was asked whether or not I thought it wise to breed any more little criminals to wander the streets.

The other right taken away from the lifers was the right to a parole date. This policy is even more heinous, not only because it is unjust, but because the parole board and the governor refuse to acknowledge that this is their policy despite the governor's having stated publicly that no lifers convicted of a homicide will be released during his tenure. He has denied parole to all people who have been sentenced for any crime that wittingly or unwittingly caused the death of another person. Furthermore, each of the people he has appointed to the parole board is either an ex-policeman or has served in some capacity in law enforcement. Not one of them is a social worker or a psychiatrist even though the board requires a psychiatric evaluation of anyone even considered for parole.

It seems to me that judiciaries should determine the length of the sentence, not the governor, who by denying lifers release dates, has effectively sentenced them to life-without-the-possibility-of-parole. For years now I have seen the looks on the faces of these men as their hopes for being reunited with their families have been crushed time and again by a parole board who has taken away dates for capricious reasons, and by governors who refused to give dates for political reasons. While it is probably true that some prisoners should never be released because they do pose a threat to society, that decision should be left with the courts and an unbiased parole board rather than in the hands of a governor and his puppet appointees.

This kind of injustice makes me angry; it makes me question what is happening to our notion of democracy, and it makes me wonder how long it will take for Americans to realize how much they have been taught to hate the poor, the disenfranchised and the people of color, for those are the only ones treated as disposable people, people to be warehoused in dehumanizing conditions from which, for over 22,000 of them, there is no escape except in a pine box.

For the last fifteen years, I have been privy to tragedies that rarely reach the papers. I visited cells which are smaller than most people's bathrooms and house only two metal bunks, one uncovered toilet, and a tiny fold-down table. There prisoners can languish, one shelved over the other, for as long as three months without ever seeing the yard - a large dirt field without trees or plants surrounded by two twelve foot fences topped by the ever present rolls of barbed wire. I have felt the stifling heat of the third tier in the summer and heard the pleading voices of prisoners begging me for one of the newspapers I was bringing to my students during a lockdown. I have smelled the cooking of malodorous food, and am amazed that these men can survive on lunches comprised of two floppy slices of white bread among with a packet of peanut butter or a slab of often rancid baloney.

I once walked a student who was passing a kidney stone to the medic on a Friday. He was told by a female officer to come back on Monday because the medic had gone home. The student could not speak English. If I had not intervened on his behalf to the captain in charge, it is doubtful he would have gotten to the hospital.

I have heard students tell me that they lost contact with loved ones because prisoners are only allowed to make collect calls and their families are charged up to five times the going rate as regular calls. I have had my students come into my room shivering and soaked to the skin because they are no longer issued raincoats.

For too many years I have heard my students referred to as scumbags, both by some of the officers and by civilians, and I wonder how we have come to the mindset where a person who runs afoul of the law has become so vilified that we have no problem throwing him onto the trash heap of existence. I'm left to wonder what it will take to reawaken our citizens spiritually to the notion that we are each other's keepers, and that what befalls one, befalls us all.

FACTOR 8: THE ARKANSAS PRISON BLOOD SCANDAL

Kelly Duda and Concrete Films have produced a documentary which details the corruption and greed that led the Arkansas Department of Correction to spread death from Arkansas prisons to the entire world. Hear the story from the mouths of those responsible for the harvesting of infected human blood plasma, and its sale to be made into medicines.

Duda's award-winning film unflinchingly documents the whole story the U.S. government and the state of Arkansas have tried to keep hidden from the world.

Click the photo of Kelly Duda at work to order your own copy of
"Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal"

Click the photo of Kelly Duda at work to visit the
Factor 8 Documentary website

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