I’m Not Allowed To Write This

But Hope To Get By Censors

To teach inside a prison, you go through a lot of hoops. It takes almost a year to go through the security background check. You’re required to complete a training given by the Department of Corrections (DOCCS). In class, you are warned about how manipulative inmates can be, taught to maintain strict personal boundaries, learn about contraband, and what to do in case of an emergency. (Line up flat against the wall, hold up your ID, and follow the guard’s orders.)

You sign multiple documents, including one that promises that you won’t reveal anything about what you see or hear inside the prison. Okay, it’s not phrased like that, but basically nothing can be published without direct permission from DOCCS.

And I get it – it’s both a security issue and a privacy issue.

But …

I started teaching writing at a men’s maximum security facility seven years ago. I work through a nonprofit, which I won’t name here, because I don’t want it to come up in a DOCC’s Internet search. Ditto with the state or the correction facilities where I teach. All programming stopped during Covid, and I took an extra year off. I’d just become a grandmother and had a lot going on.

But I started teaching again last week. In the past, I taught Memoir. But this time, I’m introducing a combination of journalism and memoir – trying for personal narrative by having the men describe their lives on the inside as a form of reporting. As I told the men last week, it’s one thing to read statistics on mass incarceration; it’s another to read about the day-to-day lives of people who are locked up.

There’s a lot they don’t teach you during the formal orientation, but much of it came back to me when I drove up and saw those tall, razor wired walls again. Never wear an underwire bra – the metal detector will go off when you are searched. Only carry a clear plastic bag. In it, you can have a driver’s license, and a sealed (never opened) bottle of water. If you are bringing in paper or notebooks, get gate clearance ahead of time. No retractable pens – they can be made into weapons. No phone. No smart watch.

I don’t know about male teachers, but women have rules about what to wear. Nothing revealing. Nothing tight. No sharp jewelry. Nothing explicit printed on clothing. No gang insignias. (Not part of my wardrobe, as far as I know.) And avoid wearing green, which is the color of prison uniforms.

If you violate any of this, you won’t be let in. And the men will not have class.

Anyway, here’s the real thing that I worry about when writing about this class. Exploitation. It’s my story – my experience – of teaching. But face it, what makes it interesting is the setting and the students.

And what students they are! In teaching this class, I’m only using examples of work written by incarcerated writers. I read them this piece, from the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news agency which covers criminal justice. After we read it out loud, the guys talked about how much they related to the story. They talked about how they hated being “paraded like a freak” when they visited a clinic on the outside.

Jumping off from the article, I asked them to write about a time where someone looked at them and missed who they really were. Here’s where it gets tricky. I don’t want to rip off their stories. But here are tiny recaps from two students:

-G. is on the courtroom steps. He sees the police officer with whom he was in a shootout. (Okay- “with whom” is my phrase.) He smirks at the cop and asks, “How many times did you miss me?” He describes the guys neck pulsing with anger. Later in the court room, he checks out two good looking girls. But when they look at him, he sees terror in their eyes. “I went from asshole to monster,” he said.

-C. is on an airplane. The white woman next to him makes a racist comment ( that I won’t repeat here.) He speaks to the flight attendant, who moves him to First Class, no extra charge. His seat mate, also white, turns to him. “Who do you play for?” the guy asks him. “What?” “What team do you play for?” C gets it. Why else would a black man be sitting in first class. “The Knicks,” he answers. “Then I have to listen to him talk about what an amazing ball player his kid is and can I get him court side seats.”

I’m suppose to teach tomorrow, but I’m just getting over a stomach flu. I don’t have any backup though, so I am really hoping to make it.