Con Academy
Kate Stone Lombardi
Word Count 1176
I have learned not to wear an underwire bra on teaching days. Shoes, coats, and class materials are searched by hand and stamped with invisible ink. A metal door slides open, and we pass through to a small vestibule. My co-teacher, Linda, and I hold our stamped hands under a purple light while pressing our IDs up to the window, where another guard sits.
A new building, more screening. We get passes to display on our shirts, and sign in: time in, time out, purpose –teaching memoir writing to the prisoners. Eventually, we are picked up by yet another officer, who escorts us to J-block. The floors in the cavernous hallways are stenciled with orders like “Stop Here” and “No Talking.” We pass a room marked “Strip Search/Frisk.” One day, the door is ajar, and I see three stalls with dirty opaque curtains. A lone, blue plastic glove lies crumpled and discarded on the floor.
To teach inside these walls, the Department of Corrections (DOC) required us to take training. Prisoners, we were warned, are masters of manipulation, who will target you, and work on your sympathies. We were cautioned never to get personal with inmates.
The night we arrive to teach our first class, my hands are shaking. I’m scared of everything – the gates locking behind us, the vast security system, the correction officers, and the men we’ll teach. But when we walk into the classroom, the men applaud. Eighteen guys are sitting at three long tables shaped like a horseshoe; two chairs and a small table in front are saved for us.
The floor is tan. The chairs are metal. The walls are white. The lights are fluorescent. There are no windows. It’s a drab, sensory-deprived atmosphere -nothing soothing or soft. There is noise, though – bursts of applause from the AA meeting next door, the guards’ nearby crackling walkie-talkies, chairs scraping across the floor.
As I look at the class, the men’s faces blur, and I think all our students are Black, save for one chubby bald white guy with a long beard. Over time, I will learn that classifying the inmates by race or face is a fool’s errand. Some are Latino - Dominican, Salvadoran, Puerto Rican. Others are African American.
The men do share a look, a blend of fatigue and resignation. It’s hard to tell their ages. My mouth is dry, and I’m grateful for the bottled water, which I can now unseal. These men take the class voluntarily – in fact, there’s a waiting list. We ask them to introduce themselves and tell us why they’re here. “And by ‘why you’re here,’” I tell them, “ I mean why you decided to take this class.” I don’t want to hear about their crimes.
Answers range from: “I just want to pass my GRE, so I got to work on my writing” to “I’ve been working on my memoir for two years, and it needs some polish.” A man named Joseph says he has “a lot of feelings that he wants to get out of his body” and onto paper. A guy calling himself “K Dog” says he has a daughter he’s never met and probably never will, and he wants to leave something for her.
The names the men give us have little relationship to the prison-issued class list. One guy identifies as “Peace.” Antony calls himself “Da-wud.” George is “Flame.” Joseph is “Flash.” We’ve been told never to use the men’s “street names.” It’s the first rule we break.
I write “Community Expectations” at the top of the green chalkboard. We talk about active listening, constructive criticism and explain the format of the class. We’ll share homework assignments, read a memoir excerpt, and then write after a prompt. Writing will be followed by sharing and feedback.
My writing is faint, no matter how hard I press down on the crummy chalk. Some of the men are squinting – they can’t make out my writing. Or they haven’t been issued eyeglasses.
“Any questions?”
A middle-aged man says, “I don’t think I want to write memoir.” “You got trouble remembering?” the guy sitting next to him asks. “You kidding?” the first guy replies. “I’m cursed with the memory of every single thing that’s ever happened to me.” I jot this sentence down in my own notebook. I’m pick-pocketing.
Eventually, we give them a prompt: “Write about a time when you got news that changed your life.” Like magic, the men’s heads are bent over, and they are writing. All you can hear is the scratching of pens in the notebooks. After 25 minutes, we say, “Stop” Some keep scribbling. I’m amazed by their commitment.
“Who wants to share?” Linda asks. Multiple hands fly up. “P-Rock” opens his piece with a text summoning him to the back room of a local store. The message leads to a murder and P-Rock’s life sentence. Peace opens with, “I’m 20 years old and at Riker’s Island…” John describes sitting in his mother’s home, newly released from prison, and savoring homemade smothered pork. The phone rings, and John learns that his sister has been raped. In that instance, he writes, he takes a last look at the kitchen walls. John knows he’ll be returning to prison. He grabs a “Nina” and heads out the door.
“What’s a nina?” Linda asks.
“A nine-millimeter handgun.” Oh.
More men want to share their work, but we’re out of time. A guard arrives to escort us out. I tell him we are not done–he needs to wait. But Linda is already in the hall, calling, “Kate, get your things!” Outside, Linda tells me never to push back on guards. Period. They might take it out on the men in our class. We could lose our security clearance. There’s so much to learn. It’s a clear, frigid night. I look up at the sky and wonder when our students last saw stars.
Over the next year, we’ll make more mistakes. We’ll let down our boundaries. We’ll know too much about the men’s lives. We’ll let ourselves feel valued. “You could be home watching TV with your husband, but instead, you’re up here with us,” Flame tells me. I swell with self-satisfaction.
I’ll begin to understand that there is something unsavory about the dynamic of teaching incarcerated men. Do-gooder white ladies hearing stories of poverty and violence and correcting grammar and sentence structure. We need to feel like we are fixing something – the old “white savior” trope. The men have agendas too. They bask in our attention. They want us to write parole and clemency letters for them.
Maybe everything’s true: the manipulation and the genuine affection, the redemption and the being played. For two hours each week, we treat these men as human beings, giving them a respite from the grind and humiliation of incarceration. As for me, I enter this foreboding place, teaching about the use of detail, scene setting, dialogue. Yet all the while, I’m stealing their stories, their backgrounds, the images of their walls and wire cages.
We’re all criminals here.
*
Kate is a journalist, author and essayist. For 20 years, she was a regular contributor to The New York Times. Kate’s work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Time.com, Good Housekeeping, Readers Digest, AARP’s “The Ethel” and other national publications. She is the author of “THE MAMA’S BOY MYTH” (Avery/Penguin, 2012), a nonfiction book on raising boys.