A Place to Stand

"They tell inspiring stories and what the stories teach me is that the human spirit is much more resilient than any abomination of the system like mass incarceration. Malcolm X and Jimmy Santiago Baca are a testament to that, to the strength of their own character, their talent as writers and visionaries. I don’t think they or anybody else would ever credit prison for their achievement. They did it in spite of prison. Jimmy Santiago Baca, in his memoir, writes about how, when he was 20 or 21, he realized he was an illiterate Chicano in this very violent, maximum security prison. He knew he wanted to get out and lead a better life, he knew he’d screwed up and he thought, ‘I should go to school.’ But they wouldn’t let him go to school, because he had to be in a work programme. So, in a dramatic part of his memoir, he simply stops going to the work programme. He gets disciplinary tickets on the cell bars for three weeks straight. Everybody around him is like, ‘Yo, Jimmy, why don’t you go to work? Come on man! Go to work! They’re going to get mad at you.’ And he’s like, ‘Fuck them. I want to learn.’ He gets to the meeting with the review board, and he confronts the counselor. He says, ‘You told me that if I showed signs of change, I could go to school!’ And the counselor reverses himself and says, ‘You’ll do whatever I say, this is a fucking prison.’ The warden is there. They don’t like Jimmy because he’s asserting his own agency. He’s saying, ‘I want to do better this way.’ That’s the exact thing Malcolm X did. And that’s the most dangerous thing you can do in prison, to assert your own humanity and to say, ‘I would like agency to make my own choices.’ And they say, ‘Your choices are work programme, and, when we say so, you’re eligible for the GED high school programme.’ No, prison doesn’t work–unless you want to say it works by opening up opportunities for some prisoners and some programmes to together decide their destiny. But I haven’t seen a lot of compassion for prisoners having that humanity. It’s more common for them to do the paternalistic thing and say, ‘You need to go to AA or NA.’ And the person says, ‘OK, I admit I need to work on that, but I’d also like to go to college.’ ‘No, you don’t need college you need AA.’ AA becomes a hurdle before you can raise yourself up the way you want."