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Senator
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THE OPPORTUNITY OF OUR
LIFETIMES
by
Kenneth E. Hartman
“Art is long,
life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient”
Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe
In the midst of
the worst meltdown of the reigning power structure in several generations, there
is a tremendous opportunity to break the stranglehold of the punishers on the
criminal justice systems of this country. The onus is now on us, on the vast
mass of men and women crowded into the thousands of prisons and jails in every
state. This is our chance to disprove the accepted, standardized version of who
we are and why our continued, ever-lengthening imprisonment is necessary.
We
should not delude ourselves by waiting for outside intervention to save us
because that just isn’t going to happen. A solid quarter of a century of
endless drumbeating to lock more people up, lock more people up, lock more
people up, has poisoned the collective consciousness. The average, tax paying,
middle-class American (read, most consequentially, voter) is convinced he lives
in a country positively rife with crime and violence. He does not believe the
government’s own statistics that crime rates are at historic lows. He believes,
instead, the droning hysteria of the local newsreader’s recitation of the day’s
crime report. The former is abstract; the latter is aimed right at the gut.
There are no bleeding photographs of enhanced safety, and no weeping mothers
bemoaning the loss of violence. The truth is the huge prison-industrial complex
was built on the unease of regular folks.
But
in front of this steamroller has appeared a fearsome chasm in the form of fiscal
crisis. I don’t believe anything else could have slowed it down. Regardless,
the prison ship has run onto the shoals of unbalanced state budgets. Those same
folks who regularly, if mindlessly, voted for politicians who stoked their fears
are looking at reprioritizing on an unprecedented scale. The bottomless pit of
borrowed money that paid for our concrete boxes found bottom in a hurry.
Irrational fear of crime has been replaced by very rational fears of bankruptcy
and penury.
Crisis is opportunity wrapped in uncertainty. For all of my 30 years imprisoned
we prisoners have been waiting for some sort of magic to happen, a golden key
that would open the locks. I suspect the vast majority of us don’t really
believe this fantasy. We fight the unpleasantness of this knowledge by fighting
each other, by escaping into drug-induced states of denial, by mailing out
voluminous writs of hocus pocus, and by generally flailing about, thrashing
against the unyielding walls that surround our minds no less than our battered
bodies. In our desperation, we too often provide fodder to the profiteers, to
the blowhards, to the very groups who depend on our obstinate refusal to awaken
from our intellectual and moral torpor into the reality of the actual situation
of our lives.
The
foundering prison ship is vulnerable right now. What we have to do is erase the
distorted portrayals of who prisoners are and redraw a different picture to the
world. We need to seize every chance that presents itself to reclaim our
humanity. Society is hurting, and we should become healers instead of
destroyers. We should, all of us, rise to this challenge. Be honest with
yourselves, looking back two years ago, did you ever imagine all the changes
we’ve seen? All the way from the White House to the various statehouses, the
old system is cracking, its foundation hollowed out and rotted.
Channel your energies into positive and productive pursuits. Create the chances
to re-enter the world through your good works. Prove your worth by becoming
worthy of respect as human beings. Sit down with the prisoner down the tier and
call a truce for the time being. Let all of this horror around us sink under
the waves of history past; let the hulk of the prison ship be pulled under on
account of its own excesses. By our actions, by doing what is right and useful
and human, we can shame them. Nothing will expose how wrong this mad experiment
is than by our rising to the challenge of this time, than by our becoming bigger
than those who have used our weaknesses and failures to enrich themselves.
The
choice is, as we all know, ours to make. We can continue to live like rabid
dogs, or we can conduct ourselves with dignity even in the face of the
indignities of prison.
If
you are interested in one roadmap to instituting real reform from inside write
to Friends & Families for the Honor Program, P.O. Box 25299, Los Angeles, CA
90025, or ask your friends and families to visit:
www.prisonhonorprogram.org.
“Four things come not back: the spoken word; the sped arrow; time past; the
neglected opportunity.”
Omar Ibn Al-Halif
Kenneth E. Hartman
has served over 29 continuous years in the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation on a life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) sentence.
He is an award-winning writer and prison reform activist. He is the author of
“Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars,” a memoir of life in
prison, published by Atlas & Co. He was instrumental in the founding of the
Honor Program at the California State Prison―Los Angeles County, and is
currently leading a grassroots organizing campaign, conducted by LWOP prisoners,
with the goal of abolishing the other death penalty. He can be reached at
prisonhonorprogram@hotmail.com and
TODP@live.com, or see
www.kennethehartman.com.
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