Doing Time

Notes During a Pandemic

Living in self-isolation, I’ve been thinking of the inmates I’ve known through the years, as part of our prison outreach at the Chapel Hill Zen Center.

The first was at Pender Correctional in Burgaw; I became his pen pal and eventually visited from time to time.  He told me at our first visit that the suddenness of his imprisonment had been startling.  He’d been picked up by the police a few hours after committing his crime, and after a short trial was sentenced to 23 years.  One day he was living his normal life—a life of crime, but mostly petty crime—the next day he was facing 23 years in prison.

People in that situation either remain in a state of denial, railing at their fate, or realize they’re in a new situation and adjust.  E. started reading widely, began with The Seven Story Mountain, though his grandmother was a primitive Baptist and he had a strong resentment of religion, then came across a book by Thich Nhat Hanh and wrote the man a letter, sending it to France.  A nun began to correspond with him, suggesting ways he could set up a practice, but eventually said he should get in touch with someone closer to home.  He wrote a letter to the Chapel Hill Zen Center.  I was the person who walked in the door after the priest got his letter.

One thing he realized was that, if it weren’t for prison, he’d probably be dead; he’d been an enforcer for the Hells Angels and a lot of people didn’t like him.  He’d also been addicted to crystal meth, though he’d been trying to get off it when he committed his crime.  He had these twenty-three years ahead of him and could live them or not.  He chose life, as somebody or other says in the Bible.  He started to attend AA and had a sponsor outside the prison.  He began a regular meditation practice and organized a Buddhist group in the prison.  He exercised a lot, living in a medium security place where he could run laps inside the fence every morning.  He earned his high school diploma, began taking college courses.  He became a vocational counselor for other men he lived with.  He even learned to play the guitar and joined a prison rock group.  Within the limits of his situation, he lived a rich life.  He talked about getting out constantly, but also lived while he was there.

I’ve learned even more from the men I’ve known on Death Row.  Their circumstances are much more circumscribed.  They have an exercise period from time to time; I’m not sure if it’s every day or less than that, but I’ve heard them talk about it.  Otherwise they’re in a very confined space.  Each man has his own cell, but it’s tiny, to the point where, if you mention giving somebody a book, they ask themselves if they have room.  The cells surround pods where they can sit at tables; everything is metal, and nothing looks comfortable.  My understanding—I may not be right, because I haven’t wanted to pry—is that they can spend their time in their cells or out in the pods, where there are flat screen TV’s.  (That may not be true these days.)  Three times a day they go in shifts to the dining halls.  They’re completely isolated from the rest of the prison population.

We do not, thank God, have an active program of executing people in North Carolina at the moment, and haven’t in the ten or so years I’ve been visiting Central Prison.  But the men who enter death row—this confined claustrophobic place of cement and metal, where they all wear red jump suits that don’t necessarily fit—will live out their lives there.  The people they live with, whom they have not chosen, are those they’ll deal with for the rest of their lives.  They’ll never move to a better situation.  This is it.

Our self-isolation will end sometime—if we live to see that day—but we don’t know when that will be, or what normal will be when we emerge.  The goofy little things I used to love like browsing in a bookstore or having coffee at a coffee shop: will I do those things again?  (I’m 71 years old.)  I vividly remember my friend Reynolds Price, when he had just discovered he had spinal cancer and could feel it slowly numbing and paralyzing his legs, bursting into tears one day when a friend and I had taken lunch to him.  “I don’t know if I’ll ever drive a car again,” he said.  “I don’t know if I’ll ever shop at the Kroger again.”  (The answer to both of those questions was no.)

But in his wonderful memoir A Whole New Life—which wouldn’t be a bad book to read right now—he says that there was a moment when he realized that that Reynolds Price, the one who had been mobile, who had driven a car and shopped at the Kroger, was dead.  This Reynolds Price—the one who was living now—was a completely different person, who would have to find his satisfactions in other ways.  To say he did that well (this of course was a person with plenty of resources, and a lot of friends) would be a vast understatement.  He had a whole new life as a hugely productive writer.  And he continued to have a social life.  He just did it in a new way.

We may have to find new ways too.  And we’ll have the choice of clinging to the old things, or embracing the new.