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Note on the Second Edition
Many of the changes to this book are a matter of preference in wording, fixing typos, making clarifications, maintaining consistency, and adding a table of contents. The font size has been modified to reduce the amount of paper used; the original twelve-point font was used in consideration for readers with visual impairments. I am sure that some things have been overlooked, so you might see a third edition in the future.
Preface to the Second Edition
I am reediting this book while under self-imposed confinement. COVID-19 has been allowed to wreak havoc on the United States and countries around the world. Prisons have become hot spots for the virus as a lack of oversight, medical treatment, and poor environmental conditions are ideal for the pandemic to take hold. It’s a microcosm representing the whole of the nation, in that how we treat our most marginalized members of society is stratified by combinations of class, race, and gender. Inmates are like the canary in the coal mine, for what we allow to happen to them is what we will see in the other shadows of our communities.
Williams (my cellie in this book) and I have kept in contact with one another. After the first edition of this book was published, he was locked up again for a parole violation in 2019. As Coronavirus made its way across the U.S., the prison holding Williams was among many nationwide to be hit hardest. In a population of 2,400 inmates, nearly half of them tested positive for COVID-19. Williams wrote letters detailing the lack of attention given to who he calls patient zero. The man was ill for two weeks, unable to fully breathe, and exhibiting all of the symptoms of COVID-19 before getting rushed to the hospital. Williams tested positive as the prison tried to mitigate damage but it was too late. Of the C.O.s that were exposed, roughly 30 had contracted the virus. Nurses were said to have been refusing to enter pods, the short-staffed prison was using educators to make sandwiches for inmates, and indefinite lockdowns were put into effect. Williams didn’t receive breathing treatments for his asthma, it took letter writing and acknowledgement of going to media outlets for them to remediate his grievances. He was transferred to a medical pod, another petri dish for the virus. Williams was then hospitalized with pneumonia and put in quarantine for two weeks. The last I heard from him was news of being recommended for parole, a process that will take until November of 2020 for him to be released. His sentence fully expires in March of 2021. Hopefully those four months spared from prison will save his life and those months in waiting will not take it.
Meanwhile the nation has experienced one of the largest protest movements in this generation, in part due to mass unemployment. People have had time and energy to commit to marching in the streets. Cities have made progress in dismantling, defunding, and reforming their police departments in order to curb the deleterious effects of punitive-based justice, warrior cop mentality, and systemic racism. It’s only one piece of the puzzle that will require several other combinations to fall in place to reach the end goal. A call to action is in order until we get what we need.
I spent the first two weekends of the protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd between downtown and home. It was emboldening to see so many people in the streets and to hear cries of solidarity from those who couldn’t be present. Dialogue about solutions was mixed, some more radical than others, with the obligatory reactionaries present to set the opposition to the arguments being made. Within three months I witnessed one protester go from questioning the abolition of police to carrying a rifle in self-defense after Garrett Foster was murdered. People were becoming radicalized and, as result, some progress was being made in local government, but it was not enough. Breonna Taylor’s murderers still got away with her death, the cops who have hospitalized peaceful protesters and spectators have yet to see charges, and federal officers have overridden local law enforcement protocols.
All of the calls to city councils, voting, protests, and petitions have yielded a slow crawl to the goals that have been proposed. Good intentions have been undermined by shortsightedness, pandering, and misinformation campaigns. The protests have resulted in police riots, a war of attrition in which police have utilized violence and trumped-up charges to chip away at the movement for police accountability and reconstruction of the justice system. It is essential that the methods mentioned above are utilized to ensure that the slow crawl to justice does not come to a standstill. To be as effective as possible it will take much more to avoid the pitfalls we are encountering. I encourage everyone to volunteer, donate to causes, talk to friends and family, and continue to educate themselves in relation to the multifaceted issues we face. The following books are just a few that I recommend to anyone interested in identifying and approaching the problems we face with policing and incarceration. If you have any suggestions for this list, please send me an email at paul.tardie@yahoo.com
The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America by Kristian Williams
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces by Radley Balko
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer
Abolishing Carceral Society by Abolition Collective
There are conflicting hypotheses about whether the sources of crime are environmental or individual. Rites of Execution by Loius P. Masur has succinctly suggested, “if social and environmental conditions caused crime, society itself should be radically redesigned.” After four years of having this experience behind me, I have gained more insight as to how jail has affected others and myself. Understanding that solitary confinement is psychological torture, be it intentional or not, explains why some inmates react the way they do when they are put on lockdown. When I was sixteen I had been put in solitary confinement for three days in the juvenile unit of the same jail this book takes place in. I could only imagine how much worse that would be for an extended amount of time, especially knowing that people have spent decades in solitary confinement. Those three days of solitary were difficult. I took to self-harm and broke down several times. All I could hear was the treble of a distant radio. There were no clocks and no way to tell what time of day it was because there were no windows. There is no justification for this kind of treatment toward any living animal, human or otherwise. Experiments on nonhuman primates have shown long-term “depressive” effects of isolation and a potential for asocial or anti-social behavior. These conditions break people, traumatize them, and do so in the name of justice or reformation of the individual. So long as we keep destroying individuals for the sake of revenge instead of lifting them up for the sake of healing, there will be no justice. In the time of COVID-19, lockdowns and solitary confinement are the only ways prisons and jails know how to curb transmission. This is one more instance of inmates being punished for the inabilities and unpreparedness of the institutions that hold them. While groups such as the Anarchist Black Cross or Nation Inside collect testimony about these conditions, many continue to die and succumb to life changing illness. To our knowledge, nobody has taken up these cases that ought to spurn, at the very least, reformation to the degree that Texas saw in the 1980s.
The reading list that I have included answers some the questions we are asking as a nation but there is much more needed to be discussed in how we approach the atypical elements of society and create structures that ensure freedom and justice without sacrificing one for the other. Ending capitalism is not enough; abolishing the police is not enough; and a more democratic system is not enough. The end goal may be a utopian pipe dream that we will never see fulfilled in our lifetimes, but we can experience it in fragmented moments, pull ourselves and others out from terrible realities, and at best establish a foothold on this mountain we climb.
Afterword to the Second Edition
I have received feedback on this book in the past two years and have had one consistent observation on the work as a whole: the book ends abruptly. This may be due to the inexperience of writing my first book. I have also chalked it up to the subject matter being abrupt in and of itself. Being in jail is a disjointing experience. Things change suddenly so often or break routine by the slightest margin to upset the whole order of individual and collective experience. The moment you have grown comfortable with a situation, discomfort always finds a way in.
While incarcerated, I read Franz Kafka’s The Trial. It was the the closest a piece of literature could get to describing the experience of the legal system in how nightmarish, surreal, and nonsensical it feels. I’m no Kafka but he has been an inspiration in writing this book just as Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier set the template for giving all of the finer details. To give any further detail after the ending would put us at the beginning of the book being written as I went back to work in a pizza kitchen, continued school, and tried my best to live as a somewhat law-abiding citizen. Having a preference for being outside was one of the biggest side effects of incarceration. As a result, I had a low tolerance for being inside loud places like bars and restaurants. Once the book was finished I had to find an outlet for that energy and began volunteering with a group that sends books to inmates. It has been a fulfilling two years with them and has been a positive environment to divert frustration into action.
