Shut up and write

Prison deaths and managing my own futility

I’ve been tracking deaths inside Alabama prisons since 2018 and it’s a grim assignment. Self-assigned, I should add, but one I feel is vital to shine a light on the state’s dark morass of incarceration. I am interested in deaths due to violence, drugs and suicide because they are the direct result of the self-made factors behind the prison crisis—overcrowding, understaffing, corruption that facilitates robust drug trafficking and an overall culture of cruelty, depravation and indifference to suffering. In 2021, I tracked a record number of these deaths.

These are the types of needless deaths that led the U.S. Department of Justice to sue Alabama in 2020 after finding the conditions inside the facilities amount to deadly cruel and unusual punishment. The Feds tried to work out a settlement with the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), but no dice. The state still refuses to admit that conditions are that bad. So, this behemoth of a losing lawsuit is headed to trial in 2024 on our dime. An Alabama-based psychiatrist who works with incarcerated people once told me “Alabama is the make-me state.” We will not reform our ways unless someone makes us do it.

Deaths in the prisons can be difficult to track, particularly when the agency in charge refuses to respond to my emails and calls, asking for confirmation. I’ve written about ADOC ignoring me for two years, which thankfully appears to have ended. I can only guess with a new prison commissioner and new people in the office of public affairs, whatever childish grudge prompted the freeze-out exited ADOC headquarters with the previous administration.

Still, responses can be slow, and as of this Wednesday morning, I am still waiting after emailing ADOC’s public affairs office yesterday asking for confirmation of 3 deaths over the long holiday weekend, a possible suicide and 2 likely overdoses.

The Jefferson County Medical Examiner sends out a morning email with deaths they are investigating, and all deaths at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, near Birmingham, come to this office. This morning’s email confirmed one prison death from the weekend: 36-year old Kenneth James, found dead on the floor of cell. A staffer told me it happened in a segregation unit (solitary confinement) and James likely suffered a fatal overdose.

I don’t know anything about James, and unfortunately his photo was already removed from the ADOC database by the time I got his name. I save the photos of the dead, mostly mugshots unfortunately, but I think it’s important to have a record of their faces. I publish them on twitter when I have them, then file them away in folders on my desktop labeled “prison deaths” by year, beginning with 2018. I don’t always know why I am doing this, but it feels important. It is something I can do to amplify the appalling death march. I am doing what I know to do—listening to sources, investigating, asking questions, keeping track, and writing.

Some days it is overwhelming. Multiple channels are open for people to reach me—social media, email, text, calls, and I often can’t get to it all. For example, I have several unread messages in the cue from the prison’s recently implemented e-messaging program, facilitated through tablets distributed to incarcerated people by prison profiteer Securus. An e-message costs money to send, so I should prioritize reading them, but yesterday I simply ran out of time. (Below are Securus stamp prices.)

My phone also rings, sometimes all day long, with calls from the prisons and I feel guilty when I can’t pick up. Yesterday it rang from Donaldson around 4pm and I suspect it was an older man who calls me just to talk. He is in a wheelchair, suffering from Parkinson’s disease and desperately wants to go home to his girlfriend, a high-school sweetheart he reconnected with through the mail. She owns her own home and recently made it wheelchair accessible, but her boyfriend has a life without parole sentence and can’t be considered for medical furlough because of a bogus sex abuse conviction from 1974. These are the stories that keep me up at night, that make me question the entire rotten prison industrial complex.

So my own sense of futility is a job hazard and writing has always been my way to manage it. A writing teacher I’ve studied with, Natalie Goldberg, (author of the famous Writing down the Bones) has a command for her students: shut up and write. I recently finished her book “The True Secret of Writing,” and the part where she issues this command reached out and grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me awake. Nat writes:

I tell my students, Shut up and write. These four words are all you need, but to realize them is not so easy. The phrase has the terseness of Zen—pithy, cutting through, to the point. But we have to fall through the many layers of human life to directly meet its prescription. We have to know the dignity of language, the dimensions of war and aggression, then patience, the slow recording of detail, desire, anguish, hope, then letting go, silence and speech, imperturbability, resolve, then flummoxing, losing it all, thinking we can escape. We go through the whole gamut, the extremes, till we lower ourselves into the center—quiet, looking harmless, barely moving, but ferocious inside, determined, touching down on delight and candor, pouring it onto the page. 

So that beautifully rendered command, along with nudging from friends brought me to this page. These posts (newsletters? blogs? journals?) will likely not be my cleanest writing. My thoughts might meander between my work covering Alabama prisons, to my own writing, to baking, to musing about getting older. It’s a way to feel less futile in a world that currently feels crushing, cruel, in crisis. One thing I want to make sure you feel is my own gratitude for this opportunity, this brief moment of connection between us, your eyes on my words that somehow made their way to you. Thank you.

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