From the Publisher

America's soaring prison population is separated from the outside world by the Concertina, the rigid spirals of razor wire that top the high chain-link fences of state and federal penitentiaries. For nearly two decades, educator Jan Walker crossed this line at medium and maximum correctional facilities to teach adult felons who had committed such crimes as murder, rape, assault, drug-related offenses, and child sexual abuse.

In this beautifully crafted and moving memoir, Walker takes the reader inside the Concertina, offering a window on the unique rhythms of living and working in the isolated and harsh prison environment. She shares her striking experiences as a correctional teacher of innovative parenting and family courses, including a controversial class on how to parent from a distance, and as the coordinator of a pioneering program on personal and social responsibility. In stirring and intimate prose, Walker weaves together the true stories of male and female inmates with reflections on her own life and career to reveal the challenges, rewards, and emotional toll of her work. Through Walker's eyes, one sees her students not as hardened criminals, but as human beings struggling to survive behind bars, to reconsider their choices and behavior, to learn new skills, and to reconnect with their children. Walker's profound commitment to helping offenders rebuild their lives, as well as to preparing them for the return home to their families and communities, is evident as she relates how she coped with political and philosophical turmoil in the prison system, confrontational attitude from both inmates and corrections officers, moments of despair and doubt, and encounters withtough-on-crime taxpayers who berated her for wasting public monies to teach "scumbags, street rats, human garbage."

At a time when budget cuts threaten programs such as those taught by Walker, these dramatic stories show that education does make a difference in a prisoner's rehabilitation and successful reintegration in society.

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Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Dancing to the Concertina's Tune

Northeastern University Press

Chapter One

When sun shines on Puget Sound, her surface shimmers like sequins on a ballroom gown and makes waterfront real estate prices seem almost reasonable. Most land along the sound's mainland and multi-island shores is privately owned. Some small plats belong to Indian nations whose ancestors once used its plenty, some to the federal government for shipyards and military use, some to the state for public recreation. One island in the South Sound, named McNeil for a Hudson's Bay steamship captain, belongs entirely to the state. Two-thirds of its 4,400 acres are forested, a pristine wildlife refuge. One-third is a medium-custody correctional facility, the last operating prison in North America accessible only by boat. In 1977, when I first visited McNeil Island, the prison compound was a century-old federal penitentiary, an ugly scar at the forest's edge. Dirty yellow and noncolor buildings with dingy barred windows stood on a hill above the dock where passenger ferries came and went twenty-four hours a day, carrying prison employees, inmates, and authorized visitors. Before going inside the fence, I looked east across the sound to the sleep town of Steilacoom andthe mainland dock where corrections officers check passengers' credentials. Freedom was a twenty-minute boat ride away. Snow-clad Mount Rainier, skirted with thick stands of fir, cedar, and hemlock, loomed above the town and sound. At sunset on sunny days, the mountain blushes pink for a time, then disappears into darkness. How, I wondered, did men housed inside the fence cope with the incongruity of nature's beauty and prison's anguish? I was on the island as a visitor with students from my Tacoma Community College Family Relationships class, most of whom startled a bit when the prison gate closed behind us. One of my students worked in the prison as a correctional officer and acted as our guide. He'd heard about the class, or perhaps my teaching style, and believed it would help him in his daily interactions with inmates. I'd never before met anyone who worked in prison, never known anyone sentenced to do time, never given prison or inmates, or their interactions, much thought. That made me a rather typical American. Another officer joined us in the wide, high-ceilinged corridor, and off we went into the dismal, almost dead interior of the old cell house. We were subdued, reverent even, but our hard-soled shoes announced our presence as we climbed steel-mesh stairs and walked cell-block tiers. We glanced into cells that were bedrooms, bathrooms, living rooms, and sometimes kitchens for men clever enough to rig electric wires to simple pieces of metal-perhaps a contraband fork-to cook stolen meat. (Plastic utensils have since replaced metal ones in most prisons.) Their crowded, dank cells, built for five men, had been double-bunked and housed ten by then, and they reeked of overused toilets, under-washed bodies, and despair. Somewhere, on one of those tiers, we viewed what my student called the lala cells. Lalas trade sexual favors for food or other commodities from the prison store, or art items created by inmates for sale and trade. Such men are generally called punks or any number of slang terms for their sexual role, but they will remain lalas in my mind. Though my student guide had prepared me for meeting them, I felt uncomfortable. We were looking into cells that were their homes, and into a world of gender roles unfamiliar to me. The lalas were playing cards; at the very least, we were intruding in their card game. Other cards, presumably from a worn deck, served as makeshift hair rollers, preparation for their late-night dates. Some lalas wore lipstick, blush, eye shadow. They were accustomed to visitors walking by, and they paid us little heed even when our guide said the Avon representative who sold them their cosmetics often achieved top-sales recognition in her region. The prison administration obviously honored their gender roles by permitting such sales inside the fence. In fact, makeup bothered me less than the sight of adults sitting around playing cards during what I considered the work hours of the day. I had no understanding then of what "doing time" meant, or how few jobs were available inside the prison fence. From the cell house we went to prison industries, to me a much more appealing place. Daylight filtered through fly- and dust-specked windows. Men worked at physical tasks: welding, electronic repair, furniture making. My dad, a carpenter by profession, had been adept in many crafts. As firstborn in a family of girls, I had a special bond with my father, a typical birth-order characteristic. Dad taught me to see the artisan in all work. Those men, working with their hands to create or restore useful items, gave me an odd sense of all being well in spite of the setting. Those prison workrooms were male places, with Marilyn Monroe pinups, machine noise, and torch flames. Men wore safety goggles, work gloves, sturdy clothing, and boots. I felt less uncomfortable there than I had in the cell house, but I was still out of my realm. Over the years I taught in prison, I heard numerous inmates say visitors walking past their cells and classrooms made them feel like they were monkeys in a zoo.

I now know only a handful of incarcerated adults ever get hired for prison industry jobs. Those who do are generally long-termers whose money goes home to support a family. They have their own inside fraternity and shun any they consider homosexual. We made the rounds-the prison hospital and chapel, an open barracks-like living unit for those who'd climbed the privilege ladder, the mess hall, staff dining room, mail room, administrative offices. We heard stories of some famous men who'd done time there: gangster Mickey Cohen for tax evasion; Teamster president Dave Beck, convicted of racketeering; auto thief Charles Manson, who later was convicted of the heinous Tate-La Bianca murders. An officer dangling chains from his bands told us about a man soon to be famous, at least inside the federal system, for information he had revealed in an attempt to lighten his sentence. The body chains were meant for him, for his transport across the sound, where he would be met by federal officials and flown to another institution. "He's wearing a snitch jacket," the officer rattling the chains said. "Nowhere's safe for him now, and he knows it. Snitches make their own death row." The male students in our tour group asked pointed questions about the move, including how many guards would accompany the prisoner into an airplane lavatory, and whether the cuffs would be removed while he urinated. The question reminded me I needed to use a restroom before we boarded the boat for the twenty-minute crossing to Steilacoom and our parked cars. I was reading door signs when one man asked if the officer would demonstrate the body chains on me. Without my agreeing to what my students considered a great laugh, the officer cuffed my wrists, snapped a chain around my waist, and knelt to put ankle bracelets in place. I remember a chill swept over me, and my stomach churned. Did I gasp for breath before the chill gave way to heat so intense it felt as if I stood in flames? I had the odd feeling my hair had caught fire. The officer must have seen alarm in my look or felt it radiating from me. "You claustrophobic?" he asked. I hadn't considered myself so, but I seemed to be in the throes of a panic attack. "Take them off. Get me out of them." My need for the restroom escalated to near-emergency. "Just get the damn things off." "Key's lost," someone joked. But it wasn't funny, not to me. It felt as though my essence, my spirit, had disappeared. My students' chatter, once we were outside the fence, seemed removed from me, like the noise of a radio in another room. The ferry approached, seagulls called, a blue heron waded in the shallows. Mount Rainier loomed. All was well in my world, but the lost feeling lingered. The memory lingers still. Perhaps it served a purpose, though I didn't know then I would teach inside the prison fence, eventually on the island, or how many times I'd see men-and occasionally women-in body chains. Hundreds of men and several women told me they had experienced emotions similar to mine. It goes far beyond the humiliation of being handcuffed, which is bad enough, they say. It's worse than the finality of prison: it's the loss of self. Body chains-shackles-serve their purpose in just that way. Officials responsible for transporting prisoners need them to be subdued for reasons of safety-the officials', the public's, the prisoners'. It is an officer's duty and obligation to manage prisoners with dignity, but dignity takes a backseat to public safety every time. Even pregnant women must endure cuffs and chains, though most jurisdictions now cuff their hands in front of their bodies as added protection should they trip and fall forward. My moment in shackles underscored a valuable lesson my mother lived by and taught: look at the person, not the chains. (She said look inside the person, or some such, but the message remains the same.) Her teachings, and Dad's, followed me through life and quite possibly prepared me for my unusual career as a correctional educator, and my return to McNeil Island thirteen years later.

Chapter Two

Two years after my brief introduction to life inside the fence, community colleges by legislative mandate became education providers inside all Washington state prisons, and my department head asked me to move from the main Tacoma Community College campus to the women's prison near Gig Harbor to set up a Home and Family Life program. "One year," I said. "I'll go out there for one year." For the next seventeen years, I agreed to one more year. Even now, it seems an odd career for one who proclaimed aloud from second grade through college and beyond, "I will never teach." My declaration began when my second grade teacher died suddenly, and my mother, who'd retired from teaching to rear a family, stepped in to complete the year. Until then, because of myopia, I had a favored place beside the teacher's desk. Mom got me glasses; moved me, desk and all, to the spot dictated by alphabet; and taught me more by her principles than primers. Through the ensuing years, I watched her prepare lessons and grade papers and listened to her fret about struggling students. Under her tutelage I achieved an acceptable level of tolerance for human differences, and a certainty I would never develop the patience necessary to teach. Most teachers, it seemed, spent inordinate time with students on the low end of the learning curve. I now admit my first two post-college positions, one as a county extension agent, one as a nutrition consultant for the Dairy Council, involved teaching; they provided ideal experience and credentials to become a community college instructor. In truth, I first became a teacher at age fourteen, when I took over leadership of a group of nine- and ten-year-old boys barred by sex from a girls' 4-H cooking and sewing club. That must have required patience, but I recall it as fun, not work at all. Those boys hand-hemmed tea towels and mixed muffin batter just enough to blend ingredients without incorporating too much air. I picture them with stained T-shirts and grubby hands. My mother, whose path I long tried to avoid, would say that wasn't true: they always washed their hands. She often accused me of exaggeration and overdramatization of simple life events. I wish she'd lived long enough to know how well both served me, especially in prison classroom. As teacher/author Gail Godwin said, "Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theater." I made every classroom my private stage and played whatever role my students needed each hour, each day, for each subject. Prison classrooms aren't remarkable: they have student and teacher desks or tables, blackboards (or white acetate boards), bookshelves, file cabinets, pencil sharpeners, and windows that need washing. Rather, it's the students who are notable for the circuitous routes they travel to arrive at a place called correctional education. For all the time I spent with them, their world inside remains foreign to me. I never stayed the night in prison, and that makes all the difference. Still, something I brought to my work fit their needs: something more than a college degree and prior experience. Skills and passions honed in my family of origin and carried forth with my children followed me to my correctional educator role. I taught my beliefs: all behaviors have consequences; proper discipline teaches; and children deserve love and care and accurate information about their family history. Washington state's women's prison, when I first went there in 1979, seemed pleasant when compared to the old penitentiary I'd visited two years before. Single-story redbrick buildings and a spacious cement courtyard were softened by lawns, flowering trees, shrubs, and flowers. Women wore clothing they brought from home: most moved about freely, gathering in groups to talk, stretching out on a patch of grass to enjoy the sun. To an untrained eye, the whole looked like a private college campus, and it made much of our new-employee training seem ill suited. We were fingerprinted; photographed; told a prison riot was a matter of when, not if; and cautioned at every turn. We watched a video that included footage on searching a toilet for contraband, and heard about an officer whose fingers, or parts of them, were blown off by a retractable pen/bomb. We were told a male former art teacher had worn a rubber apron to prevent groping by aggressive inmates. We met our students, who'd been sent to the prison (then called Purdy Treatment Center for Women) to get the help they needed; well over half of them had been convicted of property crimes. Our classes certainly qualified as help, though it's not clear who learned the most, students or teachers. We all found women enrolled in our classes who could have been our mothers, sisters, daughters, neighbors, or friends. Some of their stories boggled our minds. A young mother in my first parenting classes had been sixteen and pregnant at the time of her arrest. A judge issued an order to chain her to the hospital birthing table so she wouldn't escape during delivery. I went inside to teach female prisoners and found humanity in a microcosm. Two professional colleagues who moved from other positions to McNeil Island Corrections Center (MICC) when it became a state facility said I'd find the same thing with men, and an even greater need for my work.



Continues...

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Excerpted from Dancing to the Concertina's Tune by Jan Walker Copyright © 2004 by Jan Walker. Excerpted by permission.
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