This is the first of two pieces by Eileen Hirst.  The second will will be posted next Tuesday.           

What is it about the incarcerated that so captures the imagination and causes reasonably intelligent people to abandon common sense and good manners? It is a question I had plenty of opportunity to wrestle with in twenty years of serving as Chief of Staff to San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey.

Mine was the phone that rang when people with no reason other than curiosity sought to visit the county jails. It was as if they viewed the jail system as a sort of lending library, where they could borrow prisoners for their own purposes, for free, and then walk away. 

Requests came from all sorts of people: 
–“I live in the neighborhood and would just like to see who is in there.” Would this woman ever knock on a stranger’s door and expect to be welcomed in just to eyeball the residents? Of course not, but it seemed okay when it was jail inmates she was barging in on.
–“I’m writing my first novel. My protagonist gets a job as a prison guard. I need to see what kind of people she would have to deal with.” Isn’t the first advice to new writers something about writing what you know?
–“I’m in eighth grade and my teacher assigned us to visit a jail and talk to some real criminals.” I thought someone was playing a joke on me until five more eighth-graders called. “Have your teacher call me,” I said. She never did, even after I left a message for her myself, which robbed me of the chance to ask her what on earth she hoped to achieve with this assignment.

The answer to all these callers was no. Jails are busy, congested places. Prisoners are not just languishing in their cells waiting for the curious to show up and look at them. They are going to court, having medical treatment, and attending high school classes and AA meetings. They are conferring with their attorneys and calling their families. They are working in the kitchen and staffing the laundry.

“How would you like to live your life with the front wall of your house sawed open, like you are an exhibit in a zoo?”

Jail staff – deputy sheriffs, nurses, teachers – are in constant motion, too. Imagine what it takes to get three meals a day to 1300 people, keep track of their clothing, bedding and towels, distribute their medications, escort them to classrooms and exercise areas, facilitate their family visits, and still deliver them to the right courtroom at the right time. Now, imagine doing all that when the toilets in facilities half a century old facility have just overflowed, again. Open the doors to gawking civilians? Sorry, no.

Logistics aside, it was the gawking that made us queasy. No matter the circumstances that bring people to jail, jail is where they live their daily lives until disposition of their criminal cases, and sometimes after. They wake up, shower, get dressed, eat, and use the toilet, all within full view of jail staff, other prisoners, and anyone who happens to be walking by their locked housing units. 

How would you like to live your life with the front wall of your house sawed open, like you are an exhibit in a zoo? A law professor didn’t understand how intrusive it would be to have her first-year students do a walkthrough, just to see, she said, what jail is really like, until I suggested we have a van full of prisoners do a walkthrough of her home, just to see what middle-class life is really like.

More baffling were parents hoping to frighten their misbehaving offspring into taking out the garbage and staying away from their hoodlum friends. “I have tried everything. Nothing works. I am at the end of my rope. Maybe if my son sees what jail is like, and the people in there, he will get the message.”

How can you not feel badly for a mother so parenting-challenged she is ready to hand the job over to “the people in there,” which I took to mean big, scary, tattooed gang-banging skinheads who live in her imagination. That’s a heck of a message. No kid would miss it.

It never seemed reasonable to me that a defiant teenager would be transformed into an obedient and respectful model of good behavior by staring at a jail full of people whose problems go quite a bit deeper than mouthing off to their parents. I suggested instead a tour of the University of California at Berkeley. Forget jail; show your son college.

“The last question I asked was, to us, the most important: What’s in it for the prisoners?”

For sheer arrogance and cluelessness, college professors were hard to beat. They would design elaborate surveys requiring lengthy serial interviews with a hundred or so prisoners from which they could write up findings designed to keep them alive in a publish-or-perish quest for tenure. And then they would call me to set it all up for them.

For highly educated people, their expectations revealed an astonishing ignorance of the most basic facts of justice-involved life. They expected me to provide detailed criminal histories, which, if I did, would make me guilty of a misdemeanor. They expected a clean, quiet, dedicated space for their interviews. They expected our staff to arrange appointments for them with their research subjects. Most illogically, they believed there was some system, some big computer in the sky, that kept track of prisoners after they left our custody as if we micro-chipped them on their way out the door, the easier to find them for follow-up interviews.

It surprised these academics that most county jail prisoners do not stay long, the majority leaving within three to thirty days. Their charges are dropped, they are granted own-recognizance (OR) release, they are sentenced and move on to state prison. And, no, they don’t send us postcards to let us know where they are and how they are doing. In fact, they would rather we not know.

Sometimes, researchers asked to camp out in the intake facility, the first stop after arrest, where people are booked into custody. Here is where arrestees are subjected to the humiliation of being searched, fingerprinted and get their mug shots taken. They swap their street clothing for an orange t-shirt and pants. They are given a baloney sandwich to eat in a holding cell, while waiting with other arrestees to be medically triaged and interviewed to detect mental health issues. They meet with a classification officer to review their criminal history and answer dozens of questions about their family, their education, their job and any prison experience or gang affiliation they might have, or any enemies they know of who are already in custody. They are often combative, drunk, or high. To a person, they are unhappy about their circumstances. 

Into this controlled chaos, where upwards of 60 people could be getting booked at the same time, one professor with multiple masters degrees and a Ph.D. expected to be given a desk, where she could add her list of questions to the multi-step booking process, which is required by law to be completed in twenty-four hours, and which has to be finished before an individual, who may be detoxing, can be assigned a bed.

Nevertheless, Sheriff Michael Hennessey sought to enable academic research if it could be accomplished without too much disruption of jail routine and security, and if it would inform his effort to provide programming that would help break the cycle of poverty, violence and incarceration that keep prisoners returning to custody over and over. In search of that rare project, I asked a lot of questions about the mechanics of proposed research and how the results would be used. 

The last question I asked was, to us, the most important: What’s in it for the prisoners?

A moment of puzzled silence. Well, what do you mean?

What I mean is, what about your research is of benefit to the prisoners? You are getting paid. You are getting something to add to your resume. Maybe you will score a publishing contract. You are asking people at an enormously stressful time in their lives to answer incredibly personal, often extremely painful, questions and you are recording their answers for your own little piece of academic immortality. What do the prisoners get?

The answers were always a variation on the same theme. Why, they will get the satisfaction of having given back to the community, of having made amends. This research is going to change the lives of future generations and those who participate will be able to feel good about having helped someone else in their circumstances. 

Fine, but the answer we were looking for was something more practical. Maybe food on the table for their families? Tutoring to improve their literacy? A job when they get out? Perhaps some cash in their commissary accounts so they can buy phone cards and call their children? How about helping them make bail? 

As it was explained to me, that would be impossible. Apparently, there is something about research subjects receiving anything beyond token compensation that can taint the outcome. 

For one criminology professor, token compensation topped out at about a buck and a quarter, the price of the Snickers candy bars he proposed providing to the lucky prisoners chosen for his study. 

A Snickers bar? They don’t even get to choose their own candy bar? It couldn’t have been a Mars bar or a Hershey’s if they preferred one of those? What about people with nut allergies? Snickers. Just the name alone mocks the prisoners for being suckers enough to go along on this ride. We said no to him.

We did not say no to everyone, but we were tempted after one eminent researcher brought along his own documentary film crew. Was the film about the prisoners participating in the violence prevention program he was being paid to study? 

No, it was about him.

Paradoxically, during the years I fielded these inquiries, the Sheriff’s Department faced two federal class action lawsuits alleging inhumane conditions at two of San Francisco’s jails. One, the oldest operating county jail west of the Mississippi, was so dilapidated that the judge declared it in violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Sheriff Michael Hennessey, desperate to convince voters to fund safe, modern facilities, had me invite reporters in to show them the maggots wiggling around in the shower drains, the broken elevators, and the electrical panel only inches above the water line in a basement that flooded with every winter storm. I showed them six-by-seven-foot cells housing two people each and a broom closet converted into a medical office serving more than 600 people. I made reporters stand at the head of long, poorly lit tiers of barred cells to see for themselves how impossible it was for deputy sheriffs to properly supervise prisoners and prevent sexual assault. 

I taped a sign over my desk reading, “A day without press is like a day without sunshine,” and made it my business to have very few days without sunshine. The conditions in San Francisco’s jails made local and national news, frequently. Yet, in twenty years, I received not a single request to talk to prisoners about the experience of living where sewage bubbling up from the toilets destroys legal documents and soaks your shoes. No one was curious to know the trauma caused by a horrific rape that occurred as a direct result of obsolete architecture. Or, what it is like to sleep on the floor of a twelve-person tank holding sixteen people and having them step over you on their way to the shower. Or, to be locked in a crumbling concrete building a couple of hundred yards from an active earthquake fault.

To ask those questions is to acknowledge the humanness of incarcerated people, and there is the rub. 

It is so much easier, more comfortable, to view prisoners as “them,” some sort of subspecies, predisposed to violent, antisocial behavior. Not like “us.” To acknowledge the humanness of incarcerated people requires acknowledging – and acting to end — the inequities and inadequacies of a public education system running on fumes; a health care system where the quality of treatment has more to do with the patient’s employment than their medical condition; the use of police to respond to mental health crises; and, our utter failure to care for veterans returning from fighting our wars. It requires grappling with the roles of race and privilege, and poverty and wealth, in determining who is incarcerated and who is not.

And that is so much harder.

…

This is the first of two pieces by Eileen Hirst.  The second will will be posted next Tuesday.