Recently, I was having a conversation with my younger brother Robert on the phone when he mentioned the killing of the United Healthcare CEO and a school shooting in Wisconsin by a 15-year-old.
When I expressed pain over the incidents, he expressed surprise. “How do you know about this stuff?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” I replied. “It’s been on the news. We have television in prison.”
It made me realize how little our loved ones know about what life in prison is like.
Conversations with family are typically more about finding out what is going on with people we know — who was born and who died, those kinds of things. Or it’s about sending money. We don’t talk very much about what is happening or how things work inside prison because it feels like nothing much here is worth talking about. Some people might also want to be detached from what happens in prison; they don’t want to feel the pain or embarrassment of having a loved one behind bars.
I remember many years back when Nancy Grace, a former prosecutor and the host of a syndicated television show on Headline News, expressed outrage that people inside prisons had televisions. What she failed to mention was that no one was providing them to us for free. We have to buy them ourselves from the prison commissary at inflated prices.
The televisions are cheap models made by incarcerated people working for Pennsylvania Correctional Industries, and we pay $17 a month in Pennsylvania for a basic local cable package.
We care about what is happening outside. School shootings, gentrification and other current events are not lost on us. Many of us celebrated the election of the first Black president as well as the Black Lives Matter movement. We mourned the deaths of the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali in 2016 and, before that, Apple’s visionary leader Steve Jobs in 2011. Of course, the news sometimes impacts our lives directly: The COVID-19 pandemic is still fresh in our memory.
I have been serving a life sentence in prison since 1999. My first state prison identification photo card was dated 9/11/2001 — a moment everyone can remember. For me, that terrible day made me think about the devastating pain I, too, had caused people who didn’t deserve it. It made me more empathetic about events in my family and community.
I shared with Robert how I watch the news and try to stay current with what is taking place outside of prison. I shared with my brother how excited most of us get when the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Philadelphia Eagles play. I told him about how people pool ingredients to cook food or gather in the common area to cheer on their favorite team while watching the game on two large wall-mounted televisions.
I told him how people in the common area might also be playing card games, chess or concentrating on a 1,000-piece puzzle. At one table, there could be a group of men discussing prison reform. Another table might be discussing Derek Lee, a Pennsylvania man whose lawyer argued before the state Supreme Court that Lee’s life-without-parole sentence for a murder committed by his accomplice, during a 2014 robbery, was cruel and therefore unconstitutional.
During our 15-minute conversation, we also discussed some of his other notions about prison life.
He thought that people in prison were able to get good meals from the kitchen. I told him that we only receive the food they provide, seldom on clean plastic trays. I’ve had dinner trays with remnants of the breakfast meal caked in the corner. I told him that we can order items through the commissary, but at inflated prices. We’re especially feeling the pinch of the current economy, even more so because we only make pennies per hour.
He thought that we could move around freely. Matter-of-factly, I explained how no one is free to roam around. We can only move during “move times,” when we can go from our housing units to the library, gym or scheduled programming. Going to the main recreational yard or making medical clinic appointments are only permitted at designated times, and one must have a computer-generated pass.
My brother told me how proud he was of me. I told him it was no big deal. My 24 hours are not that different from his. I go to work and I try to help others out if they need it.
I’d like to think that his view of prison changed. “I only knew what was in the movies,” he said.
