PRISON TRANSITIONS

By Ben Hall

I could barely hear Marc on the other end of the phone. “What are you guys doing?” I asked. “Celebrating,” he replied. I had not spoken to Marc since he got out of prison a couple years before.This day was a special occasion, our other friend (my best friend) Chico, was released from prison after 21 years to Marc’s house.

Although it was difficult catch most of Marc’s words, in the background I could hear the unmistakable sound of joy and laughter coming from people I love, then 14-year-old Kate got on the phone and said “You’re next Uncle Ben, and we're going to have a big party.” Chico gets on the line and it is the first time I’ve heard his voice in over a year since I transferred to Columbia River from the Oregon State Penitentiary where I spent nearly 19 years with him and I was fighting back tears. It is a stark contrast to a phone call I had to make over 20 years ago.

THE EARLY YEARS

I went to prison for the first time at 18 in 1993, having been raised in lock-ups and state facilities, even public school seemed to prepare me for my future home, the prison. I was in and out of the hole much of that sentence. I was released from OSCI November 15, 1996, and by September 1997 l was back inside. Initially when you go in, your ties and connections to the free world are strong. The sting you and your family feel is fresh as you begin the process of coming to terms with what is ahead of you. Early on visits from my family came often, mostly because my mom missed me so much. My sister later told me that my mom seemed to cry for a year.

As years pass like miles of meaningless repetition, life outside rolls on and visits and letters come less and less. You begin to feel a sense of diminished relationship to your family and live mostly within the walled city, locked in to the dimensions of limited geography beneath your feet. This disconnect from loved ones is perhaps one of the most dehumanizing aspects of prison. When my Aunt Sis died, I remember the acute sadness I felt. Grief is a funny thing in prison, you suppress the entire trauma you experience, if and when you are allowed tears they fall quietly in the darkness alone and devoid of human touch. The longer you are in prison the less you will feel about the next death, unless perhaps it is your mother or father, otherwise your stages of grief come on the prison's terms.

SETTLING IN

It is often hard for me to pinpoint exactly how I settled into prison; events and seasons rather than dates, identical days mark time so that months and years blend into each other. I couldn’t tell you the date they took the small trees and flowers off the yard, but I know it was the small race riot when the tower fired several warning shots. Because of the tree, and an officer in the middle of the crowd, they couldn’t take a clear shot. I suppose most guys serving five years or less mark the days on a calendar, not me. I became so present in the day-to-day prison routine, one day I looked at a calendar and realized I had less then 10 years left. Up until then I rarely thought about the outside world except in the longing moments between routines.

Cement walls with gun towers anchored on each corner surrounding the penitentiary, obstructing the view of cards and people. Upon arrival you are stripped down to your naked existence in a line with other men, cementing the reality that you come here alone, with nothing. Depending on where you fall in the hierarchy of prisoners and crimes, you will be tested to varying degrees and in different ways. Prisoners have a pecking order of crimes. If you are in for a sex crime or hurting a child, you are at the bottom of that order and life can be hell. I'm in for robbery and had been to prison before so I knew what to expect, but I was also an ex-gang member which made the first year challenging. I left my gang of my own accord in 1997. I wasn’t kicked out I just didn’t agree with its ideology. I had to fight a few times behind this, with the last one coming in the shower. Prison culture demands masculinity in the form of bravado, brute force and violence, or at the very least, carrying yourself in such a manner that says you are willing to cross those lines. I am grateful that l was able to use other problem-solving methods to avoid a regular routine of violence. It is bittersweet to describe the different ways I became institutionalized. What does it mean to be institutionalized? How does it happen and who teaches it? Many define institutionalized as “the inability or struggle to function outside of prison.”

Prison is very mechanical in its routines and interactions; there is indifference comparable to the metal doors and bars. Both prisoners and correctional officers become jaded by the day-in-day-out grind of prison, a lens clouded by stigmatization, labeling, power dynamics, untreated mental illness and patterns of criminal thinking. The tragedy of this is how regulated you become to the bars, as if being in a cage is a normal life. I once went so long without calling home that my mother called the prison to find out if something happened to me. It was always difficult to hear the pain in her voice every holiday knowing I was responsible for that pain. I am not a victim. I was once an intentional criminal and a drug addict but that is not what defines me. I suppose the sweetness of spending years inside is the community and relationships that became the family that I formed far from home.

COMMUNITY & PURPOSE

You can drown yourself in many things in prison.

Some saturate their sorrows in drugs or gambling, others devote their stay to intense workouts and sports, anything to break up the monotony and time. The prison culture is definitely foreign and backwards to outsiders, containing subcultures such as gangs and racially divided topography that is present in day-to-day space. I’ve seen guys locked into cycles of drug use, violence, and depression, some spending calendar years in the box (solitary confinement). Many believe living in the box gives them a sense of freedom that nothing else can be taken from them, but it takes a toll. Certainly not all pursuits in prison are bad. In fact, many are transformative.

After a year-long adjustment and shock I began to immerse myself in whatever was available to me: working in the industries laundry, finding a compatible cellmate, becoming part of a faith community, working out to keep my sanity and building relationships without even realizing it. I got involved with some of the Activities Clubs, Athletic Club, Seven Step, and Toastmasters. These clubs are a unique and integral part of the penitentiary; they are all self-supported by prisoners and outside volunteers, with a structure that gives one purpose or simply passes time for some.

The clubs hold monthly meetings and do a number of events. There is a deep philanthropy in the prisoners inside those walls. Prisoners make an average of $20-50 a month and I’ve watched my fellow prisoners give in little amounts to accomplish big goals for the outside community, especially the youth. Seven Step once raised money to build a treehouse for a child with cancer. The clubs established a hygiene drive for the homeless youth of Salem that happens annually where prisoners give their personal hygiene items or donate a few dollars. The Homeless Youth Shelter has told the prison that they receive more from the prisoners each year than the outside community. We have a passion for helping at risk youth. We understand what they are up against and don’t want to see them locked up.

It’s difficult to imagine my life anymore outside of coming to prison it is the worst and best thing that ever happened to me. During this long journey somehow I developed these deep and meaningful relationships with men who will always be family. One of the worst things about prison is also the most precious, that there is no escape from the men around you. Being stuffed together under such conditions always brings about conflict. Guys deal with conflict in various ways sometimes it’s fist fighting, or guys won’t speak to one another for a year because both are too proud or stubborn to say, “I’m sorry”. One way or the other you have to deal with conflict there is no running from it you either work it out or you sit with it internally.

“I FELT I HAD TO BE SOMEONE I WASN’T INSIDE, AND LOATHED PUTTING ON THAT MASK.”

For many years I often felt I had to be someone I wasn’t inside and loathed putting on that mask. If you do it long enough, perhaps it’s who you become. The rules and norms of prison dictated I maintain an indifference to the violence and prison politics around me. Most prisoners are typecast as hyper violent. While violence and tension are always present, there are human beings that rise above the environment, which in many ways is created by how prison is staffed, and ran. I developed friendships mostly through the programs I involved myself in. I could be authentic in those close friendships, living without fear of exposure.

In 2008 I took my first Inside-Out class through Oregon State University. Inside Out is a national program that brings in students from the colleges to take a course with prisoners. I wore a long-sleeve shirt to cover my tattoos and began to perspire on the way to the education floor. I was terrified to talk to the public. I remember sitting down to do an icebreaker conversation with a young girl named Rory who was 19. I realized that I hadn’t talked to a female outside of my family in years and somehow prison had convinced me that I was breaching a boundary. My nerves eventually calmed as I talked to each student. I left class feeling, for the first time in years, human again, as if just perhaps I could have met these students on a campus and they never would have known I was in prison.

My first class was a 400-level criminology class and I did not even know how to write a five-paragraph essay. I remember believing that I would certainly fail. I read some chapters in the material repetitiously. When I wrote my final I recall lying on the floor of my cell with dictionaries and reference books spanned out in front of me as I hand wrote a 25-page double-spaced final paper. I was thankful the professor graded me on content rather then grammar. Somehow I got an A in the class and the teacher told me I was the hardest working student in her class. I later took two more of this professor’s courses. Her name is Michelle Inderbitzenan—amazing human being with a PhD in sociology specializing in juvenile delinquency prevention. She believed in me and saw something worth investing in. I wasn’t eligible for the small college program that was funded by a private businessman because I had too much time left on my sentence and had no money to self-pay. Nevertheless, education was transformative for me opening a lens to endless possibilities that had previously been closed to me. Professor Inderbitzen later anonymously funded part of my college until I got into the program.

None of these programs are presented to you when you come to prison. In fact, they are rather limited in scope, funding and availability. To better yourself in prison you have to do a lot of independent study, and you have to want it more than what you have and seek it out. Change and transformation inside prison is never environmental, but rather speaks to the deep resilience inside the individual who chooses to rise above the walls that attempt to hold us. I am currently working on my BA through the University of Oregon and have gotten some of my writing published. Writing has become a major tool in my life—it's how I resist oppression, process grief and make sense of life. 

Most prisoners from my type of criminal background, who have turbulent years in prison (due to drugs, violence, time in the box, etc) do it early on in their prison sentences. I however, am a bit of an anomaly. 

THE DARK YEARS

Having started well, I began turning wide of the mark toward the end of my sentence. In their book, “Shared Beginnings, Divergent Paths,” criminologists Robert Sampson and John Laub explore “turning points” in life that contribute to desistance from crime. I’ve seen those turning points in prison go both ways, one’s mom dies or a family member comes back into one’s life or an accumulation of trauma and losses stack up till it is too much.

By 2011 l was president of 7-Step, working on my lower division in college, and involved in a Restorative Justice group among other special interest groups. I had also begun my journey as a hospice volunteer, getting involved when my friend Wally got sick with pancreatic cancer. I was with Wally nearly every day until he passed. I had never thought much about death in prison until then. In February Wally was walking the track with us, talking about sports, and by the end of March he was dead. I sat with 14 men as they died and it profoundly changed my perspective on life, but it also took a huge toll on me. In 2013 l was so busy, I would leave my cell at 7:15 AM and not return until 10:30pm, with much of that time being spent in the infirmary talking with hospice patients. I constantly talked to new hospice volunteers about “self-care” but rarely practiced it, which was quite arrogant. Without realizing it I began to burn, out and it seemed my life was filled with sad shit. I used drugs for the first time in 16 years. Pitfalls such as this rarely come straight at you. It is a subtle, slow fade as if someone turns down the lights slowly till you find yourself in a dark room. I got high three weekends in a row and I must have looked so out of sorts because I got drug tested the third time in 2014 and went to the hole, a place I hadn’t been a regular in since the '90s. Everyone seemed shocked, especially my close friends who I hid it from. The darkest season of my sentence had begun.

I remember having to tell my mom in a visit before I went to the hole. When you get a dirty UA in prison, it's automatically a year of security visits behind glass. Shame overwhelmed me as I told my mom this would be the last time she could hug me for a year, and my eyes began to leak. At the sight of her son’s tears, my mother immediately reached out to touch me and I realized that it was the first time in 16 years that another human being had touched me while crying, let alone seen my tears. Sitting in the hole, as dark as it was I received letters every day from other prisoners, and, l have to say, I felt the hands of my community holding me up. When I left the hole I had to live on tier full of gang members. It was the first time in years I didn’t have access to my closest friends who were in honor housing. I was determined to bounce back. But then, on May 9, 2014, Salem police killed my cousin Jackie. She was 25 years old. My mother and aunt gave me the news through a security glass visit.

All of a sudden I had all this intense anger with acute pain and unprocessed trauma surfacing, thus began my up-and-down cycle of using drugs. Each time I saw a CO misuse his authority I couldn’t separate it from my cousin’s death. As things became worse my friends really didn’t understand, except for Francisco who stood by me no matter what. I remember getting high and being unable to look at my picture board where it seemed my family’s eyes burned into me. At one point I took all my pictures down in my 6ft x 8ft cell because I couldn’t stand to look at them and even contemplated suicide. In 2016 I also began to process trauma I didn’t realize I had around violence.

In his memoir, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Victor Frankle describes the daily horrors of violence in the concentration camps and talks about feeling detached from it, even having a morbid desire to look toward it. While I cannot compare the sufferings of American prison to that of the camps, I understood this. If the average person in the community witnessed a vicious beating mere feet from where they stood, there is a good chance that trauma would stick with them for life. l have suffered, inflicted and witnessed violence in such a way that I am out of order inside. I could not even remember most of the hundreds of incidents. l was trained to be detached from it. There are, however, a handful of instances of which the sound, sight, smell and feeling of the violence I can never wipe from my memory because they were so brutal. Human beings operate in fight or flight mode. Our bodies are only intended to function above certain stress lines for about 30 minutes, but many in prison live and operate there for years at a time. No one teaches us what that kind of trauma can do to the body.

At some point the body will lose its will to resist, reaching some kind of breaking point. This happened for me in 2016 in the chow hall when a fight broke out directly in my line of sight. I did what I was conditioned to do, sat down and acted as if there was not a man being brutalized in front of me. For some reason I watched the men around me—how excited some got, others looked frightened while others looked down at their trays. I heard the thud and felt the vibration in the linoleum as one guy stomped the other’s head with his foot and I felt sick. In the following weeks I would be walking around the penitentiary when tears would just start falling without thought. It was the first time in my life that I couldn’t stuff it down as if my body was saying, “screw you, I’m going to process this shit.” My body was feeling the effects of that breaking as my mind accessed trauma in hidden recesses.

“I WAS OVERWHELMED BY THE ARRAY OF COLORS...IT WAS THE FIRST TIME I HAD STOOD BENEATH
A TREE IN 18 YEARS”

In September of 2016, my 92-year-old dad was sick, and it was becoming clear that my drug use was progressing. I had never planned on going to minimum custody prison, but I was eligible. My mom came to visit me and urged me to transfer to Columbia River in Portland where they live. I took the plunge and transferred here. The day the transport van pulled out of the penitentiary onto State Street, with shackles on my feet and wrists, that oppressive weight of those murdering walls began to lift off me as if I had narrowly escaped death. When I arrived at CRCl l was dizzy from all the colors and my head was spinning. Even the colors at OSP are dull gray. I stepped out onto the prison yard, which is surrounded by large trees in a horseshoe shape, as if hugging the prison. I was overwhelmed by the array of colors as the setting sun drenched the trees. It was the first time I had stood beneath a tree in 18 years and I had to wrestle back tears.

I had been in a cell for 19 years straight, and now I found myself in an 80-man open dorm, the bunk next to me within reach. My anxiety level was so high I remember flashing on people that got too close to me in line and them all looking at me like I was crazy. I couldn’t sleep, not to mention I was grieving deeply having left my community of 19 years. I now knew next to no one. l was in shock to say the least. It took me about six months to adjust and realize that the problem was within me rather than everyone around me. l was institutionalized to a degree. In the penitentiary there are all these rules around respect saying, “Excuse me,” and norms of edict, that if not followed, can be enforced with violence. I had all these unreasonable expectations of how prisoners around me were supposed to conduct themselves.

Many in prison dream of home more than anything, the power of place. Home is no longer a place for me; memories have faded so much over the years that I have questioned them. When I think of home, it's faces that come to mind, and most of those faces wear prison blues­­—they are my family now.

FINDING PURPOSE

Prison is such a dehumanizing space yet I have lived for years off moments of humanity, moments of kindness and the resiliency of a community. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison and managed to hold on to his dignity and humanity. He often attributed his resolve to community saying, “It would be very hard if not impossible for one man alone to resist. I do not know that I could have done it had I been alone. We supported each other and gained strength from each other.”

This is how I feel of the small community we built in the penitentiary. We created our own lives in a way that demanded acknowledgment of our humanity. For so many years I rarely thought of release at the Walls (OSP) when prisoners paroled they simply disappeared down a hallway. At Columbia River one can walk down the corridor, look out the front door to see the free world and a bus just outside the fence. About 6 months after I arrived at CRCI I was walking to work when I looked out the front door to see a young woman and older man standing outside the gate pointing their cell phone at it. I saw a prisoner walking toward the gate with a box of property and realized he was paroling. I paused as he walked through the gate watching his loved ones run to embrace him. It was the first time I had ever seen someone released. I got about ten more steps and my eyes filled with tears. In 20 straight years of prison time I don't believe I have ever wanted out of prison more than I did at that moment, and have thought about it every day since.

These words on the page are but threads of my narrative, but connect to the universal fabric of many prisoners. My father is 92, my mother 73 and I am fortunate to still have them, because not all prisoners can say the same. Over the years I have been blessed to have amazing people in my life. I watched the walls of the penitentiary absorb many lives and they nearly took mine. The fact that I have managed to hold on to my heart and mind speaks to the grace of God and the resiliency of the hands in my community that have held me up.

“We have to take time to notice all the beauty around us or this place will swallow us up.”

Prison is meant to break you down and stomp out every piece of your humanity by thousands of apathetic lacerations but there is something inside it cannot take, an unseen power resist and maintain your dignity. Not everyone has the community I had in prison, many are alone with no hands reaching for them and my hope is that hands, hearts, and voices in the community will reach over those walls. Francisco’s voice on the other end of the phone sounded starstruck as he reminded me I would be out there soon with him. I was thinking of the time when Francisco and I worked in the laundry maintenance. Chico came to get me asking me to go up to the laundry loft where we kept parts; it’s the one spot in industries where you can see over the walls. Chico pointed to the sunrise saying “look” we stood in silence for several moments as the sun hit my eyes illuminating an array of kaleidoscope colors and suddenly the walls disappeared. It was the first time in years I‘d taken the time to notice the sunrise or see over the walls. My friend put his arm around me and said, “We have to take time to notice all the beauty around us or this place will swallow us up.” That simple sunrise with my friend did what all my punches, effort and violence could never do — it removed the walls that surrounded me. There have been many dark seasons in prison, where I felt I could touch despair as if it were one of these walls. I told Chico I loved him and how overjoyed l was for him, as I hung up the phone for the first time in my sentence I could touch hope as if tangible.

On December 16 of 2018, I made another phone call to Chip, my cellmate of nine years that paroled after 25 years. Marc, Francisco and Chip—three of my closest friends will be waiting for me the day I get out. Part of me will always be in prison with the men I know who will never get out and those who did not make it out and my hands will always reach for them.

Other Articles From Issue One