Recidivism. A tendency to slip back…into bad behavior. We use the term mostly to describe the return to prison after serving time. Most of us who have been in prison tend to go back, you know.
I know. I was there four times. As a visitor, I hasten to add. A visitor with a microphone. Others who visit do return, especially if one has developed a personal connection with an inmate, or a ministry to those who are incarcerated. It’s one way to follow Jesus, who identified with the hungry, the sick, and the prisoner. “I was in prison and you visited me.”
For about 200 years, Richmond, Va. was home to the Virginia State Penitentiary (or its predecessors). My first visit there was as a guest invited to speak to the Prison Civil War Round Table. I had done a “Celebration Rock” show about Native Americans, and an inmate heard it, assumed I knew something about the subject, made a weak connection to the Civil War, and wrote an invitation. As I look back on the programs I did in the mid-1970’s, I recall at least two CR shows on Native Americans (both already mentioned elsewhere in previous blog entries). One program featured the music of XIT, an American Indian rock band. The other focused on members of a Virginia tribe, the Mataponi, who spoke of their tribal history and current living conditions. Which program prompted my visit to the prison I don’t recall.
But I did go, and presented some kind of program to about 15 inmates who kindly excused my very limited knowledge about the topic they chose for me: Indians and the Civil War. (I’m certain that they didn’t care about my expertise or lack thereof; they just wanted to fill a slot in their schedule and have someone from the “outside” pay attention to their Civil War interest group.)
Sometime later, I returned to that maximum security facility, whose walls were within close proximity to Richmond’s downtown. I was helping the Virginia Chaplaincy Service produce a slide show on their prison ministry. I took a cassette recorder with me as Chaplain George Ricketts introduced me to some inmates. Holding the microphone up to the bars, I asked them questions, and recorded inmates describing what it was like to live in a cell day after day. I remember distinctly two things about that visit. One was the loud, wailing voice of a man screaming his complaints against…well, everything and anything. The sound of that voice eerily echoing through the cell block while another, more stable inmate calmly described prison life made for a dramatic soundtrack to our audio-visual documentary.
The other thing I remember was interviewing an inmate who was in his early 20s. He looked and sounded like the most vulnerable kid on the cell block. He had been in the infirmary for some reason, and felt safe there. But now that he was back in the prison population he was clearly scared to death.
There is another memory connected with both those visits. After presenting credentials, I emptied my belongings into a basket, was patted down, and walked through a heavy iron door that “clanked” shut behind me. “Clank” doesn’t do it. There must be a better word. Even knowing that I would be coming out within a couple of hours, I heard that slamming cell door and felt a definite shiver.
I just retrieved CR program #464 from my collection of old tapes. The title of that show was based on a John Prine song, “Christmas in Prison.” The program includes interviews I did with members of the “Future Unlimited Involvement Corps,” a group based at the Powhatan Correctional Center, another of Virginia’s maximum security institutions. The Center is located at a place called State Farm, Va. Inmates who had listened to (and written to) my radio program asked me (through their Chaplain Bill Dent) to help them tell their stories. Through my taped interviews they wanted to project themselves as human beings who were making some progress toward giving something back to their communities through various service projects.
Since my visit took place in early December of that year (the actual date of the show is lost, but the music says late 1970’s), I asked the inmates to describe what it was like to spend Christmas in prison. As I write this, Christmas is “over,” but I listened to the program yesterday and found that some things never change. My hunch is that if I were to interview inmates some 3o years later, their responses would be the same as those I interviewed for that “Celebration Rock” program.
In my next entry: some of the things they wanted for Christmas, how pathetically naive I was back then, and what songs on the show’s play list redeemed the hour.
