I’ve been wanting to write about my trip to San Quentin for a week now, but the odds of striking the wrong note about visiting a prison — too sanctimonious, too nonchalantly un-sanctimonious, too cloying about how gracious the inmates were, too TV-stereotype-confirming about how creepy the walk across the yard was, too too too — were great enough to keep me away. So I decided I’d just blog about any old thing, and then I got hung up there, too, because I couldn’t think of what the title of the post should be. So then I decided to look at my bookshelf and give the post the title of the first book spine that grabbed my attention. And there you have it: Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish, big gold block letters on a black background.
Full disclosure: I have not read this book. It’s my mom’s book. She has definitely read it. A lot of her books wound up at my house when she moved last year, and now I look at least 75% more erudite than I actually am. But I know the book is about prisons.
Fuller disclosure: My mom runs the program that invited me out to the prison to read. The invitation went something like this: “You’d better come and talk about your book on my show, young lady,” except I just put the ‘young lady’ in there for tone, since she doesn’t actually talk like a 1950′s schoolmarm.
The program is called the Video Literacy Project. Inmates collaborate with my mom on choosing books. They read everything: books on law, tales of terror, self-help, literary fiction, a biography of Janis Joplin. Once they did a show on the history of rock and roll. After they’ve read the books they discuss them with my mom or with each other while the inmates who run the AV lab videotape the discussion. When possible, they read books by local authors and invite them on the show. Tobias Wolff, who has many fans at SQ, came out once. The show is broadcast on San Quentin TV, and, ideally, the inmates who watch will check out the book being discussed from the prison library.
It doesn’t always work like that, of course, because no organization I can think of is more baffling and changeable than a prison. Actions that are encouraged one week are verboten the next, which means you walk around the place feeling guilty when you haven’t done anything wrong, because maybe you have. I’ve been there three or four times now, and the mood strikes me as a mix of painful opposites: chaotic and subdued, courtly and sneering, hopeless and wildly cheerful.
Maybe those are the contradictions we all live with, only bigger. You encounter something that gives you a feeling of freedom, a burst of imagination or connection or discovery, and then something else happens to remind you of all the ways you aren’t free. Bobby, the man who interviewed me, had read Darkwood with the kind of close attention that makes an author feel like a million bucks. He asked questions about sentence structure and the recurring motif of proof, and why I had given Serena a small person’s name. (We agreed to disagree on that.) Later, off camera, we talked about the ending and he told me he missed his mother’s touch, which was moving and surprising in a way that seems particular to people who cannot hide the trouble they are in. When any stranger can see the restrictions and humiliations of your life, when everything you can’t have and can’t do is so obvious, maybe then you are free to speak matter-of-factly about pain.
My mom wrote once that growing old was what made her want to work with prisoners. The restricted body, the amplified sense of time, the importance of memory, the troubling daily uncertainties, the worse certainty — it makes sense. There’s not one easy thing about prison. I’m glad I went. My mom runs a great show.
