| I had a poetry residency at the Vermont Studio Center in the fall of 2001. The word "quaint" must have been invented to describe the little hamlet of Johnson, Vermont -- home of the center. The entire village was an animated Norman Rockwell painting. If I even thought about crossing the street; even in mid-block; cars would stop and the drivers would politely insist that I cross. No yelling or blaring horns. No extended middle fingers. Just genuinely nice and courteous people who seemed to have figured out that rushing is a preventable disease. I was living by myself in Arena, Wisconsin during that time in a little farmhouse on top of a hill with hawks, deer and young cows as neighbors. A woodchuck routinely visited my basement and I was determined to co-exist until he started having friends over and they got to fighting in the basement at all hours. You give woodchucks an inch and they take a mile, but I didn't know that at the time. So an artist retreat in Vermont was a little ill-timed since I had all the solitude I could stand in Arena. But timing has never been my strong suit. Johnson, Vermont is home to Johnson Woolen Mills which dates all the way back to 1842 when farmers used to bring in their wool to have it woven into clothing, blankets and other useful items. Indigenous people lived there before 1842 and that can be the subject of virtually every column written about any piece of land on this continent. The mill is still in operation and a wide variety of exquisite woolen goods can be bought there to this day. But the economy of the village of Johnson started to falter for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was a flood in 1927 that wiped out many homes, farms and businesses. The Vermont Studio Center was founded in 1984 and its 30-building campus is not clumped in one area, but dispersed throughout the village. The performance and work spaces for painters, sculptors, poets, writers and other artists are integrated with the rest of the village. The local hardware store is a short distance from a performance space. The main Vermont Studio Center building was once a grain mill. It is an example of American ingenuity; taking a negative like the potential demise of a town and turning it into a thriving community that benefits non-artists, artists and visitors from all over the world. The story is a little different in the town of Tutwiler, Mississippi. Like Johnson, Vermont, the population of Tutwiler is about 1,500 and a paltry local economy necessitated finding new revenue-generating ventures. But that is where the similarities end. Tutwiler's population is nearly 90 percent Black. The history of the economy is linked to cotton and not wool. The bulk of Tutwiler residents commute to low-paying jobs outside their community. That was the case before the construction of the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility and that is the case today since the prison never provided the economic boon that Tutwiler residents had hoped and prayed for. I picked up on these facts by reading the November 24, 2001 edition of The New York Times that contained a story titled "Delta Town's Hopes Are as Scarce as Inmates". The content of the article did not surprise me. It wa more a matter of being presented with known information in a different form that caused it to settle differently in my gut on that day. Maybe it was the shock of reading the article while I was trying to take a break from reality by blending into a Rockwell scene. I was assaulted with the reminders that a huge proportion of the United States prison population looks like me. I was saddened and sickened to have pointed out that the prison in Tutwiler was owned by the Corrections Corporation of America. I was torn apart by the glaringly obvious contradiction that government-owned and -operated prisons are motivated to reduce their populations while private prisons have the opposite interest. A private prison that relishes a low census is like a hotel that loves unoccupied rooms. I was struck by the irony that an enormous reduction in the prison's population was the result of moving out Wisconsin inmates and relocating them closer to Wisconsin. When the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility opened in April 2000, 322 of the 351 inmates were from Wisconsin. Tutwiler residents and business owners were interviewed in the article. The prison was to have provided about 300 jobs but that employment dream bubble burst when the facility struggled to reach even a mere fraction of its 1,000-plus bed capacity. This is all disturbing enough, but the thing that really tore me up was that the article didn't leave me with any sense of the humanity of the prison inmates. Their low numbers were bemoaned because their presence would have represented revenue. Human lives were mentioned as if they were iron ore deposits that were depleted long before the archaeological surveys indicated that they would disappear. This is not the fault of the New York Times. If I had to rewrite the article I doubt that I would do anything differently. What I'm trying to get at is a national conscience (or lack thereof) that equates human lives with iron ore, bales of cotton or other commodities. But there is a lesson in this. What if we were to welcome the presence of potential prisoners before they become prisoners? What if we were to value individuals before they became just other heads in daily prison head counts? And the challenge goes beyond this. Potential inmates (and that includes me since over half of the prison population of the country looks like me) need to define ourselves in ways that are expansive and not constrictive. We need to pull the bushel baskets off of our respective lights and share that light with others. We need to use all available tools to master the games in which we are presumed to be the losers. We need to use our brilliance and build, expand and share our wealth in ways that do not require looking over our shoulders and subjecting ourselves to residency in publicly- and privately-owned prisons, because my guess is that slamming, electronically operated, one-ton doors make your guts quake just the same when you're on the inside looking out. Johnson, Vermont realized and acted on the power of the potential to bring together unlikely allies (farm-related enterprise and the arts) for the benefit of all involved. The economic success of the venture does not depend on assigning any participant in the experiment a lower or enslaved status as is the case with local economies that are dependent on prisons. There are cases in which imprisonment is justified and situations in which it is not. In either event, imprisonment is a form of slavery and we should know from past experience that the consequences are long-lasting if not interminable. Prisoners are not disposable. They do not cease to exist. Most are released. They are not the new cotton. They are not raw material. They are our brothers and sisters; mothers and fathers; sons and daughters; and with lightning-fast and apparently fickle twists of fate, they are you and me. |
| Simple Things/Lang Kenneth Haynes Raw material |
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