One afternoon at San Quentin prison while we were waiting in the media lab for a room to open, there was a TV on and as often happens we start chatting. On this particular day, there was a segment on some obscure channel about an underwater hotel where the fish are swimming around you. In essence, you are the fish tank. One of the prisoners tells me he would never live there because he’s scared of fish.
Scared of fish? Like, all fish?
Yes.
I asked him if Nemo scared him as well and he said yeah, all fish. What did a fish ever do to you? I wanted to know.
Come to think of it - what did this introspective articulate out-of-place prisoner (not that all prisoners aren’t out of place, because what place is prison) think of the almost daily groups of people signed up to take tours of San Quentin?
So, I say to my fish fearing felon friend - “Don’t you feel like you’re in a fishbowl when people tour the prison?” I would often observe the people observing the incarcerated men looking seriously nervous standing in a room with people that they cannot, and I can’t emphasize this enough - cannot relate to as people.
The first time I toured Alcatraz was when someone visiting me asked to take a ferry to the landmark home of the infamous prison. I can see “the rock” from my living room and pass it on the ferry on my way to San Francisco but had never been there. When we get to the cells, I walk out, ashamed of the human race. It hurts my heart - it is deplorable.
I understand that people tour San Quentin tour for a variety of reasons and can profit from the experience. High-school students look anxious and hear stories from the incarcerated men that echo “tough love”. Then there are the "suits" who observe the facilities and listen to the men explain the rehabilitation programs. If one is lucky enough to get the PIO, Lt. Sam Robinson for their guide, they will be treated to an entertaining as well as informative experience. And tours are a way for people to get a better understanding that the men inside are not monsters. Some people are so moved that they are motivated to enlist in social justice work.
Tours happen. Visitors come and go. Even well-intentioned family members have to move on. Volunteers take other positions and cellmates come and go. Incarcerated men tell me they know not to get attached to people and for many, this is a lesson they learned a very long time ago. Trust has to be earned, and even then it's a very thin line.
When I was a kid living in New York, I found some fish flopping around on the side of a creekbed. They had been speared and I had a bucket with me so I put them inside and took them home. I let them out in a white porcelain sink in the basement where I tried to nurse them back to health. I looked for worms and fed them bread crumbs and would visit them a couple of times a day, but it didn't feel right.
We lived across from a school with a field that would make a small pond after it rained (maybe that would be a very big puddle) so I decided that I would take them for a walk.
I put them in the bucket and crossed the street and let them skirt around in the rain-filled water and after a good swim, I'd catch them and put them back in the bucket and return them to the basement sink with a heavy heart. Our basement felt like a dungeon to me and I was always scared going down to the cold, dank cement cave beneath our house. Without light or air circulation, I worried the fish wouldn't survive. I thought I would add some plants to their makeshift home.
I wondered as people do when they see something confined if this is any kind of life for them, enclosed in this unnatural environment. Two days later I discovered that somehow the sink had been unplugged, and all the water was drained out. The fish could not be resuscitated. (I'm not blaming any family member but you know who you are; )
I cried a little and buried them in the backyard. I wondered if I should have just left the fish or if life under any circumstance is worth living be it a bird in a cage or rabbit in a hutch. If you never had a taste of freedom would you still miss it?
I wanted to ask the men who were sentenced to life in prison to answer the question so many people ask me. Is living in a confined space under the worst possible circumstances living? I've
wondered the same thing and from what I know, the answer is most definitely yes.
They hold on. They keep their faith under the worst of circumstances and now with their lifelines cut-off they have to navigate the virus under the worst possible conditions.
With their freedom gone and restrictions imposed on their lives, their tapestry of hope is threaded by the same abstract realization that is relevant to all of us; to live in the moment but have hope for the future.
In my opinion, these men are more observant and aware than most people on the outside. They have to be. They need to have razor-sharp instincts and be aware at all times of who they can trust, who is on their side; who are the sharks, and which people are there for the “right” reasons.
I write these essays to toss a small line to a community of people that have in most cases turned their lives around. They were born into families or lived in communities where circumstances dictated their behavior. And now yet another obstacle that they have no control over has been thrown at them; which means swimming against the current that is once again, beyond their control.
