This week marks three years since Sam was remanded to prison by Judge Kaplan. The cumulation of years brings its own worries: whether (when?) the person Sam is at his core will be irrevocably altered; whether (when?) he will give up hope. When we visit him, I find myself watching anxiously for signs of change on either front, like a parent watching over her sick child for indications they have taken a serious turn for the worse. Sam continues to hold steady, as far as I can see, but I can only see so far. Happily, from time to time, we get external confirmation from others that Sam is still Sam. As we were leaving the prison last weekend, a fellow inmate stopped us and said, “Your son is one of the kindest people I have ever known.” It is not the first time fellow prisoners and their grateful families have reached out to us to express similar sentiments. (Simon Van Zuyland-Wood published a thoughtful piece in New York Magazine last June on Sam’s life in prison, which includes interviews with some of them.)
Since Sam was moved to Lompoc in April, we have been able to visit him much more frequently. That has allowed us to be a more continuous and real presence in his life, which is a blessing for us and I hope keeps him more firmly tethered to who he was and still is, and to hope. More frequent visits have also given us the luxury of time to talk about things that have nothing to do with his current circumstances. But it also means those circumstances are more vivid and omnipresent for me.
There is an outside visitors’ area at Lompoc, which is where we sit and talk, weather permitting. It is surrounded by barbed wire. On one side is the dilapidated concrete jungle where the prisoners live, on the other the surrounding, beautiful countryside. The outside visitors’ area is itself surprisingly pleasant. There’s real grass, picnic tables that are spaced far enough apart to allow for privacy, and a colorful mural painted on a wall. There is also the sun, which shines even in prison yards, and until very recently lots of fat and happy squirrels ambling about in search of food, which—thanks to the vending machines on the periphery—is plentiful.
A few weeks ago Sam reported that the squirrels were no more: the prison authorities had poisoned them, no doubt for sound health reasons. It is often hard to appreciate things adequately until we lose them. So it was with the squirrels. Like the birds circling overhead, they were a small reminder of freedom—what it feels like to go where you want to go and live as you please. Without them, the visitors’ yard is a more depressing place, more like the living death that the prison itself is.
This past weekend, while we were waiting in the parking lot to be let into the prison facility, the woman behind us in line said, “Look! The squirrels are back!” They were indeed—three baby squirrels desporting themselves on a little patch of grass. “Good for them!” the woman added. There was no need to state the obvious: they were the resistance, striking a blow for freedom, for life, for hope, despite the best efforts of the authorities to crush them. Alas, it is a lot easier to break into prison if you are a squirrel than to get out of it if you are a human.
I was struck by something else her comment revealed. All of us on that line and on thousands of identical lines across the country share a secret store of knowledge about how our criminal justice system actually operates, down to the fate of squirrels. I found myself thinking, for the umpteenth time, that if there were somehow a way to communicate that pooled knowledge to our fellow citizens, to get them to understand what the government is actually doing in all of our names—to people, not so much squirrels— it is possible we could change it. Many of the worst pathologies of our criminal justice system, in particular the routine abuses of prosecutorial power that land so many people in prison to begin with, I believe would horrify citizens across the partisan divide, if only they knew about them. But they don’t, in large part because most repeat players in the system—prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges alike—have their different powerful incentives to keep quiet about them. I have no illusion that I can succeed in communicating the breadth and depth of the problem where so many able critics before me have failed. But at least I can try.
