Stop the Presses! I Want to Get Off!

A Brief History of the Prisoners’ Digest InternationalBy JOSEPH W. GRANT

Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2012 Joseph W. Grant
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-061-0

Contents

Foreword by Mumia Abu-Jamal…………………………………………………………………………..xiEditor’s Preface by Ken Wachsberger……………………………………………………………………xiiiIntroduction by Joseph W Grant………………………………………………………………………..xxiAfterword by Paul Wright……………………………………………………………………………..213About the Authors……………………………………………………………………………………217Index………………………………………………………………………………………………219

Chapter One

Stop the Presses! I Want to Get Off!

A Brief History of the Prisoners’ Digest International

Prisons and Prisons, My Daughters and Sons

Penal Digest International. The PDI. A newspaper with two purposes: to provide prisoners with a voice that prison authorities could not silence, and to establish lines of communication between prisoners and people in the free world. At one point the staff chose to change “Penal” to “Prisoners” and we became the Prisoners’ Digest International. But, Penal or Prisoners, we were the PDI.

Over forty years have passed since the idea for Prisoners’ Digest International began to take shape. I was a prisoner in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, at the time. You’ve heard of Leavenworth—one of the end-of-the-line prisons where feds, and even the states, send their “bad boys.” At that time the federal prison at Marion, Illinois, was being used as a youth joint while the feds perfected what was to become the most repressive monument to absolute security that the U.S. government could design. Back then, they used Leavenworth for the truly incorrigible. Leavenworth was where they sent the prisoners when they closed Alcatraz.

Stepping into that prison and becoming part of it reminded me of the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best and the worst place to do time. The best place to be if you wanted to serve your prison sentence and not be bothered by anyone—prisoner or guard. The worst place to be if you were hoping to make parole. The best place for quiet in the cell blocks. The worst place for informers. The best place for food. The worst place for library books. The best place if you could learn by observing and be silent until spoken to. The worst place if you had a big mouth.

I was a first-timer, a fast learner, nonviolent, and, in many respects, lucky.

So what was I doing behind the walls at Leavenworth with guys who had averaged five previous incarcerations for violent crimes? It’s a long story. I’ve never told it before. But the memories of that period are clear. My thoughts frequently turn to the injustices that surrounded me then. I internalize them. Sometimes, when I am alone, maybe sitting on the patio in Lawrence late at night, I doze off. I awake suddenly, look up, and everything seems new. Fresh. The shadows on the trees are a deeper, richer, more visible green. The air is clear. The sound of the cicadas is sharper, crisper, vibrating. The sound waves can be felt—almost seen. A raccoon is eating at our cats’ food dish. As I watch, her eyes pick up the light from a full moon—a female, heavy with young and leading a good life. She ponders what to do and continues eating. In a reverie about the life around me, I shift and reach for a beer that has warmed as I dozed. She looks around at me, casually waddles off, and disappears into the wall of brush, trees, and tall grass that encloses us and provides a sanctuary for a variety of critters, including me.

In the joint, one afternoon. Very hot, the last week of July. I’m in the shade, in a slight breeze. Half asleep, thoughts freed, a child again daydreaming. My eyes skim along the ground, moving fast, observing, soaring over the factories, cell houses, walls. The factories are humming and the yard is almost empty. Flying as in a dream, yet even in a dream staying inside the walls. Constantly turning away and gliding back in. Flying lightning-like through clouds and around corners. Observing. Even the shades of gray are a miracle in the blinding Kansas sun, contrasted with dark shadows that turn into a phosphorescent, trippy darkroom green. A few black prisoners across the yard work with weights. From this distance, they reflect a deep, rich blue/black. Suddenly blood splatters black across bleached concrete as a face is smashed with a handheld barbell. Awake. Back on earth. I quickly stand and walk away. One sees death in the can, but there is never a warning of impending violence. Arguments? Never any warnings. Clueless, sudden, unseen death. No one has eyes in the back of his head.

I wondered when the war would ever end. I still do.

Godless Country Not the Worst Country

Today, when conversations turn to prisons and prisoners, I listen. I learned long ago that the moment the conversation turns serious, eyes (and minds) begin to glaze over. It was the same when the conversations turned to Cuba and Castro years earlier. I remind people of writer Dorothy Day’s trip to Cuba after the Cuban revolution. She had gone down to see for herself if life was as oppressive for churchgoing Catholics in Cuba as the U.S. government was reporting. In one of the columns she wrote for the Catholic Worker she said, “Better a Godless country that takes care of its poor than a Christian country that doesn’t.”

Believe me, talking to the average citizen about injustice is like walking into a white Southern Baptist church in Danville, Virginia—the last headquarters of the Confederacy—and asking for donations to the Black Panther Legal Defense Fund or the American Civil Liberties Union. Anyone present who knew what you were talking about would think you were completely mad. Those who didn’t would think you were an affront to their selective, lily-white God and attempt to do to you what the Romans did to the good carpenter. Not pretty.

When I began getting phone messages in the summer of 1989 that someone interested in Prisoners’ Digest International was trying to contact me, I was only mildly interested. Over the years I have been contacted by an occasional law student or theology student who was doing research on, or volunteer work with, prisoners. Invariably they had gotten a taste of prison life, and had heard about the rise and fall of the PDI and/or the Church of the New Song, a prisoner religion whose philosophy had been successfully spread to prisoners internationally by the PDI.

These links to my PDI past show themselves unexpectedly. I’ll notice someone staring at me. Usually I walk over and introduce myself. Not infrequently the person turns out to be a former PDI subscriber or a librarian. Occasionally, after I am steered away from the crowd and into a private space, the person confesses that he or she was once a prisoner. That confession is followed by a narrative of memorable moments. “Acid flashbacks,” as the person says. “I remember the Sunday church service in Atlanta,” or “The Terre Haute tour was a gas; whatever happened to John?,” or “I was at Oklahoma Women’s Penitentiary.”

Sometimes it’s a writer, someone with a clear enough understanding of what gets into print in these United States to know that to be well informed, a person has to set aside money to subscribe to a few progressive publications: In These Times, The Progressive, The Nation, Mother Jones, Z Magazine, Utne Reader, Catholic Worker, Washington Monthly, Workers World, Dollars and Cents, and EXTRA have been a few of my favorites. They are publications and organizations with staff who understand the insidious Rain Barrel theory of politics, the theory that best describes politics in the United States—the scum rises to the top. People whose names are anathema to the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA, Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan, the Bush presidents—organizations and individuals whose existence personifies the Rain Barrel theory’s validity.

(One of these days you will read that I have finally gotten enough prize money together to invite artists to submit works for the “Rain Barrel Art Classic.” Artists can portray the scum in oils, watercolors, clay, whatever. And with five-dollar contributions from the folks who were ripped off by the Keatings, the Madoffs, the Wall Street financiers et al., we will have big money to hand out for prizes and purchases. We’ll save enough to put all the submitted works together in a book so the scum will be given a permanent place in history. The artists will do a better job of exacting equity for the servant class than the justice department will ever do.)

This most recent contact was different. Ken Wachsberger not only knew about the PDI, he had been part of the day-to-day insanity we had all learned to love in a sadomasochistic way. Ken had been hitching west on I-80 one afternoon in May 1972 and was picked up by some PDI staff members who were returning from D.C. Like so many road-weary wanderers, he accepted an invitation to join us for dinner and a night’s rest. While waiting for dinner, he wandered into the PDI offices—where the lights burned 24 hours a day—and Ken went to work.

Seventeen years later, he asked if I’d like to look back at those years and share some thoughts on the PDI, the times, and the people. I had doubts about whether I was the best person to do so. For many years, friends who were witness to those traumatic years had urged me to tell the story. I always assumed that someone else would. The PDI had staff members who were skilled writers—far better writers than I. But Ken wanted me to write the history because I was the founder. After calling around and finding the writers with the skills to do a professional job too busy, I agreed. My story was one part of his landmark Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, which came out in 1993 and went out of print far too soon. Sixteen years later, he told me he wanted to see Voices back on the bookshelves and in the classrooms. So here I am, tweaking the first edition, and maybe even correcting a few errors that slipped in during that first writing, and elaborating on some stories that got shortchanged to meet deadlines.

In this brief memoir, I share pre- and post-prison experiences with the observations that convinced me that the PDI was desperately needed; I also include information on why I thought it would succeed, and how, with the help of an unusually diverse group of people, we forced it to succeed.

The PDI came into existence in 1970 during politically painful times. We had caught the tail end of the Vietnam War both in and out of the can. Our detractors called us radical. We probably initiated as many lawsuits against agencies of the federal and state governments as any newspaper in history. The list of our reporters, sales agents, and prison representatives read like a Who’s Who of jailhouse lawyers—those prisoners who became experts in the legal system because they were forced to defend themselves and others. Many were serving life terms with no hope of parole for committing acts that ranged from political crimes against the state to crimes for profit, revenge, you name it. In prison, they had turned to education and law as a means of self-fulfillment. Many became very adept at writing sophisticated briefs for other prisoners as a method of getting back at the system that traditionally screws other prisoners. They were our newspaper’s strongest supporters and most committed advocates. They never gave up. They had nothing to lose. They were afraid of no one. They could be threatened, but they remained uncowed.

For over three years, with a staff that started with two and grew to twenty-five, the PDI operated out of a three-story house at 505 South Lucas in Iowa City, Iowa. At the time, 505 became synonymous with PDI. I bought the house at 505—with the help of sympathetic realtors and a no-down-payment GI loan—so the PDI and the staff would have a place to live. For three years, using a variety of means, I fed, clothed, and sheltered the staff, their friends, drifters, runaways, wanted men, women, and children, and paid the bills. Well … most of the bills.

A little over four years and a couple hundred thousand dollars later, I walked away from the PDI with exactly what I’d walked away from the slam with. Nothing. I wasn’t totally without resources, however. I owned a home in Georgeville, Minnesota, in the west central part of the state that had been home to Hundred Flowers, the underground newspaper edited by Eddie Felien, the Marxist scholar from the University of Minnesota who ended up on the Minneapolis city council. My home there didn’t have running water or electricity, but what do you expect for a real estate package of two houses and a 60′ × 30′ two-story brick office building for a total of $400. The house we lived in was once the town’s post office. I also had a 1963 one-ton International pickup that looked like it had been abandoned in Watts during the riots. The pickup had been part of the junk pile out back of the house. It needed tires, a battery, and six weeks’ worth of hard work to get it running. Along with everything else, I considered it a gift. Hell, the PDI was a gift that for a long time nourished prisoners and their families. And why not? It was their newspaper. They wrote for it, produced it, paid for it pennies at a time. We never refused a prisoner a subscription. We accepted whatever they could afford. Most could afford nothing. How they got it and why they got it is part of the story I will get to.

Witnessing and Experiencing Violence

Those PDI years were lean, hungry, tough, violent years. By that I mean we were witnesses to endless prison violence. Violence against men, women, and children in prison. Violence against the families of prisoners. Violence against the poor, many of whom were on their way to prison—even the poor in Iowa City, where there wasn’t even a semblance of a ghetto. Year after year of never a payday; but we had a roof over our heads at 505, food stamps, and people committed to social change.

And finally, violence against the primary staff members of the PDI by the federal, state, and local police that culminated in murder—a murder that was committed by a man who was pushed over the edge by an undercover cop who sealed all of our futures by giving the man a gun and urging him to use it. Staff members were arrested for possessing drugs that were stashed by ex-prisoners who had been released from prison for the express purpose of destroying the PDI and the Church of the New Song. The seemingly unlimited power and resources of those three levels of government were more than a handful of overworked men, women, and children could withstand. Most took off trying to find a place to rest and restore themselves. Consequently, the PDI and a number of staff members were destroyed.

With the PDI’s voice stilled, the prisoners lost their voice. By the time I began writing the first edition of my story in 1989, prison conditions had grown more repressive. As I begin again, over twenty years later, those conditions look comparatively good by comparison. Extreme overcrowding exists, mainly because of the longer prison sentences that are handed out today, frequently for victimless crimes. Increasing numbers of prisoners are being locked up for minor drug offenses—many are denied the opportunity to earn a parole. With more of the poor, uneducated members of society ending up in prison, the need for educational and vocational programs is greater than it has ever been. Yet, vindictive legislators continue to initiate legislation depriving prisoners of the means to return to society prepared to function in an increasingly difficult environment of fewer jobs and no access to the resources available to non-offenders. Today we live in a society that is more oriented to using endless punishment to show how committed they are to “law and order.” Legislative commitments to cutbacks in correctional-department budgets mean that fewer of these programs are available.

And the PDI? Today it is a mass of notes, letters, papers, and subscription lists that are safely stashed in boxes in the State Historical Society of Iowa. And, of course, there are memories.

I look back, see the victories, and I’m reminded of a line by author Barry Hannah: “Not only does absence make the heart grow fonder, it makes history your own beautiful lie.”

This gathering of relatively recent history will not become my “beautiful lie.” Not with so many participants looking over my shoulder.

Cuba: Political Beginnings While Korea Cooks

The foundation for the government’s intense rancor against me goes back to an incident that happened in Cuba, where I served in the navy in 1952. There, I had knowledge of a delivery of some Springfield rifles from our destroyer squadron—old rifles that were being replaced by the new M1s—to a group of remarkable people who showed me firsthand what Fulgencia Batista, the U.S.-supported Cuban military dictator, was doing to the Cuban people. It was a time of personal political awakening that took me far past the simple, pro-union childhood I enjoyed, surrounded by uncles who were Farm/Labor activists. It was my first serious political act.

My activities in Cuba might never have surfaced if I hadn’t “lost it” one day in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was twelve or thirteen years after Cuba, and I had too much to drink at a sertoma Club meeting. “sertoma” was an acronym for “SERvice TO MAnkind.” One day a former resident of Cuba visited our local sertoma gathering to speak about the Cuba he had fled when Fidel Castro led the people’s army into Havana. He was a banker and a gusano (Spanish for “worm”), one of the “haves” who skipped to the United States with enough gold and connections to “make a new begin in the land of the free.” He managed to leave with enough to steer clear of the fast money from criminal activity in Miami and had opted for banking—another form of criminal activity. His new life began as a vice president in the bank that served eastern Iowa. Why settle in Miami and take the chance of being illegal when you could be a bank executive and steal with the blessing of the FDIC?

(Continues…)

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