Sham: Inside The Criminal Corrections Racket
By Brent McCall
C. 2021
$12.95
People who have never been inside a prison – most of us --
think: 1) the purpose of a prison is to provide punishment, not rehabilitation;
2) justice essentially means, “If you did the crime, you do the time; 3) every
prisoner has duped himself or herself into thinking he or she is innocent and
therefore any punishment, however unjust, is merited; 4) egotism does not stop
at prison doors, and the notion that one should
take a prisoner’s testimony as gospel truth over that of prison
authorities is patently absurd; and 5) books written by prisoners nursing
grievances should be taken with two tons of salt.
People convinced that the above propositions are indisputably
true will not be persuaded otherwise by Brent McCall’s latest book, Sham, which presents a strong case that
the administrative architecture of modern prisons, many of which put themselves
forward as rehabilitation centers, have yet to throw off certain medieval
characteristics. Sociologists who spend their days probing various
administrative organizations – schools, the family, corporations, political parties,
etc. -- should turn the pages of Sham
with some interest, because prisons are among the first age-old
repositories of unchecked, secretive and personalized administrative power.
When the cell door is locked and the key thrown away, also
discarded is any critical word from prisoners concerning administrative justice
or humane treatment. At its most primitive, punishment without mercy is terror.
Central to terror is arbitrary, personalized treatment by an overpowering force.
That is the message of Feodor
Dostoevsky’s partly autobiographical novel The Idiot.
Written twenty years after Dostoevsky’s own imprisonment, Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of
the novel, tells a story of an execution that intentionally resembles Dostoyevsky’s
own mock execution: “...But better if I tell you of another man I met last
year...this man was led out along with others on to a scaffold and had his
sentence of death by shooting read out to him, for political offenses. About
twenty minutes later a reprieve was read out and a milder punishment
substituted...he was dying at 27, healthy and strong...he says that nothing was
more terrible at that moment than the nagging thought: "What if I didn't
have to die!...I would turn every minute into an age, nothing would be wasted,
every minute would be accounted for... (Part I, chapter 5).”
In “The House of the Dead," Dostoevsky traces the path
of a “diseased tyranny,” always related to the unbridled personal power of one
man over another: “The human being, the member of society, is drowned forever
in the tyrant, and it is practically impossible for him to regain human
dignity, repentance, and regeneration...the power given to one man to inflict
corporal punishment upon another is a social sore...it will inevitably lead to
the disintegration of society.”
The subject of McCall’s Sham
is not personal vindication. Sham is a
brief against personal tyranny, the tyranny of an administrative organ hidden
from public view and, deployed outside of administrative guidelines,
inescapable. Sunshine, we are often told, is the best disinfectant. What is
brought to light no longer festers in the dark. Prisons are meant to be, by
design, dark. And prisoners are meant to be invisible. Any prisoner who flips
on the light switch is bound to be greeted with sour disfavor.
Sham is McCall’s second book. The first, Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of
Corrections Encourages Crime,
co-written with Michael Liebowitz, McCall’s friend and cellmate at (MacDougall-Walker
CI in Suffield, Connecticut was reviewed by Connecticut Commentary in February,
2018.
Following the
publication of their first co-written book, the two co-authors were separated,
McCall being shuttled off to Cheshire Correctional Institution. Both authors had been appearing semi-regularly
on Todd Feinberg’s radio talk show program at WTIC News/Talk
1080.
At the center of McCall’s
disfavor was an embarrassing sham he had uncovered that involved salary padding on the part of prison officials. Both McCall and Liebowitz had agreed that none of their publications
should be made available to other prisoners, a stipulation that since has been
faithfully adhered to by all parties. The publications were intended to be
corrective, not unnecessarily destructive to prison order or discipline. Both
authors favor discipline when it is merited, just punishment and administrative
order.
Indeed, the chief
point of both books is that chaos on occasion replaces both discipline and
order in some prisons because in some instances non-professional administrative
staff and administrators find chaos, for a number of reasons, to be preferable
to order and discipline.
Sham is jam-packed with such incidents. Such
“troublesome themes,” McCall writes, play out time and again in many prisons,
even when gross “dereliction of duty” presents clear and present dangers to
both prisoners and guards.
An episode
involving a guard and two quarreling prisoners in which the guard was clearly
baiting the prisoners rather than repressing the quarrel, a clear dereliction of
duty, induced McCall to write a letter to the Commissioner of prisons.
Naturally, as on so many other occasions, McCall was not advised that the guard
had been disciplined. Prisoners who had
witnessed the quarrel drew the right conclusions from it, namely that order and
disciple in the prison was not a high priority for administrators.
McCall writes that
the same theme, always destructive of rehabilitation, “took place at
MacDougall’s prison industries… First, there was obviously nothing of
rehabilitative value in staff colluding with inmates to bilk Connecticut
taxpayers out of fraudulent overtime hours (not to mention the various other
kinds of thefts going on there).
“Secondly, I went
from being ignored to being transferred, with the staff creating the climate
that ostensibly made that transfer necessary… Finally, even after all this
time, I have no idea whether any of the staff at MacDougall industries were
ever held responsible for the crime they had committed or the CDOC
[Connecticut Department of Corrections] directives they openly violated.”
True discipline
should not be confused with a “foolish consistency,” the “hobgoblin of
little minds,” according to Ralph Waldo Emerson. In prison environments, the
two often walk hand in hand.
Chapter 5 of Sham,
headed “Correctional Lemmings”, carries a quote from George Orwell: “The heresy
of heresies was common sense,” and it describes in meticulous detail the
orderly procession of chow lines at Cheshire CI. “On the whole,” McCall writes,
“East Block’s chow procedure is one of the most orderly and well managed things
I’ve ever seen the Connecticut Department of Corrections do.”
It is a
choreographed dance, flawless in every step.
Then comes chow.
The prisoners are seated, and chaos – disruptive conversations that run afoul
of CDOC’s Code of Penal Discipline – follow in due course, while unperturbed
guards pretend not to notice the disorder.
“Why regulate
seemingly innocuous behavior, McCall ruminates, while ignoring misconduct that
would likely get one arrested for breach of peace and disorderly conduct at the
local Burger King?”
Why MUST
arbitrariness rule like a king in prisons? Is not the arbitrary the enemy of
discipline, precisely in the same way a foolish consistency is the enemy of
constructive order?
McCall makes the
attempt – most often successfully – to answer questions such as these.
Full of footnotes
and lacking a proper index for quick reference, Sham is an easy read,
because McCall writes well, and his analytic powers are fully mature. The
purpose of analytical writing is to dispel the darkness and shed light.
After he had
finished reading Witness, Whittaker Chambers’ account of his own rise
from demon communism to the light, Andre Malraux told the former soviet
operative, “You did not come back from hell with empty hands.”
Sham is brave, clear in its witness, and well worth a read.
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