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Ted Conover: I got interested when I moved to New York City from Colorado and noticed all the headlines about the record number of people in prison—a sense that this was uncharted territory. The War on Drugs created something unexpected, which was this giant class of people in prison. And I thought: How can I contribute to the discussion and maybe to the solution? So I went out and looked for the best books I could find about prisons, and they were all written by prisoners: Mumia Abu Jamal, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and the guy Norman Mailer helped get out: Jack Henry Abbott. Intelligent, literate prisoners had written the best books about prison. I thought, Could I become a prisoner in any meaningful way? But I didn't see any way of faking that. You either commit a crime and go to prison or you don't. I started thinking about how much prison guards must know about prison, but because they don't write about it or nobody wants to hear from them, there are almost no books.
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That's a good question. There's just a dozen things. The one thing that just jumped into my mind right now is just a picture of a prisoner with mental problems just sitting on his bunk, rocking back and forth. This is a guy who my coworker and I were just like, he shouldn't be here, right? In the parlance of the prison, he's a bug. He's not even present mentally—why is he sitting here day after day rocking on his bunk? It was one of those moments where prison just felt deeply wrong.
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You know, I think as with The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, the journalist goes in with a reformist agenda, right? And that book is sort of the best case scenario in terms of change coming out of it. That's when federal meat inspections got started, amid the horror of revelations from The Jungle. But… No. For whatever reason, [maybe] the American prison juggernaut is just so deeply a part of our culture and so deeply capitalized and so deeply a part of our criminal justice system that I can't point to specific reforms that my book brought about. There's just so many prison books come out every year, I think it's because educated people—publishers and readers—know we have a huge problem, and they want to talk about it and figure out how to solve it. But at times, it seems kind of intractable. I think the last few months definitely have suggested that an opportunity is coming up to change the way we do things, right? The whole awareness of the racial character of American incarceration, with Black Lives Matter and Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, really opened people's eyes to that side of it. But the fix is not simple. Let's put it that way.How do you see that playing out in terms of prisons and incarceration? Is that drawing attention back to the issues? As you said, the prison juggernaut is so huge that there's not often a way into it, but this could be a moment?
Yeah, I do think it's a moment to do that. I mean, I think possibly a stronger thesis than Michelle Alexander's is that prison discriminates against poor people, and the racial quality of American incarceration reflects our society broadly, with an underclass in perpetual crisis and lots of ways for people in that class to get in trouble. Perhaps because I worked in a prison with such a long history, I spent a long time reading about the period in the 19th century when the Irish were disproportionately imprisoned in New York State prisons, for example. And maybe there was national prejudice against them, but another way of looking at it is that they were poor. And poor people commit more crimes, mostly against each other. The idea that our prisons are a conspiracy that target a very specific demographic, I'm not sure I believe that. But that that demographic is disproportionately imprisoned is indisputable.
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I don't think things have greatly changed. We depend, for example, on solitary confinement to a macabre extent. I mean far beyond any other nation, we are deeply committed to the supermax, to virtual entombment in metal cubes. Which we've done by building supermaxes in most states. One thing I never predicted is Newjack would give me this qualification to write about the War on Terror, but soon after 9/11, it became clear that one big result of the attack in the Twin Towers was the way we were handling people we captured. So Abu Ghraib in Iraq is one example, but the big example is Guantanamo.A year after the first prisoners were sent there from Afghanistan, I went down there for the New York Times Magazine, and I just went again early last year in 2014 for Vanity Fair, this time to write about solitary confinement, because it's kind of like we take this article of faith that that's the best way to lock up really bad people. And with Guantanamo, we've made it worse by removing any due process around it. At least at Sing Sing, a guy would spit on a guard or stab another prisoner or be caught with a lot of heroin and would go to the box for a set period of time, maybe 90 days, maybe 24 months—that would be a long sentence. But other states have been really extreme with this: Louisiana, California, Texas, I'm pretty sure, have been keeping people in solitary indefinitely. This is being challenged in court and I think, just this week, California agreed to change some of its practices around indefinite confinement in the box. But, if anything, that part of it has gotten worse since I was a CO. Again, we are at a cultural moment where people are becoming a little more aware of this and feeling worse about it. Feeling bad about it is a problem when you work in a prison because everybody assumes, as you know from my book, you carry a stigma just by working there. That makes the job hard—knowing the rest of the world thinks you're a brute. So there are just so many ways that improving the system would help all of us.
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I think we are, partly because it's so expensive. It costs so much to do everything for a prisoner—and when they're in solitary, they can't do much for themselves. It's very labor intensive and the buildings are super expensive to run and build. And it just seems that local governments don't have that kind of cash to throw around these days. So that's one pressure that's making the tide turn just a little bit. And then another is that even as the American rate of incarceration peaked in 2008, I like to think that marks the swing of the pendulum, however slowly, in the other direction. In the direction of greater engagement with wrongdoers: less lock 'em up and throw away the key, less purely punitive treatment of lawbreakers, especially lawbreakers involved with drugs. It seem there's a consensus that we went overboard with mandatory sentencing and the result is this incredibly racially unfair system. I hope I'm right when I say I think that things are ever so slowly starting to move in the other direction. And I hope Canada will head there more quickly than we do.You mentioned drugs just now, but the other part of that is of course mental health issues, and how that plays out when it comes to solitary confinement.
Right. It's like a recipe for mental dissolution, for damaging people emotionally and spiritually. It's a way to break people, and it doesn't cure anybody. If there's a cure that's being affected by long-term incarceration, it's simply that people get old and they come out with less fight in them. But that's just because they got old, not because of anything that prison did for them. As North Americans, we're supposed to be the ones still dreaming up original new idea for how to organize our societies. That's why it's so striking to me that we are so far behind industrialized countries when it comes to locking up prisoners.Is there anything you'd have done differently? Would you approach it differently if you were to do it again?
Do I have to?Yeah, I've got a great idea for a VICE show: Ted goes back to prison.
[Laughs] I don't have many regrets about the experience. I think I did it the right way. I think if I'd been tougher and managed to stay for two years, I think I would have written a book that was that much deeper and more impactful. And in fact, that was the complaint of a lot of senior Sing Sing officers when I published the book was, "You know, it's a good book, but you're only a newjack, so why should anyone listen to you?" I kind of think that the rookie's perspective is one of the reasons the book works, because it didn't look normal to me—it all looked kind of strange and fucked up. It's all a balance, right, wondering if you're doing things the right way. But in the main, I don't have any regrets about it. It beat me up in certain ways, some of them physical more than spiritual, but I think the result was worth doing.I know from the book's epilogue that, when it came out, the higher-ups were super pissed that this even happened. And yet the guards and the prisoners appreciated that you were telling their truth. How has the reaction to the book changed over the years?
I still hear once a week from someone who's come across the book for the first time, and they are relatives of people who are in prison or they're people who've done time and they say "Thanks for this book. It helped me understand what my husband is going through." Or "Thanks for this book, because it seems like doing time in Australia is a lot like doing time in the States." Or it's a public school teacher saying you wouldn't believe how much this resembles my day, which is a pretty upsetting thing to hear. But mostly, it's those readers, or people in some kind of class who've been assigned the book—the ones who really dig it write me and want to make contact. There were some spasms of anger, especially from the State of New York, when it came out, and from a couple of corrections professionals who took issue with the way I described some things. But now I mostly hear good things. And I hear it's still relevant, which makes me happy and makes me sad.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Follow Chris Bilton on Twitter.