Oral History with Staughton and Alice Lynd, January 13th, 2017, Part Three

So we were just starting to get into the TCI,

Yes.

To covering talking about TCI. And, just wondering, to maybe sort of give an introduction—Staughton started to give an introduction, it would also be nice to hear from you, an introduction about what you all set out to do at TCI. We can kind of go deeper into what has unfolded and is it what you expected or not, but you know, I sort of introduced it as bridging the Freedom Schools because I know that when I first contacted you two saying, I'd love to talk about the Freedom Schools, the SNCC Freedom Schools, the first response that I got back from you two, was "sure we can talk about that at some point, but we are actively involved in a Freedom School right now, which is the one we teach not too far down the road in a correctional institution."

Has anything been said about the Trumbull Correctional Institution, the security level, how long we've been involved with the prisoners there, anything like that?

Just very initially, so please, please go ahead. Yeah.

Are you interested in our first contact with TCI, which occurred right after the Lucasville riot? Didn't have to do with education—well, it had to do with education of us rather than education of the prisoners.

Yes, very interesting. I'm going to close the bathroom door just a little bit, because you're seeing the sink. It'll be distracting when people watch this years—days, weeks, years in the future. Yeah, I think that's meaningful, don't you?

Yes.

I think it's meaningful how you came to be, how you came to be involved.

Yes, yes. Was anything said earlier about Workers Against Toxic Chemical Hazards?

No.

Well, that was a group of men at the General Motors plant. In, near here, in Lordstown, where several of the men had become chemically sensitive as a result of the fumes and so forth in the plant. And one of these men was a Black man who grown up in Youngstown, had been in prison, but had then been able to work at General Motors until he became chemically disabled. He was part of a group that we worked with of people who had been afflicted by the work with toxic chemicals called Workers Against—it was Workers Against Toxic—?

Toxic Chemical Hazards,

Toxic Chemical Hazards, right, Workers Against Toxic Chemical Hazards watch, and this particular man, Leslie, got into a dispute with people from General Motors who felt that if we protested too much, that would mean that they just wouldn't put the next car on the Youngstown line, but would do it somewhere else. So they were afraid of the consequences of protesting the working conditions—that's a whole separate story, which I don't want to go into—but Leslie got into some sort of altercation, there were guns involved, it was alleged that he had shot somebody, although nobody—

At somebody.

Yeah, but the person wasn't injured. Anyway, they sent Leslie off to prison for fifteen years. He ultimately got out after eleven on parole, but he was in prison. They sent him to the Mansfield Correctional Institution, in Mansfield, Ohio. At the time of the Lucasville Uprising in April 1993, there was so much destruction of the cell block where the riot took place that they had to have some place to send those men. And so they were, I think, 129 of them who they felt could not stay at SOC, at the Southern Ohio Correctional Institution, the maximum security prison for the state, because of the potential retaliation by the guards. So they had to send those men to Mansfield, which meant they had to get some of the other Mansfield prisoners out. They sent Leslie to the Trumbull Correctional Institution. Leslie wrote to us and said, "I would like you to be on my visiting list." So in October 1993, we began to visit Leslie once a month. We visited him once a month for six years until he was transferred to a lower security prison. And when he got out, he came back to Youngstown in a halfway house and we resumed the relationship, and it was a very significant relationship even throughout the educational work that we did under the auspices of the Catholic Diocese on crime, justice, and the death penalty. Non-viable—I guess he was dead by the time we did the non-violence one. But Leslie is a whole separate story but we would go and see Leslie, and he would say something like, "you know, they're building that new private prison in Youngstown, and they're going to transfer men from Lorton, Virginia," which is where people from the District of Columbia were sent if they were convicted, "I wonder, there's an awful lot of TB at Barton, I wonder whether they're going to test these men before they come." So I made some inquiries, answer? No. In fact, 300 of them came without their medical records, and they might have been diabetic, they might have had all sorts of reasons for needing specific medication, but the new prison didn't know that. There were many issues around that prison.

Or, Leslie would say, with regard to snowplows, that the part—that Ohio Penal Industries was making snow clearing equipment. He said, "you know, that could have been done out of General Motors, rather than have prisoners doing that work." Opened up this whole concept of prison labor, and I did a lot of looking into that, of states that were using prison labor in order to get the cheapest possible labor. And there were just a multiplicity of issues. Every time we'd go he might tell us, "there was a fight and one guy was chasing another with a knife. And I told the guy that was being chased just come into my cell and then he just stood there in front of his cell." In other words, he didn't say anything, didn't do anything to the attacker. He just stood there, in front of his cell, with the guy who was being chased inside his cell. I mean, it was a different something-or-other every single month, and I felt we really got an education.

So that in 1995, '96, that winter, when the American Friends Service Committee contacted us and said, "they're building a new supermax prison in Youngstown. Bad things happen in supermax prisons, we need somebody to monitor what goes on there." I didn't know—we had never practiced criminal law, we didn't know anything about monitoring a prison I had, for six years, traced what happened in a race discrimination case of operating engineers, so I was pretty familiar with keeping track every month of what was happening and trying to—if there were glitches trying to find out, well, what's underneath this? And I think that was the best training that I had for it, but it sort of came out of the relationship with Leslie that the American Friends Service Committee knew that we were interested in prison issues, because if they had something on criminal justice, we'd go. We wanted to learn more. We wanted to understand what was happening. It was very close to the time that we were going to retire from legal services, I didn't have any projects—he's always got projects—but I didn't know what I was going to do when I retired, and this sort of dropped into our laps. So we had a conference, after I'd done a good bit of research and written up a paper and so forth. We had a conference on what is a supermax prison, and I figured well, we need to know what it's like to spend years in solitary confinement. So I was looking for someone who either had been in solitary for years or the relative of someone, I found both. The relative of someone was the sister of George Skatze, who a few weeks before had been sentenced to death for his role as a spokesman for the prisoners in the Lucasville riot. So that led onto the whole involvement with the death penalty in Ohio. And I later wrote a law review article on the problems, you know, typical problems like geographical disparity, racial disparity, quite a long article on that for the Toldeo Law Review.

But there again, what we want to do is to get back to TCI. But the fact is that we had had this long relationship at TCI. Well, in the course of events, the lady who cut my hair took degrees in education. She got her Master's degree, she got a principals license, she qualified herself as a teacher. Well, where are you going to get a job around here in a prison? That's where you can find jobs. So she came on as a teacher, first of the Ohio State Penitentiary, and played a very important role there, particularly in the case of James Were, who had been sentenced to death. She drove through the night to get to Cincinnati, to be at his hearing, and to testify that when she was trying to teach him, he would come up against a wall and he just couldn't get through. If she said, "I give you a dollar and you spend 80 cents, how much should you get back?" He didn't know, and couldn't—she just couldn't get through. She was demonstrating his disability, and she had the tale that one time when she was standing in front of his locked cell door trying to speak to him through the window or whatever, the guard opened the door. And she said Mr. Were just stood there with a smile on his face, he didn't attack. She had the sense, he treated me like a gentleman. I mean, this kind of thing came out of that. Well, one time I went to get my hair cut, she was still cutting hair on the side, and she told us that she was needing people to come into—by this time she was supervising education at Trumbull, and at OSP, and one or two other prisons. She said "we need people to come to Trumbull, because there are these guys that are just eager for more education than they can get." The state only provided education up through the GED, and she said, "these guys want to talk about all sorts of issues, I don't have the time to do it." She was looking for volunteers.

This coincided with the end of Occupy Youngstown, where people were thinking "well what can we do to continue?" And we thought, well, one thing we could do is like what we did with Leslie, get to know the person while they're in prison. I mean, we knew him before but—get to know the person while he's in prison, build a relationship of trust, then when he gets out we'll be much more able to help him. Which we did with Leslie. That has had its problems. We began teaching at Trumbull in 2012. So, until this fall when we had to discontinue for medical reasons, we had been going out there once a week—sometimes more often, sometimes we'd miss a week—but approximately once a week for more than four years. And in one way, I think what it amounted to was just showing up. What does that tell those people, that we just show up week after week, month after month year after year? I think it gives them a sense that maybe they're worth something. Maybe somebody respects them, maybe somebody cares. And I think that's sort of the the minimal. But since we—a number of the men got out, and before they got out, having completed their their term as opposed to being transferred to a lower security prison or maybe a higher security situation, we would give them our name and address and say we would like to to know how things go, keep in touch with us. And it was, I think after three and a half years before anybody did. That is, there was a very talented musician who, when he got out, was deported to Peru, which was his country of origin. And there was a long story having to do with how he was going to get his violin, but he finally got it. But since then, a couple of other guys have followed up with us when they got out and have come to see us at our house, so it's not a total washout from that standpoint.

But last summer I took a list of who's left. Half of them were lifers, that is, they had no prospect of getting out. Some of them might possibly make parole, but you know, what, two percent of the prison population—and that counts lower security people that never murdered anybody. And I think those lifers are probably serving life for having committed murder, and almost all of the rest of them had a number of years yet. That is, probably more years than we have left in our lives before they will get out. So my feeling was, we're not doing this anymore to establish the relationship for when they get out, what these guys need is some sense of leading worthwhile lives while they're in prison. A number of them do tutoring, you know, suppose somebody's having problems with the math aspects of the GED. Well, they'll tutor the person in math, or some of them—one of them has a creative writing group, another one organizes groups to play music and sing together. They're doing things like that, but I want to be able to feed these people with things that will help them to live meaningful lives without the prospect of leaving prison. o become exemplary as far as the other prisoners' concern, and that involves some pretty tough stuff. When, you know, the slightest little thing can be regarded as disrespect and then there's a fight, and the sense that if you don't fight back they'll just run right over you, and take advantage of you and so forth, the whole convict code comes into play. So, I think that it's an opportunity for the men to talk with each other in ways that they can't on the general housing block, and where we can give them food to chew on.

I'd like to add one thing, if I might. I kept running the line on the this group of long-termers. Well, you look at Detroit Red, he went to prison as a petty hustler and emerged as Malcolm X. Look at Nelson Mandela, 27 years behind bars and then president of the new South Africa. I don't say that every long-termer is a Mandela or a Malcolm, but surely their lives suggest that it's possible. But later on something occurred to me. That in each of those two cases, Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela, there was a very strong outside support group. And that these men, the long-termers at TCI don't have that, so we're just at the beginning of all this but, there is somehow a connection between the group that meets in our basement and the lives of these men behind bars. And exactly what that is and how everybody can fructify their lives from that remains to be seen.

So, in there some more you wanted to ask about TCI?

I'm not sure about you Dan, my only main thing I'd like to talk about while we're on TCI, is the content of—

Yes, and there's something I should tell you about that. Our colleague Thomas, who is a very good history teacher, also has a rather dismal view of where things are going and there was one—

Oh, I should say we've got three minutes on this card, so when we're at about 1 minute we might pause until it bumps over to the other cards. I don't want to interrupt you, but go on.

You tell me when. Thomas had presented a number of [whispering away from the mics]—yeah. Our colleague Thomas, who is an excellent history teacher, also has rather a jaded view of where things have been and where they're going. And he had given them stuff by Kafka and all sorts of writers that I didn't think were very inspiring. So a couple of years ago, I had the feeling I want to take on a series of classes. I think it ran for about six weeks, and we began with the topic of respect. What does the word respect mean? And what is it Staughton? It's respect has to do with seeing, it's sort of like the I see you concept, and in South Africa in the Zulu language the meaning of the greeting that you would use for an older person whom you respected is, I see you.

And we have a book downstairs of the man who was asked to be the correctional officer with particular responsibility for Nelson Mandela and other members of the African National Congress when they were imprisoned at Robben Island outside of Cape Town. And so, in that officer, that guard's autobiography, he tells us about meeting Mandela and that he, a white child, had grown up on his father's plantation in the interior and his obvious playmates were the black children of the Zulu laborers who worked for his dad. And as Alice says, when you're younger person in that culture, and you meet an elder you say, I see you. So here, he finally meets Nelson Mandela, the man he is to guard, and what does he do? He says, I see you. And that was the beginning. And, however many years later that guard was in the front row when Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president.

It became a very meaningful relationship between those two. Anyway, to get back to respect. You know, what is respect? One of the guys said, "well—

Can we pause for one moment until the card bumps over, and just as soon as it bumps over—It says zero minutes. I always just wonder if there's a little, I think there's a little *bloop* so it's ending, it says end, and it's going to the next. So maybe you could just start over. He would...

Well, did you already catch the ICU part?

Yeah.

Yes. Okay. So here we are at TCI and, you know, respect is the bottom line in prison. You know, the guard disrespected me, you disrespected me, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, what is respect? How do you show respect? Is it respect if you say, "you know, I respect that that guard could really do me in if I do such and such," and the other person, "that's not respect!" I would toss out a question and 10 minutes later, I'd be ready to ask the next question because the guys were talking to each other, and that's what I love about teaching out there. I really want to give them tidbits and then let them go at it and talk to each other about what they think. And how do you show respect? What do you do if somebody does disrespect you? How can you cool the situation? What things are worth standing up for, and what you might just as well make a joke and let the thing disperse? So that, these were kinds of things that that we asked. And we—I did quite a bit on Nelson Mandela. Not Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that he was in charge of, and I pulled out of his book. What is it? No Future Without Forgiveness? Picked out a number of paragraphs that he wrote, and typed them out, and distributed them. We went through them one by one, so I'd read a paragraph and say, what do you think of that? Get the discussion going, you know. We did a couple of weeks on that, and then we took the statement of that Louis Farrakhan made at the Million Man March about the eight stages involved in forgiveness. And guess what? Each one of those correspond to what we had been reading in Desmond Tutu. So that it was coming at the same subject matter but from these two very, very different proponents of having to fess up to what you have done, and having to then take positive steps to try to reach out and undo the harm or at least some sort of attempt to restore an equilibrium in society. And I just loved those classes, and I loved the process that I was seeing going on with those men. And it also gave me a sense—but that way of teaching made sense. For me to collect stuff and give it to them like food. And then sometimes we would take food, we'd get it arranged to have a—oh, let me tell you about this.

At the beginning, if a person came to 75% of the classes on a regular basis, after a few months they were entitled to get a certificate. So, the first time that we were going to have certificates I didn't know whether the person in charge of education would give them out, or whether she would give them to us to give out. Well, it was the latter. So we, I said to Staughton, I want to do this the way we did it at the labor school that we went to in Mexico, where the director gave us the certificates in pairs such that I would give to Staughton the certificate with some words of praise as to what he had contributed to the group. Then Staughton would give me—now, it wasn't partners, I mean, each of us in labor school had a different partner. So that it was these members of the group complimenting another member of the group on what they had contributed to the whole. So, I arranged the names in alphabetical order which meant that it was going to sometimes be black, and white, and—so Mr. A gets up there and gives a certificate to Mr. B, and then Mr. B comments, gives the one to Mr. A, and says what he had contributed to the class. I think Mr. A grew about 6 inches that day. To get appreciation from another prisoner. When does that happen? And here's the education person at the door smiling like a Cheshire Cat [laughs]. But then we would have a Christmas party, or a party at the end of one of these sessions where they would let us bring in refreshments, and then maybe some of the prisoners would organize some music, and they would, you know, have three instrumentalists and a singer singing a song that they wrote. I mean we would have these very special times. So, you know, some of the people would come very regularly, some people come sometimes and you don't see them for months and they come back, we don't know to what extent it's a problem getting passes, they are supposed to be given a pass I think the night before, but sometimes they don't get a pass, so they can't come. Or sometimes they had to go to medical, or they had a visitor, or who knows what. More on TCI?

Anything else you'd like to add on TCI, Staughton?

Not at this time, no.

Ok. Anything you want to add?

Do we, do we have a little time?

We have good, we have a little over an hour on the second card, but I'm also wondering about timing for lunch.

Well, let me just take a few minutes to say something about my experience in teaching early childhood, that is, my early childhood. I'd like to go back to the—

I'd like to put the lav back on you, we'd refrain from doing it now because we're going back and forth, but I just want to make sure that we've got that closer, almost did it a moment ago.

A little bit tangled, there.

It's ok.

What is this little mic called?

It gets right under your chin and it's not really visible, so it allows the audio to be much clearer.

I understand, but what's the name of it?

It's called a lavalier.

A lavalier?

Yeah.

Nothing having to do with washing.

Or volcanoes.

Right, lava.

Our French teacher in the high school was Mrs. Washburn, and the slang was Madame Lave. I've been meaning to wash. Mrs.—well, Mrs. Wash was sort of her nickname, but then one of my friends used to call her Madame Lave. When I was in the middle of my junior year at Radcliffe, I dropped out of college and I had the feeling that I didn't want to have to deal with words, that I had just gotten to the point where I couldn't read effectively, I couldn't write effectively. I didn't want to have to be judged by how I put words together to be articulate. So I went and did volunteer work with children in a settlement house in Roxbury, which was an all-black, decrepit neighborhood in Boston. And I found that, well I went there to teach hand crafts, but what I really cared about was was the children and what they—what turned them on, how they were relating to each other. So I needed a job, and was able to get a job at the nursery training school of Boston—which later became the Eliot Pearson School of Tufts University—where they trained nursery school teachers, had nothing to do with nursing or babies, it was nursery school teaching. And I took, initially I took one course there in child psychology, and I became familiar with the ideas of the Gesell Institute for Child Development, where I actually worked later, having to do with child development. And, for example, a very young child may have a habit of doing things that make no sense to an adult, and there's no sense trying to stop them from doing it because it's just something that they're going to do at that age. Don't worry about it. Six months later, they're not going to do it anymore. What you can expect by way of periods of relatively placid behavior; and then times when everything seems to be at sixes and sevens, and and the behavior just falls apart and they can't seem to function the way they could when they were younger, but they can't really function well as an older child, they're betwixt and between. These developmental cycles and the organizing and disorganizing that goes on within a personality.

I was fascinated by that stuff, and it involved observation of children. How do they use their large muscles? Well you—then you begin to notice: oh yeah, the way they climb up the slide, and they slide down, and they run off. And, you know, the large muscle activity is very important for children. They've got to be able to do that, whether that's climbing on the furniture in the living room or what, they've got to have ways to use their large muscles. Well, what about the small muscles? What are they doing in the in the sandbox, or what are they doing with the clay? Or what are they doing with the beads? You know, threading, the the lace through the beads, these things. I did a paper on what would make a little child laugh. The contradictory things, the sudden things, everything, you know, [gets closer to the mic and speaks quietly] Jack is hiding down in his box and all the sudden [moves quickly away] pop! [Laughs] you know, these little sort of things that just, that's hysterical from little kids! You don't know quite when that pop is going to come, but you know it's going to come, and then all of a sudden [laughs]. So, I love that kind of work, and I liked working with preschool children because the whole thing has to do with these developing personalities, and their interrelationships with each other, and their relationships to adults, and how you can create love, how you can set things up so that children will bond.

There were two—I used to like to work with two year olds in particular. You don't have any curriculum, they don't have to learn the alphabet by the time, so many months away, they don't have to learn two plus two. Well, there were two little boys that would have a tendency to fight and, you know, make life miserable for each other. So, okay, I'm arranging the cots at nap time. I figure if I put those two little boys next to each other, they're going to try to sort of talk when they're supposed to be quiet, and the mischief in them can be a way of their building a relationship with each other. Where they can find something in each other to laugh about. Just subtle things like that. They weren't going to get out of bed and fight, but they were beginning to establish a relationship with each other just by having their cots near each other. There was just a great deal that I felt I was learning at the same time that I felt that I was doing something for these children.

I remember there was a—parents were going to come. So I wanted to show that the youngest children, all they do is just smear the paint, and then they get to a point where they can draw circle, and then they get to a point where they might have a stick figure with a vertical line and a couple of lines going off for the legs and maybe some arms and maybe a head, maybe the head had eyes and a mouth. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't have a nose. Probably didn't have ears. Probably didn't have hair. And then, when the parents come, to say: this is what is a normal progression for children, when they're drawing or painting. They start out just by scribbling or smearing the colors, and as they grow older, you can begin to see them take shape, you can begin to see these forms. So that it was an education of the parents too, don't tell your kid, "oh, you're just scribbling, you can't paint anything." Well, this is part of their development, they need to go through these different phases. There was one little boy where they—when he came in for the first couple of weeks, all he did was [fake crying], "oh, I want my mommy, I want my mommy, I want my mommy!" He had been hospitalized for a while and didn't have his mommy. He wanted his mommy, and the social worker said "you're never going to get this kid to adjust. The mother doesn't want him here. It's just a requirement that she's supposed to go out to work and he's supposed to be in daycare. Just don't try." My attitude then—and as a lawyer later on—if you give me the case, if you give me the child, I'm going to do what I can. So I would talk to him about, is your mommy going to come? You know, ask him to illicit it, and then the end of the day: who's that I see? Is that your mommy? "Yeah! Mommy did come!" After a few weeks, he loved the daycare center. It was where he wanted to be. And I remember one time when there was some construction going on in the street outside the daycare center, I took the children into a room where they could watch out the window. These two-year-olds, two and a half, "dems n*****s, dems n*****s." Two and a half years old! "Dems n*****s."

So there were a lot of things to learn in that situation, but I did want to speak about it because I think what we're doing at TCI is also the building of the relationships among these men, as well as giving them opportunities to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do. I mean, I'm not giving them paint, but I'm giving them stuff that they might want to paint about or write about. Or, if we get their writings, then have them share them with the group and have the group ask them questions. Let me add one more thing. We did some interviewing of the guys where they talked about whatever they wanted to about their own lives. And at the end, one of the prisoners asked this musician, just before he got out of prison: tell us, in one word, what you feel you learned in your 14 years—or whatever it was—in prison. And he said: kindness. That's what he learned. He had been—I checked his attendance record for our class before his departure—out of 124 attendance sheets that I had, he had signed in on 121. So I know that there were some times when he had other things he had to do. So, we can stop now and I can fix lunch.

Beautiful, beautiful.

So it's a bit of what education means to me.