January/February 2001

January/February 2001 | Contents

LIFTING THE VEIL:
Voices From Prison

BY LAUREN JANIS

Joe Richman wanted to go to jail. He ferreted out every contact he could find, called every prison he could think of, and sent faxes and proposals around the country. It took four long months, but he finally got in. And now, nearly two years after his quest began, Richman slides in wool socks over the warped floorboards of his East Village studio toward a wooden cabinet. He pulls out drawer after drawer to reveal exactly what he got out of his days and nights behind bars: endless rows of audio tapes.

An independent radio producer, Richman wanted to document life inside the prison system. With 250 hours of tape, he is doing just that, creating the "Prison Diaries," a radio documentary series that features correctional officers, one judge, and several young inmates chronicling their own lives over a six-month period. Richman outfitted his subjects with recording equipment and then used their raw tape to create a series of audio portraits. They will air on National Public Radio's All Things Considered every Tuesday throughout January, in four twenty-two-minute segments and a one-hour special. Additional segments will air on NPR throughout the year, and Richman also collaborated with a criminal justice Web site, 360 Degrees of Justice (www.360degrees.org), to create an enhanced multimedia version.

Richman does most of the work for "Prison Diaries" in a small, three-room tenement, complete with bathtub in the kitchen, that seems to revel in its transformation from his apartment to his radio studio. Christmas lights drape from the ceiling, old-fashioned signs hang from the walls, clusters of tall file cabinets rise up like a city skyline, and eclectic antiques crowd around the three large computer modules like curious spectators. This is where Richman spends his eighty-hour workweeks, listening, editing, and producing.

By now, he's used to the schedule. Since 1996, Richman has been producing similar projects such as "Teenage Diaries," "Civil War Widows," and "The Last Place: Diary of a Retirement Home." The documentaries are part of Radio Diaries (www.radiodiaries.org), a nonprofit organization Richman founded in April 1999. The idea behind Radio Diaries is to allow people to tell their own stories. "We give them the tools, turn them loose, and see what happens," Richman says. What often results is a sense of intimacy and immediacy, as Richman's subjects talk without the interruption of a narrator. "We let one person tell their story -- about being a teen mom or an immigrant -- as a way to get behind the statistics and agendas and clichés, and just humanize it," Richman says. "And with prisons, I can't think of another institution that needs more humanizing."

At age fifteen, in 1996, Cristel viciously attacked a classmate with a razor blade, leaving the victim with 300 stitches in her face and neck. When she was first incarcerated, Cristel was a wild, uncontrollable, and very pregnant teenager. In October 1999, she was released, three years shy of her six-and-a-half-year sentence, because of her extraordinary rehabilitation. Cristel's diary follows her from inside prison to the outside world, where she spends her first night at home with her three-year-old daughter. When the listener first meets her, Cristel is still in jail. At times, she sounds simply like a vibrant teenager.

"I've been in this room for three years. It almost looks like a college dorm, I think. And it's my room. But it's not really my room. Because I can't do what I want with it. If it was my room, the walls would be painted differently. It's not my room. I'm just borrowing it."

There are other times when Cristel sounds like a prisoner. She hates jail, especially the sound of her cell door.

"I hate that sound, because it just feels like they have power over me. And the key, I hate those keys and I hate the slam of the door. Because we don't have doorknobs and we don't have keys, so we can't get out. And we can't open our doors. And I hate the cuffs. The sound of the cuff, oh, I can't stand it, and when they put it on you, you feel so cold. Just the sound of it makes me sick. And the staff, sometimes they just walk around, and they play with the cuffs. And it's like, stop. I just, I hate, I hate, I hate it so much."

Richman wanted to tell prison stories from the inside. Most of the prison images he had seen on television or in movies focused on the prison clichés -- loud noises, harsh people, constant drama. Richman wanted the opposite. "What we wanted in these stories was the quietness, the intimacy, the slowdown," he says.

But first he had to get in. Inmates are not even allowed to carry a pencil. Richman had to convince prison administrators that prisoners should be permitted to carry heavy recorders with batteries, wires, and microphones for six months. "It wasn't easy," he says. Could a tape recorder turn into a bludgeon? Could batteries placed inside a sock turn into a mace? Would inmates think they were being spied on? "I had many, many prisons that were going to open the doors and say, do all the interviews you want," says Richman. "But as far as giving inmates tape recorders, forget it."

It took two "angels" to get Richman behind bars. At the Rhode Island Training School in Cranston, Rhode Island, the principal of the prison school led the way for Richman and facilitated a meeting with the superintendent. Richman remembers the superintendent saying: "'I've been in this job for twenty-five years and it gets pretty boring after a while. This should spice things up a little bit.'" At the Polk Youth Institution in Butner, North Carolina, Richman benefited from a progressive policy that supports the public's right to know what goes on inside state prisons. Adhering to this policy, a public information officer at the prison secured Richman's access. He could finally put to use the $50,000 grant he had received from the Open Society Institute's Center on Crime, Communities and Culture. He was in.

And he was scared. "At first, it's really intimidating," he says. "The people look so big and scary." Richman, who has serious brown eyes, but the casualness and jeans-and-flannel-shirt warmth of a best friend, is not a big guy. It's easy to see how he might be dwarfed by an early-blooming teenager. But as he started interviewing inmates, his impressions changed. "After your second or third day, you start talking to them and realizing these are sixteen-year-olds who are worried about acne and whatever else," he says. "You start to see the kids in them."

Richman interviewed about fifty inmates in both facilities before choosing his subjects. "Certain ones shine, but I'm wrong a lot of the time," he says. Finding interested participants wasn't hard, since the inmates were so eager to have something to do in prison. Parents easily gave permission for minors. Richman chose five young inmates to produce diaries. Once they learned how to use the equipment, most of them were naturals. They took tape recorders from their cells, to the chow hall, to the recreation room. They recorded the sounds of inmates, officers, metal doors slamming, cell searches, and their own, latenight thoughts. "Younger people are more willing to talk honestly," Richman says. "They're less self-conscious. They're also really going through something, really questioning, and don't question the idea of documenting as much as older people do."

John Mills, twenty-one, is serving seven to nine years for armed robbery. He was locked up at age seventeen. He describes his cell, where the walls are adorned with magazine cologne samples to make it smell nice, and photographs of his family. One photo of his mother is slightly smeared with toothpaste, because that was the only adhesive he could find. He reads a letter from his mother out loud, sniffling just a little as he reads the signature, "Love, Mommy." He lets us listen to the radio with him, and invites us to lean in as he snuggles up to a vent to talk to an inmate with a life sentence in the adjacent cell. "Just like a real conversation," he says. For John, taping became almost therapeutic, a chance to let his guard down. He shares his thoughts, some of them frightening. In one segment, he recalls the only time in his life when he felt powerful.

"Robbing people was fun. Not like I'm proud of it or nothing. But when I was out there, I did love the thrill of it myself. And the look is always the first thing you get, once you put the gun in their face. I always point the gun to the head, you know. It's always like 'surprise' and then they're frozen. I love that look in their eyes. I loved that when I was out there because, I don't know, I really can't explain it. Makes you feel, you know, I got him, yo."

The correctional officers were tougher. As adults, they were more self-conscious and very suspicious. Inmates might say things that would incriminate officers. Officers might say things that would incriminate themselves. One officer even tried to edit his own tape. After reprimanding an inmate, the officer went back over his recordings and tried to take out all the curse words, thinking he could splice it without anyone noticing. Richman noticed. "It was really kind of funny," he says.

Richman was also able to get remarkable access to a Rhode Island Family Court judge. "It was luck," Richman says. "He trusted us, he likes to talk, and he was just game." Judge Jeremiah Jeremiah allowed tape recorders in his courtroom and his chambers, and made a diary. In the documentary, his diary is woven in with the diary of Matthew, a seventeen-year-old repeat drug seller, whom Judge Jeremiah pardons, only to find him back in his courtroom in two weeks. "I gave you a fair chance," the judge says to Matthew. "You really let me down. It bothers me because I lose my faith in kids."

It wasn't all smooth sailing. At the North Carolina prison, the assistant superintendent initially insisted on listening to the tapes before they were sent to Richman. It took about a month, but Richman finally got that policy discontinued. Then, the public information officer at Polk, Richman's "angel," left her job. Richman's access was threatened. He campaigned his way back in by producing a series of e-mails that documented his agreement with the prison. "We had to put out little fires every week," he says.

Four correctional officers made diaries, sharing their views about life in the lockup. Officer Alicia Covington recalls the day she discovered that her son was a new inmate at Polk Youth Institution.

"One day at the prison, I got a call to come down to Receiving. When I got down there, I saw an inmate sitting in the chair. And once the door closed, and he heard the door close, he looked up, and when I looked into his face, it was my son. It is just a devastating thing to see your child locked up, in shackles, in handcuffs. Here I was for sixteen years telling other people's children where they went wrong and what they should do to straighten their lives out. And then I look around, and here's one of my own walking through the door."

Sergeant Furman Camel is retiring from Polk after twenty-seven years.

"I often say that people who work in prison, you have to be a special type of person. Not necessarily good, just special. Because you can come in, and your supervisor is going to take your days off, they're going to tell you that you ain't going to get no raises, the inmates are going to threaten your life, going to threaten to rape your wife when they get out, cut your children's throats, all that stuff. And you'll come home that night, take a bath, iron your uniform, shine your shoes, come back tomorrow."

"Prison Diaries" takes the listener inside the criminal justice system. The voices are conversational and confessional. The sounds range from harsh to heartbreaking. During six months of tape recording, Richman went to jail nearly twenty times and talked to his subjects on the phone every week. Encouragement was helpful; listening was essential. "They need to know it's going to someone's ears and being received in some way," Richman says. Initially, the inmates taped every day, and later, only when something was going on. Which was rare. "After the first month, it was just the same thing over and over again," he says. "And they knew it, too. You realize from working with them how mundane and never-changing the life is."

Listening to 250 hours of tape could be a bit trying. Richman collected more tape than he has ever worked with before. By now, he has heard the prison voices so many times that he can quote them at will, complete with intonation and accent. Yet for him, these tapes are also a revelation. "The most exciting thing is the surprise of it," he says. "You're going through tapes, and eighty percent is just junk, and you're throwing it away, and throwing it away. And then, all of a sudden, there's this little thing, this little nugget, that completely blows you away."

Lauren Janis is CJR's assistant editor.