In the late 1960s, when The Fortune Society – a prisoner re-entry non-profit organization that I founded – was in its infancy, Eddie Morris walked through our doors. He was fresh out of prison, nearly 40 years old, with more than 25 years behind bars in juvenile and adult facilities. He had the scars, mental and physical, from too many years in a cage. He was looking for a new life and was fighting to overcome his past. One day, he joined me and a group of formerly incarcerated men as we drove to a speaking engagement in upstate New York.
Motoring through parks and pastures, I commented on the scenery and the serenity it conveyed. Eddie turned to me and said, “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore.”
I was stunned. He was the last man in the world I would expect to be quoting a poet. I asked him whose words he was recalling.
“Lord Byron,” he said.
I inquired, “Do you know other poets?”
He made it clear, “Only Lord Byron.” He told me that when he was about 17 years old, doing time in Clinton Correctional Facility – a maximum security prison in Dannemora, New York – he was thrown into solitary for six months. He had a cot, a sink, a toilet and a shower once a week. And for some inexplicable reason, there was one book in his cell, “The Complete Works of Lord Byron.”
I will never forget the expression on his face when he told me, “Lord Byron saved my sanity. No teenager should ever be confined like that. Lord Byron’s poems brought beauty into my dungeon. That’s what kept me going.”
That was the first of hundreds of stories I would hear about “the hole.” In John Herbert’s prison drama, “Fortune and Men’s Eyes,” an inmate warns a new prisoner about life in a six-by-six, “You ain’t done hard time kid until they throw you into solitary. It’s real cozy if you don’t go haywire in the first month. A couple of goons smashed their own heads on the brick wall, wide open like eggs. They figgered they was better off in a hospital than locked in a cage.”
Since hearing Eddie’s story, I have visited hundreds of prisons around the country and I always ask to see solitary. I have talked with men in solitary at Dannemora and Rikers Island in New York, Trenton State Prison in New Jersey and at the state prisons in Delaware and New Mexico. It was as if the bowels of the Earth had opened up. I was witness to men living in the most inhuman conditions conceivable.
And today, with the use of solitary as a correctional “tool” at the center of a heated national debate, questions must be asked: “How many men in solitary will be released from prison someday? And, how will they be able to function in society after such dehumanizing conditions?” Yet, prison authorities are never able to provide a response.
Sadly, the answer is frequently reported in the news, which glibly announces that an “inexplicable” violent act was committed by a formerly incarcerated person. Rarely does a reporter dig deep into the story. The prison system is never held accountable for its acceleration of violence and uncharted rage. Quite simply, our method of administering severe punishment is a contributing factor to crime in America. The high recidivist rate is a measure of prisons’ failure. They send back to society an army of angry, broken men and women.
Eddie Morris never went back to prison. We stayed in touch for about a decade, as he struggled to find a place for himself. A few years ago he called me from a hospital, where, elderly and sick, he was in his final days. He never had a life that could be called self-fulfilling. But whenever I see a poem by Lord Byron, I am thankful that the poet gave that troubled boy some beauty and insight.