Alan Bisbort: BELLY OF THE BEAST

From AMP Magazine

BELLY OF THE BEAST

by Alan Bisbort

Prison. Just the thought of it is depressing, especially as it’s one of America’s few “growth industries,” ranked somewhere above fast food and below Wal-Mart. In America’s bright future, if you don’t want to flip burgers or be Sam Walton’s slave, you’ve always got three squares and a bed at Guantanomo Bay.

We’ve heard a lot about prison these past six years under the psychopathic stewardship of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who themselves are candidates for a maximum security lockdown. Though the U.S. Congress is scared of its own collective shadow, one brave member, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), has introduced a resolution (HR 635) to set up a select committee to look at allegations of wrongdoing by the Bush Administration. This would be the first step toward impeachment, then criminal prosecution, then prison.

Beyond our borders, everybody and their brother wants Bush and Cheney behind bars. An Australian Senate candidate named Glenn Floyd, for example, has initiated legal actions against Bush at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, filing “formal charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against United States President George Bush…based in his declaration of war on Iraq on March 19 2003, in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441.”

Coincidentally, Bush is a big fan of prisons and punishment. As Texas governor, he gleefully presided over 153 executions. And when he isn’t killing people, or driving them to suicide, Bush gets off on torturing them just as he, as a lad, loved to put cherry bombs down frogs’ throats and ignite them. Anyone who wants to know what happens to those who, in our name and on our dime, have been tortured at Guantanomo Bay and Abu Ghraib—many of whom have been held for three years without being charged—ought to read Jack Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast. Remember Abbott? Sure, he’s politically incorrect, but that doesn’t alter the truth of what he has written in his series of letters to Norman Mailer.

Abbott was no angel, of course. Let it be remembered, however, that his original sentence, as a young man (an orphan and ward of the state), was for “writing a bad check.” His additional prison time after that was for infractions incurred while in prison, including, finally, his killing another prisoner in self-defense. By the time he came to the notice of Mailer, Abbott was, no doubt—after 20+ years of imprisonment—a hardened criminal, as they say, and a man who would kill you for a pack of smokes. Prison does that to some folks.

If Abbott’s experience is any window on Bushworld, then being a prisoner at Abu or Guantanomo is like being a rape victim. The guards can do anything to you at any time and you can’t do anything about it. They get it in their head to kick you in the nuts, bang, they do it. You look at them wrong you get the business end of a night stick or electrodes attached to your earlobes. They starve you, spit on you, place soiled underwear over your head, sic dogs on you, etc. and they face no consequences, unless they’re stupid enough, like dimbulbs Lyndie England and Chas. Graner, to show off their self-made photo opps.

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DEATH ON LIFE ROW

Caryl Chessman was another briefly famous literary outlaw and prison inmate. [Full disclosure: I have written a biography of Chessman, as well as the introduction to the new reissue of his book, Cell 2455, Death Row (both published by Carroll & Graf)]. Chessman was unique in American history. He received two death sentences for crimes that he probably did not commit and, if he did, did not result in loss of life. In a word, he was given two death sentences for: blowjobs.

As I wrote in Gadfly in 2001: “In May 2001, Ruben Patterson, a professional basketball player for the Seattle Supersonics, was convicted of attempted rape after he forced his children's nanny to perform a sex act on him. Patterson's punishment for this offense was a suspended sentence consisting of 15 days of house arrest—presumably without a nanny to assist him with parental duties, as well as a five-game suspension by the National Basketball Association.

“I'm not no rapist,” a beaming Patterson eloquently explained to the media, assembled in August 2001 to witness his signing of a $33.8 million contract with the Portland Trail Blazers. “I'm a great guy.”

In June 1948, a 27-year-old drifter and petty criminal named Caryl Chessman was sentenced in California on two separate counts of what was essentially the same crime to which Ruben Patterson pled guilty. Caryl Chessman's punishment: two death sentences.

In the twelve intervening years between his sentencing and execution, Chessman lived and tirelessly labored in Cell 2455 on Death Row in San Quentin Prison, shaping what has to be one of the most remarkable bodies of work in American legal history: three wide-selling memoirs—Cell 2455 Death Row (1954), Trial by Ordeal (1955), The Face of Justice (1957)—and one novel—The Kid Was A Killer (1960), numerous articles and an unrivaled expertise in American law.

“With extraordinary energy, Chessman made, on the very edge of extinction, one of those startling efforts of personal rehabilitation, salvation of the self,” wrote Elizabeth Hardwick in a poignant essay that ran in Partisan Review at the time of Chessman's trip to the gas chamber. “It was this energy that brought him out of darkness to the notice of the Pope, Albert Schweitzer, Mauriac, Dean Pike, Marlon Brando, Steve Allen, and rioting students in Lisbon (Lisbon!).”

Chessman was as much a political prisoner as others who preceded him, like Eugene Debs and Tom Mooney, and those who came in his wake during the 1960s, like Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale.

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STAY “FREE”

Right here, right now, in the US of A, we have our own homegrown political prisoners being treated in the same capricious, secretive ways as the Muslims in Cuba and Iraq. You don’t have to agree with them or condone their crimes to know they’re getting shafted. Take Jeff Luers, aka “Free,” the eco-radical activist who has served more than six years of a prison sentence for torching three SUVs to protest global warming. I’ve written about Jeff Luers in this space before. His plight is heart-rending and inexcusable in a civilized society.

His latest bad break was to be sent to “the hole,” or solitary confinement, for the infraction of having “too clean” of a urine test. That is, the prison regularly checks for drug use by inmates through urine tests. Jeff’s came back negative because, well, Jeff doesn’t do drugs. He’s a revolutionary, lean and mean and clean.

Ah, but to the prison officials the test could only mean that he has used an illegal urine sample, had purchased clean piss on the prison black market, or some such crazy notion. At any rate, he’s been in the hole for weeks and still hasn’t been given a hearing. If he’s found guilty of tampering with his urine test, he could get more prison time.

He will also lose his contact visits for a year, which means that he will
only be able to see his family and friends from behind glass, and those visits will be limited to one hour. 

        Never mind what this says about the abysmal legal help he must be getting, it is, pure and simple, harassment of a political prisoner and  “cruel and unusual punishment,” a violation of the U.S. Constitution—the document with which Bush and his thug attorney Alberto Gonzalez wipe their ass after defecating on the Bill of Rights. 

                    Please help Jeff Luers, send him letters of support, buy him a book, pitch a few pennies at his commissary fund. (Money order or cashier’s checks only) made out to “DOC Central Trust For Jeffrey Luers, #13797671” and send it to: Central Trust, PO Box 14400, Salem OR 97309-5077. For more information, check: http://www.freefreenow.org

or mail other donations to
“Free's Defense Fund" POB 3, Eugene, OR 97440

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R.I.P. SYD BARRETT AND ARTHUR LEE

By now, anyone who cares has heard of the untimely passing of two of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest artists, Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd founder, and Arthur Lee, leader of Love, the LA band whose album Forever Changes should be on all music lovers’ Top Tens. Barrett was, for the last 40 years of his life, trapped in the prison of his own mind, having become mentally unhinged in the wake of his 1966-69 LSD binges. Arthur Lee, on the other hand, actually did serve prison time, as the result of California’s draconian “three strikes” law. He got out, though, in 2001, rehabilitated himself and had been playing beautiful music the last five years of his life.

If you don’t care about the deaths of these two musicians then I truly feel sorry for you. One of my friends, on the night Arthur Lee died told me he had this dream: “The show was an operatic mounting of the album Forever Changes. The entire group came out dressed in richly colored and patterned silk outfits. There were numerous singers, including a shaven-headed brown midget, trading off lines and dancing around the venue like Russian folkdancers. It was like a cross between a rock concert and Cirque de Soleil. When Arthur Lee came striding down the center aisle toward the stage, I shook hands with him and held onto it. His arm extended to a length of 20 feet as I held onto his hand and he kept walking and singing. At one crucial point in one of the elaborate songs he hopped on a steed and rode around the theater. It was announced that this was his farewell tour, because he had leukemia.”

Alan Bisbort is the author of “When You Read This, They Will Have Killed Me”: The Life and Redemption of Caryl Chessman, Whose Execution Shook America (Carroll & Graf).