susanville

Vacation in Susanville

As I was putting out this issue, vacation-time rolled around and I headed north on the maiden road trip of my "new" '84 Accord. It died a sad but convincing death on US 395 in northeastern California.

A tow-guy came and towed me to nearby Susanville. On the way we chatted, and I asked him about the area. What's going on here? I asked. Mostly cattle and hay production?

"We have some of that," he told me. "We had a lot of lumber, but two of the three mills closed. Really, that over there is our main industry now."

He pointed to a complex of low buildings out toward the mountains.

"Prisons. The closer, brick buildings, that's the California Correctional Center, opened in the mid-60s. The cement buildings are the High Desert State Prison, which just opened a year and a half ago. That big cement building in the center is all Maximum Security. We have some of the worst hombres in California there!" I think he was proud of that.

Back at the garage, while I waited for the mechanics to take a look, I admired the box of Spotted Owl Helper propped up on the deer horns on top of the coke machine. I made a mental note to change my Green Party t-shirt at the first opportunity.

The car was dead, with no viable options for revival. So I checked into a motel and spent a couple of days thinking about my options. While I was there, I wandered about and talked to people about what it was like to live in a prison town.

A lady at the historical society, a lifelong Susanville resident, told me she was ashamed of her town's main industry, and that she felt the prisons had been a bad influence, even though they provided a lot of high-paying entry-level jobs.

"It's by far the best-paying job for someone starting out, except for a doctor or a lawyer. Actually, there are quite a few lawyers....except for a doctor, the best job is at the prison.

"But it's a stressful job that spills over into the rest of their lives. Drugs, alcohol, domestic violence are all rising. Housing costs have gone through the ceiling. Quality of life is going down.

"And another thing." She looked around furtively.

"I guess I have to be careful saying this. I never smoked marijuana, but my adult kids do. It's ridiculous to put people in jail for that. A lot of the people in there don't belong there."

Later I spoke to the clerk at my motel (a big one that filled up every night even though it was on a road from nowhere to nowhere). She told me that most of their business was from people coming to visit prisoners.

"The new prison was just great for business," she said. "Another big motel opened just across the road, and we're both doing fine. It's been a good thing for us."

I asked her about the plan to open a third prison, this one federal.

"That would be down at Doyle, half way to Reno. It used to be an air force base. They kept missiles there. It was the second largest missile site in the country before they closed it."

From missiles and lumber to prisons, and doing better than ever!

GETTING OUT OF Susanville without a car is problematic. They have a few rental cars in town, but all of them were out and not expected back soon. Greyhound canceled bus service to the area a few years ago. Besides walking and hitchhiking, there are two ways out: A daily shuttle to Reno and the mail truck to Red Bluff. I called for the shuttle.

It was an hour and a half late, and I was glad I didn't have a plane to catch. It was packed: two 60-ish women talking about their old times and kids who used to be in high school together; a young woman with "Snoopy" tattooed large across her neck; and eight or nine men. From the sparse conversation, I figured they were mostly on their way out of jail; the one guy I talked to said he had spent 22 months in the county jail. They seemed neither ecstatic nor weird, and I wondered what they were feeling.

I GOT THE IDEA for this "prison" issue when my friend's stepson got out of kiddy-jail. Then several other friends and Dagger contributors came forth with their new and old prison stories as the issue developed. I began to pay more attention to those leftists on Pacifica Radio, people like Noam Chomsky and Jerry Brown, who talk about the "prison-industrial complex" and the significance of this incredible growth industry. In California, the number of prisoners has grown six-fold in 20 years; something like 18 new state prisons have been built, while only one campus has been added to the state university system; and the prison guards have become one of the most powerful political lobbies, spending twice as much as the teachers even though they have only one fifth the membership.

My friend's kid is a bad boy. He resists authority. I'm sympathetic to that, but his resistance is often ill-thought out, chaotic, hurtful. C68209 was a bad kid. At 21 he killed someone. He says he deserved to be in prison, and so did most of the ones he was in with. The community has to deal with kids like this. The exploding prison project provides "good jobs" to some and warehouses others in a modern-day slave system. Is this the best way to deal with bad boys and girls?

The prison project is fueled by the immoral and disastrous War on Drugs, which in some ways was a logical continuance of the War on Vietnam and serves some of the same economic and political interests. Do you buy into this? Do you think your legitimate interests in safety and order are served by this maniacal money-sink, which is not only draining our resources but also eroding our liberty? Is there a better, cheaper, kinder way to deal with the problems of drug abuse?

I JUST HEARD on "Democracy Now" about a Haitian, Emmanuel Constant, head of Haiti's dreaded FRAPH under the military dictatorship. He was a CIA operative; the coup itself, I believe, was serving someone's perverse idea of US interest in the region. One victim describes being dragged out of her house by the FRAPH, taken to a "killing field," hacked up with a machete and left for dead. But she survived. Accused FRAPH head Constance is living in Queens, selling phone cards, under US protection from prosecution in return for his silence. He is accused of responsibility for thousands of deaths in Haiti during the dictatorship.

Does this have anything to do with our little "crime and punishment" conundrum? I think it does. I think that a kid with half a brain who hasn't yet bought into the dominant paradigm must look at it with revulsion. Not that he thinks twice about US culpability in the mass slaughter in a neighboring country; nor that the culture of consumption he sees all around him is enabled by this covert aggression; he doesn't know it and would stare at you blankly if you told him. But he must sense the corruption and hypocrisy that underlie the "American dream" we all take for granted. He knows he's being had, and that the chains that will bind him for all his life to this inhuman juggernaut are being clamped to his ankle.

Why do we have six times as many prisoners as we did 20 years ago? Have people gotten worse? Or are our sins in Vietnam, Haiti, Guatemala, Indonesia, the Congo, etc., not to mention our ongoing sins here at home, catching up with us, crying out for recognition and repentance? If we're into punishing the guilty, who can go unpunished?

So instead of investing our resources into oppression and control, maybe we could redirect them to healing and growth.

POOR CAMBODIA! I've been combing the stories, unsuccessfully, for some reference to a little item that caught my eye last year and which I haven't been able to find again. One of the prime ministers (I guess it's the one who has just seized power), distressed at having to pardon a known Khmer Rouge butcher, said it would only be fair to pardon everyone. So he did, and practically all prisoners in the country were released.

I like this idea. All the worst sons of bitches get impunity. Be fair. Give it to everyone. Turn everyone loose and start over. And this time, let's be more judicious about who we lock up, and how and why.

LET ME END with a horror story. A man I know was a political prisoner in one Northern California county a few years ago. For years he worked part time for the county, running a remote rural dump. Then the county decided to close the dump, which left the locals highly inconvenienced and pissed off. My friend collected a bunch of signatures on a petition and took it to the board of supervisors. A week later a warrantless raid on his property turned up some pot plants. He spent about eight months in a county jail.

He says it was torture and they will never take him alive again.

While he was in jail, he worked in the kitchen and took prisoners their meals. He said for seven days an old man with Alzheimer's disease was kept in the "rubber room," a 6' x 6' padded cell with no furniture and a floor that sloped to a hole in the center for waste disposal. He said the man was always squatting down, whimpering. Twice he actually saw guards beat him: "Two or three guards rushed in and beat him with their black-gloved hands. They always carry those gloves, so they don't leave marks."

Amnesty for those guards! And their victims! Let's start from scratch and do it better.