Day 2
Ohio State Penitentiary is an imposing building. If you're not paying attention, Warren Correctional could be an ugly high school. Ohio State Penitentiary starts out unassuming, just turn right onto a road across the street from a farm. When I pulled up, though, the fence has a net of wire that screamed "we mean business". There are several stop points to get in. From the sidewalk, I could hear the guys screaming from administrative segregation.
I had the disturbing privilege of visiting two prisoners wrongfully convicted of murder at this unit. I don't think Ohio realizes just how many people there are in its prisons convicted of taking a life that did not. Both should have been eligible for contact visits and were at a security level low enough not to even be at OSP, but we nevertheless visited through glass in a small booth that (to me) felt like a cell.
The COs were royally confused that I was visiting two people back-to-back, so that raised some challenges. But I wanted to capture the feel of how different these two Black men, both innocent of which they have been convicted, are.
Talking to Jermane about his youth was to look back on his life through the lens of an older man who realizes the structural issues that led him to choose the street life. He is excited to be getting a visit from The Innocence Project next week, and we did quite a bit of strategizing. For those unfamiliar with his case, Jermane went on a shopping spree with a credit card that turned out to belong to a dead man. When he refused to snitch on how he came into possession of the credit card, he found himself facing the death penalty for a murder he did not commit and could not have committed. For example, evidence was withheld that the neighbors knew the victim hid his garage door opener, the location of which was necessary for the murderer to use the car as the get-away vehicle. Jermane didn't know the victim; couldn't have known about the garage door opener; didn't drive the get-away car, because he didn't kill him.
But since when does the US justice system care which Black man killed someone, as long as someone is warming a bed in the prison plantation? As a high security prisoner, Jermane costs the State of Ohio more than $60k to house, not to mention what his supporters spend in overpriced phone calls and gouged commissary items.
What struck me the most though was Jermane's decision, when he was 36, to become a pacifist. I'm often told that the only reason I can be a pacifist is that I'm a middle-class white woman; that my pacifism is really an extension of my privilege; that it is bought through the violence of others. Across the glass, with a warm smile, is the counter-example. This is a man who spent 20 years of his life as a gang member, inside and outside of prison, peacefully retired, and now continues to live non-violently in one of the most violent situations one can be. I was curious if people tried to goad him into fighting, and he just smiled, shook his head, and let me know that wouldn't work.
At the end of our visit, I had to go all the way down the elevator (ELEVATOR? Never seen one of those in a prison), check out, then come back in.
Prisoners getting non-contact visits are also not allowed food or drink during their visits. That's different from Texas: there, you buy from vending, hand it to the CO, and the CO takes it behind the glass. Technically, I could buy vending for myself and rudely eat and drink in front of them, but my mother raised me better than that. Since there was no time between the visits, that meant I couldn't eat or drink until I was all the way done. There was a drinking fountain on the second floor, but it didn't appear to be working.
Going to the bathroom between visits was eventful. I tried to go downstairs, but was told to use the upstairs bathroom. The CO upstairs tried to get me to exit the unit to use the restroom outside of security, not realizing that I was visiting two separate people. So, I ended up using a bathroom I thought I was locked in for a few minutes. I've never had to knock on a door to be let out of a bathroom before (even though it turned out I just hadn't turned the handle hard enough), but that brief 10 seconds of confinement was yet another reminder of what my friends go through every single day for decades.
Now we get to the Photography Review portion. Because Sean couldn't get a picture, and I was told I couldn't buy commissary, I wrongfully assumed this meant I couldn't get pictures during this visit. Greg knew better, and ordered three pictures taken. I hopped on the counter, trying to stand in a way that made it seem like we were together. The photographer was another inmate, and Greg was adamantly instructing him on what to do to avoid the massive glare coming off the glass. To be fair, the glare was bad enough that I kept moving so that my head was immediately in front of Greg's even while we were talking - that was the only way that I could get a good look at him.
Most of us think of Greg as the resistance fighter, wrongfully convicted of murder during the Lucasville Uprisings of April 1993. Let me point out he has a softer, funnier side. His dating advice: go to RV conventions, because it's a good place to meet guys who like to travel and have their life together. It was a gentle reminder that just as much as I worry about my pen pals, they worry about me.
There is plenty to worry about with Greg. His security level is a 4, which means he should have been let out of OSP, out of segregation, and able to transition back to general population. But the Central Office can't seem to find a bed in a lower security unit for him, so he continues to be held in administrative segregation for no good reason. Keep in mind, if he had been moved to his new unit, we would have been able to hug hello and goodbye, share vending machine junk food, and sit next to each other like human beings. Instead, we tried our best to be heard through the glass, sometimes yelling to get our points across.
Suddenly, it was time to go. The worst part of a non-contact visit is watching the person I'm visiting bend down to put their arms into the hole so they can have their hands cuffed behind their back again. Greg pointed to a bar on the ground of his side of the booth, saying that back in the day, he would have been chained to it while being behind the glass during a visit.
I'm sitting at a diner, about to go to bed before heading off to my next visit, this time in Pennsylvania. But I feel like part of me was never let out of that bathroom, never walked out of that fence. I kept seeing it while I was driving across the beautiful Pennsylvania landscape.
How are we going to abolish these factories of evil? In the mean time, I keep carrying in light.
