Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

The first thing I notice at ADX Florence are the floors. They are mostly linoleum, in checkerboard patterns and custom colors like adobe red and poppy-seed gray, and they’re waxed and buffed to a remarkable sheen. They seem to beg notice and comment. Ditto the cleanliness of ADX, the solidness of its steel fittings, the dapper white shirts and garnet ties and outstanding grooming of its guards, its disorienting nonrectilinear layout, and its unobtrusive but effective protocols: these are all on display. Indeed, it’s possible to read into the place’s high gloss a conscious effort to buff away the tarnish that the “control unit” concept received from Pelican Bay and from ADX’s own predecessor in Marion, Illinois — a supermax whose reputation Amnesty International has blackened periodically.

Even as I admire the sheen at ADX, however, there are things that I won’t notice until after I leave. Not until I get back in my baking car and nearly scald my mouth by drinking from the water bottle I left in it, for example, will I realize that the temperature in ADX has been perfect. Same deal with ADX’s smell, of which there is a complete absence except in one corridor where I catch a whiff of something pleasant, something on the cusp between organic and inorganic — fresh spackle, maybe. ADX’s lighting is ideal: never harsh, easy to read by. The sounds: no clanking, no distant shouts, no barking intercom. The automatic doors hum when they open and click shut without echo. Mr. Winn speaks in a low voice—

MR. WINN: (to a lieutenant passing by) How’s it going?

LIEUTENANT: (worried, bending closer) What did you say?

MR. WINN: (wearily, disappointed) I said, How’s it going?

LIEUTENANT: (obviously relieved) Oh, fine, fine.

— but I can hear him without straining. I’m tempted to say that the ambience of ADX is one of sensory deprivation. But the impression that ADX leaves on visitors is one of peace, not deprivation. Indeed, more than once on my tour, I find myself thinking that this would be an excellent place to read and write . However, I’m suspicious enough of large systems of control to believe that this is exactly what Mr. Winn would like me to feel.

Each time we encounter a checkpoint, he passes one of the Polaroids that Donna took of me through a metal drawer to a guard behind heavy glass, and the guard slides back a carrot-size portable black light to check my stamp. It’s apparently enough that something on my forearm glow.

Here is how a prisoner enters a “contact” visit room at ADX. Mr. Winn and I are standing on the free-world side of the cast-concrete table that divides the room, and the door behind us has been locked from outside. Through the tiny window on the opposite door I hear rattling and clinking and glimpse some heads and shoulders. The door opens, and Mutulu Shakur steps in, hands cuffed behind his back. The door closes behind him. With a complex expression of nonchalance, anger, and dignity on his face, he places his back against the door, crouches, and lets the guard outside open a shoebox-sized slot and reach through to uncuff him. The cuffs disappear, the slot is closed and locked.

Mr. Winn props himself against the wall behind me. During the interview I don’t look back at him, not once, but the vibe I get is that he’s glancing at his watch a lot.

Shakur is wearing a knit watch cap and generic black plastic eyeglasses. There’s some gray in his dreadlocks. He asks me where I got his name and prisoner number. I reply: from a prison-watch group in Boulder that has close ties with political prisoners. Shakur is active in the Republic of New Afrika movement and was convicted of, among other things, complicity in a 1984 armed robbery that left two cops dead; the prosecution held him responsible under RICO statutes because the robbers had held meetings in his acupuncture clinic.

Shakur explains that he ended up in maximum security, first at Marion and now at ADX, because the warden at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he was first confined, felt he had too much influence on young black men and too much outside contact. Shakur’s message to me, in our too-brief interview, is that black men who have been in trouble with the law have guidance to offer their communities, and that the System locks them up to keep the country’s black communities rudderless. “The prisons are placed in isolated areas around the country,” he says. “People like myself who have a background in communities have a hard time feeling connected to the world. Imagine a kid who gets twenty-five years for a half ounce of crack cocaine: he’s isolated. The potential for mental damage is tremendous.”

Standing up to leave, Shakur asks me to send a copy of my story to his son. “Tupac Shakur,” he says. “You know who that is.”

I promise to get a copy to Tupac.

When Mr. Winn and I are alone again, he gives me a lecture. He says that ADX is being “completely open” with the media, and that he has no control over what I might make of my tour. (He cites, with a chuckle, the headline for the piece the London Times did on ADX: America’s Wild Men Jailed in “Tombs .”) However, he wishes I’d told him that I’d called the human-rights people in Boulder. “All you would have had to do was mention that,” he says. “It would have helped me understand what you’re doing.”

I explain that I called Boulder only because I needed the names of inmates willing to talk. But by now his disappointment with me seems to have hardened into judgment.

Mr. Winn next announces that our tour must be finished by 3:30. It’s now 2:15, the tour hasn’t even started, and I have a second interview to do. What a shame, he says, that I didn’t come in the morning. Then we’d have had all day.

“But I could have started any time you wanted,” I say. “You asked me to pick a time. I said one o’clock off the top of my head.”

He shakes his head sadly. He was under the impression that I couldn’t come until one. He’s a morning person, himself. If only he’d known. .

Ray Luc Levasseur is a working-class French Canadian from Maine. He’s powerfully built and well tattooed, and he exhibits the reined nervousness of a man who could smoke half a cigarette in a single drag. He has a mustache and eyebrows so broad and dark it’s as if he has three mustaches.

From 1974 to 1984 Levasseur lived underground and worked with an organization that specialized in bombing the military and corporate enemies of the global working class. After a stint on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, he was captured in 1984.

“I watch very little TV, mostly news and an occasional ball game,” he says. “When the radio is working — which it hasn’t been for the past few weeks — I’ll listen to NPR sometimes.” The only time he sees a fellow prisoner is during his three weekly outdoor-recreation hours. He has a wife and three daughters whom he last touched in 1989.

Every prisoner in the federal system is expected to participate in some kind of rehabilitative “program”—drug or alcohol treatment, vocational training, factory work. To get out of ADX, a prisoner must not only follow the rules but do “programming” as well. Part of what makes Levasseur a “political” are his refusals. At Marion he refused to work in a factory that manufactured coaxial cable for the military. “They can step on me and keep me as long as they want,” he tells me, “but I’m not making military or police-related equipment, period. Never.” As for working in the furniture factory that recently opened at ADX: “I think using prisoners as indentured servants or slaves is fundamentally wrong.”

I ask him about the guards at ADX.

“I haven’t met one yet that’s from this area,” he says. “They’re all imported. The good thing about that is that, unlike Marion, they don’t have that good-old-boy network. It was terrible at Marion, everybody’s working for their cousin, you know, and they would do some real brutal nasty shit to you and they knew they could get away with it. Here it’s not so bad because they’re all new here. My feeling is that, over time, that old-boy shit’s going to settle in. I think prisons foster that kind of thing.”