Jeff Smith, a former Missouri state senator and now assistant professor at The New School, is author of Mr. Smith Goes to Prison: What My Year Behind Bars Taught Me About America’s Prison Crisis, from which this article is adapted. (Copyright © 2015 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.)

The first correctional officer I saw had two teeth. I came in with a young black guy who mumbled and a 40-ish Chinese man who spoke broken English, but at least I could decipher their words. The correctional officer, or CO, was impossible to understand. Manchester Federal Correctional Institution is tucked in a desolate Southeastern Kentucky mountain hollow and sits snugly in a crater atop a former coalmine; this CO had apparently not traveled far.

He sent me to a heavyset nurse, who had a battery of questions.“Height ’n’ weight?”


“Five-six, 120 pounds.”

She frowned at my slight frame. “Education level?”

“Ph.D.”

She shot me a skeptical look. “Last profession?”

“State senator.”

She rolled her eyes. “If ya wanna play games, play games. You’ll fit right in here. We got ones who think they’re Jesus Christ, too.”

Another CO escorted me to a door-less bathroom. “Stree-ip,” he commanded. I did. “Turn ’round,” he barked. I did.

“Open up yer prison wallet,” he ordered.

I looked at him quizzically.

“Open yer butt cheeks!”

I did.

He manhandled me roughly. “Alright, you’s good to go.”

The final stop was the counselor’s office. He was a compact, sandy-haired man wearing a light blue shirt and a wispy mustache. He flipped through my presentencing report, pausing briefly to absorb the case summary and shook his head. “This is crazy,” he said quietly, without looking up. “You shouldn’t be here. Complete waste of time. Money. Space.”

Exactly, I thought. Finally, someone agreed with me. But now, it was too late.

***

Six months earlier, with a nervous spring in my step, I’d bounded onto the elevator up to my lawyer’s office. A vaguely familiar man inside smiled slyly and asked, “Gonna run for Congress again, Mr. Smith? Or City Hall?” My heart pounded—it hadn’t stopped since the Feds had thumped on my door at 7 a.m. that morning. I numbly replied, “Right now, sir, I’m happy in the state senate.”

But I realized I would never reach Capitol Hill or City Hall. The walls were closing in, and it all stemmed from my first, much-ballyhooed political race, back before I was a state senator. In 2004, as a 29-year-old political nobody, I had challenged the scion of Missouri’s most beloved political dynasty for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, coming up just short of the Democratic nomination. Media accounts had named that campaign one of the nation’s most surprising, featuring the young, 650-strong volunteer army that had powered our team from literally zero support to a near-win. An award-winning film chronicling the race, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?, would earn a cult-like following.

But the campaign had a dark underbelly the filmmaker hadn’t seen. A few weeks before Election Day, two of my aides had been approached by a shadowy man who wanted to produce a postcard highlighting my leading opponent’s dismal legislative attendance record in the state legislature. I was pretty sure campaigns couldn’t legally coordinate with an outside party. I was also pretty sure it happened every day, without consequence. After a brief discussion, my aides asked if they should move forward.

Whatever you guys do, I said, I don’t wanna know the details. Understand?

They nodded.We agreed to never speak of the matter again.

The postcard dropped in the campaign’s last week. It was a 3x5 picture of my opponent on a milk carton. “MISSING: RUSS CARNAHAN,” it read, and in tiny print detailed his absenteeism. The design was totally amateurish—a joke, really. We laughed and shook our heads. ButCarnahan filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, alleging that my campaign illegally coordinated with the postcard’s producer.

Long story short: Five years after losing the election, I pleaded guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice for impeding the federal investigation Carnahan had initiated. But I requested an unorthodox sentence: two years of home confinement and full-time community service during which I would be allowed to leave my house only to teach civics and coach basketball at a St. Louis charter school I’d co-founded a decade earlier. It would’ve saved taxpayers about $175,000: two years of a teacher’s salary, plus the cost of housing a federal prisoner, since I would’ve paid for my electronic monitoring. More than 300 people, including a bipartisan group of the state’s top elected officials, wrote public letters to the judge requesting clemency and arguing that—as the prison counselor in Kentucky would later note—locking me up would be a waste. But the Feds portrayed me as the mastermind of a “textbook case of political corruption” and pushed for a harsh sentence at the top of the federal guidelines. The judge gave me a year and a day in federal prison.

Six months later, I was adrift in a sea of sharks—a professor-turned-politician-turned-felon forced to learn prison patois and the politics of survival. Among other areas, I’d studied and taught criminal justice policy as a political scientist for a decade. But in prison I would be the student, not the teacher.

This is the story of what I learned—about my fellow prisoners, the guards and administrators, and the system in which we operated. It is a cautionary tale of friendship and betrayal. It is a story of how politics prepared me—and didn’t—for prison, and how prison prepared me for life. But more broadly, it is a scathing indictment of a system that teaches prisoners to be better criminals instead of better citizens, and a prescription for how America can begin to decarcerate and harness the untapped potential of 2.2 million incarcerated people through programs that will transform offenders’ lives, infuse our economy with entrepreneurial energy, increase public safety and save taxpayers billions by slashing sky-high recidivism rates.

As a senator, I’d authored and passed legislation to reform Missouri criminal statutes, without consulting any correctional officers. But once the gates slammed shut, the tables were turned: COs had the power and exercised it ruthlessly. They—along with the prisoners—were the ones who knew the score, and my education in the so-called “convict code” would be rocky.

***

After intake, we received our uniforms and were taken up the yard. About 50 prisoners lifting weights and doing pushups spotted us and began circling, drawing a larger crowd who hollered at us. The CO took me to a second-floor cell-block and nodded at a cell containing a guy in a black do-rag in the bottom bunk. As the only white guy on the block, I was a source of curiosity. My cellie, whose freckles gave him a striking resemblance to Morgan Freeman—sure enough, guys called him “Red” after Freeman’s Shawshank Redemption character—sized me up. “White colla?” he asked, with a mix of disdain and bemusement.

“Yep.” He had some attitude but I wasn’t about to give any back.

“What you done did?”

“Lied to the feds.”

“Damn, how’d they get you?” asked a guy next door with dreadlocks, a Rasta cap and a Jamaican accent.

“My best friend was wired.” He was the one who had, on tape, spent several weeks enticing me to admit my knowledge and de facto approval of the postcard.

A chorus of “day-um,” “sheeeet” and “bitch-ass-nigga” rained down.

Then somebody said, “Dude need to get chalked,” referring to the chalk outline around dead bodies at crime scenes.

A chorus of “Hmm-hmmm"s.

Under 30 seconds, and it was unanimous: Someone should kill my ex-best friend. I made a mental note to stay on these guys’ good side.

Red had spent 25 years in and out of federal, state and county jails on a dizzying array of charges. One of the first prison codes he taught me involved dining etiquette. On my second day, I sat down with guys from my cell-block. Immediately people stared; Red put down his fork. “Listen, cellie, is you tryin’ to start a muthafuckin’ riot on your first day?”

“Huh?”

“Look around, cellie. What you see?” he asked.

I shrugged, confused.

He shook his head. “How many white folks you see eatin’ with the kinfolk?”

I looked around. “None.” I ate quickly and left.

As I walked back to the unit alone, a beefy, goateed white guy with a sleeve of swastikas and a thick drawl approached. “Boy, is yew some kinda nigger-lover?” he demanded.

“No,” I said, figuring it wasn’t an opportune time to reveal my black studies major.

“Then sit with y’own kind tomorrow at chow.”

“OK, my bad. See, that was my cellie. … I just got here.”

“They put you with a nigger?”

“Uh, yeah.” Not the kind of language I tolerated on the outside, but since there was no gang of Jewish tax lawyers who had my back, I let it go.

“Don’t worry, I’ll fix it. I’m Cornbread. Holla if ya need seomthin’, ya hear? But lemme find out you’seatin’ wit the niggers again, you just lemme find out,” he warned with a sinister grin.

I’d gotten off easy. Violating this rule could have harsh consequences, I would learn. Eating with members of another race could get you hurt; sharing food items could get you killed.

This was the reality of prison. The biggest threats don’t come from the obvious places—the sex-crazed guy who jumps you in the shower or the muscle hired by the bookie to collect debts. The biggest threat comes from the myriad quotidian interactions that can go horribly wrong, for reasons unfathomable to the uninitiated.

***

A week in, a CO awakened me at 6 a.m., summoning me to the administrative building. I thought it either meant that my request to teach GED courses was granted or that I’d received mail requiring my signature. The only glimmer of good news en route to prison had been a literary agent’s interest in working with me, and I had asked her to send a contract if she were so inclined. So I’d been carrying a pen and napkins with me everywhere—paper would’ve drawn unwanted attention—and started quietly jotting down notes when I learned new prison norms or when interesting conversations or incidents happened.

But Red, who I’d thought was still asleep, caught the spring in my step. “They ain’t call you down at 6 a.m. to sign no mail,” he said assuredly. “And they sure as shit ain’t do it to tell you you gon’ be teachin’ no convicts.”

I was led into a large, barren room. A stocky man with a shaved head, goatee and brown shirt and tie combo identified himself as the prison captain—if prison were private school, the captain would be the dean of discipline—and I stood facing him.

“Inmate Smeeth,” he sneered, slouching in his seat. “How long was you in politics?”

“About a decade.”

“Hmm. … Well, then, you prolly know more about politics than I do, dontcha think?” He was enjoying himself, and paused to savor his tobacco plug. “And how long you been in prison?”

“About a week.”

“Well, I been workin’ in prisons 18 years now. So who you think knows more ’bout prison?” He’d hit his stride.

“Probably you,” I said.

“Yeah, prolly so. And so I got a lil advice. You know what blendin’ is? Cuz you ain’t blendin’ so good. And this book you’s writin’ ain’t helpin’.”

“Well, sir, I hope to make the most of my time and write it while I’m here.”

“Hm. It’s rules against conductin’ a business outta here. We been reviewin’ some things and we think it might be against the rules.”

“I read the rules. They said inmates can’t operate a business. The way I interpreted that, I’m not conducting business—like selling pornography or tattoos. I wouldn’t receive a penny while I’m here. So it doesn’t seem like I’m breaking a rule.”

“That how you interpret it? See, Inmate Smeeth, thing is, this ain’t no Senate. Ain’t no Supreme Court. This the B-O-P [the Bureau of Prisons]. … If I think you’s conductin’ business, then you’s prolly conductin’ business. And if you ain’t, I’ll throw you in the SHU [solitary confinement] for six months while I find out.”

The next day, I received my work detail: unloading trucks in the prison food warehouse. My colleagues weighed 230, 230, 250, 260, 315 and 350 pounds,and we moved all of the incoming food in and out of massive freezers—approximately 35,000-40,000 pounds per day. This gave me a close-up look inside the bowels of the prison-industrial complex. Much of the meat, mostly in patties, had expiration dates of 2006 or 2007. It was 2010. It’s not that any of us thought that we deserved filet mignon. But that we were fed such obviously stale and repulsive second-hand food reminded us exactly what the system thought of us: We were not quite animals, but not quite human.

***

Miss Horton, a squat, gruff, chain-smoking CO with spiky gray hair, supervised the food warehouse. On my first day, she told three of us who were starting together that if we didn’t steal food, she would feed us well. Like the veterans, both of my first-day colleagues left that day with a dozen chicken patties Saran-wrapped around their chest and produce stuffed into every bodily nook and cranny, to be sold once we returned to the yard. I wondered how much demand would fall if customers knew the conditions of transit. But bodybuilding is central to prison culture, and bodybuilders needed extra nutrition, given our starchy diet. Key to that was the warehouse crew siphoning off bags of raw meat while throwing boxes from man to man.

I’d promised my family that I wouldn’t break any rules in prison, but soon, another prisoner approached me and said that I’d better start stealing immediately because if I didn’t, one of my colleagues would plant raw hamburger meat in my coat. (Since I wasn’t stealing, they feared I’d rat them out.) I didn’t know whether to trust this; I thought he might be setting me up.

There were four levels of formal violations, or “shots.” Series 4 shots were the prison equivalent of jaywalking. Series 2 and 3 infractions—fighting, bribing a CO, having manual intercourse during visitation (yes, I saw this happen)—were more serious and could earn you six months in the SHU and transfer to a medium-security facility. Most serious were Series 1 breaches: murder, inciting a riot, etc. Because of fears about E. coli’s deadliness, theft of raw meat could be Series 1, causing new charges and transfer to a high-security prison’s SHU.

Solitary scared the shit out of me. Prisoners who lived it described claustrophobia, rage, depression, hallucinations and self-mutilation—slow-motion torture. Yet now, just two weeks in, the possibility of the SHU was real. Should I trust the guy who warned me that my colleagues thought I was a rat? Or was he just trying to trap me into stealing so that he could rat me out?

I waited for Miss Horton take her smoking break, drifted backward a few steps, dug into a box of green peppers and frantically stuffed one in each sock and another in each pocket.

I turned back to the group and my colleague ’Ville guffawed. “Y’all check out the senator. He think he slick!” Our inmate supervisor, K.Y., just shook his head. “Senator, take them peppers out yo pocket,” he ordered. But no one noticed the peppers in my socks—which I only showed the guys after work. “Damn!” exclaimed ’Ville. “The senator be em-BEZZ-ling! He a regular convict now!”

There was no higher praise. To anoint someone a convict was the prison equivalent of endowing a professor. What I didn’t yet realize was that my first foray into prison hustling did more than just temporarily kept me out of trouble. It introduced me to a defining feature of prison culture: ingenuity.

***

B.J. was one of many fellow inmates with entrepreneurial drive. His twin obsessions—sports cars and redheads—were abundant in his previous life as a notorious Detroit cocaine dealer. But now, B.J.vowed that when he got out, he would fly straight. He’d purchased a porn website targeted at men with a fetish for women having sex on top of or inside luxury cars, with a special focus that explained his nickname. For $10,000, he had purchased the domain, the site design and the back-end work enabling financial transactions.

Prison was teeming with ambitious, street-smart men who had business instincts not unlike those of the CEOs who had once wined and dined me. Using somewhat different jargon than you’d hear at Wharton, they discussed promotional incentives (“I don’t never charge no first-time user”); quality control and new product launch (“You try anything new, you better have some longtime crackhead test it”); risk management (“I could make more money in lil’-ass Owensboro than if I went to Louisville and had to fuck with them crazy-ass thugs”); territorial expansion (“Once dude on the East Side got chalked, I had my dopeboys out on his corners ’fore that muthafucka’s body was cold”); supply chain management (“You always got to stock up a few days before Santa Claus come,” “Santa Claus” being public assistance payments); and barriers to entry (“Any muthafucka wanna do business on the West Side know they gotta deal with me”).

Ingenuity was a prerequisite for successful hustling, necessary for most prisoners to survive on sub-poverty wages (I made $5.25/month for a 40-hour/week job) and purchase hygiene products, pens and paper, stamps and haircuts. Ingenuity took many forms: cutting hair with toenail clippers, cooking grilled cheese with an iron or making weights out of boulders placed in laundry bags and tied around a bar for use during lockdowns. Many prisoners planned to use their ingenuity to start barbershops, restaurants or personal training businesses. Sadly, prisoners received no preparation to make their ideas a reality. No one to help them write business plans, or translate their intuitive grasp of business concepts into legal industries, not even an Internet connection to help them learn more or begin looking for jobs. And zero staff interest in rehabilitation. “You’ll be back, shitbird,” one CO liked to tell men on their way out the door, embodying the system’s attitude about prisoners’ potential redemption.

Upon release, 650,000 men show up each year on America’s doorsteps to try to succeed in communities where they once failed—now with the added baggage of prison records. Two-thirds will re-offend within three years, and the main reason is financial struggle. Most are unemployed, and are far more likely to commit a crime than are those with jobs. Seeking legitimate work can seem laughable when most employers won’t hire ex-offenders—state-sanctioned discrimination in jurisdictions without “Ban the Box” laws.

Prison education programs can help overcome this. The natural ingenuity of prisoners makes entrepreneurship education particularly ideal. But only when society stops seeing prison as a warehouse for society’s throwaways and starts seeing it as a costly waste of human potential will the status quo change. In B.J., in K.Y. (whom I helped with a business plan for a trucking company), in ’Ville (a former male exotic dancer who aspired to own a similar business that would cater to bachelorette parties) and in so many others, I saw an entrepreneurial passion that embodied the best of America—but was all too likely never to see daylight.



***

There’s one more important, and repugnant, major way in which our prison system fails prisoners and society more broadly.

Prisons have been called “training grounds for rapists,” and according to one estimate based on two decades of surveys, nearly 300,000 rapes occur annually in U.S. prisons. The most recent Justice Department data concluded that from 2003 to 2012, nearly 2 million inmates were sexually assaulted, costing society as much as $51.9 billion annually, including the costs of victims’ compensation and increased recidivism. Advocates hoped that passage of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which sought to prevent, uncover and address sexual assault, would help, but many large states have refused to comply with it (with little consequence). In 2011, a typical prisoner’s likelihood of being raped was roughly 30 times higher than that of a given woman on the outside, suggesting a depressingly steady trendline despite PREA’s passage. And since reporting assaults will only bring more trouble from fellow prisoners and COs alike, most victims remain quiet, rendering official prison data unreliably low.

Exacerbating this is a dearth of post-rape psychological treatment during incarceration and reentry, which increases the likelihood that victims will suffer from PTSD as well as their odds of recidivism—especially for crimes involving sexual assault. Tragically, prison rape often causes compensatory aggression as untreated victims commit rapes upon release to reclaim their manhood in the same way they imagine it was lost. This vicious cycle by which (frequently) nonviolent offenders become violent is the opposite of the duty that “correctional institutions” are meant to perform.

Two weeks into my bid, a CO ordered two dozen new guys into the admin building and showed us an orientation video featuring a nondescript white guy who warned us not to eat any sweets offered to us. He’d eaten the Snickers bar placed on his pillow, unwittingly signaling his predatory bunkie that he was willing. He described the horror of life as a repeat rape victim after that. Everyone laughed, but his story wasn’t unique; hundreds of prisoners are raped every day, and once victimized, a prisoner often must trade submission to one or two men in exchange for protection from the rest. Victims are usually the smallest, the nonviolent, the “fresh fish” (first-timers) and those charged with minor crimes. Middle-class prisoners with college degrees and those without gang affiliations are also likely targets. For those keeping score at home, I was seven for seven.

And yet, though there were frequent fights, one act of violence I did not see was rape. Actually, I saw love.

If felons were cars, Porkchop was as standard-issue as a Ford Taurus. He was 6’2” and husky, with close-cropped dark hair, a goatee and more tattoos than teeth. In and out of state and federal prison for nearly 20 year, his offense ranged from selling meth to kiting checks to stealing cars. He spent every waking hour smoking, on the weight pile or watching TV. A habitual offender, the law called him. To us he was just a regular thug, always trying to get over for a cigarette, a beef jerky or a pack of mackerel, the $1 protein source of choice at FCI Manchester.

The minute J.T. came on to the compound, Porkchop had his eye on him. Now, J.T. wasn’t flamboyant—not one of the dudes who wore makeup (grape Kool-Aid on the eyes, cherry on the lips, Tang on the cheeks). He wasn’t the type we got warned about by the gruff veteran staffer during orientation: “You might wanna move now if you got a single and go move in with somebody you know,” he’d warned. “You don’t wanna get a cellie with boobs.”

J.T. was just a regular drug offender who kept to himself other than the occasional poker game. But Porkchop took a shine to him, pursuing him quietly but relentlessly. First it was bringing J.T. into his “car,” the small group with whom he worked out. Then it was showing him how to make a nacho, a unique prison dish made in a bowl with rice, chips, beef jerky, cheese, beans, onions, peppers—most smuggled out from the warehouse. Finally, it was ironing J.T.’s greens before weekend visiting hours.

And then one day, as I walked down to the bathroom late one night, I saw it. They were in bed together, snuggling and talking quietly. I saw a newbie snicker, and then a prison old-head ice-grilled him. “It ain’t none o’ yo muthafuckin business,” said the look, and the newbie scurried back to his cell. After that, no one said a word about it. And it remained that way every night for the next few months until I left.

Anyone who has spent time in prison understands how dehumanizing it can be. And yet—whether it was B.J. running his website from prison, or K.Y. spending evenings with me learning to read as we worked on his trucking business plan and he taught me powerful lessons about forgiving my former best friend, or J.T. and Porkchop transcending stereotypically brutal prison sexuality to find comfort, companionship, even love—the human spirit triumph even in the most adverse environments. That should remind us not to write off 2.2 million people like so much refuse, and inspire each of us to play a part in helping incarcerated souls gain worldly redemption.

I spent less than a year in prison. In the words of my first cellie, I had less time in prison than he had done on the prison toilet. I had every advantage upon re-entry: I was a white guy with a Ph.D. from a top school, community and family support, and financial savings. Yet getting a decent job was a struggle. I often think about the re-entry of the guys I was locked up. Most had a GED earned in prison; some hadn’t had a visit in years, or even a decade, and had no one to call on the phone; few had savings to fall back on. They would be coming home to a world in which four of five landlords and nine of 10 employers run criminal background checks on prospective tenants and employees to screen out felons; a world in which many are not allowed to vote or use food stamps; and must immediately find money to pay for housing at a halfway and urinalysis tests even as they cannot afford clothes for a job interview.

Mass incarceration is driven in large part by sky-high recidivism rates, and when one contemplates the myriad obstacles to successful prisoner re-entry, one grasps that the system is not, as many claim, broken at all; rather, it appears to be a well-oiled machine, keeping millions of people out of our economic mainstream. And only a shift in our cultural mindset—a realization that people who are incarcerated could, to paraphrase President Obama after his recent prison visit to a federal prison, be our brothers, our sons, our mothers, or ourselves—will change that.