According to the Allegheny County sheriff, a very nasty, disruptive standoff occurred at SCIP when prison guards refused to remand Robert Wideman into the custody of sheriff’s deputies who’d been dispatched to the prison to execute Judge McGregor’s court order. For hours my brother was forcibly detained, denied his right to post bond and be freed. This after he’d been ordered earlier that day, when prison officials learned of McGregor’s verdict, to clear out his cell and prepare himself to attend a hearing downtown, where he could post bond and then go home.
To this day I don’t know why the DA said one thing and did another, why he didn’t honor Judge McGregor’s ruling nor respect my brother’s rights. I do know I was impressed by the courage of Judge McGregor, since the DA’s father just happened to be chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and one of the chief justice’s functions is to oversee administrative matters that vitally affect the careers of judges. Perhaps after making his initial decision, the DA was advised that an inexperienced prosecutor couldn’t afford the public embarrassment of losing a high-profile case and a high-profile prisoner at the start of a bitterly contested, who’s-tougher-on-crime election campaign in which he would be fighting to convince voters to ratify his claim to an office he’d gained by political appointment.
Robby was sentenced to prison because he made bad decisions and did bad things. He’s responsible for his actions and must carry forever the awful weight of having participated in a crime that cost a human being’s life. None of this alters the fact that courts and prisons, notorious for their racism, cruelty, and corruption, operate in a fashion that creates as many problems for society as it solves. My brother’s case confirms the general pattern of abuse and discrimination suffered by the poor, especially poor people of color, in the courts. The harshest sanctions are imposed upon them (no inmate in Pennsylvania convicted of a similar offense has served a longer sentence than my brother), and the poor have least access to protections the law provides. I know I may be jeopardizing my brother by accusing a powerful public official of complicity in the worst practices of the legal system. But for a good long while now, Robby and I have agreed that truth, as we understand it, needs telling, is worth telling; truth easy enough for me to risk stating, though not for him, since he’ll always be a kind of hostage as long as he’s in the penitentiary, liable to brutal or subtle retaliation for telling truths that might antagonize or embarrass his captors. Unfortunately, whether Robby keeps his mouth shut or not, prison remains a very unsafe place. During the twenty-nine years he has been incarcerated, few in power have stepped forward to lead any major reforms of the failed institution they serve and that serves them and us.
In 1981, when I began collaborating with my brother Robert on the project that became Brothers and Keepers, I hoped we both might find an outlet for our despair, anger, and helplessness at the point he commenced a life sentence in prison. I also harbored deeper, unspoken motivations. Perhaps this joint effort might reconnect two brothers who’d somehow become strangers to each another. Deeper still, at the level of dream and magical, wishful thinking, I hoped my brother’s story, if I wrote it well, would bring him home. As I learned more about prisons, a different sort of ambition manifested itself. Maybe my brother’s story, by bearing witness to the prison system’s waste, ineffectiveness, and dangers, might spur some readers to rethink an institution that encourages violence and perpetuates another very old American habit—old as slavery in Europe’s New World colonies—the habit of embodying in some stigmatized, segregated other those incriminating desires, fears, and deficiencies we deny in ourselves.
In the year of this book’s original publication, 1984, about 600,000 Americans occupied the nation’s prisons, jails, detention centers. Today over two million of us are locked down. In the same period of years, America advanced from number three to number one in the per capita rate at which First World countries incarcerate their citizens. The percentage of people of color in the USA’s total inmate population continues to rise daily, from approximately 25 percent in the early eighties to over 50 percent at the present moment. Since my brother’s chance for a new trial was stolen, I’ve watched a boom in prison construction, the growing popularity of brutal high-tech facilities, an intensifying racial and ethnic polarization among inmates, wholesale elimination of rehabilitation and educational programs, awarding of longer sentences, privatization of prisons for profit, post-9/11 federally funded security measures that curtail civil rights and criminalize dissent and difference. Given how fiercely and frequently we confine ourselves, is it any wonder, even without the chilling recent examples of Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, that the world is determined not to cede to America the moral authority to build an empire. And my brother remains in SCIP
A rather sobering context in which to begin writing a preface for Brothers and Keepers. A cold-blooded critic could complain that even in terms of the author’s professed intentions, the book fails on most accounts. To say nothing of the fact that writing any preface provides an occasion for melancholy as much as celebration. Though a preface appears at the beginning of a book, it also signifies the end. A little birth, a small death simultaneously. A project has reached completion. The pleasure of finishing, the privilege of presenting a work to readers, mixes with the pain of severing a vital relationship with the book’s material, losing an ongoing intimacy with the discoveries, challenges, and disappointments endemic to the creative process. I’ve been publishing for over forty years and still get a bad case of postpartum blues each time a piece of mine goes out into the world. Writing a preface to a reissued book that has already endured one career is doubly difficult—like one of your children who becomes an adult, the book will have suffered the wear and tear of predictable ass-kickings any life accumulates. A book’s potential to earn more life, also like your children, brings intimations of mortality. For a next edition, maybe some other writer will have to supply the preface.
Though quite pleased that Brothers and Keepers should be kept in print, and gratified by the thought the book may gain a new audience, I’m reminded of frustrated hopes, bitter ironies. So why present it again to the public? Money? Vanity? Do I still believe in miracles?
About two weeks ago I wrote a draft of a preface that I’ve since scrapped, because it turned out in too many respects to be Brothers and Keepers all over again. The preface described a visit to SCIP detailing the systematic dehumanization prisons are designed to inflict upon prisoners and their visitors. When I reread it, its depressing familiarity hit me. Little about my brother’s situation in SCIP had changed, except that he and his visitors had aged twenty years. We were all veterans, frailer, beaten up. Ironically, while we were growing older, the prison had become younger, more an outpost of the violent teenage streets that produce most of the inmate population. Younger, more dangerous, blacker, more overcrowded, more obsolete— so much so that a new prison was being constructed in a remote rural county far from Pittsburgh (its location a form of political patronage to rural voters), a facility to which Robby lobbies not to be transferred, since traveling there would add another expensive hardship for family and friends who wish to visit.
The worrisome, depressing familiarity of my brother’s plight did not justify the familiarity of my narrative address of it. What was the point of attempting once more to document the aching necessity of visiting. The preface I’d composed was going nowhere. I was upset, upset and even ashamed at the thought readers might believe I was asking them to feel sorry for Robby. Pity him, pity me. I recalled the great African American novelist Richard Wright, who took for his subject the lives of the poor and oppressed. Wright castigated himself, agonized over the possibility that his literary success might have depended on a talent for making bankers’ daughters cry.
This preface may not be the place to attack or defend the practice of writing, nor writing’s utility, nor literature’s relevance or irrelevance, nor literature as a force for achieving social justice, except to note in passing Theodor Adorno’s formulation—is poetry possible after Auschwitz—because Adorno memorably preserves the stark enigma presented by considerations of literature’s significance. More specifically, in this case, as I review my relation to Brothers