Jails aren´t built to house the successful, and I suppose Dad wasn't a success, especially since life seemed to have fallen apart around him. He was open hearted and friendly, my father, and I couldn’t imagine him as a prisoner. The failures that he was being punished for were no more than an emblem of his humanity.
Dad was an old school card player. He was brought up in a large family, the last of eleven children. He was born in 1911 or 1912, the records are unclear, in Brooklyn after the family emigrated from the region of Salerno in Italy. There wasn’t a radio or a book in his home and their dialect of Italian was the only language; he always joked and said that his father learned only one word in English,"sologobitch". On Sundays the women went to an early mass and then cooked. The men dressed up in their best clothes, ate and passed the time by playing cards. The kids watched and learned.
Dad loved cards and reading the papers and was going to have a lot of time to do both. His favorite games were gin and pinochle and draw poker; his favorite papers were the Daily News and the Mirror. Prison was his new home, at least for a while, and playing cards were the way people on the inside made the days go. The cons that he played with didn’t know "shit from shinola about cards" he said, but he never told them or let on that he knew, and like any smart player he didn’t rely on chance and usually won more than he lost. He flayed his fellow players so deftly that they hardly felt it. The guys that sat around the crate that they used for a table weren’t hardened criminals, and not even especially bitter. They were a mixture of white collar swindlers and conmen, drunks and drug offenders, brawlers and petty thieves. It wasn't like in the movies where "everybody in here is innocent". They were like dad, just part of the two million or so Americans doing their time, regretting their mistakes or at least regretting getting caught while making them and wishing that they could turn back the clock and do things differently. They were putting one foot in front of the other, keeping their sorrows and disappointments stowed away in inaccessible places, missing their kids and wives and girlfriends while paying a debt to a society that never gave most of them a chance.
Dad did his time in a low security facility, an open prison which the state euphemistically called a correctional institute, a name that promised lofty social ambitions but was just an obfuscation used to disguise the real purpose of the place, which was to exact a penance from law breakers and discourage them from committing new crimes. There wasn't any correction or rehabilitation to speak of, and even if the jail's main objective was containment there were no bars or cellblocks like in the really brutal prisons and no violence. It was natural of course that the men squabbled, but they did it quietly. Any infraction of the rules could mean that you could be moved down the ladder to one of the hell holes, and that threat kept everyone in line.
The men lived in dormitories and were placed defacto according to race and the seriousness of their crimes. They had kitchen privileges for their Saturday night meals, something to look forward to and break the monotony of the adequate but unimaginative prison fare. That was perfect for dad because he loved to cook. His culinary concept was basic. He made the same food that his mother made fifty years earlier and that my mother made for us, cuchina povera, macaroni and tomato sauce, with pork and sausage and meatballs with a piece of cheap beef thrown into the sauce to simmer for a few hours, veal parmesan, eggplant and lasagna. He used garlic and onions, oregano and basil that the guys that worked on the outside brought him and other ingredients that they received from visitors. They pooled their money and bought tomatoes and meat and Ronzoni pasta, and once in a while some good Italian bread would materialize. He fed them and then he cleaned them out at the card table. He took their pocket money and made them feel good about losing it, and then he shared the Pall Malls that he bought for his winnings at the commissary. He paid an installment on his debt to society by working in the prison barber shop, cutting his fellow inmates hair. He was a master barber and came from a family of barbers. Any education past the sixth grade was a luxury for most immigrant children in the early nineteenth century so he learned the barbering trade as a young boy by watching his older brothers and then opened his own shop before the war. His method of barbering was also old school. He used scissors, a comb and straight razor, but inside he'd have to settle for scissors, a clipper and a comb.
Like many working class people Dad was conservative and suspicious of anything he didn't understand. He never questioned authority. He liked Eisenhower and Nixon and distrusted Kennedy, so he voted Republican, but otherwise wasn't particularly interested in politics.
He accepted his lot in life without complaining and praised the society that saw him as nothing more than cheap, expendable labor. The late sixties were a time of a fermenting social awareness and the inflated rhetoric of the new left that in essence arose from feelings of unity with the disenfranchised had leached into the prison system. This social consciousness manifested itself in the anti-war, civil rights, and women's rights movements and he couldn't avoid being exposed to the heated discussions and tension caused by the injustice of the war in Vietnam and the other issues that blossomed during those turbulent times. Radical inmates said that incarceration was just another way of punishing the poor and uneducated; that poverty was the real crime in America and that the wealthy felt a need to protect themselves from it.
A former accountant doing time because the IRS thought he took too many shortcuts maintained that "Jail was just a modern form of the workhouse". A sandy haired, waspish, Vietnam War protester, entitled would be the word to describe him now, was doing jail time for resisting arrest and unlawful assembly. He called it non-violent disobedience and pleaded futilely that it was his constitutional right. The court also, absurdly, convicted him of breach of the peace because he was demonstrating in an illegal peace rally. In the exercise yard he talked about the "movement" and the "disenfranchised" with the fervor of a holy roller quoting the scriptures and spoke passionately about the need for solidarity between the exploited classes. Smitten by working class romanticism and its clichés, he went on about the need for all working people to unite against the establishment and overthrow the system. One of the inmates, a dark skinned jail bird who otherwise never let his feathers get ruffled, couldn't hide his irritation and gave him a burst of his street savvy, "Sheeyit! What the fuck yo ass know about bein' sploited white boy, po people don't want solidarity, they just wanna be rich".
Normally dad's philosophical musings were limited to a few idioms that mostly had to do with work and nature, platitudes like ”make hay while the sun shines, don't let grass grow under your feet, money doesn't grow on trees, etc". He had a favorite that he said in Italian, "he who sleeps doesn't catch any fish." His constants were work and more work and he never had any time to himself even if I later realized that all that work was in some ways a vehicle to escape the demands of my mother and my seven brothers and sisters.
Now that he was in jail he had lots of time to think. He said that the fences and locks didn’t bother him. They kept the world out, that jail was like a monastery. He said that he was freer than he had ever been. There were no requirements other than keeping your head down and following the rules and routines. He said that in prison you didn't ask a lot of questions so he watched the others and learned the rituals by inference. He said you learned them quickly or there could be unpleasant consequences. He knew intuitively the existential difference between being a prisoner and being in prison. He didn’t feel like a prisoner, he felt okay there, no bills, and a doctor if he needed one. He said "prisoners were the people on the outside, the strivers trapped on their treadmills, the people caught up in life's meaningless rat race. They were the ones in a cage. When you had nothing more to lose then you became free," he said. If you told him that his thinking was very much in accordance with Zen philosophy he would have sneered and said it was "goddamned bullshit." But still he was relaxed and at peace with his simple existence even if it wasn’t exactly a vacation. On visiting days he put on his best smile, and pretended that everything was okay but there was always tension in the air and a feeling of disappointment and melancholy. Still, he remained an affable and likeable guy, my dad. Fate had just shuffled his deck and gave him a bad hand. He said that he had made mistakes and had come to terms with his situation, but it really seemed as though he had given up. He had his vices and weaknesses but none of them had to do with arrogance or pride or laziness. Life had just battered him like it does all of us
This was a long time ago. Dad and all those men are doing their stretches in the graveyard now, no time off for good behavior or parole, just long sentences served in solitary.