Free A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden by Stephen Reid Page B

the women into a sit-down. Jan Wong would have problems holding her pen and a spoon, never mind hearing over the clatter of steel trays in the chow hall. David Frum would quickly become the warden’s clerk and write glowing columns on the humane treatment of Canadian convicts, and why no other prisoner deserves what he, the David, is receiving.
    Perhaps the days of prison literature have passed. Our society doesn’t lock up intellectuals, and our culture doesn’t encourage those locked up as criminals to learn to engage with their experience on any intellectual level. The discourse on crime and punishment, in our parliaments and newspapers, has been reduced to bumper stickers. Zero Tolerance: Three Strikes and You’re Out . We are a society impatient with its misfits.
    This procession towards orderly thought demands a moral consolation, not a confrontation. There is a turning away from the darkness and the turmoil, the wickedness and the sick livers. These things belong to someone else, something foreign, not us. No one wants these problems in their living room or in their literature.
    There is no “noir” left in American crime novels; the characters are all Republicans. The best prison books are written by non-prisoners. A novel called Green River Rising occupies the American paradigm so perfectly, it is shocking to learn it was written by an albino psychologist (Tim Willocks) from London, England. No other recent fiction, with the exception of Edward Bunker’s The Hate Factory , Little Boy Blue and No Beast So Fierce , comes close.
    In the Belly of the Beast , a work of non-fiction by Jack Abbott, a prisoner, has a great title and comes from a hard-forged mind, but it is his literary mentor Norman Mailer who succeeded in a true crime book of his own, The Executioner’s Song . The last major book to emerge from the dungeons in Canada was Roger Caron’s Go Boy , but this was more of a personal accomplishment than a blast from the zeitgeist.
    The decline in the genre is inevitable in the context of the reigning critical correctness. The prison writings that are competent enough to be published today are either so filled with facile remorse as to be obvious, or so seduced by the requirements of entertainment they become tales of false bravado.
    Rebuked by the public, prison authors have learned to write with shame, but not about it. Many choose to invert shame; most drown in it. The dignity so essential to authentic literature is not easily recovered in the aftermath of a crime and its punishment. The moral authority to express suffering is forfeited and everyone, reader and writer, in this age of absolutes feels uncomfortable stepping into the territory, the eventuality of reclamation. To enter through the gates of a prison, carrying the weight of your crimes, to hear that six-hundred pounds of steel slam shut, is to know absolute loss. Later we become belligerent or accepting, reflective or numb — often all of the above. But misfortune earned can become a profound privilege. To know absolute loss, to suffer real guilt, to look back on how you have betrayed most of what you thought of as decent and good — that is a stripped-down place indeed: a naked page on which to write down the lost language, that language which reflects the enormity of being born.
    Prison writing, to survive, must return to that reflecting skin.

T HE C LOCKWORK G REY OF THE CSC
    T HIRTY YEARS AGO, IN SIMPLER TIMES , I was sent to the penitentiary. They gave me a haircut, stitched a number above my breast pocket, and tossed me in a cell on the fish range. My biggest worry, besides my sentence, was whether I’d ever get the right-sized boots.
    It’s year 2000, and I’m back in prison. No haircut, I have to memorize my number, and my biggest worry is whether I’ll get the right crimogenic index rating.
    The fish range is now called an Assessment Centre. They have painted murals on the concrete,