The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Perhaps you've noticed a few of the short-timers -- those in minimum- and medium-security facilities serving "good time" and about to be released -- trimming bushes or mopping floors at the Empire State Plaza. They remain silent phantasms in their green work-release shirts and slacks, staring blank-faced into a middle distance, prevented by prison rules from speaking to passers-by. We, the free, avert our eyes and walk briskly past as if they belonged to an untouchable caste.

Even more imperceptible than these invisible men living behind prison walls are their wives, girlfriends, fiancees and significant others on the outside. There are no reliable statistics that enumerate how many women -- not to mention children and other dependents -- are waiting for the release of a loved one from a state prison. There are surely thousands of such women living among us in our cities, suburbs and rural communities, existing on the uncharted margins of the state's prison economy.

Stewart O'Nan creates an indelible portrait of one such woman in "The Good Wife" (Farrar Straus & Giroux; 308 pages; $24), an elegiac and deeply affecting novel set in Elmira, Owego and the Southern Tier.

O'Nan has written a gritty survivor's tale about Patty Dickerson, a small-town, low-achieving, working-class girl who married Tommy, a high school sweetheart, a few years after graduation. Tommy's parents died and he was raised by a grandmother, but had been living on his own in a crummy apartment since his senior year. Tommy supplements his lousy pay as a carpet installer by selling pot on the side. He often drives home drunk in his pickup after a night out with the boys at a local tavern. He seems to aspire to nothing more than scoring a goal in his rec hockey league.

Patty works hard to make their hardscrabble life and difficult marriage work, mainly as an affront to her embittered and critical mother, a joyless and tough single mom, and in defiance of the I-told-you-so attitude of a snooty, social-climbing older sister.

One night after a hockey game and bout of drinking, Tommy and a buddy decided to rob the house of an elderly widow who was supposed to be away. They ended up startling and killing the woman and setting fire to her house to try to cover up their crime. Tommy and his accomplice were quickly apprehended. His buddy saved his own neck by fingering Tommy as the murderer. Tommy is convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life.

Patty, who is in her early 20s at the time, is pregnant with her first child, Casey, who is born shortly before Tommy is processed and sent to Auburn Correctional Facility.

Left behind

Writing about the crushing weight of incarceration on the family left behind is where O'Nan -- author of eight previous novels, including the highly acclaimed "A Prayer for the Dying" -- is at his heartbreaking best.

O'Nan expertly captures the dehumanizing effect of the vast DOCS agency, which shifts inmates among prisons without first notifying the family. He describes long bus rides and excruciatingly long waits in the visitors' area on a weekend prison visit. He relates the awkwardness and humiliation that a father, bound and shackled, feels in meeting his young son on visiting day. He portrays the humiliation family members feel during searches and interrogations by cold-hearted prison guards.

O'Nan writes in spare, unflinching prose and paints riveting scenes of family prison visits: the bitter stares of guards, heated arguments punctuated by long silences, and the constant clink of quarters being fed into vending machines in order to indulge a prisoner in the rare luxury of consuming junk food.

It's hard to find hope about rehabilitation in this bleak landscape of criminal justice. There's an unrelenting grimness to the life that Patty's left with while Tommy serves out the maximum sentence after repeatedly being denied for parole. A single mother, she has to abandon her own apartment and move back in with her surly mother while raising a son with serious emotional problems. She earns paltry wages as a flagger on a town road crew. She puts all her hope and energy into applying, and eventually being approved for, overnight conjugal visits in a trailer within the prison walls. But these artificial matrimonial encounters prove unsettling, too-brief and a different form of torment.

Years later

The years pile up for Patty and develop a depressing sameness, except for when Tommy is willy-nilly relocated to a different prison, adding hours to Patty's exhausting weekend commutes for visitation. After awhile, back home, it's as if Tommy no longer exists. Relatives stop asking about him at holidays.

And yet Patty, a kind of upstate Everywoman, fiercely endures the 28 years Tommy spends behind bars. She is neither hero nor victim in O'Nan's unsentimental portrayal. She is flawed and often less than sympathetic, but she is resilient and committed to her son, her husband and his eventual freedom.

A graduate of the Cornell University MFA program, O'Nan, who lives in Connecticut, combines a novelist's touch with a journalist's knowledge of his material. In his acknowledgments, the author thanks Alison Coleman of Albany, director and founder of Prison Families of New York, a support organization for women like Patty. In the book's dedication, O'Nan also mentions Coleman, whose husband was sent to prison in 1981 for third-degree robbery involving $18, with no weapon or resulting injuries, according to his wife's account. Coleman's husband is serving 25 years to life. She is raising their two children.

From the inside

After finishing "The Good Wife," anyone interested in a gritty, inside view of the New York state prison system should get a copy of Ted Conover's book, "New Jack: Guarding Sing Sing," published in 2000. The immersion journalist spent a year working as a state correction officer after being denied access by state Department of Correctional Services officials to write a magazine article about the job.

Together, "The Good Wife" and "New Jack" offer a clear-eyed view of the dangerous, spirit-crushing, soul-destroying and corrosive half-life of the prison system, which taints both those left waiting on the outside and those toiling inside its high walls.

http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=416077&category=ARTS&news
date=11/6/2005&TextPage=1