The holiday season is a time to be spent with loved ones—yet for the nearly 2 million people incarcerated in US jails and prisons at any given time, that’s not a possibility. Rattling the Bars host Mansa Musa and TRNN Editor-In-Chief Maximillian Alvarez discuss how the holidays are experienced behind bars. Click here to watch Max’s interview with Eddie Conway on being incarcerated during the holidays.
Studio Production: Adam Coley
Post Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
Mansa Musa: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa.
Maximillian Alvarez: And I’m Maximilian Alvarez, editor-in-chief here at The Real News Network. Don’t worry, I am here in The Real News studio keeping Mansa’s seat warm. We weren’t able to get him in the studio today, but we wanted to bring y’all this timely conversation because as we know, it is the holiday season. The holiday season, as you can probably guess, is the most painful time to be locked up out of the year, and we’re going to talk about that today. This is something of a tradition that I started with our dearly departed brother, mentor, and colleague Marshall Eddie Conway. As The Real News viewers and listeners know, brother Eddie Conway founded this show, Rattling the Bars, here at The Real News Network after being incarcerated for 44 years as a political prisoner. Eddie was locked up on trumped-up charges and held wrongfully for nearly half a century.
Afterward, before he joined the ancestors earlier this year in February, Eddie did incredible work here at The Real News Network and beyond, and it was truly, truly an honor to get to work with him, even for a short time. While I’ve been here at The Real News Network as editor-in-chief since October 2020, I only got to record one one-on-one interview with Eddie. It was this interview that we did two years ago on this topic where I wanted to talk to Eddie about why it is such a devastating, lonely, and painful time to be incarcerated around the holidays and what folks watching and listening could do to support those who were locked up, their families, and their communities this time of year.
I wanted to keep that tradition alive and asked Mansa if he’d be okay with me coming back on his show. Mansa has taken over hosting duties this year, and it’s been incredible to work with him and watch the show grow under his leadership. I’m sorry you can’t be in the studio with me today, brother, but I appreciate you agreeing to have me back on so we could have this conversation. We both agree it’s really important to remind folks this time of year not to forget about our brothers, sisters, and siblings who are locked up right now. So I wanted to start there.
Eddie, as I mentioned, was locked up for 44 years. You, as you’ve talked about on this show, were locked up for 48 years. I was wondering if we could start by having you talk to folks out there who have never lived through something like that, and couldn’t even imagine what living through something like that entails, could you talk to us about what it’s like? As much as you can? There’s only so much we could ever understand about it but for folks out there watching and listening who want to know, what would you say to folks out there about what it’s like being locked up around the holidays, why it’s such a painful time, and what folks on the outside don’t see about what folks are thinking and feeling and what’s going on on the inside around this time of year?
Mansa Musa: Yeah. Max, I’m glad you did bring this up because there’s a myriad of things that go on during this time as far as holiday and the effect it has on men and women who are held captive on the plantations. The Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the bah-humbug, all these adjectives are descriptive of the prison administration’s overall mannerisms and dispositions towards people who are incarcerated or held captive, in terms of acknowledging or seeing the holidays and making a connection between the holidays and humanity.
Be mindful that all of them celebrate the holidays, the guards come in on Christmas, they drink, they celebrate the holiday, they celebrate New Year’s, they celebrate Easter, and they celebrate Thanksgiving. So they celebrate these holidays but there is a disconnect when they come into the environment because in the environment they’re not prone to express or show any type of humanity as a general principle. It’s not everybody but as a general principle. So it’s against that backdrop that you see the evolution of – And this is where I want to take this – When you say how is it in prison for people during the holidays and across the board, it’s depressing. That’s a given fact. What we amass out of being depressed or what we act out on.
It’s depressing because one, you can’t be with your loved ones, two, you have limited access to them, and three, for most people, we live for years of being incarcerated and aren’t able to have any impact on our family during this period or revisiting how when they were growing up, they had the disadvantage. I know from my own experience, I became numb to the holidays in terms of any type of celebratory activity. As comrades, we would do little things together; drink homemade wine, stuff like that, and that was how we interacted with each other, reminisced about what we did on the street. But overall, the prison environment has a blanket of depression over it.
They give you a traditional holiday meal – So you’re feeding 1,600 people, or you’re feeding 2,000 people, or you’re feeding 2,500 people – All the delicacies are coming out: the pies, the turkey, any of the delicacies that are coming out during that period, they’re fair game for the black market. So you might go into the kitchen and they might say, we got pies on the line. It depends on what line you coming through because by the fourth line, all the pies might have been stolen, and then you get jello. Then that’s even more depressing because this is what you wrap your mind around. It might seem a little mundane, but this is what we wrap our minds around. It creates more tension and more depression because you’re trying to serve so many people at so much time, you try to get them in and get them out, the food might not be well prepared, and the food might be cold. That creates a sense of tension. So overall, that’s the atmosphere in general that you find in prison.
Now, when you look at how do we deal with it? I’m reminded of this in, I want to say ’84 or ’83 in the Maryland Penitentiary, the prison had so much tension between the officers and the prisoners, that it got to a point where the younger prisoners decided they weren’t taking anymore. So it was an all-out war with the police. So they were in the yard slinging knives and they came in, they shot some of them with real bullets and whatnot, and we went on lockdown at the Maryland Penitentiary. We were on lockdown around October and we stayed locked down until November. The warden back then was calling out the inmate representatives to try to get… They knew they couldn’t leave the jail like it was, it was going to become unmanageable. The longer we stayed locked down, the more unmanageable it was going to become. It wasn’t healthy for anybody. So they were calling up these guys to talk about how can we resolve this?
What happened was we created what they call family day. So now in terms of how we deal with it, this is how we deal with it, we always try to create some program, project, or activity where we bring our families into the prison. We were able to try to get that, that’s the part of this that goes unnoticed by society. We had a family day, so on family day we had toys, we were able to have unlimited family members come in, unlimited children come in, and they gave you two hours in the auditorium. You selected your time and your date. Your kids were able to come in, they were able to get some toys, and you were able to interact with your family. But that didn’t come from the prison administration. That didn’t come from them saying we need to have a sense of humanity or what can we do to create an environment where we have these men and women feeling some sense of community and some emotion towards their family? So that’s how we dealt with it on one level.
Maximillian Alvarez: I want to ask a little more about that. This is something that Eddie and I talked about two years ago when we talked about this same topic. I know this is something that you on the show and Eddie on the show before, are constantly stressing: The person it makes out of you when you are living in these inhumane conditions in prison, the modern-day plantations, when you are so thoroughly cut off from the outside world and your family, your community. Not only in the physical sense like you are imprisoned in a cell for years on end, you could even be in solitary confinement for Christ’s sake, but also all the other ways that the prison-industrial complex cuts people off from their support network. You can’t even hug your family anymore. A lot of these prisons will only let you talk to your family through a phone, a video phone machine that you have to pay an arm and a leg for to see your loved one for a few minutes. But you lose that human touch, you lose that sense of intimacy. That’s all gone.
And Eddie and I talked about what that does to you as a person, especially around the holidays, because it’s a time when we remember from our childhoods being around our family, being in that warm embrace of community, of togetherness, of celebration, and that makes it all the more painful to not have that. I do think during the first couple of years of COVID-19, when a lot of us were in lockdown and staying at home, those of us who could – Of course, many people had to risk their lives to get a paycheck at that time – But for those of us who were staying inside and working inside, we got a tiny, tiny taste of what that isolation is like the cabin fever, and everything else.
One of the profound realizations that I came to was I was falling apart as a human being, not being connected to other people. My body is hurting more, I’m letting myself go, I’m not sleeping well, I’m not happy as much. Even that momentary isolation from other people made me start falling apart so I can’t imagine what it’s like to endure that in the worst place imaginable. You and Eddie were in for over 40 years. I wanted to ask if you could talk about that; Why it was so important for you guys to fight for that family day, what does it mean to not have that, and how does that all boil over around this time of year?
Mansa Musa: That’s a good question. In George Jackson’s, The Prison Letters, in his intro, he talked about the struggle is the struggle for our individuality. Everything they do has us function on a herd instinct, that we’re lumped into this plantation mentality where we’re numbers and we operate accordingly. So holidays in prison, it’s probably the most depressing time for a person. But then you put on top of that when you find yourself like, I’m in prison and I’m serving multiple life sentences. I’m in prison and I have a 2029 release date. It’s 2019 and the environment is so unruly and so disruptive that for the most part, this is the environment that you find yourself in now. For the most part, you stay in lockdown. So to not be consumed by that environment, you try to maintain your sanity by being focused on what your priorities are, in terms of how you adjust. Then you’re going to put on top of that, it’s a normal way of living.
I got to come out, I got to try to maintain my sense of sanity. All right, now what’s the problem? We were on lockdown. But then you put on top of that a holiday, and every time you turn on the TV it’s “Jingle Bells,” “Deck the Halls,” a turkey, an Easter bunny, it’s somebody with a crazy mask, a Freddie Kruger mask on, it’s Halloween. You try to relate to those things because of your family but at the same token, you can’t internalize them in terms of having no sensitivity towards them. I’m going to give you an example; I had a life sentence. Before I got my sentence cut, everything I saw on TV I looked at it as if I was looking through a magazine. It’s unattainable, it has no meaning other than my senses absorbing it for references in conversations or whatever.
So that’s what I was thinking. Holidays, the same way. I talk to my family, and I go through the motions, but I’m not internalizing it. When I got my sentence cut and I was in the pre-release system and I knew I was getting ready to get out, I was looking at the TV and I saw something… I got out December 5, 2019, so leading up I talked to the people about Thanksgiving, and they’re talking about the turkey and they’re saying, yeah, next time we going to make sure that we get your favorite whatever because you going to be here next Thanksgiving. Then the same thing with Christmas. I’m sitting back, and to resonate with your point, I still couldn’t grasp that I was going to be in an environment where I would be able to engage in this because I had been so institutionalized to suppress any emotions towards it.
So when I finally did get out I was in a festive environment and I got my family and kids around and they doing what kids do, the ones that believe in Santa Claus, the ones that are excited about what their parents got, I couldn’t really embrace it. Other than I was looking at it, I was feeling good about it, but I couldn’t get into the mood because I had suppressed it for so many years. That’s where the problem is because the system doesn’t provide you with this opportunity to humanize yourself. That’s why family days became important. That’s why we sat down, Eddie included, we got together in this environment and came up with ideas like what can we propose to the administration to give us to humanize these people, to get their families in here so they can be humanized enough to have some hope about getting up out of there.
As I said earlier, because it’s a depressed environment, you have a high substance use disorder that goes on during that period. Whatever it is that they can use to get their mind altered, they’re using it. You have a high assault rate because of a short fuse. You might be one of the people that’s like I’m not going to let it bother me so you might walk around with a homemade Santa hat on. And now you made me mad because I’m depressed. So now I say something crazy to you about, man, take that piece of cardboard off your head. You say this is a Santa hat. I’m Santa Claus. Make a wish. Now I’m ready to kill you. And they saying, oh, man, they locked in jail. And they say, why? Slim in dorm two was fighting Santa Claus.
Because I can’t relate to that and the person that can relate to that, we clash. The institution’s whole design is to make us feel less than human. They want to make sure that we feel that we are actually under the 13th Amendment, that we’re servitude because of what we’ve been convicted of, and that we have a servitude disposition, and that’s it, that’s all. Anything you get from us during this period is us doing that because that’s what we want to do, not because we feel a sense of humanity towards you.
Maximillian Alvarez: Right. This was something that Eddie mentioned as well two years ago when we talked was the transfer of hostilities. Moments when you’re passing people in the halls, maybe you bump into someone and it could flare up because of everything you described. All that stuff that’s going on under the surface, all the dehumanization that you’re feeling because of the institutional dehumanizing setting that you’re locked in, that’s why suicides are highest this time of year. Again, I’m sorry everyone out there for the heavy subject, but we can’t look away from this. We have to acknowledge why so many people, our fellow people are killing themselves, ending their lives on the inside around this time of year. We need to understand why, and we need to understand what we could potentially do to help, lessen that burden.
Of course, we know that dismantling this monstrous prison-industrial complex needs to be the ultimate goal, and Mansa reminds us of that every single week with the incredible work that he does on this show. But in the meantime, while we are working towards that goal, Mansa, I wanted to ask if you could share with us some thoughts on what people out there watching and listening can do like you and Eddie did when you were thinking of ideas of how to maintain that human connection with people on the inside. What can folks out there who are watching and listening to this right now do to show a little bit of love, a little bit of kindness, and a little bit of humanity to those on the inside who receive so little of it, especially around this time of year?
Mansa Musa: You know what, Max? You mentioned earlier about how the system is set up such that it makes it more impersonal for us to communicate with our family. You get emails, you get video visits, you don’t have contact visits, and then you don’t have a lot of time to spend with your family. The main thing that people in society, in this country, and around the world at large should think about is how would you feel if you found yourself in an environment where a holiday came up, and the only reason why they’re not letting you have a contact visit to visit your family that day is because they’re short of staff or they don’t feel like that’s important enough. The thing that we need people to understand is it’s imperative for you to impact and change the policy. These are your tax dollars that are going to keep these plantations alive and bussing.
It’s imperative that society voices its opinion about that. Everybody doesn’t have a life sentence in prison. Everybody doesn’t have a triple life in prison; They’re coming out of prison ultimately, eventually. So it’s imperative that people recognize that you need to talk to your congressional representative, you need to talk to your state and local representative so why not allow families to have conjugal visits? Why not allow the husband to have a conjugal visit with his wife? Why not allow the husband or the mother to have her children come into an environment where the mother can be an essential part of the child’s life in a structured environment? Why not? What’s the problem with that? They’re coming back out into society.
So it’s imperative that people recognize that we’re human beings. I always say this whenever we talk about a subject matter, I’m always reminding people that we’re talking about human beings. We’re not talking about animals, we’re not talking about people who don’t have feelings, who aren’t remorseful about the things that they might’ve done in the past, who have not displayed that sense of remorse in terms of how they change. We are talking about people that have feelings and are human beings. We’re not asking for you to ignore that something happened. We’re saying look at the person and look at the situation and the condition that that person is in. If the design of the system is to help a person better themselves – Because I’m always reminding everybody of this – The sentence is what you get. It’s crime and punishment; The crime is what I committed, what I was charged with. I’m sentenced, and the punishment is my sentence, how much time.
The punishment is not how you dehumanize me, how you subject me to the most inhumane conditions. No, the sentence is to try to get me in a state of mind where ultimately I will return to society. When we look at prisons throughout the US, we know for a fact today that prisoners are creating programs, projects, and activities to try to get society, its members, family members, and the community to come into the environment so they can show them that they’re human beings and they can try to get them to organize around changing the narrative when it comes to the prison-industrial complex and mass incarceration.
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. That’s so beautifully and powerfully put and it’s something that we so easily and willingly forget that supposedly the whole point of this system is to rehabilitate people. How are you going to rehabilitate someone when you have smashed their humanity to bits? How are you expecting them to reintegrate into society after that? The answer, again you cover every week on this show, is clearly that’s maybe what the system says it’s here for, but that’s not what it actually does. It’s there to break people. It’s there to swallow people up. It is there to disappear people into the bowels of a prison-industrial complex that is so cold and so unfeeling and is so good at extracting money from everyone who is touched by it, from the prisoners themselves to their families, to the communities that they’re in.
I want to wrap this up, Mansa, first by thanking you again for agreeing to do this, but also to maybe end on not necessarily a positive note, but a slightly lighter note. Let me be the first to say from all of us here at The Real News… This episode which we’re recording here at the end of November is going to come out next week. So from all of us here at The Real News to you, happy release day on December 5. Brother, we are so grateful to get to work with you. We’re so grateful to get to see you out and about doing the incredible work that you do. We love you, and we are so happy for you and we know that everyone watching and listening to this is also sending their best to you on December 5. Also, Merry Christmas, brother. I don’t know if we’re going to see each other before the holidays but I really hope that you can rest, relax, and enjoy what can be enjoyed after everything that you’ve endured. I wanted to end on that note.
As you said, the majority of people who are incarcerated are going to come home at some point. What can we also do to try to make the holidays a little better, a little kinder, a little more manageable for folks like that? Like the situation you were in 2019, I wanted to ask, has it gotten better at all? Are there parts of the holiday that you feel you can connect with or is that gone? Are there other parts of the holiday that maybe you’ve come to enjoy or appreciate since then? And what can folks on the outside do to help make that home for people who are returning from, as I said, the worst place imaginable?
Mansa Musa: I have gotten better because it’ll be four years, December 5. Today where I work, we were going to collect some toys for people who are donating toys. I work for an organization that deals with men and women coming out of prison and we normally give their family members a list to get their kids what toys they want. So we were going to collect the toys for the kids. Then I see the kids coming in and for me, that’s the important thing, for the parents that are locked up, when I see these kids with a smile on their face. So in terms of when we think about this, think about that the person that’s behind the bars, behind the wall, locked in the cell, that person is a human being, that person’s got family, and that person’s got children. You can invest in the children. You can invest in providing them with toys. You can look around and see who’s doing what in terms of that. You can be in a space where you can write to people who are incarcerated and encourage them. You can do all these things to help let them know that you look at them as human beings regardless of how the system looks at them.
It’s because of this network right here that we were able to communicate that to our viewers. When you talk about the Rattling the Bars that Eddie created, when I see from the response that I’m getting from our viewers on Rattling the Bars, we got some well informed and well educated and well opinionated viewers. This makes it good for us to be able to do this work and bring people this information so they can discern or analyze or critique whether or not they think it’s important for a prisoner’s child to have a toy, a prisoner that’s locked up to have a card come to them saying “Merry Christmas,” or to write their legislators and say we think that they should have contact visits so that the men and women that are married can have contact visits.
If you think that’s important in terms of humanizing that environment to ultimately dismantle it, we ask that you continue to support The Real News and Rattling the Bars so that we can continue to get this information out. Like Max said earlier, this is a subject matter that we take seriously because the people who are in this environment during this time are coming back out. Years of being dumped on and dumped on and their emotions are suppressed, when they come back out, it’s a no-brainer when they find themselves back into society that now, I got out. Now, I’m back in a society that looks at me as less than a human being, then they act out as less than a human being when we’ve got the opportunity to change that narrative right now. So we ask you to continue to support Rattling the Bars and The Real News. Max?
Maximillian Alvarez: Hey baby, it’s your show. Like I said, I’m keeping your seat warm. I thought that was beautiful. Any parting holiday messages you got for Rattling the Bars viewers and listeners, you close this out, brother.
Mansa Musa: For Rattling the Bars and The Real News folks, we appreciate your support. I definitely appreciate, more than anything else, I appreciate your feedback, because it’s your feedback that gives me a sense of direction in terms of what subject matters I’m trying to get out. Eddie would always say this to me when we were getting ready to get into a debate or something, he’d say, you know this, that we accept constructive criticism. This was his way of opening the door of like, okay, so don’t take what I’m saying personally. When people give feedback, I don’t take it as a personal affront to me. I take it as your views, and this is what The Real News is. Because guess what? We’re asking you to relay the news and continue to support us.
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