Number 529

A close friend of ours has a brother in prison in southern Arizona.  He’s been in and out of jail for years for various disorganized crimes, all related to his drug abuse.   Mike is trying hard to keep a good attitude and do his time in as fine a form as he can.  At is sister’s request, I and other of her friends have written him letters of encouragement.  He responded with an upbeat letter focusing on his work assignment:  picking tomatoes and cucumbers at the huge Eurofresh greenhouse complex near the prison.

In the letter, he said that he won’t need much more spending money from his sister, because he’s going to be earning $80 every month.  That’s for working hard, more than full-time, harvesting in a hothouse in Arizona for about $2 an hour.  His take-home (take-cell?) pay, after various deductions including restitution and mandatory savings, is about 50 cents an hour.

So keep an eye out for the number 529 the next time you buy a whole case of perfect Eurofresh tomatoes still clinging to the vine.  That’s Mike’s stamp number – his only sign to the outside world that he exists and deserves some measure of dignity. In his letter he let us know this mark he is making on the world.  A unique and precious human life has been reduced to a number stamped on tomato boxes.

Number 529 represents one of over 2 million incarcerated Americans. Ours is the country in the world with the highest number of citizens behind bars, both absolutely and proportionately. All of these prisoners have stories, most involving crimes for which they were personally responsible. But when we consider the national statistics, there can be little question that we all share the responsibility. We have a frightful prison-industrial complex that lobbies for its own growth. It includes companies like Eurofresh that bargain for a cheap, steady source of labor. We have entire neighborhoods in cities around the country where the majority of men have spent at least some time in jail over their lifetimes. That means that most of the children in those neighborhoods live in families where one or more members of the family either are behind bars or have served time. The likelihood that those children will one day serve time in jail is much, much greater than it is for the children of people who have never been incarcerated. A nation with real “family values” would work overtime and make serious investments to support the children of prisoners so that the cycle is not repeated.

But are we even willing to look at the outrageous scale of the US prison system or the social malaise that has created it? In Marin County, where I live, we have a town of over 6,000 people located on the tip of a little peninsula sticking out into the Bay – a town better known as San Quentin State Prison. Our local State Assembly member and our County Board of Supervisors are pressing the state to close the prison and move the prisoners out of sight and out of mind, so that the land can be turned into a planned community of stratospherically-expensive homes. So that the commuters who ride the Larkspur ferry to the City won’t have to look at the men standing in the prison yard every morning. I was one of the daily passengers on that ferry for a while years ago, and engraved in my memory are those silhouetted figures waving at us from behind the razor-wire.

I ordered a salad with sliced tomato at lunch today, and it gave me a taste of the American gulag. A bitter-sweet taste, as I pondered the possibility that it had been picked by number 529...