This month's author spotlight is on David Matlin, author of Prisons: Inside the New America. David is a novelist, poet, and essayist who has taught literature and creative writing at San Diego State University since 1997. This book is based on his ten year experience teaching in a fully accredited college-level prison education program in New York State.

Q. How did you come to be teaching college courses in a maximum-security prison? And what drove you to stay?

In the early 1980s I was riding a bus from New York City to our then home in Saugerties, New York. I began talking to a fellow passenger and learned that he was resigning from a job teaching in a fully accredited higher education university program in a local prison. He was moving to another state so I asked about pertinent information and persons responsible for administration. A few weeks later I was interviewed and that began the ten-year experience which forms the basis of this book.

And what drove me to stay? The work and the lives of the people mattered and my experience with these men changed my life forever. Their struggle to overcome so great a negation created a sense of shared humanity I have rarely witnessed. I realized that many of the men I came to know behind those walls would never have gone to prison had their experience with basic educational institutions at the beginning of their lives not been so destructive. I came to know poets, Sufi mystics, Platonic scholars, and great teachers among my students, who taught me.

Q. Why are such prison education programs needed, and why has their funding been discontinued?

What country or society can or has ever been able to afford any historically sustained abandonment of any segment of its people? Such programs are essential if we intend to restore even the most basic framework of trust among ourselves. The higher education programs that once existed provided a sense of humane restoration for both the men who got this fine education and their communities. Unfortunately the Clinton Crime Bill of 1995 destroyed these programs, which constituted less than 1% of all funds spent on higher education on a nation wide basis. Our nation literally descended from that moment into its on going episode and strange triumph of mining its own population for industrialized storage and punishment.

Q. Why do you think American prisons hold such a disproportionate number of the world's prisoners, twenty-five percent to be exact?

Because no other nation has been able to nor wanted to reinvent its peculiar forms of racism as we have, and to transform that reinvention into a massive growth industry, a massive kidnapping and transformation of these persons into a new mineral and treasure. In the process we have become extremely skilled in the practices of brutality and savagery and how to hide these skills from ourselves.

The recent findings by Harvard's Civil Rights Project, for instance, in terms of the drop-out rates among California high school students are indicative of how poisoned this iceberg has become. For Asians the graduation rate on a state wide basis for the year 2002 is 83.5%; for Whites, 77.8%; for Latinos, 60.3%; for Blacks, 56.6%. For the city of Los Angeles, however, these numbers are much more troubling. The graduation rates for the same year for Latinos are 39%; for Blacks 47%, for Whites 67% and for Asians, 77%. The report's conclusions are that the public remains ignorant of the actual extent of this problem and that the state has been using "misleading and inaccurate" methods of accounting for the actual numbers. We know the despair begins in elementary schools both locally and on a nation wide basis and that these numbers translate into poor health, unemployment, increased crime, and bodies that can be mined for the prisons.

Q. Why are prisons so profitable?

Prison industry profits are intertwined with investment houses, architectural firms, construction companies, and support services specializing in transportation, furniture, food, medicines and medical care, fencing, drug detection devices, protective armor, washing and drying machinery, lighting fixtures, cameras, paving, wristbands, real-estate investment, advanced surveillance technologies, ammunition, electronic monitoring technologies, footwear, acoustics, cleaning materials, computer systems, fabric and linen supplies, floor safety treatment, guard tour systems, locker systems, mirrors, modular buildings, modular cells, office products, riot control equipment, telephone booths, wastewater systems, x-ray security, and screening equipment. The needs are endless. Each prison is a small city and the competition for these "services" is intense and has the potential for vast profit. The players are Nestle Brands, the major car manufacturers, AT&T, GE Plastics and Structural Products, Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, Southern Bell, South Central Bell, Southwestern Bell Telephone, Sprint, MCI, Media Link, Air Tech, Mitsubishi, Simplex, Smith Barney, American Express, Correctional Corporation of America with 48 prisons in 11 states, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, and Australia and there are thousands of companies constantly competing for this "industry's" needs. Populations that can be mined for this industry are renewable. In this too, our games of ignorance can be mined. The profits seem to be bottomless. Surplus "Others" can be transformed into invisible lucre at boundaries we do not want to see or hear.

Q. In what ways does the current state of our prison system place our democracy in jeopardy?

As I have tried to say in my book, the craft of such huge merciless cruelty, its commercialization, and the propaganda which authenticates and legitimizes its perversions destroys the bonds of common trust which make daily life possible in a democracy. We have infected ourselves with a savagery and have no idea how deep the infection is. The democracy at this point seems to have a broken neck.

Q. What specific reforms do you feel are necessary to counter the dire consequences of a prison system out of control?

The prison system as mining industry can only exist because of indifference and ignorance. We have now gone so far into the journey of absolute punishment and security that we no longer remember what compassion might have been nor how to apply it to the consequences of what we have done to ourselves. I don't know if "reform" is the proper term with all of its burden of intent which seems so similar to "corrections," but the possibility of initiating once more an experiment in prison education which includes both the prisoners, guards, and community resources might be a place to consider a beginning. That would mean we have to concentrate as much on this possibility as we have concentrated as a culture on the department of defense.

Q. What can a concerned citizen do to get involved in prison reform?

Perhaps what a concerned citizen can do is examine exactly why we have reinvented the central wound of racism in ourselves, and discover how unimaginable the price we have paid and will willingly continue to pay really is, in the same way we might examine exactly why we have concentrated and poured so much of ourselves into the department of defense and allowed such fantastic and fatal permission to take place. A democracy and its people as I understand it and continue to believe from earliest childhood, has the capacity to ask such questions and to recognize that one of the basic forms of health is the health that derives from the truth, no matter how inconvenient or ugly the truth might be.