One of the most commonly cited statistics in corrections department promotional materials is the one about how 95 percent of incarcerated people will come home one day. Legislators use it a lot, too, when explaining that we have to invest in rehabilitative programming since most prisoners will rejoin their communities. There is never the slightest suggestion that anyone in custody would be worth investing in if they weren’t going to get out; presumably we can just throw the other 5 percent away.
The 95-percent stat itself isn’t accurate; it’s from the early 2000s, and hasn’t been true for a long time. Today it’d be around 84 percent, and that’s with the extremely conservative assumption that the only people who won’t come home are the ones serving 50 years or longer. The United States Sentencing Commission considers a de facto life sentence to be anything over 39 years and two months. Which is about the average sentence length for prisoners in Georgia right now. Lifers aren’t the outliers that they used to be.
Mandatory minimums, “three strikes” or “repeat offender” laws, truth-in-sentencing laws, sentence stacking and the formal or informal elimination of parole were all already underway by the turn of the century, and even as the size of the United States prison population has changed trajectories a few times since then the proportion of people serving life has continued to grow. (This refers to people sentenced to life with parole, life without parole, de facto life, and the death penalty.)
Since 2020 when corrections officers across the country quit in droves amid the COVID-19 pandemic, lifers—specifically the long-timers who’ve already been in prison a while—have been the ones keeping the peace at their facilities, relatively speaking. But as their role becomes more critical, corrections departments are simultaneously treating them as more expendable. Moving the older and vulnerable folks into gang-controlled units to see if that diffuses the violence; skipping over them for basic resources and programming because they don’t factor into recidivism statistics.
For example, lifers are generally ineligible for medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD), just by virtue of being lifers; if a prison has a Suboxone program at all, it’s likely considered a re-entry service and only made available to people with release dates in the next few weeks or months. Even the more traditional, non-MOUD treatment programs, which mostly consist of group meetings with limited capacity, will prioritize the people whose counselors wrote it into their re-entry plan, or who were steered toward it by the parole board.
As the only people who have to stay in the system, lifers the only ones with any real reason to make it better. Or who know how anything works.
Jobs are also considered re-entry preparation. Meaning that on wait lists—rarely do prisons have enough jobs to go around—people are in some cases bumped up or down by release date. Lifers are already ineligible for many if not most of the best-paying jobs, because they can’t go to work-release camps. Even in states that don’t pay prisoners at all, lifers who are barred from those jobs can still find themselves cut off from basic resources that went with them.
Work assignments, educational or vocational programming, pretty much any meaningful way to pass the time—these things only exist in the context of re-entry, family reunification, public safety and reducing recidivism.
The few officers who do show up, to work 16-hour shifts while they bring in contraband to offset the low pay, are rookies who will quit in a few months. The private kitchen contractors, whose job is to spend less on food than the state would have, will continue to shrink the portions of the meal-replacement powders they serve instead of food because future health care costs aren’t their problem. The private health care contractors can deny necessary surgeries and stop ordering everyone’s blood-pressure medication so they can pass the savings to their shareholders, because they’re not sticking around either. So there is an obvious need to invest in lifers. As the only people who have to stay in the system, they’re the only ones with any real reason to make it better, and the long-timers are the only ones who’ve been around long enough to know how anything works.
Though lifers build up so much expertise about the prison system they live in, they’re rarely able to compare notes with lifers in other systems, or see how the forces affecting them fit in with what’s happening in the rest of the country. The following is a discussion between three lifers who’ve each been incarcerated for around 30 years, each in a different state and different type of prison environment. It was not conducted in real time but in stages, as each contributor’s responses were relayed back and forth. As such, certain responses have been organized for readability rather than reproduced in strict chronological order.
Tony Vick, in Tennessee Department of Correction custody since 1997, serving life without parole: In Tennessee the biggest way lifers are hurt is, we can’t get into any of the good prisons. All the good prisons are short term-only prisons, 10 years or less. So we can’t get to a prison that has good [programming], and less violence, because they’re all short-time prisons. They call a prison like this one a time-building prison, and they’re the worst prisons. Might as well call it a death-waiting facility.
Jonathan Kirkpatrick, in Washington State Department of Corrections custody since 1995, serving a 60-year sentence: In this state I think custody plays a bigger role than length of time. [But] length of time is factored into your custody, so for example I reached Minimum but they have a special designation, Long-Term Minimum and this is the lowest security level I can get. So we can be classified as Minimum, but we can only go to Medium-capable facilities. So we have to have two fences between us and freedom, is what that means. Some Minimum facilities, like [work-release] camps, don’t have any fences, some have one fence, but nobody Long-Term Minimum can go to those facilities.
Jimmy Iakovos (pseudonym), in Georgia Department of Corrections custody since the early 1990s, serving life with parole: Politicians with no experience with prisons make policy calls totally contrary to all that is known to work. That pressure recently caused [a mass transfer of lifers from Medium-security Calhoun State Prison] to make room for short-timers. Consider that the lifers there had earned Medium security and were accepting of the terrible heat and insects of Deep South Georgia, because they were left alone to live as comfortable as they could make it with phones and whatnot.
Now [Calhoun] is full of short-timers who know they are leaving in X amount of months. They are tearing the place apart because they have no reason not to.
Vick: I would dare say that the most change the younger inmates passing through, the most education and positive change they get are from the old-timers taking them under their wing and trying to help. That’s more than what the state will do for you. I say that without any hesitation. That’s why you have to invest in lifers, too. They are your constant support, constant teachers, constant moral police, constant peacemakers … lifers are the Ted Talks of the prison system.
The current ideology of what Americans think about prisons, it’s going more and more toward retaliation and less toward rehabilitation. They’re giving such long sentences, they want to just forget about you. They want you to go off to prison and they don’t have to think about you anymore. So the only reason they have to think about you is if you’re gonna come out, so they’re trying harder and harder to not let that happen. Get you sent in there once and for all, and then we don’t have to worry about you no more; we just have to build more prisons.
Iakovos: When I first began we had Pell grants for four-year degrees available. The education director at the prison then turned me down saying, You have a fresh life sentence. You have plenty of time to get that degree. I got one year in before the Pell grant was cancelled. It’s back now, but none of the colleges are jumping at the chance to get involved.
Kirkpatrick: That’s really similar here. In the first few months of my sentence we had Pell grants, before the feds took it. Now they’re back but there’s this real emphasis on [younger folks] with this FAFSA thing. I don’t know what it stands for, but I was starting my associate degree and got a few classes in and then the college said they needed me to fill out the FAFSA grant stuff and I got denied. It’s really common, here at least, to not get anything … this quarter the Black Prisoners’ Caucus is gonna give me a couple of classes, that’s really the main way that guys are doing it. If you’re doing any amount of time here you’re not getting classes through government grants.
Vick: If there are new computer coding programs or things like that, they don’t want anybody not getting out in there. They don’t bother putting you in a program for a good-paying job, or any self-improvement type of programming, or in any class with a certificate—what do you need that class for if you don’t need the certificate to show the parole board?
Iakovos: Lifers [in GDC] are not outright denied programs, classes, vocational training etc, but we are out at the back of the line … Our superpower is waiting lists. We naturally stick around long enough to make an issue if we have been waiting patiently. Educational aide jobs do not require long-timers, but those are the ones who have been on the waiting list the longest, so 90 percent of the time are the ones that get the job.
GDC only issues raincoats, thermal underwear and knit skull caps (AKA toboggans) to people assigned to work outside details. [Lifers are no longer assigned to those details, so that change] denied us [winter] clothes. Outside of very picky shakedowns or transfers, once I’m issued an item it’s mine until I choose to get rid of it. I had a thermal top that was 16 years old before it developed a hole in it. Because I needed it for two months a year. But without it, those two months are a misery.
Now granted, I am able to buy my own clothes. But there are lifers older than I, who have served longer than I, who have [no money] coming in. Of course we—other lifers—look out for these men as we can, but that should not be required for survival.
Vick: [Correctional industries here] no longer hires anybody .. who doesn’t have a possibility of getting out in the next 25 years. Because of all their re-entry programs that they have now. They want people to be able to count toward their statistics. And here’s the problem, some people spend years learning those big six-color [printing press] machines that cost $1 million. You can’t learn those in a year or two. I can understand them wanting a mixture of people there. And we [lifers] even advocated for that, saying, Listen, you should at least have like 20 people who have long sentences so you can have some continuity. But …
Iakovos: The Braille transcribing program here specifically requires at least five years [served], and five remaining to serve in order to be considered … most short-timers never get in. Sometimes one will be foisted upon the group through connections to administration. Worthless for the business.
A lot of people who come in with marketable job skills are reluctant to give their skills away for free. At first. Over time they get bored and or decide to keep skills sharp and gravitate to the job near their field.
Kirkpatrick: Here you can go to correctional industries for seven years. But [these days] a regular job you can only spend two years, and have to get extensions approved by an associate superintendent or above. Reason is the same, don’t want prisoners to get comfortable. But that logic doesn’t stand … it’s the officers who get comfortable in their positions and let people do things they shouldn’t. And that’s the problem. It’s not because I live here and I’m gonna be exposed to the same thing every day, day in and day out for the rest of my life. How am I supposed to not get familiar with things? This is where I live. The officers are the ones who need to get moved around so they don’t get complacent and comfortable. My opinion at least.
Vick: Yes, that’s a good point. Because if the officers are following policy, it shouldn’t matter what the inmates are doing. It’s the officers being corrupted.
Kirkpatrick: Back when I was at Stafford Creek, where they have a lot of jobs, there was a short minute where they didn’t care who worked there. Then all of a sudden everybody doing more than 20 years got fired. Took us four or five years but then it was brought to everybody’s attention that they were supposed to have 10 percent of the population that works there be lifers, it’s supposed to reflect the population of prisoners. But they hated having lifers because their whole gig is, We’re building people for getting out. They like it when people doing a really long time come in at the end of their sentence, and then what they do is, Look, we reformed this person!
Vick: About 10 years ago they started a policy of rotating certain jobs every year, out of fear that inmate and staff would get too close. It seemed ridiculous, because you got all this skill associated with jobs you have to learn. Usually lifers or long-timers were the ones that had those jobs, because they had the most knowledge. You wait your whole life to get a job like that in prison, then all of a sudden you can’t have it no more. They diminish your skill, make you feel like it doesn’t matter if you know anything or not. You’re just a number. We’ll just move you around on a spreadsheet. We’ll just put another cow in the field.
The staff here stopped following that policy to tell you the truth. Maybe sometimes, depending on the warden or job coordinator, but they haven’t really been doing it here. I think they saw that they were supposed to take people with all this experience and [replace them] and just realized, My goodness, we can’t do that or we will never pass an audit.
Kirkpatrick: Maybe it’s different in other states, but here almost all the guys who have been around for a long time—we just want to chill. Most of the time, 90 percent of us just want to chill. And if they put us in the same place it’s going to be a real mellow institution, right? And they never do that, just let us all chill out. And I sort of understand why. In a way, the old-timers are also the most dangerous, right? They have the most experience and know-how. So I understand. But there are a lot of us that, given the opportunity to go to a lower custody level, it’d be nothing but good for [DOC] and it’d be less money spent on keeping us incarcerated.
Vick: If they put all of us [lifers] in one pod they would never even have to have an officer come in. All we want is to have peace and get along. But they know if they did that the rest of the prison would be so much more violent and chaotic, they gotta disperse us. Just using us old folks to mellow it out, keep the peace. While causing us more harm, putting us in danger, denying us programming.
Lifers are often the stability in the unit. They try to keep it clean, keep it maintained. The newcomers don’t really give a flip. They don’t regard it as any sort of home, they’re just passing through. And when I first come to prison you’d see guards here 20 years, 30 years, who retired in this industry. Now very seldom do you see guards who’ve been here more than five years, and the new ones coming in, of course, they don’t have any respect for where they are. They’re just trying to collect a paycheck and clock out, and I don’t blame them.
Iakovos: The difference is, this is a lifer’s home. We are not just visitors. Lifers are invested in prisons being comfortable, and in being left alone by the guards.
Meanwhile, the Close security prisons that those [Calhoun] lifers were sent to have become chill, because of the overwhelming chill attitude of a bunch of lifers just trying to do the time unfucked with. We know that the police have to respond to the trouble areas. So the Close security prisons are becoming the least staffed. Completely contradictory of any planned best use of resources excusing the higher cost of higher-security prisons. Lol.
Top and first inset image (cropped) via Washington Office of the Corrections Ombuds. Second inset image via They Have No Voice. Third inset image via Tennessee Department of Correction/YouTube.
