The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley

Author:Ann Walmsley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780747842
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

12

CHRISTMAS IN PRISON

CHRISTMAS IN PRISON was like a poorly attended Visitors Day in a seniors’ home. Many men at Collins Bay remained unvisited and lonely. And those who were visited couldn’t count on their loved ones making it past inspection, where guards used frisk searches and sniffer dogs to detect contraband while visitors spread their legs wide to stand on two footprints painted on the floor. The drug-detection equipment was sensitive, and routinely picked up cocaine traces on paper currency because snorters’ residue contaminates a large percentage of banknotes in general circulation. Some book club members said they didn’t want to put their families through the ordeal.

The season was particularly painful for the fathers in the prison book club. When I talked to Gaston at the beginning of December, he broke into tears as I read in his journal that it would be his third Christmas in a row without his four children. “My son is eleven, and he thinks I’m at work and asks, ‘Why isn’t Dad coming for Christmas?’” he said, after I finished reading, his voice cracking. “The younger ones say ‘Daddy’ on the phone but they don’t really know who I am. It’s a horrible feeling. To be honest, Christmas is the worst time of all.” No inmate had cried in front of me before, let alone a serial bank robber with a weakness for crack. I wanted to put my hand on his arm, but I refrained, respecting his dignity.

His remorse was not just as a father, but as a son, because his own parents had never missed Christmas with him. And, as if the holidays couldn’t be more depressing, he hadn’t spoken to his wife for several days. His journal said that she was frustrated about having to work full-time to support four young children on her own. In Gaston’s view, she was the one serving time and he felt helpless. He wiped away his tears, self-conscious not just about weeping, but about a bright red infection that had developed on his nose.

Nor did he expect any presents from his family other than a Christmas card. He said that the restrictions on sending and receiving gifts were too onerous to bother. Three days after Christmas he planned to send his wife $110. It wasn’t a Christmas present, just a portion of his pay from his CORCAN job. In the run-up to Christmas he focused instead on reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island for his reading-the-classics project; Small Island, by Andrea Levy, for the book club; and, to feed his devotional needs, the Bible.

One bright spot during the season was “Christmas bag.” As Gaston explained it to me, under a federal prison directive allowing certain privileges at Christmas, the inmate-run canteen expanded the variety of goods for sale to the inmates and the men were allowed to spend $175 over the two-week period around the holidays, up from $90 every two weeks during the rest of the year. The canteen managers also took inmates’ wish lists into consideration in ordering Christmas stock.

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