They assemble for their writing class at a table along the side of the gymnasium.  There are three men today.  Across the floor some guys are playing half-court basketball.  Over in the far corner a musician practices Sympathy for the Devil on a guitar in the shower area.  On the opposite side three guys are doing bench presses using parcels of encyclopedias for the weights.  Other men are working as clerks for the college distance-learning program and the GED program.

    The students are always happy to see me. I am the writing teacher.  They patiently wait their turn to read aloud what they’re working on.  A guard sits on a podium on the other side of the gym.  He eats an apple and checks his watch.  The shift will be over in an hour.  It’s pretty easy duty: the prisoners are all ex-gang members.  They’re part of a special program.  They were shot-callers, or soldiers, or just ‘made’ gangsters.  Now they’ve disavowed the gangs and moved on.  They don’t make trouble any more. We hope.

    A man read his story about how he was on the prison yard outside the cell window of another prisoner in the Federal Penitentiary.  The older prisoner was the head of the Aryan Brotherhood Commission, the senior man at the pen.  He told the young fellow that he knew he would die there, out on the yard or on the tier.  He was resigned to it.  It was his fate. But his desire was to perpetuate the cycle of violence that had ruled his life. He wanted above all to leave something behind him:  the burning sword that was in his side. 

    Looking back on the event years later, the young man who had fervently believed in this pronouncement saw it as a futile and empty gesture.  There was no stated goal of contributing to the greater good of the fellow-travelers; no lofty plans to provide for economic benefits to the families of brotherhood members outside the prison.  There was nothing but a bitter man determined that the ‘cause’ took precedence over everything.  Thus, in the wake of his inevitably violent death, he bequeathed a legacy of hate.  This continues to poison the politics of prison life across the country.

    The men in the writing group are avid articulators of the realities of organized crime. They have a film group and are engaged in watching a series of gangster films.  They saw Scarface: Shame of a Nation, starring Paul Muni, and enthused about how accurately this portrayal of prohibition-era gangsterism reflected the way California crime syndicates operate. Howard Hawks intended his film to be a wake-up call to the public.  Tony Camonte walks into the speakeasy and tells the owner he’s got a deal for him.  He’s going to start supplying his beer. The guy says he’s already got somebody.  Camonte says, “You got two choices: you can buy from me, or you can buy from me.”
    That’s how it goes in the world of cocaine and meth distribution too.  The mob wants its piece of the action.  And they’ll get it.

    The writing is grueling.  They revise, they re-evaluate, they polish.  Their work is a kind of social commentary which is so foreign to outsiders that it can be difficult to understand. Their lifestyle is incomprehensible to sociologists, psychologists, police and prison agencies, and even to writing teachers.  Their fervent documentation of the proliferation of street gangs to communities far from Los Angeles has the passion of evangelism.  This is not surprising, as several of these men are committed Christians.  One is a Greek Orthodox.  It isn’t hard to imagine him in a monk’s robe sampling the latest vintage of wine from a vineyard on a rocky slope above the Aegean Sea.  That idea would appeal to him: he’s a long way into a life sentence with no possibility of parole.
    Most of this writing group is on a life sentence.  But that means they’ve got all day to polish their metaphors.  What else is there?

    Kids from the street are brought in to the prison to meet with the convicts and get reality checks.  They walk through an electric gate, then another, past the lethal electric fence.  Then they go through a sliding door, another ID check, then another locked door, and a gate that takes them onto the mainline.  Pelican Bay. By the time you get there you are definitely far inside the pen and it’s easy to see it would be hard to get out.

    The men lecture these kids about how the gang life leads to right there.  They tell them how the tattoos they get can make them subject to gang control inside the prison.  They tell them that their criminal record is public knowledge to other prisoners and can have deadly consequences for them.  If they hit their girlfriend, or, God forbid, their mother, they could be stabbed for it in the penitentiary.  They learn about the gang reading lists: the Nuestra Familia and the Mexican Mafia read Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and Immanuel Kant.  The Aryan Brotherhood reads Aristotle, Machiavelli, Sun-Tzu, Clausewitz, and the Dhammapada.  A beginning Mexican gangster might be given an abstruse archaeology tome to read.  If he completes it he can move on to The Will to Power.  Everyone reads Nietzsche.  His brand of anarchism appeals to the criminal gangs.

    The kids are shell-shocked.  They are already on their way in to this tenacious and dangerous culture.  After the meeting the men go back to their small cells.  The kids get to go home. Keep it that way, they’re told.  Don’t believe the lies.

    The gang culture is about power and control.  It’s about continuity, succession and proliferation. These men have been in the middle of it.  They were like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace.  Except that these men walked into the furnace of their own devising, a cauldron of hatred and violence.  Even so, one like the Son of God walked with them.  When they came out the other side you could barely smell the smoke.

    I ask one writer, “When you talk about the ‘green-light’ do you really mean ‘process’ or do you mean ‘signal’?” I ask them,  “Do you intend to educate your reader or frighten him?  Outline your intentions so you can clarify your story.  Decide what you are trying to say and say that.”  These writers endure analysis and actually take suggestions and implement them.  It shouldn’t be surprising but it is. These are men who came from a life where to order an execution could be as commonplace as making a grocery list.  It’s just business.

    Now they hammer out essays about crime that are breathtaking in their starkness.  They devise instant stories that crackle with humor.  They write poems that are eloquent with longing and regret.  In spite of the fact that they will spend their lives in prison, through their writing they are crafting a legacy of hope.

from 'Tales of Pelican Bay'