The day after September 11th, I heard from a former student in my creative writing class at Pennsylvanias Graterford Prison, fifth largest in the country. Awkwardly I said, I guess you guys are the only Americans not afraid of being bombed.

He said sadly, We face terrorism in here every single day.

I was silent, remembering the tales of deprivation and cruelty theyd talked and written about.

Graterford was a culture shock, like entering a horror theme park. Id never before experienced a building emanating such pain, despair and rage that it was almost palpable. This anachronism from the 19th Century, with an 85% failure rate, punishes rather than rehabilitates. Weve paid more than $5 million so far just to keep the seven prisoners highlighted in the book behind bars.

Escorted by guards, I passed a sea of men in prison garb, their skins mostly black and brown, an occasional white whose expressions ranged from madness to fierce intelligence. Some looked lost, barely alive, their spirits on their last legs.

Some are too damaged and a danger to society. They need treatment, not punishment, which is what prisons offer. 70% have addictions, 35% are mentally ill or retarded, and most come from poverty. 70% of prisoners cant fill out a drivers license application. Some SageWriters could only write their names when they came to prison as teens.

This system harms not just those imprisoned but imprisoners as well, most of whom are decent people working under irrational laws like the recent one that no one could have more than ten books, their links to education and growth, in their cells. Some had a hundred books which were given away or dumped in the trash, like them.

There wasnt a peep out of anyone, especially the press. People just dont seem to care when bad things happen to prisoners. Until they find themselves or a loved one incarcerated.

Graterfords compassionate superintendent, Donald Vaughn, knows all too well what can happen. A prison guard forty years ago because he needed a job, hes worked his way up through the ranks. He says, Just because we run prisons doesnt mean we believe in them, echoing what 92% of the countrys superintendents and wardens said in a Senate sub-committee-ordered survey. They also said that half the people now in prison could be released tomorrow, with no threat to the community. (Some states, their budgets decimated by the $35,000-$65,000 a year it costs to incarcerate one prisoner, are having to release non-violent prisoners as they cant afford to keep them.).

Imagine the rehabilitation that $23 billion could buy.

The system has broken Vaughns own heart. A few years ago, his son was arrested and sentenced to Graterford. Vaughn immediately had him transferred to another prison, where he was beaten to death two days later.

According to prisoners, though denied by authorities, there is rape and often murder in every prison by either inmates or guards on a regular basis. Estimates by activists that there are at least 364,000 rapes each year in prisons are too low according to prisoners. Sadly, these violent assaults are too often material for comedians and cop shows. As a culture, we accept the possibility of violent sodomy as part of the punishment of incarceration, chuckling over vaseline jokes. If there was any other $46 billion system like the prison industrial complex that was such an abyssmal failure at rehabilitation, it would be abolished quicker than you can say Enron.

Anton Ford, the Jamaican, one of the innocent ones, was once beaten so badly by 15 guards that he had to have his face reconstructed. Tall, slim and still elegant after twelve years behind bars for a crime he did not commit, hes partly blind and suffers chronic pain. The magna cum laude graduate of York (NY) College says, Ive seen quite a few people get stabbed. In here, death is not such a significant event. Ive heard screams of Rape! in the night. The guards never come. Ive listened to one prisoner beating another to death two cells away, the blood-curdling screams of a man being bludgeoned. I never knew humans could make such a sound. You can actually hear the soul depart in those ghastly screams.

Anton Fordes Contemplations of a Convict: Aphorisms for the Heart and Mind was published by Infinity, the first project of our group which we called SageWriters.com

When harassment by guards escalated to an intolerable level, Id begun to feel a deep anxiety like Id never known before, a shakiness in my solar plexus. They knew I was collecting prisoners stories of abuse and injustice. I felt fear as I went through the inevitable interrogations and searches before I even got to the class, if I even got there at all, which sometimes happened. I finally felt in my being what inmates must endure every day.

I resigned, confirming their perspective that anything good that happens in this place they destroy. Looking back that final night when I knew I probably never see most of them again, I felt an ache where theyd touched my heart.

Wed already started on this book. Two years later it is finished despite working under censorship and taped phone calls. I wasnt allowed back in the prison to visit any of them. One of the rules-former teachers cant visit.

A week after I resigned, I was walking with a friend, Bill, a park ranger, around a lake in Chester County. When we came upon a man fishing, Bill engaged him in fishing talk while I gazed dreamily out at the water. When the man said hed just retired as a guard at Graterford Prison, my ears perked up. Knowing about our book project, Bill asked him what it was like for him working there.
We were astonished at his reply. I hate niggers, he said, spitting into the lake as he adjusted his pole, not noticing our shocked responses. If I didnt like the way they looked at me or if they didnt obey me immediately, Id wait until no one was looking, get em alone in their cells and grab their balls and hold my stick against their throats and tell em if they didnt do what I said when I said it, they might find themselves dead on the floor of their cell.
He continued, describing a contest where theyd strip a prisoner, put him naked in an empty cell and turn a firehose on him, counting how many times they could bounce him against the wall before he collapsed.