Lifer Lessons
m.citypaper.com | Apr 26th 2011
Now 65 years old, Marshall “Eddie” Conway started serving a life sentence for
murdering Baltimore police officer Donald Sager when he was 24. Back then,
Conway was a postal worker and U.S. Army veteran. He was also a civil rights
activist who, as a member of the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality, had
helped organize efforts to better working conditions for African-Americans at a
number of major employers in the Baltimore area. His most renowned role,
though, was as Minister of Defense in the Maryland chapter of the Black Panther
Party—a position that put him on the front lines of a successful government
effort to undermine the party.
Now, Conway is a published author with two books to his credit. In 2009, iAWME
Publications issued Conway’s The Greatest Threat: The Black Panther Party and
COINTELPRO, in part as a fundraiser for Conway’s legal defense. And earlier
this month, AK Press published Conway’s memoir, Marshall Law: The Life and
Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, a release party for which takes place April
29 at 2640 Space featuring readings from the book by Bashi Rose and WombWorks
Productions, Pam Africa talking about the Mumia Abu-Jamal case, and a
performance by Lafayette Gilchrist. (Visit redemmas.org/2640 for more details.)
The new memoir provides an ideal opportunity to consider the man and his life
from different perspectives. Edward Ericson Jr. takes a serious look at
Conway’s claims to be a political prisoner in his essay about The Greatest
Threat (page 13). Michael Corbin, who taught at the Metropolitan Transition
Center, the former Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore, places Marshall Law in
the American tradition of prison literature (page 12). And since decades in
prison have tempered Conway’s revolutionary zeal, in a recent phone interview
from the Jessup Correctional Institution, he spoke of what hurts and helps the
corrective function of prisons, the challenges of fatherhood on the inside, the
folly of drug dealing, his own unrealized aspirations in life, and what he
would do as a free man.
City Paper: Maryland has a life-means-life policy, essentially denying the
possibility for parole for those serving life sentences. It was put in place in
1995 by then governor Parris Glendening, who recently admitted his regrets.
Marshall “Eddie” Conway: Yes, I’m aware of his regrets, 16 years later and
after about 50 of my associates are dead. During the course of waiting for this
policy to be changed, they passed away.
CP: In your mind, what is wrong with this policy?
MEC: The real problem is that young people coming into the prison system see
people that have been participating in the programs, doing all they can to turn
their lives around and become usual citizens in the community, and they see how
they’ve spent 10, 20, 30, 40 years doing that, with no kind of possibility of
release. Well, right away, young guys end up saying, “Well, what’s the point?”
It increases the potential for violence, because there is frustration, and it
increases hopelessness, which means that people tend to act out. It doesn’t
give an incentive for people to rehabilitate themselves, and instead creates
negative activity and energy. If you take away hope in a system like this, then
you’re going to receive a lot of people returning back to the community very
frustrated and hopeless—which is not good, considering the unemployment
situation. Also, when a person reaches a certain age, just the fact that a
person is, like, 45, 50, or over, means that he becomes a safer risk for
release in the community. And most of the time, when you get people that have
done an extensive amount of time in prison, they got an associate degree or a
bachelor’s degree, so they are more capable of taking care of themselves.
CP: Since the policy has been in place, have you seen an increase in violence,
hopelessness, and nihilistic approaches to serving time?
MEC: There was a real spike in violence immediately after that policy was
announced. In this institution, for maybe a 10-year period after 1995, pretty
much every week there was something fatal or near-fatal occurring. I’m not
saying that’s a direct result of Glendening’s policy, but it got so bad that
the guards actually refused to come to work. And that violence spread from this
institution to others.
CP: If the policy is overturned, would prisons become more suited for
rehabilitation?
MEC: Well, of course it would. There are a lot of older prisoners, like myself,
working to decrease the level of violence and conflict, and that’s really
having a good impact. But in terms of people turning their lives around and
having hope and having a desire to motivate change—if you can’t show them
something at the end, there’s no incentive for that, and I’m kind of like
swimming against the tide. But if they see a way to get out of this
predicament—if they work, if they develop, if they grow and change their
paradigm—that’s going to probably change the climate within the prison
population.
CP: Do you suspect you would have been paroled if this policy hadn’t been in
place?
MEC: I don’t know if I would have been paroled, but I have to assume that I
would have. I was a model prisoner, quote unquote, meaning that I was—and I
am—working to improve the conditions among the prisoners.
CP: Let’s pretend you hadn’t been convicted. What would have been your career?
MEC: I want to believe that, if the community hadn’t been drugged and the jobs
hadn’t been shipped overseas, we could have turned this around, and I would
have probably ended up teaching somewhere. I had two interests. One was history
and education, and the other was the medical profession. I had an aspiration to
go into school at Johns Hopkins University, trying to engage in further
training for the medical profession. I don’t know that that would have
happened, but the teaching probably would have. Either way, I would have been
constantly engaging in the community, trying to better the conditions.
CP: What do your sons do?
MEC: I have two sons. One of my sons is an instructor at Bowling Green
University in Ohio, teaching computer science. The other is a manager of a
water-purification plant in Maryland.
CP: How did you manage as a father in prison?
MEC: Right at the beginning, I have to admit that I succeeded in the case of
one and I failed in the case of the other. In the case of my second son, I was
estranged from him all the way until he was 18. It was my fault that that was
the case, and I certainly never was a father to him. We tried to recover and
establish some sort of relationship, and it just didn’t seem to work out. My
oldest son, who I knew from the time he was born, I kept in touch with his
mother, but I kind of lost track of him through my early years in the prison
system simply because, of my initial seven years, I spent six of them in
solitary confinement. Somewhere along the line, his mother came to me and just
pretty much said, “Look, you need to talk to your son.” So at that time I had
organized a 10-week counseling program for young people, and I actually had my
son brought to the program. I would sit down and talk to him, one on one, and
we would counsel in larger groups. We developed and we started bonding. Like
all young black men at the time, he was like, “I’m going to the NBA, going to
be a baller.” He was really good, but only so many people get selected to go
into the NBA, and he needed to be considering a profession. So he decided to go
to college and do the computer-science thing. I’ve supported him as much as I
could, and I tried to get him to get his doctorate, but he had had enough of
that. I think it was a good experience for both of us.
CP: How do you see it going with other inmates, and their issues with
fatherhood?
MEC: It’s one of the things that we deal with a lot. I’ve been working with
young guys for the whole entire 40 years, but at some point I had to stop for a
while. They were just so angry, and the morals and values had changed to such a
degree that I couldn’t be a neutral observer when somebody is talking about
beating up their grandmother or disrespecting their mother. But after I started
back working with them, I noticed this great hostility to fathers, this great
anger at being abandoned.
But the other side of that is that they really want to be very connected and
attached to their children, even though they’re locked up. They’re trying to
break that cycle, even though the cycle continues due to the simple fact that
they are here. They’re trying to be the father that they didn’t have. So that’s
good, and it’s more young people like that than not, and a lot of them actually
do end up going back out, and they realize that they almost blew that
opportunity to be that father. So they tend to get jobs and do what they need
to do to stay there because of that.
But, I’m in here now with three generations of people. I’m looking across the
generations of absent fathers. And I don’t know how that cycle gets broken if
there’s no jobs. One of the great negatives is that maybe 80 percent of people
in the prisons around the country are there for drug-related activity, not
necessarily violent. Just selling drugs, buying drugs, using drugs, or fighting
over drugs, based on the fact that there’s no jobs out there.
CP: It strikes me that these low-level drug dealing jobs are just bad jobs. Low
pay, long hours, harsh management.
MEC: You think? And there’s not very good health care!
CP: People tend to think drug dealers get into it because it’s an easy buck.
MEC: It’s not an easy buck. It’s day-to-day survival—and it’s detrimental to
your survival. If you manage to make any money, the state comes and scoops up
any you might have around, and what you may have stashed away is used for the
lawyers. So you end up with nothing.
CP: I wonder, are there any drug dealers out there for whom it doesn’t end
badly? The odds are probably better that you’d make it to the NBA.
MEC: This is the bottom line: The nature of drug trafficking itself means that
you are going to be highly publicized, that people are going to know who you
are, that there’s always going to be a chain of evidence back to you, and that
there’s always going to be someone who’s going to want to avoid being
incarcerated by saying, “Go look at him or her.” It’s definitely a loser’s
proposition.
CP: What do you know about gangs in Maryland prisons?
MEC: The real problem is that anybody in prison that associates with street
organizations is pretty much tagged or targeted, be it the Black Guerilla
Family, Crips, Bloods, Dead Man Incorporated, or any of them. It has made it
impossible to interact in any kind of a positive way with members of those
organizations without being tagged. I was educating people, and on the days
that I made myself available, I would be in the yard and anybody could approach
me to talk about things like how to make parole, how to deal with domestic
situations. The result was the prison authorities tagged me. When I talked to
the lieutenant about it, I said, “These are the same guys that are going back
into our communities, and if they go back in with negative attitudes they are
going to be destructive, they’re going to hurt people—your family, my family,
everybody else’s families—and I’m not going to ignore that, so I’m going to
work with them.”
But you can’t get too close without being labeled, without it being reported
that you’re associating with them. So I don’t even go into the yard anymore,
but I still work with organizations that provide information, education,
insight, and skills to manage conflicts. You get penalized if you try to work
with these groups any closer than that. It’s almost as if the prison
authorities want them to proliferate, so they can have “X” amount of members or
associates documented and get funds for, quote unquote, anti-gang activities. I
don’t know what the end is, other than everybody at some point will end up in
Big Brother’s files.
CP: What would you do if you were released tomorrow?
MEC: With the rest of my life, I would try to get a house with a nice garden
and grow some food and smell the roses. I would still be involved in developing
good, positive communities, but I’m a big supporter now of organic food,
growing your own food, developing your way to sustain yourself into the future.
So I would want to do that and encourage other people to do it.
Original Page: http://m.citypaper.com/news/lifer-lessons-1.1137776
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