by Mark K. Thomas
Prologue
No life history told is without a context. Regardless to whether it is made explicit or not, or whether that context is sharp or dull, it is there. The sharp context for this life history might be identified as “crime and punishment in America.” Michael Marcum was nineteen years of age when he shot and killed his abusive father. In 1966, he was sent to California state prison, where he would spend the next six years. Soon after his release from prison twenty-five years ago, he went to work for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department as a rehabilitation counselor. Today, he is the Assistant Sheriff of San Francisco County, administrating its six jails. And remarkably, he has been able to change the culture in those jails by introducing new programs and attitudes among both the staff and the incarcerated. He has designed a new type of jail that has made incarceration safer for all concerned, in addition to it resulting in a lower recidivism rate for released prisoners.
My own history definitely has led to my writing a life history about Michael Marcum. His story interests me because I have gone through a similar process: in that I spent years in prison and upon release went on to better things. Today, I am in my fourth year of work towards a Ph.D.
Regardless of what you were in prison for, regardless of how long you were in prison, and what you do afterwards, there is something you understand about the experience that someone who has never been in prison doesn’t. The prisoner experiences a most overwhelming feeling of helplessness, of being trapped, and under the total control of malevolent outside forces.
Most people have had experiences in their lives that have evoked similar feelings. Circumstances that might cause similar feelings are: being victimized by a childhood (or even an adult) bully, being a victim of a crime or injustice, dealing with an abusive parent, spouse or other, financial disaster, severe illness, natural disaster, and so on. If you, the reader, have ever even momentarily been in such a circumstance, recall the feelings and thoughts it led to.
It is understanding the emotions, feelings, thoughts, sensations, instincts and attitudes involved that can, I think, best convey an understanding of the prison experience to the non- prisoner. See yourself like Michael Marcum, a thin nineteen year old kid, trapped in a terrifying hell of steel and concrete, of brutality and humiliation, of rage and despair. See yourself looking out from the bars of 6 by 8 foot cell, alone and separate from all that is familiar and comforting. Home, family and friends are far away, but you think of them. A great longing wells up inside, you want to be out there with them right now. The desire is so strong and attaining it so impossible. You feel as if you are on the edge of insanity: your head throbs, your heart aches, your gut twists. You cry when and where no one can see you, in your bunk at night or in the deep recesses of your broken heart. Welcome to prison.
The feelings of prison are typically despair, numbness, fear, anger, sorrow, grief, guilt, desperation, panic, depression, humiliation, hatred, bewilderment, and rage. Think about being subject to this sense of being trapped for minute after minute for hour after hour for day after day for year after year, and you might understand some of what the prison experience is really about.
Most often prisoners don’t know exactly how long they will be in this “trapped” and caged situation. Some know it will be short if they survive. Some know that it will be for the rest of their lives. For some the pressure becomes unbearable regardless of length of time. Some kill themselves. Some kill others. Some suffer psychological and/or physically breakdown. Most survive by adapting. Unfortunately for themselves and society this adaptation is not healthy.
Some become institutionalized. Some become more criminal, meaner, callous, disempowered, and then they are released. A few commit heinous crimes. Most released prisoners end up returning to prison for the same old thing because they only possess the skills for coping with prison society and not for normal society. Many successfully readapt to society and become normal law-abiding citizens. A few commit humanitarian service and become exceptional members of society; their prison experience motivating them to change as much of the world as they can.
At the other end of the emotional spectrum from the despair and gloom of arrest and incarceration is the joy and exhilaration of release and freedom. In between is the hopes and fears involved in the struggle for survival inside prison and success in staying outside of prison. Prison involves personal transformation for better or worse. No one comes through the experience unchanged. Prison can help create villains or heroes, Adolf Hitlers or Nelson Mandelas.
Hopefully, in telling this life history I will be able recognize and make explicit those things which two individuals who have shared the common experience, and are in dialogue, might take for granted. In this case I interviewed Michael Marcum. Both of us have had the experience of committing a crime, being arrested, convicted, sent to prison, released from prison, and reentering normal society. His story has an additional twist: he who was once the kept has become the keeper in a sense.
My practical interest in interviewing Michael Marcum was to look especially at the transitions and transformations he went through to become a productive, law-abiding person after prison. The interview began with my statement: “I am interested in the story of how you went from being incarcerated in prison for a violent crime to leading a law-abiding or socially beneficial life.” Actually, the interview began with him interviewing me about my background.
I first became aware of Michael Marcum from a segment on the CBS television news magazine, 60 Minutes. This news story chronicled told of his experience on “both sides of the bars.” It told of his incarcerated in prison for shooting and killing his father at age 19 to being the Assistant Sheriff of San Francisco county and in charge of running its jails. The news piece highlighted his designing and running a new type of jail, dubbed “the glamour slammer,” and his focus on education, control, and safety inside the jails. It ended by saying that prisoners released from “the glamour slammer” have been shown to return to jail far less frequently than those released from typical jails.
I interviewed Michael Marcum in his office with its particularly avant-garde feel because of the numerous posters on the wall. I especially remember a “Most Wanted” poster of Angela Davis which was autographed: “Good Luck, Michael.” Not what one would expect of your typical assistant Sheriff. But this, of course, wasn’t the office of your typical law enforcement officer.
Before the interview started Mr. Marcum asked me questions about my background, and how I came to be interested in interviewing him. I explained that I had seen him on 60 Minutes, and that I was studying how people went from being in prison and being involved in violent crime to living a socially beneficial life. This because I had been through the same thing myself: spending thirteen years in prison and being able to change my life.
I told him about my studying for my Ph.D. in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and interested in applying transpersonal psychology to social problems such as crime and violence. At a certain point, I told him that I didn’t want to say too much more about myself until I had completed the interview. I understood soon that he was a “people person.” And that he was trying to read me, tell where I was coming from, and then give me what was I needed. I was trying to be the good researcher, wanting rapport, but not wanting my statements to influence unnecessarily what he said in the interview.
Later on, he would use what he gathered from our conversation before the interview to highlight a point. I mentioned that I had planned while in prison to attend graduate school after release from prison. He said later that his type of planning for the future is what he is constantly telling prisoners to do, instead of wasting their energies focusing on the various injustices and discomforts involved with incarceration. Such efforts were usually futile. What they need to do is be more concerned with the rest of their life, with their own potential, and figure out how they are going to be successful in staying out of prison. They needed to do this planning over and over, because it is the heart of being successful after jail or prison.
In his own case, he didn’t have any laid out plan while in prison, because prison life most often involves living and surviving one day at a time. Nor did he have any clarity about his past, present, or future at that time, and then come to a decision about how he wanted to proceed. Any clarity about the course he should take evolved very slowly over time as his story tells.
A LITTLE VOW
My own spiritual thing was a little tiny vow I made somewhere early on [after being sent to prison] — about the only attention I ever paid to the issue — was that somehow when I get out I would do something to give another kid a chance not to be in this situation. And it may sound kind of hokey, but it was this little vow I kept making to myself in the middle of doing a million other things that seemed to have no relationship to it. –Michael Marcum
Perhaps fulfillment of this vow in seen in the fact that he went on to design a newly built jail to which fewer releasees return to than the typical jail. It may have been fulfilled in the fact that he has provided a good home to at least 11 foster children. However, this work continues for Michael Marcum. For it seems those who make such vows to make a difference in the world are never satisfied with what they have done. On the contrary, they are usually preoccupied with what more they can or should do. Michael Marcum’s story, like many that involve outstanding humanitarianism, grows from a past marked by pain and tragedy.
He grew up in Oakland as the only child of two parents involved in show business as booking agents who handled small time vaudeville type stuff. Because both parents worked, he was raised primarily by aunts, babysitters, and the like. His father was very abusive to his mother, and accordingly, their marriage was horrible.
Consequently, his mother left when he was about eleven or twelve. However, “as a young American male,” the way he says he understood what happened was to blame his mother. His thinking was that she must be doing something to make his father so violent and unhappy, and so his emotional loyalty was to his father.
In retrospect, he sees his attitude then to be a huge mistake, but that was how he was able to understand things at that age. Although his mother asked him to go with her, he couldn’t leave his father at that time. He felt that if he had left also both of them would be abandoning or betraying him. Consequently, he ended up staying with him.
From that point on his life with his father was very dysfunctional. It was not only physically violent, but psychically violent. He became a master of how to avoid and manipulate his father’s violent and controlling behavior. This later “in a sick way” served him well in prison, because he was very accustomed to sensing how violence could start. In prison, the potential for violence to erupt is always there. One’s survival in prison is often tied to be able to sense when and how such violent situations can occur and thus be able avoid them.
However, in fact this was a horrendous survival skill, because although he developed the ability to deal with his father in a violent and dysfunctional family situation, he did not develop the ability to deal healthily with the normal social reality. He tended to withdraw from safe normal social situations. Consequently, his world primarily consisted of life with his father, doing what he had to do in school, and a lot of writing. Nevertheless, he thinks at that time people would have probably thought him an exceptionally well behaved kid.
However, the reality was that he was primarily afraid of his father’s abusive behavior. Consequently, he would stay within the very extreme boundaries that his father set. Because of what happened between his mother and father, violence was something he strongly abhorred. At various times when he was young he did a lot of reading of Buddhism. He was raised Catholic, but his father hated Catholics, even his mother and the Italian side of the family side were Catholic.
The general value of nonviolence was a real important thing to him, but in the last couple of years with his father he came closer and closer to reacting to him with physical violence. He didn’t do it until he finally shot him, but he had come very close to doing it previously. He actually thought about it, out of rage, anger, and some need to strike back. But this was always tempered by his really wanting acceptance from his father, wanting him to just be his Dad and love him.
He had a tendency to make a lot of excuses for his father and his behavior, e.g. it was his mother, work or the mean world which caused such a good person to act so horrendously. That was his rationale: external things made his father act that way. So he did what he could to make it easier on him.
In the last six months before Michael shot his father, he thinks that possibly he was suffering from clinical depression. He became less and less functional except for going to school and having a girlfriend. He believes that at the time he was suicidal. He didn’t think he was going to last much longer, and not knowing how he was going to get from under the control of his father. This was constantly on his mind without a solution appearing to be available except suicide. It was like having a option: if all else fails he could always kill himself. That was his attitude at the time.
The night of the shooting, he said it wasn’t as if he was out of his mind, or in a psychosis, nor did he blackout. He was lucid in regard to what was happening which precipitated from a humiliating incident related to his girlfriend. He consciously knew what he was doing, and in fact he told his father he was going to shoot him if he didn’t listen to him. However, his father stayed in his typical role.
When Michael shot his father, he says he knew exactly what he was doing. But he wasn’t thinking at the time that he was going to kill his dad and that would to solve his problems. He says it was just this conscious, but real emotional, irrational act.
Somehow he thought this would put a stop to everything, but it didn’t put a stop to anything. Afterwards, he had this sort of “naive, young people idea” that society, the state, would now handle everything. He would go to the gas chamber or something, and that would be appropriate. At the time, he was unable to even think about what happened. Or why, or what should be done about it.
He was definitely unable to try to defend himself in any sense, because he had no reason to defend myself. Ironically, one of the things that he still remembers from the newspaper headlines of the day was something like, “Boy Shoots Father over Dog.” And the reason that was reported was because for a week the police and the DA investigators were constantly asking questions about his father, and it was very important to him was that nothing besmirches his father’s reputation. Consequently, he couldn’t say anything bad about his father, because in his own mind, he knew that there were reasons for everything bad his father did. He was still in that type of mindset.
Simultaneous to this, he was in county jail under suicide watch. The whole thing was a totally new experience for him. He was in jail with maybe twenty to twenty-five men who were all in on no bail charges: mostly homicide, maybe kidnapping, rape, but mostly homicide. These other men were fighting the charges against them in court. So he could understand their attitudes. They were much more sophisticated than he was about the system.
The D.A. and his attorney were telling him, “They’re going to treat you as a juvenile and your going do two years and get out, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Of course, the other men in jail were telling him don’t accept a plea bargain and plea guilty to anything; “don’t plea guilty.”
He went through a very confusing six or eight month period where he was back and forth between juvenile hall and adult jail. Michael said, “It’s like one day I’m this dangerous, dangerous adult offender. The next day I’m in juvenile hall out on a 150th [Avenue in San Leandro, California], saying grace with six year olds. You know, taking one minute showers. It’s like what on earth is going on.”
And through all these events he wasn’t mentally processing anything about what had happened. He was gradually getting out of his depression, strangely because of his reaction to the violence all around him. This was both violence among other offenders and between staff and offenders.
This was behavior he had never seen before. Even as violent as his father had been, it was shocking for him to see staff people dragging people out of their cells, after a peaceful food strike that the prisoners staged, and stomp people. He says, “I didn’t think, this may sound a little bit bad at that age, I didn’t think officers of the law would do things like that. You know, this really shook me up.”
And then it made him wonder how this whole system was going to perceive him. He started to feel that it didn’t really care about what happened to his father or what happened to him.
He recounts: “I violated 187 of the penal code [murder], and this machine had taken me in. There was no rhyme or reason about what happened and why it happened and how to stop it from happening to someone else. None of that seemed to be a part of the process and that really devastated me, because I did need attention. I did need understanding. But I thought there was some external authority that was going to do this, and there wasn’t.”
The only place he found it was among other prisoners, not all of them, but a few. He remembered one older guy who ended up becoming a friend for many years. Unlike some of the other cons, Michael tended to listen to him. This prisoner was a little less bravado and a little more sober in some of the stuff he was saying. What he said typically came true every time Michael went to court.
Also difficult for him was kind of the great embarrassment and shame on his mothers part. She was feeling enormous guilt over what happened. So she was trying to hire attorneys, and my father’s mother was tiring to hire attorneys. Additionally, he says, “there was all this family dysfunction going on.” So he couldn’t talk to any of his family about what he was going through.
He guesses after about six months he stopped feeling the guilt, which was probably a way of surviving. He didn’t get out of it. He didn’t resolve it. He sort of “set it aside” and just got into this — in want of a better term — “convict mode,” which was a way of handling and adapting to the violent, degrading, and stressful environment by living in terms of anger and derision toward the criminal justice system.
And he went back and forth between “copping a plea” — that is pleading guilty in a plea bargain — to a murder charge and withdrawing his plea and deciding to go to trial about four or five times. He would decide to go to trial. Then there would be what his mother wanted, and so he’d go back and change his plea again. He found all this embarrassing
It was the cons who kept saying: “Don’t cop a plea.” However, his family kept saying, “just plea guilty and this will be all over with,” etc. And ironically seven years later that vacillation in withdrawing his plea is finally what got him out of prison on a habeas corpus, though he didn’t know that at the time. So he finally gave in and “copped a plea,” and received a five year to life sentence, and went on to prison.
“And for the first five or six years in prison, apart from a real personal part of me…that was still living with what I had done to my father…my biggest thing was how could a good person, I kept thinking of myself as a good person, a decent person, do something so horrible. You know, and that it shouldn’t be that way, there’s got to be something [to explain it].
“You know, my own spiritual thing was a little tiny vow I made somewhere early on — about the only attention I ever paid to the issue — was that somehow when I get out I would do something to give another kid a chance not to be in this situation. And it may sound kind of hokey but it was this little vow I kept making to myself in the middle of doing a million other things that seemed to have no relationship to it.”
Going to prison was a terrifying experience for Michael. On entering prison the first day, he and the other new prisoners had to a shower while being watched by other jeering prisoners who were sized them up. These jeering prisoners were calling out who among newly arriving prisoners would belong to which among them for sexual and exploitative purposes. Michael did his best to appear tough, but the truth was that he was terrified.
Naively, he initially thought that he could look for help or support from the guards and staff, but was shocked to find that they also accepted this strange, violent prison culture. The prisoners actually controlled the prison on their side of the bars. He was on his own when the steels doors clanged behind him.
Prison life for him was just a matter of survival. It was about how to “get over” or best take advantage of circumstances and people. How to protect oneself? How to find dignity? How to find power? How to deal with the racism inside? How to deal with the staff?
Being convicted for murder was to his advantage while in prison, because other prisoners respected and fear those who were proven violent and capable of killing. Though he dislikes violence, he regrettably admits that there were times when he regrettably carried a weapon and even used one. He found this necessary in order not to become a victim himself.
Later on, he became a prisoner activist. His forte was challenging the system, and he went on to found an inmates union. However, he also challenged the convicts and made efforts to deal with the rampant racism among them. He had successes in getting prisoners who belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood (a violent neo- Nazi white supremacist group), to quit their involvement with this group and change their racist attitudes.
Michael was released from prison after filing a habeas corpus. He was offered an immediate release on parole by the state if he dropped the court action. Consequently, he took this offer and was released. However, he sometimes regrets doing this, because being released on a habeas corpus would have provided him sense of vindication.
He says there wasn’t any time after his release from prison when he was completely free of doubt about not being able to make the streets. Even today there’s some of it with him. He had strong doubt for a long time about his being able to make it. Early on, he even considered committing a crime so that he could return to prison.
Michael had difficulty with social situations when he got out, because he didn’t have adequate social skills. Since he didn’t have the social knowledge or the skill, and he had fear about getting into those type of situations and tried to avoid them. Because of his fear, the most difficult thing to deal with after release was dealing with people socially. This fear governed his social relations.
A great deal of the fear seemed related to the stigma of being an ex-convict and how people would react to him. Nevertheless, he could work at the jail and function pretty well in that situation. Actually he was somewhat comfortable with working in the jail, because he was familiar with the jail environment.
There were many times when he thought it would be easier back in prison rather than having to deal with the doubts and the fear that life outside caused. He had a lot of doubt about whether he could make it. But as he gradually learned more social skills, he was able to handle the world outside of prison.
He had grown use to the prison way of surviving, and it didn’t involve trusting. So it took time for him to be able to relate to people on an open, personal level. Something that probably made a significant impact on his making this transition was the children that came into his life. After he became married, he and his wife took on 11 foster children. Through dealing and relating with them and their needs, he learned to “come out” of himself.
This was where he took “a fork in the road.” The road to where he could be very confident about making it outside of prison. I questioned him as to whether the change that he had underwent was subtle and gradual or as to whether there any dramatic events to mark the point of that strong confidence in making it out of prison. I noted that he had mentioned earlier that his relationship with his foster children had had a strong effect on him.
He said that he thinks that the transition was subtle and gradual. He wasn’t sure at first if the word “dramatic” fit at all, but then he remembered something significant. He said the last doubt probably disappeared because of the children. He had this “shtick” about having a period of time to his self when he got home before dealing with the children. It was time to take a shower, change clothes, etc. It was time that he kept reserved for himself.
It probably had to be a half hour when he first came in before he could deal with their stuff. When the kids first came home from school, they were enthused with all the stuff that happened to them that day: the social situation, the teachers and whatever. They had stories they wanted to tell him: how things were, and that kind of thing. However, he always had this thing about having that time to himself. Then something occurred well over the year into this situation.
At first his time to himself had been about 30 minutes, as time went by it became shorter and shorter as time went on. It went down to 25, to 20, and so on, until it was just 5 minutes.
One day he came home and one of his foster daughters was at the door. He could see the pain and need in her eyes. She was very upset about something that had happened at school, a racial slur or something. But it was the pain and need that he saw in her eyes that affected him. When he saw that he could no longer hold anything back. And that was it: no more time set aside. He thinks then was when the last of the doubt disappeared about his being able to make it outside of prison. That incident was the end of him holding any of his self back occurred.
After prison, Michael found it important to learn to depend on new friends. He had always depended a lot on his prison friends, and he still does, though many of them are dead. But for a long time it was only his prison comrades that he trusted. However, the friends he made post-prison eventually came to have the importance to him as did the people he knew in prison. All these friends, those inside and out, were part of his process of adapting to life out of prison.
The first thing he was worried about when he got out was what his friends in prison would think about what he was doing. He had been out about a year and a half, doing odd jobs, and union work, when this grant came up. His parole officer told him about it. He said, “They’re looking for a man and a woman ex- offender to get in on the foundation of this thing, and then hire about twenty college students to go in and work inside these jails.”
Michael was very intrigued by it, but at the same time worried what his friends in prison would think. Was he now going to become “the man,” authority, the system, the establishment? That was a big issue to him in those days. He remembers writing a couple of his closest friends, and was both relieved and excited by the response: which was “to go for it.” They said that he could go in there and do something, have a voice that people will hear, and so on. So he felt some support regarding this first issue.
The second thing was the fear. In the beginning, every time he went to work, he was afraid that he might not come back out that day. And it was more than only an unreasonable fear, because of the hostility directed at him. This was in 1973, and some of the staff very hostile about an ex-convict working in the jail as staff.
Staff would constantly come up with things to take his clearance to get in the jail away. For instance, they would run warrant checks on people vaguely similar names or the same birth date in order to accuse him of being wanted somewhere. They might then claim that he was wanted on a robbery in somewhere. Additionally, they would lock his office and wouldn’t let him go in to work. He’d have to get on the phone to the sheriff, and say, “You want to come out here. They won’t let me go to work.”
This was literally a daily experience. And he was still very much in a fighting mode himself, also seeing the situation as us versus them. He understood himself more as a prison advocate than part of any sheriff’s department or working in terms of responsibility to the community. Rather, he saw it primarily as a situation where he was there to fight for the rights of prisoners.
In this two to three year period of working in the jail he saw how similar it was to when he was a prisoner: he saw a lot of prisoners just making excuses for everything. It was constant excuses. He knew when he talked with certain prisoners that they would be on their way back to court for doing something wrong. He was hearing how they’re never going to make it; they’re not going to make it out with their family; they’re not going to make it on the streets. They were still using the horrendous conditions inside jail as an excuse. They would blame the staff, blame the cops, blame this, blame that.
And it was really bothering him. However at the same time, he felt jail conditions were so horrendous that he had to continue to battle to change them. Unfortunately, this fighting against the conditions drained prisoner’s energies away from the real problems in their life. So he was trying to balance that tension. How can he get Joe Smith over here to understand that: yes, it is wrong that he’s not allowed to use the telephone, but that’s not the big problem in his life. How can he do both of these things?
What happened was that very gradually his view started to spread in the jail. He and a lot of the cops started to let go of some of the mutual stereotypes that they had about each other. A few different cops would take a risk and be seen talking to him in public, which was a stigma. If jail staff talked to him, other jail staff would “cut them loose” or socially shun them. It was that kind of situation. Then a couple of veterans talked with him. They’d say, “I kind of respect what you did Tuesday. I kind understand why you did this.” In turn, he started looking positively at some of the things they did.
Anyway, it was an evolution of trying, on the one hand, to do something about what he thought was this horrendous lie about prisons and jails: that somehow they were suppose to correct something in this society. He wanted to make that truth public. On the other hand, he wanted prisoners to stop acting the stereotype people thought they were: that they were animals and worthless. He wanted then to quit acting like it, and to quit believing it.
Furthermore, he wanted them to start taking some responsibility for what brought them to prison, and not to look for an easy way out. Their release might be ten years from now, and so they might ask why any preparation for this makes any difference if they were doing a long amount of time in prison. Their release may be next year, if their doing a county term. But they had to understand they needed to start educating themselves right now.
During the rest of the seventies, there was tension around him in the jail. But it wasn’t clearly defined because of the situation in the department where he had his job. At various times, he was a case work supervisor, then a prison services director, and an education director. There wasn’t any coherent mission.
What did happen was that he began to see the jail affect the deputies the same way it affected prisoners. He saw new deputies come to work in the jails with the motivation to work with people. They wanted to do something for their community. They really believed that in their heart. However, after they were in there a year or two, their cynicism was great.
Suddenly their attitude was: “Everybody’s an asshole. Everybody’s an animal. No one understands us. That’s why we have to have our own code of conduct just like the convict’s code. We need to have one. We’re not going tell the truth, either.” Michael thought this was this unbelievable bizarre ethics coming from so-called “peace officers.”
At that point he was just starting to develop his view of the possibilities for the sheriff’s department. He was thinking about what could be done in San Francisco’s jails. What could be done to change this whole thing? That was when the department was under a liberal, but difficult, Sheriff at the time named Richard Hongisto. He was a very powerful guy. And Michael said maybe that’s the only kind of person that could have begun to make the changes. But he wasn’t someone who believed in winning people over, and reading people. He believed in giving orders and edict. He was very much a dictator.
However, the problem was in the jails where the work was done. Hongisto could write a policy in city hall and the deputies would get it at the jails. But if they didn’t believe in it, they’d subvert it. So the department never made any growth. Eventually Hongisto left and went on to the New York department of corrections.
There was a series of acting Sheriffs for a year, year and a half. Michael became persona non grata. Right when he was beginning to get a handle on what he wanted to do in the jails, he and several other people were fired. This was about 1978 or 79.
That’s when he went up to the country. He said to himself, “Hey, I did x amount of time in and x amount in the system, I’m done with it now. I’ve paid my debt.” He wanted to live another life. He went up to the country, and ended up getting married.
What happened in interim was that Michael Hennessey, who was an attorney and had been a counselor who he had worked with in the jails, decided to run for sheriff. It was a fluke thing. It was supposed to an educational campaign. No one believed he’d they were going to elect him. He’s this crazy liberal prison rights attorney and so on. Nevertheless, he ran and was elected in 1979.
Michael was stunned. Everybody was stunned. Hennessey didn’t so much win as these other guys lost the election, a bunch of white liberals. So Hennessey called him, and he remembers what he said to him, too. Which was, “will you come back?” Michael’s response was, “No way.” He was done with this. But he was also wandering around the country, and he really didn’t know what he wanted to do. He knew he had a lot of unfinished business.
Hennessey said, “You know, Marcum it was one thing to be these outsiders battling for reform, us versus them. But if we really have any vision, it’s like inmates running the asylum, now’s our chance. I mean, it’s ours. We can do what we want. We’re either going to fail or we’re going to succeed. You know, it’s like a golden opportunity.”
So he came back and encountered a less hostility than before. However, he still had to prove myself all over again. As he received more responsibility and promotions the hostility lessened. His focus this time was on training staff. He finds it ironic that you have an ex-convict training deputies in safer ways to run jails, ways that were also more beneficial to their own psyches, not only for the prisoners, but for both.
Some prisoners became very angry at him because of the strictness of the rules that he would make. There was a lot of resistance from prisoners, who would say, “What is this petty shit, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
What he was trying to do was to deinstitutionalize these places. He would tell deputies to: “Stop pretending this is a zoo, which is the way they have been running this tier. Start pretending this is your living room. I want you to hold people to the same standards you hold them to in your living room.”
“At first deputies were going, ‘Are you crazy?’ But some of them got into it. The prisoners rose to the occasion, because they really wanted to be treated with some dignity. Yea, they griped about the pettiness [of the rules] at first. But the big thing was that it was safer for everybody.”
Michael found that as staff started setting high expectations, prisoners stopped fashioning weapons and cliqueing up as much. This was also because the staff was physical present all the time in the living units in the two new jails that he was involved in directing. Consequently, fear was significantly reduced. There was still fear, and there was still racial tension, but it was constantly being addressed and talked about, and that kind of thing.
He tried to train deputies to be as what he saw as good organizers like he had been when he was in prison. This meant to fight racial stuff, the divisiveness and hostility between prisoners of different races, and to fight crooks. Additionally, to find things of common interest with the prisoners, and to start treating education programs not like they were special privilege for the prisoners but that they were an obligation and a responsibility. He was trying to get the deputies off the attitude, “Ah, they’re getting to go to school,” and it’s not fair, and to the to understanding that, no, they owe this to the community that pays us. We have a responsibility here.
He was in a manner combining — while trying to avoid labels — sort of traditional conservative and liberal approaches into something that could keep people from stereotyping his approach.
He’d sell an innovative new anti-violence, drug treatment, and education program. He’d do it to some deputies by saying, “Hey, we have to make this a safer place to work in.” If that’s what it took to get them to buy into it, fine. He wasn’t going to make any big claims that we were going to rehabilitate everybody and their mother.
But to the other people, he would try to explain to them why they were doing this: that this does change things. A person, if they complete this and get some treatment, when they get out the likelihood of them “going upside somebody’s head,” that is committing a violent crime, is diminished. That’s about all they, the jail staff, could do. But they had an obligation to do at least that. Otherwise they were stealing money from the taxpayer. That kind of approach really went over well with sort of the newer generation of staff. He was lucky that he knew enough people in the system, too — old cons, medium age cons. That when things would get a little hairy [threatening] inside, there would be enough backing for me about holding people to pretty high standards. So people wouldn’t think his motivation was simply to abuse them or be strict for strictness sake. There would be an understanding that there was some reason behind this.
Michael said that it was a big identity change for him, going from convict to assistant sheriff. It was definitely so publicly, with him becoming more of a jail manager. But privately, where he “gets his juice,” or his satisfaction, is still from convicts who make it, who learn, who grow. He still spends a huge amount of his time writing people inside who hear about him, or maybe even he knew him. But at this point it’s mostly people who heard about him from somebody who would say to them, “You should ask this guy for some help.”
Michael gets his “fix” or pleasure from — helping prisoners. And also from the people in our system that he sees get out and make it. Down at the new jail, they have a “wall of fame” for folks that have been in their system that are still out and doing well. His heart is still with those people who have been at the bottom and who recover some belief in themselves. It is with those who don’t internalize that societal stigma about who they are: that they’re losers, that it’s over with, that they’re violent, that they’re junkies, that they’re whatever. That’s sometimes a life long struggle for people.
He said that he still considers it a struggle for himself in life. He doesn’t consider that it’s all over for himself. There’s not a day goes by that he doesn’t have to confront the legacy of his choices back then, either publicly, or in assistance from somebody. Or the opposite, sometimes some people give trust that he hasn’t even earned yet. Some assume he can be depended on because he’s been there and done that. So it’s always there, it never goes away.
And because it has been valuable being honest about it with him self, it’s also something he’s always been pretty public about. He’d rather be public about it, take his licks and take the positive stuff, than try to keeping it in the drawer. This honesty also helps him a great deal internally in trying to understand what he’s doing and why he’s doing it.
Once in awhile he’ll be with a couple of his good friend’s, who are criminal defense attorneys, and someone will go: “Can’t you take your badge off.” To Michael, this illustrates how big of a role change it been for him.
For other people, Michael recognizes that the badge still has a pretty powerful and negative effect. And he understands that, but seeing that whole identity change in him self has been a long and fascinating process. He said, “It’s a strange thing for me. Because I realize for me it’s not a symbol of power and authority, it’s a symbol of what I’ve gone through and what I’m trying to do now.”
Epilogue
My own particularly interest in studying people who have gone from prison to law-abiding and humanitarian lives is on the spiritual or transpersonal aspects of the process. So when we finished the formal interview I mentioned to Michael Marcum that I saw similarity between the way he deals with people and Quaker spirituality, which is to recognize and thereby bring out the good (or the “God”) in all people. Ironically, it was some Quakers with good intentions who started the first “penitentiaries.” Unfortunately, it didn’t work out the way they had hoped.
Michael Marcum says that he doesn’t pay any particularly attention to “spiritual” practices. I suppose he means by this recognized and conscious systems of belief and ritual, which don’t necessarily, in my view, have anything to do with spirituality. However, the spirituality of his life is obvious when spirituality is recognized by the positive and transformative effect that people have on their environment. This in contrast to how devotedly people follow a particular belief system.
Michael said that a lot of his time working in the jails involves drilling into staff his own perspective on the offenders they have in their charge: “There’s no good and bad people. They’re good people who have acted badly, conducted themselves badly. And it’s really important to make that distinction.” Here is a definite similarity to Quaker spirituality.
He said it is clear from his own background why such a distinction would be important to him. Because as long as there is good people and bad people, and that is the only way you could judge it, then he would have had to say therefore he was a bad person. Consequently, he would have lost any reason to want to live.
Making a distinction between the way people conduct themselves, and who they are, in their heart, soul, or however you want to perceive it, was a huge distinction that allowed him to survive. It allowed him to communicate with other people who were in like situations. It eventually allowed him to teach people who were working with folks in that situation, to meet them, and to have them follow him. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have. Instead, they would have said, “Why in the hell are you doing this?”
If anyone asked me why I thought Michael Marcum was doing what he is, I would say it was because of a little vow he made about thirty years ago when he was in prison. A little vow that somehow when he got out, he would do something to give another kid a chance not to be in the same horrible situation he was in.
[This paper was originally written in 1998 for a "Life History as Research" course at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Michael is now retired from the SFSD.]
Recent Comments