A few years ago, when I taught in prison, I came home one time and wrote down my feelings. I’m not sure my ideas of how to deal with crows are correct. What do you think?
Crows
by Ed Griffin
800 words
I teach a course in creative writing at Matsqui prison. Week after week I drive forty-five minutes into the country to the prison. As I walk to the gate, I notice several crows flying back and forth across the two, razor-wired fences. The crows screech at me as they perch on the fences. What are they trying to tell me? Then suddenly they fly deeper into the prison grounds.
I go into the guard house and chat with the guards. Most of them are good human beings and we talk about the weather or we laugh at my cheap briefcase which I have to pound so it will open for inspection. Occasionally I meet someone with an attitude, but mostly they’re just ordinary people. They’re not eagles or hummingbirds or blue-jays. They’re just crows, like the rest of us, ordinary birds trying to live.
I can’t understand why the men in prison hate them so.
As I wait for the big gates to slide open, the crows fly over my head and scream at me again. I think how strange it is that we call a pack of crows a murder of crows. Why are they flying back and forth? Maybe there’s a murder of crows living in the prison and one outside and they’re just changing shifts.
I go into my class. Jack and Brian and Dennis and….. Not their real names, but just ordinary guys. Guys trying to write. Trying to figure out their lives with pen and paper and keyboard. Jack was beat up regularly by his father, so he figured violence was the way you dealt with society. Now he’s writing about his early years — and his father. Brian, 32, the article writer, sees a lot wrong with the world and especially a lot wrong with his world. He’s trying to write down his anger instead of acting it out. And Dennis, 41, is finding an outlet for his creative energy in fiction rather than in a line of cocaine.
They’re not representative of society as a whole. With few exceptions, they’re poor people. People without resources. A disproportionate number of minorities and natives. They, too, remind me of crows, not eagles or hummingbirds or blue-jays. Crows.
I teach my class. We have a lot of laughs. Occasionally I meet a con with an attitude, but mostly they’re just writers. I can’t understand why the guards hate them so.
Maybe writers are different from the general prison population. But I care about these guys. I read in the paper every day how we should lock these guys up and throw the key away or we should just hang them all. No, not Jack and Brian and Dennis. Don’t.
I finish my class and I walk to the gate to leave. What have I accomplished? A Band-Aid. I haven’t solved the problem of crime. I haven’t faced the agony of a woman who’s lost her daughter to rape and murder. I haven’t broken the cycle of abuse to kids who later turn to abuse. I’ve gone to prison and passed out Band-Aids. It’s very frustrating.
When I go home, my friends will ask me about prison. “It’s a big warehouse,” I’ll say. “What kind of society puts a human being in a cage?” Then my friends will demand my alternatives. I won’t be able to say anything.
The crows laugh at me as the gate slides open. They’re so loud and obnoxious. Caw. Caw. He doesn’t have any answers.
I get back in my car and drive to the city. Questions peck at me. Why do we try to solve crime out in the country, instead of where it happened? Why is Canada locking up more and more people, yet crime seems worse? Why did the government cut funds to educate prisoners? Why are all the criminology books in the library clean and unread, while the public rants on? Why does society give these guys three squares a day and not demand they change their souls?
I’m going mad with questions. I jam a tape in the player, something soothing. Simon and Garfunkle. On the side of the freeway a murder of crows works a farmer’s field for some left-over corn.
I go home and check my bird book on crows. Very intelligent, gregarious. Crows gather together to mob owls and other predators, but may, in turn, be mobbed by other birds. In agricultural areas, crows are considered great pests.
The crows fly back and forth over the prison walls If the crows inside the fences are just like the crows outside the fences, what is to be done with those inside? Put them all in cages? Kill them? No. What do you do about crows? You study them, you learn how to help them, and you put up scarecrows where you have to.
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Check out an interesting graphic, the Criminal States of America
Prison Uncensored - The Truth Behind the Bars 