How Words Set Free a ‘Solid Con’

Fear of crime, hatred of the counterculture, the sheer number of prisoners taken in the war on drugs--whatever the reasons, America a generation ago abandoned any pretense at enlightened penology. Attempts at rehabilitation gave way to simple punishment. It was a binge from which the nation today is only beginning to awaken. It had a literary dimension, too: Villains in crime books and movies, from the real Charles Manson to the fictional Hannibal Lecter, tended not to be human beings with social or personal problems that readers might share but remorseless psychopaths, embodiments of pure evil.

Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca knew monsters in the Arizona state prison where he served five years in the 1970s for dealing drugs. He could have become a monster himself: Just to survive, he says in this eloquent and gripping memoir, he smashed one inmate in the head with a piece of angle iron and sliced open the stomach of another with a butcher knife. The prison code demanded no less, he says, because “the man who backed down still lost his soul--and in a humiliating way, which was the worst way.”

But prison, Baca makes clear, is a cause of, rather than an antidote for, “the insidious process that criminalizes a man and makes him more violent.”

It speeds up the process by adding to the prisoner’s burden of pain and forcing him to keep ever more distant from his own feelings. In Baca’s case, the pain began early. His father was a drunk. His mother abandoned him and his siblings to pass as white and marry a wealthy man. From age 7, he lived in orphanages and detention homes.

When Baca was arrested, he couldn’t read or write. He wanted to go to prison school, but the administration, which was headed by a warden who “ruled though intimidation, beatings and lockdowns, and by taking away time served and imposing his own sentences,” said no. Baca, in turn, refused to work. He was placed in solitary confinement, among some of the prison’s most dangerous men--a course that risked his life but also gave him precious time to think.

At this point, “A Place to Stand” becomes an amazing story. Lying in his cell, remembering a brief period in his childhood when he lived with his grandparents in a traditional New Mexico farming village, Baca discovered that he had things he desperately wanted to write about, and he taught himself to read and write, with minimal help from inmates and outside correspondents. His first note to one of the latter in 1975 is painfully illiterate, but less than two years later he was reading poets Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda and writing powerful, sophisticated poems of his own.

As a boy--”a poor kid with too much anger and the wrong skin color”--Baca had loved quiet, beautiful places and mourned the loss of his parents and his first girlfriends. As a 20-year-old, he had run a successful (if unlicensed) plumbing and landscaping business in Yuma. As a drug dealer and “solid con,” he had stood up to tough guys and won respect. He was highly capable, even without an education--this is clear from the beginning of the book; capable of both good and evil. Still, the velocity of his transformation through literature is breathtaking.

Baca’s father died of drink. His brother died of a drug overdose. His mother, hungry for her Chicano roots and willing to acknowledge her first set of children at last, was shot dead by her second husband. In prize-winning works such as “Black Mesa Poems,” “Martin & Meditations on the South Valley,” “Immigrants in Our Own Land” and “Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio,” Baca took it as his mission to express such people’s pain.

Pain must be expressed or it kills the self and others--that’s the message Baca distills from his life’s story.

“Everything [in the prison] had weight and substance, intended to silence, imprison, destroy. Yet somehow I had transmuted the barb-wire thorns’ hostile glint into a linguistic light that illuminated a new me. In a very real way, words had broken through the walls and set me free.”