Andy Thibault

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Couldn't Keep It For Themselves
To Wit
Colin McEnroe
Northeast Magazine, Hartford Courant
April 18, 2004

"I happen to believe in recovering the cost of incarcerating criminals. And I believe that any exceptions ought to be very few and far between - if indeed there are any exceptions. Most importantly, I believe the process of investigating and detecting assets has to be more thorough, comprehensive and systematic."

The person who said these words about a year ago to Connecticut Law Tribune columnist Andy Thibault was Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. Blumenthal had filed a lawsuit against HarperCollins and against a group of women convicts and ex-convicts from York Correctional Institution in Niantic. The issue was royalties the women might receive through the publication of their critically acclaimed anthology of personal essays, "Couldn't Keep It To Myself," compiled with the help of best-selling author Wally Lamb and a teacher named Dale Griffith. Blumenthal filed liens against the prisoners under the "cost of incarceration" law, a bizarre state provision that requires prisoners to pay for the cost of locking them up.

Blumenthal's position at the time was that, once he was "tasked" (a term newly in vogue) by then-Correction Commissioner John Armstrong to go after a prisoner's assets, he had no choice but to do so.

It's worth noting that, by early 2003, Armstrong had all the moral credibility of King Herod, especially around women's issues. A report by the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities had, the year before, found that sexual harassment of employees in his department was pervasive and winked at by higher-ups. Two years before that, Amnesty International, a group we normally associate with the denunciation of, oh, Salvadoran death squads, had repeatedly singled out York as a place where reports of sexual mistreatment of prisoners had reached epidemic levels.

Armstrong's replacement is Theresa C. Lantz, whose introduction to the zany world of Connecticut politics came last March when she was presented to the public at an event where the press was gnashing at Gov. Rowland about recent disclosures involving his former Deputy Chief of Staff Lawrence Alibozek and Public Works Commissioner Ted Anson. Rowland rejected the idea that he could anticipate members of his staff turning to the dark side and used Lantz as an example. "If a year from now she does something wrong, how do we know that?" Rowland inquired, pointing at Lantz as if, at any minute, she might morph into a graft-snuffling psycho-killer. According to The New York Times, she ducked her head in embarrassment, a popular pose in public life these days.

Back to Blumenthal. Ordered by the All-American Boy Jack Armstrong to pursue the royalties, he did so. But in an interview with Thibault, he dropped out of his "only following orders" mode long enough to blurt out that he endorsed the policy and that, if anything, it wasn't applied rigorously enough.

As of last Sunday, in a Hartford Courant column by Michele Jacklin, Blumenthal was among those state officials saying the "cost of incarceration" law was too broadly drawn. In particular, Blumenthal believes "rehabilitative" activities should be exempted, especially cash prizes a prisoner might win for her writing.

The prize in question is the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, bestowed this year on Barbara Parsons Lane, one of the contributors to the anthology. PEN is an international writers group. Newman's Own is a line of delicious sauces, dressings, snacks and, for all I know, antidepressants. Lane's daughter and son will accept the award at a ceremony next month in the glamorous Pierre Hotel. Her husband will not attend because Lane, a survivor of domestic abuse, is in prison for killing him.

PEN gave the award to Lane not so much because she is a champion of First Amendment rights but because she represents a kind of human battleground over them. The organization has been pretty open about the fact that they gave the award to highlight the stupidity of applying the "cost of incarceration" to writers trying to better themselves.

Applied to almost anybody, the policy is stupendously wacky. Imagine a guy who does five years for, say, snatching an old woman's purse. He gets out, inherits $134,000 from his grandfather and the state sues him for $121,000 to cover the cost of keeping him locked up all those years. Actually, you don't have to imagine it, because it happened here in Connecticut to a guy named John Filippi. It sounds like something out of Victor Hugo.

The people who run York didn't like the idea of Lane getting the prize. They didn't know it was in the works, and they like to do the surprising. Their reaction was to suspend the Lamb and Griffith program, seize computer hard drives, transfer Griffith to a different job and tell Lamb he couldn't meet with his students. Imagine somebody seizing your hard drive. Now imagine you were a woman in a prison writing program where you were encouraged to try, for the first time, writing down personal narratives you had never shared with anyone and might ultimately never want to share at all. Now imagine somebody seizing that hard drive. Imagine wondering if the guards were reading your stuff.

Word on the street was that "60 Minutes" had caught wind of the story and would be in town by the end of last week. And then there's the whole Paul Newman thing. If you were an ambitious Connecticut politician, would you diss the state's most celebrated liberal? By Tuesday afternoon, Blumenthal, Lantz and others came stumbling out of a closed-door meeting with Lamb and a PEN representative. The happy news? The writing program would be re-instituted. Blumenthal was even more sure than ever that there should be exceptions to the Javert-like "cost of incarceration" policy.

Maybe you can screw around with Wally Lamb, but you can't cock a snook at "60 Minutes" and Paul Newman. And Lamb hadn't even rolled out his big cannon yet. He is, after all, the apple of Oprah's eye.

Incarceration is a significant thing to do to someone. Think of all the things you do every day, every week to try to make yourself happy. Think about never doing any of them. We punish people by locking them up where they can't go shopping, see the people they love, drive to the beach, go out for a burger and a glass of red wine. THAT'S the punishment. They shouldn't have to foot the bill for what we decide to do to them.

One of the women who wrote for Lamb's book is Bonnie Foreshaw. One night in 1986, at a gas station in Hartford, she pulled a gun on a man, a stranger, who had been following her. Foreshaw had the gun because her ex-husband had been stalking her. The man at the gas station testified that he pulled a woman in front of him as a shield when he saw Foreshaw's gun. In the ensuing scuffle, Foreshaw accidentally shot that woman, who was pregnant. She got 45 years for pre-meditated murder. Go figure.

Under the insane logic of the "cost of incarceration" law, Foreshaw owes the state $117 a day for a sentence that would strike most people as absurdly long. She also recently complained of being sexually molested by a female guard at York. One of the two corroborating witnesses is Barbara Parsons Lane, the new PEN award-winner. The state police have recently reopened that sexual assault case after the Department of Correction quickly dismissed it as baseless. Foreshaw told her lawyer last week that the FBI had also come calling to ask about it.

Behind the inept PR and the silly hypocrisies of this story is a darker tale - the story of women who were easier to control in the good old days before the novelists, movie stars and television cameras showed up. Foreshaw's essay in the Lamb book is about how faith kept her going. There was a time when faith was just about all there was.

You can contact Colin McEnroe by e-mail at Rmag99@ aol.com.  

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