Living and Dying in Prison: The Fight Joe Correia Won

Denver, Co, March 18, 2006 anti-war rally

Joe Correia died in the hospital unit of a Massachusetts state prison. He had been suffering from kidney cancer for several years and had been serving a sentence of life without parole for a 1978 first-degree murder conviction -- a conviction that he fought up until his death, citing a whole slew of errors and, most important, his actual innocence.

Time was running out on Joe and by the time I went to visit him, he knew he wasn't going to beat the cancer or the life sentence. He knew he was going to die in prison.

By almost any way of looking at it, Joe didn't manage to triumph. But in my handful of exchanges with him, I saw triumph of a very particular kind.

Our first communication took place a few years ago. I was soliciting written reflections from prisoners who had spent time in the Departmental Disciplinary Unit (DDU) -- a state-of-the-art "control unit" representing the harshest punishment our system offers. Joe had spent six years there and he was now reluctant to relive the experience by writing about it. He told me he wanted people on the outside to understand what that kind of confinement did to prisoners, but he was wary of revealing his true feelings. After more than twenty years of concealment, he wrote, such revelation wasn't easy.

If people give any thought to what happens after prisoners are sent away for life, most tend to think about the physical and logistical aspects of that life: How much does it cost to keep someone incarcerated for all that time? What kind of facility is required?

For the prisoners, however, the question of psychic survival is often at least as urgent as the physical. Joe told me he felt lucky to have gotten out of DDU with his sanity intact. "At times that place was such a seemingly hopeless pit that it's amazing I didn't take the final plunge," he wrote. "While few men will admit it, DDU detrimentally affects everyone that enters there. ... I personally experienced episodes of extreme depression, paranoia, and at times felt like I was on the verge of an abyss and that with one more step I would truly be lost forever in some psychotic void. Believe me, it's a scary situation which I've actually not been able to fully come to terms with yet myself, and which has made writing this letter a very hard and painful process."

Yet he did write it. I was struck by the way Joe's letter didn't just describe the tension between the need to conceal and the desire to reveal true feelings; it exemplified it.

When Joe knew he was dying, he wrote letters to his family and friends on the outside. His two closest friends were ex-prisoners themselves and thus forbidden by regulations from visiting him. His friend Bobby had been serving a life sentence too but, after 40 years in prison, had managed what Joe had not: to win a motion for a new trial and then, eventually, release. I had come to know Bobby well after visiting him for several years, and had been involved with his efforts to win his freedom. I was there on the extraordinary day that he walked out the door after having served more time in prison than I'd been alive. I offered to visit Joe because Bobby couldn't.

Visiting someone at a maximum security prison is such a concentrated experience. It's like drinking human interaction straight up. There's no time for small talk, no chance to build trust gradually, no opportunity to pause or turn away or dilute the conversation with activity. I knew this visit would be even more concentrated than most because it would be our first and last and because I had a huge assignment. "Try to get a sense of what he needs," Bobby instructed me. "Try to let him say what he needs to say or hear what he needs to hear."

Joe was cordial, certainly, but watchful, taking my measure without showing much of himself. We talked about his physical condition, his poor prognosis, what kind of care he was getting. "What're you gonna do?" he said repeatedly, the phrase and a rueful grin appearing at the end of his sentences like personal punctuation.

Inevitably the talk turned to Bobby, our mutual link. It was an easy topic to fall back on, but I worried about it too. With Joe, the natural exuberance I had when talking about Bobby's first year of freedom seemed not quite appropriate. Still, we talked about how well Bobby was doing, and I said it had been amazing to be present on the day of his release.
"What was the first thing he said?" Joe asked suddenly. His tone was less guarded, more eager than it had been before. It felt like the first thing he had actually asked me for on the visit.
"You haven't heard the whole story of that day, have you?" He shook his head. I didn't have time to think about the risks of telling it to him; I just jumped in.

He listened carefully, in two senses: he paid close attention, but also didn't let me see much of how he was taking it. His expression barely changed when I came to the funny parts or the tense, dramatic parts. Still, I kept going. I came to the moment when Bobby was standing on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, looking at the Boston skyline, with his cousin motioning to the grand sweep of the view and saying, "Bobby, this is the world." I was wrapped up in the story by then, not fully monitoring Joe's reaction, until I glanced at him and saw that his eyes had filled with tears.

He blinked them back and looked away, shaking his head. "It makes me cry," he said. I nodded. He had let himself feel it, for a moment --- how much he had wanted freedom for himself. The tears came before he had time to brace himself against them.

We sat for a moment without speaking. Then he said, "I don't want to get too emotional here." I took a chance and guessed at his meaning.
"Because you're going to have to go back there?" I motioned to the corridor that led back to the rest of the prison. He nodded: Exactly. Back to the place where it's risky to reveal your true feelings.
"Joe, I'm watching the clock," I said firmly. "The visit's just half over. I promise I won't let you be like this when we're five minutes from the end of the hour." We had crossed over from carefulness, from the watchful courtesy of strangers. We were in the free fall of genuine feeling. How could Joe bear to confront his own wish to get out of prison before he died? How could he bear not to?

Joe had written that letter to me about DDU even though he was wary of revealing himself in the writing. He had opened himself to the story of Bobby's release even though it put him smack in the middle of his own impossible longing. For a man who knows he is going to die in prison, these are triumphs. They mean prison didn't claim him all the way; they mean that Joe did achieve the psychic and emotional survival he was so worried about. He feared he would be lost forever; I say I've seen the proof that he wasn't.

I hadn't been able to find a lawyer who was willing to take Joe's case, though to my layperson's eye, his legal motion looked credible and outrageous, in the way of such things (obvious errors, things you couldn't believe a lawyer wasn't leaping up and objecting to, real doubt about whether Joe was even present at the scene of the crime). Joe certainly wanted to be exonerated before his death, and now the chances of someone deciding to take up the claim posthumously are slim indeed. This is not, though Joe urgently wanted it to be, the story of a man who finds justice at last. But it's a story of the fight that Joe Correia did win: the fight for -- as he had put it in his letter to me -- his own true feelings and his own true self.