By Bill Littlefield

Indefinite argues that legitimate change in the way this country deals with people accused of breaking the law would have to begin with the recognition of their humanity.

Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail by Michael L. Walker. Oxford University Press, 267 pages, $29.95.

Prison is bad. Jail’s worse. That contention, probably irrefutable, is at the center of Michael Walker’s potent book. Walker, now assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, adopts an ambitious approach to proving his thesis. He is simultaneously operating as “Michael the subject, Michael the narrator, and Michael the sociologist.” His own multiple incarcerations provide him with much of the fieldwork for his study, and, obviously, it is fieldwork nobody would choose to undertake.

Walker points out early in Indefinite that although much has been written about prisons, jails have not been much studied. He theorizes that this is because most people regard jail time as minimal compared to the time convicted men and women spend in prison, and he establishes that people who think that way are wrong. “I learned that someone could be in jail for nine years while fighting a case,” Walker writes, “and that if you can be there for nine years, you can be there for much longer.” He also learned that suicide is and long has been “the leading cause of death in jails. Between 2006 and 2016, there were 16,962 deaths in jails; 40 percent of them occurred within the first seven days of being incarcerated; about 31 percent of all deaths were suicides at a median of just nine days in jail,” and “in the decade leading up to and including 2016, no less than 70 percent of the people who committed suicide in jail were the innocent-until-proven-guilty.” As Walker puts it, “There’s definitely something going on in American jails, and 26 days is more than enough time for it to happen.”

Just as chilling as the statistics are Walker’s accounts of how he and the men he met while he was incarcerated spent their days and nights. They “endure.” Often they’re not doing much else. Many of the deputies and other officials charged with keeping order and caring for the residents (Walker does not use terms like “criminal” or “inmate”) ignore their needs. Others are actively hostile. This is perhaps unsurprising. Walker quotes a cousin who works in the system and claims that “during training, correctional officers were taught that ‘every inmate either has AIDS or is trying to kill you because that’s what criminals do.’”

It won’t surprise anyone who has even limited familiarity with prisons and jails in this country to learn that the men who serve as Walker’s subjects are often hungry, cold, and anxious, and always sleep-deprived. They are also subject to “a set of race-based rules” which dictate their associations as well as their behavior, even with respect to the routes they can use to walk across the dayroom. To say that residents lack privacy is a grotesque understatement. Guards read the residents’ mail out loud, sometimes while the residents watch. Phone calls are monitored. Guards and residents cannot help but overhear conversations between residents and the doctor, nurse, or counselors from whom they’re seeking help. A man sharing a cell must learn how to minimize the noise he makes and the stench he creates while he’s on the toilet, since the toilet is inches away from the bunk bed where his cellmate lies. Walker suggests flushing often.

Instances of kindness and comradeship do occur in Indefinite. A man who’s obviously undernourished and without family members to provide him with money for extra food finds a bag of chips or an envelope of instant soup outside his cell, courtesy of another resident. Residents create celebrations of a sort for men who are being released, though the vibe in that circumstance is mixed. Walker reports that when he learned of his own imminent release, one of the men with whom he’d been close shut him out. When Walker brings up the change in behavior, his fellow resident says, “I just don’t want you to leave.… I should be getting out.” Walker isn’t surprised to hear this. As he writes, “Part of why someone’s freedom was so painful was that it was an unwelcome reminder that you weren’t going anywhere and that you couldn’t say when that would change. There was always this lingering, mostly latent, feeling that maybe you would never get out. You rode the Hope Rollercoaster, but you were still in jail.”

Many of these wretched circumstances feel as if they could apply to prison as well as jail. That’s why Walker at the end of Indefinite reminds the reader that there is a significant distinction between the two. He references the explanation of a resident with experience in both institutions. “In prison, you’re home,” the resident tells Walker. “You’re just home. They try to make it comfortable for you. Jail is punishment. Prison is like working for the government. You’ll be taken care of. You just do your job, and you’ll be OK. Jail is like working at McDonald’s. You could be fired. The pay sucks. The whole thing sucks.”

Men and women who’ve been incarcerated in various prisons might not subscribe to “they try to make it comfortable,” but Walker’s made his point. Early in the book he points to another significant distinction: unlike people incarcerated in prisons, many of the residents of jails have been found guilty of nothing. They are waiting — sometimes for years, often with no help but an overworked, underprepared public defender — for the system to decide what to do with them. Some of them are suddenly released simply because the jail is overcrowded and they’re judged to be potentially less dangerous than somebody else whom the state needs to lock up. Others sit for months or years with no sense of when they’ll go to trial or, much more likely, be offered a plea deal and perhaps threatened with decades of incarceration if they don’t accept it.

Indefinite catalogues the indignities, abuses, and injustices built into the jail system in particular and the “corrections” system in general. From the particulars, Walker moves to a generalization about efforts to reform that system without a radical overhaul. “Penal organizations can’t be used to fix anything in the lives of their residents because penal organizations just break shit and are governed by logics that necessarily thwart attempts at reform. There is an inherent foolishness — a purposeful ignoring of realities — in penal reform initiatives for residents who are hungry, cold, and sleep deprived.”

Walker suggests throughout Indefinite that legitimate change in the way this country deals with people accused of breaking the law would have to begin with the recognition of their humanity. “Objectification” of the residents as criminals, cons, thugs, scum, and so on is at the heart of the circumstances that shape the system that Walker describes and analyzes. He writes that “as students of the history of degradation, we know that the objectification of personhood is its own justification for torture and human atrocity.” One important achievement of Indefinite is the presentation of Walker’s fellow residents as complex individuals from whose experiences, anxieties, coping strategies, and perceptions he and the rest of us can learn.

Bill Littlefield works with men incarcerated at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord under the auspices of the Emerson Prison Initiative, a program that enables incarcerated men to pursue a college degree. You can contact him at blittlegame@gmail.com