The Death Class: A True Story About Life (17 page)

He decided to go back to school.

I
SRAEL ENROLLED IN
a community college. But it was located in the neighborhood of the rival gang that he had crossed, the turf of the guy he had nearly shot in the face.

One night, Israel was walking near a McDonald’s across from campus when he noticed a burgundy Honda with tinted windows slowly rolling by. Israel had not lost his jumpiness since the last incident involving him and the gun, seven months earlier. He started walking toward the parking lot, when he saw the window lower. He heard someone shout, “Get ’im!”

Israel took off, dipping between cars as gunshots pounded behind him, hightailing it back to campus, barging into an office, where he jumped over a desk and hid behind it. He waited in a safe place for a long time and then called a cab when he felt enough time had passed, leaving his own car in the parking lot to pick up another day in case they were waiting for him near it.

That was his last day of community college.

Maybe, he thought, school was not for him anyway. He tried working instead. He found a job at an HIV clinic as a peer educator and worked his way up the ranks to coordinator. The clinic sent him to counseling training in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Las Vegas. Israel finally felt as if he was doing something worthwhile. A few years had passed. He began to rethink his decision to quit school. Perhaps he could handle college after all, just not so close to his old enemies?

He went to speak to a counselor at Kean University, after a mentor suggested he try to get in through the school’s Exceptional Educational Opportunities Program, which relied on state funding to help at-risk students who might not be accepted based on their SAT scores or grades and didn’t have the money required to pay for college.

It took some effort on the part of the counselor, but one day Israel received his official notice: he had been admitted to the university.

A
S
I
SRAEL SAT
contemplating what to write for Norma’s first class assignment that day, a name came to mind. A young man he’d once known. The name sometimes cracked in his throat when he said it out loud.

Israel had never had the chance to say good-bye to him.

Before he knew it, Israel’s fingers were flying over the keyboard, as if they knew what he needed to say better than he did.

When Norma called on Israel to share his good-bye letter in front of the class, he said he didn’t want to read it. She urged, but he refused. When she called on him again the next week, he still flat-out said no.

He wasn’t ready to go there, to disclose his shame and guilt. Not yet.

Each semester, Norma took her students to a men’s prison. It was a death class requisite. She usually spent the class period before the field trip running down the list of dos and don’ts: no keys, IDs, pens, notebooks, cash, coins, cell phones, ChapStick, belt buckles, or underwire bras. “You can’t wear blue, red, orange, or khaki. Don’t wear tight clothing. Don’t wear anything that says your name on it. You can’t have anything in your pockets, not even a piece of gum.”

The prison visit would take about four hours. “There may be times when there is a code,” she added, “and we’ll just have to wait it out. Every-body goes running, and you have to jump against the wall.”

Students would see the insides of cells, the gang unit, the psychiatric center, the infirmary, and the administrative segregation section, which was like a jail within the jail. Northern State Prison was the second largest prison in the state, originally built for 1,000 prisoners, now straining to house 2,700 to 3,100. It also held the most notorious gang members in the region. Norma used the trip to launch a discussion on capital punishment, sometimes held with inmates themselves. After being led through the facilities by corrections officers, everyone would gather in the prison law library, where, as Norma explained, “You will be face to face, sitting at the table with murderers.”

For the next hour and a half, students would meet arsonists, serial killers, robbers, sexual offenders, kidnappers, and men who had shot, stabbed, strangled, or beaten people to death. There would be no bars
between them, no glass partitions, no handcuffs. The inmates would rotate tables so everyone would have a chance to talk.

“You will be able to ask them anything you want about their life, about what they did, about what they think of the death penalty,” she said. “You can ask about remorse. Anything.”

Norma looked around at the thirty-six students in class, some of whom sat in stunned silence, eyes wide, jaws dropped, some smiling incredulously or dumbfounded. Apparently not everyone had heard about her field trips before signing up for the course.

She heard the under-the-breath mutters: “Oh, my God.”

“Now,” Norma would reply with a chuckle, clasping her hands together, “anyone wanna drop?”

I
SRAEL COULDN’T HELP
but feel a mixture of anticipation and foreboding when Norma announced she was taking his class to the prison that winter of 2008. What if he ran into someone he knew from his past life?

Two of his former gang affiliates had been locked up in the years since he’d left—for shooting people in a drug deal gone bad. He believed they were housed at Northern State. And there could be others he’d crossed paths with. How would it look, his old friends, acquaintances, or perhaps even enemies on one side of the bars, Israel the college student on the other?

Still, he could not pass up the opportunity. He had not been able to forgive himself for the wrongs he’d committed in his life, and he didn’t even know if he deserved forgiveness in the first place. He didn’t know why he’d been given second, third, and fourth chances. Maybe in prison he’d find some answers.

Israel’s class met in the lobby of the prison, which sat across from the New Jersey Turnpike and the airport, sharing a long, lonely street with a Holiday Inn and a ditch filled with cattails. The prison opened in 1987, on a landfill. Before that, the site had been used for a petroleum distribution center and a plant that produced formaldehyde. Though built to relieve overcrowding, Northern State had become one of the most congested prisons in New Jersey.

Some of the region’s
most notorious killers had served time at Northern State, including Robert Zarinsky, sentenced to ninety-eight years for the 1969 murder of a seventeen-year-old girl on her way home from a corner store, where she had gone to pick up a carton of milk. Or Christopher Righetti, a bald, bearded man with a tattoo of the word “animal” on his body, who was serving a life sentence for kidnapping, raping, and stabbing to death a young woman who had gone to buy shoes at the Paramus Park Mall in 1976.

The students lined up and passed through metal detectors as the doors to the yard opened. They walked into a cell block and through another set of bolted doors, and a guard unlocked an electronically controlled sliding door to a cell. Israel took his turn as students were allowed inside two at a time, as the inmates who lived in the space were kept in a separate holding space. At eight by ten feet, each cement cell was about the size of an elevator and had been designed for one person. But the guards explained that the inmates slept two per cell, sharing a stainless steel sink, a metal locker, a toilet, and a bunk bed barely big enough to fit Israel’s burly frame into. There were not enough cells to house everyone, so trailer-style bungalows had been installed in a lot across the grounds to sleep 140 men, with 14 men in seven bunks per wing.

In some cells, pieces of cardboard covered the toilet, and rows of Sprite bottles and cartons of lemonade ice tea lined the sink. Inside one cell, an inmate had set up an outdated, yellowing computer monitor and keyboard. It did not receive the Internet, but the prisoner used it as a word processor. Most prisoners received their meals on trays handed through slits in their cells. Many had small televisions, on which men watched
ABC Nightly News.
Among the men’s favorite shows:
America’s Got Talent, Lost,
and
CSI.

Some inmates woke just before the third shift ended, arriving in the kitchen at 6
A.M.
to report for duty, while others worked as electricians or in sanitary jobs. Some prison jobs could go on for twelve-hour stints, for which inmates could earn $1.25, or $4 a day in the kitchen. That was how they paid for goods such as plastic televisions the size of small computer monitors. But when it snowed, guards woke the inmates from their slumbers and told them to shovel, for no pay.

The guards quickly ushered out Israel’s class, and they were on to the next stop: the gang unit.

By the late 1990s, state prison officials had hatched a plan to squash the growing power of gangs in lockup across the region. One morning, nearly three hundred incarcerated gang members from a dozen prisons across the state were awoken by guards and carted away in buses and vans to Northern State, where a new two-tier, 160-cell unit had been established for 320 inmates. The inmates placed there had to meet three of eleven criteria proving their gang affiliations, such as tattoos, participation in gang-related crimes, and affiliations with other gang members through, for example, cell phone contact lists or possession of gang paraphernalia.

When Israel walked through the outdoor courtyard of the gang unit, he noticed that there were no basketball hoops, no open areas through which to roam. Instead, the recreation area was filled with clusters of metal cages not much bigger than porta potties. The men housed in the gang unit were not allowed to mingle with members of other gangs. Their outdoor time consisted of being released from their cells into these outdoor cages in rain, snow, or sweltering heat for two hours every other day, while separated from their rivals by the fences. “This is a dog cage within a prison,” a guard liked to tell the students. “I got two pit bulls at home, and their dog house in my backyard is as big as that.” The unit was known as “PC,” for protective custody. But the officers called it Punk City.

The door was unbolted, and into the unit Israel went, glancing up to see inmates staring down from their cells, pressing their noses against glass windows, and peering through slits, like spectators in a gladiator stadium. This, Israel knew, was exactly where he could have ended up had he pulled the trigger that day in the living room. He looked at the prisoners kicking and pounding violently on their cell doors during the class visit, overexcited by the young specimens before them. Some inmates dropped their pants and masturbated in plain view. Handwritten signs posted on the front of each cell spoke to their allegiances: Bloods, Crips, Aryan Nation, Five Percenters, Latin Kings. This could have been his life.

H
IS CLASS CIRCLED
back to the law library, through another metal detector, past a corridor with a barbershop, past walls painted with images of the Statue of Liberty and Muhammad Ali. A sign on the wall announced, “Learn to read and you will forever be free,” a quote from Frederick Douglass. The library was filled with legal books and ratty paperbacks that looked like leftover titles from someone’s garage sale. Paintings of dolphins, hammerhead sharks, pink jellyfish, and schools of fish floated across the rear walls. The students took seats as a dozen inmates strutted and scuttled into the room, standing before the class as if in a criminal investigation lineup. Israel looked them up and down. They were dressed head to toe in khaki jumpsuits.

One freshly shaved man with broad shoulders stood five feet, eleven inches tall. He had pink cheeks, a square jaw, and a helmet of dark, closely cropped hair. He introduced himself as Carl, and he looked approachable, as chummy as a neighborhood postal worker. His chin dipped inward beneath his lower lip in a pout, and a faint dimple emerged in his left cheek when he smiled, along with traces of wrinkles in his forehead. He had red-rimmed ears and brows that arched into accent marks above his hazel eyes when he smiled.

Unlike most of the other inmates, who blamed their fate on unfortunate circumstances and dirty prosecutors, Carl made no excuses for his crime in front of Israel and his classmates. Instead, he gave the students the same explanation that he had once written in an essay: “I beat a man to death in my sister’s kitchen in a failed attempt to steal his inheritance. It was brutal, senseless, intense, messy, tragic, and absolutely without justification. It was the most terrible thing I have ever done, by far, and the one thing I can never take back.”

One by one, the men sat at one of the nine tables, two prisoners facing three college students. The two COs monitored from the perimeter of the library. The encounter began with uneasy greetings. No handshaking allowed. First names only. The obvious questions hung in the air. Why? How? Some students charged right in. Others didn’t know how. Awkwardly, they tried to strike up a casual conversation. “So, what’s it
like living in here?” or “Do you get conjugal visits?” A prison supervisor strolled between the tables, eavesdropping. Israel sat across from a Mafia hit man and an arsonist.

When the small-group sessions ended, everyone formed a large circle, inmates interspersed with students. Carl told the students to remember that some of the men before them would be paroled one day. “We could be your neighbors.” Unlike the inmates, Carl said, the students could contribute to the world with their college degrees and careers. He urged them to support rehabilitation, education, and job training for prisoners.

As the men filed out, Israel watched them nod good-bye to the students before being led back into the trailers and holding cells he’d been standing inside of earlier. The funny thing was, Israel thought, he’d spent so much of his life believing he would die young, probably by a gunshot wound. He had lived his life with a target on his back and a finger close to the trigger. As he’d learned from talking to Norma and the inmates, many men died inside Northern State—of cancer, by hanging themselves with bedsheets, or by setting a mattress ablaze inside a cell. One old inmate had dropped dead in the middle of the prison courtyard under a blue sky as guards and prisoners stood over him. Even now, Israel was not entirely sure why his own life had been spared after all those close calls. But seeing those men, Israel realized that he had dodged not just a gunshot but a life of inescapable despair.