[Ppnews] Lifer Lessons - Marshall “Eddie” Conway talks about prison life

Thu Apr 28 17:04:36 EDT 2011

http://citypaper.com/news/lifer-lessons-1.1137776

Lifer Lessons

Marshall “Eddie” Conway talks about prison life

By <http://citypaper.com/archives/authors?author=Van%20Smith>Van Smith

Published: April 27, 2011

Now 65 years old, Marshall “Eddie” Conway started 
serving a life sentence for murdering Baltimore 
police officer Donald Sager when he was 24. Back 
then, Conway was a postal worker and U.S. Army 
veteran. He was also a civil rights activist who, 
as a member of the NAACP and the Congress of 
Racial Equality, had helped organize efforts to 
better working conditions for African-Americans 
at a number of major employers in the Baltimore 
area. His most renowned role, though, was as 
Minister of Defense in the Maryland chapter of 
the Black Panther Partya position that put him 
on the front lines of a successful government effort to undermine the party.

Now, Conway is a published author with two books 
to his credit. In 2009, iAWME Publications issued 
Conway’s The Greatest Threat: The Black Panther 
Party and COINTELPRO, in part as a fundraiser for 
Conway’s legal defense. And earlier this month, 
AK Press published Conway’s memoir, Marshall Law: 
The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, 
a release party for which takes place April 29 at 
2640 Space featuring readings from the book by 
Bashi Rose and WombWorks Productions, Pam Africa 
talking about the Mumia Abu-Jamal case, and a 
performance by Lafayette Gilchrist. (Visit 
<http://redemmas.org/2640>redemmas.org/2640 for more details.)

The new memoir provides an ideal opportunity to 
consider the man and his life from different 
perspectives. 
<http://citypaper.com/news/no-excuse-1.1137778>Edward 
Ericson Jr. takes a serious look at Conway’s 
claims to be a political prisoner in his essay 
about The Greatest Threat. Michael Corbin, who 
taught at the Metropolitan Transition Center, the 
former Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore, 
<http://citypaper.com/news/prison-prose-1.1137774>places 
Marshall 
Law<http://citypaper.com/news/prison-prose-1.1137774> 
in the American tradition of prison literature. 
And since decades in prison have tempered 
Conway’s revolutionary zeal, in a recent phone 
interview from the Jessup Correctional 
Institution, he spoke of what hurts and helps the 
corrective function of prisons, the challenges of 
fatherhood on the inside, the folly of drug 
dealing, his own unrealized aspirations in life, 
and what he would do as a free man.

City Paper: Maryland has a life-means-life 
policy, essentially denying the possibility for 
parole for those serving life sentences. It was 
put in place in 1995 by then governor Parris 
Glendening, who recently admitted his regrets.

Marshall “Eddie” Conway: Yes, I’m aware of his 
regrets, 16 years later and after about 50 of my 
associates are dead. During the course of waiting 
for this policy to be changed, they passed away.

CP: In your mind, what is wrong with this policy?

MEC: The real problem is that young people coming 
into the prison system see people that have been 
participating in the programs, doing all they can 
to turn their lives around and become usual 
citizens in the community, and they see how 
they’ve spent 10, 20, 30, 40 years doing that, 
with no kind of possibility of release. Well, 
right away, young guys end up saying, “Well, 
what’s the point?” It increases the potential for 
violence, because there is frustration, and it 
increases hopelessness, which means that people 
tend to act out. It doesn’t give an incentive for 
people to rehabilitate themselves, and instead 
creates negative activity and energy. If you take 
away hope in a system like this, then you’re 
going to receive a lot of people returning back 
to the community very frustrated and 
hopelesswhich is not good, considering the 
unemployment situation. Also, when a person 
reaches a certain age, just the fact that a 
person is, like, 45, 50, or over, means that he 
becomes a safer risk for release in the 
community. And most of the time, when you get 
people that have done an extensive amount of time 
in prison, they got an associate degree or a 
bachelor’s degree, so they are more capable of taking care of themselves.

CP: Since the policy has been in place, have you 
seen an increase in violence, hopelessness, and 
nihilistic approaches to serving time?

MEC: There was a real spike in violence 
immediately after that policy was announced. In 
this institution, for maybe a 10-year period 
after 1995, pretty much every week there was 
something fatal or near-fatal occurring. I’m not 
saying that’s a direct result of Glendening’s 
policy, but it got so bad that the guards 
actually refused to come to work. And that 
violence spread from this institution to others.

CP: If the policy is overturned, would prisons 
become more suited for rehabilitation?

MEC: Well, of course it would. There are a lot of 
older prisoners, like myself, working to decrease 
the level of violence and conflict, and that’s 
really having a good impact. But in terms of 
people turning their lives around and having hope 
and having a desire to motivate changeif you 
can’t show them something at the end, there’s no 
incentive for that, and I’m kind of like swimming 
against the tide. But if they see a way to get 
out of this predicamentif they work, if they 
develop, if they grow and change their 
paradigmthat’s going to probably change the 
climate within the prison population.

CP: Do you suspect you would have been paroled if 
this policy hadn’t been in place?

MEC: I don’t know if I would have been paroled, 
but I have to assume that I would have. I was a 
model prisoner, quote unquote, meaning that I 
wasand I amworking to improve the conditions among the prisoners.

CP: Let’s pretend you hadn’t been convicted. What would have been your career?

MEC: I want to believe that, if the community 
hadn’t been drugged and the jobs hadn’t been 
shipped overseas, we could have turned this 
around, and I would have probably ended up 
teaching somewhere. I had two interests. One was 
history and education, and the other was the 
medical profession. I had an aspiration to go 
into school at Johns Hopkins University, trying 
to engage in further training for the medical 
profession. I don’t know that that would have 
happened, but the teaching probably would have. 
Either way, I would have been constantly engaging 
in the community, trying to better the conditions.

CP: What do your sons do?

MEC: I have two sons. One of my sons is an 
instructor at Bowling Green University in Ohio, 
teaching computer science. The other is a manager 
of a water-purification plant in Maryland.

CP: How did you manage as a father in prison?

MEC: Right at the beginning, I have to admit that 
I succeeded in the case of one and I failed in 
the case of the other. In the case of my second 
son, I was estranged from him all the way until 
he was 18. It was my fault that that was the 
case, and I certainly never was a father to him. 
We tried to recover and establish some sort of 
relationship, and it just didn’t seem to work 
out. My oldest son, who I knew from the time he 
was born, I kept in touch with his mother, but I 
kind of lost track of him through my early years 
in the prison system simply because, of my 
initial seven years, I spent six of them in 
solitary confinement. Somewhere along the line, 
his mother came to me and just pretty much said, 
“Look, you need to talk to your son.” So at that 
time I had organized a 10-week counseling program 
for young people, and I actually had my son 
brought to the program. I would sit down and talk 
to him, one on one, and we would counsel in 
larger groups. We developed and we started 
bonding. Like all young black men at the time, he 
was like, “I’m going to the NBA, going to be a 
baller.” He was really good, but only so many 
people get selected to go into the NBA, and he 
needed to be considering a profession. So he 
decided to go to college and do the 
computer-science thing. I’ve supported him as 
much as I could, and I tried to get him to get 
his doctorate, but he had had enough of that. I 
think it was a good experience for both of us.

CP: How do you see it going with other inmates, 
and their issues with fatherhood?

MEC: It’s one of the things that we deal with a 
lot. I’ve been working with young guys for the 
whole entire 40 years, but at some point I had to 
stop for a while. They were just so angry, and 
the morals and values had changed to such a 
degree that I couldn’t be a neutral observer when 
somebody is talking about beating up their 
grandmother or disrespecting their mother. But 
after I started back working with them, I noticed 
this great hostility to fathers, this great anger at being abandoned.

But the other side of that is that they really 
want to be very connected and attached to their 
children, even though they’re locked up. They’re 
trying to break that cycle, even though the cycle 
continues due to the simple fact that they are 
here. They’re trying to be the father that they 
didn’t have. So that’s good, and it’s more young 
people like that than not, and a lot of them 
actually do end up going back out, and they 
realize that they almost blew that opportunity to 
be that father. So they tend to get jobs and do 
what they need to do to stay there because of that.

But, I’m in here now with three generations of 
people. I’m looking across the generations of 
absent fathers. And I don’t know how that cycle 
gets broken if there’s no jobs. One of the great 
negatives is that maybe 80 percent of people in 
the prisons around the country are there for 
drug-related activity, not necessarily violent. 
Just selling drugs, buying drugs, using drugs, or 
fighting over drugs, based on the fact that there’s no jobs out there.

CP: It strikes me that these low-level drug 
dealing jobs are just bad jobs. Low pay, long hours, harsh management.

MEC: You think? And there’s not very good health care!

CP: People tend to think drug dealers get into it because it’s an easy buck.

MEC: It’s not an easy buck. It’s day-to-day 
survivaland it’s detrimental to your survival. 
If you manage to make any money, the state comes 
and scoops up any you might have around, and what 
you may have stashed away is used for the lawyers. So you end up with nothing.

CP: I wonder, are there any drug dealers out 
there for whom it doesn’t end badly? The odds are 
probably better that you’d make it to the NBA.

MEC: This is the bottom line: The nature of drug 
trafficking itself means that you are going to be 
highly publicized, that people are going to know 
who you are, that there’s always going to be a 
chain of evidence back to you, and that there’s 
always going to be someone who’s going to want to 
avoid being incarcerated by saying, “Go look at 
him or her.” It’s definitely a loser’s proposition.

CP: What do you know about gangs in Maryland prisons?

MEC: The real problem is that anybody in prison 
that associates with street organizations is 
pretty much tagged or targeted, be it the Black 
Guerilla Family, Crips, Bloods, Dead Man 
Incorporated, or any of them. It has made it 
impossible to interact in any kind of a positive 
way with members of those organizations without 
being tagged. I was educating people, and on the 
days that I made myself available, I would be in 
the yard and anybody could approach me to talk 
about things like how to make parole, how to deal 
with domestic situations. The result was the 
prison authorities tagged me. When I talked to 
the lieutenant about it, I said, “These are the 
same guys that are going back into our 
communities, and if they go back in with negative 
attitudes they are going to be destructive, 
they’re going to hurt peopleyour family, my 
family, everybody else’s familiesand I’m not 
going to ignore that, so I’m going to work with them.”

But you can’t get too close without being 
labeled, without it being reported that you’re 
associating with them. So I don’t even go into 
the yard anymore, but I still work with 
organizations that provide information, 
education, insight, and skills to manage 
conflicts. You get penalized if you try to work 
with these groups any closer than that. It’s 
almost as if the prison authorities want them to 
proliferate, so they can have “X” amount of 
members or associates documented and get funds 
for, quote unquote, anti-gang activities. I don’t 
know what the end is, other than everybody at 
some point will end up in Big Brother’s files.

CP: What would you do if you were released tomorrow?

MEC: With the rest of my life, I would try to get 
a house with a nice garden and grow some food and 
smell the roses. I would still be involved in 
developing good, positive communities, but I’m a 
big supporter now of organic food, growing your 
own food, developing your way to sustain yourself 
into the future. So I would want to do that and 
encourage other people to do it.

Email <mailto:vsmith at citypaper.com>Van Smith

More on Marshall "Eddie" Conway
<http://citypaper.com/news/lifer-lessons-1.1137776>Lifer 
Lessons Marshall “Eddie” Conway talks about prison life | 4/27/2011
<http://citypaper.com/news/prison-prose-1.1137774>Prison 
Prose A lifer explains his life | 4/27/2011
<http://citypaper.com/news/no-excuse-1.1137778>No 
Excuse Cop killer’s treatise doesn’t add up | 4/27/2011

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