You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish
by Jimmy A. Lerner
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jimmy A. LernerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-10-14
ISBN: 0767909194
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Broadway
Book Reviews of You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish
Book Review: "Society prepares the crime, the criminal merely carries it out."
Summary: 5 Stars
There are three ways to view this book: (1) As a chronicling of a personal tragedy emerging from living too close to the outer margins of American society; then (2) as a descent into the hell of the American gulag; and finally (3) as the redemption of one man's soul in a society that "sold him out." Each has a special meaning and a special message to the reader. The story:
Part three: The monster's Ball
Jimmy Lerner, a victim of a brutal beating within inches of losing his own life in a fight in a Las Vegas hotel room by a friend (Dwayne Hassleman, aka "the Monster") who was, as it turns out, an out-of-control drugged-raged psychopathic ex-Vietnam vet, ended up killing the guy in a life-and-death struggle that can only be described as a textbook case of self-defense. Yet, unexpectedly Lerner got a taste of the other side of American justice. ("And it wasn't nothing pretty.") His life was never to be the same again. This descent into a special Kafkian like hell, American style, was never supposed to have happened to a Pacific Bell executive, a college trained MBA; a Jew from Brooklyn's famous Erasmus High School, a school that has turned out more Nobel Prize winners and famous people than any other High School in the U.S.
Based on the facts of his case, naturally Lerner thought once his story was presented in a fair court of law, he would be summarily acquitted and released, and his pristine world would resume uninterrupted. But this was not to be the case. Mostly because he had chosen to live on the outer margins of American society - with his "new found" drug addicted psychopathic pal, Hassleman, he was snared by the traps set for people who engage in such indiscretions, and violently jerked into an alternative American reality, not to be seen or heard from again until some five years later; after which, as they say in prison, he had "nothing coming." This new Kafkian-like alternative reality that descended on Lerner's life, unfortunately has become more the normal reality for those trapped in the American criminal injustice system than the exception.
Part Two: The American Gulag
It is true that Mr. Lerner did kill a man, but did so in a clear case of "life-or-death" self-defense. As a result, he had no choice but to trust that the criminal justice system would give him a fair shake. However, when the facts of his case are all lined up and reviewed impartially, it is clear that he did not get a fair shake. He was forced to enter the system through a revolving side door, where he was tricked into rolling the dice and accepting a "plea bargain" a maneuver that uses as bait the dangling above his head the false promise of "early release." That promised was reneged on, and Lerner ended up spending five years of his life behind bars for a crime that he should have been acquitted for. This subtle miscarriage of justice, this little "overused" expedient of the courts, this minor short-circuiting of "real" justice, has all too often become a motif that is an integral part of our "revolving door injustice system." However, the real injustice does not occur in this side door of the court, but when the door finally slams shut on the prison cell. This, new "out of sight, out of mind" reality, this descent into hell is not a halfway house where subtle distinctions can be made between the "guilty," the "near-guilty," and the just plain "tricked innocents." In this hell, everyone is "guilty." It is an equal opportunity destroyer of American humanity.
The template for Lerner's stay in the Nevada prison system has been described best elsewhere in literary contexts such as that by Elie Wiesel's description of time spent in Auschwitz, or Jean Genet's novels of his times in a number of French Gulags, by John Le Carre's famous novel, Papillion, about time spent on French colonial run Devil's Island; even by the experience in an insane asylum described in "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest;" by Alexander Solzinitzen's tales of time spent in the Russian gulags; or most famously, by Franz Kafka's descriptions in his novels (especially "The Trial") about the capriciousness, arbitrariness and incompetent of the administration of mindless state run institutions. All of these experiences are about how to survive on the edge of life while attempting to maintain a modicum of ones dignity, when all semblance of institutional reason seems to have broken down, and petty savagery has taken over as a substitute for meaningful state run administration. In such circumstances, ones survival pretty much becomes a random variable. No matter how innocent one may be, he is as likely to be "shanked" while sleeping in his bunk as to be "gang raped" in the shower, or shot by a prison guard spraying the prison yard during a fight by a pair of inmates, or even die from the neglect of an abscessed tooth or of HIV/AIDS.
The amenities of prison life are purposely reduced to the subhuman level -- well below the minimum essentials. And along with this diminishment of the prisoner's physical environment, is, correspondingly a reduction of his psychological world to the level of that of a neurotic wild animal. Just as is done on the outside, (but to a much more draconian extent), this is accomplished by rationing intangibles. As Lerner notes, prison is a virtual incubator for low-self esteem and disrespect. Since there is so little respect to be rationed, what little that does remain, becomes of infinite value. Everything begins to look like a basis for robbing one of what little residual self-respect he has tried to hoard and retained. And thus every problem in prison is reframed in terms of a life or death struggle about disrespect and "perceived slights." Indeed, inside American prisons "dissing" is a much bigger crime even than prison murder. As Lerner tells it, one can be killed for giving the wrong glance or for pointing a finger in the wrong direction, or unintentionally flashing the wrong gang sign, or otherwise making an innocent but very wrong gesture. Rape victims are often obligated to kill themselves just to save their honor and avoid the embarrassment of being "turned" into surrogate women. There is only one alert level in prison, "Defcon one," at all times. Every individual's radar and antenna is constantly scanning for disrespect, or for "being dissed." Every instance of "being dissed" has the same "life-or-death" value and thus always calls for the nuclear option: a shank in the neck or belly.
Prison, thus is the purest from of a Hobbesean world in which dog-eats-dog, and the weak is always gobbled up by the strong. It is a kill or be killed kind of existence, 24/7. Being isolated without protection, or a single lapse in vigilance (even with protection), a single act of misjudgment, any demonstration of a lack of savvy, can all spell instant death or rape (which is actually worse than death). On the other side of this coin, violate a trivial prison rule and you could spend a year in solitary confinement. And in Nevada this means living in a 6x8 tin can like room where the temperature in the shade in the summer is normally above 108 degrees. Put simply, in the American system of injustice, petty crimes and non-crimes, such as Jimmy Lerner's, often become unintended death sentences.
Part one: A Chinese Proverb: "Society Prepare the crime, the criminal just carries it out."
It is no accident that the principles of survival Lerner learned (no pun intended) at the phone company proved uncannily durable in his survival in jail. The survival requirements in the corporate world were eerily similar to those needed in prison. So much so that a comparison of the narrowness of the objective human distance between prison life and normal life is almost unavoidable: Both prison life and life on the outside are defined by the same deafening emptiness, shallowness, meaningless and general poverty of the human spirit. Both manufacture meaning in the same way, out of thin air by rationing the most important and most precious human intangibles: man's sense of self -- his need for self-esteem; his need for companionship and connection with his fellow man, and his need of a sense of self worth. The main difference however, is that inside prison there is nothing to buffer this cruel game of "rationing" of ones inner needs. In prison, this psychological game of human self-destruction comes un-buffered with fake civility and political correctness. It is played out in the raw, unalloyed, and unvarnished.
On the outside, mostly to demonstrate that we are more civil then we really are (and especially that we are more civil than those on the inside), we are forced to use society and the law as a shield -- as a buffer for protecting our own sense of our own worthiness. But it can easily be seen that this shield is just a veneer, for the bare truth stares up at us from the subtext of our society: It is that in prison, as is true on the outside, envy and hidden desires for petty injury and revenge seems more the rule than the exception. One-upmanship, petty competition with the goal of crushing another's ego and self-esteem, is what Lerner found as the "corporate way" at Pacific Bell as well as the only route to survival inside the Nevada prison walls.
Thus, clever societal compartmentalization even with fences and razor wire cannot insulate our humanity from our worse selves. For better or worse, we are still defined as much by our deepest secrets, by our hidden desires, by the "papered over" evil and envy deep within in our hearts, by our passive aggression, as by our "best selves." What defines us, whether we are inside or outside prison walls, is what we pretend not to see, hear or know; by how we treat "the least or weakest of us." In short by the skeletons in our collective closets. And in this regard, what Jimmy Lerner discovered was that, just as on the outside, the most sensitive issue inside American prisons is the "mother of all hidden societal afflictions," the issue of race. As is the case "out in the world," prison is a strictly tribal affair, a partitioning that is encouraged by the prison administration because for all the mayhem it causes, racism and racial hatred still has the one important "saving grace" a prison administrator needs, it promotes and facilitates easier prison control and order. It allows prison society to be easily maintained in a stable steady state.
In summary, Jimmy A. Lerner's story proves that the "electronic and razor wired society" of prison is just a "walled-off" reflected version of our own collective denial (and as they say in prison, another version of that river in Egypt, "de' Nile). What we see in the mirror behind the cell bars (if only we would look) is a reflection of ourselves. There is leakage through social osmosis across the membrane that seeps over the razor wire. "Prison reality" no matter how much we pretend it is not so, spills over into normal American reality (and vise versa). One of the unintended consequences of callous injustice of the kind that Jimmy A. Lerner experienced, that of "throwing American citizens in jail first and asking questions later," is that we are becoming a more criminalized rather than a less crime ridden society. The leakage occurs in the membrane across the gap in our humanity. Race, as always is deeply implicated in any societal conspiracies we might play on ourselves: Today its blacks, Chicanos, and Native Americans; tomorrow it's the Jimmy A. Lerners of the world.
In this context, it is especially difficult to erase from the mind, the warning that the cultured, urbane, intellectual German, Albert Speer, Hitler's number one henchman, bequeathed to us. He too tried to "distance" himself from the evils of Hitler's Third Reich, but his buffer failed too. Twenty years later when he was released from Spandau prison, he left us with this piece of advice: when we cease to see others as human, we have already crossed the Rubicon into the racial holocaust. The rest is just tying up so many inessential bureaucratic loose ends; details to be "worked out" in the cubicles of the phone company, or in a Conference in a Villa in Wannesee, on the porch of a General Store in Mississippi, or in the back rooms on Capitol Hill. Five stars
Summary of You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish
A memoir of astonishing power?the true story of a middle-class, middle-aged man who fell into the Inferno of the American prison system, and what he has to do to survive.It is your worst nightmare. You wake up in an 8' x 6' concrete-and-steel cell designated "Suicide Watch #3." The cell is real. Jimmy Lerner, formerly a suburban husband and father, and corporate strategic planner and survivor, is about to become a prison "fish," or green new arrival. Taken to a penitentiary in the Nevada desert to begin serving a twelve-year term for voluntary manslaughter, this once nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn ends up sharing a claustrophobic cell with Kansas, a hugely muscled skinhead with a swastika engraved on his neck and a serious set of issues. And if he dares complain, the guards will bluntly tell him, "You got nothing coming."
Bringing us into a world of petty corruption, racial strife, and crank-addicted neo-Nazis, Jimmy Lerner gives us a fish?s progress: a brash, compelling, and darkly comic story peopled with characters who are at various times funny, violent, and surprisingly tender. His rendering of prison language is mesmerizingly vivid and exact, and his search for a way not simply to survive but to craft a new way to live, in the most unpropitious of circumstances, is a tale filled with resilience, dignity, and a profound sense of the absurd. In the book?s climax, we learn just what demonic set of circumstances?a compound of bad luck and worse judgment?led him to the lethal act of self-defense that landed him in a circle of an American hell.
Electrifying, unforgettable, bracingly cynical, and perceptive, You Got Nothing Coming is impossible to put down or shake off. What the cult favorite Oz is to television, this book is to prose?and all of the events are real.
From the Hardcover edition.
You Got Nothing Coming, Jimmy A. Lerner's memoir of his first year (of a possible 12) as an inmate in a Nevada state prison, is a shocking, hilarious, and heartbreaking narrative of a world both parallel to and absolutely alien from the one most readers inhabit. With deft, economical prose, Lerner, a middle-aged former marketing director for a major corporation, introduces us to his fellow inmates--swastika-tattooed skinheads, Wiccans, methamphetamine addicts, and fashion-conscious prostitutes, among others--as well as a multitude of prisoner scams, nonexistent but on-the-books rehab programs, and the life-or-death intricacies of the convict code of etiquette. Lerner's ear for prison language is pitch-perfect, and much of what we learn comes directly from the mouths of the incarcerated. Lerner has, in effect, written a nonfiction novel, one artfully laced with mordant humor and by turns tender, caustic, insightful, and relentlessly candid. --H. O'Billovitch
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