A Prison Librarian’s Efforts to Humanize the Stories of Incarcerated People

By Mansa Musa / The Real News Network

The nightmarish reality of the prison industrial complex depends on a vast array of stereotypes and tropes about incarcerated people that have proliferated through our culture. From the myth of the ‘superpredator’ to other racist and anti-poor constructions of the prisoner, the real stories and lives of the human beings trapped in the prison system are obscured by a veil of assumptions propagated by the institutions and interests most invested in maintaining mass incarceration. Fred Winn, a former librarian, correctional officer, and case manager at California’s Soledad Prison has attempted to peel back this veil with the true stories of the human beings he encountered behind bars in his memoir, For the Least of These. Winn joins Rattling the Bars for a discussion on his book and the humanity that clings on in prisons in spite of constant repression.

Studio Production / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

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TRANSCRIPT

Mansa Musa:  When you hear the phrase “For the least of them,” you might think of a biblical scenario where Jesus talks about for the least of them. Fred Winn wrote a book called For the Least of These. Fred Winn served as a correctional officer, a librarian, and a case manager in Soledad Prison. In this book, he talks about how the prison-industrial complex, the penal system treats the least of them. Thank you for joining me, Fred.

Fred Winn:  Well, thank you. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Mansa Musa:  All right, Fred, let’s talk about the title of the book: For The Least of These comes out as a biblical term. Explain this title and why you chose this particular title.

Fred Winn:  Well, it comes from Chapter 25 of the Book of Matthew. In this chapter, in this particular passage, Jesus is talking to his disciples; He’s giving an illustration about who’s going to make it to heaven and who will not. And he says that when you show kindness to different groups, you’re showing kindness to him. He uses the example of refugees or the term stranger. He says, prisoners, when you came to visit me in prison, then you were being kind to me. And people would say well, we never visited you in prison. He said when you did it for the least of these, then you did it for me.

Christ identifies with people who are at the bottom of society. He identifies with the have-nots, he identifies with people who are othered, that are mistreated, and the downtrodden. So that’s why I chose the title because that’s the image that inmates have and other groups too: refugees and poor people. Yeah. That’s why I chose it.

Mansa Musa:  Okay. All right. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who is Fred Winn?

Fred Winn:  Good question. Well, I was born in the ’50s, grew up in the Bay Area: Oakland, California, and went to Oakland Public Schools. When I finished high school, I went to Cal State Hayward, which is called something else now. I went there for a couple of years and I finished up my undergraduate work at UC Santa Barbara, which is a beautiful campus out in Southern California. In Oakland, when I was growing up, the Black Panthers were very active. There was the King assassination, the Malcolm X assassination, and the upheaval that was taking place in society in general. So I was a product of all that and I saw major changes the Civil Rights Movement produced. And that’s who I am.

Mansa Musa:  Okay. When I was reading the book, and I did some cliff notes, I noticed that your storytelling method – And I want our audience to be mindful of this particular method that you use – Is that you’re taking stories and events, and you introduce it as saying, well, this is a story about… Then you do a postscript on it, more or less explaining what you thought of it. But the body of it is the story of the individual or person. Why did you use this particular method? Which is very effective.

Fred Winn:  Thank you. I had an agenda. I wanted to convey certain concepts in each story. Now, to be fair, the stories that I talk about are not one person. For example, we talked about inmate education and inmate college; There were quite a few inmates who had a similar experience so I wanted to highlight that educational opportunities, vocational training, and psychological counseling, and these things are very important for inmates to develop the skills and to move on, and move forward in life. But a lot of people, too many people, are against that. It’s wasting money.

But most inmates are returned to society at some point so it’s to our advantage to have them be able to have a successful reentry and to have a better shot at being successful. Otherwise, they’re going to return and that’s a waste of their life and society will suffer because that’s one person that’s not contributing to the extent of his or her abilities. So that’s why I did that. I wanted to convey a certain message.

Mansa Musa:  I was laughing at some of the stories because I see myself in those stories. Like Oliver; I was Oliver in the Maryland prison system. I came in, I was a substance abuser prior to being arrested, I had opted out of society in and of itself. When I went to prison, they tested you when you first came in. I had a third-grade reading level and a sixth-grade math level. Back when I went through the system, they didn’t have mandatory education but in California, they had mandatory education. Like you say, this is Oliver: Oliver is everybody who’s had the same educational background. Oliver chose not to go to school and because he chose not to go to school, they put him in a restrictive housing area that minimized his activities. But once he decided and was able to go to school, he got privileges. Do you think this was because the California prison system was concerned about men and women being educated and would help them have a better chance of surviving in society? Or was this something that was mandated by the state legislators?

Fred Winn:  I believe this was mandated. I would have to check but I know it was required. You had to have a security level. But many people did not want that. A lot of inmates would say yeah, I want to go to the yard and make some money. And you can understand them wanting to work to get money to buy their soap and all that, however, I believe it was the legislature that required this but I could be wrong. Yeah.

Mansa Musa:  Okay. Let’s unpack some of the stories. Going back to what you said about the education system because they took the Pell Grant out. I’m digressing a little bit. When they took the Pell Grant out under the Crime Bill, that opened the door in the prison system for the proliferation of gangs because prior to the Pell Grant being taken out, most people were going to colleges. Most people have seen the value of education. Education has transformed the prison population.

Let’s talk about how one of your jobs in the corrections system was a librarian. I was going over how you were talking about the process of being a librarian or trying to get a clerk. We’ll talk about the clerk; That was another story in and of itself. But I want you to talk about when you came in and you decided to overhaul the library and get more books. Talk about the Black books.

Fred Winn:  I was living in the Bay Area prior to moving down there and I worked in a library and it was standard practice: Whatever library you’re working at, if you’re working in a Hispanic area, then you want to have books about Hispanics. You have other books too, but you want to cater to your audience. You’re working in an Asian neighborhood, you want to have those books. So we’re at a prison and it was still like a public library. We had a large percentage of Hispanics and Blacks, and we had others, then we had whites. I wanted to build a collection to reflect that so I didn’t give that any thought. I went and started ordering books. I went to a bookstore in Oakland called Marcus Books, I believe, and ordered some books and I was with some other librarians throughout the state.

Then I got a call from my supervisor, hey, I need to talk to you. I go in there thinking, okay, what’s up? And he said, hey, the warehouse says that you ordered some Black books. And I’m thinking, okay. There’s more to the story, right? And I look at it and go, yeah. And he goes, well, we’ve never had Black books here before. What do you mean you guys haven’t had Black books? You’ve had Black inmates, right? Well yeah, we have Black inmates. We had them when I came here 20 years ago. So he went on and what happened was that somebody in the warehouse had written a letter to the warden, complaining about having Black books.

My supervisor had to justify the books so he was trying to get from me why I ordered Black books. So I told him, hey, these are not just Black books, these are books from American history and the reason why they exist is because American history books do not include the stories of people of color. And that’s when I was building a collection to reflect the inmate population. I had some Hispanic books coming, I had some Native American books on order, and that solved this problem. Oh, no problem. He had this answer for the warden. So that was a lesson for me that he was not anti-Black books, he needed an answer to his problem at that moment to respond to the warden. I had other issues too with folks but that’s that story.

Mansa Musa:  For the benefit of our audience, you’re in Soledad, you’re in the California prison system. This is in the ’80s, this is on the heels of George Jackson, this is on the heels of the San Quentin Six, this is on the heels of a serious upheaval in San Quentin, Folsom, and these other institutions. We were talking earlier and you said when you came in, the number of prisons that existed versus when you left the number of prisons that existed[were greater]. I can identify what you’re saying about individuals but the general politics of the correction system back then was that… Because of George Jackson and because of education, they looked at prisons as being more of an incubator for alternative revolutionary thoughts. So that might’ve had a lot to do with it.

Talk about Space Cadet. The reason why I want you to talk about Space Cadet is because when he was talking about it, I thought about a guy who was in the prison where I was, and he was knowledgeable of the Bible when he first came in. He was into going to church and worshiping his God as he saw him. But he was knowledgeable. He was well-read in the Bible. For whatever reason, he had a mental health issue so he lost his ability to deal with reality. He used to walk around randomly, and wherever you were, he would start spewing out Bible verses. There wasn’t anybody there, wasn’t nobody looking at him or anything. We had a term for it. We had a term that we used, to our ignorance, that we would call him but then they started calling him the Prophet. So talk about Space Cadet.

Fred Winn:  Okay. Well, my point in that story was the fact that we needed mental health counseling and training and awareness and all that. This inmate came to the library – And we had all types of people there – And he wanted to talk to me. Sometimes they had issues that they needed to address or things they thought I could help them with. So he comes in and he’s from outer space and he has this issue he’s trying to address: They want him to get back on the mothership and head out. I’m looking at him thinking, this guy is… Then my mentor came in and I said, hey, maybe you can help us with this problem. So the inmate, Space Cadet, talks to my mentor and tells him, hey, I’m from outer space and blah, blah, blah, blah. So my colleague says hey, guess what? I’m from outer space too.

He said, hey, you know what? You need to put your hat on a certain way to block the radiowaves. And he said now they’re going to call you into the mental health office pretty soon. I need you to go there and talk to them. He calmed the guy down. The guy was all happy because somebody else was from outer space too and we could take care of his problem. So then he called the office, the mental health department, and came and took him away and put him somewhere else. So my point of that story is –

Mansa Musa:  – Yeah and –

Fred Winn:  – Go ahead.

Mansa Musa:  – Yeah. For the benefit of our listeners and our audience, this is part of the storytelling that shows the underbelly of the prison system, the prison-industrial complex, in terms of the precedent. A lot of the trauma that we go through while we’re incarcerated and the evil in most institutions, they don’t have people that are sensitive towards a person that succumbed to the pressure of being incarcerated for lengthy periods. In some institutions they do. In this case with you and your mentor, it seemed that y’all had a sense of humanity towards the person and ensured that they got the proper treatment that they needed. Was that the case?

Fred Winn:  Well, yes because there are a lot of people that have issues and they didn’t have that program set up at Soledad at that time. But the mental health department, the psychologist, and the psychiatrist interviewed him and then they removed him from that prison and they sent him somewhere else where he could get help. That has changed though. Now they have so many different programs and due to lawsuits that occurred while I was there, they have whole institutions that deal with mental health issues and with medical issues. So I’m happy to say that that is no longer when I left anyway, that was no longer a major, major issue. They had entire units that only housed mental health inmates. They got training, they got daily activities geared for them, and they were able to address their concerns.

Mansa Musa:  In your storytelling, for me, it was an effective writing style. You have a story but then you come and you do what might be considered social commentary on historical conditions and transitions in prison. I think that was one of the topics. Talk about why did you see the need to interject these subject matters within this book. Even though it’s premised on a lot of events that have taken place, the historical commentary you provide is consistent with what’s going on in society. Why do you see the need to do it like that? Or bring that in like that? Or not just write a book on the historical perspective of prison and social conditions as it relates to why prisons are like they are? Why’d you use this particular matter?

Fred Winn:  I wanted to humanize it. I wanted to put it in a way that people could relate to it and understand it. There are a lot of things I did not understand about the inmate’s lives prior to coming to prison. For example, somewhere in the book I talked about the fact that inmates, prior to coming to prison, they’d be in the car with their friends, the police would pull them over, line them up against the wall, photograph them, get their AKAs, get their information, and then let them go because they hadn’t done anything. They were not suspected of any crime; The police were getting information about them. If you grow up in that environment, what are you going to think about the country that you live in?

You go to school, the teacher tells you that you have all these rights, and then you realize these rights do not extend to you. You have the right against seizure, being stopped and searched and all that stuff without cause, but this doesn’t extend to you. So what are your views of America? I wanted people to see that because most people are not aware of that. And the war on drugs in prison, hundreds of thousands of African Americans during the period when I was working there, it was alleged that members of a certain administration in Washington were instrumental in dumping crack cocaine in Southern California in Black communities. So they dumped the crack there, people got addicted to it, and then other agencies came and arrested them and put them in prison. That was a setup and people don’t understand that. If you’re not from that environment, if you don’t have anyone that’s gone through that, you don’t believe that stuff. But it does happen. It did happen.

Mansa Musa:  Right. That’s why I was asking why did you use this particular method? Because that’s what it does: It gives a story, it gives events, and then when you come with the commentary, a person can be able to make an objective decision to believe or not to believe. At least they have enough information to say, well, if you’re putting the crack cocaine in the neighborhood, the prison population explodes and then these are the things that go on in this population that you created.

Talk about Grant’s Tomb, because one of the things I noticed when I was locked up, and I spoke on this earlier, was about the literacy rate in the prison. After I got my GED, I started teaching, reading, and writing. But before I started teaching, reading, and writing, I didn’t know that people couldn’t read. I was in a cell with a guy that couldn’t read. When he got letters from his female friend about his daughter, he would always have to get somebody to read it to him. I wound up in a cell with him and ultimately, we got him to be able to read and he got his GED. But talk about Grant’s Tomb, because this is another part of the storytelling method and information that’s being conveyed that our audience would be able to understand, mainly when it comes to their family members and the necessity for investing in certain things when it comes to the prison-industrial complex.

Fred Winn:  When I got there, I invited teachers to come and bring their classrooms to the library like a little field trip. I wanted to expand the library services and I wanted the inmates to know that the library was a useful place for them to hang out and it contained information they could use. In one of the first classes to come over, I developed a little quiz as a teaching method. I had different reference tools, current biographies, almanacs, and things like that. One of the questions was about a popular singer. I forget her name, but a popular singer at the time. What is her address? They all got excited because they all thought, oh, I’ll get to write to her.

I had other little questions but at the start, I wanted to give them confidence in using the library so I put what I thought was a very easy question for number one. The question was who is buried in Grant’s Tomb? I figured it would give confidence for question number two and then number three. But after a half hour, I walked around the room and they were all on the first question. They were going through the books trying to find out who was buried in Grant’s Tomb. So you got guys come, hey, boom, boom, boom, boom. And one guy said, oh, this test insults my intelligence. But they all laughed. And I had kept and saved up some magazines I was going to throw out. I said I’ll give you magazines if you get the answers right. So I gave out some magazines anyway. 

But out of that class, several members all either finished, reached the sixth grade, or transferred out before they did, and some of them stayed and they got their GED. At least one person stayed there and he became a college graduate from the local community college. Then others went on and went to the vocational trades and got a vocation. That’s when they had that there. So I wanted to show that these programs are worthwhile. Once the inmate has the skill that he can market and get a job, then he has a better chance of surviving and making it on his own once he gets out. That was the point of that story. That did happen. I was trying to make it amusing so people would read it but then they would make the connection, well, maybe we should have money for educational purposes, or have money for vocational training, and have college back in there. Because they had all these college programs but then they stopped all that. And that was horrible. That was one of the worst things they could have done.

Mansa Musa:  Right. Right. Yeah. When they took that Pell, I remember the crime. Because I was going to a college in the Maryland prison system. We had what they called the extension college, extension program. In the district, in this region down here, each college took the prison population. If the institutions were in one region, like where Morgan State was, Morgan State HBCU would be the college that serviced them. If it’s in the Baltimore area, Coppin State would be the HBCU that would service them. If you were in Western Maryland Park, it was Frostburg.

What happened and what was going on during that time, all of us that were in the institution, changed the institution, because now people are more educated and the conversations are more along the line of being more informed. Once they took the Pell Grants out, that opened the door for the proliferation and infestation of gangs. Fred, talk about why all lives don’t matter. Because as you go on, you delve deep into a lot of the social agenda issues and you do it from a perspective that has a slight religious overtone. But I want you to explain your view on that and why you chose to interject it in this book.

Fred Winn:  Originally, I was going to write different stories about inmates in hopes of dissuading young people from traveling down certain paths. While I was writing – It took me several years – I’d write a bit, then I’d put it down for a month or two, and then the pandemic hit. But the George Floyd tragedy occurred. I didn’t watch the whole video. I saw that initial part and they said he had a $20 counterfeit bill, I think it was. But you don’t get the death penalty for having a counterfeit bill. You don’t even get the death penalty if you have a machine in your house pumping out money. You don’t die. They don’t kill you for that. Yet he was killed. I thought that was unfortunate and tragic. But what was as bad was the fact that so many of my fellow Christians didn’t seem to think there was nothing wrong with that. So the concept of Black Lives Matter came up and many Christians said, no, no, no. All lives matter. All lives matter. I thought that was disgusting. How can you say all lives matter when he lost his life over $20? I thought that was horrible.

So I started writing about that and I realized that during the Civil Rights struggle when I was growing up – You were growing up too – It took place in the Bible Belt: The place with strong Christian values, the Bible Belt. But the Christians in the Bible Belt were totally against that achievement for Black people. These were Christians. But then you go back a little bit further, the Christians in the Bible Belt were in full support of the enslavement of Black people. And they were Christians. Then you go back even further, in 1493, Pope Alexander put out a Doctrine of Discovery and he spoke for the Christian Church. He was the Pope but at that time, that was before the Protestant movement. So he spoke for all Christians that were in the West. He said that if you go to an area like Columbus did – Into what he thought he was in India but he was not in India – If you go to an area that does not have Christians, you can kill them, take their land, enslave them, take all their resources, and et cetera.

You have things like the King of England was selling land to North America, to people here. They’d come up with a piece of paper and say, hey, I own this plot of land. But he didn’t have the right to sell that land, that wasn’t his land. It was already being occupied. It already belonged to somebody else. So I brought all those things in, showing the hypocrisy, and the fact that Christians have harmed society, to the body of Christ, and the people who claim they’re Christians are not necessarily following Christ. So that was my whole thing with that. I wanted to talk about the church, the role of the church, and the role of the media in portraying Black people and people of color the way that they do. It’s much better now, but the way the criminal justice system was… For example, Ronald Reagan, President Reagan – He was Governor Reagan at the time, he wasn’t president, he was a normal governor – He went to Philadelphia, Mississippi to announce that he was running for president. Now, he could have gone to Sacramento and announced it, he could have gone to Washington and announced it. He went to Philadelphia, Mississippi.

That place was only famous for the killing of Civil Rights workers. Two whites got killed. It caused a great deal of attention because two whites got killed along with a Black, African-American, and the whites came down from the North. And so Regan was saying, hey, I believe in states’ rights. In other words, to my way of thinking, he was saying, you can treat people any way you want to. When I’m president, I’m going to ensure that that’s the case. And he followed up on it. So I wanted to show that he had the full support of the Christians. The Christians supported him. They had a guy named President Carter, who I believe was a Christian, but the Christians abandoned Carter and went to Regan. So I found that a lot of the people who claim to be Christians are anything but.

Mansa Musa:  Right. You spoke on Dr. King, and I remember Dr. King’s letter from, I think it was in Birmingham, Alabama, or where he wrote where he was being criticized by the clergy for having a social agenda and being a Christian. They were saying that it’s a contradiction. You can’t be a Christian and have a civil rights agenda where you’re opposing the government or you’re asking for equity. That you cannot do this. And he wrote the letter telling what you’re saying. But why did you bring Dr. King into the analysis? You’re showing the effects of the prison-industrial complex on people and you’re humanizing the people, in terms of how they adjust. You’re showing the connection between the church and, as far as you perceive it to be the least of these, and their perspective towards the least of these. And as their doctrine says, they should be concerned with the least. Why’d you bring Dr. King into this?

Fred Winn:  Right before that I talked about a guy, who I can’t think of his name, but he was returning from World War II. He was on the Greyhound bus coming back and he asked the driver, hey, let me stop and use the restroom. And the driver got mad but he stopped and let him use the restroom. Then he called him a boy. And the soldier goes, hey, I’m not a boy. I came back from the war. He was talking back to the bus driver so the bus driver got to the town, got off, and called the police. The chief of police shows up, grabs the guy, takes him to the jail, and they put his eyes out and they pour liquor on him to say he was drunk. Okay? So then they have this trial. The police chief, no one, does anything. Then finally the federal government steps in and brings charges against him. After the prosecution, the trial, the court proceedings, the jury gets together. Then five minutes later they came back and said, not guilty.

And that was common, very common. This guy lost his sight. He’s a veteran and yada, yada, yada. So then King is in jail. After that I talk about King, several pages later probably, and how he was in jail and several of the leading preachers in the town said, hey, if there are grievances that you have, you should go to court. But that’s insane. That’s absurd. That soldier, they tried the guy that did that to him, and they found him not guilty. That was common. Most of the time they didn’t even do anything to people. The KKK, they didn’t do anything to them for all the people they killed or lynched and all that stuff. Medgar Evers was killed in his front yard and years, years, years later, they finally… So that was coming. So my point was that King was right. He was right to protest and do what he was doing. And the people that told him, hey, you need to go to court, they were full of crap. They knew that nothing would happen.

I put this in that there were a couple of white ministers that were true Christians. They got run out of town and one guy stayed, but they put sugar in his gas tank, bombed his house, or threw bricks through his window, and they did horrible things to him. So yeah, the Bible Belt is not a place where people believe in the Bible, is my point.

Mansa Musa:  Right. Right. I got you. As we close out, what do you want our audience to know about For The Least of These? The takeaway. Are they taking away that this is a Christian book, a religious book? Are they taking away that this is a social commentary on the prison-industrial complex? What do you think their takeaway should be?

Fred Winn:  Well, it could be all those things. We should think about the things that we hear. We’re constantly told today that we’re a Christian nation, but when did Christianity start? Did it start in 1493 when they came over here and started stealing and killing? Or did it start when the Native Americans were forced off their land, the Trail of Tears? Did it occur when Blacks were brought over here to be enslaved for hundreds of years? When did this Christianity thing start? And all lives matter: When did all lives start to matter? I don’t see that. I don’t think all lives matter today. I don’t think they’ve ever mattered in this country.

But I want people to see that, first of all, we have an opportunity to change the way we do prisons. And we need to start doing that. Otherwise, we’re going to still have people come in, not receive any type of training, go out, and then come right back in. We need to have resources for them. We need to invest in underperforming schools. We need to bring them up to par so that every student has a shot at being the best that they can be. And we need to get back to the church. If you say you’re a Christian, you need to start acting like a Christian, you need to start believing in what Jesus said, and you need to stop going to churches that preach the opposite. There are ministers – I mentioned two in the book, but I won’t call them out now – They were anything but Christian ministers, although people were under the impression that they were.

The abortion movement started because of opposition to integration. The leaders of the anti-integration movement, couldn’t get people to get on board until they found the abortion issue. And then people said, oh, yeah, yeah. So then they did the abortion thing of we’re against that and then, oh yeah, we’re also against this other thing over here too. And that has worked completely ever since. People who oppose abortion tend to also be conservative on social issues. Not always, but that’s a major part of that group. So my thing is, who do you listen to? Who are you paying attention to? Be careful who you follow.

Mansa Musa:  Okay. Fred, how can our audience get in touch with you and learn more about your work?

Fred Winn:  Well, the book is available on Amazon or wherever books are sold. The E-book is on Amazon, the E-book is $7. I have a website, fredawynn.com. So those are my contacts.

Mansa Musa:  There you have it. The Real News, Rattling The Bars. This is not an interview about a religion. This is not an interview about someone’s opinion. This interview is about humanity and how we look at humanity. And Fred gave us some insight too, from his own experience being in the correction system as a guard, a case manager, and a librarian. And in these three areas, you see the prison system from the ground up and he was able to give us some insight into how the prison-industrial complex impacts people and how it doesn’t invest in their return to society. But more importantly, how we take our belief systems and interject them into the prison-industrial complex or into society, to oppress and suppress people. Thank you, Fred. Thank you for this enlightening interview. And we wish you much success in your endeavors as you go forward.

Fred Winn:  Well, thank you for having me. Have a great day. Thank you.

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