Anti War Resister-Frank Cordaro Reflects On & From Prison

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report Saturday April 08, 2006 04:51 by Ploughshares

He's in There for Us, We're on the Loose for Him!

Frank Cordaro addressed an anti-war meeting last Summer in Dublin. Frank is presently serving a 6 month sentence for trespass at Offcut Air Force Base, Omaha Nebraska, USA. Offcut is the HQ of the U.S. Air Force Base. Although a Federal prisoner of the U.S. federaL Government, he is thus far doing his time in county jails given the crowded nature of U.S. Prisons (2 1/2 MILLION INSIDE AT LAST COUNT).

How to do "good time" in six month intervals

A month down and I'm still in the Pottawattamie County Jail. I did
not expect to be here this long. The last time I came through
Pottawattamie County Jail was four years ago and it was less than a
week before Federal Marshals drove me to the for-profit Federal
holding facility in Leavenworth, Kansas. Then it took the Bureau of
Prisons three months to assign me to the Federal prison camp in Duluth
from Leavenworth. I traveled Con-Air to Oklahoma City then to the
U.S.P. in Terre Haute, IN, for a week in the hole. From there we were
bused to FPC in Oxford, WI, for an overnight. Then on over to FPC in
Duluth. So it's still very early in the process and I could end up
anywhere at this point. For now, the US government is paying
Pottawattamie County $75 a day, not counting meds, to house me in
their jail.

The challenge for me is to live each day making the time serve me
instead of me serving the time. So far, I'm winning but not without a
plan.

This is my eighth six-month bit in my peacemaking career. So I
consider myself an expert in doing 180-day stretches. The most
important thing is to make sure your significant personal
relationships are solidly behind you. They need not agree with your
peacemaking ways. Few of us peacemaking outlaws can boast of total
support of our nonviolent resistance actions from family and friends,
yet to have the love and support of family and friends is most
helpful. All of my significant relationships and family are solidly
supporting me. It cannot be overstated how helpful this is.

It's also important that your outside jail work and responsibilities
are not hurt or significantly diminished while you're locked up. In
this regard, I am greatly blessed. As a member of the Des Moines
Catholic Worker (DMCW) community, we are committed to supporting
community members who risk jail time for nonviolently resisting war.
These last few years the DMCW community has been able to afford the
loss of a few community members to serve jail time while the everyday
work of hospitality carries on. As DMCWer Ed Bloomer is fond of
telling me, "Frank, we're out here for you, brother, so you can be in
there for us." Spoken as a true Catholic Worker!

It's important to have a good support system in place before you get
locked up. Best not to assume it will just happen. Support needs to
be thought out and prepared beforehand. Everybody's needs and
circumstances are different, so what goes for support will vary from
person to person. Again, past experience has helped me put in place a
support system that makes my doing "good time" possible.

My first support principle is never to go to jail alone. Bring as
many people as you can into the experience. The reason being that
should you be unjustly treated while locked up, your friends and
support people on the outside can come to your aid. This was the case
last year in the Polk County Jail when I was not given needed heart
medicines. There are lots of ways to bring people into the jail
experience. One way we are doing this this time is through my 460
plus email support list in which friends and supporters are receiving
my written journals and lectionary reflections and updates when
needed.

Key to any support system is to have people designated and assign
specific tasks. People you can count on to do what they said they
would do. In this regard, I am doubly blessed! Fellow DMCW and
Berrigan House resident, Fran Fuller, is serving as my main support
person. This is Fran's third tour of duty with this assignment.

Fran is doing double duty. She has taken over job responsibilities I
have at the Catholic Worker while I'm gone. These are managing the
DMCW data base, editing our newsletter the via pacis, and making sure
it gets in the mail, doing the Berrigan House books, and paying its
bills, overseeing the DMCW web page, overseeing my mail and email
account and, with Brian Terrell, being point persons for our planned
October National Catholic Worker Gathering and most importantly, she
is caring for Daniel and Phillip, my cats!

She is also the person who keeps tabs of my whereabouts and well being
while I'm locked up. If I am in trouble and need help, Fran is my
first responder. She knows who to call and if she does not, she will
find out. She edits my prison journals. She is in charge of my email
support list and emails my prison journals and lectionary reflections
and updates. She makes sure I have enough money in my jail account.
I call her twice a week. Fran Fuller is doing this six month sentence
just as much as I am and I'm blessed for her unsung efforts and
support.

Once locked up, a disciplined life that gives meaning and focus to
each day served is most helpful. For me, this begins with paying
attention to my physical, spiritual and emotional needs.

When I was younger, the main issues in doing jail time were social.
How well would I handle living with an inmate population? As I've
gotten older, my physical concerns have become critical. My first
physical concern is getting my needed heart meds. I am getting them
and I am grateful. Exercise is another physical concern and even
though we never get outdoors, I walk three hours a day: 2 hours at Rec
time and another hour in the unit. This is hard on my feet. The
shower shoes they give us are not the best walking shoes. If I wear
three pairs of socks and band-aids on critical toes, I get by. Within
a few weeks, my feet have adjusted to the regiment. Diet is important
also for physical well being. As I mentioned earlier, the food here
ain't half bad for a county jail. A major discipline effort is needed
to avoid eating too much junk food from the jail store.

I've discovered that dealing with futures in commodities can be just
as risky in jail as out of jail. My desire for fresh fruit is well
known in the Mod. During the week, a number of deals are made for the
future apples and oranges that come on the weekends. A hamburger,
chicken on the bone, a couple of hot dogs and two honey buns were
given up in exchange for weekend fruit. During a cell shake down on
Sunday night, I got caught with a bag of apples and oranges. I not
only lost the fruit, I was locked down in my cell for 24 hours.

Meeting spiritual and emotional needs are perhaps most important to
doing "good time". This is best done for me through a discipline
routine of praying, reading and writing.

Prayer:
I used to say I was a better priest in jail than out of jail. One
reason for this is my prayer life was much better in jail. This is
because my immediate needs and challenges are greater. Jails and
prisons are not easy places to be, even the best of them. The
separation from loved ones, the lose of freedom and personal control,
living in close quarters with other men, many of them with serious
personal and social problems, the noise, the smells, all are hard on a
person emotionally. And though you are never alone, loneliness is the
most common experience because everyone does their own time, with
nothing but "time" to reflect over and over, week after week, day
after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, the circumstances
that land you in jail. Prayer on the outside is often optional.
Prayer on the inside is a necessity for survival.

My formal prayer is the Liturgy of the Hours, the prayer that priests
are supposed to pray daily. I confess I was not very faithful praying
the "Office" while an active priest. However, in jail, it's a perfect
prayer for me.

I first got introduced to praying the Psalms while in jail in 1983.
They are powerful, personal prayers with a full range of human
emotions and needs expressed. In recent years, I've been troubled by
all the violence found in the Psalms, especially the violence
attributed to God. Like all human prayers, they are flawed. These
days I make efforts to overlook the violence in the Psalms and focus
on the heart and spirit of the voice in the Psalm with its human
anguish, need and trust in God.

When I learned how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours as a priest, it
was a natural prayer for me in jail. Because the Liturgy of the Hours
is best prayed in a monastic setting and the jails and prisons I've
been in are by design monastic-like environments. And unlike the
"Office" I prayed on the outside, inside jail I'm not rushed to get
done. I have plenty of time to pray, stop and reflect on a verse,
re-read a line or two. And now that I find myself alone in a two-man
cell for the last two weeks, I can even begin singing the Psalms. I
also have a Catholic missalette here and since I have plenty of alone
time, I've taken to singing the songs I know from the back half of my
missalette. In short, my prayer life has never been better.

Being locked up really brings the Catholic part of me to the
forefront. This is especially true when it comes to the Eucharist.
Not having access to it makes my need and desire for it stronger.
I've received Holy Communion four times so far. Three times from the
lay Catholic bible folks who come weekly and one time from Fr. Jack
McCaslin who visited me last week. Each time it's been a real
spiritual high. I miss it terribly when its not available and I'm
ecstatic every time I get it.

Reading:

Good reading is not easy to come by in these places. More often than
not in county jails you are not allowed to have any books sent in to
you. You are limited to what is available in the jail. It is no
different here. We are limited to a small book rack in the Mod with
no more than 200 books and most of them I would never read even while
locked up. When I first arrived, I read the three best books on the
rack: two John Grisham books, The Testament and The Painted House and
James Michener's Chesapeake. After these three books, it was slim
pickings.

The lack of good reading material might have been a major downer for
me if it were not for the jail Chaplin, Rev. Dick Arant. Rev. Arant
is really a good jail Chaplin and I hope to write more about him and
his ministry here in my next journal reflection. One of the things he
has done for me is to allow friends to send spiritual and religious
paperback books to him and he, in turn, lets me read them. This is
how I got the Liturgy of the Hours sent to me. So far I've read a
book on Oscar Romero and I am reading a book on St. Francis and Mark
and Louise Zwik's book on the Catholic Worker movement. Without
access to good books, my time here would be greatly diminished.

I thing I sorely miss here is access to the news. We get little to
none here. The best it gets for me is watching the first 15 minutes
of the 5:30 pm national news on TV before our 5:45 pm lockdown. We
can't hear the TV over the noise in the Mod. We have to read the text
in closed-caption. This has all changed for me this last week. I
started receiving the New York Times in the mail. Glory be to God!
It just don't get any better.

Writings:

The most self-indulging thing I do is to enlist my selfless support
people to take my prison journals and lectionary scribbling in their
raw handwritten form, edit them, type them into cyberspace, and have
them emailed to my prison support list. Fran Fuller you already know
does my prison journals. Barbara Hans and Andrea Molinari, the
Director of the St. Joseph Education Center in West Des Moines, Iowa,
edits my weekly lectionary reflections. Barbara takes my raw
handwritten text and does the first edit and emails it to Andrea who
does the second finer edit before he sends it to Fran to be emailed to
my list. These good people are doing a Herculean feat and I am
eternally in their debt.

The discipline of writing a reflection for the Sunday Lectionary text
reminds me of a song in the musical, Fiddler on the Roof, that Tavia,
the main character, sings called "If I Were a Rich Man." In one of
the verses, Tavia sings if he were a rich man he would not have to
work very hard and he would have time to study the Holy Book. I am
living out this verse in Tavia's song for I am truly a rich man who
does not have to work very hard and has lots of time to study the Holy
Book. This discipline more than anything else I do enriches my soul
as I'm doing my time here in Pottawattamie County.

As good as all this is, I know it can all change in a moment's notice.
All I need to hear is, "Cordaro, roll it up. The US Marshals are
here to pick you up." And when that happens, my whole world changes.
I could easily go to a more difficult place. It could take weeks to
get situated into a new jail with its own routine and schedules,
pluses and negatives. And to re-create the self disciplines of
prayer, writing and reading is never easy. Even so, I am confident I
have the building blocks in place to make any new jail or prison work
for me and not against me.

In my next Prison Journal, I hope to address the other side of doing
time, the communal side. And why I see it as a Gospel mandated
ministry to visit the imprisoned. And sometimes with the help of God
you actually see a captive or two set free from bonds that hold them
down.

(Note: Shortly after this was written, Frank was moved to much less
favorable conditions. You can write to him at: Frank Cordaro,
Jackson County Jail, 210 US Hwy 75, Holton, KS 66436.)