“Oh two.”
“No,” Don said, “when will you see the board, James?”
“Oh two.”
“Let me try again, James. How long until you’ll first have a chance to appear for a hearing before the parole board?” Don persisted.
“Twenty-oh-two.” James looked down as he mumbled his answer.
Don and I looked at each other, stunned. We were both teachers at the Ohio Penitentiary in 1966 and not a lot older than James. Our interview would determine whether he could be accepted into the prison school. James, a huge but remarkably immature nineteen-year-old inmate had just told us that he would be held in a maximum-security institution for at least thirty-six years before any opportunity for release, his entire early and middle-aged adulthood.
We didn’t know James’s offense because we had no access to inmates’ files. We assumed someone had died in order for him to have received such a harsh sentence. That wasn’t always the case, however. Some men had been convicted of nothing more than marijuana possession – this was the mid-1960s – and then found themselves living among some pretty dangerous guys.
Karl moved through the wards like a cat. He had an ability to seem to disappear into the background, to become invisible. He rarely spoke to anyone. As far as I could determine, Karl was the man who wasn’t there.
I learned from other patients that Karl had been a patient at the Dayton State Hospital for fifty-three years, longer than any other man or woman in the mental institution. His parents, long dead and forgotten, had committed him to the care of what was at the turn of the century known as the Southern Ohio Lunatic Asylum. No one seemed to know why, and, as an attendant, I was not permitted access to any patient files. My information about patients came from other patients.
I gathered that Karl was in his mid-seventies. I met him when I was assigned to two wards, one of which housed the hospital’s teenaged patients. There were only a dozen or so teenagers, perhaps fewer, in the institution, and why Karl was among them, I don’t know. I do know that he could not have functioned outside the institution.
Steven was fifteen when I met him at the Columbus State School, now called Columbus Developmental Center, a vast improvement over its original name, Ohio Institution for the Education of Idiotic and Imbecile Youth. I knew his cousin Iris when I was in elementary school and his uncle, a patient when I worked at Dayton State Hospital. He was deemed “educable,” which meant he had tested within a 50 to 70 IQ range, the highest level within the school.
Steven was a shy but pleasant kid who wrote constantly. He carried a yellow pad and pencil all day long and often would be off by himself writing stories. He needed a new tablet every two or three days. His stories didn’t make much sense, generally just a jumble of seemingly unconnected words, but they definitely meant a great deal to Steven.
Along with a couple dozen other kids on the ward, Steven would be confined at CSS until he turned eighteen: I have no idea what happened to those who aged out of the institution; some, I suppose were transferred to mental hospitals. Others perhaps returned to their families if they still had one.
I worked part- and full-time at the Ohio State University Medical Center as well as these state institutions before, during, and after my college years. A job was always easy to find. The common theme in all except the Medical Center was my inability to know the backgrounds of any of the inmates or patients I taught or cared for. That situation illustrated most states’ tendency (Ohio wasn’t unique) to treat those they lock away from public view as human beings. They became numbers and names – statistics – not real people.
Whether being discharged from prison or hospital, these men were expected to fit seamlessly back into a society many of them no longer recognized. Some didn’t want to leave the place that had been their home for decades, deciding the life they knew inside was better than what might await them outside. It was as if they were being committed all over again to a world of fear and danger.
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