by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

May 22, 2008

Before entering Northern State Prison, Justin Hochberg was anxious. “I thought it would be chaotic, and crazy, and maybe dangerous,” said Hochberg, 16. “I was scared. Would they be crazy? Would they be rapists?”

Hochberg is no criminal, but one of seven students from Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School who visited the Newark prison on May 13. All are students in a psychology class taught by Richard Kirsch, and the prison visit was meant to show them what prison life is like, from 23-hour lockdowns and regular body counts, to the inmates’ inability to make choices.

The students entered the prison through the main door and were ushered into a lobby area. Because the students were under 18, they were not permitted any further into the prison.

Three inmates were escorted to meet them in a sectioned-off area of the lobby. Dressed in brown, prison-issue shirts and pants, they met with the students as several officers stood on duty.

All three convicted felons were close to the end of their sentences on drug and armed robbery convictions. As each spoke of the consequences of his behavior, each became suddenly human in the students’ eyes.

Mostly, they described prison as a place of fear, which the inmates addressed when Eli Krantz, 16, a student from Staten Island, asked each man what went through his mind upon first arriving at the prison.

The inmates described the fear that accompanies them throughout their stay, from the first few minutes of the first arrest, to the last day of the sentence.

“Prison is not a pretty picture,” said one inmate, Gilbert Whitaker. “When you’re incarcerated, there’s a mental and emotional abuse you take on a daily basis, living your life being told what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and how much to do it.”

Rafael Rosado, 39, said he had been in and out of the prison system since age 18. “They took me to a county jail in Jersey City,” he said of his first arrest. “It was really dark and there were cages with bars. To use the bathroom there’s a dark area in the corner where all you hear is rats. I was scared.”

Twenty years later, “a lot of things go on here that still scare me,” said Rosado. “Every day I wake up and I don’t know if I’ll get food or if someone will stab me in the back.”

“At the littlest noise, I wake up,” agreed inmate Frederick Bukowski, 27. “There are so many fights. Anything can happen.”

“Even now, all I think about is whether I will survive,” said Whitaker, 39.

When asked about the victims of their crimes, the three acknowledged that it took some time to see their victims as people; but they also reflected on the unexpected consequences of their actions.

“My kids are the real victims,” said Rosado. “What I’m doing is not beneficial to anyone. I’m not a role model for them here. Every time my family comes to visit me, I feel ashamed.”

Whitaker said he would not allow his nine-year-old daughter to visit him for many years, and still won’t allow his 17-year-old brother to visit.

“It’s a hurtful thing to put your family through. When you come to be incarcerated, you don’t do time by yourself. Everybody who loves and cares about you is doing time with you. They worry about you on a daily basis. That’s something I never took into consideration when I was doing my criminal activity — that the decisions I was making were not just going to affect me.”

A fresh start?

Student Arik Routhenstein, 18, of West Orange went in with a particular theory that he shared on the bus: “If you grow up in the ghetto and you don’t know your father and you don’t finish high school and you never had the drive, would you get into drugs and get arrested and go to prison?” But when he asked whether their upbringing led them to prison, he got an unexpected answer.

In fact, two of the three inmates grew up in the suburbs; Whitaker had a family he described as loving.

“My environment was very good,” said Whitaker. “It’s what you do outside your home that determines what you do. If I had listened to what my mother and father told me, I would never be here. I chose to do what I did to get here. I blew my inheritance making bad choices. It doesn’t matter where you come from.”

The students also gained lessons in what their curriculum might call teshuva, or repentance.

Each of the three inmates, part of a program called Fresh Start, has begun paving the way for a future outside of prison. Whitaker has earned a GED as well as an associate’s degree in marketing. He works in the kitchen and plans to continue with his education and hopefully get a job. Bukowski has earned 42 college credits in business management and an engineer’s license; and Rosado hopes he’ll be able to earn a living as a construction worker or truck driver.

But each knows the reality that awaits.

“Even though we have all these programs, we’re still felons,” said Bukowski. “For me to get a degree and look for a job versus you — who do you think they’re going to hire first?”

After leaving the prison, Hochberg acknowledged, “I didn’t think of them as people before we went there.”

He was impressed that they seemed to have grown beyond who they were when they entered.

“I thought it was really interesting how they could start fresh and not give up hope for themselves,” he said.

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