“I’m not,” I say curtly. “Do you know who else will be there?”
“I have the attendants listed as you, your brother’s lawyer or a representative from their firm, the medical director, and someone from the State Corrections Office.”
“Does the person from the state have a name?”
“Walter Penny.”
While we’re talking, I Google Walter Penny and get photos of a super-skinny college track star from Gambier, Ohio. Do we live in a world where there are multiple Walter Pennys?
The pet minder comes to take care of Tessie and the kittens.
I pack for George, emptying his drawers into an enormous suitcase — more like an armoire than something you’d attempt to travel with. I figure what he doesn’t want can be donated.
At The Lodge, they remove the suitcase from the car and carry it in for me.
“Checking in?” the fellow asks.
“You’re new,” I say.
“Is it that obvious?” he asks.
“Yes.”
They’re running late. I sit in the waiting area outside the director’s office, eating from a blue tin of Danish Butter Cookies and drinking tea poured from a pot that I suspect has a higher-than-normal bacterial count. I hold the tin on my lap to catch crumbs.
“Manny,” the guy sitting opposite me says, jutting his hand forward, “from the firm — Wurlitzer, Pulitzer and Ordy.”
“Have we met before?”
“I came along for the ride with Ordy in White Plains. Rutkowsky isn’t going to be here today — he’s in the middle of a trial.”
“Any idea how formal or informal the meeting will be?” I ask.
Manny shrugs. I offer him a cookie; he declines.
“I was under the impression that it was going to be a discussion of what should happen next — but then they asked me to bring George’s extra clothing. I get the sense that decisions have already been made.”
“Nothing is definite,” Manny says. “But, in the interest of conserving energies and expenditures, we have a plan that I think will serve George well.”
I must have scowled or made some other face.
Manny anxiously adjusts the large shopping bag he’s got parked between his feet and says, “Why don’t we wait for the official meeting.”
A few minutes later, we’re summoned into Dr. Crawley, the medical director’s office. Walter Penny is already there. Clearly there was a pre-meeting to which we were not invited.
“Come in, come in,” Dr. Crawley says. He’s a plump, balding man of indeterminate age. Walter Penny introduces himself, shaking hands with a strong up-and-down pump. He’s young, rail-thin, and wearing a cheap suit, which looks good on him only because there is nothing to him. His hair is close-cropped into a fuzzy buzz cut. He could pass for eighteen. Scratching behind his ear, Walter Penny makes a repetitive gesture reminding me of Tessie scratching herself with her back foot.
I look at him, wondering if he is in fact the Walter Penny of Gambier, Ohio, who ran track a couple of years ago, and curious what he could possibly know about people, or justice.
He hands me his business card. Dr. Walter Penny, with a Ph.D. in criminal justice.
“Walter, how’d you get interested in criminal justice?” I ask.
“My family was in the military, and we’re hunters,” he says as though that explains it.
I nod. “What part of the world are you from?”
“Ohio,” he says.
Manny hands over the shopping bag, and the director extracts from it an enormous tin of Garrett’s of Chicago caramel corn.
“It’s from my brother-in-law,” Dr. Crawley says. “The infamous Rutkowsky.”
“A bribe?” I suggest.
“My wife loves the stuff,” Crawley says. “She grew up on it.” He pulls himself together. “Okay, so Walter here is going to tell us a bit about the program he’s been working on — and I can tell you that, while we’ve not placed anyone in it before, I’ve been talking with lots of folks about options for George, and short of either a classic loony bin or jail, there’s not a lot out there. And I honestly don’t think either of those would be right for George.”
“May I?” Walter asks.
“Please,” Dr. Crawley says.
“We’re always exploring new concepts in criminal justice, everything from the architecture of prison structures to the psychological experience of punishment. The Woodsman is an experiment that can be boiled down to a low-cost survival-of-the-fittest model. And while George isn’t the typical candidate, we think he’s a viable candidate and this could be a strong placement option.”
“Who is your typical candidate?” I ask.
“Someone with more of a criminal history, rural as opposed to urban experience, not much white-collar, more robbery, grand theft, a little murder. A man good with his hands who needs physical challenge. We’ve found that violent men are less likely to behave violently in a natural setting. When they’re up against the elements, they train themselves, they self-regulate — they see it as man versus the land, instead of man versus man. We have no serial killers — we think of that as a very different profile, and as much as we have a legal mandate to punish, we also have to respect the inalienable rights of our prisoners and not put them at undue risk. Essentially, The Woodsman is designed as an inexpensive self-policing penal colony. As you may know, there is a long history for a self-sustaining prison farm, as well as the Quaker model. They built the first penitentiary, which included the need to look towards the sky.” Walter in fact looks up as he speaks. “In essence, see the light, be with God, and repent!”
“You sound almost like a minister when you say that,” the medical director notes.
“Thank you,” Walter Penny says.
“Could you be a little more specific? The way you’ve described it so far, it sounds like an episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” I say.
“Show him the PowerPoint,” Crawley urges.
“Of course,” Walter says, tilting the screen of his laptop towards me. “A quick bit of background to keep in mind: the cost per prisoner in New York is more than fifty thousand dollars per year, the cost per prisoner in our program is less than ten thousand per man.” He pushes the start button. A macho logo comes on-screen, “THE WOODSMAN,” followed by intense heavy-metal music and a highly produced video rollout that looks like a commercial for joining the army or the National Guard. The “sample” inmates—“Tough, Strong, Willful, Resistant”—are shown climbing trees, fishing for their own food in a river, rappelling off a rock wall. All using the carefully selected supplies provided in their Woodsman pack, which is given to them upon launch into the program and replaced annually. It closes with the disclaimer that “The Woodsman is a back-to-basics model for human management using the Physics 300a or 300b microchip, tracked by satellite, with the 300b chip also providing a constant read of vital signs. Should there be any kind of uprising or behavior problem, it can be neutralized either temporarily or permanently by drone or computer-assisted power shot within one to five minutes.”
“That’s pretty much it,” Walter Penny says. “The prisoners are microchipped and released onto a forty-five-hundred-acre parcel, a former military testing facility. There are no live munitions there, but enough infrastructure so that we can run some back-office activities from the underground bunker and so on. There are shelters for sleep, the prisoners farm and forage, and there is a central structure above the bunker where they can come and do laundry, bathe, and restock their supplies — we have government cheese, surplus foods including peanut butter and milk, and water on hand. We’re testing a new doc-in-a-box system by which routine medications can be dispensed and medical conditions can be tracked via a robotic field medic who can take temperature, blood pressure, EKG, and draw blood if needed. In the winter — each man has a solar yurt.”