(part 3 of 4) 1999: HOLES by Louis Sachar
“Now you be careful out in the real world,” said Armpit. “Not everybody is as nice as us.”
I have visited a juvenile prison once in my life and - brace yourselves for this revelation - I did not enjoy the experience. The circumstances were a little bit unusual, because I was there to sing with a bunch of other people; I was there with my church choir, and we were visiting the inmates of the Thomas N. Frederick Juvenile Justice Center in Saint Joseph County, Indiana, to put on a brief concert. In my faith, visiting the imprisoned is a corporal work of mercy, and in the Gospels, God in the person of Jesus explicitly lists this act as a key requirement for entering Heaven. There are people who visit the imprisoned regularly, to teach them, to pray with them, to provide them with medical treatment, to do anything to temporarily relieve them of the desolation and hopelessness that comes with being incarcerated. I know people, including people that I sang with, who regularly ministered to the incarcerated, but I never went back after that one time. I never did anything else that involved working with incarcerated people - one or two opportunities actually came up in the course of the activism and organizing work that I did as an adult, but I passed on them. I just couldn’t do it.
I know nothing about the twenty to thirty children who attended our concert over fifteen years ago. They had a pretty wide range of responses to our music: some recognized the songs (and we picked pretty recognizable, broadly appealing songs), and you could kind of see them singing along to themselves. And then some just stared stone-faced at us, and we didn’t really know if they cared at all or not. And there appeared to be a wide range of ages represented; eyeballing it, I remember thinking that some kids looked to be about thirteen or fourteen, and some looked as young as eight. None of the people I was with, of course, had any idea who was incarcerated for what reason.
If you want to be incredibly depressed, you can look up the detention levels and incentives on the website of this exact juvenile prison, which I assume map easily onto other juvenile prisons across the country. If you really behave yourself and don’t piss off any of the guards, you may just earn your way into an incredible luxury like being able to listen to the radio for up to 30 minutes per day, or visiting the library once a week - you know, the kind of things that you expose your children to all of the time because you consider it an essential part of being a happy human person and depriving them of things like music and books and stories and going out and getting some fresh air might seem unnaturally cruel. Play your cards right and your parents might even get to visit you twice a week instead of once. And yeah, they show movies on the weekends and the kids get schooling there, but that assumes that everything is fully funded and runs efficiently and correctly without any human failing, and, guess what, this isn’t always the case.
If you want to depress yourself further, you can read this 2016 news story from the South Bend Tribune about the appalling conditions in the prison, which had a leaking roof and no working fire sprinkler system and only one working water fountain in the building and broken toilets and a kitchen that was about to be shut down for code violations (so what was the plan for feeding the inmates?), and that all of these conditions had been persisting for years, while the county just didn’t see it as a priority to rustle up funding and see that the child prisoners were housed in a livable structure. I mean, come on, they’re bad kids, they don’t need a working roof.
I don’t know what debt an eight-year-old could possibly owe to society that would land them in this situation. I don’t know what world we’ve created for ourselves where this is where some of our children end up. That’s why I didn’t go back to visit the imprisoned, because I could not separate that ministry from the crushing, suffocating thoughts of what this all meant for the children here, and what it meant for us, for our collective failure as a civilization.
Camp Green Lake is, of course, an unusually hostile prison given its unique way of “rehabilitating” its inmates - and also because the whole thing is a lie and giant extractive scheme tied to a generations-old racist grudge - but it’s still an unsettlingly believable prison. Louis Sachar wrote a brilliant novel which wove together three different timelines of magical realism, but behind them all is the brutal realism of a hot, dry, miserable patch of Texas populated by children who are chained in there by the state. One of the more wrenching passages in the novel, one that is easy to overlook given how much is going on throughout Holes, is Stanley writing his first letter back to his parents as an inmate. Stanley’s mother packed him stationery to take to Camp Green Lake, and it becomes obvious that Stanley’s parents never fully realized that Camp Green Lake was a hard labor camp as Stanley writes “Dear Mom, Today was my first day at camp, and I’ve already made some friends. We’ve been out on the lake all day, so I’m pretty tired. Once I pass the swimming test, I’ll get to learn how to water-ski.” As the reader knows, Stanley spent the entire day digging his first five-foot hole. Every inch of his hands are bleeding or blistered over. But he doesn’t want his mom to worry about him. It would be sweet if it wasn’t so tragic.
So you have the vicious labor and physical abuse, bordering on torture, where parents are lied to so they never find out how bad their children have it. But Camp Green Lake is, somehow, an even crueler place than, you know, a work camp where kids have to dig daily giant holes in a blasted landscape. This becomes clear when Zero runs away, and the Warden and the guards have to get their stories straight. They have this conversation, inexplicably, in front of Stanley:
“‘You sure he has no family?’ the Warden asked Mr. Pendanski.
‘He’s a ward of the state,’ Mr. Pendanski told her. ‘He was living on the streets when he was arrested.’
‘Is there anyone who might ask questions? Some social worker who took an interest in him?’
‘He had nobody,’ said Mr. Pendanski. ‘He was nobody.’
The Warden thought a moment. ‘Okay, I want you to destroy all of his records.’
Mr. Pendanski nodded.
‘He was never here,’ said the Warden.
Mr. Sir nodded.
‘Can you get into the state files from our computer?’ she asked Mr. Pendanski. ‘I don’t want anyone in the A.G.’s office to know he was here.’
‘I don’t think I can erase him completely from all the state files,’ said Mr. Pendanski. ‘Too many cross-references. But I can make it so it would be very difficult for anyone to even find a record of him. Like I said, though, no one will ever look. No one cares about Hector Zeroni.’.
‘Good,’ said the Warden.”
So, you see why this is so horrifying. The guards have basically decided to let Zero die out in the desert, and destroy as much of his paper trail as they can, which they can basically get away with because Zero has nobody out there looking for him, and is, as far as the guards are concerned, not a real person. We learn later in the book that they want to disappear Stanley after he runs away to find Zero, although obviously they have a harder time doing it since Stanley’s family knows where he is. It’s terrible, obviously. But it turns out something far more sinister happens in the climactic scene of the book.
In the final chapters of Holes, Stanley’s attorney comes with a court order to get him out of Camp Green Lake after new exculpatory evidence surfaces. But Stanley, having overheard that earlier conversation between the Warden and her guards - why would you say all of those things in front of Zero’s friend! - refuses to leave without Zero. His attorney, Ms. Marengo, has come to recover Stanley with the Texas AG:
“‘There’s nothing I can do for your friend,’ said Ms. Marengo. ‘You are released pursuant to an order from the judge.’
‘They’ll kill him,’ said Stanley.
‘Your friend is not in danger,’ said the Attorney General. ‘There’s going to be an investigation into everything that’s happened here. For the present, I am taking charge of the camp.’
‘C’mon, Stanley,’ said his lawyer. ‘Your parents are waiting.’
Stanley stayed where he was.
His lawyer sighed. ‘May I have a look at Hector’s file?’ she asked.
‘Certainly,’ said the Attorney General. ‘Ms. Walker, go get Hector’s file.’
She looked at him blankly.
‘Well?’
The Warden turned to Mr. Pendanski. ‘Bring me Hector Zeroni’s file.’
He stared at her.”
Mr. Pendanski is staring at the Warden, of course, because she was the one who asked him to destroy the file in the first place.
‘My office is having some difficulty locating Hector Zeroni’s records,’ the Attorney General said.
‘So you have no claim of authority over him?’ asked Ms. Marengo.
‘I didn’t say that. He’s in the computer. We just can’t access his records. It’s like they’ve fallen through a hole in cyberspace.’
‘A hole in cyberspace,’ Ms. Marengo repeated. ‘How interesting. When is his release date?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How long has he been here?’
‘Like I said, we can’t-’
‘So what are you planning to do with him? Keep him confined indefinitely, without justification, while you go crawling through black holes in cyberspace?’
The Attorney General stared at her. ‘He was obviously incarcerated for a reason.’
‘Oh? And what reason was that?’
The Attorney General said nothing.
This is more horrifying to me than the Warden’s original plot to disappear Zero; at least with the Warden, you know she was monstrous. But the Attorney General is the guy who’s supposed to fix everything, he’s there to start an investigation into Camp Green Lake and stop the bad things from happening. He’s the public official, he’s us, he’s stepping in to set things right. And when presented with an inmate who has no paper trail, nothing from the state that’s keeping him imprisoned, the AG’s response is to shrug and go along with the status quo. What the hell sort of prison is this, sure, that’s a valid question. But what the hell sort of prison system is this? This is a system where the judge and jury don’t particularly care whether or not you’re innocent, and don’t bother to check with the people who can prove you’re innocent. It’s a system where if you’re unhoused, or poor, or orphaned, you are on the tracks to just one destination, and it’s being locked in a cage. It’s a system where you can be tortured and neglected and nobody will stop the torturers or neglectors because the assumption is that you did something wrong to deserve it, even if you’re a child. It’s a system where if there’s no concrete reason to keep you in Hell, the state might keep you in Hell anyways because it’s just simpler. It’s real. It’s our system. We built it, and we maintain it.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. This is the third of four installments on Louis Sachar's 1999 medalist, Holes.