During his 16-year on-again, off-again affiliation with the Illinois Department of Corrections, Ron Campbell went from delinquent armed robber to jailhouse propagandist. He did five turns in the stir–for breaking into houses, setting fires, smoking pot, and stealing a van. During the last two he wrote and edited Constipation, a sardonic zine that carried his and other prisoners’ words beyond the prison walls.
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“I felt that it was important that people realize I’m just a regular person–under different circumstances,” says the gangly 39-year-old ex-con. “I laugh. I cry. I felt there were a lot of misconceptions about prisoners. I’m not a talker. I write what I feel. It gave me the feeling that people would actually get to know me.”
One of the stories Campbell told in the pages of Constipation was his own. He’d run away from his home in Canaryville when he was 13 and spent his adolescence in psychiatric facilities, receiving treatment for paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and impulse-control problems. In 1980, when he was 17, he was sent to juvenile detention for breaking into a VFW hall. Three years later he was in prison for burglary.
In solitary confinement at Menard, Campbell became more reflective. In one issue of Constipation he wrote an essay titled “Personal Prisons,” in which he flayed himself for “the years of my life I’ve wasted within these walls. I’ve been told more than once that I’m doing life on the installment plan.” He also described his conflicts with the Northsiders, a “racist bonehead” gang that had tried to recruit him. He agitated for a recycling program and did an editorial, “The Plug-In Guard,” suggesting that TV be banned from prison. “I’ve seen firsthand how it turns intelligent, lively, interesting people into dozed automatons,” he wrote. “Books collect dust, conversations are virtually nonexistent.”
Flood’s political language is more sophisticated than that of most inmates. How many cons would title an autobiographical sketch “The Re-Birth of Humanity in a Pathological Capitalistic Society” or fill it with quotations from John Dewey and Sir Walter Scott? Flood is a self-made man of letters, educated in public libraries and prison cells. In his “Re-Birth” essay he writes, “It was in these dark dungeons that somehow I rose above the insanity–mine as well as others’–and realized that it was up to me to make the change. I had always enjoyed reading and was fortunate enough to have someone I knew from my neighborhood working in the hole as a runner. He introduced me to Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Guevara, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Confucius, Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, Buddha and a host of others.”
