15 To Life: How I Painted My Way To Freedom

FERAL HOUSE, 223 PAGES, $22.95

IF YOU'RE LIKE me and about 500,000 other New Yorkers, you did your bit for democracy, freedom and liberal bragging rights this past August by marching down 5th Ave.. Or daring fate, taxi cabs and the police you blocked traffic with Critical Mass. Maybe you even found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time and were detained for a day and a half in a bus terminal, trying to massage the feeling back in your plastic-handcuff-numbed hands while the motor oil on the floor burned through your sneakers and you pondered how much you'd rather have some decent Chinese takeout instead of a piece of bologna between two slices of stale white bread.

Bearing in mind how much fun it is to spend 36 hours enjoying the hospitality of the NYPD, imagine spending 12 years in a maximum-security prison.

In 1985, Anthony Papa was living in the Bronx, self-employed as an electronics repairman and struggling to keep a roof over his family's heads when a bowling buddy talked him into making a quick $500. All he had to do was come along for a car ride and deliver an envelope containing four and a half ounces of cocaine to Westchester. Instead of getting his rent money, Tony wound up walking right into a police sting.

Ratted out by his supposed co-conspirators, painted by ambitious DAs as a drug lord hell-bent on turning Ivy League-bound suburban teenagers into raving crackheads, and swindled by greedy, incompetent lawyers who make fortunes by dangling false hope in front of desperate people, Tony, a first-time, nonviolent offender, was sentenced under New York State's Rockefeller drug laws to 15 years to life in prison.

15 to Life is Anthony Papa's account of his arrest, trial, imprisonment and fight for both his freedom and his sanity. For being duped into passing the equivalent of a Glad sandwich bag half-full of processed alkaloids derived from a common South American plant, Tony not only lost his wife and his six-year-old daughter, but he discovered some new things about himself-such as what it's like to be robbed of one's dignity, identity and, finally, humanity by a brutal system that exists only to perpetuate itself. He also found out what it feels like to spend more than a decade without a woman's touch, and that even a nonviolent offender would rather bash a guy's skull in with a tuna can wrapped in a gym sock than be raped.

He also learned to paint.

Some experiences can either destroy people or bring out the finest in them; prison seems to be one of them. The scholar Boethius was rotting in a medieval dungeon waiting for the Ostrogothic king Theodoric to sign his death warrant when he composed the Consolation of Philosophy, one of the most beautiful works of Christian theology ever written. Cervantes began Don Quixote while in debtor's prison. Dostoyevsky wrote The House of the Dead and Crime and Punishment after spending four years in Siberia. Antonio Gramsci wrote his diaries while locked up by Italian Fascists. Gandhi was in and out of British prisons most of his life. The list goes on.

Papa isn't as elegant a prose stylist as his comrades listed above (15 to Life is co-written with Jennifer Wynn, author of Inside Rikers: Stories from the World's Largest Penal Colony), but he has an astounding visual imagination. Exposed to the political work of Picasso and Diego Rivera through a prison-art program, Papa began working with whatever materials he could get his hands on-acrylics, bedsheets, toilet paper-and produced startling images of prison life. His big break came in 1993 when the Whitney Museum wrote to Sing Sing, seeking to borrow a piece of prison art by a convicted killer for the artist Mike Kelley's exhibition Pay for Your Pleasure. His appeals exhausted and seeing no other way out, Tony told the museum that he was a double murderer and submitted a piece to Kelley's show. Then he played the publicity for all it was worth. When his burgeoning art career began attracting public notice, including a few write-ups in the New York Times, Gov. Pataki granted him clemency in 1996.

15 to Life is more than an insider's view of New York's prison archipelago. It's also a powerful statement against a war on drugs. It's the Rockefeller drug laws, not the dealers and junkies, that are the real villains in Papa's story. Instituted in 1973 by then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, who wanted to build a "tough on crime" image as part of an aborted run for the presidency, the laws dictate 15 years as the minimum possible sentence a judge can give a person found in possession of four or more ounces of certain controlled substances. That is, of course, unless you can cop a plea bargain, which means that big-time dealers can get a reduced sentence by trading information, while guys like Tony Papa get screwed. (By way of comparison, Robert Chambers had a minimum term of five years for killing Jennifer Levin; Joel Steinberg a minimum of eight for killing his daughter Lisa.)

The New York State prison system is currently home to more than 17,000 nonviolent drug offenders: one-third of the state's inmate population. Ninety-three percent are black or Latino. Keeping these people locked up costs the public more than half a billion dollars a year. But since no politician wants to seem soft on crime, neither Gov. Pataki nor the State Assembly has given any sign of willingness to change the laws, and so our prisons continue to fill with people who need treatment instead of punishment, people who, unless we keep them locked up until they die, will one day be dumped back into society having learned nothing except how to victimize the weak and kowtow to the strong. Anthony Papa's testament makes a strong case that it's long past time we opened the cell doors.