A Conversation With Larry White:
The Radical Anti-Prison Activist
And Teacher For Life

“Free Yourself As Quickly As Possible.”

Interview: Sophia Giovannitti
Photography: Naima Green

Larry White will never stop fighting for liberation. In and out of jail since he was a teenager, he arrived at Green Haven Correctional Facility on his final bid in 1976, staring down decades of time. Sentenced to 25-to-life, he paroled in 2007 at the age of 72. He signs every email with: “struggling.”

During the 32 years he spent inside, White became one of the leaders of a movement—the Non-Traditional Approach to Criminal and Social Justice—that laid the groundwork for prison abolitionist organizing today. Green Haven was home to a “think tank” studying and opposing the burgeoning criminalization of Blackness and poverty. In 1979, White and his fellow leaders produced the groundbreaking “seven neighborhoods study,” proving 75% of New York’s largely Black and Latino upstate prison population—staffed by white guards—hailed from just seven New York City neighborhoods.

Simultaneously, White began to study the psychological effects of lifetime incarceration. He developed a theory of hope as a lifer, which hinged on the commitment to free yourself as quickly as possible. To White, if one’s intention is to free himself, then every act committed in service of that intention becomes a liberating act: lobbying for parole reform; accepting harsh deprivations to avoid disciplinary infractions that add time to a sentence; unionizing prison workers to gain collective-bargaining power; connecting with activists on the outside. He raised a generation of men sentenced to long-term confinement. Every lifer in the system knew his name. Prison officials saw his success organizing as a threat and transferred him repeatedly, but he continued wherever he was sent.

In summer 2020, amid a nationwide uprising demanding an end to the epidemic of fatal police brutality against Black people in the United States, the concepts of prison and police abolition proliferated widely. Previously marginalized by reformists as unrealistic, mainstream news outlets began to platform leading abolitionist thinkers; Angela Davis, for example, appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 infections surged in American prisons. While campaigns such as Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP) and COVID Bail Out NYC work tirelessly to depopulate jails and prisons, paying bonds and calling for clemencies, the task they face is monstrous in both scale and inhumanity. Older lifers remain at particular risk.

The older lifers are still White’s focus—those he left behind. Until the pandemic took hold, he continued to teach his curriculum, now under the umbrella of Hope Lives for Lifers, a program of the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee, in New York State prisons.

I met White in 2013, when I became his editorial assistant. We have remained close friends since. He is equal parts jovial and solemn, greeting every person with a warm laugh but often turning the conversation to heavier realities that weigh on his mind. He brings up the teachings of Paulo Friere and Carlos Castaneda casually, and speaks often about the abject conditions of those sentenced to life without parole. He also offers inimitable vitality and joy; he grew a red pepper plant in his apartment from the seeds of one he had eaten, and when I noticed it, he promptly offered me the solitary fruit. He gives people life, without a second thought.

The conversation that follows is part of an ongoing dialogue, and an effort to preserve the long and too-often-hidden history of anti-incarceration activists fighting from within prison walls.

Sophia Giovannitti

Larry White

How old were you the first time you were sent to a prison of any kind?

I went to Warwick when I was twelve years old—for wayward kids. In addition to stealing and stuff, we would walk around with our new things on, and the police would search us out. This time we got busted gang-fighting in the schoolyard.

The judge told my mother, you've been down here too many times, we’re going to put him in the Youth House. The Youth House was a big building in the Bronx. You would stay there for a while and go to counseling. I stayed there and came home on visits. When I was on a weekend visit one day, we went and broke into a store. So from there I had to go to Elmira, for adolescents.

But let’s talk about the concept of poverty. Poverty is not just an economic condition. It’s a social condition as well. The kids on my block—Easter time would be coming, and you’d better have Easter clothes. I used to come out on Easter, everybody had suits on and stuff. I had my old raggedy—[laughs].

And it wasn't just me. All the young guys who found ourselves in that position, we used to cling together. We’d go downtown, look at the suits they had in the store, and some of us would break in and steal it, some of us would steal the money to buy that stuff. So that was a whole process of just being socially equal with people during holidays. It wasn't so much a matter of stealing as it was a matter of getting what everybody else was having, and I couldn't get it the way that they got it.

Did you come to expect that, eventually, you would get a very long sentence?

We used to sit down and we’d be talking, and some of us didn't think we’d be alive at 30. You’d hear about the cops shooting people and all that. Other guys would be in jail. We’d hear about guys getting busted: “How much time did he get?” “15 to 30.” We won’t see him until we’re older and he comes out, and 15 years have passed, or 30 years.

When you’re a kid, you think you're invincible. When you're a juvenile, you think, I can do that shit, and come out and do it again. Some people see their growth up the ladder of improvement: they work in a drugstore, and they graduate from high school, and they go work for this person here, then there, and they move on up like that. In the neighborhood I was in, all those jobs weren't available, so you went from one stage of crime to another. From burglary to robbery to selling drugs. You'd go from the juvenile places to adolescent places to adult prisons. And that’s what you call people who are “state-raised,” raised in state institutions.

When did you become politically and socially conscious?

There was always a rebel about me. Every time I went to the joint, I was always telling people who had never been there before that this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. But this time I really grew, because this time I was involved at a level that didn't have to do just with prison. I began to understand the connections between prison and the communities I came from.

I used to wonder, how come every time I come to jail, I know all these guys? And then I began to realize, wait a minute—if we are a minority in the street, less than 15% of the population in the street, how the hell are we a majority in prison? How did that come about? Because you know, for a while there we all thought that Black folks were criminals. We didn't have models of people who made it outside the community.

But this time here, I really started doing some serious reading. And the more I read, the more I began to understand. I started writing. I really understood that we were in the system as cordwood, this wood that you throw in to keep the fire burning. We were kindling to them. We thought it was personal! It wasn't personal. Any Black person, any one of you all, would do. And then I began to understand the whole question of race—of being able to identify the people you wanted to play the lowest part.

I remember my grandmother telling me one day—I saw her in the yard crying over her flowers. The flowers were dying. It was October, only one flower left. A little purple flower, small. And I said, what are you crying for? I’d never seen her cry—always a jolly person. She said, look at my roses. I said, there’s no roses, all the roses are gone! She said look, look, look! And I looked, and I saw it. Small little purple one. All the rest were red, they'd died off. Getting ready to snow, and the little one was beginning to blossom. She said, that’s what you call a late bloomer. She said, you're going to be a late bloomer. Out of all my children, you're the one that I fear for the most. I fear for you, that they’re going to wind up killing you or something. She said, but see that rose? All the other ones had come and gone, and here he comes. That’s how it’s going to be with you. You won’t bloom until late in your life. You will have trouble all the way up there, but don't give up. Remember what I told you: the older you get, you'll start to bloom.

When you think about how long you were incarcerated for, do you feel angry?

It fucked me up so motherfucking bad. And it didn’t dawn on me until I was out here. Worse than I ever thought. You try to explain it to people, but you can’t really explain it to people.

Did you always think you were going to get out?

There was a time when I thought I wouldn’t. That’s when Reverend Muller came—I got transferred, and he came all the way to Clinton. He said, I read that letter and that’s bullshit! Don’t ever believe that you won’t get out. Don’t ever. Never, ever! You must believe that you can get out. If you don’t believe that you can get out, you’ll stop trying to get out. But I used to think about—if they ever let me go home, it would be fucked up for me.

What did you think?

I couldn’t live among my people. I didn’t want to go home and live among my people, the way I had become. I said, I didn’t want to go home to my people. Parole said, what? You don’t want to go home to your people? I said no. They said, why not? I said, I’m going to the halfway house, with other prisoners. They understand me, and my people won’t understand me. Not the shit I’ve been through, all those 32 fucking years.

For the person who must survive under it, punishment, after an extended period of time, is no longer punishment. It becomes something else, and so does that person. What I’m telling you here is this: for the person who must survive it, he understands that after an extended period of time, punishment changes into something that he can tolerate. Something that the person likes. The things that happen in prison don’t drop on you all of a sudden. You may not be aware that it’s happening to you until a long time after it happened.

In prison I’d wake up late at night, and that’s when I’d really be fucked up. I’d say, I’m never getting out of here alive. I have to live my life here. What does that mean? No sense being mad about it—what does it mean?

The first thing I had to figure out is how to make everything around me new. I started with the bed—take the bed out. I’ve got a mattress on the floor, that’s good enough for me. I want to sleep on the floor, just for myself. I want to sleep on the floor to see what it’s like. Because I know what it’s like to sleep in that bed! If I keep doing that, it’s boredom. When I get tired of that I’ll find another way. You know what I mean? You look for new ways to feel, and to be.

And I never told anybody else, because most people would think I was crazy. But that’s the only way I could keep my sanity. Every day when I would wake up, open my eyes, the first thing I’d see is the bars. All in the same position. The bars don't have to look like that. Look for differences between the bars. They can’t all be exact. Look for differences. I would always look for new things, so the situation would be new for me every day.

When I was in the box, in seg, I used to think, if so-and-so happened, or if so-and-so would do this, then I could be out of here. And you think of all the things that people could do for you, that wouldn't cost them a dime, that never get done, and so you stay there in that suffering position that you got. That’s why I give money away every day. I see somebody on the train asking for a dollar, I give it. I see the joy in his face, you know, and that’s the kind of joy I wish I had when I was in those moments.

What do you want to say about the prison system that you haven’t said? What do you want people to focus on now?

Right now, when we talk about the criminal justice system, it’s hard to determine what to do because of the virus. Before the virus, a guy would have 25-to-life, 30-to-life—okay, I’ve got to do 25 years and get out. But now, there’s no telling. With the virus coming, they may never get out. If I’m over here [gestures to himself], and a guy over there [gestures across the room] has it, he’s only 30 cells from me. How can I stop that from coming down here? It’s not his fault. So now, I would find myself in the same position as the guy with life without parole. The virus has changed everything around.

But when we talk about people who are serving life without parole, the virus doesn’t make any difference, because they were facing the virus from the start—which was death, you know. Right now, people say, oh, get them out of jail before they catch that virus. But they’re not talking about the people with life without parole. I want to help them.

How?

I’ve tried to give lifers without parole a process of living. It’s important that people have something to struggle for. We don’t give these guys anything to believe in. A person must have something that he can believe in, to make his life worthwhile.

When people talk about a “natural life” sentence they equate it to life without parole—it means you’re not ever getting out. It renders the person sentenced to a hopeless existence. And that’s the belief that has to be challenged.

Because I know that a sentence of life without parole does not condemn the convicted person to a doomed state of imprisonment. In New York State alone, he has at least three avenues of release: judicial appeal of his sentence, legislative reform that will modify his sentence, and executive clemency. This means it’s not a state of being where there are no possibilities, and there is no freedom. Avenues of release represent the possibility of freedom, and give rise to hope, where his life must transform into a constant and serious struggle to free himself.

People think the word “hope” means to wish for something. Something like, I wish I could have that. But hope is more than a wish or a desire. You have to see it in your mind’s eye, and to believe that what you’re wishing for will come about, even if it takes five, 10 years. It has to be like: I hope that I get out of prison, and I believe that I can do that. What result am I looking for? My freedom.

In a prison setting, hope takes on a working definition that corresponds to the life circumstances of the imprisoned person. Hope is planning and action, no longer just a concept, or an idea. It’s a process—a praxis—by which what is envisioned and sought after is achieved. It’s an act of living.

All the lifers have to dedicate their lives to a struggle for freedom. And what’s a struggle? My definition is having a primary objective to overcome an opposing force with the intent to prevail. The people keeping me in jail—they’re who I’m struggling against. I’m in this not just for me, but to fight to bring all the others that were fighting with me out too—so it becomes a movement.

Sophia Giovannitti is a writer and artist who lives in New York.