Criminal - The Editor

Episode Date: August 26, 2016

In November of 1988, Robin Woods was sentenced to sixteen years in the notoriously harsh Maryland Correctional Institution. In prison, Robin Woods found himself using a dictionary to work his way through a book for the first time in his life. It was a Mario Puzo novel. While many people become educated during their incarceration, Robin Woods became such a voracious and careful reader he was able to locate a factual error in Merriam Webster's Collegiate Encyclopedia. He wrote a letter to the encyclopedia's editor, Mark Stevens, beginning a friendship that changed the lives of both men. Contributor Daniel A. Gross has the story. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Bedford Road. These are some businesses. This is a liquor store here. This is a, uh, Chessie Bank. They just built this not too long ago. City Limits is right here at this intersection of Befford Road and Shades Lane. So this is the place over here on the right-hand side that I committed the breaking and entering at. This is Robin Woods.

In November of 1988, he was 26 years old when he stole a car and drove to an office building in his hometown of Cumberland, Maryland. Robin is African American. In that side door, there's a steel door with a glass window. And I just knocked the window out. And I stole some stuff, computers, some typewriters, some telephones, they were called Marlin phone systems.

When I took this stuff to a place I was staying at, it was just a little shack. It wasn't much of a place and there wasn't much furniture in there and I had put all the stuff in there then I abandoned the car and I knew that I was going to be in trouble because I had what they said was $20,000 worth of office equipment.

Well, what was I going to do with that? Robin started trying to sell the stolen equipment as quickly as possible, offering it up for cheap. So a few people knew he had it. And the next night, while he was playing pool, his plan fell apart. Someone turned him in. Troopers came in. It was about six or seven of them. They came in the side door and came in the front door. I was standing there talking to a friend and I seen them come through the door and I knew exactly who they was coming after. I knew

they was coming after me. So, of course, there's no reason to fight six or seven state troopers. You know, you go ahead and you go, you just went on to jail. And a friend of mine ended up turning me in for the reward. He's since passed away, and there's no reason to throw any mud on him. When he passed away, I didn't have any animosity against the man. Robin was convicted of two counts of warehouse breaking and entering, a nonviolent felony. But he'd been arrested a half dozen times before, and because of prior convictions,

he was sentenced harshly, 16 years at the notorious Maryland Correctional Institute, or MCI, in Hagerstown. He'd been there before, serving two years for firing a gun through a woman's window. But this time, he was going to be in much longer. I think the word's draconian. Well, I know the word's draconian, to just take all those years for this crime. And I had a couple other things that I've done prior to that, you know, but nothing to justify the time that I got for it. But that's the way things are. You know, I had to deal with it.

I didn't have any choice. And they gave me the time, and I went to prison. And, you know, I had to deal with it. I didn't have any choice. And they gave me the time and I went to prison. And, you know, that was that. Today, contributor Daniel Gross has the story of what happened to Robin during those years in prison. And now his world got smaller in every way, except for one. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Robin described MCI Hagerstown as one of the worst prisons he ever set foot in, and he spent time in quite a few. The Baltimore Sun described it as crowded and racially tense, and reported that numerous

inmates complained of beatings by guards. Basically, they would use sheer brutality to bring you in the line. You could get beat severely for simply looking an officer in the eye and standing up and back talking. One day, a group of prisoners decided enough was enough and refused to leave their cells until the prison warden agreed to meet with them. The warden, instead of going down and finding out what the problem was, he sent his goon squad in and what they call an extraction team,

and probably within 12 hours' time, they had beat probably 40 inmates. You didn't have to get beat up to be pissed. I mean, it was a night of terror. The next morning, the rest of the prison heard about the beatings. And at breakfast, a bunch of inmates attacked a group of guards and took the keys. It was retribution time. We went out and tore the jail up, you know. Were you afraid for your own safety?

Well, it's very disquieting because you, it's basically every man for himself. You know, I armed myself to the best of my ability to defend myself. What did you have? Well, I had a, it's called a homemade knife, it's called a shank. According to the Baltimore Sun, the prison was filled with clouds of tear gas, and some guards were firing shotguns. And I'll never forget the look of terror in their eyes as well, because they had never in their wildest imagination imagined that they would lose their prison. Robin alleges that he was taken down to the prison basement and severely beaten. You know, the wonderful thing about it was I found out that day that I could take a whipping.

They surrounded me and one of them hit me in the ribs from the back and another one hit me in the kidneys and I fell to the ground and basically they stomped the crap out of me. As Robin remembers it, when the Baltimore officers arrived to transfer him, he started shouting back at the Hagerstown guards. I was telling the captain, you let those guys know in the basement

they hit like a bunch of sissies and then I got down and started doing push-ups, you know, and so everybody knew I was nuts. But did you actually, I mean, like, were you proud of the riot? Absolutely. Would you have done it again? Absolutely. Robin was charged with helping to incite the riot, and seven years were added onto his sentence. He was transferred to the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, a Supermax facility in Baltimore. And from that day on, Robin was officially classified as one of the most dangerous prisoners in

Maryland. And I don't claim anything, any such thing. I know dangerous people. Believe me, I'm not. There's nothing dangerous about me. But the people around you were, like, were they murderers? Yes, I've seen people fight each other with knives. I've seen people jump on, two or three people jump on one person with knives. I've seen people murder each other. I've seen the worst of what man can do to each other. Now, this is where I grew up at.

You actually grew up in these buildings? I grew up here, yes. Robin is driving me around his hometown. When he was a kid, he lived at the Fort Cumberland Homes housing project. He says it was a mix of poor white and poor black families. This was a library. I white and poor black families. This was a library. I used to go to this library all the time. Even though I couldn't read as a child, we would go in there and play. At first, Robin loved school, but he wasn't great at it. He never paid much attention to his teachers, and he says he got in trouble a lot for acting up and

causing problems. And I remember the teacher used to put me in the closet, or the coat closet. They decided to put me in special education. Robin was kept in special education for five years, through seventh grade. He remembers being told that someone like him didn't really need to learn things like math or reading. Back in those days, it was just a place to put someone and you didn't have to deal with them.

I would go around and pick up the attendant slips. Now at the other end of the building here, right here to our right, is the cafeteria. And I used to go in the morning time, the milk, the local milk company would drop off crates of milk. And my job would be to go and stack the milk into the coolers so at lunchtime the other students could have cold milk. So you're saying that instead of getting an education here, you were basically doing the chores. You were doing the chores of the school. Exactly.

And that's how I got through junior high school. Robin didn't make it through high school. And when he was sent to prison almost a decade later, he could barely read or write. He knew enough to get odd jobs and to read a menu, but not much else. I had never read a book in my life, so... Really? Not even a kid's book? Nothing. Not even watch Spot Run. Robin's prison in Hagerstown was organized by floors, or tiers.

The inmates were alone in their cells for most of the day, and he says they'd sort of yell out and try to talk to each other. One day, a guy wound through the tiers with a cart, yelling library call. And I was thinking to myself, well, why would I want a book? Robin was skeptical, but he figured why not. He borrowed the thinking to myself, well, why would I want a book? Robin was skeptical, but he figured why not. He borrowed the autobiography of Malcolm X and The Sicilian, a mafia novel by the author of The Godfather, Mario Puzo. The librarian slid them through the slot that was normally used for food. Many, many words I had to skip over because I didn't, I couldn't read them. What did it feel like, like staring at the page, only understanding some of the words and like trying to figure that out?

It was hard at first because I may have been, I may have been grasping maybe 30%, 40% of what a page would say. But every time I would turn a page, I would become more confident that I was understanding more what was going on in the book. I mean, it's like, wow, this is pretty good. Eventually, Robin bought a dictionary from the prison commissary. He would copy words he didn't know into a notebook, then study them carefully. But I remember reading that Sicilian and getting done, and I wept like a child. Because those people had lied to me.

They had programmed me that, don't even try. You can't do it. You're not capable of doing it. And then once I did it, it was like I could go to China. I could go to Rome. I could go to Greece. I could go to the Second World War. I could go to the Civil War. I could go to the moon.

He started a small library in his cell. Other inmates sometimes asked to borrow his books or for his help reading legal documents. It was a marvelous thing. The whole world opened up. Even though I was confined in an institution, in a prison, in a building, in a cell, my mind was free because the only thing I had to do

was wait for the library man to come and bring me a book, and I could escape. Robin tore through the books he could access in the library, and as he became more confident, he also became more ambitious. I wanted to know about the world that I lived in. I wanted to know about Sir Isaac Newton and Socrates and Alexander the Great. In 2004, he ordered an encyclopedia from the Merriam-Webster catalog. It contained 2.5 million words, a gigantic book of 1,800 pages.

By the time that I got a hold of the Merriam-Webster's desktop collegiate encyclopedia, I always give the whole thing out because it's impressive for me. By the time I got to that point, I had probably read five, six hundred books. That's not hyperbole. That's the truth. Once I would find a subject, it would lead me to the next. It would all dovetail together. While most people open an encyclopedia looking for a specific thing, Robin just started anywhere and let one discovery lead him to the next.

One day, he read an entry about the acquisition of Texas, and it didn't seem right. I believe the reference was that the acquisition was acquired through the American and Mexican War, which of course that happened after Texas became a state. And when I found it, and I read it several times, and I knew that it was wrong, I went and found the chief editor or the editor for that, for the Merriam-Webster desktop encyclopedia, and his guy's name was Mark Stevens. In November 2004, 15 years into Robin's sentence, he wrote a letter. Dear Mr. Stevens, I'm writing to you at this time to advise you of a misprint

in your fine collegiate encyclopedia. I thought maybe they would think, well, how arrogant is this guy sitting in a prison somewhere, writing me to tell me that, you know, I've made, that there is an error. Probably about a month later, I get a letter. I went and sat on the bunk and I opened it up very gingerly because I didn't want to tear the envelope up real bad. And I read the letter and Mr. Stevens congratulated me. First, he thanked me. I mean, a person who had basically taught myself to read and write,

and I found that error. It's like getting an A in English class or something. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It was getting an A in English class or something? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It was getting an A+. This was the beginning of a real correspondence, and he informed me, I think fairly early on, that his ambition was to read the entire encyclopedia.

Mark Stevens, editor of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Encyclopedia. Mark basically assembled the book from scratch. And nobody before or since has ever told me that that was their ambition for that book. Within days of his first letter, Robin caught more mistakes. The entry for William the Conqueror mentioned Harold I when it should have said Harold II. And a different entry said Uthman ibn Affan was the third caliph of the Umayyad dynasty. But Uthman ibn Affan died five years before the dynasty began. Over the course of two years, Robin caught more than a dozen mistakes

that were corrected in later editions. Mark started to think of him as a freelance editor. There's actually a history of this. Back in the late 1800s, a famous prisoner in England was one of the main contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary. Anyway, Robin and Mark debated whether Lincoln deserved credit for freeing the slaves. They discussed whether Cleopatra was Greek or African. He would move through a lot of subjects that you might find improbable, you know, for an incarcerated person with the pages, checking and cross-checking information, and then writing to Mark, lots and lots of letters going back and forth. And in all that time, Mark did not know what Robin was in prison for. He never asked, which seems funny, but maybe some part of him just didn't want to know.

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In early 2006, Robin was transferred to a different prison, which happened a lot. But this time, they told him he wouldn't be allowed to take his books. Usually they give you your property when you get there, and they had all my stuff. So I immediately went on a hunger strike within three or four days. Robin wrote to Mark, I need my books, and I cannot afford to replace them. He refused to eat until he got to speak with the Maryland Commissioner of Corrections, Frank Sizer. And I went from 220 pounds, roughly, to 147 pounds.

You could see the bones in my face, the bone structure. I got a very distressed letter from him and he had been thrown into solitary confinement again, far from the first time I believe. But on this occasion, they had removed and evidently destroyed his books, his own private library, including the encyclopedia. And this was the most distress he had ever indicated in a letter. And in response to that, I actually looked up the...

I looked for information about the institution and its, and who its wardens might be. And, and I sent a letter to the warden who I thought I had identified. What did you include in that letter? I mean, what was your goal? I was trying to convince them of how really cruel, unnecessarily cruel it was that his library had been taken away from him. Mr. Sizer came. He had asked me, one of the questions he asked me after he was asked about my health and a couple other things and told me what he he was asked about my health and a couple other things and told me what he was going to do he he was very curious and a curious curious look on his face and he said

who is this mark stevens and i said oh he's a friend of mine it works for he says well what i said he works for marion wepters and he was he asked me well what do you do? Do you work for them? And I was like, well, no, I don't work for them. But I found some errors in their Merriam-Webster's desktop encyclopedia. And then I filled him into the relationship that me and Mark had had over the years. It was very few days after that that I got another letter from Robin, and he was not only getting his books restored, but he had been informed that he was on the road to freedom. Mark and Robin didn't piece this together until later, but here's what they figured out. The Commissioner of Corrections was impressed that Robin was so determined,

not only in his hunger strike, but also in his obsession with learning. He offered Robin a deal. Mr. Sizer said, if you do everything that I tell you to do, and you walk through the door, I'll give you your good days back. But you have to be infraction-free for a whole year. And I'll give you your good days back, and I'll let you go home. In short, even though Robin had once participated in a riot that left a dozen guards injured, the commissioner was willing to let him out early.

Robin had five years left to serve. But once he got his so-called good days back, there was just one year left. It was the craziest thing in the world to walk out of the prison gates after all those years and be free. 18 years had passed. He went to prison as a 27-year-old and left when he was 44. Robin was released with around $50 in cash, the minimum required by law. He knew about Julius Caesar and the Mexican-American War, but he couldn't remember how to count money. He had trouble finding work back home in Cumberland. He couldn't pay rent. And all this time, he stayed in touch with Mark. Every so often, they talked on

the phone. Of course, I have no dependents myself. You know, there's who I'm supporting in the world. Eventually, Mark decided to send Robin a little bit of money. The first time, it was a loan. But then he sent a bit more. And a bit more. And eventually, Mark started thinking of it as a gift. A gift that added up to thousands of dollars over the years. And remember, they'd never even met. If you had a family of your own, do you think that this story would have happened? No, probably not. I don't think people tend to put themselves out in a personal way, maybe, when they have families of their own. You must have had friends that would have said,

what if this is a bad idea? My friends didn't know I was doing it. My friends didn't know. How did that happen? How did it happen that for so many years a relatively significant part of your life was invisible to your friends? I don't know. I don't know.

There are just things I just don't necessarily tell people everything about. I'm not sure if I've ever told one single soul how much I might have sent to Robin. They would struggle to believe it, actually, I suspect. Here it is, Stevens. Okay. Should we knock on the door? Oh! My goodness! You must be Robert.

I'm Robert. I'm Robert. I'm Robert. I'm Robert. I'm Robert. I'm Robert. I'm Robert. I'm Robert. I'm Robert. I'm Robert. I'm Robert. My goodness. You must be Robin.

How are you? After a decade of phone calls, Robin finally met Mark at his house in Massachusetts. Give me a hug. Oh, it's nice to meet you. Great to meet you. It really is. I told you I was going to cry. Oh, it's nice to meet you. Great to meet you. It really is. I told you I was going to cry.

Oh, no. Not really. Anyway, well, great to meet you. I didn't know what we was going to do, so I brought a couple different outfits. But I'm going to tell you, it's just the only way I can tell you this. I've never met you until today, but I love you very much. You're a good man. That's really sweet of you. I'm not surprised you have a lot of books. I'm not, because you see all behind the piano there is all stacked books. I remember in prison, you know, it's, again, you know, a lot of people that had a little bit of means, they would have five or six pair of $100 tennis shoes, you know, and I would have a whole sale full of books.

But I had my sanity because of it. I would have went nuts. I would have went nuts. It's impossible to imagine being in there and not having printed material and not having stuff to read. It's just unimaginable. It's just unimaginable. Over the weekend, Robin and Mark went for a hike and went to see a play. They even visited the house where Emily Dickinson grew up. And then Robin drove seven hours back to Cumberland.

When he got home, he was in for a shock. One of his windows was hanging open. Someone had broken in. The irony of the situation wasn't lost on Robin. No one has ever broken into my residence and robbed me. So what poetic justice is that? That now I know what it feels like to be invaded, to have someone come into your home and steal your meager possessions.

What does it feel like? It feels like you've been violated. And you're helpless to do anything about it. And now, you know, the old me, but now I have to depend on the law to deal, to get satisfaction because certainly I'm not going to go out and retaliate because someone stole some material possessions. What would you want to happen to the person that did this? Well, they need to go to jail. There's probably a lot of people that will look at this and say, well, this man spent

years in jail, but they need to go to court and answer up for it. But things happen. Now I know what it feels like to be robbed. And maybe if I would have felt this way before, I would have never robbed anybody in the first place. Robin turned 54 this year. He still has a copy of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Encyclopedia. But he told me he doesn't really read much anymore.

In prison, books connected Robin to the outside world. But now, he's in it. I actually do have time to read. But to my shame, I don't... I don't read as much as I should. I called Mark last week to check some facts, and he told me that after 24 years, he was just laid off by Merriam-Webster. He's 66, and he spent years working on encyclopedias,

but people just aren't reading them anymore. Daniel Gross Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Special thanks to Alice Wilder and Julie Shapiro. Julianne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. The New Yorker is running a companion version of this story. You'll find it at newyorker.com. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best podcasts around.

Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp. And thanks to Adzerk for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. We'll be going on a little tour this fall. We'll be stopping in cities all around this fall. We'll be stopping in cities all around this country. We'd love to see you. We'll be in New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Portland. You can find out all about it at our website, thisiscriminal.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. Ribotulinum toxin A is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.

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