In “Mr. Smith Goes to Prison: What My Year Behind Bars Taught Me About America’s Prison Crisis,” Jeff Smith has written a book that deserves to launch him as an author and burnish his star in a constellation of interconnected fields: as an academic, policy wonk, political commentator, lobbyist – just about everything other than an elected official in the state of Missouri.
In a tightly written, incomparably lucid 250 pages, the Olivette native who went to high school in Ladue really writes several books. He delivers a political tell-all about his brisk emergence as upstart congressional candidate, who loses that primary but becomes the star of a powerful documentary film about his candidacy, then runs as a white man in a majority-black state Senate district and wins.
He spins a true crime narrative, where he breaks a minor campaign law, lies about it to federal election officials, and then elaborately conspires with campaign staff to cover up that lie and obstruct a federal investigation into it. This conspiracy – ridiculously overwrought, given that the underlying issue was the fine print on a campaign mailer – was caught on tape when Smith’s friend and campaign aide Steve Brown wired up for the feds.
He gives us a candid peak behind bars when he serves most of a one-year sentence in a minimal-security federal prison after making a plea deal with a hard-driving federal prosecutor. The prison memoir is a classic mode of American literature, and Smith updates the form for the 21st century, in just a few brilliantly observed passages telling us everything we secretly wanted to know.
Then he pivots and makes all of this about much more than himself and his personal arc. He makes his mistakes and punishment pay off in an intimately detailed yet data-driven argument for making sweeping reform to criminal sentencing guidelines and prison policy. Further, he doesn’t make this argument like the smartest guy in the room (or cell) who just figured it all out. Rather, he writes well aware of – indeed, already embedded in – a prison reform movement. He doesn’t offer so much new policy recommendations as new momentum to help others who already know what must be done and are working hard to do it.
In St. Louis and Missouri political circles, this is a book where many people will look for their names in the index and then brace themselves. Though physically small, Smith has always been brash and combative in his politics, not afraid to make alliances that make others uncomfortable and willing to defend his positions and partnerships in great detail. As a battle-scarred veteran of Missouri politics, he also practices the art of the payback – sometimes viciously.
Russ Carnahan – the legacy candidate who beat Smith in the 2004 congressional primary – comes in for a bruising. Of course, he filed and pursued the grievance about the minor campaign ethics crime that led to Smith’s undoing. Carnahan wears a dunce cap in this book, but gets off easy compared to his operative Joyce Aboussie, who held the reins of the Dick Gephardt congressional dynasty that Carnahan was trying to inherit. “I hung up in shock,” Smith writes after Aboussie makes her one appearance in the book, issuing a crude threat by phone. The EYE is still in shock that Smith published Aboussie unplugged for all the world to see.
Aboussie and Carnahan were defending a congressional district, Missouri’s 3rd, based in the southern half of the St. Louis metropolitan region that no longer exists in that form. After the 2010 Census, South St. Louis was drawn into Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, and Carnahan was left to run against the incumbent, another legacy politician, U.S. Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay.
Clay also comes in for payback. When Smith wins the state Senate seat in 2007, Clay is quoted as telling him, “I knew you was gon’ win all along,” using a plantation English variant spelling for “going to” or “gonna.” Then this statement gives Smith an “epiphany” that “everyone after tonight is suspect because they may want something from me,” making Clay the embodiment of politics’ opportunistic duplicity.
But again, Clay gets off easy compared to his operative. This unnamed “Clay aide” is described as a “former Ivy League basketball star,” which sounds like Darryl Piggee (now with Stone Leyton & Gershman). Smith describes their conversation during his state Senate primary. Despite his Ivy League education, this operative’s statements are also rendered in black plantation dialect – including when he is presented as issuing a physical threat to Smith: “If you come up in my ward, you best bring security. ‘Cause it ain’t gon’ be pretty.”
That’s a threat of physical violence in the context of a political campaign. You don’t get that sort of thing on the record very often. For the record, Piggee tells the EYE he “never claimed star status” and is not a knuckle-dragger who threatens physical violence. He said he never threatened Smith.
Smith shows poor judgment in using plantation dialect to render black speech. In prison passages, he uses a similar and also insulting print dialect to render the speech of white prisoners from the Deep South. This book deserves to be taught, but this authorial and editorial decision and what it implies needs to be discussed. The book also deserves to see additional editions, but Smith and his editors would be wise to revise their handling of black (and white Southern) speech on the page before reprinting.
The EYE also finds poor judgment in how Smith discusses his actual crimes and his continuing attempts to render payback to the prosecutor he was forced to plea bargain with, Hal Goldsmith (now a partner at Bryan Cave). Smith wittily quotes from transcripts of wire recordings Steve Brown made for the prosecution, but anyone who has read Smith’s entire plea agreement can see he lets himself off easy.
His taped comments and federal plea agreement reveal Smith to be the leader of the conspiracy to obstruct a federal investigation. He says many incriminating – and some humiliating – things on those transcripts and in that plea agreement. His attempt to minimize his own role in his own undoing and instead implicate the prosecutor for malicious overreach makes Smith come across as having failed to learn some valuable lessons about himself.
He suggests the prosecutor wasted federal resources by investigating a lie about something as minor as a campaign postcard. But Smith himself was the sitting state senator who later coached friends and staff to lie on his behalf to cover up that small lie. Who overreached, the state senator trying to save his skin by assembling a conspiracy to deny a minor crime, or the federal prosecutor doing his job by prosecuting obstruction of justice perpetrated by an elected official?
Smith’s hostility towards the prosecutor paid off for him in prison, though. His prison reporting reveals an inmate population who can read all of the signs of a snitch based on their sentence relevant to their crime. Because Smith didn’t snitch – he claims he had nothing incriminating on other political players to give prosecutors – he entered prison with respect in the prisoner’s code.
It also helped that prison administrators – who come across as the bored sadists we would expect – assigned Smith warehouse duty, rather than the teaching and tutoring he had prepared for. This threw Smith in with some of the biggest and toughest men in the prison. A genius at defying low expectations based on his small stature, Smith bulked up and somehow held his own in the warehouse, earning himself valuable protection.
His innate opportunism and willingness to break the rules to protect himself continued to serve Smith well in prison. He understood that to survive he must align with his fellow prisoners, not the prison staff, and he learned that participating in the petty theft ring run by warehouse workers was a good survival strategy. It cemented his image as outlaw and gave him delicacies to trade for favors, including the most important favor in prison: protection.
It is sobering to reflect on how far that Jeff Smith – stealing prison food to blend in safely with the other prisoners – has descended from the star of “Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?”
The Jeff Smith of his 2004 congressional campaign was a fresh-faced alternative to politics as usual, running against rot in the form of a no-show legacy politician. Protecting this super-clean self-image – pre-scream Howard Dean was the template – explains why Smith lied about his minor campaign crime. He didn’t want to admit to breaking the law by having his staff collaborate on an opponent attack piece without disclosing their involvement. He didn’t want to admit that the brave new candidate was willing to play dirty politics as usual.
By the time the feds were onto him in 2009, Smith was no longer a daring outsider, but rather a savvy Missouri state legislator who lived and breathed political maneuvering. Even then, he conspired to obstruct justice rather than simply confess to a minor crime of dirty politics five years in the past. Only when a prosecutor presented him with direct audio evidence of his crimes did Smith confess. And before his signature on the plea agreement was dry, he returned to trying to talk – and, now, write – his way out of looking as bad as he sounds in those transcripts.
It’s possible to imagine that by so doing Smith is asking for future payback himself, since all of the audiotaped evidence in his case is presumably available to the public via open records requests. The callous, manipulative Jeff Smith captured live on those wire transcripts is a far cry from the charming, confident, brilliant voice behind “Mr. Smith Goes to Prison.”
Left Bank Books (399 N. Euclid ) will host Jeff Smith for a book signing and discussion at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, September 15.
