Bryan McDaniel takes off at a dead sprint with the football. He feints right, spins back left, and momentarily escapes a defender. Boxed in, he dives for the first-down marker, but an opponent snatches the flag dangling from McDaniel's blue jeans.
With ball outstretched and chained by gravity to the dirt, the quarterback's head turns to the sideline marker - first down. "Built Ford tough," he hollers, scrambling to his feet and plucking his shirt away from his chest. He turns his back to the defense, ready for another snap.
The 33-year-old anticipates many more plays here in Anamosa State Penitentiary's yard. McDaniel is serving a 75-year sentence for murder. Many convicted killers, rapists, and robbers are milling about the sidelines, behind the milk jugs marking every 15 yards of the field.
Some men are waiting to sub; others are just thirsty for entertainment. Anamosa is one of the nine state prisons in Iowa, all of which offer convicts sports, according to the Department of Corrections. Taxpayers may wonder why they should pay for prison tennis courts when they can't afford the luxury for themselves.
Victims and survivors can struggle with the options offenders enjoy, especially those they view as superfluous, such as foosball or table tennis. And even experts must speculate whether athletics actually affect criminal tendencies. Yet those same experts tout sports' psychological, physical, and social effects, and corrections' officers say recreation occupies inmates' idle time and releases aggression.
Dean Craig, an activities specialist for 21 years at Mount Pleasant Correctional Facility, is one of them. "I'd rather have an inmate get upset about a Dear John letter and pump some iron than take it out on my face," he said. Most officials estimate at least half of inmates participate in athletics.
At Anamosa, more than 200 "lifers" routinely roam the yard. But in the cocoon of competition, it's easy to forget the setting is a medium/maximum security prison and not someone's backyard. A yellow paint stripe climbs the face of the wall, interrupted only by the numerals 25-7 - the barrier's height.
Razor wire and a security tower loom within a Hail Mary toss of play. The grass isn't dead, but it's not healthy. Dilapidated chalk markings and splotches of dirt, the kind that won't yield when pressed with a strong foot, pit the field.
A gravel jogging path surrounds the action. Not far off sound the thuds and whacks of leather smacking pavement and flesh - a basketball court. An indoor gym, previously a boiler room, is used when the elements play too rough.
Prison sports aren't a recent phenomenon. Anamosa's website bears pictures of the facility's baseball team, The Snappers, from the 1920s. The changes activities are undergoing are new, however.
From fiscal 2000-06, the Iowa Department of Corrections' appropriations for recreation have increased by an annual average of 3.2 percent. The true cost of sports programs is difficult to calculate, however, because it's grouped with music and craft activities as "recreation" in the budget.
With a record number of convicts, though, the money doesn't go as far as it used to. Anamosa's gym used to be open seven days a week but is down to five, recently retired activities' specialist Mike Dooley said. Upon his departure, the venue closed for at least a week because of a lack of staffLong ago, the prison used to host regional weight-lifting competitions and shuttle outside offenders in for football.
Now, its residents only play outsiders from the public in softball and basketball. The space and time limitations aren't likely to evaporate. Officials forecast an Iowa inmate increase of roughly 31 percent over the next decade, according to a Dec.
1 report by the Division of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Planning. Paul Stageberg, the primary author, says past forecasts typically overestimated increases because of later policy changes. While the state's prison population is expected to rise, spending on recreation supplies has steadily decreased.
Other expenditures are also limited - in fiscal 2006, eight of the state's nine facilities didn't use taxpayer money to buy recreation equipment. Craig said except for major purchases, such as the renovation of a court, Mount Pleasant's recreations are self-sustaining because of capital raised from a canteen program, which allows offenders to purchase novelties, funneling funds back into the prison. Yet salaries and larger projects still require public money.
Rep. Lance Horbach, the chairman of the Iowa House justice-system appropriations subcommittee and a self-described tough-on-crime guy, says prison sports are necessary not out of compassion for offenders but for the public. "If you were to ask, 'Should we provide more frills in Iowa prisons?
,' the vast majority of people would say, 'No,' " the Tama Republican said. "They'd also say, 'What the heck are you guys doing, releasing this guy from prison without helping anything?' " The United States incarcerates more of its citizens per capita than any other country, the vast majority of whom aren't locked up for life.
Iowa's system, according to the Department of Corrections' daily updated web statistics, operates 22 percent over capacity - eight of the nine state prisons held more offenders than their theoretical limit. The effect stretches many corrections' divisions thin, and recreation is no exception. Three years ago at Mount Pleasant, the men's and women's departments combined to staff eight recreations employees, officials say.
Today, they use half that to manage both physical activity and hobby crafts - everything from punching bag workouts and organized card tournaments to leather working and pastel drawing. For inmates, the cutbacks mean the gym is open two fewer hours a day. For activities personnel, there's more area to supervise with fewer sets of eyes.
Craig estimates though 100 prisoners are frequently in the Mount Pleasant gym at once, bullying the punching bag or battling on the basketball court, 70 percent of the time it's with no security personnel present. Often, just one activities staffer supervises. "You're more tense," he said.
"Kind of sitting on pins and needles, waiting for something to happen." Some wonder if sports aren't making those pins sharper and the needles longer by bulking up offenders. The U.
S. Department of Justice estimates two out of every three people released from prison are rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within three years, and almost half of those released are reconvicted. So what's the point of allowing criminals to get bigger, faster, and tougher for the next cop to subdue?
"He doesn't have to be a 240-pound guy, all bulked and big and muscular," said Barry Lyons, an activities employee at Mount Pleasant. "If his choice is a gun, he's going to take a gun, whether he's 120 pounds or 240 pounds." What's more, offenders who really want to bulk up don't need weights to do it - pushups and other weight-free exercises can more than accomplish the feat.
Some advocates for prison recreation argue a larger problem than administering strength-training, however, is the "us vs. them" mentality - often, the public perceives prisons as strictly punishment for crimes committed. Department of Corrections officers, however, stress the importance of therapeutic goals.
It's easy to disdain prisoners' acts and hope their problems vanish. But the out-of-sight-out-of-mind philosophy is unrealistic. Mount Pleasant treatment director Jay Nelson estimates "95-plus percent" of the offenders he oversees re-enter the community.
They'll be back in-sight and in-mind, he adds, when they're living across the street. McDaniel, a father of three boys, says he was justifiably sent to prison, but others shouldn't be too quick to judge and throw away the keys. " The public forgets the fact that we're human beings," he said.
"That we cry. We get lonely. We miss our families.
When we see our kids come to visit, we are happy. "They don't see these things." No comprehensive national studies have been undertaken to determine sports' effect on recidivism rates.
The reasons are varied, experts say. The public's mentality of punishment over rehabilitation may strengthen political notions to get tough on crime, which endanger prison recreation altogether, and discourage costly studies, according to a 2005 article in The Journal of Offender Rehabilitation. It suggests recreation, if implemented with attention paid to individual offender needs, may prove to be a "critical and underutilized component of offender rehabilitation and subsequent reduced recidivism.
" But that's about as far branch as anyone ventures to assess long-term impact. "I did an experimental study on strength-training adjunct therapy," said D.J.
Williams, a co-author of the article and professor at Idaho State University.
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