Episode 49: The Editor

Aug 26, 2016

In November of 1988, Robin Woods was sentenced to sixteen years in the notoriously harsh Maryland Correctional Institution. In prison, Robin 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 inmates become highly educated during their incarceration, Robin 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, beginning an intricate friendship that changed the lives of both men. Contributor Daniel A. Gross has the story. 

We're very excited to announce that we're taking the show on the road this fall, visiting Washington D.C., Durham, Philadelphia, Anaheim, Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago, Iowa City, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Toronto. We'd love to see you. Learn more at http://thisiscriminal.com/live/. 

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this is though the world is this Bedford Road these are some businesses this is a liquor store here this is a Chessie bank they just built this not too long ago

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City Limits is right here at this intersection of Bedford Road and shades Lane

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so this is the place over here on the right hand side that I committed the breaking and enterings 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 and that side door there's a steel steel door with a glass window

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can I just knock the window out

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I stole some stuff computers and typewriters and telephones ever card Marlin phone systems when I took this stuff through a place I was staying at it was just a little Shack it wasn't much of a place and it 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

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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 he was about six or seven of them they came in the side door came in the front door that was standing there talking to a friend and I seen him come through the door and I knew exactly who they was coming after I knew that was coming after me

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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 put on the jail and a friend of mine ended up turning me in for the reward he's since passed away and doesn't there's no reason to throw any mud on him when he passed away while I didn't have any animosity against against the man Robin was convicted of two counts of Warehouse breaking and entering a non-violent felony

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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 words Draconian the way I know the words Draconian to just

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take all those years

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for this crime and not had a couple other things that I've done prior to that you know but nothing nothing to justify the time that I got for it but that's the way things are you know I hate 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

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today contributor Daniel Groves has the story of what happened to Robin during those years in prison and I was World got smaller in every way except for one I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal

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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 know you could get you could get beat severely for somebody looking at officer in the in the eye and standing up and and back talking

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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 ward instead of going down and finding out what the problem was he sent a his goon squad in and in the 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 if you was just it was all night of Terror the next morning the rest of the prison heard about the beatings and

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at breakfast a bunch of inmates attacked a group of guards and took the keys it was retribution time

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we went out and told the jail up hello were you afraid for your own safety

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well

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it's very disquieting because you it's basically every man for himself you know I arm myself through the best of my ability to defend myself and what did you have well I had a it's called a homemade knife is 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

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as well because they had never in their in their wildest imagination imagine 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 weapon 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 and basically they stomp the crap out of

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me

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as Robin remembers it when the Baltimore officers arrived to transfer him he started shouting back at the Hagerstown guards I was tell the cat then you let those guys knowing the basement they hit like a bunch of sissies and then I got down to start doing push-ups you know and and so everybody knew I was nuts but did you actually I mean like where you proud of the riot absolutely that would you have done it again absolutely Robin was charged with helping to incite the riot and seven years were added onto his sentence

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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 that I don't claim anything any such thing I know dangerous people believe me I'm not it's nothing dangerous about me but the people around you were like where they murderers

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yes I've seen

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I've seen

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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 just seen the worst of what of what man can do to each other

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that is where I grew up at

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you weren't you actually grew up in these old things 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 usually 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 loves 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

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and I remember the teacher used to put me in the closet all in the coat closet may decide 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 of those days it was just a place to put someone in you didn't have to deal with them

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I would go around and pick up the attendance lips 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 then my job would be to go and stack the milk into the coolers so at lunchtime the other students can have cold milk so you're saying that instead of getting an education

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here you were basically doing like the chores you were doing the chores of this little exactly and that's 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 of my life so he's not even a kids book nothing not even watch Spot Run

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robyn's present in Hagerstown was organized by floors or tears 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 tears 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 autobiography of Malcolm X and the Sicilian Mafia novel by the author of The Godfather Mario Puzo The Librarians

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them through the slot that was normally used for food

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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 may have been grasping maybe 30% 40% of what a page would say but every time I would turn the page I would become more

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that I was understanding more what was going on in the book I mean it's like wow this is this is pretty good

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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 and I wept like a child because those people had lied to me they had program 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

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Rome I could go 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 ask 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 I was my mind was free because all only thing I

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had to do was wait for the library man to come and bring me a book and I could Escape

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Robin tour through the books he could access in the library and as it 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 in and Socrates and Alexander the Great in 2004 he ordered an encyclopedia from the Merriam-Webster catalog it contained two point five million words a gigantic book of eighteen hundred Pages well the time that

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I got ahold of the Merriam Webster's desktop Collegiate encyclopedia 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 600 books that's not hyperbole that's the truth once I would find the a subject

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it would lead me to the next it would all dovetail together while most people open encyclopedia looking for a specific thing Robin just started anywhere and let one Discovery lead them 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

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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 test desktop cyclopedia and is guy's name was Mark Stevens in November 2004 15 years into Robins 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

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Collegiate encyclopedia I thought maybe they would think well how arrogant is this guy sitting in a prison somewhere right me you tell me that you know I've made that there is an error probably about a month later I get a letter I wasn't set on the bunk and I opened it up very gingerly because I didn't want to tell her the envelope up real bad and and I read the letter and mr. Stevens congratulated me first he thanked me

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I mean person who who had basically taught myself to read write and I found that error it's like getting an A in English class is something we're absolutely that yes absolutely he was getting an A-Plus

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this was the beginning of a real correspondence and he informed me I think fairly early on that he was 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 is ever told me that that was their ambition for that book

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within days of his first letter Robin caught more mistakes the entry for William the Conqueror mentioned Harold the first when it should have said Harold the second and a different entry said uthman even often was the third caliph of the umayyad dynasty but Guzman even often 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

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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 who I learned had a ridiculously small amount of

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of Education of formal education Robin may not have graduated from high school but he was an incredibly close reader he'd read hundreds of books by this point and he'd flip through 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 new you they give you your property when you get there and they get 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 200

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he pounds roughly 247 pounds you can see the bones in my face the bone structure

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I got a very distressed letter from him that is that it and he had been thrown into solitary confinement again as far from the first time I believe but on this occasion they had removed and and evidently destroyed his books his own private Library including this into the encyclopedia and this was the most distressed he had ever indicated in a letter

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and in response to that I actually I looked up the I looked for information about the institution and its and who it's wardens might be and and I sent a letter to the warden who I thought I had identified doc what if you include in that letter I mean what was your goal

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I was trying to convince them of how really cruel unnecessarily cruel it was that he did that is that this had been that is Library had been taken away from him mr. Sizer came he had asked me what are the questions you asked me after 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 it carries the Curious look on his face and he said who was

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smorc Stevens and I said oh he's a friend of mine who works for he says well what that said he works for Merriam-Webster's and he was he asked me well what do you do do you work for them and and I was like well no I don't work for him but I found some errors in there Merriam-Webster's desktop encyclopedia and then I filled him into the relationship that me and Mark had had over the years

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it was a very few days after that that I got another letter from Robin and he was not only getting his books restored but he was 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 the Robin was so determined not only in his hunger strike but also in his obsession with learning he offered Robin a deal

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mr. Sato 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 in fraction 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

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and it was it was the craziest thing in the world to walk out of that prison gates after all those years and

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and be free eighteen years had passed he went to prison as a 27 year old and left when he was 44 Robin was released with around 50 dollars 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

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of course I have no dependents myself you know II have no there's nobody who I'm supporting in the world eventually Mark decided to send Robin a little bit of money the first time it was alone but they 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 never even met

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if you you know 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

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put themselves out in a personal way maybe when they are when they have families of their own and but you must have had friends that that would have said what if this is a bad idea

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my friends didn't know I was doing it

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my friends didn't know apparently how did that happen how did that 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 like they're just things like I just don't necessarily tell people everything about

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I'm not sure if I've ever told one single soul how much I might have sent to to Robin they would struggle to believe it actually I suspect it is Stephen Kelly

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my goodness you must be Robin after a decade of phone calls Robin finally met Mark at his house in Massachusetts

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great to meet you it really is I told you I was gonna cry anyway well great to meet you I didn't know what was going to do so I brought a couple different outfits that and but I'm going to tell you it's just only way I could tell you as I've never met you today but I love you very much you're you're a good man

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that's really sweet of you may not surprise you have a blob a lot of books I'm not because you see all behind the piano there is all stacked books I've ever read in prison you know is its again you know a lot of people that had a little bit of means they would have five or six pair of hundred dollar tennis shoes you know when I would have a whole sale for books by have my sanity

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because of it I don't want nuts I would have went nuts impossible to imagine being you know being in there and and not having God and not having printed material and not having stuff to read I just can't it's just a matter unimaginable 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

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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 in and robbed me so what poetic justice is that that now I know what it feels like to be invaded to be have someone to come into your home and steal your meager possessions what does it feel like

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it feels

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like you've been violated and you are helpless to do anything about it and now you know the old me but now I have to depend on the law to 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

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well

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they need to go to jail

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there's probably a lot of people that are really look at this and say this man spent years in jail but but they need to they need to go to court and answer up for it

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but things happen well now I know what it feels like to be robbed and maybe if I would have felt this way before I would never robbed anybody in the first place Robin turned 50 for 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

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in it I actually do have time to read but to my shame I don't

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I don't read as much as I should I called Mike 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

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Daniel gross

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criminal is produced by Lawrence poor and me audio mix by raw buyers special thanks to Alice Wilder and Julie Shapiro Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at this is Criminal.com the New Yorker is running a companion version of this story you'll find it at New Yorker.com criminal is recorded in the Studio's of North Carolina public radio W UNC were proud member of

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topia from PRX a collective of the best podcasts Around Radio topia from PRX is supported by the Knight foundation and MailChimp and thanks to adcirc for providing their ad serving platform to radio Topia will be going on a little tour this fall we'll be stopping in cities all around this country we'd love to see you will be in New York Boston Chicago Seattle Portland you can find out all about it at our website this is Criminal.com I'm Phoebe judge

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and this is Criminal

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