Opie was on the ball court.
There were about five of us out there.
For some “weird” reason our rec yards have been opened infrequently the
last two weeks. The decent officers tell
us they’re short-handed. See, DOC is
facing a money crunch. They have almost
40,000 of us locked up and Virginia can’t afford it. DOC’s director, Harold Clarke, sent a message
to the employees on September 30th that Pennsylvania was ending
their $20 million lease of a Virginia prison.
“It puts”, wrote Clarke, “DOC in a difficult financial position.”
Anyway, Opie’s shooting basketball when the officer spies a
blue-bagged lump in his sock. “Bring
that over here”, the officer demands. “F---
You” replies Opie who proceeds to take the bag out of his sock and ingest
it. So Opie is taken out in handcuffs,
his bed area cleaned out, he’s thrown out of college, and, as I write this, he
still hasn’t gone.
Opie, as I’ve written before is a good kid deep down. But, he is heavily institutionalized. All he has known since he was a child is
juvenile hall, courts and prison. He runs game in here because, well that’s
what prison does to you. It teaches you
to be hard, to be dishonest, to snitch, to prey on the weak, to mistrust
society. And unless and until the
politicians have the guts to admit that corrections is nothing but a scam,
there won’t be real rehabilitation.
Opie is a poster-child for how screwed up this entire system
is. When I met Opie in December, 2010
(ten months ago) he had a 2.0 GPA and was regularly getting in fights. Now, he has a 3.4 GPA. With the exception of smoking, wine-making
and tattoos, he’s a model inmate. Opie
is at a crossroads. He tries to do right
and still skirt the rules a little and they add time. He is on the fringe of being that guy I see
in here who eventually loses all hope, gets out, comes back and spends the rest
of his life locked up. The system has failed
the Opies of the world.
Which leads me to Amanda Knox and the West Memphis
Three. In this country there is an
immediate, general consensus that if a person is found guilty “they must have
done it”. Over and over we see evidence
of police malfeasance, prosecutorial corruption, incompetent counsel. We see a system where over 2.3 million are
locked up, the vast majority for nonviolent offenses, and we turn a deaf ear.
If even 1% of those incarcerated are actually innocent, that
is 23,000 men and women whose lives have been unjustly stripped from them. Imagine 5%:
that’s 115,000! Amanda Knox’s family
has practically bankrupted themselves to get her free from an Italian
prison. Who is going to give that young
girl her four lost years back? If it
wasn’t for certain Hollywood celebrities caring about their cause, the West
Memphis Three would still be on death row.
This past weekend a family member remarked during a visit
with me how unfair my sentence is and how depressing the prison is. And I told her prison has always been like
that. It’s just until you know someone
going through it, you turn a blind eye to the despair and filth and violence
present in the state’s prison system. “After
all”, you rationalize, “bad people go to prison and they get what they deserve”.
Here’s a life lesson:
even good people can do stupid things.
And sometimes those stupid things break the law. But that doesn’t justify what passes for “corrections”.
Don’t wait for a friend or loved one to get caught up in the
system before you react. Demand your
elected representatives do something now.
Push for prison reform, real reform.
Opie is someone’s son. He’s more
than a number.
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