Hasten Down the Wind

            A story. We were all eighteen; just graduated high school; Marty, Kevin, Doug, and I. the world was out there. Three of us would leave in August for colleges out of town. One would spend a year at the local community college and work before also heading out. It was our last summer and we were all lean and tan and thought we knew everything. And life was easy. Every weekend we’d play cards, we’d drink more than a few beers (the legal age was eighteen back then), and we’d listen to music; the music mattered.

            Saratoga Springs was two hours away. Saratoga Springs and the performing arts center with its open-air pavilion and long, sloped hillside. We went five or six times that summer to see bands and performers I still listen to. We’d load up the family station wagon, crank up the cassette deck, and it was road trip time with coolers and a Frisbee, and all the bravado four teenage boys trying to find their manhood could muster.

            I remember the concert; I remember her. Her music captured us; her looks were like, well perfect. She had shoulder length brown hair and big doe eyes, and tight jeans with a silk button shirt. We sat in the second row and we watched her sing; God, that girl could sing.

            It was Linda Ronstadt. She was a few years older than us but she looked like the girl next door. And, she had all these musicians playing with her – longhaired guys who played with Jackson Browne and the Eagles. Guys with names like Kunkl, and Sklar who spent their lives on tour. The music moved us; the music meant something. She meant something. And at the end, when her last note was hit, the four of us did something we’d never done at a concert. We each threw a red rose on the stage. And Linda Ronstadt walked over and picked them up and mouthed “thank you” and smiled and – as Bob Seger once sang “my heart began to rise …”

            She could sing. She was young and beautiful and healthy and she had her whole life ahead of her. I saw all my teenage dreams in Linda Ronstadt that night. I was eighteen; I was living, moving forward. I was going away to college and I was going to discover life. I was eighteen and I had my whole life to live …

            “Tell us a little about yourself.” I said matter of factly, “Well for starters I’ve been in here, locked up since August 2008 – you want the exact minute when my life stopped? I stole two million dollars from people who trusted me. I broke the hearts of two young men who deserved better from their father; I lost the woman I loved. I hurt my family and friends and lost everything.” The words just came out naturally, easily. “And no matter how dark it got, I knew all I had left was my self-respect and my soul. So I started telling the truth.”

            I read the other day that the Library of Congress deposited a Linda Ronstadt recording in their collection of seminal recordings (U2’s “Joshua Tree” was also included). Linda Ronstadt couldn’t attend the ceremony. She suffers from Parkinson’s disease. That beautiful voice and face and life – all the things I saw that night in Saratoga – were in the past. Age, reality, had changed for Ms. Ronstadt. And yet there she was, her picture in the paper, with a smile – a serene smile. She’d written her autobiography and reviewers agreed: she was candid and honest. And I looked at the picture and I saw her eyes. They were the eyes I remembered all those years ago.

            “Are you married?” He nodded yes to my question. “Then maybe you’ll get what I’m about to say. I called her from the sheriff’s department and told her I’d been arrested. I told her to divorce me. It was the worst phone call I’ve ever had to make and I still hear it. I let the woman I loved down; I ruined everything. I need to live a long time to atone for that. I do what I do because that’s on my heart.” He nodded again, and I knew he understood what I meant.

            In the last two months people I would have never guessed could find my blog have read it. I keep writing about “this” – prison and the people in here – warts and all – hoping it matters because the truth is, most days I’m not sure it does. This place, the way we act and treat each other – and ourselves – it just wears you down and saps the life and the hope out of you. And, I know, I understand, why this place is here and why it’s full. And it is so dishonest, and destructive, and dehumanizing. And I wonder what that eighteen year-old so long ago, who knew everything, how would he have held up. Did Linda foresee this future when she smiled at me?

            “Seems like yesterday

            But it was long ago …

            I remember what she said to me

            She swore it would never end

            I wish I didn’t know now

            What I didn’t know then

            Against the wind

            We were running against the wind

            We were young and strong and running against the wind.”

            And now guys – young guys that is – in here laugh at me because I’m the grumpy, moralistic bastard who says, “Get your head out of your ass! You don’t want this for your life.”

            “The years rolled slowly past

            Found myself alone

            surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends

            further and further from my home

            And I guess I lost my way

            There were oh so many roads

            I was living to run and running to live

            Never worried about paying or how much I owed”

            I had a difficult week. Life in here will do that. I got hung up on thoughts of someone remarrying, of another graduation being missed. I found myself talking to people I didn’t know about things in here I’m trying to ignore. And through it all, I wondered if I could have even imagined this all those years ago when I was captivated by that voice.

            “I found myself seeking shelter against the wind.”

            There is no shelter in here. You are constantly bombarded by ignorance and dirt, and guys who cut corners and quit a long time ago. Most days you write them off. You aren’t like them you tell yourself. You can use this and grow and overcome. Then, the doubts, and the memories. And you see why they all gave up … until you read a small verse. It’s been there all the time. It makes sense immediately. Isaiah tells them,

            “Do not call to mind the former things,

            Or ponder things of the past.

            Behold, I will do something new,

            Now it will spring forth …

            I will even make a roadway in the wilderness”

In the background, I hear Bob Seger singing “Like a Rock” –

            “And I stood arrow straight

            Unencumbered by the weight

            Of all the hustlers and their schemes

            I stood proud, I stood tall

            High above it all

            I still believed in my dreams

            Twenty years now

            Where’d they go?

            Twenty years

            I don’t know

            I sit and wonder sometimes

            Where they’d gone

            And sometimes late at night

            When I’m bathed in the firelight

            The moon comes callin in a ghostly white

            And I recall

            I recall”

It was the dreams of that eighteen year-old man-child who heard that voice, that beautiful, soulful voice of that young girl with the brown eyes that brings me back. Parkinson’s couldn’t rob her; I still hear her exquisite voice. I get it I sigh; I get it.

            “Hey, don’t think about the exile; don’t think about what was. Our God is making it all new.”

New. This place is a wilderness. This place is an exile. This place is a desert. And I close my eyes and I hear her sweetly sing that “he tells her to hasten down the wind.” I look at myself in the mirror and in my eyes I’m back there, back at Saratoga Springs. And the dreams are still there. The eyes tell me so.

            It’s been a difficult, emotional week. I questioned my mental toughness. I questioned God. And then Isaiah showed up. And then I heard her voice … and I was young and strong and running against the wind.

Swampland – PT 3: The Cost

So the Richmond Times Dispatch reported the other day that the Justice Policy Institute presented its study on the Virginia prison system to Governor McAuliffe.  In one glaring item, the JPI noted that “community corrections” in Virginia costs less than $2 per day per offender versus almost $14 per day to keep a person behind bars.

Governor McAuliffe may be ready to lead Virginia to real prison reform, the kind of reform that will lead to the release of sizeable numbers of incarcerated men and women doing excessive sentences for non-violent felonies in facilities where meaningful rehabilitation is non-existent. 

As I have written numerous times, prison will not rehabilitate a person.  It is a mind numbing, soul crushing, dehumanizing experience.  There are so many more cost effective ways to address the majority of criminal behaviors. 

Prisons drain resources that could go for better schools, better mental health services, more effective drug and alcohol treatments. 

The swamp that is Virginia’s prison system only survives because it is fed with taxpayer money and politician’s lies and distortions.  It’s time to drain the swamp.

Swampland – Pt. 2: Rats

            Years ago, my younger son – then in Kindergarten – came home and announced at dinner that his best friend wasn’t speaking to him. When we inquired why, he matter-of-factly announced, “I told the teacher on him.” My immediate reaction was right out of “Sopranos”: “Son, dead finks can’t squeal.” He laughed and for weeks after that, as we would run around the yard, I would hear him giggle and repeat my words over and over, “dead finks can’t squeal.” It also gave my then wife and I a chance to instill a life lesson on our son, one I had to call on a number of times since my arrest: Namely, unless there is an imminent danger of harm to someone, I won’t be a teller.

            Rats – no one in prison is as despised as a rat, a guy who goes to those in charge and tells on his fellow inmates. And yet, this system couldn’t survive without guys ratting each other out. There is no honor in telling. Usually the guy doing the telling is already implicated in his own wrongdoing. “Tell us what you know and we’ll go easy on you.” Too often, that is what passes for “good” police work.

            In here it happens daily. And, it’s usually the guys who beat their chests the loudest and say they hate guys who talk. Case in point – two idiots in here (Heemer and Fat Dom) steal a case of laundry detergent from the loading dock. Why? Who knows. The dock area has a camera and when the case turned up missing, “let’s go to the video tape.” Both knuckleheads are locked up for theft. Here’s where the “rat” comes to play.

            Fat Dom is a scumbag. There’s no other way to say it. He tries to act like one of the five percenter philosopher kings, spouting off multi-syllable words, which he neither understands nor correctly pronounces, yet he is one of the most ignorant men I have ever met in my life. He sells out Heemer. Before you know it, Fat Dom is out of the hole – guilty plea on a theft charge and loss of a little good time (but hey, his “bid” ends in May!). Heemer? He’s being transferred. The irony is, Heemer is a follower. Dom is the truly corrupt one. But Dom regularly is in the officers’ ears so his behavior is overlooked.

            And that’s the problem with Rats. You never know when they’ll come after you. Piss one off and your name gets in front of the officers.

            What does it say about the system that they rely on guys telling on each other to maintain order? George Orwell, in his classic novel “1984” described power vesting in “Big Brother” who knew your every move, even your thoughts. And “Big Brother” made sure folks told on each other. Big Brother is alive and well in here and relying on dishonest, dirty inmates to tell on other inmates. It’s just another sign of how dirty this place is.

           

Swampland – PT 1: Drugs

            I have a special fondness for Russian authors I guess it’s the existential angst that permeates all their stories, but Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Solzhenitsyn speak to me in here. And so it was this week that I found myself flipping back through hand written notes I’d made years before about Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

            In that novella, set in a Stalin-era Soviet prison camp – Solzhenitsyn explores the age-old theme of good versus evil. In this dreary tale, however, he asks how man can be good – and remain true to his moral code – when held in an evil system. And Solzhenitsyn’s answer is not simple. After all, he was a survivor of the repressive Stalin-era camps. He understood the magnitude of torment and fear present in those places and he knew there was no easy answer. As the main character realizes, sometimes the best we can hope for is survival.

            Prisons are evil places. Sometimes they are necessary. Some act in such horrendous ways that the only way to protect society is to remove those perpetrators. Those cases are few, however. A society that relies on the mass incarceration of a significant number of its citizens is itself evil. America’s love affair with prisons is wrong. It is an evil system.

            This prison, this “correctional center” is built on a swamp. I mean that both literally and metaphorically. In my six years behind bars I have never seen drug use at such epidemic levels as I see here today. Daily I see dozens of men completely obliterated from snorting heroin. The other night I walked in our building bathroom to a young man retching violently – the “afterglow” from getting high on heroin.

            Adderall, the ADHD drug prescribed to too many young American boys, can be bought in handfuls. Weed is so prevalent it has become commonplace. Any drug can be found here. The facility appears impotent to stopping it.

            Appearances can be deceiving. There is a new, relatively young, major in charge of security. He’s forcing building officers to “get tough” in the building with dorm rule infractions. Meanwhile, dirty officers are turning a blind eye to the flood of drugs pouring on this compound – some even bring the drugs in.

            An evil system. There are some decent officers here, men and women who do their jobs correctly, treat the population with respect, and genuinely believe – and hope – that those sentenced here will leave and not return. I am coming to believe that those officers are in the minority. The things going on inside the walls are a direct result of a broken, corrupt system. And the good, the decent, they quit or give up and turn the other way.

            I asked a young man – a kid really, 21, and in on heroin possession – why he would be so foolish and get high on heroin in here two, even three times a week. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “What else do I have to do?” Does anyone really believe that by sending this kid here at eighteen for heroin use and permanently labeling him a felon, will lead him to quit using drugs on his release? He can’t quit using in here. How does anyone think prison is a justifiable solution to the nation’s love affair with drugs?

            I expect one morning to walk in the bathroom and see this young man laying on the floor blue and foaming around the mouth – overdosing and near death. I’ve seen it before. It is a look I can’t forget. Yet, in our nation’s support of such an evil system the vast majority will not care. He’s just a drug addict, just a felon, just a prisoner; so what if he dies?

            This is a swamp. And the mire and muck sticks on you and clogs your pores and tries to drag you under. It is a problem of the ages. How do you stay good with evil surrounding you? How, Ivan Denisovich, do you maintain decency and truth in the face of corruption and lies? How do you save a kid from his own self-destruction when the method is provided by those in charge?

            “And their cry for help … rose up to God. So God heard their groaning and God remembered His covenant … and God took notice of them.”

            It is the beginning of the Exodus story, an exit from another evil swamp toward freedom. I only hope my young friend in here lives to see it.