Thoughts on the Governors

Governor Bob has had his whole life exposed during these past 5 weeks. We’ve learned his marriage was in disarray and his wife was a loud, abrasive, near psychotic who could have given Lady Macbeth a run for her money. We’ve also learned Bob was corrupt.

Now, the Gov.’s future, his freedom, rests with a jury. Hey Gov. – I’ve been there. The difference between you and me is I knew what I was doing was wrong; and, I “manned up,” admitted my wrongdoing and took the heat. I didn’t defend my actions on the back of my wife and our problems.

I had a bemused reaction the other day when I heard Mr. McDonnell say he wished he acted in a different manner, but all of us do things we regret. No kidding. As Governor, he could have applied that philosophy to thousands of men and women behind bars who deserve a “second chance” and who shouldn’t be doing time just for time’s sake.

But he didn’t. He supported the present criminal justice system that sends way too many to prison for way too long; it’s a system forged in retribution and vengeance that costs the commonwealth dearly in destroyed lives and communities.

A quote about liberals goes like this: “A liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.” Governor Bob will soon learn his fate. Perhaps this will be Mr. McDonnell’s Damascus moment when he will find his real calling and his soul. That would be a better result than sending him to prison. I know from personal experience. 

And out new Gov. – Governor Terry? He’s presiding over a budget meltdown. He has the chance to do something extraordinary and change the money-sucking criminal justice/corrections operation in the state.

Like Moses to the Pharaoh, hey Gov., “let these people go.” Institute meaningful early release. Restructure sentencing. Fire your DOC head and his sycophant managers and bring in real reform-minded leadership. Re-establish a parole system that rewards good behavior.

What is happening is DOC has to find $43 million in immediate cuts. “Buy less office supplies” is the message to staff. Are you kidding me? Virginia’s prisons are too full, too expensive to run, and have too many non-violent offenders just “doing time.”

Come on Governor Terry. Be courageous; be bold; make real savings happen. 

Transitions

Nothing remains constant in here, least of all the population. It didn’t used to be that way. Years earlier, you went to a prison and you stayed there for years. You knew who was living around you. Every week just two or three would leave and two or three would take their place. Now, it’s a whole new world of corrections – which is odd because the Virginia state budget is such a mess, you would think they’d quit locking people up for stupid, short sentence stuff and then moving them from low custody facility to low custody facility. Transitions are part of life; in here you move, things change, just for the hell of it.

So last week, “Randy” left, He was supposed to have gone in February but he’s a “civil commitment” guy. You know, his sex crime was so severe, so abnormal, that he has to be civilly committed. Here’s the funny thing – he spent his entire time in low custody. I’ve met violent predatory sex offenders who have been at high security levels worked their way down here, who aren’t civilly committed. Meanwhile, this guy “Randy” spends his eight years here (that’s right, 8 years for sick child porn) then goes through a due process hearing for the last 6 months before heading to the “behavioral science” center.

Early in the morning last week (before 6:00 am count) they woke him up. “Get all your stuff. They’re coming for you at 6:30.” And that was it. Randy will be held in sex detention for a year. Then, they’ll be another hearing to determine if he’s “cured.” Can you ever be “cured” of aberrant sexual feelings?”

Transitions. They moved a gay guy into the building the other day. Change that. We’ve had gay guys in the building before. We’ve never had a guy who sits to urinate, plucks his eyebrows, and calls all the officers “sugar.” I’ve seen all this before, the flamboyance and exaggeration. Is it real? I’m not sure, but prison is a mass of guys wanting people to think you are something/someone other than who you really are. Guys aren’t just gay in prison, they’re “Bird Cage” over the top gay.

The whole building environment changed when he swished his way in. There’s an air of uncomfortableness. A few closeted fellows feel emboldened and become more gay; others more homophobic. The building is tense. Meanwhile, he sings show tunes in the shower.

Football season kicked off last weekend and with it, gambling tickets flew around the compound. One of our college guys runs back and is pretty good on his lines. Just on Saturday he took in over $500 in tickets. I watched him sweat out a few “10 pick” tickets late Saturday – they could have hurt him; instead, it was a profitable weekend; very profitable. 

Fall is always a transition time in here. Football keeps things moving. Forget New Years; the first Thursday night catches almost everyone’s attention. With football season you know fall lockdown is coming. After that, Thanksgiving and Christmas. So stamps thousands of them – change hands with tickets: 5 picks, 8 picks, parlays; gambling is back with a vengeance.

Every week, twenty to thirty new guys show up and the same number leave. DOC spends millions each year “transporting” – i.e. moving 3 or 4 guys at a time on old school busses to various prisons around the state. It’s a stupid system which makes perfect sense in a money wasting backward operation which is DOC. And yet, the “new” guys coming in aren’t new. So many are back for round “3” or “4.” The “system” hasn’t worked; it hasn’t rehabilitated them. They grease the wheels of the system; they keep DOC in business.

And the guys showing up are uneducated and ignorant; many are plain dumb. They have little – if any – hope of success outside. Prison time becomes just another season for them. They cycle in and out. They “remember” on their last bid that “chicken on the bone” was served every week. “They don’t feed us like they use to,” they moan. Maybe, you should stay out, you think.

It’s a mind-numbing process. Like a hamster on a wheel, you move at break neck speed hoping to outrun this time. You try to ignore the predilections and violence of so many around you. You try to find humanity in your surroundings. You try and block out the guy who lies about his military status as he seeks to con a free education. You think “I can do this; I can get through this.” Like Andy Dufresne in “Shawshank Redemption” you try and hold on to beauty and joy and hope so you don’t transition into just another DOC number.

Transition may be the wrong word. It’s a conveyor belt in here. And for far too many, the belt runs into a wall. You have to be better than that.

A Tale of Two Cities

The dichotomy was apparent. During the same weekend; from the same city, great joy and pride and terrible heartache and loss. Chicago. Summer in Chicago. And like so many other summers in that mid-western city, the blood of its youth spills too easily. Black children lying dead. Teenagers gunned down by gun-toting Black teenagers shouting gang slogans. A three year old shoots himself in the head with a gun his paroled felon father – a gun he should not have because of his criminal record – carelessly left out. Five dead. All children. Another weekend in Chicago and it barely registers a mention on the news.

Pennsylvania. Baseball; little league baseball. An all-black team from the Southside of Chicago, “the baddest part of town.” They win the American draw, beating a team from Nevada who five days earlier had knocked them around. It’s Williamsport – idyllic, rural Pennsylvania – where every summer young baseball players from around the world gather and play the greatest game on fields of green grass and manicured infields. Baseball and Pennsylvania are a million miles from Chicago.

For months the talking heads on Sports TV have decried the absence of Black big leaguers. And, by the numbers they are right. Growing up, I remember Mays and Aaron, and Gibson. I wanted to be Willie Mays. Today, less than one in ten ball players are African American. The pundits have a dozen theories. But, I listened as the coach of the all-black squad from Chicago, from the almost all-black “Jackie Robinson Little League” answered the question:

“Baseball is a game passed down by your father. In our league we still have a lot of fathers. It’s not that way for everyone.”

Jackie Robinson. Perhaps no single man’s courage and self-control mattered more in the country’s slow march toward integration than he did. Jackie Robinson, a great man, a hero. And yet today, more young black kids in Chicago can tell you about Jay Z than Jackie. Who really matters? What really matters?

Missouri. Over four thousand people gather for the funeral of a young black man gunned down by a white police officer. No one yet knows what happened. I don’t presume to know what was in the officer’s heart before firing those fateful shots and I choose to believe he is distraught because blood has been spilled. Too many – on both sides – use this tragedy for their own political ends. Blood spilled and a family mourns a son gone too young. And, another family lives with the repercussions.

Here’s what I wonder, how many black children have to die in the street of Chicago at the hands of other black children before someone stands up and says “enough!” Where is the national outrage and national dialog as we watch thousands of young kids turning to gangs and killing each other? Why is “Ferguson” the issue and not just a symptom of something so much larger? And why are we not watching – and listening – to the mothers and fathers of those ballplayers?

A young man I know in here from Richmond told me about the shootings that regularly took place near his home. He was raised in a home with a mom too young to care for herself, let alone three young kids. So “Gramma” became their refuge. “Gramma” fed them, even when it was just mayonnaise on white bread. “Gramma” was responsible. Mom? She was in and out; Dad? He was at “state farm” (Powhatan to those not “in the know” on Virginia’s prisons).

And summers in Richmond, summers in the city’s notorious Gilpin Court, were filled with robberies and drug deals and killings. My young friend whom I tutor in English and Excel and any other class which comes our way, tells me when he was six he was sitting on the front stoop with his brother and sister. “It was loud, like a firecracker. Pop, pop, pop. Then, people across the street started running and that’s when I saw him … bleeding as he fell in the street.” His first seen “body.” Man shot across the street staggers and dies yards from him. And his six-year-old eyes see it all.

A few moments later, the police and an ambulance arrive. The neighbors stand all around but nobody “saw anything,” at least not in Gilpin Court. An ice cream truck approaches and Gramma gets the three kids popsicles, “Red, white, and blue rockets,” he tells me. They stand with the others behind the yellow tape, licking their popsicles as the dead man is loaded up and carted off and the blood, pooled on the ground remains. Gilpin Court, Richmond. Another dead black young man.

I can’t watch the news about Ferguson, Missouri anymore. It seems almost ghoulish and undignified. And, no matter what that young man may – or may not – have done, I can’t help but think it could have been avoided. There are too many dying too young and they look like so many of the young men I care about in here.

I confront race every day in this place. Early on, in my first few weeks in jail when my life was in a complete tailspin, I realized how little I really knew about being black in America. Every opinion I held as fact came from a life almost completely devoid of blackness. Then again, almost every opinion I held as fact came from a life almost completely devoid of contact with poverty, poor education, ignorance, and a whole lot more. My opinions were all forged from my own privileged life. I knew, I soon realized almost nothing about living – and dying – in America. Dylan wrote about such things in “License to Kill,”

Now all he believes are his eyes

And his eyes they just tell him lies

But there’s a woman on my block

Who sits there as the night grows still

She says who’s gonna take away his license to kill?

I hear about my young friend’s life in Richmond, I watch as more families weep over the loss of children cut down for no good reason and I wonder who will take away our license to kill? When will we see beyond color or economic status and mourn, really mourn the incredible waste of life and vow to do better? It seems as if it will overwhelm us, destroy us, condemn us. And then, twenty young black kids in yellow shirts with white pants run across the infield and I see hope.

Two cities. You can take all the pain and death and despair of Chicago, and Ferguson, and Richmond together and weep and lose hope until you see Williamsport, Pennsylvania and grass, and smiles, and baseball. 

You know what gives hope? When all you see and hear is death and anger and you look around your prison housing unit and almost every TV is turned to a team of little leaguers from Chicago and guys, hardened by life and crime and death are pulling for these kids as they play … a game.

There isn’t a black and white; there’s green and there is the sound of a ball coming off a bat and there’s joy. 

Time

Two college guys getting ready to leave. Every week one of the remaining IT guys packs up; it’s been like that all year. We’re down to the last five; five guys all finishing their last few days, or weeks, in here; guys finishing their time. Time. What is it? In here, it’s a whole lot … and it’s nothing.

“Seen a man standin over a dead dog lyin by the highway in a ditch. He’s lookin down kinda puzzled pokin that dog with a stick. Got his car door flung open he’s standin out on Highway 3. Like if he stood there long enough that dog get up and run. Struck me kinda funny seem kinda funny sir to me. At the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe.”

Bruce understands time. Guy’s looking at his dog, thinking he’ll just jump up and go. But he won’t. The time is gone. Time, “a system of measuring duration.” In here, time is everything … and nothing. 

My friend DC has been locked up for forty-two years, let me write that again: 42. 1972 he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery within weeks of the Olympic boxing trials. Nineteen years old and the world waiting to see him in the ring. It didn’t start out as forty-two, the court gave him twelve. Back then you earned 30 for 30; twelve was a max of six. At four, DC made parole, everybody made parole. The weekend before his release there was payback and dead convicts. DC was in solitary facing death or life behind bars … and time moved on.

Mikey, the middle class white kid and so damn smart for fifteen. He stabs a neighbor kid to death and at fifteen he escapes capital murder for a first-degree plea. “Do 25 on 50.” Fifteen years old, what do you know about how long twenty-five years is? Now, he’s 36 and he’s spent more time behind bars than outside. “Under four,” he said a few weeks ago.

You hear years thrown around with almost hushed reverence: 25, 20, 15, 8, 6. On and on time goes. Six years; six years since my arrest. What is it? Divorce; longing; guilt; redemption. There were missed graduations, birthdays, weddings. Tears shed; smiles of nostalgia. “Time heals all wounds,” bullshit. “Time waits for no one,” true. “Time is what you make of it,” thank God!

Years are handed down arbitrarily as though in some mystical calculus this precise number of years, this time, adequately punishes. How many years, how much time is a life worth? How many years equals $2 million? I don’t know the answer. But, I know time doesn’t serve anyone well as a punishment. I asked Mikey one day if he thought his victim’s family has had their pain lessened any by him being in here 21 years. “I don’t think so,” was all he could say.

There was a time during this six years when I thought this time – so arbitrary, so long – was meant to kill me, to break me and leave me with nothing. And then, miraculously, I came to understand time is in His hands. It was no longer a sentence but an opportunity. And my friend DC? “I’m a better man now than I was back then,” he told me. I believe him.

Time wears men down in here. Even short runs – two or three year bits – break men. Life outside moves on and if you dwell on it, it’ll destroy you. Maybe, just maybe that’s where the punishment comes in. One day or ten, if you dwell on the time and thieving nature of it you will succumb. So, you look beyond the years, you look to the future, to life. You look, you hope, you live. Even in here, you live.

Guys prepare to leave. They get quiet; they stay to themselves; they run through all the “what-ifs” – what if I can’t make it out there? But the time comes and they go.

I don’t know how much time a crime is worth. In my former life I thought I knew it all. Now, I have more questions than answers. Like the “Hamburglar” he leaves tomorrow. Eleven years for sexually assaulting a little girl. Has eleven years “cleansed him,” made him realize his sexual proclivities are twisted? I don’t think so. He’s returning to his mother’s home convinced he is the victim. Has eleven years made the neighbors forget what happened? Time has changed nothing, and that is the cruel truth when we rely on time; it has no feeling, no emotion, it just is. 

“Lord won’t you tell us tell us what it means

So at the end of every hard-earned day people 

find some reason to believe.”

Time moves on. New guys show up; old guys go home. People’s lives move on; nothing stays static. You can drift through life – inside or outside – or you can find the reason you’re where you are at that moment. Time is nothing but a measurement. Life is so much more than time. And maybe, just maybe that’s what I needed to learn to begin again. Forty-two years or forty-two days, time is what you do with it.

Rainy Saturday Observations

I was all set to go run, clear my head, breathe deep and think and feel and “13” – the C/O in charge of movement whose job it is to stand in the middle of the boulevard and radio in and out of the buildings – he let me know, “there’s a storm moving in, no morning rec.” No morning rec. No 5 or 6 mile run to loosen up from a week on the weight pile trying to do “cross fit” with guys half my age. Prison is schedule; schedule is everything. You organize and discipline yourself or you and your mind turn to mash potatoes …

I’m sitting here and listening to the rain pelt the dorm building roof and it’s rhythmic and entrancing and I feel, for just a second at least, that I’m not in here. I have Johnny Cash playing in the CD player; he’s singing “Long Black Veil” and the peddle drum matches the “thwap” of the rain: “Nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me …” Damn Johnny made great music. He did time; his life was a mess and then, well then God saw fit to tell Johnny “You don’t have to fight anymore. You don’t have to carry all that anger and guilt and pain anymore,” and he was free.

Funny the things you see in here when you scan the building. Seventy men; seventy stories, some worse than others. DC, he’s become the “bird man” of Lunenburg. A few months ago, not even sure why, but he decided a few small birds needed crumbs of bread. Now I see him heading to our ball court with a quart and a half bowl full of breadcrumbs. Twice each day he goes out and feeds dozens of birds, and two small field mice who now venture close.

He’s tearing up bread – I can’t even tell how many slices he’s pulled out of the chow hall this morning – and I’m laughing because he’s so damn precise with his efforts: crust off first (“I shred that between my palms main man!”); then small cube-like pieces. His cut is awash in bread scraps; crumbs flying everywhere; he’s oblivious, focused only on the bread. 

Guys, young mostly – but hey, in here anyone below 40 is considered young – don’t have a clue how you do laundry. There’s a guy jamming everything he has – 3 jeans, 3 blue shirts, sheets, blankets – into the washer and he’s measuring out boxed “All” detergent. Problem is, we buy “All” in one-load boxes and that half of box sprinkled on tap of a non-agitating load of clothes won’t clean anything. “Should I add some shampoo?” he asks.

Look guys, here are a couple of simple rules. First when you use the bathroom you wash your hands (you’d be surprised how many in here don’t bring soap into the bathroom). The shower is for your bathing, not washing your tees and boxers. Second, laundry. You need detergent to clean your clothes. And, washers are built around the principle of agitation and then spin. Don’t over fill. And whatever you do, don’t put your washcloths and towels straight from the shower and throw them in the dryer!

I watch these guys. They don’t know how to make a bed, do a load of laundry, wash a dish, or keep themselves clean. I think we need “life skills” classes. You want to be a “grown ass” man (a favorite inmate expression) then learn to live independently! Institutionalization – you get comfortable letting the institution take care of you. They do. Frankly, it’s easy for them if they can provide for you. You lose your self-respect. You forget everything comes at a price.

Three sex offenders, all white middle-aged guys who in a prior life and without their warped predilections, could have lived in my neighborhood – carry on; they “know more” than anyone. I find myself angry watching these three guys because there’s an undercurrent of racial and economic superiority in their demeanor. None of them will admit to any wrong doing; all “misunderstandings.” Sure those kids (yup, all child sex offenders) asked to be touched and photographed.

What’s the issue? Seems the school has a rule: No sex offenders can work in “academia.” These three all have degrees. The young guys in here can’t stand them – they’re arrogant and abrasive (funny, but at higher levels child sex-offenders don’t behave that way; they become “cell rats”). Me? I work every college class – 3 new ones starting in a week with female faculty who know they can trust me and know there won’t be any crap in the classroom. I read a piece a few weeks ago about “hearing” when God calls you to your vocation. I understand that now.

There is redemption in suffering and atoning. These three don’t get that. They feel persecuted, wronged. Their wives still visit; their lives “outside” still exist (except for that little “registration” requirement!) and yet they feel that they are the victims. I don’t get the mindset …

Rain still falling. There’s a whiff of mackerel in the air. It’s 10:00 am and this guy is microwaving pouch mackerel. “I need 30 grams of protein,” he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen. Health and fitness are big topics yet guys don’t know the first thing about anatomy, physiology, kinesiology. The other day I ran a 6:45 mile – smoked past four young muscle-bound guys half my age. “How’d you do that?” Iggy asked me. “Know your body. Forget 600-pound squats. Get your cardio right. Stretch.

Mumford & Sons on the CD player. Great acoustic music. Dylanesque with their lyrics. They sing, 

“It seems that all my bridges have been burnt

But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works

It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart

But the welcome I receive with the restart.”

And the rain keeps falling and I feel great. I’m six years in. I lost everything and found so much more. Should I feel this good? I don’t think that judge who sent me here expected this. I don’t think anyone did.

“You were a lawyer once, right?” The question caught me by surprise. A new “resident” of our building; big burly, country fellow with a Carolina twang and broad toothy smile. He leaned in. “My pen pal, a nice Christian girl in South Carolina reads your blog.” What? I laugh. I started this blog four years ago to document publicly what I was writing in the cells of the jail and receiving unit. I accept full responsibility for every word. I’ve pissed people off at times; I’ve whined and moaned; but I write, I keep writing every day. Why? Because I thought, what seems so long ago, that maybe – just maybe – this journey would someday matter to someone: my sons; my friends; the woman I loved and lost.

I thought, back then, if I wrote I would be steeled and courageous in whatever I faced, even I thought I couldn’t do this; I could never redeem myself. I wrote and I have had guys threaten me and curse me and officers find the blog and tell me to back off (and once, an assistant U.S. attorney read it and said, “you’re a pretty good writer.”) I wrote, I write, because I have a story and I think of Victor Hugo who said, “If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” The writing brings the light. 

It’s raining and I write because even on a slow, rainy Saturday, this matters. The men in here, so many of them anyway, matter to me. I write so I’ll never forget – good or bad – this. 

“Love it will not betray you

Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free

Be more like the man you were meant to be”

Who you were meant to be. I tell the young guys who daily gather around my cot that idea. Mumford & Sons put it to music. “Be;” “Live;” the words fall like rain….