Baltimore

I spend a great deal of time thinking about race; I can't help it. One of the biggest changes to my life from "out there" to "in here" was confronting some of the preconceived ideas and prejudices I held about black and white issues.

The "old Larry" would have immediately reacted to what took place in Baltimore as " a group of thugs." I would have been muttering under my breath how we “coddled” bad behavior, needed to get tough; I would have had all the slogans down about "those people" burning and looting their own neighborhoods. I would have remained narrow minded and foolish.

I see things differently now. Race is the 1000-pound elephant sitting in the middle of the room--in the middle of America's room. I can't fully appreciate what it means to be black in this country but I know we still have a long way to go. The rioting isn't about "getting something," as much as it is a cry of hopelessness.

Baltimore is representative of the segregation that still exists in America. Within two or three short miles of the epicenter of the rioting there is a whole different world. The life expectancy in the rioted neighborhood is 20 years less than in the suburbs just a short drive away. Twenty years--imagine that. Imagine the lack of even basics such as grocery stores or shopping where decent produce can be bought.

America has failed the poor of this country--and poverty knows no color. Most of the men I see in here--black and white--come from poor families; they are generationally poor--and nothing we have done has improved their lot. A few days ago I went back and began rereading John Steinbeck's epic American novel, "The Grapes of Wrath." The plight of the Joad family--Okies treated worse than most would treat a pet dog--as they sought a new life in California is as fresh today as it was in the late 30s when it was published.

We have got to come to grips with the reality of poverty and race in America. Crime, I have come to learn, is a public health issue; and the symptoms are poverty and racism and ignorance. That has not changed since Steinbeck wrote about the great dust bowl migration of the 30s.

I have a great number of young black men who look up to me and believe me when I tell them they can do whatever they desire with their lives after prison. I tell them to hope...and to believe in themselves. I pray each night I am not letting them down with my false dreams and hopes.

Baltimore can be a defining moment for this country; or, it can be just another riot--another misunderstood action by people like me who miss the real challenge facing this country. That it took prison for me to see the dignity in folks who didn't look like me or talk like me is an irony I don't overlook.

Prisons are full of the results of this country's failed response to poverty, discrimination, and ignorance. It is time for a change.

I saw the movie “Selma” this weekend and what astounded me was not the beatings, not the ignorance and hatred, but that even in the face of such institutional wrong, people could still have hope and believe.

As the character Andy Dufresne says in "Shawshank Redemption," "hope is a good thing; hope is the only thing."

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.

I Was Brought Low. . .

This is about death, a subject that scares the hell out of me. The other day news broke in Richmond about a horrendous murder. In a poor neighborhood on Richmond’s Southside an eight year-old boy was murdered. His head was crushed with a block by an assailant who was attempting to rape the little boy’s nine year-old sister. The little boy came to his sister’s aid and was murdered. One moment, two children playing; the next, a senseless murder.

            This facility has a connection to that tragedy. Friday afternoon the guy in bunk “70” was called up to the booth. “You need to go to the watch command.” The dead boy was his son. The assailant a fourteen year-old from the neighborhood. It took less than five minutes for everyone to know. And what do you say to a man doing five years for drug possession who is told his son is dead? There is a heartfelt moment in “The Shawshank Redemption” where the protagonist Andy Dufresne, looks at his years in prison and tells his friend, “I made mistakes and I’ve paid for them … and then some.” I’ve told myself the same thing. I’m sure Job muttered those same words. Even those words fall short when I look at the man in “70.” What does it all mean? “I was brought low and He saved me.” For what, I wondered.

            One of my close friends here is a Navy retiree – 25 years as a Master Chief, E8, in the U.S. Navy. Four years out of the service, living a good life in the Virginia Beach area, and he gets drunk and drives. He drives through a red light and hits a car. A grandmother and her eight year-old granddaughter are in that car. The impact kills both. My friend walks away without a scratch except, except he sees the little girl in the car every day. He can’t go back and get a “do over.” He can’t undo his stupid behavior. He does his sentence and tries to atone the best he can. But, the girl is dead; the grandmother is dead; and he can’t wash the blood off … and he shouldn’t. I can’t make sense of any of it. Good people do bad things; bad things happen to good people; life goes on, even in death, life goes on.

            Bug splat. That’s our military’s jargon for an errant drone attack; like two weeks ago, six kids playing in a rock-strewn courtyard somewhere in Afghanistan. One moment they are there, the next vaporized. “Wrong target. Bug splat.” Hell of a phrase.

            The other night, the state of Oklahoma tried to execute a convicted murderer. The guy lying on the gurney won’t get much sympathy. He raped a young woman, shot her three times, then buried her – still alive. So he’s condemned to death by the state. Problem is, there’s a shortage of lethal injection drugs so the states are trying all sorts of combinations of “other” drug. We aren’t far from giving a guy on death row a twelve-ounce bottle of anti-freeze.

            They strap the guy down, finally (after multiple attempts) find a “viable” vein – in his groin – and start pumping drugs into him. A “good” lethal injection leads (1) sleep (2) breathing stopping (3) heart stopping. This doesn’t work out that way. The first drug doesn’t knock him out. By the time number 2 is pumped in, the vein has collapsed and the drugs are seeping and pooling under his skin. For over forty minutes the condemned moans in pain until he suffers a massive heart attack (ironically fifteen minutes after the head of Oklahoma DOC stops the execution because it’s been so badly botched).

            And most folks’ reaction? “So what? He was a cold-blooded killer who didn’t think anything of torturing and killing poor girl.” I shake my head and realize all the talk about forgiveness, all the mom and apple-pie, July 4^th talks about “rule of law” doesn’t stand a chance against bug-splat and botched executions.

            Death. One truth I understand is, we’re all going to die. And most of us don’t get to pick the time, place or manner. Those that we leave behind try and find meaning in it all, like the guy in bed 70 trying to figure out the cosmic connection between his crime and incarceration and his son’s death. And my friend, he tries to atone – if that’s even possible.

            So often we act nonchalantly about death as it surrounds and invades our daily life. It doesn’t directly hit us; we breathe a sigh of relief. At times – like Newtown or Columbine – when we’ll hug our kids a little tighter, when our chests clutch ever so deeper, when we realize we aren’t in control and it can all be taken so suddenly, and callously, and without a moment’s thought. And we’re scared and confused.

            “Show me the way

            Take me tonight to the river

            And wash my illusions away

            Please show me the way.

            Give me the courage to believe

            I’ll get there someday

            Please show me the way.”

            None of it makes sense, the guy suffering in bed 70, the grandmother and little girl in the car, the kids in the courtyard, even the murderer on a gurney … and I close my eyes and hear David’s words, “I was brought low and He saved me.” And that has to be enough to get me through.

Twenty Years Ago

1994. Two movies were released that year that matter to me: “Forrest Gump” and “Shawshank Redemption.” I hear Forrest’s words each day when I run. “Momma said sometimes we just have to outrun our problems.” And on those bad days when I wonder if anything exists beyond this, I can hear Andy Dufresne tell Red and the other inmates, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the only thing. And, hope never dies.”

            Hope never dies. I remember seeing both movies at the theater. And, I laughed at the slow-witted Forrest and his angry antagonist/friend Lt. Dan and I thought I already knew all about love and heartache, failure and redemption and a movie couldn’t explain it to me. Then there was August 2008, and arrest, prison, divorce, and loss. And I ran and yelled at God and cursed my life and found my soul. And I realized Forrest was the smartest protagonist ever written and Lt. Dan, well he proved Romans 8:28 is true.

            And Andy and “hope” – hope is a funny thing. At our best we think we understand it. At our worst we dig deep to see if it’s really there. And, if we find it, we hold on to it tightly because it’s the only thing that keeps us going.

            Twenty years is a long time. Sometimes it feels just like yesterday.

But Hey …

            The other day another female officer was “escorted” – classy word “escorted” – off the compound. She was “involved” with an inmate. Her Don Juan was sitting in 7 building, a/k/a “the hole” dealing with a fraternization claim and a pending transfer. The officer? She’s gone, but she won’t be prosecuted. Officers in DOC don’t get prosecuted very often. That’s just the way things are. Two have a relationship; the inmate loses his good time and goes up a security level. But the officer – fired or, more likely, resigned and still gets the state retirement years from now. But hey, that’s the way it is.

            “Shawshank Redemption,” the movie and Stephen King short story, brutally depicts Andy Dufresne’s wrongful conviction and life behind bars in a fictitious Maine prison named Shawshank. We read and see a world of violence, and wasted life, and corruption at the hands of prison administrators and guards who treat the facility like their own money dispenser. In the midst of that Andy keeps hope. Hope, he says, “Is a good thing, maybe the best thing. And hope never dies.” But that’s just a movie, just an eighty-page short story. Funny how life imitates art.

            Corruption is rampant in here. And I would expect it from the inmates. After all, scams and hustles make life go on behind bars. But the extent to which those running the prison are dirty, well it’s hard to tell one shade of blue from another.

            Fraternization is always a problem. A few times each year there goes another female officer or female counselor out the front. And it’s not just the sex that gets compromised. Those officers look out for their “boos.” Dirty officers feed information; dirty inmates do the same. So the game’s fixed; the field isn’t level.

            Drugs, tobacco, cellphones. Imagine getting “shook down” by a dirty C/O. You know she brings in cartons of cigarettes for $100 a carton. Here she is confiscating your extra shirts. Who are you going to tell? For all you know, she’s paying off the C/O up front. And you – you’re screwed. You’re a rat; you’re off the compound, sent somewhere where time isn’t as easy. Hey, that’s the way it is.

            Officer comes to you, “I need a gun cabinet built.” The wood – birch, beautiful stuff – has been ordered through the school for “carpentry projects.” So the carpenter, getting forty-five cents an hour, builds the gun cabinet. It’s friggin’ beautiful; stained, inlay work. He builds two matching bookcases and end tables. And all that stuff – all that furniture – goes right out the back through the sally port. Free furniture courtesy of the taxpayers who’ve been lied to so they think these places keep them safe.

            Everything in here has a price. Everything in here can be bought. So you see guys getting high on the rec yard and you want to say, “Hey dumbass, that’s what they put you in here for.” You know the dope came in by an officer so you ignore it. All you do is hope, hope you get through this and when you get out someone gives a damn that you kept your honor and dignity in a dark and discouraging place.

            Andy says hope’s a good thing, maybe the best thing. Andy says hope never dies. But hey, that was a movie. This is real.