Super Bowl … And Winter Inside

THIS BLOG WAS WRITTEN IN FEBRUARY, 2015.

 

            Past couple of weeks have been interesting in here. There’s been the security audit – a sham of a process where everything looks good for a few days; then the “system” goes back to normal and cluster rules the day again. There have been fights, dirty urines, new tattoos, more weed, more tobacco, no bagels on commissary, even after 22 day stretches. Days pass … but it’s like the movie “Groundhog Day;” you’ve seen it all before. The shifts change, the rules are rewritten, and then everything returns to how it was: poorly run.

            What breaks the monotony? Super Bowl for one thing. In my former life there was always a Super Bowl party. First, at our house with twenty or more friends and the table packed with food and drinks. Later years, there was Vegas – special invitation to high roller casino parties with more food and drink than is imaginable. Beautiful women everywhere. It was hedonism to the nth degree. Then came arrest, and lock up, and the Super Bowl didn’t matter until …

            I got here. Sports matter inside; and, the Super Bowl is celebrated in here just like on “the street.” It is an event that allows you to feel part of everybody else. You’re doing the same thing everyone else is.

            Food is everywhere: Pizzas, dips, nachos, wraps, cheesecakes, banana puddings, snack mix; it’s all here and it’s all made “fresh” (as fresh as prepackaged foods can be when mixed with Ramen and Rice and block cheese). Hours upon hours guys line up for access to the microwaves. Meatballs, pepperoni, bacon, ham, roast beef – the smells fill the air. Popcorn, cheese doodles, Fritos, Doritos – chips are unbagged and placed on newspaper. Kick off and tickets: bets for a dozen lines with quarter boards (1 soup equals 1 pick) flood the room. It’s loud and exciting and as close to “not here” as you can get. And as the game progresses into the 4^th quarter every eye is on the field. Nothing can break the feeling except “Count Time. TVs off.” It’s 9:30 count and for five minutes the building is silent and we remember, we are still inside … Football and the Super Bowl, they remind you of what is beyond here.

            Then, winter hits. First the arctic blast – it’s 0° and no rec is called. The snow starts and by Tuesday we have over six inches. No school. Stuck in the building, you read, watch TV; some play cards or bones (dominoes). You watch the news and again you’re reminded the world outside, real life, is so much like yours in here. They can’t keep the weather out. They try and take away your dignity, truth, self-respect, freedom. But those things, like the weather, find their way in here.

            The playwright Eugene O’Neil, remarked that “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”

            As I walk out the door and head down the boulevard to chow I think instead that the grace of God is snow. It is cold - 5° with the wind chill – and it is pristine and it is quiet; and it pierces the despair that is life behind bars. Winter, contrary to so many poets’ words, really is a fresh season, a new beginning. Keep your spring; I’ll take Super Bowl and snow and running shirtless with my breath hanging in the air. Prison has no answer for winter.

 

Letters to the Soul

Our college students in the student development class were given the assignment to write a letter to their younger self ten to twenty years ago with words of advice about what these years since have meant. Letter writing is an outdated form of communication for most. In here, however, it’s the way many of us communicate. And, writing to yourself? It’s tough. Three days after my arrest I began keeping a journal, a daily recitation of my life in here. This blog grew out of that journal – almost 1500 pages front and back to date. I began the journal so I’d remember all of this and in the hope that after I’m gone someone – my sons perhaps – would read those pages and understand what “this” really is.

            Letters to your younger selves. That’s a hard assignment. It’s tough looking back critically without saying “if only I …” because “if only I” doesn’t exist. The past is closed and unchangeable. We can learn from it, but there is no “Groundhog Day.” We don’t get second, third or even fourth chances at our past; there’s only the present and the future.

            I waited to see what these men would write. My expectations were not very high. Most of the guys in here don’t disclose their true selves. Fears and failures are both embarrassing and dangerous in a place like this. So bullshit is the chief form of oration in here. I expected more of the same. What I read and heard instead was profound. These men opened their souls on paper. Their stories echo in my head. They are gut wrenching, and oh, so human. As I read and edited. I felt moved. I went to one young man, Matt – a vet – and told him as an editor I found his syntax and grammar persuasive. As a father, I hugged him.

            Here are brief glimpses in these men’s stories: Matt wrote of watching his best friend die in a firefight in Iraq. “When this happens to you, remember to forgive yourself. You did all you could and you helped load his body on the plane to return to his mother.” I read about his nightmares, and his anger, and his guilt and I thought about my own support of a war my sons never had to fight. It was – it always is – the Matts of this country, the blue-collar kids, who fight, bleed, and die for America while those of us with education and money talk of geopolitical conflict and politics without a shred of sacrifice.

            My friend “O” wrote about his parent’s desperate travel to this country illegally to escape the horrors of El Salvador with its leftist guerrillas and its rightist death squads killing, bleeding the country to death. “They sacrificed so much, became citizens, worked for their children to have a better life and in my arrogance and impulsiveness I let them down.”

            As I read his words, flowing with Spanish colloquialisms, I felt shame. Thousands of children being sent to our borders as families seek to save their young lives. How are they met? By flag-waving protesters crying “go home.” We are pissing on the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

            “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”

            Yeah right; F- you Lady Liberty. O knows; his family lived it. And in spite of the Nativists (as is anyone really can claim “native” status in this country) and their ignorant protests people will still come. Ignorance can never kill hope.

            I read papers from Cubby, and B, and John Wayne, and Bugsy who told their younger selves about watching friends die from drug abuse. Drugs, alcohol, quitting school; these men all saw a part of life I never experienced. And in this class they felt free to talk about it. “Drugs kill.” “I drank too much and repeated the same behavior my mother did.” “He died in the chair next to me, overdosing on heroin.”

            There was Mike. Locked up since he turned fifteen for first degree murder; charged and convicted as an adult; given fifty years. He stayed in juvenile custody until age 17 then he was shipped within days of his birthday, to Southampton. Southampton (closed in 2006) was known for holding Virginia’s violent, youthful offenders. Gang rapes were commonplace as were brawls, stabbings, extortion. Everything you think you know about prison could be summed up in Southampton and fueled by youth it was a zoo on speed.

            And Mike, Mike wasn’t your typical teen killer. He wasn’t black, in a gang, poor, or on drugs. He was a white, middle-class kid with two educated, employed parents. He was smart, very smart; he was a loner … and he did a horrible thing. Strange, I look at Mike and wonder why, how he did what he did.

            They tested him after his arrest. Everyone wanted to know if he was a sociopath. TV shows called his parents, “Let us interview you. We want to figure out why he did it.” Know what the doctors found? He was just like any other fifteen-year-old kid … and he took a knife and stabbed a neighbor teen to death … 

            Mike wrote to his 17 year old self and said the following: “You’re soon going to head to Southampton and it is scary. You’ll be afraid and face a number of occasions when your humanity is tested. No matter what, be the decent man you will grow to be.”

            Letters to selves before they head the wrong way. My dear friend DC let me read his. I so often forget the man DC was. He was for years – one of Virginia’s worst offenders. He was violent and predatory. Twice the commonwealth prosecuted him for murders committed inside the notorious “walls,” Virginia’s since destroyed penitentiary on Spring Street in Richmond. Twice they tried to have him executed; twice he escaped the death chamber.

            He was in the midst of twelve years in solitary confinement at Mecklenburg Virginia’s Super Max facility. They moved him and fifteen others (the worst sixteen the state had) in the middle of the night with dozens of heavily armed state police – and he wrote his parents and his wife: “I will die in here. Forget me …” DC’s soul was dead; he was cold, his heart black; life was nothing to him. He was, in penitentiary – speak (old style violent cons still know this term) “down-in-law.” That meant he lived by his own accord. He took, he killed, he was the law for himself and being close to him was a life sentence, or worse.

            “Your Pops will show up at Mecklenburg and the officers will drag you from your cell to see him. And your Pops – the man you love and respect more than anyone in the world will tear into you. He’ll tell you being a man means doing right even if the load you up with fifty or sixty years. ‘You made this mess, you clean it up,’ he’ll say. ‘And don’t even think you can walk away from your responsibilities as a husband, a father, a son, a man.’”

            Forty-two years behind bars and I read his letter and know what happened afterward – that day DC gave up his life of violence, and anger, and death. “It won’t be easy but you can do it,” he writes. And all the respect and brotherly love I have for this remarkable man wells up inside of me.

            I realize as I read these letters that no man is beyond redemption. So many times in my old life I said I believed that. After all, isn’t that the point of the cross – that God’s grace can redeem even the darkest hearts, the most hopeless of lives? I read and know grace, true God-given grace is real.

            DC asked me what I thought of his letter. I recite to him William Ernest Henley’s poem, “Invictus.”

            Beyond this place of wrath and tears

            Looms but the Horror of the shade,

            And yet the menace of the years

            Finds and shall find me unafraid

            It matters not how strait the gate

            How charged with punishments the scroll

            I am the master of my fate

            I am the captain of my soul.

Job Fair

Something new happened at Lunenburg yesterday.  That in itself is surprising.  The thing about prison that is most difficult to bear is the time, the monotonous rolling forward of time.  Day in and day out there are the same announcements at the same time.  Days repeat days; weeks repeat weeks.  And years?  You watch the calendar click.  It’s maddening.  You live your life almost like Bill Murray did in “Groundhog Day”.  If you’re smart, you avoid the temptation to get comfortable with the monotony.  You design your day according to your needs.  You exercise your mind – and your body – and you resist the urge to be institutionalized.  And, in spite of the drudgery, you remain – at least in your mind – free.

Every so often, however, a day comes along which reminds you the monotony can be broken.  College graduation was one such day and the joy, the freedom I felt that Friday in January has sustained me.  Yesterday was another such day.  Yesterday, the LUCC Transition teacher and his aides sponsored a job fair for approximately 100 inmates who leave in the next 90 days.

This was not your typical job fair.  For one thing the majority of employers were contractors.  Second, there was an emphasis on mini-workshops with the Virginia Employment Commission and various non-profit organizations who assist released felons with a myriad of re-entry issues.

I was asked to attend to assist our Goodwill rep who was meeting with twelve of our IT grads who leave within the next 60 days.  It was remarkable seeing these men, resumes and portfolios (of programs completed) in hand looking a potential employer in the face and answering truthfully about their crime, their incarceration and their skills.

And I learned a few things.  First, there is a national fidelity bond that is free to an employer – providing $5000 (more is available for a small premium) of coverage for employee dishonesty – who hires a convicted felon.  “Even applies to a disbarred attorney convicted of embezzlement.”

Second, a significant number of released felons may be eligible for disability payments.  Extensive periods of incarceration may cause post-traumatic stress disorder.  It seems ironic but the “system” designed to encourage responsible behavior is, in fact, one of the main causes of PTSD and anti-social behavior.  Prisons are viscous, filthy, Darwinian environments.  It should come as no surprise that they do not encourage rehabilitation but promote the opposite.

Third, there are employers willing to give ex-cons a second chance.  One recruiter with a national construction firm told me “God gave me a second chance.  How could I not do the same thing?”  A few guys with significant construction training (and licenses earned while here) were made offers.  A few more were told to “stay in touch”.  The results weren’t great, but there was hope.  And in a place like this hope sometimes is all it takes to get you through.

The job fair wasn’t like anything experienced “out there”.  Recruiters had to clear security.  Guys had to be screened to get in.  There was a two and a half hour window to get the entire program in before 11:30 count.  And, it wasn’t some DOC initiative, some project spurred on by Governor McDonnell’s “re-entry initiative”.  It was the brainchild of this institution’s transition instructor, “Mr. Nick”, a twenty-five year veteran of the DOC prison re-entry process.  Mr. Nick believes in the power of hope.  His four aides – two of whom are college students I tutor – carry out his instructions.  Their goal:  to give every exiting inmate a chance at work after release.

Prison is a terrible experience.  It goes against every human emotion and is counterproductive for changing most lawbreakers into “good citizens”.  And against that backdrop Don Quixote – like men and women still launch themselves against the windmills of hopelessness and recidivism.  They believe a man with a job, a man with an education, can succeed.

We need more job fair days, more college graduation days, more days of hope and less groundhog days.

And So It Goes

Prison time passes remarkably quickly even though each day feels like a repeat of the previous one. In many ways, you end up feeling just like Bill Murray did in “Groundhog Day”, doing the exact same thing, walking and talking with the exact same guys, same workout routine at the same time with the same guys; on and on, day in and day out it goes. As I’ve written about before, I’ve always been fairly disciplined with my schedule so monotony is something I’m comfortable with.



Even when unique events happen, you realize they’re not that out of the ordinary anyway. This week “Flo” pulled a series 100 stealing charge getting caught in a strip search with an orange from the chow hall. Series 100 charges are serious and this one, the sergeant who wrote it knows, won’t stick because taking food from the chow hall is a series 200 charge for contraband. The sergeant was just ticked off because he knew Flo had been taking stuff out of chow every day he’s been here.


Every morning at breakfast Flo carries two empty squeeze jelly containers which he fills with milk and brings back to make oatmeal and cappuccino. Every lunch, he sneaks back fresh veggies and butter from the common fare tray to add to rice dishes; every evening, fresh fruit for snacking while watching TV.


The sergeant knows he’s doing this, but couldn’t ever catch him in the act. His solution? Wait for him outside of chow the other day and then take him to the watch commander’s office to strip search him.


And Flo’s reaction? You would think he’d admit it, face up to the charge and accept a $6.00 fine (what they offered him when the orange first fell). No, he filed a complaint against the sergeant alleging the strip search constituted “sexual harassment”.


I laughed at the stupidity and arrogance of both men, but truth is, they acted exactly as I’d expect them to. The sergeant overreacting and chest thumping because of his own ineptitude and impotence to control simple pilfering; and Flo, a career criminal who wouldn’t admit he was caught even when the orange fall out from between his cheeks (“How’d that get there? It ain’t mine!”).


There’s Tony and his marital problems. Tony is in here for a long time – until 2026. He is a computer wiz and accomplished jazz musician. He also had sex with a number of his teenage daughter’s girlfriends, photographed the girls and put their photos on a number of websites. The strange thing about Tony is, you meet him and – not knowing his crime – you think “he seems like an OK guy”. Then, you see he’s hardwired into all these teen girl shows and books and you suddenly realize “this guy’s got problems”.


He and his daughter were abnormally close. When he was arrested she tried to take her own life. She got help, was hospitalized, and after three months returned home. So here’s Tony dilemma. His daughter has now been arrested for stealing a car to drive to the mall and meet a boy. She got caught – in the backseat – with the boy and is now on house arrest (ironically, the same prosecutor who handled Tony’s case also handled hers). And the wife? She’s absent most nights bar and bed hopping.


Tony’s furious with his wife’s lack of involvement in their daughter’s life. Yet, it was that lack of involvement that allowed him to get close to his daughter and use her to get to her girlfriends.


E, who spent a week wondering and worrying if he was going to go to the hole, lose his job, his apprenticeship, and college all because he’s been blatantly stealing from the kitchen, decides this week to grab another 10 eggs for me to make a quiche, which, by the way came out perfectly (I made a Ritz cracker crust, tuna, sautéed onions, pepper jack cheese, bacon and broccoli; guys circled around the table when I lifted it out of the plastic pan).


On the one hand, he’s still worried, borderline paranoid, that the investigators will show back up and bust him. Yet, he can’t or won’t realize the shakedown was a wakeup call. He has to get out of the hustler mentality. Everything he does revolves around a scam, a con, a hustle. If he’s not careful, he’ll get out of here and the first twinge of greed that hits him will lead him to try and move some drugs again.


It’s not easy to stop what you’re doing. My arrest for embezzlement wasn’t the first time I “played” with other people’s money. I may understand now why I did it, but that doesn’t excuse it, nor does it make the hurt I brought to my wife and kids any less painful. I was self-centered and short sighted and hurt deeply the three people I love the most. No matter what “issues” existed between my wife and me, she and our kids deserved better from me.


I decided after my arrest that I didn’t want to keep repeating the insanity of the past. I couldn’t do it anymore. Maybe it was my finding my faith and understanding what grace really means. I just know, as most people – COs and inmates alike – will tell you, I’m an honest, truthful, stand up guy. I’ve learned that faith and trust in a power beyond yourself is the only way to break out of the cycle of repeating the same behavior.


It also makes you recognize you’re not always right about things. You’ve got to be a little kinder, a lot more forgiving. I wonder, as I sit in here, whether I’d feel the same way if my wife – instead of divorcing me – had said “I’m deeply hurt and it’s going to be very difficult to put this behind us, but I love you and I know that’s what our marriage means”. Somehow, I think I would have.


Days in prison, just like days outside, go on. One leads to the next. Yet, for me, my days are all new. I may follow the same routine, but I go about it in a whole new way.