B.I. was one of the smartest students in the college
program. He was shorter than most guys
in here, maybe 5’7” max, but he was bull strong. He’d spend two hours each day, six days a
week, lifting weights.
He was also very bright and well read and very
studious. He would read pretty intense
pieces and ponder their meaning. Whether
it was Kant and Nietzsche or Whitman poetry, B.I. always had a book in hand and
a pad and pen nearby.
And, he was friendly and outgoing. He had an infectious smile. He was polite and kind. Did I mention he’d spent twenty years in
prison for murder? That’s one of the
strange things about prison. There are
guys like B.I. who’ve spent years at low custody (14 of his 20 years). To see them you wouldn’t know they committed
a violent crime. DOC doesn’t consider
them violent – they’re housed at lower levels.
And yet, the years roll by, like water in a stream.
The last week before he left, B.I. became withdrawn, introspective. He quit lifting weights choosing instead to
spend hours by himself walking the track or just sitting outside. Last Sunday, I finished running and B.I. came
up to me while I cooled down. We talked
for a good while. B.I., a guys who’d
seen the worst prison had to offer coming into the system at a high security
level with stabbings, rapes and extortion a daily occurrence, was scared. He wasn’t sure he could make it “outside the
walls”.
It reminded me that I’m one of the few who find themselves
in this situation who actually lived “normal” society lives. B.I. never held a full time job, never lived
on his own. Buying groceries, going to
and from work, paying rent, buying a car or a house – it’s all foreign to him;
so is the Internet, cell phones, ATMs, debit cards.
B.I. came to prison as a 19 year old, living at home with
his mom. He was a high school dropout,
selling drugs and carrying a pistol in case things went wrong. One night things did. And twenty years later this no longer young
man walked out of prison to a world he’s seen on TV but which is completely
alien to him.
The general “thought” in “cultured society” is way too much
is spent on inmate education and programs.
“They’ve got it too easy.” I’ve
heard it; I said it before I came inside.
Nothing could be more incorrect.
Prison is a brutal, dehumanizing environment. It is also a time warp. The world moves on each day, yet life in prison
stays the same. And for long-term
inmates, men like B.I., the transition from an over-regulated environment
fraught with violence and filth, to a relatively fast paced free lifestyle, is
perilous.
For B.I. his fear was, in part, driven by the fact that he
couldn’t “go home”. His mother lives in
federal subsidized housing which prohibits him from living there. So Tuesday morning he sat, waiting for his “ride”
and wondering, “Can I do this? Can I survive
out there?”
B.I. is one of the lucky ones. As a member of the college IT grant
program. Goodwill Industries took an
interest in him. Tuesday morning, two representatives
from Goodwill’s Northern Virginia office came to Lunenburg. They picked B.I. up, took him to DMV to get a
state issued ID. They drove him back to
Fredericksburg and got him lunch, his first meal outside.
And they did more.
They found him housing and lined up job interviews. They were there so B.I. had a chance to
succeed. Will he make it? Maybe I’m too much of an optimist, but I
believe B.I. will be alright. He survived
hell; he survived a twenty year time warp.
He has support from the good people at Goodwill Industries. It won’t be easy, but he’ll do it. He’ll do it because, in spite of his crime,
he is a decent human being who will overcome the challenges facing him. Hopefully folks “out there” will see that in
B.I. He’s paid his debt. He is entitled to live again.
