Stupid Is as Stupid Does

This blog was written in November, 2014. 

            Where’s good Ole’ Forrest when I need him? I’d love his take on the stupidity that passes for “rules” in here. At the outset, let me explain that I’m pro – “dorm” rules. There must be rules, a code of conduct that governs offender behavior. But, rules have to make sense and most of what this Major has put in force is nothing but silly, stupid rules which – candidly – piss guys off and make them more disrespectful of the system and larcenous. Worse, they do nothing to improve the facility’s safety or operation.

            Drugs are everywhere on the compound. Those in charge know who’s using; they’re getting positive drug tests every week. And, we aren’t talking tobacco (that’s all over the place too!). No, we’re talking heroin. More drugs are here than at anytime in the 5 years I’ve been here. How do you suppose all those drugs come in? There are only two ways things make it inside: snuck in under the noses of officers (bad police work) or with complicity of officers (dirty police work). Both are telling examples of fundamental problems inside the fences.

            Some officers – perhaps the majority – care. They don’t want any 23-year-old OD’ing in here. They want a clean compound. But, they’re told by the “program chief” to “tighten up” the building. Two book limit for your locker; all beds must be made with blue blankets tucked in. Then, search to make sure guys don’t have extra shoes, tees, or socks. After all, what’s a drugged out guy in the building compared to a man with 5 state t-shirts?

            This week the “Housing and Program” manager (hell of a title – like jamming this many men in such a tight confined space constitutes “housing” or interfering with education constitutes “programs”) put a new encyclical out. During “dayroom” quiet hours (11:00 pm to 5:15 am.) you are supposed to be in your bed area. This genius changed it to “on your bed.” We have 40 guys each taking upwards of 4 classes who can’t sit on their chairs and study at night. And, ironically, they are now allowed to have computers in the bed area – ever try writing or typing on a rubberized mattress with no backseat?

            Here’s how things work inside: you stress guys out over little things that don’t matter. Meanwhile drugs are everywhere; re-entry (good ole’ bldg. 3) is a complete failure, and fewer men have time to earn their GED. If I didn’t know any better I’d think that those in power were doing it deliberately.

            At the close of World War II U.S. forces poured across the German border; allied troops liberated Nazi concentration camps. Eisenhower and Patton, incensed over the horrific scenes their troops uncovered, ordered local towns people to walk through the camps. “We didn’t know what was going on in here,” the German civilians pleaded. “How could you not know?” Came Eisenhower’s reply.

            “How could you not know?” In his dire portrait of the corrections fiasco in America, researcher Robert Ferguson makes the same argument. Inferno details the violence, neglect, and outright stupidity that is mass incarceration in this country. Which is worse, he asks. Ignorance or knowing and not caring? Prisons are poorly managed with money being poured down a rat hole for stupid rules and little or no measurement of money spent to results achieved. It’s stupid and it’s obvious to anyone who cares. The question is – do you?

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.

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. 

Heroin 2014

The news channel devoted hours the other day to analysis (or what rubber-necking at an accident scene is now deemed as analysis) of the overdose death of forty-six year-old, academy award winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Given that entertainment news dominates our collective psyche (“Did you hear the latest on Justin Bieber?”) it didn’t surprise me that within minutes of his body being discovered, syringe still protruding from an arm vein, hand-wringing, pretty blond newscasters read dozens of tweets from equally distraught celebrities lamenting the loss.

            I don’t mean to sound callous but why does an actor deserve such mournful attention when our prisons, our cemeteries, are full of thousands of junkies: heroin, crystal meth, molly, crack? Why do we only care when it’s a morbidly obese, multiple failure at rehab celeb who happens to be in some movies we watch?

            I knew nothing about heroin use until I watched a young black man detox at the jail. As I’ve described in numerous blogs and short stories, I have never seen anyone sicker. I came away from watching that young man violently retch and lose bowel control realizing every pre-conceived notion I had about drug abuse was absolute bullshit.

            It isn’t about willpower; you can’t just “walk away.” Heroin, crystal meth, and the others invade your mind, poison your psyche, and enslave your body. You develop a junkie mentality. I see it here every day. It’s easy to spot, guys who will hustle for anything, sell anything, lie, cheat, gamble, steal, anything for a nasty “roll up” (a rolled cigarette) or a pill from the med unit. Guys literally sell their souls for spice (synthetic weed), let alone crack or heroin. The junkie life: dirty, disorganized, bad teeth, bad health, bad futures.

            Three bunks down from me is Cal. He’s twenty-two with a baby-face who doesn’t look old enough to shave. He’s a polite kid, comes from a family that raised him “the right way,” with “good old” middle class American values. He’s been in three years with little more than a year to go. And, he was strung out on heroin. That’s right, Cal was a junkie. See, drugs don’t know race, economic status, or your kid’s GPA. We make all these assumptions about drug use and they are almost always wrong.

            I live around guys in their twenties whose teeth are rotted out from crystal meth use. Most of them are redneck white kids looking “to get high.” Their arms are covered in tats to hide the scars where they used to pick apart their skin while strung out. I live around crack heads, black guys in their forties, fifties, and older who can’t remember their kids’ names but can still name the guys who’ll sell them dime rocks. Their brains are fried; they are incapable of retaining anything new. And, I live around needle junkies who have Hep C and worse, all a result of shooting up poison.

            That’s prison. Philip Seymour Hoffman had a name, and money, and fame. He didn’t go to prison. He sat in his apartment on the East Side and shot up and died. And people mourn him. No one mourns the millions living on the edge doing the same thing. They go to prison, not rehab. They get out and die and no one at CNN gives a shit.

            Heroin doesn’t care if you win an academy award. Neither should we. I’ve seen enough of the results of our nation’s drug war in here to know we don’t have a clue about any of this stuff. And the only time we seem to care is when some celebrity dies.