Good Old Days

December 15, 2016, 6:00 pm

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By J. Michael Stanfield Jr.

Autumn takes me back in time. In the beginning, anyway, when the dry, lukewarm days of fall first replace the humid, sweltering ones of summer.

A mild autumn breeze can somehow remind me of the long-gone and distant past, of childhood and adolescence, of being a teenager, or those mystical, fleeting years of adulthood before prison.

There’s something about the end of summer that brings it all back, the change in temperature or barometric pressure, perhaps, or something in the wind, undetectable odours of dying foliage, maybe. Whatever its cause, the changing season sparks my nostalgia like an old, forgotten song: “Jane Says,” perhaps, or “The Final Cut.”

I’ll be walking back from the chow hall, living one more day of bleak prison life, when the fall wind finds me and carries me away. I suddenly notice the way the sunshine colors the landscape, the way the patchy clouds softly smudge the dense, blue sky, and I’m six years old again, or 12 or 15, 20.

Days with a sun like this, with the wind and temperature just right, don’t belong to the world of concrete and life sentences. These are days from the past, when, as a child, I played with Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars in the dirt.

On days like these, my friends and I would construct a makeshift ramp from a board and a cinder block, and we would spend hours jumping it on our bicycles.

On days like these, I brooded in a high school classroom, foolishly dreaming of the time when school would end and adult independence would begin.

On days like these, I moved into my first apartment, worked on cars, started kindergarten, fell in love, had my heart broken, played in the woods, waded in the creek, went to rock concerts, skipped school, smoked pot, drove drunk, went on fourth grade field trips, went to job interviews, went to family picnics, mowed grass, went to the lake, laughed, cried and got pissed off.

It was on days like these that life was rich and good, and the future was as promising and hopeful as a first kiss with Daisy Pratt in her father’s driveway.

Such recollections are bittersweet, often more bitter and less sweet. In prison, reminiscing about the lost paradise of freedom is something less than pleasant. Nostalgia for the holy and sacred Good Old Days can produce in you, if you’re not careful, a debilitating kind of longing that is not unlike suffocation, a futile, head-against-the-wall, shaking-fist-at-the-sky state of helplessness that can choke the very life from you. And, so, sometimes I think it might be best to forget the past, the things once taken for granted and then lost. After all, what’s done is done, and one must come to terms with one’s reality.

Oh, but then the fall breeze blows against my face once more, and I forget the present, recall some past jewel and marvel at how good those Good Old Days were.

Under marvellous, silver-azure skies, just like the one outside my barred window, my companions and I played and danced and explored the wholesome, good earth like so many young gods. We were unconscious creators, it seems now, a lifetime later, makers of the very universe.

The world seemed to beg to please us, always revealing new magic and fresh excitement, yet we weren't always excited. We fancied ourselves unhappy. We pretended not to enjoy childhood or adolescence or teenhood. We thought we wanted to be older, to have more money and responsibility.

In spite of our unrealized, but undeniable happiness, we wanted the greener grass of something we were not yet, but would too soon be.

Older people often tried to tell us, in their well-intentioned-but-generationally-ambiguous manner that we would soon miss the days of summer and of school and of restriction that was hardly restriction. They attempted to make a gift of their experience and knowledge, but somehow they forgot that their parents or grandparents had attempted the very same thing; that is to say, they had tried to teach an unteachable language, unharkened prophets they were.

And so we never heeded the urgent utterances from someone else’s long-gone world, the wall-written warning that said: “Enjoy your youth while it lasts!”

It seemed like nonsense to us then. Somewhere inside us, maybe, we knew the old people were right, yet we played out our parts nonetheless, thinking ours was a difficult, hapless lot.

We could not be satisfied until we achieved independence and freedom, even though we had it all along.

Ah, the Good Old Days.

I always had a kind of unconscious feeling that my life wasn’t quite good enough, that it could somehow become more satisfying and fulfilling.

Little did I know that the future would bring a horror and misery that was utterly unfathomable to my hopeful, unsatisfied soul.

While I was indifferent to the sun, the autumn breeze, the puffy-cloud-filled sky, I was unaware my future would consist of concrete, steal, sickness and hunger, that my life would be spent wasting away, growing old and dying inside a cinderblock tomb.

I was so busy envying the future; I failed to realize I was happier and more fulfilled in the present than I would ever be again.

This is the curse of life. We don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone. We don’t treasure our youth until we’re old.

Or until we come to prison. In which case, an entire early adulthood, midlife and old age can be lost to decades of regret and torment for a life wasted.

“And so it goes,” Kurt Vonnegut so aptly wrote.

Thus I walk across the prison compound, and the autumn breeze feels good, mussing my hair and stirring my nostalgia. The colors of the distant trees are beautiful this time of year. A sea of yellow-orange and scarlet surrounds the prison grounds in a torrent of iridescent splendor.

It’s nice but poignant, in a wistful way, and I nearly yearn for winter and the mercy of its gray-brown death.

J. Michael Stanfield Jr. 209006 2B TCIX 1499 R.W. Moore Memorial Highway Only, TN 37140-4050

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The Magic Lantern, Chapter One

December 22, 2016, 4:54 pm

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By Anthony S. Engles

Wild Turkey and Broken Glass

July 30, 1983

The tarnished silver bell above the thick glass door heralded the arrival of Washington State Trooper Bob Wooten. His eyes burned from staring down hundreds of miles of mostly deserted black-top, and Denny's was his final stop each night before heading home. He stood with his thumbs hooked in his utility belt and surveyed the damage. He gave a low whistle. 

"Jesus Christ, Lynette, you should have gotten the bomb squad down here," he said. "What the hell happened?"

Lynette looked up from the register and offered a weary smile, her thick mane of cinnamon brown hair piled up and clipped in place with wild, loose strands escaping everywhere. She handed change to a young man with a black leather jacket and a military haircut.

"Hey, Bob," she said. "Erika was a no-show and Monique called in sick again. Help yourself to the coffee if you like, you know where it is. We're short a cook, too, so Rita‘s back helping on the line."

Wooten watched a teenage busboy with greasy blonde hair and a volcanic case of acne sweep the entire surface of a cluttered table with his forearm, dumping everything into a filthy gray plastic tub.  Platters with utensils and napkins glued on with dried egg yolk, dirty ash trays, banana split boats that swam with melted ice-cream, half-empty water glasses and coffee cups smeared with lipstick clattered angrily into the grimy receptacle. Except for a few diners enjoying coffee and languid conversation, every table in the restaurant was covered with dirty dishes or stripped of everything but a tacky film of residue - as if the only coffee shop for 40 miles had been over-run by a starved mob, ransacked, then abandoned with the same haste. The angry few that remained formed a sloppy line at the register, reluctantly paying their checks and upbraiding the only representative of the company about lousy service - Lynette, the harried swing-shift waitress.

Wooten associated the smell of Denny‘s with the end of long, lonely nights on the highways with nothing but a radio dispatcher to keep him company. The distinct blend of coffee, stale cigarette smoke and maple syrup--even Lynette‘s Avon perfume and Aqua-Net hairspray stood out as cornerstone aromas that helped him unwind. They swirled around him, loosening his neck muscles while he performed his paperwork chores before heading home. Lynette would make an extra strong pot just for him, and he would sip the potent liquid until the effects of the road began to ease their grip on him. Then he would go home to a small, empty house and keep Johnny Carson company until he drifted off in his easy chair.

He set his logbook, paperwork, and portable radio on the end of the counter. Several other seats were taken, most of them fellow bachelors like himself that had no better place to be at 11:15 on a Saturday night. Their heads swiveled towards him in the haze of cigarette smoke and watched with raised eyebrows as he boldly crossed the invisible barrier that normally kept customers out from behind the counter. Wooten grabbed a clean cup out of a rack and filled it with coffee. He sat the cup at his space and looked down the line at expectant faces that watched him where he stood-on the business side of the counter.

"You're wearing the wrong uniform, ain't you, Bob?" one of the men said. The others chuckled.

"Howdy, Earl," said Wooten. "What about it, Lynette, You want me to give this crew a refill while I've got the pot in my hand?"

"Oh, would you?" said Lynette, pinned at the register. "Those poor boys have been dry for ages."

He went down the line, refilling cups so empty the brown residue had dried on the bottom; ashtrays with cigarette butts formed into tiny mountains lay strewn along the counter. The men nodded their heads in appreciation and gave up lighthearted banter about his newly chosen profession, even speculating aloud how he would look in a brown polyester skirt. Back at the warmer, Wooten swapped the empty pot for a full one. After a moment of hesitation, he sighed and made another pot; he had seen Lynette do it at least a thousand times. He made his way to the row of booths along the wide bank of windows at the front of the restaurant that faced Melrose Street.

"Bob, you give the term Public Service a whole new meaning," hollered Lynette from the register, "When I get caught up here, I'm going to make you the best banana split you ever had."

Wooten smiled. He walked across the carpet with a limp that was hard to conceal after working a double, stuck behind the wheel of a police cruiser for sixteen hours. He had taken one in Soc Trang in October of '68, the slug shattering his hip - an injury that never did quite heal properly. The pain was especially acute during changes in the weather or after extended periods of inactivity. Wooten might not turn down a banana split-or anything else Lynette cared to offer him, but what he really needed to wash away the broken glass in his hip waited for him at home in his liquor cabinet: 101 proof whiskey. Wild Turkey was a tried-and-true choice for pain relief that provided the additional benefits of curing White Line Fever and exorcising demons that wore black pajamas and carried AK-47s.

The booths along the windows lay abandoned and cluttered except for two. Wooten approached the first table - two mildly inebriated women in their thirties, their faces still aglow from a ladies night out. While he refilled their cups, one of them leaned forward provocatively and batted thick eyelashes at him.

"Thanks, officer," she breathed lustily. Her companion giggled and the counter gang chuckled as well. Wooten was not a small man; he stood six-four at just over two hundred pounds. He wore his fine black hair long on top, parted to the side, and combed back-a style somewhat dated for a man only thirty-three. When his blood was up, his sub-zero cobalt-colored eyes were able to unnerve and subjugate even the most belligerent drunks that stood bobbing and weaving on the side of the road.

Wooten stopped at the other table although neither customer had a coffee cup. An attractive couple in their late teens leaned across the table, holding hands, oblivious to the universe around them. The girl was big-eyed with honey-wheat hair in a ponytail, wire rimmed glasses, and a willowy figure. The boy had thick brown hair, intense blue eyes, and a movie star chin. He wore a spotless dress-white Navy uniform, with his dixie cup on the table, off to the side.

"I thought that was you, Miller," said Wooten. "What brings the Navy to Vermilion? You know, the nearest port is over 400 miles away."

"I joined up, Sir. I came back to get my girl. We're going to get married."

"Don't shit me, Miller. It sounds like you swiped that line out of an old Gene Kelly movie."

"It's true. We got the date set and everything."

Wooten narrowed his eyes and looked at the girl.

"Colleen, isn't it?"

“Yes, Sir,” she said.

"Your folks know you're getting hitched to a Navy man? You know about these guys, don‘t you?"

The girl smiled. She squeezed the boy's hand harder.

"Yes, Sir. I think I've finally got him tamed."

Wooten gave a somber nod and returned his attention to the sailor. "You know, you have to be an officer to play football in the Navy. It seems like your recruiter would have let you in on that little piece of information."

"I know, Sir."

"Well, the Army's got a hell of a team, too. Maybe it's not too late to divert you to O.C.S., what do you say?"

The boy laughed.

"No thanks. I'm done with football." He straightened his back, his eyes gleaming with pride. I plan on getting into law enforcement."

Wooten raised his eyebrows.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said. "Congratulations. On all accounts, I mean. To both of you."

He turned to leave, coffee pot still in his hand, but stopped and fixed the sailor with a stern glare.

"Stay off my roads if you've been drinking, Miller. If I catch you again, I'll drag you in and book you."

The boy's face colored slightly and he dipped his head, duly penitent.

"I will, officer. Thanks for the break last time."

Wooten returned the coffee pot to the warmer and took his place at the end of the counter, his hip grinding as though it were packed with jagged pieces of gravel. He lit a Chesterfield and drew deeply. He aimed the plume of blue-white smoke upwards toward a speaker that currently provided a lively Muzak rendition of "Eleanor Rigby". Wooten secretly enjoyed Muzak and found it soothing, but he despised the Beatles. He turned up the volume on his portable radio slightly to create a distraction for himself. He adjusted the squelch. It had been a quiet night, and there was nothing more than a steady stream of distant chatter-most of it from the Whitman County Dispatcher 35 miles northwest, towards Spokane.

"How's business?" asked Earl, from his right. “Thwart any evil-doers?"

Earl was in his fifties, widowed, and owned the feed store over on Ridge Road. He wore a greasy ball cap that was as old as he was and had the checkered Purina logo on the front. 

Wooten sipped his coffee and shook his head.

"Slow, just like I like ‘em," he said. "Couple of folks who spent too much time at the beer garden and a fat doe that bought it trying to cross 469 down by the golf course. Not much else, I‘m happy to say."

"Poor thing," said Lynette. She stood just a few feet to his left and gave change to a dour, elderly woman with puckered lips and eyes that could cut stone. Apparently, her dining experience had been less than pleasurable; she snatched the change from Lynette's palm and stomped out with her rickety husband in tow.

Wooten set out to complete his paperwork, starting with the daily entry in his log. Lynette wished the final customer at the register a good night and began to restock the restaurant, wiping each surface thoroughly as she went. Wooten looked up from his work occasionally to see her walk past. He enjoyed watching her walk. A big-boned woman, her backside had an easy, gentle sway no matter how busy she was. Even in a uniform designed to conceal all traces of her femininity, Lynette carried herself with a confident, sensual elegance that kept the counter lined with lonely bachelors throughout her shift. She appeared with a pot of coffee and an appreciative smile.

"Once I take this order out, I'm going to fix you up, Bob," she said. "Do you like walnuts?"

Wooten smiled at her.

"I can't eat ice cream this close to bed time. It gives me nightmares."

"Seriously? That‘s no fun."

"Not really. But, I don‘t need it," he patted his flat stomach. "Thanks anyway."

Lynette opened her mouth to protest. Just then the sound of ceramic striking metal rang out as four steaming platters of eggs, sausage, pancakes, and French toast clattered on the pass bar behind her. 

Lynette frowned.

"I'm not finished with you yet, mister," she said.

"I hope not."

Lynette turned her back to him so she could gather warm containers of maple syrup, individual jellies, and scoops of whipped butter. 

His attention back to his paperwork, Wooten wrote for several seconds then stopped in the middle of a word and lifted the pen from his ledger. He turned and looked at Earl. Earl's leathery, gray-stubbled face was twisted up and his head was cocked; He was hearing it, too. Lynette turned her head and looked toward the east, dark brows knitted together in concentration, her hand with the butter scoop suspended above the stainless steel counter. Wooten turned his head toward the sound.

The adjacent building to the east was the new Circle K, its fluorescent lighting spilling out into the parking lot. Melrose Street continued past the Circle K, turned into

Highway 114 just beyond and disappeared into the blackness. The mill lay two miles out, but past that was nothing except hundreds of miles of cornfields and timothy.

A faint high-pitched mechanical whine was growing louder with every second, swelling from the east. Stationary silhouettes began to take form -tall black cut-outs of trees backlit with the pale glow of approaching headlights. In an explosion of light, the beams broke the plane of the dark horizon, forcing Wooten and the others to momentarily look away.

The car appeared in a flash of purple and chrome in the neon light of the Circle K, a five year-old Toyota Celica coming fast. The four-cylinder engine screamed like a jet preparing for take off. The car was either stuck in first gear, or the driver had failed to upshift. The Celica disappeared from view for a moment as it passed into a blind spot created by the foyer, then re-appeared in the far right edge of the bank of windows in the front of the building, speeding west. Wooten guessed the speed of the car at around sixty mph.

"Jiminy crickets!" said Earl.

As the Celica reached the mid-point of the restaurant, the driver stomped on the brakes. The car went into a sideways skid and all four tires screeched to a smoking halt. The engine gunned twice, then lurched forward and stalled. The driver started the Celica and gunned it. This time he successfully navigated the car into the parking lot after jumping the curb and uprooting a two-foot swath of Arbor Vitae. The car skidded into the space next to Wooten's cruiser-avoiding the rear bumper with the driver-side door by an inch.

The driver abandoned the vehicle and sprinted towards the entrance. The glass door flew open, almost tearing the bell off its tiny chain, and a young woman burst into the lobby, chest heaving. She was the archetypal student - minimal make-up and a gray sweatshirt with W.S.U. on the front. Her eyes locked with Wooten‘s. Dark irises stood out in fields of white; her mouth opened and closed as she took in great gulps of air. Cold adrenaline crept along the length of Wooten‘s spine. He and Lynette rushed to meet the girl, Lynette still holding her butter scoop.

"Now just take it easy, Miss," Wooten said, "Try to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Like this, watch. One. Two. One. Two. That's it."

After a few breaths, the girl was able to manage a few words.

"I forgot - until I saw your car-I was looking-for a phone --"

"It‘s okay, it‘s okay. Just breathe."

She did. The few customers in the restaurant had gathered around, but maintained a respectful distance.

"What is it, sweetie?" asked Lynette gently. "What happened?"

The girl half-turned and pointed in the direction that she had come from. Once more, the night had swallowed everything beyond the Circle K.

"A wreck," she blurted out. The color left her face and she began to shake. She looked at something faraway that only she could see. "It's awful. There's people --"

The young woman doubled over and ejected the contents of her stomach onto the carpet, splattering several shoes, including Wooten's and Lynette's. The other patrons took a step back and covered their mouths and noses-the sour stench of vomit immediately thick and overpowering. The sick girl had turned a chalky green color, a thin sheen of perspiration coating her face. Wooten and Lynette helped her to a vacant seat at the counter. While Lynette went for a towel, Wooten placed his hand on the girl's shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

"How far, Miss?" he asked.

She shook her head violently as if to drive the memory from her head.

"I don't know. Ten miles, maybe."

Lynette returned with a warm, wet towel.

"Have her leave a number where she can be reached," Wooten said. He snatched up his paperwork and radio, hailing the Columbia County Dispatcher as he rushed for the door.

"Be careful!" Lynette called after him.

***

The light breeze offered a weak breath of vitality and carried the aroma of the nearby Snake River. Wooten slid behind the wheel of the Plymouth Fury sedan and turned the key in the ignition. The 383 Interceptor sprang to life, its blood still warm, anxious to roam the highways once again. He activated the safety and emergency lights, backed out of the parking space, and flipped the switch for the siren. He left the lot and sped east into the night, red and blue lights flashing overhead while the shrill blare of the siren cleared his path. The radio was abuzz with local traffic, abrupt beeps and the crackle of keyed transmitters as the dispatcher relayed information to other agencies. Wooten's current position in relation to other emergency services- those of Whitman County Memorial Hospital being 14 miles north of Vermilion- increased the likelihood of his being the first official on the scene.

Wooten gripped the wheel of the cruiser. The engine thrummed and the tires whined, forced to take 35 mph corners at twice that speed. The modified rigid suspension allowed him to feel every pebble on the road through his palms on the steering wheel. This stretch of highway had been part of Wooten's route for several years -- he could drive it in his sleep, and often did while in bed at home. The 10 mile mark from Denny's would be at the middle of a long, straight section of road that ran through lush fields of timothy in the spring, or a layer of snow several feet thick in the winter. The Ricknor farm and surrounding property of ten thousand acres ran along the south edge of the highway for several miles. This area was also the favorite haunt of local hot rodders; they would flock here to measure each other's cocks and let off steam, so Wooten was surprised to see the linear strip of highway deserted with only impenetrable night on either side of his headlights. Directly ahead lay nothing but cracked asphalt and faded white lines that sped toward him.

Wooten pressed on the accelerator, the needle on the speedometer edging toward eighty. After two miles, a low rise and gradual curve to the right loomed, forcing him to reduce speed. With the skill of a stock car racer, Wooten negotiated the winding road that cut back and forth through an area wooded with thick stands of pine, dipping in and out of shallow ravines. He would break sharply going into a turn, then rowel the Fury onward when he came out the other side - the front end lifting slightly as Wooten drove the gas pedal to the floor.

At 15 miles, there was still no sign of the accident. Wooten drove another mile, then another. The night hurtled toward him as his headlights peeled back layer after layer. He feathered the brakes going into a steep curve, then applied them with force when the phosphoric pink flash of a flare winked at him from the far left of his periphery. He carefully followed the turn and suddenly the wreck was in full view, his windshield a panoramic screen swollen to the edges with macabre visions of horror in flashing red and blue. He inhaled slowly, and then exhaled with the same deliberation. Plastic and broken glass crunched under his tires as he pulled the cruiser to the side of the road.

Wooten killed the siren and stepped out onto the gravel. He stood motionless for a moment and let his senses catalogue the overwhelming amount of stimulus that bombarded him. Two cars -- a red station wagon and a late model oxidized-green Ford sedan -- had collided head-on. Pieces of wreckage both mechanical and human littered an area the size of an Olympic swimming pool and prevented traffic from moving in either direction. Besides Wooten’s, three vehicles that had been heading east stood empty, parked in the middle of the road with headlights left on, illuminating the grisly scene. Eight or nine cars sat on the other side of the crash, west-bound towards Vermilion, abandoned with their doors still open. A dozen citizens, stunned and shocked, shuffled towards Wooten, their appearance spectral and unnerving as they swirled with the ethereal fumes of spilled gasoline. Some of them were blood spattered like grossly under-dressed surgeons with haunted eyes that peered out from deep sockets. Flares lay in a circular pattern dangerously close to the fluid leaking hulks and completed the hellish vision of carnage and destruction. Bone jarring heavy-metal music continued to pound from the sedan and bore down on Wooten‘s nerves.

The first motorist to reach Wooten was a man in his fifties in a loose fitting canary-yellow tank top and a white-collar haircut. Fresh blood coated his hands up to mid-forearm. He pointed a dripping finger at the green Ford that had been picked up by a fifty-foot tall giant, twisted and crushed, then hurled back to earth. 

"The racket's coming from that one," he said in a loud voice. "I must have gotten here seconds after it happened, I could still hear the echo of the crash when I opened my door. Creepiest thing I ever heard. How the hell could the battery have survived that?"

It was a good question. The Ford lay in a crumpled "V," the front half from just below the driver's seat bent upward at a forty-five degree angle, yet the stereo was intact; a heavily distorted guitar chattered like a machine gun while the vocalist unleashed demonic howls. Wooten realized he was grinding his teeth.

"What's your name?" he asked the motorist.

"Strand. Albert Strand. I own Columbia Paint down in Bend. I was on my way back from Pomeroy. Rafting trip."

"It looks like you've rendered assistance. Where are the survivors?"

Strand pointed his chin at the gravel shoulder on the northern edge of the road.

"I tried to help that one, but he was dead when I got to him, probably before he hit the ground. You‘ve got a live one in weeds in front of the Torino, but he wouldn't let me get near him. He‘s got - well, you‘ll see. It's a mess.”

Several other motorists began to gather around like zombies in a horror film, eyes glassy and jaws slack.

"Strand, help me kick these goddamn flares away from this fuel before we all get blown to hell."

Wooten flicked on his Mag-Lite and made his way to the northern edge of the road, kicking flares back. Tiny chunks of twinkling safety glass carpeted the pavement as though it had fallen from the sky in a strange storm. The odor of burning rubber blended with the seductively sweet smell of gasoline, and Wooten felt the first wave of nausea pass through him, leaving a sour taste in his mouth. He swept the beam of his flashlight in a wide arc to the left, and an icy hand closed its fingers around his heart. He had been able to get used to all aspects of his job but this: dead children.

It was a boy, ten or eleven years old. Only the style of clothing on the small broken body allowed Wooten to determine the sex of the victim. The head and upper body was an unrecognizable mass of glistening bone and sinew with much of the skin torn away. Wooten swallowed hard. He swung the beam of his light back towards the west-bound station wagon. The boy had been jettisoned from that vehicle and thrown close to twenty feet to this spot, where he may or may not have drawn his last breath. Anger surged in Wooten’s veins, anger at the boy's parents for not strapping him in, anger at the futility of seatbelt campaigns. He acknowledged the emotion, embraced it, and then dismissed it-he was a professional and had work to do. He moved towards the wagon.

A windshield lay on the pavement, nothing more than a lump of clear plastic encrusted with chipped glass among a small sea of flotsam: A large tweed suitcase split open like an oyster, empty except for a navy blue pajama top hanging limp over one edge-men's shirts, still creased, a woman's beige skirt, a pair of Scooby-Doo underpants, a tennis racket in a black vinyl case with a neon green Spalding on the face-all scattered about like a bomb had gone off at a yard sale. Wooten reached down and picked up a Mrs. Beasley doll that had not received a scratch from the impact; her face smiled up at him, every blonde curl on her head perfectly intact. He set the doll down and closed his eyes for a moment to will away the nausea and clear his head. Where were the paramedics? The heavy metal from the Torino chipped away at his powers of concentration. He trained the beam of the flashlight on the station wagon. The front-end had been driven to the firewall, most of the engine in the front seat.

Neither of the occupants in the front seat had worn seatbelts either. The passenger, a woman, lay half out of the opening where the windshield had been. Her head, left and shoulder were unseen, crushed to the width of cardboard by a crumpled section of hood and right front quarter panel. Wooten resisted the urge to reposition the woman's blouse that had been torn back and away so that it lay in a clump of blood soaked rags bunched up around her waist. She'll be wearing a plastic sheet soon enough Wooten thought.

The driver's death was no more dignified. The explosive force of his brief forward flight had been arrested suddenly and violently by the vertical support designed to keep the windshield in place. The narrow piece of steel had cleaved the man's skull in two, lengthwise.

Wooten swept the beam of his flashlight through the passenger compartment, looking for survivors. A spatter of blood and hair the size of volleyball marked an inner side window, but there was no sign of other victims. He stepped cautiously across the white lines toward the mangled Torino, skirting a tiny human appendage that had been torn out by its roots, part of the fourth victim, no doubt. Wooten did not linger.  He pushed the image from his mind like so many others that he had during the war. He took a series of controlled breaths with the same count - in and out - then moved on.

Wooten circumvented the tail end of the Torino and identified it as an early-seventies model he had seen around town. He scanned the database in his mind, but could not place a driver behind the wheel. The ceaseless hammering of the music vibrated pea-sized pieces of safety glass on the bent trunk lid. Wooten found several crushed sixteen-ounce Budweiser cans scattered on the slick pavement. A woman's sandal lay on its side in a puddle of fluid, the strap torn away. The car was twisted at such an angle that the passenger door hung from above; Wooten was forced to duck down and bend his upper body sideways to access the interior. He squirmed his way into the dark cave of twisted metal, torn upholstery and bent plastic. The thunderous bass from the rear speakers reverberated through the frame while the overpowering smell of alcohol and gasoline threatened to send him into a swoon. Gritting his teeth, he shone the light at the dashboard while he reached behind it with the other hand and tore wires away indiscriminately. The vocalist continued to shriek, searing his venomous message into Wooten's brain:

Do you believe in God?
He's chained up like a dog
and every hour he screams
‘Satan rules supreme!'

Wooten's hand finally closed on the correct group of wires and the ear-splitting din ceased with an eerie suddenness and finality. He exhaled with relief.

"Jesus Christ," he said.

Before he left the passenger compartment, Wooten's flashlight fell upon another sight that caused icy insects to creep up the length of his spine - the shattered windshield on the passenger side had blown out and hung like a limp flag. Intricate spider web patterns twinkled against a backdrop of drying blood in the glow of his Mag-Lite.  He knew where to look for the other victims.

Wooten extricated himself from the interior of the Torino and walked east along the gravel shoulder. A soft breeze carried the smell of freshly cut timothy and the wail of emergency vehicles still a short distance away. Above the whisper of tall grass, along the side of the road, Wooten heard someone talking. The voice was male and originated from a point ahead and off the road, speaking in a relaxed, conversational tone. Wooten followed the voice into the knee-high grass. Ten feet from the road his flashlight beam fell upon the bare back of a shirtless survivor

He sat in the tall weeds, facing away towards the blackness of the timothy fields. Wooten now recognized the boy as a local teen by his thick tangled black hair that hung past his bare shoulders, his pale skin smeared and smudged with engine grease and blood. He rocked back and forth, talking quietly as though he was telling a bedtime story. Wooten came closer. 

“Son, I'm coming up behind you. My name is Bob Wooten. I'm with the State Patrol."

The teen did not respond. Along the trail of crushed grass Wooten's beam showed heavy amounts of blood, arterial splashes every foot or so; someone was losing copious amounts of the precious liquid fast. Wooten came within a few feet of the boy. The rocking seemed to quicken.

“Son?”

He caught a glimpse of a bare foot, then the other that wore the sandal that matched the one by the Torino. The teen had a girl in his lap. He held her and talked to her while he rocked faster and faster. His voice began to break as he lost control. The girl wore tight-fitting pants, the cotton fabric pristine white from the knees down, spattered with red drops above the knee and a deep, wet crimson from mid-thigh up. Her legs shivered violently with shock. Wooten was directly behind the pair now and he could smell stale beer and plasma. The girl made a ghastly gurgling sound, and her legs went rigid; every muscle contracted while she went into a seizure. The boy began to weep. His upper body shook and convulsed with hers as she slipped away. Wooten stepped around the two and shone the flashlight on the young woman to assess her condition.

"Good Christ," he said.

He covered his mouth with the back of his hand and stumbled back a half step. He closed his eyes to will the horrific vision from the sight of his mind, but the action only ground it into his memory - the vision that an ocean of Wild Turkey could not wash away.

To be continued...

Anthony Engles 832039 Coyote Ridge Corrections Center P.O. Box 769 Connell, WA 99326

My name is Anthony Scott Engles, born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1965.  After a brief stint in the Navy, I pretty much roamed around the country, waiting tables and bartending.  I settled in Spokane in 1994, then got pretty heavy into survivalism and related activities.  I got in a shoot out with Stevens County Deputies in 2003 and wounded one of them.  I’m serving a 30-year sentence in Washington State, where I have done the majority of my writing.  I have one short story published and several unpublished short stories and poems.

World War I and Prohibition and the Birth of Jazz

December 29, 2016, 6:00 pm

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By Denver 

I.

In 1897, there was mass chaos down in New Orleans in the year of 1897. The wild rowdy city was a melting pot of ethnicity and commerce. Frenchmen, Creoles, West Indians, Spaniards, Blacks, Mustees, legitimate businessmen, church ladies, pirates, and prostitutes, all co-existing in a relatively limited area.

An alderman by the name of Joseph Story proposed setting aside an eighteen square block district for vice. The proposal was passed and the chaos submitted to organization. The district was dubbed Storyville.

Storyville was a siren calling men from every state. There were 2000 prostitutes in its 230 brothels; as radically diverse as the city. They were catalogued annually in an official "Blue Book" which sold for a quarter on street corners. In those days the bar owners did not hire bands. They did not believe patrons who danced would drink. Brothels, however, hired parlor piano players, and that is where Jelly Roll Morton began his musical career.

Born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe in New Orleans on October 20, 1890, Jelly Roll Morton invented jazz. Of course, he also claimed to have invented the piano and anything else that came to mind. He was a colorful character, and -- veracity aside -- an accomplished pianist, composer, arranger and writer. He could put his money where his mouth was.

II.

In another part of the country, during the same era, a baby boy was born to J. E. Ellington and Daisy Ellington. Edward Kennedy Ellington’s life could not have been any more further from conditions in Storyville. Born in the home of his maternal grandparents in a northwest corner of Washington D. C., he spent his earliest years in a big comfortable house just a few blocks from the White House.

J. E. was a man of modest means but lofty aspirations. Butler to a prominent Washington physician, he sometimes served as a caterer at the White House, and eventually became a blueprint maker at the Washington Navy Yard. His son remembered him raising his family as if he were a millionaire.

Daisy, the daughter of a police captain, was so devoutly religious that she wore no lipstick because she thought a woman should not be attracting men. Daisy had lost one child in infancy so when Edward came along he represented a second chance. Nothing was too good for him. He was pampered and spoiled rotten by all the women in his family. He once said his feet weren’t allowed to touch the ground until he was the age of six.

Daisy took Edward to church twice each Sunday, once to the Baptist Church where her family had always gone and again to the Methodist Church favored by her husband. When the boy fell ill with pneumonia she saw to it that not one, but two, doctors were in attendance.

On the piano, Daisy played classics so beautifully for Edward that sometimes he wept. She made certain that when he was old enough to reach the piano keys, he faithfully practiced after each lesson with the neighborhood teacher, Marietta Clinkscales. His mother used to tell him, "Edward, you are blessed. You can do anything anyone else can do." She believed it, and because she believed, he did too.

III.

In 1901, in a section of Storyville so violent it was called the "Battlefield," another baby boy was born. He grew up with the nick-name Dipper. At the tender age of seven Dipper began working after school for a rag collector. He collected rags, bottles, and bones and delivered coal to the prostitutes in Storyville. He rode in a wagon while blowing a long tin horn to let clients know the rag collector was coming.

When Dipper was ten years old he spotted an old battered cornet in a pawnshop window. He borrowed $5 from his employer and purchased it. It was so dirty it had turned black. Morris, one of the ragpicker's sons, cleaned it up with brass polish and poured oil through it. Morris was quoted years later as saying Dipper played a song for him on the newly acquired horn that sounded so bad he did not have the heart to tell him.

When the Dipper was 11 he dropped out of third grade. He quit his job with the ragpicker and organized a street quartet, who sang for pennies while keeping a sharp eye out for truant officers and policemen. His eye was not sharp enough though, because on New Year's Eve he got arrested and sentenced to an indeterminate term at the Colored Waif's Home.

The cosmos aligned for the Dipper with that one unlikely event. The home was known for its marching band. The Dipper had to prove himself worthy before the band director would allow him to join, and in a short time he was made leader of the band.

IV.

Up North, fifteen year old Edward Ellington took a temporary job washing dishes at the Plaza Hotel while on vacation with his mother in Asbury Park, New Jersey. He was befriended by the headwaiter who talked him into going to hear a Philadelphia ragtime pianist during his off hours, named Harvey Brooks. It forever changed his life.

After returning from Asbury Park in 1914, Edward entered Samuel H. Armstrong Technical High School. This was during the Jim Crow era, so the high school was segregated. Young Edward was determined to become a piano player – in part because he noticed girls were attracted to piano players and he was attracted to girls — and because music would be his way to express himself.

Edward was soon playing for teen-age dances at True Reformers Hall on U Street for 75¢ a night. He began to work up his own tunes. As young Edward matured, his grades waned and his interests shifted away from school toward ragtime piano. Yet, he painted well enough to win a scholarship to the Pratt Institute in New York. With just four months to go until graduation, and to his mother's horror, Edward gave up the scholarship and dropped out of school. He had decided to become a full-time musician. As for jazz – the music he would one day make his own – it was unlikely that he had yet heard a single note. But within a few weeks that would change for young Edward and for the whole country.

V.

Back in Storyville, young Dipper turned 13 years old and made it back to the streets. In the black section of the red light district, known as the "25s," Freddie Keppard was the number one horn player. Joe Oliver was number two. One night Oliver decided he was going to be number one and snatched the crown from Freddie's head.

Oliver told his piano player; "Get in B♭." Oliver walked to the door, lifted his horn to his lips and stepped outside playing beautiful, soulful blues. People started pouring out of other spots to see who was blowing all that horn. Oliver took young Dipper under his wing. He let him substitute in the band and one day passed him a battered cornet.

VI.

In 1917 members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded "Dixieland Jazz Band One-Step," and "The Livery Stable Blues." The record sold more than a million copies at 75¢ each. One moment jazz was virtually unknown . . . the next, it was a serious past-time of 100 million people. Initially people wanted only to listen to this music. Eventually the melody, the beat and the energy all culminated in the frantic form of dance called the Charleston. In retrospect, it was a natural progression.

The same day the record was made President Woodrow Wilson appeared before Congress asking permission to arm merchant ships against attacks by German submarines in the Atlantic. Thirty one days later America entered the World War.

On New Year's Day 1918, two thousand men of the Fifteenth New York Regiment landed at Brest on the coast of Brittany. The French soldiers, sailors and civilians who turned out to greet them had never seen or heard anything like these Americans. The officers were white, as were all the combat soldiers who had trooped ashore in France since the previous June. But these enlisted men were black. So were all the members of the regimental band.

The leader of the regimental band was Lieutenant James Reese Europe. He had joined the regiment two years earlier because he thought a National Guard unit for Harlem would bring together all classes of men who stood for something in the community.

The Army brass believed Europe's band with its brand of martial ragtime would be good for morale while winning new friends among the French. The band played French marches, American military marches, plantation melodies and ragtime pieces. The music was still orchestrated ragtime meant for marching, not jazz, but it was filled with jazz elements; breaks, riffs, trombone smears, and rhythmic excitement no other marching band could come close to matching.

A concert was given in the Tuileries Gardens in conjunction with the greatest bands in the world; the British Grenadier's Band, the Band of the Garde Republicain, the Royal Italian Band and Europe's band. Europe was quoted saying, "My band, of course, could not compare with any of these, yet the crowd, and it was such a crowd as I never saw anywhere else in the world, deserted them for us. We played to 50,000 people, at least, and had we wished it, we might be playing yet."

Making nice with the Allies, playing music and sowing seeds of jazz for future tours was not the only thing the Fifteenth New York Regiment was known for. They endured 191 unbroken days of combat, won 171 decorations for bravery (more than any other American unit) and took special pride in the name the French gave them – Hellfighters.

VII.

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. a young Edward Ellington was making a name for himself as one of the most successful dance band leaders in town. The Duke's Serenaders played all over the city and its suburbs, but Washington had become too small.

Even though the Duke was married and had a young son to care for, he took off with two friends a drummer and a saxophone player, for Harlem. The Duke was soon getting pickup jobs. Then he was chosen to be the band leader of the Black Sox Orchestra before changing their name to the Washingtonians.

There was an exodus of musicians to Chicago and New York. The clubs were begging for jazz. King Oliver headed for Chicago in 1918, leaving Dipper to take his place in the band. Dipper, also known as Satchel-mouth, or Sachmo, was becoming known in his own right.  His given name was Louis Armstrong.

Four years later, King Oliver sent word to "Little" Louie asking him to come to Chicago, which he did. Meanwhile, the Duke made his way north to New York. Clubs were flourishing. The country was experiencing unprecedented prosperity. Post-war a decade later caricatured as the "Roaring Twenties."

This was a time unparalleled in American History. Homes were lit by electricity; and featured refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, twelve million radios, 30 million automobiles, untold tickets to theaters, luxury and glamour unimagined. But there was also prohibition.

VIII.

Rural life could not have been more different than city life in the twenties. Slum conditions were so severe tmen went to saloons to escape the depressing reality of their home life. Drinking only made them quarrelsome and disorderly. Hardworking, nondrinking, churchgoing farmers and business people in the rural districts and country communities began to think of all cities as Sodom and Gomorrah, and they blamed alcohol. They launched temperance movements to counter its bad effects.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, sentiment among the majority of Americans was that temporary Prohibition would help the war effort. The war was over, however, by the time the 18th Amendment was ratified on January 15, 1919. 

When Prohibition went into effect, many people believed the public would accept it. Who would risk a $1,000 fine or six-month jail term just for a drink? Chicago's gangsters, on the other hand, saw a promising business opportunity in Prohibition. Brazenly, six masked men invaded a Chicago railway yard and took $100,000 worth of liquor from two boxcars. Bootlegging led to the division of territories between gangsters like Al Capone, Detroit's Purple Gang and others.

Gangsters owned most of the best clubs, dance palaces and cabarets. It was natural to sell alcohol in these establishments and liquor was on everyone's mind because of Prohibition. People were curious, and drinking was more attractive now that it was illegal. Speakeasies were supplied with liquor by underworld dealers and protected from arrest by corrupt police and public officials.

By the late 1920s the country had more speakeasies than it ever had saloons, and though bootleg liquor was of low quality, even dangerous, millions of people were drinking it. Women who would never have considered entering a saloon were now gleefully sitting at bars.

Meanwhile in the Windy City, Louie Armstrong was teaching the world to "scat" (singing in nonsense syllables). Legend had it beginning as an accident. Armstrong said his lyric sheet slipped on the floor as he was recording "Heebie Jeebies," and the record producer signalled him not to ruin the take by stopping. "Heebie Jeebies" was Armstrong's first hit, selling more than forty thousand copies within a few months. "Scatting" caught on and became a trademark for future jazz artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway.

Prohibition continued to negatively impact the nation. In 1929 a meeting in Atlantic City, N.J., of Capone, Detroit's Purple Gang, and other territorial czars agreed to a nationwide division of the spoils. In Cincinnati, Ohio, George Remus, an attorney-turned-bootlegger, bought nine distilleries and amassed a fortune estimated at $40 million before he was caught. Captain Bill McCoy of Jacksonville, Florida, also became a millionaire by carrying schooner-loads of liquor from the Bahamas to New York, then dropping anchor beyond the 3-mile limit, and selling to bootleggers who came out in speedboats. He founded "Rum Row," a huge fleet of vessels selling liquor outside the limit.

Mabel Walker Willebrandt, U.S. Assistant Attorney General in charge of liquor law prosecutions, sent Remus, McCoy, and many others to prison, but when she resigned in 1929, she became an attorney for the wine industry.

Some of the unfortunate results of Prohibition are still with us. The affiliation between corrupt politicians and organized crime, is still evident today. So is the disrespect for the law which became widespread during the Prohibition era.

IX.

Liquor and its impact on the nation was not the only form of corruption in America Jazz – and the dancing it inspired – was also said to be having a catastrophic impact on the national character. "Moral disaster is coming to hundreds of young American girls," reported the New York American, "through the pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music of jazz orchestras."

Within two years in Chicago alone, the Illinois Vigilance Association reported in 1923, the downfall of one thousand girls could be traced directly to the pernicious influence of jazz music. In Cincinnati, the Salvation Army obtained a court injunction to stop construction of a theater next to a home for expectant mothers on the grounds that "the enforced proximity to a theater and jazz palace" would implant dangerous "jazz emotions" in helpless infants.

A social worker reported on the "unwholesome excitement" she encountered even at small-town dances in the Midwest. "Boy–and–girl couples leave the hall in a state of dangerous disturbance. Any worker who has gone into the night to gather the facts of activities outside the dance hall is appalled . . . by the blatant disregard of even the elementary rules of civilization. We must expect a few casualties in social intercourse, but the modern dance is producing little short of holocaust."

Ethel Waters possibly advanced the "moral disaster" view early in her career. She began as a shimmy dancer and singer. Singing lewd burlesque blues and specializing in sly insinuation with records like "Organ Grinder Blues,""Do What You Did Last Night," and "Handyman."

He shakes my ashes, greases my griddle, 

Churns my butter, strokes my fiddle, 

My man . . . such a handyman. . . .

He threads my needle, creams my wheat, 

Heats my heater, chops my meat, 

My man . . . such a handyman. . . .

Don't care if you believe or not, 

He sure is good to have around 

Why when my furnace gets too hot, 

He's right there to turn my damper down....

My ice don't get a chance to melt away, 

He sees that I get that old fresh piece every day, 

Ah that man . . . sho' is such a handyman.

Her manager insisted she try to perform for the all-white vaudeville circuit. She was certain she would fail, but white people loved it and she became the first black woman to headline at the Palace Theater, in New York. Starring at the Plantation and Cotton Clubs, she went on to Hollywood. In 1929, appearing in a film in which she introduced her best-remembered song, "Am I Blue." For a time she was the best paid woman in show business, black or white. Lena Horne once paid her the highest possible compliment saying, “Ethel Waters was the Mother of us all.”

Х.

New Yorkers could not get enough of this new music. In 1924 a jazz enthusiast visiting the West Side of Manhattan could, , without walking more than four blocks see and hear the giants of the age. Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians played at the Hollywood Club at Forty-Ninth Street and Broadway. Bix Beiderbecke and the Wolverines played at the Cinderella Ballroom at Forty-Eighth Street and Broadway, and Fletcher Henderson, with the brand new cornetist Louis Armstrong, played in the Roseland Ballroom on Fifty-First Street and Broadway.

Whenever Duke and his men could get away from the Hollywood club they came to the Roseland to hear Armstrong. "There weren't words coined for describing that kick," Ellington was quoted as saying, "everybody on the street was talking about the guy."

At a time when cornetists and trumpet players rarely played higher than high C, Armstrong would routinely finish choruses on F and with a big, robust tone. Other trumpet players would eventually play higher than Armstrong had, but no one since has gone so high with such a consistent blend of power and warmth.

Back in Chicago, Jelly Roll Morton was making records under contract with Victor. He handpicked his band, called them the Red Hot Peppers and paid them $5 a session for rehearsals – unheard of in that day and time. But Morton's recording sessions were strictly business.

Morton willingly listened to his musicians, recalled Johnny St. Cyr. "Jelly was a very, very agreeable man . . . He was fussy on introductions and endings and he always wanted the ensemble his way, but he never interfered with solo work . . . He'd tell us where he wanted the solo or break but the rest was up to us."

There was never any doubt about who was in charge. Once, when trombonist Zue Robertson repeatedly refused to play a melody precisely as written, Morton pulled a revolver from his jacket and placed it on top of the piano: on the next run through Robertson never missed a note. "You did what Jelly Roll wanted you to do," Baby Dodds recalled, "no more, no less."

Immediate successful, the records they produced sounded like pure New Orleans improvisation at its best. Morton's celebrity only enhanced his ego. He was in demand all over the mid-west, yet at the height of his success, he decided to pull up stakes and move to New York. He believed the success he’d enjoyed in Chicago would be even bigger in the center of the music business. It did not happen.

Jelly Roll Morton continued to tour and make memorable records for Victor but he never established himself like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Still, he did pretty good for a piano player who started his career in the House of the Rising Sun down in Storyville. Who else will go down in history as claiming to have invented the one truly American form of music embraced by the rest of the world?

Dennis Vertin #135167  Lakeland Correctional Facility  141 First Street Coldwater, Michigan 49036

Dennis Vertin, pen name Denver, is 66 years old. He has served over 44 years on his life sentence. He is the only prisoner in the history of Michigan who had his conviction reversed by the federal court after serving ten years, was released on PR bond, was free nearly four years without negative contact with authorities, then the reversal was reversed.

In 2009, after a public hearing, the Parole Board recommended Denver's sentence be commuted to thirty-seven years but Governor Granholm turned the recommendation down without explanation, despite absolutely no opposition from the victim's family or friends. Denver has currently served more time than any Michigan prisoner who has been granted a commutation, with three exceptions.

Sixty-six and Counting...On Justice Reform

January 5, 2017, 5:51 pm

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By Isaac Sweet

She is a sixty-six year old, cancer-surviving, type-two diabetic. She is also the World's Greatest Mom. As a young woman she put aside dreams of a career in archaeology to raise a family. Though plagued with a multitude of obstacles including, health concerns, divorce, financial instability, etc., she faced each one with a courageous smile. She led by example. She had to - she had six of us.

As I reflect on just how many sacrifices Mom made for us when we were young, I cannot help but be amazed. I remember complaining about having to wear second hand clothes, but come to think of it, she was in rags. I belly-ached about the food, but at times she didn't even eat. She was faced with hard choices but she always made the best one. She handled each situation with superhero composure - even when we kids were in trouble. Though we were too young to understand most of the life lessons, we knew she did an amazing job. We had everything we needed: toys, ample attention, and most importantly, unconditional love. Mom didn't show us how to play sports or ride bicycles and skateboards, but she did teach us character, values, resolve, and perseverance. She even taught us how to scream and jump up onto a chair every time she saw a spider, especially if it was big and mean looking - oh, one the size of a dime or so. Yeah, Mom is awesome. I wish there was more I could do for her now. I am, as she often reminds me, her only son.

****

In school I was the chubby, awkward kid with glasses. I really wanted to fit in and be cool. Instead, presented an easy target for practical jokers and sometimes worse.

A few weeks after my eighteenth birthday, I was befriended by a man eight years my senior. I liked him because he was adventurous and personified "Joe Cool." He liked me because I was an easily manipulated teenager with a truck. One day he gave me an ultimatum, and I made the wrong choice. Chose compliance over courage and participated in a crime genuinely wanted no part of. I drove the getaway vehicle. Instead of graduating from high school, I was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and assault, and given an exceptional prison sentence of nearly thirty-six years.

Each day, I climb in and out of a cage like a well-trained animal. It doesn't even feel like punishment any more. Over the years I've grown accustomed to it. I have gotten used to some of the angry bullies working as prison guards, and I've even conditioned my palate to the institutional gruel. The real punishment is being separated from my loved ones as they grow old, suffer, and pass, sometimes without saying goodbye. One day, I returned from my prison work detail to find a post-it note on my bunk from my counsellor that said: "Call home - your Grandpa had a heart attack." When I finally got to a phone, I tried every number knew to no avail; they were all at the hospital. Years later, I got a surprise visit from my mom and sister who both began to sob at the sight of me. They had come to tell me that my dad only had a few hours left. A few years after that, a guard woke me in the middle of the night and told me my Grandma had died. But nothing could prepare me for what happened in 2015. On my way back from lunch, I was summoned to my counsellor’s office. My baby sister, the one who had previously come to tell me about my dad, passed away just two months after her thirty-fifth birthday. My stomach didn't stay full for long. A few months later, I was summoned to the Sergeant's office. Heather, my big sister, hadn't made it through the night. She was forty-two.

I survive decade after decade in prison, often wondering what it would've been like to live a normal life, or to have a family of my own. Would I have been a good husband and father?

*****

Roughly two generations ago, a criminal justice revolution swept our nation. It was fuelled by fear of largely fictitious "super predators," and by criminal justice experts who claimed rehabilitation was a "myth." The big idea dominating the trend was "determinate sentencing." Endorsed by the federal government as the solution to punishment disparities, determinate sentences were embraced by most states. However, as parole boards were being eliminated all across our country, so were the incentives for convicted felons to pursue self-improvement. We are still suffering the consequences of that paradigm shift.

The term "mass incarceration" commonly accompanies disturbing statistics such as "the United States has five percent of the world's population and twenty-five percent of the world's incarcerated population." From my prison cell, I lack the resources to qualify the numbers but live in an environment densely populated with men serving draconian prison sentences. In 1984 the Washington State Legislature produced the "Sentencing Reform Act." Thus began our state's era of politically influenced, purely punitive justice. This legislation introduced a one-size-fits-all determinate sentencing scheme and provided prosecutors with their greatest bargaining chip yet - the other death penalty: life without the possibility of parole. To accommodate angry voters and further political careers, members of the legislature have revisited portions of the S.R.A. every year to stiffen penalties and lengthen sentence guidelines. At some point, people have gotten desensitized to the overwhelming number of years or lifetimes imposed. Our criminal justice system has spiralled out of control. For substantive proof, simply google prison growth in Washington State during the final thirty years of indeterminate sentencing (roughly 1954 to 1984) and compare that to prison growth of the past thirty years (roughly 1984 to 2014). Mass incarceration is the result of a system restructured around punishment.

Returning to an indeterminate sentencing model would improve public safety, reducing recidivism by reintroducing the fundamental concept of rehabilitation and incentivizing it. Rehabilitative treatments, classes, programs, or training are important, but incentive motivates people to apply themselves in earnest. The opportunity to earn freedom would provide incarcerated people compelling incentive to pursue positive change. Increases in individual improvements will yield safer communities.

Washington State can reduce mass incarceration by returning to a parole based, sentencing system. A large number of prisoners, such as myself, are serving exceptionally long or lifetime prison terms, have matured beyond any further criminality, and no longer pose a threat to public safety. Despite the emergence of aging prisoners as the most expensive prison population demographic, we quietly remain in prison. To serve decades in prison past the point of our reform serves no benefit for society.

For several years, I have worked to become the best person I can be. I am focused on pursuing education and preparing for my future. I continue to develop character and mature with integrity. Contemplate my actions and consider how they will affect others. I strive to be courteous, make responsible decisions, and set a positive example. I continue to learn each day and encourage others to do the same. While there is nothing I can do to change the past, I hope to use my life experiences to help prevent others from making similar poor choices. Maybe I can make a difference.

*****

Over the years Mom has aged pretty well. The color has faded from her hair, and she has slowed down a little bit but she still gets around okay. She isn't hopping up on chairs anymore, but I'm sure she can still muster up a loud enough scream to scare any old spider away.

Losing my two precious sisters deeply affected Mom. She seems to have lost a little motivation and sometimes speaks in monotone. She's not as talkative or optimistic as she used to be. This year I turned 39 and it marks the first birthday in my life that Mom didn't send a card. I'm concerned about her. She's pretty smart, and given her health history she knows she probably isn't going to break any lifetime records. Recently, she went shopping for another car, but she didn't bother looking at any brand new ones because, she said, it will probably only need to last her three or four more years.

Mom still smiles and waves when she gets honked at in traffic, and she says "Excuse me," when hurried shoppers bump into her at the grocery store. She really is the coolest little old lady. Not long ago she took a bad fall at the gas station and lost one of her front teeth. There was no one to call, and she had to drive herself home. I wish I could've been there. Unfinished projects are piling up around her house and now she's hoping the roof will last another winter. I wish I was there to show her how much I appreciate her, to reciprocate the love and protection she has always given me. She certainly deserves it. Instead, regardless of the difficulties involved, she'll continue making a few trips each year to whichever prison warehouses me, and she'll do it in champion form.

Please, before it's too late, help provide me the opportunity to be there for the World's Greatest Mom. Contact your local legislators and ask them to pursue and support legislation to undo the damage of the Sentencing Reform Act. Ask them to replace determinate sentences with indeterminate sentence review boards and reinstate Washington's quality control release mechanism: parole. Ask them to legislate solutions to mass incarceration that would inspire people to pursue personal positive change. You can find any necessary contact information by typing: www.leg.wa.gov into your search engine.

#JusticeReformForMom

Isaac Sweet 752399 WSRU D-2-27 P.O. Box 777 Monroe, WA 98272-0777

A Passage

January 11, 2017, 4:49 pm

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Page 258 of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy.  

Dedicated to the memory of Christopher Wilkins, executed by the State of Texas on January 11, 2017

Time to Dance the Thirteenth Step

January 12, 2017, 6:00 pm

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By Jeff C.

1. Thirteenth Step: Call an Optimist, He’s Turning Blue

When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.—Norm Crosby

Being rejected is never pleasant, whether it’s for a duty few want anyway or something else entirely. Being rejected over something you did two decades ago -- and knowing that those rejections will keep coming -- isn’t hilarious either. 

My sister told me to not send in my jury summons paperwork because, allegedly, if you never respond to the first one then they soon give up and you’ll never have to do it. But I actually want to participate in jury duty. I want to serve, to be called to serve, and likely be immediately dismissed by the prosecution. (Though they might be stupid in doing that because if I were to serve on, say, the Indeterminate Sentence Review Board—think parole board with a softer name—I’d be harsher on those guys that continue to keep the recidivism rate above 66 percent. I might be the same way on a jury: harsh toward those who deserve it.)

Early in 2016 my CCO (Community Corrections Officer—think parole officer with a softer name) told me that due to a recalculation of my sentence I would no longer have to be “on paper” until March 2018, but instead would be done with the Department of Corrections exactly two years after I had left Work Release, over 400 days early. My immediate response when he told me that this would happen December 10th, 2016 was, “Damn, I’ll just miss the election.” 

I had tried to sign up to vote earlier in the year (at a My Morning Jacket concert at The Paramount in Seattle) and got a nicely worded letter from the Secretary of State of Washington telling me that due to my conviction 20 years ago I was not eligible to vote. I received the same response a few months ago when I did, indeed, send in that first jury summons paperwork. Due to my conviction 20 years ago I was not eligible to be on a jury of my peers. Or maybe I didn’t have any anymore.

But in four days from this writing, on December 10th, 2016, I will be “off paper.” I will be done with the Department of Corrections; able to leave the state without advanced permission, to vote, and to be denied in person the privilege to serve on jury duty. Also, I will be able to own a gun and travel to Canada. Oh, wait, scratch those last two, permanently.  

2. Thirteenth Step: Mistook the Nods for Your Approval

And I don't care much for wishful thinking
It's heavy as I breathe
Because I don't believe in second chances
It's heavy as I leave—“Heavy Is as Heavy Does” by Menomena

Being denied the chance to vote for Hillary Clinton due to a poor decision 20 years ago is one thing (thankfully Washington state managed that without my vote, sadly the rest of the country didn’t follow suit). But being denied the chance to meet someone in person who is otherwise interested in dating you because they Googled your past is another thing entirely. Both are disheartening…and yet at the same time galvanizing. At least I was eventually stirred to action, you know, after the sting of the first few rejections.

Though I’ll not go into the why of how and the how of why I became single again this year (and, regular readers, please do not offer condolences or ask), I will say that dating in the modern internet era, for a convicted felon, is fraught with atypical obstacles. A decade ago, when I thought about dating after I got out, I figured I’d wait for “the third date reveal” which I envisioned as somewhere between getting to know each other and the physical stage.  Just enough time to reveal who I am, without actually lying about my past (only skirting by it with some carefully placed omissions). 

Basically, reveal it when the time was right. That was the plan. Then came reality. 

The modern reality is that Herr Google is very good at sussing out your past if you’re not actively lying about your identity. And I didn’t. I gave my first name and actual, real, current pictures of me to the various dating websites I was using (by the end it was five, perhaps six). And when I offered to meet people (or they offered to meet me), I gave them my last name. With my picture and full name it’s not too hard to figure out, if you’re willing to put in a modicum of work, that I have a felony conviction. Well, a twofer, but still.

The problem is that I don’t get to “control the message.” And as I’ve figured out in my line of work: when I get interrupted in my pitch to give them a free vacation, if you’re not able to tell the story, to dole out how the information gets out, to reveal a carefully honed out good then bad then good pattern…you lose control of the situation and people hang up. Or, in the online dating world, they block you or tell you that they’re not going to meet you. Not because you lied to them but because they can’t handle the truth.

Some, of course, got to learn about my past from me in person. The most visceral response I got from this revelation was from someone that I will call T. She and I did meet in person and she asked me a question that there’s no way to answer untruthfully: “So how did you get into all this criminal justice reform advocacy volunteering?” I had honestly expected T. to have checked me out before we met. We’d bonded through our commonality of nonprofits. I’d mentioned that one of the three nonprofits that I was on the board of was hiring a new executive director and because she had experience (though I learned later not at that level), I’d sent her a link to the job offer.  The name of the organization clearly shows that it’s prison-related, and if she would have clicked onto the website she’d have seen a picture on the first page of me in prison. But she did not.  So while T. and I were at in a crowded restaurant sitting across from each other in a booth, I answered her question and told her the brief(er) version of my past.  She physically cringed in her seat. I’d never watched someone go from being attracted to me, literally leaning in, to being scared of me in a few minutes, pulling back (almost clutching her non-existent petticoat). It was rather horrifying to see. Yet I’m actually grateful for her lack of a visible social filter; I got to see what specific things made her face curdle. And found out how some people truly feel about convicts. 

There were others I met in person (I don’t know the actual count because for about nine weeks I was, as I affectionately called it, “non-violently ‘aggressively dating.’” When they would ask, “How’d you get into that [criminal justice reform volunteering]?” I’d tell them the truth.  I’d usually get, “But you don’t LOOK like you were in prison” or other unoriginal remarks (as if we all get spider web and teardrop tattoos on our necks and faces). Many didn’t exactly know what to say and I get that. I truly do. But a few questions about “what it’s like” is fine—a two-hour interrogation, less so. Ignoring it completely is also a bit off-putting. But that’s okay; it’s not exactly a dating situation one often comes across. 

I also had a few dates with one person who -- even after I’d read out loud a text about her to my badass chess playing friend in Australia, in which I’d said she was great but not very inquisitive -- never asked anything Which would have caused me to reveal my past.  It’s possible I could have gone on dating her and she never would have asked. But that showed a sense of aloofness, or possibly selfishness, to never really ask follow up questions about me. 

One totally went mad hatter on me when I’d requested that phone number before we met (because, as I told her, I’d been stood up by someone who maybe wasn’t even a woman because I thought I’d be the gentleman and not care that her profile picture was of a landscape). After she gave me her phone number and we were texting, she found out about my past, she asked how I didn’t know that she only gave up her phone number reluctantly so that I’d not cancel.  But because people can stalk you with just your phone number and since I’m a felon isn’t it obvious that she was right in doing that. She then added the obligatory, “oh, I’m sure you’re fine,” but still cancelled the date before we ever met in person. Friends who saw the screenshots of the texts said I’d dodged a bullet. 

But not everyone was thoughtlessly reactionary. Back when I was on just one dating app, another person, let’s call her S., and I hit it off quite well.  We exchanged long, letter-length correspondences within the dating app (a way to communicate without having to give up your phone number to a stranger). She was a musician and I liked that she could understand my creativity, such as it is, and after a few weeks she wrote: “Another thing I wanted to mention, as it’s been on my mind, has to do with this digital age and the visibility of individuals’ information. As I mentioned to you previously, I am not worried about you knowing who I am (as long as you’re not a psycho killer, ha!), because I have nothing to hide (I think I mentioned hidden husbands/kids, criminal records, and social media gaffes). It has become pretty common to research people online when considering whether or not to meet him/her in person. I do this mainly through Facebook, to see if a guy shares mutual friends with me, so I could potentially find a further connection or even a testimonial to a good guy. It’s also a very good way of finding out if the person behind the profile is simply promoting a prospect who doesn’t actually exist. But there are other things that can come up. One guy who approached me online recently, for instance, had many posts on his Facebook wall that directly conflicted with my fundamental views and even my rights. That was an easy e-mail to craft to him, letting him know that we would not get along very well, based on what I found. And then, there are other things we can find in our innocent little investigations. // You might know where this is leading. If so, I’ll allow you to explain. If not, then I guess I might have to be more direct. I’ll let you respond at this point.”

Then, of course, I confessed all. I genuinely liked her, and I genuinely liked her way of bringing this up. And then she responded with this: 

“Honesty is very important to me. And it’s very helpful for me to know how long you were incarcerated (whether the sentence was just or not), and especially how long you have been out. While I am no better than no one, I am also not able to truly empathize with everyone. I can try, and I wish I could. But I’m just being honest when I say that I have no idea if I can be in a relationship with someone who has been through what you have been through. I am very fortunate in that no one in my family or circle of friends has ever been even just arrested, that I know of. Yes, I know this makes me pretty naïve, but I’m not afraid to admit that it’s a comforting feeling. // As this dating site thing is designed to help narrow down choices and find the best fit, I’d have to say that there are a few ways I can see how this revelation would show that I’m not the right match for you. And vice versa. But I think you would do much better with someone who could at least conceive of the world you’ve endured. I just can’t. // While I’ve really enjoyed our correspondence, there are a couple of reason I don’t see things moving in a romantic direction. One is that I honestly can’t fathom what you’ve been through. Another is that I’ve been sharing a lot off-line with a particular guy I’ve met here. I mentioned to you before that we will be meeting soon. As I usually am when things start so well, I am cautiously optimistic. We’ll see. // I do think that you are doing wonderful things within the community and that you have much going for you. I hope nothing but good things for you.”

Because of this S. and I never met in person.  She never got the chance to see if she could, in fact, empathize with someone who had been through what I had been through. S. never got to see if I am more than what I went through. She never got to see what many who know me say: that I do not “seem like” I was in prison, let alone for 18.5 years. Though S. was by far the most reasoned, thoughtful of rejections I got before ever meeting them, she never got to know who she was truly rejecting. 

There’s one more to tell: the classy response. This woman, who I’ll call E., and I had a conventional first date. She, unlike many American women, doesn’t know how to take a selfie (which means that she looks like her profile picture). We had coffee which became brunch which became a walk around a park where she explained about her nonprofit water reclamation educational work. Of course, I had to “show off” and give her my nonprofit business card when we were done with the date. Our second date got postponed. I went to Nashville, Tennessee for a few days because 1.) our nonprofit had a grant to send our outgoing executive director to the national conference on higher education in prison, 2.) I asked to pay my own way (to a resounding “yes” from my board), and 3.) because I wanted to. And when I came back her mother was in the hospital for a few weeks and one night I ended up offering a drive-by hug to E. who was at a hospital which is between my work and my home. We talked for over two hours. By the time our third date happened we’d been texting and talking for a few weeks.  On that third date I kept throwing things out there that I’d expect someone to question. I was TRYING to do that third-date reveal naturally …but she wasn’t going for it. She’d ask all kinds of questions, but none that would lead to me being in prison. So I had to say, after the first (and possibly only) lull in our great conversation, “I’d hoped that this would come up naturally but there’s something about my past that you need to know if we’re going to continue,” and she said, “I know.” She had, of course, used that card to Google me after the first date and knew by our second date, but said nothing. 

A few dates later (one where I got to see her sing in a band) I asked to go “exclusive” a few days later she accepted my offer and I uninstalled all five dating apps from my phone and I happily haven’t looked back. E. and I are very happy and we’re meeting each other’s friends and families and even going on a vacation together after Christmas on a drive to the coast. 

3. Thirteenth Step: Clever Got Me This Far, Then Tricky Got Me In

Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore): What do you do for recreation?
The Dude (Jeff Bridges): Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback.—“The Big Lebowski”

Speaking of driving, when I began dating I realized it would be a major turn-off to most women if I didn’t have a car. So, in a matter of a few weeks I took and passed my written and driving test and bought a car. When I was shopping for a car I asked people who knew me what kind of car they saw me in. Though coincidence I did end up getting the car that five out of seven people said that fit me: a Prius. But this is Seattle; so that’s not all that unusual. 

Nor is it all that unusual, I imagine, for someone with, um, as limited of a driving record as mine to embrace, uhhhh, driving in the specific way that I have. Well, actually, two ways: 

Ever since my first car ride in almost 16 years, which was about 29 months ago I would repeat when we’d come close to oncoming traffic: an involuntary shudder and/ looking away or closing my eyes entirely. I felt like we were going to crash, head-on, with the oncoming cars. Or I felt like we were going to hit an object on the driver’s side (guard rails, what have you). This was so apparent that whoever was driving would notice. Considering I used to drive HUMVEEs across narrow-road Germany for three point five years, I’ll admit that my fear was a post-incarceral occurrence. And I’ll admit that, in small part, it contributed to me staying with the bus and bicycle thing for what ended up being 21 months. 

But once I got my license -- and past my over-cautious ever-readiness -- and, really, when I went down to Nashville and rented a car that had a wee bit more punch to it than a hybrid Prius, I had a different car experience. One of the best parts of that trip to Nashville (my first vacation on my own), was driving on curvy backroads with great visibility on a clear fall day doing…um, exactly the speed limit. Promise.  

There is a beautiful freedom in having a car. It’s surprising how I never knew that. But that’s partially because of my driving history: I owned my first car in Germany for all of 90 days before I got rear-ended and it was my fault (trying to turn left basically across a highway entrance/exit).  My second car I had all of eight days before I creeped out into foggy traffic to clip the side of a car.  It was decommissioned for six months before I got the bumper put back on, only to have it working all of 27 days before I committed two concurrent felonies in it, and totaling it and getting a few bullet holes in it. So, driving is really rather new to me (not counting the whole Germanic HUMVEEing in a convoy). It’s no wonder that this week, the first week of snow on the roads since I’ve been out, my Mom has been texting me advice and concern about my driving in the snow and ice. It’s okay, Mom, when not on a curvy Southern road with no cops in sight, I’m a very good driver. Promise. 

4. Thirteenth Step: You Know it’s There so Don’t Neglect it

After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. […] Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. ― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

So I went back to prison this year, albeit briefly. One of the nonprofits that I’m a board member for is the University Beyond Bars (which I wrote about in my very first MB6 piece entitled “Time to Learn”). They had their yearly graduation ceremony and I was allowed special permission by the Department of Corrections to go back in and attend. I, of course, dressed in my best outfit and got to see many of the guys that I’ hadn’t seen in over two years since I left for Work Release. It was more surreal hearing everyone ask if it was weird, than it was going inside again. But, certainly, there were a few moments when it hit me (leaving through the sally port, alone, to go use the bathroom was one of them as it was different than when I was with the crowd). It was also odd to hear so many people say that I seemed taller.

In a few days, on December 10th, 2016, the first thing that I’ll be doing when I’m officially “off paper” is applying to go back to prison on a regular basis. My two co-best-friends are getting married and I hope to be there for Loretta and Atif’s marriage. And then I will join them on a regular basis in the same visiting room where I used to get visits from my family in; but this time I’ll be the one leaving out the front door when the visit is over, not getting strip searched before going back to a concrete cell. I’ll get to experience some of what I put my own family through during the 18.5 years time that they had to do with me. And I’m looking forward to it. 

5. Thirteenth Step: With Your Halo Slipping Down

Hold my hands, feel them shake
I fear I'm showing my age
All my love is in one place
Now I, I'm not so brave
And I fear, oh I fear, I'm showing my age—“Oh Pretty Boy, You’re Such A Big Boy Now” by Menomena

I’m heavily involved, with no slowing down or end in sight, in criminal justice reform issues. That’s not only because I genuinely care about these nonprofits, their causes, and the people effected by them, but also because I have found over the two years that I pretty much don’t care about most so-called entertainment. Most of it I find tasteless (as in bland) pablum for the masses which, considering how our electorate voted this election, seems to work on them to distract them from the real issues that we have: one of which is the mass incarceration of Americans. We have 4.4 percent of the world’s population and house around 22 percent of the world’s prison population. We incarcerate more people, for longer sentences, and have a higher recidivism rate (sadly, a word that all too many Americans don’t even know) than other countries but more importantly, than we should. We should do better. In the two years I’ve been out I’ve spoken at the state capital three times about various criminal justice issues and plan to do so again; some people complain about the problem: I, and the people that I proudly surround myself with, are tilting at windmills trying to elicit the change that we believe can and will come. Change that we know, through evidenced-based research, works: such as how the recidivism rate drops from 66 percent to 11 percent with an Associate of Arts degree; it drops to 4 percent with a Bachelor of Arts degree. This is the answer, people—do you get what the question is? “How to stop the prison-industrial complex from strangling America?”

Doing this is more than a hobby and it’s not simply just because in all this volunteerism I can’t say no (though that’s certainly a part of it); doing this is now a part of who I am. (Though I do have to learn how to say no sometimes since I’ve been known to not know how to strike a healthy balance.) But I don’t know or care enough about much of anything else to do that oft-talked about but seldom-done thing: change the system. I’ve begun; have you? What have you done in the last month that has helped make this imperfect world a better place? As they say to prisoners petitioning for clemency: “What have you done that is extraordinary?” Well, yeah, what have YOU done?

6. Thirteenth Step: Vanishing Like a Cyan Sunday

"Good morning, and in case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight.”—last line of “The Truman Show”

Last words of a free man.

1.I’ve been writing for Minutes Before Six since April 28, 2012 when I first talked about the University Beyond Bars and how great of a program it is; one that I still believe in by being a board member for it. 

2.On June 11, 2012:  I wrote “Worse Than Senseless” about a Shakespeare play put on in the prison, my review of the crowd in attendance, and the near-violent reactions to my review. 

3.On December 12, 2012: I wrote “Beyond Hope” about Obama’s Re-election campaign returning my $20.12 donation and other ways in which the prisoner in America is treated as less than human.

4.On February 13, 2013: I wrote “The DOC Does Not Have a Sense of Humor” about just that and how I got the infractions that I can count on my thumbs from them. 

5.On April 26, 2013: I wrote “Cherchez la Femme” about a doctor who believed that prisoners shouldn’t breed or be in relationships outside of prison. 

6.On August 30, 2013: I wrote the third part of “Thoughts on Education Part 1” with other writers; my part was entitled “Forging a True Community” about why the University Beyond Bars is more than just a classroom in prison. 

7.On September 20, 2013: I wrote “The Right Way to Say Goodbye” about two separate men I knew in prison: one who committed suicide and one who was executed. This was part of a series with other writers called “Set Me Free” also writing about William Van Poyck, the MB6 writer who was executed by Florida. 

8.On March 27, 2014:  I wrote “10 Things I’m Going to Miss About Prison” about, well, that. 

9.On January 1, 2015: I wrote “Beginning Anew: Part 1 (of 2): ‘Quasi-Freedom’” about coming out of 18.5 years of prison and going to Work Release.

10.On April 16, 2015: I wrote the second half entitled “Prisoner No More: Beginning Anew: Part 2 (of 2…or maybe 3) ‘Freedom is…’” about the busyness of life on the outside and all the addictions that come with freedom. 

11.On July 9, 2015:  I wrote “13 Three Paragraph Vignettes” about living a free life in awe. 

12.And on December 17, 2015:  I wrote in “Impure No More” about, among other things, being denied the chance to donate blood because I was a felon.

All that recap (which was hopefully less painful than the one in the first 20 minutes of “The Godfather Part III”) was to both offer up a collection of my 12 previous pieces on Minutes Before Six in one easy place and to preface to what may well be my final confession: this may be my last written piece for MB6. Thirteen entries seems perfect (and not just because I turned 13 on Friday the 13th and that number has never scared me…even when 1313 North 13th Avenue was my address at the prison in Walla Walla, Washington). 

Certainly if anything ever comes up where I’ve got some righteous indigestion (sic) about the criminal injustice (sick) system that I feel shows the ways in which it continually berates those who are just trying to put their lives together I’ll ask to write an epilogue, as it were, to this. But I think that just as this week the DOC is done with me, I’m done with writing for MB6.

I want to thank everyone who has been such a major part of my MB6 writing career: Dina, my editor and friend. Thomas, my friend and the impetus of this amazing site. Maggie, still and always my friend. The writers who have inspired me: Thomas Bartlett Whitaker, Christi Buchanan, and William Van Poyck. And the writers who I invited to join MB6: my friends Jeremiah Bourgeois and Steve Bartholomew and also Tim Pauley and Art Longworth. And thank you to all the readers who have left both positive, and, um, other, comments. Thank you for reading and making Minutes Before Six something more than us just talking at a blank wall and thank you for making me feel like I was never being rejected.

Because I have always done my best thinking with a pen (and now on a laptop), I am a better man for having written for Minutes Before Six.

*****
--December 2016

Jeff C.

Dreaming of Oxen

January 19, 2017, 6:00 pm

≫ Next: Entering the Hall of Remembrance

≪ Previous: Time to Dance the Thirteenth Step

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A novel of the '60s by Burl N. Corbett
(Copyright 2016)

"If an ox herder were to take opium, he should dream of oxen." From The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey

Chapter One

Breakfast at Julio’s

On an early May morning in the spring of the 1967 "Summer of Love," Sean McClaskey looked up and down Bleecker Street for any spoil sport cops before he pushed his ruined sofa off the fire escape outside his fifth-floor loft window. Nothing was stirring, not even a narc, and the only sound was that of the traffic light at the Bowery intersection clicking through its changes with the dry, pulsing insistence of a gigantic insect. By mid-morning, a scrum of competing winos would be at its feet waylaying stopped motorists for "donations," pawing awkwardly at the windshields with filthy rags, hoping for a quarter or dime to buy another punch on their one-way tickets to oblivion. But at 4:30am, they were sleeping off their drunks in the doorways and vestibules of the Bowery: the shabby seam where the aesthetic sensibility of Greenwich Village butted heads with the brutal indelicacy of the Lower East Side, a vile slum that the media in the journalistic equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig had dubbed "The East Village."

"How's it look?" Sean shouted down to his roomie, Mark Fetter, a native Brooklynite serving a summer's internship as an apprentice beatnik, before deciding whether or not to cannonball into the countercultural waters. "All clear?" 

"Bums away!" Mark punned, giving Sean a double thumbs up.

Sean double-checked the street; it was deserted. The city's fauna had gone to den; nary a teeny-bopper or hippie was in sight, not even a toked-out beatnik or a brain-dead junkie. With a chuckle, he tipped the decrepit couch over the rail, then watched with satisfaction as it gracefully descended, revolving exactly 360 degrees to land with a God-awful crash on its legless bottom. A billowing cloud of ancient dust bunnies, marijuana residue, and many decades of grime mushroomed upwards, then slowly drifted toward Washington Square Park.

"Like, wow, man!" Mark yelled, bouncing foot to foot. "What an outrageous gas!"

Sean thought it pretty cool, too. He glanced at the row of lofts on the opposite side of Bleecker to see if any late-night heretics might hold differing opinions, but not even a heat pipe coughed, let alone a disgruntled beatnik/hippie/pothead hipster choking on a lungful of Acapulco Gold. Evidently, a Zen tree had fallen in a Zen forest and no one had heard it.

Chortling like a pair of mad bombers, they smoked a nightcap in their cold-water, direct current, shower and bathless loft, rehashing with joy their exploit. Mark turned on WBAI-FM, a listener-sponsored radio station that was a great favorite of the hip set. Absolutely non-commercial, it didn't run annoying ads, air boring public service announcements, or pretend to be objective. Since it accepted no public funding, it had no obligation to present opposing views. It was anti-war, anti-Establishment, and didn't care who liked it. Besides the eclectic political content, which ranged from Ayn Rand-libertarianism to New Left autocracy, they played a lot of groovy music, some of which you could actually dance to, not that there were very many besmoked heads up for a quick boogaloo or shimmy.

As Sean was passing a fat doobie to Mark, the disc jockey announced the commencement of the station's semi-annual fund drive.

"Aw, shit, man!" Mark bitched, reaching for the dial. "Not another two weeks of that crap!"

"Wait a minute," Sean cautioned. "Let's hear him out. There's a rumor going round that they have a new scheme planned to get our bread. Turn it up."

"Dig it, all you cats and chicks, we gotta raise some bread to operate," the dee-jay explained, "but instead of bringing down your heads by begging and hassling you, we've decided to play nonstop, as in twenty-four hours a day, that all-time favorite of all you patriotic hipsters, Sergeant Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets," until we reach our goal!"

"WHAT?" Sean shouted.

"He gotta be putting us on, man," Mark hoped, frowning.

But the fiendish disc jockey had already cued the record; the first verse blared out in all its martial glory:

"Fighting soldiers/ from the sky/ Fearless men who jump and die...."

"ARGGGH! Turn it off!" Mark moaned. "If I gotta hear that shit all day long, I'll jump out the window and die!"

Sean unplugged the radio. "Well, either we chip in a few hundred or listen to another station for a few weeks."

"I vote that we find another station," Mark said, climbing the ladder to his platform bed. "I need my bread for dope."

Sean hadn't the money for either, so he flopped onto his floor mattress and fell asleep, dreaming of sofas parachuting from C-130s, gung-ho for glory. 

The warehouses and businesses on the shitty end of the Bleecker Street stick opened at eight, and shortly thereafter the tourist buses and taxis and delivery trucks began their day long crawl from the Village to the dead-end intersection at the Bowery. The defenestrated sofa was dragged to a basement landing where its skirts and lining were crudely eviscerated by desperate wino numismatists who mined eighty-two cents in change, including two buffalo nickels, one fairly scarce Morgan quarter, and five Indian head pennies. A reputable coin dealer would have bought them for enough money to finance a four-day spree, d.t's included, with enough left over for a carton of smokes. Instead, the thirsty treasure hunters settled for a pint bottle of "Pete's Five-Star," an unspeakably foul double-fortified muscatel that by state law could only be sold in New York City. The pulverized residue from broken bottles frosted every sidewalk and stoop from Cooper Union to Canal Street with a glittery rime, over which the legions of drunkards unsteadily navigated, a brain-dead army stumbling towards their personal Little Bighorns.

As these benighted outcasts slowly drank themselves into historical oblivion, a new swarm of future casualties began filtering across the bridges and through the tunnels: the hippies. A bastard offspring whom the remaining Beats denied fathering, and the media denied birthing, they began to infiltrate the two Villages by some weird sort of cultural osmosis. However, the West Village--the traditional haven for aspirant artists, musicians, writers, and quaint eccentrics--was a bit pricey, even for well-heeled suburban kids mooching off their parents. On the other hand, despite its terminal seediness, the East Village was eminently affordable. And there these naive pilgrims from gentler shores found refuge, only to become the prey of vigilant take-off artists, native junkies, Puerto Rican street gangs who despised longhaired maricon "heepies," gung-ho police narc squads, and greedy slum lords. 

Acting as if they had invented happiness, these flower-bedecked, unshorn naifs blithely pranced and gambolled past the stumbling, odoriferous bums much as the pioneers had trudged past the wind-pierced, sun-bleached skeletons of starved horses and mules, thinking, Nah, that won't happen to us. Instead of seeing the godforsaken wino tribe as living warnings against overindulgence, the hippies merely accepted them as colorful denizens of a shared ecosystem, picturesque oddities akin to animated cacti, ragged sun-stunned owls disoriented by the midday sun.

Sean woke up just before eleven, splashed his face with cold water, and walked down the block to his friend Sam Hardy's loft, skipping nimbly over pools of urine and caked vomit, rebuffing panhandlers with a practiced ease. Under Sam's second story window, Sean called his morning greetings.

After a minute or two, Sam's curly-haired head and stubbled face cautiously peered out, squinting his brown eyes in the sun. "Shit, man!" he groaned. "It's like so early, man! I, uh...like...." Overwhelmed by inertia, his voice faded to a stop. 

"Throw down your key," Sean said. The shaggy head vanished, then a roach clip keychain with a single key flew from the window, narrowly missing a passing rabbi. Sean picked it up and entered the building's open vestibule, only to find an unconscious bum blocking the door.

"Jesus, what next?" Sean muttered. The man was either sleeping off a drunk, or dead. Waking a comatose bum wouldn't be easy, but dealing with a dead wino would be a hassle of a much higher magnitude. Police would have to be called, boring questions answered, and besides the time wasted, there would be the future risk of being called for a coroner's inquest. Any way you looked at it, it was a horribly inconvenient way to start one’s day. A real "bummer" one could say, he-he-he.

Fortunately, after a bit of prodding by Sean's genuine Pakistani water buffalo (with a big toe loop), the choice of discriminating beatniks from San Francisco's North Beach to New York City's Greenwich Village, the forlorn bum regained a sort of insect awareness and lurched erect, reeking with an appalling effluvium of unwashed clothing and decaying flesh pickled in wine puke and well-seasoned with urine and badly wiped excrement. Peering about, his dead and rheumy eyes portals to a vast emptiness; he staggered past Sean into the sunlight, his very existence an insult to humanity, and possibly God as well. Within an hour, resurrected by a few drinks, he'd be working the squeegee hustle at the traffic light, a proven tourist attraction in his busted clothes and exploded work boots that had never known a lick of work harder than dragging a soiled rag across the windshields of stopped cars.

Sean unlocked the door and entered the cluttered downstairs hallway. On the right was the storefront apartment of Dave and Donna Bonner, long-time Village residents whom had once witnessed Jack Kerouac during one of his monumental and pointless binges. They had been unimpressed. "He just wasn't cool," Dave had recalled, easily separating the myth from reality.

"Yeah," Donna added, "he seemed so sad, so frantic. Definitely uncool."

Their heresy had surprised Sean. When he met Sam on his first day in the city the previous year, Sean still cherished a naively romantic view of the Beat forefathers, unaware that Kerouac, Ginsburg, and Burroughs had spent as much time uptown as down, or that Kerouac preferred to share a jug with Bowery bums rather than hobnob with the Washington Square folksinger set that Sean wanted to join. Wounded internally, Kerouac had retreated to his mother's nest in the early '60s to die, and his sporadic visits to the Village entered legend as the peripatetic wanderings of a flawed saint. But as Sean was to learn, even saints have their sceptics, and heresy is an all-inclusive religion open to all. So far, Sean neither worshipped with the true believers, nor stood with the agnostics: He remained unaffiliated.

At the bottom of the stairs, a suspended low-watt bulb burned night and day, illuminating dusty political posters from the '30s that depicted noble farmers and factory workers surging forward in the heroic stances so beloved by the hack illustrators of the Old Left "Communard School." Exhortations in Cyrillic which Sean mistook for Greek, urged the masses to rise as one and overthrow whichever running-dog capitalist scheme that was then afoot. That linguistic ignorance proved advantageous one smoky evening when an unappreciative neighbor who had a thing about loud music summoned two of New York's "Finest" to squelch the decibels.

The cops invited themselves into the downstairs hall where they quickly spotted the lurid posters. Peering about warily, as if expecting Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh to leap from behind the mounds of junk waving a hammer and sickle, the older officer poked the curled edge of a fly-specked poster and asked, "What the hell's that say?"

"Beats me," Sean confessed. "I can't read Greek." The mollified cop then delivered a boilerplate warning about "keepin' it down, fer Christ's sake," blah, blah, blah. His younger partner examined the posters with a more worldly eye, smiling wryly to let Sam and Sean know that he recognized Commie propaganda when he saw it, but didn't give a damn, knowing that nobody outside of the John Birch Society took seriously the leftover claptrap nailed up forty years ago by an unrepentant Trotskyite. The cops did take seriously, however, the drug laws, so Sam skilfully maneuverer them back to the front door before they decided to investigate the source of the loud music. But chickenshit complaints like this one were a pain in the ass for the cops, too, and after a last half-hearted warning, they split to catch a few z's at their favorite back alley "coop," leaving no one worse for wear except the whining neighbor who would now live in dread of some sort of nefarious beatnik retaliation.

"Whew, man," Sam whewed after the squad car drove away. "That was close! I'm just glad that you told him that the writing was Greek instead of Russian. We don't need the fuzz thinking we're Commies as well as dope fiends." They went upstairs, fired up a celebratory joint, hurled a few threats out the window to the subdued complainant, and turned down the radio a half-decibel.

That was then, but this was NOW, and past the posters and up the creaking stairs Sean raced to Sam's loft, pushing open the knobless, lockless door to enter a beatnik lair of stupefying disorder. Amid scree of crumpled cigarette packs and sheets of discarded notebook paper, dirty clothes and dirtier clothes, sat three sofas as ratty as the one thrown from Sean's fire escape. They formed a rough "U," its throat open to a blackened fireplace last used to burn the collection of parking tickets accumulated by Sam the last time he had "owned" a car, and usually bedded overnight guests who had ventured one toke too far over the line. Actually, Sam had "borrowed" the car—a Volkswagen Karman-Ghia --from a storage garage when its owner left for a hitchhiking tour of Europe, using it to tool around the Village picking up girls, "junking" for discarded goodies on uptown trash set-out nights, and zooming to Jersey for the odd carpentry job to pay the rent. Eventually the local junkies stole the battery, then the wheels, and until the city finally towed it away, it sat forlornly on the corner of Mulberry and Bleecker serving as a "bum" shelter, pun intended. For a brief time Sam fretted over his friend's future reaction to the loss of his "short," but then word came across the Atlantic that his hitchhiking pal had gotten busted in Portugal for possession of hash, and very probably would not be returning for a while, and just like in the movies everything sorted itself out nicely.

Sean found Sam sitting full-lotus on the floor, fiddling with a radio he had Frankensteined together from parts scavenged in the streets. It glowed and hummed like a jury-rigged in a low-budget sci-fi B movie, but it was better than nothing. It perched on a wooden crate that served double-duty as a table and a stool to reach the ceiling fan switch. Once it had a chain, but Sam figured that replacing it would enmesh him in a long, complicated series of boring tasks, each more onerous than the preceding one: Schlep to a hardware store, find a chain, and pay for it; schlep back home only to discover that the goddamn chain doesn't fit because the fan is almost fifty-years-old and obsolete; schlep back to the store and get involved in a "no return policy" scene with the uptight cat behind the counter; then after an incredible hassle, get back the goddamn ninety-six cents and schlep home again (by now, it's fucking raining!); roll a joint and get high. So why not just skip the preliminaries, say "Fuck the chain'," chill out in comfort, and toke up?

Sean pushed aside a heap of mildewed tee shirts and flopped on the opposite sofa. "What's happening, man?" he asked.

No reply. Sam was totally engrossed in a radio scene, turning the tuner to and fro with a screwdriver, staring at Sean with his typical unblinking, penetrating gaze that Sean at first had found profoundly unsettling until he realized that it wasn't some sort of weird intimidation ritual, only Sam's normal method of socialization. After sailing through seas of static and dead air, the tuner found WBAI, which of course was playing Sergeant Sadler's mindless paean to die-at-the-ramparts patriotism.

"What a bummer!" Sam moaned. "They've been playing this crappy song all day! What's the point of it anyway? Don't they know how many heads they've brought down?"

Sean laughed. He brushed back his almost-to-the-shoulder brown hair, pulled at his moustache, and began cleaning his round, wire-rimmed glasses on his semi-clean tee shirt, explaining the while how WBAI decided to blackmail their listeners into ponying up their ransom bread.

"What a total drag," Sam pronounced, fruitlessly attempting to find the classical station. "Fuck it, man, let's get breakfast at Julio's," he said, yanking the cord from the outlet and springing to his feet.

With youthful vigor, they galloped down the stairs and exploded into the glorious sun of a New York City day, where anything was possible, instant gratification imminent, and enlightenment waited just around the corner.

Julio's was a long, narrow Latino eatery wedged incongruously in the middle of a block of anonymous warehouses and mysterious offices in which nondescript workers conducted enigmatic tasks of an unfathomable nature. Lower Manhattan was dotted with similar four and five-story buildings, many sporting ornamental cast iron facades and Grecian-styled concrete friezes and cornices. Once imposing, they were now soiled and eroded by smog and time. The restaurant seemed vaguely out-of-place, like a blacksmith shop plunked down in the midst of uptown's "Diamond Row." But Julio served good, cheap food only a half-block from Sam's loft, and, best of all, extended credit to anyone with the cojones to ask, which Sam had in spades.

The first time that Sam had stopped in, he made the honest mistake of assuming Julio was a Puerto Rican. He had been instantly corrected. "No, no, amigo! I'm Mexican, not Puerto Rican! They no damn good!"

Sam, a typical "Ban the Bomb" liberal and civil rights supporter, found Julio's prejudice not only perplexing, but counter to the liberal mantra of "racial solidarity," a basic tenet of the "Movement." Puzzled, Sam concluded in a not untypical bit of "Progressive" rationalization that it was just a "Spanish macho trip, man. What more can I say?"

Sam had been elucidating his convoluted theories of racial politics ever since Sean had come to the Village the previous summer with only a Martin 00-16C guitar, a child's suitcase with one change of clothes, and a fuzzy desire to follow in either Bob Dylan's bootsteps or author Henry Miller's pecker tracks. With the optimism of a nineteen-year-old, both had seemed possible. But now, a year later, neither seemed likely and Sean was content just to have fun.

"Hola, amigos!" Julio called as Sam and Sean entered and took counter seats. "The usual, no?" Sam lifted two fingers and grinned. With a smile, Julio began frying slices of ham, potatoes, and sunny side up eggs.

"Uh, do you mind putting it on my tab, man?" Sam asked.

Without turning, Julio switched the spatula from his left hand to his right and pencilled on the wall another two slashes, then resumed cooking, humming along with the jukebox. The present tally was nine meals--$7.20. Old tallies from months past were scribbled over, never erased. It was an unusual arrangement, given that Sam and Sean were Julio's only gringo customers. Sam often wondered where all the Latino patrons came from; the nearest barrio was several blocks away in the Lower East Side, aka "The East Village" or "Alphabet City," a seething slum that began at Avenue A and grew progressively worse as one traversed Avenues B and C en route to the unmatched squalidness of Avenue D. Beyond that nadir of crime and poverty was the East River, and perhaps dragons. But at Julio's that fine May noon, no one was worried about social inequality or racial injustice, or even the breakfast tab. When Sam or Sean scored some extra bread, they'd square things away with a tip and a sincere "Gracias, Julio," and a few days later, broke again, the score would begin to mount once more.

After wolfing down their food, they went outside to smoke and watch the steady stream of humanity pass by. Sometimes Sean felt like he had wandered into a documentary on comparative religions. Down the sidewalk came Orthodox Jews and their Hasidic brethren; preoccupied rabbis muttering in Hebrew; pairs of black-habited nuns, fingering their rosaries as they placidly tacked through the throngs of believers and heretics and the neutral; gaggles of Hare Krishnas ommming and chanting and tinkling their silly bells, the slap and scruff of their flip-flops accompanying their weird incantations; the bearded and burnoosed of arcane sects; the Arabs and Sikhs and Hindus; the stray itinerant preachers from their church of one; and, for all he knew, Jesus in disguise, bringing in His anger a terrible judgment.

But today, that vengeance was held in abeyance; the apocalypse postponed. As they came to the corner of Mulberry Street on their way to Sean's loft, Sam asked Sean if he felt like checking out a few Canal Street junkshops.

"Sure, I have a few bucks to blow. I'm planning to work at Minuteman tomorrow anyway," Sean replied. "Who knows? Maybe we'll find a magic lamp with a stoned genie." 

They turned right onto Mulberry, and a few blocks later entered a foreign country.

To be continued...

Burl N. Corbett HZ6518 SCI Albion 10745 Route 18 Albion, PA 16475-0002

Born 6/9/47 in Reading, PA.  Raised on a 123-acre sheep farm only three crow miles from John Updike´s famous sandstone farmhouse of “Pigeon Feathers,” The Centaur, and Of the Farm.  Graduated from Daniel Boone High School in 1965.  Ran away to Greenwich Village to become a beatnik in 1966 with only a Martin guitar and the clothes on my back.  Lived among the counterculture for 3 years, returning disillusioned to PA for good in 1968.  Worked on a mink farm; poured steel in a foundry; chased the sun as a cross-country pipeliner; drove the big rigs, baby!; picked tomatoes with migrant workers; tended bar on the old skid row Bowery; worked as a reporter, columnist, and photographer for two Southeastern Pennsylvania newspapers; drove beer truck (hic!); was a “HEY, CULLIGAN MAN!”; learned how to plaster, stucco, and lay stone; published both fiction and nonfiction in several nationally distributed magazines and literary quarterlies; got married and raised four children; got divorced and fell into the bottle; and came to prison at the age of 60 with no previous criminal offenses other than a 25 year-old DUI. The “crime”? Self-defense in my own house without financial means to hire a decent lawyer.  Since becoming the “guest” of the state in 2007, I have won 3 PEN Prison Writing Awards (two first and an honorable mention); the first and only prize of $500 in the 2013 Eaton Literary Agency short fiction contest; written a children/young adult book, Coon Tales, soon to be published by Xlibris; a novel of the 1967 “Summer of Love,” Dreaming of Oxen; a magic realism novel, A Redneck Ragnorak, and many short stories and memoirs.  My first novel, A Haven from Violence, is available at Xlibris.com or Amazon.com.

Authors note: Dreaming of Oxen is a 52-chapter, 556-page tour de force in search of a literary agent or an independent publisher willing to disregard my present circumstances and focus instead upon my art.

Entering the Hall of Remembrance

January 26, 2017, 3:28 pm

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By Mathew Aho

My Grandfather is the glue that holds our family together. He raised three daughters, but was never given the son he wanted. Ironically, all three of his daughters would grow to have sons of their own. My Mother and her sister would end up raising their sons as single parents. My Uncle and my Father had their own agendas and were not around. My Grandfather stepped in as the male role model, and father figure, that my cousin and I needed.

I would only see my Grandfather a couple times a year, but I remember counting down the days until it was time to visit. He took me fishing at the local creek, Big Greek, where I caught Crawdads, small Trout and Sculpines with him for hours. He also taught me how to tie and bait a hook. He took me fishing for salmon and Sturgeon, and crabbing on the Columbia River. He taught me how to shoot a bb gun, and even let me shoot my first real gun, a .22 caliber revolver.

I loved fishing so much, and still do. Being in the woods and surrounded by silence except for the sounds of nature—and Grandpa's quiet knowledge of local trees and plants, how to read a river and the tides--this is when I was happiest. Grandpa recognized my passion for fishing and being outdoors. He took me to Alaska one year, driving us all the way there from Oregon. We stopped at every lake, river and puddle so I could cast my line a few times. In Alaska we dug for Razor clams, fished for Halibut in Cook Inlet, Chinook and Sockeye on the Kenai and Russian Rivers.

Grandpa taught me how to run a chainsaw and split firewood, to stoke a fire. He taught me how to ride a dirt bike, a Honda XR 80. I remember how he laughed at me when I dumped it over while riding through a large mud puddle. I was embarrassed, discouraged, and soaked to the bone but he made me get back on and try again. He taught me to never give up.

But I was just a young boy in those days. As I got older, I started getting into trouble with the law and using drugs. Grandpa never turned his back on me, but instead sat me down and explained that I had a choice to make. He reminded me of the good times we'd shared and explained that one direction included all of those things, and the other way none of them. The choice was mine. I chose wrongly.

I continued down the path of destruction, a life of crime and addiction. Several felony convictions later--including a couple gun charges--and I‘m serving a sentence of 17 1/2 years in prison.

The trouble with being a hard-headed and drug-addicted youth is that you don't realize your own mistakes until it‘s too late. My biggest mistake wasn't in missing out on creating more good memories with Grandpa. Rather, my biggest mistake was in not realizing the hole I had dug for myself until it was too deep.

Grandpa deserved a better grandson than me. I regret most of all not being able to show him the man I have become. He will never be able to witness my redemption, and I will never hear him say he's proud of me. I am finally on the path I should have been on a long time ago. I have sworn oaths and dedicated the majority of my time to self-improvement and education, for the sake of my own children. But my Grandfather will never get to see me succeed.

Cancer is consuming his body. I can't help but feel an overwhelming sense of guilt because my family needs me and the man who taught me so much needs me for the first time. But I cannot be there for them, for him.

I will never be able to take my Grandfather fishing, as he did for me so many times. Whenever I receive a Jpay message saying I should call home, my stomach churns and my thoughts immediately go to the worst. Will I even get a chance to tell him goodbye? Or will a sergeant appear at my cell front one day bearing the news I have been dreading? I do not want to hear it from DOC staff, especially the Chaplain.

I worry about my Grandmother. Who will make sure she is okay, that the wood is split and the fire stoked? I look a lot like my Grandfather. Could my presence comfort her? My Mother and aunt will need my help since they still live on their own. Yet I cannot be there for any of them.

I feel like a failure. I have failed my family, failed to make proud the only man in my life whose opinion of me matters. Regardless of what I am able to accomplish or what type of degree I walk out of this prison with, the pride I gain from it will be stained with the residue of my failures. 

Doing time used to be easy. I used to hear others—and myself--say, "A three-piece? A nickel? Shoot, I can do that standing on my head." But not now, not after being given this sentence. Sobriety and reality have set in. The realization that my children won‘t have their father present in their lives until they are adults made me focus on truly making it this time. The days melted together, the past five years becoming a blur. But now that I am so close to reaching my goals, time has all but stopped. I am haunted by the thought of losing my Grandfather. What if something happens to my family? My children? I am now painfully aware of every day I am serving, and with the passing of each another set of memories I am missing.

I am trapped behind a red brick wall and razor wire, unable to do what needs to be done. I hate that I am helpless in this regard, and have only myself to blame. I will carry this guilt for the rest of my life.

In the belief system of my ancestors, which I also follow, there is an afterlife. Reserved for those who have lived honorable and courageous lives, Valhalla is also for those warriors who have been slain in battle. Those who’ve shown no fear, honoring their ancestors and descendants through their deeds in life and actions in death.

Highly sought after and filled with glorious souls, Valhalla is literally the hall of the slain. Throughout the day there is much drinking, feasting and celebrating. At the end of each day the warrior souls, known as Einherjar, fight to the death only to be restored the following day so they can repeat everything again.

Upon entering this great hall you are greeted by the god Bragi, the divine Skald who sings of your exploits and welcomes you, reuniting you with your ancestors. You fight, feast and die everyday, in preparation for Ragnarok: the final battle, and end of time as we know it.

In the poem "Havamal," Odin tells of the importance of living honorably, being hospitable and having our deeds remembered: "Cattle die, kinsmen die, and everyman himself will die. But the one thing that never dies is the fame of a dead man's deeds." 

We honor our ancestors at days of remembrance, at Blots and at Sumbel. We tell their stories at family gatherings, commemorating our lineage.

When I was told that my Grandfather, who had been the only steady father figure in my life, was sick with cancer and only had six months to a year to live, I began to question whether I would ever see him again in eternity or not. To what part of the afterlife would he make it? Would he gain Valhalla? Does Odin's hall hold a seat for him? For me?

Valhalla, taken literally, can only be reached by those who are chosen or have died in battle. But what is Valhalla symbolically? Access to the hall requires honorable acts worthy of story or song, deeds worth reliving until existence itself ceases.

I believe Valhalla represents the importance of being remembered. To become a memory or have one‘s story written is symbolic of gaining Valhalla. Living an honorable life, leaving a mark on the world, will earn our exploits and deeds a place in the halls of the living. We live on in the minds of those we have affected. Our battles will be relived and refought every time we are remembered. A mead horn will be lifted in our honor, and we will each be celebrated in the minds of our descendants, our family and friends. To inspire those who follow in our footsteps, making them strive to emulate or continue what we‘ve accomplished--that, I believe, is the essence of Einherjar.

To gain Valhalla is to become unforgotten. Becoming memorable is gaining Valhalla. According to Odinist beliefs, a glorious death is defined by martyrdom or dying in war while fighting. But what about battling cancer? What about battling addiction, or fighting to feed, protect and provide for your family? Fighting life‘s obstacles without fear- persevering and striving forward, unwavering in the face of adversity. Are those deaths worthy of song? Worthy of being turned into stories passed down until the end of time as we know it?

Our ancestors strived for fame and renown so they would live on forever. They did not fear death, but rather welcomed it. If I die, went their reasoning, it will have been my time. Why worry about when that time arrives? Embrace life, and accept the inevitability of death.

I could attempt to trace my lineage back to All-Father Odin, as some kinsmen have done, and brag about being a direct descendant. But I need not go back further than two generations. For being a descendant of Kenneth Hoagland is worth bragging about. My heart swells with the pride and honor of calling myself his grandson. Without the gift of his blood in my veins, I would not exist, nor would my children. How can someone ever repay another for such a gift? All I can do is strive to become even half the man he is and offer this:

Grandpa, you will never be forgotten. I will not let your memory die. I will make sure that your descendants, my descendants, know you and love you. Even though you may never see it, Grandfather, I will do all I can to make you proud.

As long as Valhalla‘s gates still shine for those who deserve remembrance, I know he will be welcome there.

I will do my best to see you again, Grandpa Hoagy.


Update:  My grandfather passed away the morning of December 25th, 2016.  He will be missed...

Mathew Aho 841807 WSRU D-224 P.O. Box 777 Monroe, WA 98272-0777

I am 35 years old, and the father of three wonderful children. About halfway through a 210 month prison sentence for firearm and burglary charges, I'm utilizing my time by earning a degree from Seattle Central College through University Beyond Bars at Washington State Reformatory in Monroe, Washington. I'm nearly there.

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No Mercy For Dogs Chapter 20

February 2, 2017, 4:45 pm

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By Thomas Bartlett Whitaker

To read Chapter 19, click here

"The fire," the voice said, somewhere off to my right. "El fueyyyy-go," it echoed, annoyingly.

I didn't respond. Didn't want to answer him, or to otherwise embolden his ontology.

"It's going to become a real problem, you know," he droned on stubbornly, ignoring my ignoring. It took me a moment to summon the will power needed to shift my body slightly on the cot. The pain exploded again in my chest, the three broken ribs ratcheting up an old symphony, now familiar, that the opiates had concealed before I foolishly tossed them away back in Cerralvo. My head didn't hurt at all, which was a much bigger problem, but I wasn't cognitively capable of approaching the realization that brain injuries kill you with soporific camouflage. The embers from the elevated concrete fireplace-cum-oven still glowed a comforting red. "Looks fine," I murmured, closing my eyes again. I tried to decide if attempting to burrow deeper into the three wool blankets currently covering me was worth the pain, and decided against it.

"The fire's fine," he riposted after a few moments. "It's more the lack of the fire that might, you know, become worrisome."

I opened my eyes again, moving from the fire down to the four by five by five foot recess built into the wall underneath the fireplace, where several stacks of corded wood lay in what had previously seemed to be sufficient abundance. How many had there been, then? I wondered. I closed my eyes and tried to think back to my arrival...yesterday? I wasn't sure anymore. It was clearly dark outside. Surely I hadn't slept all day and into the next night? "The fire wouldn't have lasted," he responded, now somewhere to my left. He was right, the annoying bastard. Which meant that in less than a day, I'd already used roughly fifteen percent of my wood, I calculated groggily. That really was going to be a problem, I agreed, telling myself I needed to sit up. I didn't listen.

"Wake up, sleepyhead," he crowed happily, now above me. "You've been putting things off without a break now for hours. Nobody gets time off in the procrastinatorium for good behavior."

I finally managed to pull myself upward into a sitting position, my breath ragged. The pain pirouetted across my torso and back, feeling as if rusty nails had been driven down through the skin. I almost reached down to feel if this was in fact somehow the case, but decided if it was I couldn't do anything about it besides let the heat out. Even with the fire, my breath was clearly visible in the air in front of my face as I panted.

"It's alive," he cackled as I stood blearily and shuffled closer to the heat. Gingerly placing a few new logs on the embers, I turned to survey my frozen hell. The Hammer had admitted that his little mountain hideout wasn‘t a resort, but it was barely habitable - indeed, if I froze to death in a few days, it would pretty much meet the textbook definition for being inhabitable. Little more than a rectangular concrete box, it possessed only three amenities: the aforementioned fireplace, an army cot almost identical to the one I'd been sleeping on in my stall at la ranchita, and a decrepit old table. I had brought a few bags of supplies with me, some food, matches, and oil for the lantern. Someone had obviously been notified of my arrival, because four huge mesh bags hung from the ceiling rafters, each filled with supplies of a still undetermined nature. No electricity, no restroom, and apparently only enough wood to keep a warm-blooded mammal alive for a few days.

"'Left behind like a rainbow in the dark,'" he sang behind me. "They threw you away like a bloody rag. You know this is Gelo going for a soft resolution to the you-problem."

"Maybe," I nodded, trying to figure out what I needed to do in order to survive, and not entirely certain why I was having so much trouble jump-starting the decision-loop.

"Deus vult," he remarked, sounding almost chipper. "Maybe you should ask Him for some help. Though He won't hear your prayers until you tell him you are sorry."

"When He apologizes to me, I'll do the same," I answered, before pausing. "I can't smell the fire." I bent down towards the flames, inhaling deeply.

"Meaningless," he said offhandedly. It wasn‘t meaningless, but I couldn't connect the dots. Wood. That was the important thing. I was told there would be an ax in the cabin, and I assumed it must be in one of the sacks. I trudged over to the first and began poking at it, trying to spin it so the light from the fire illuminated the contents. The first looked to be mostly canned goods and pastries. I could see at least a few cans of some brand of soup that was unknown to me. When I tried to shift the load a bit I winced, so I moved on to the second. This contained more food, boxes and boxes of snack foods plus what looked to be some crates of eggs and a few fat sausages wrapped in plastic. I found the ax inside the third, nestled inside a few dozen brown paper bags. Each mesh bag was suspended by a thick rope that was tossed over exposed wooden beams near the ceiling, with the terminal end of each tied to hooks on the all. It seemed an odd set-up, and I wouldn't discern the reason for it for another few days. Following the line corresponding to the third bag, I moved to the wall and slowly untied it, attempting to let the line play out slowly. You don't realize just how core your core is until you lose it, and at the first tension I released the line with a gasp. The sack plopped onto the concrete gracelessly, and I hoped there hadn't been anything delicate inside.

"Now that's what I'm talking about," he laughed. "Got to love all of that idealistic Emersonian self-reliance shit. 'All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.'"

"That's Whitman, asshole. Right time, wrong master." He said something in response but I ignored him, rooting around in the sack until I was able to pull out the ax. It was a pleasantly heavy thing, with an oak handle and a leather holster affixed over the blade. In that moment, it seemed imperative that I immediately go outside to chop something down, so I moved to the door and threw it open. The wind tore into me and I halted, confused, suddenly and devastatingly at a loss as to what I was supposed to be doing out there. I looked down at the ax in my hand and then out into the darkness. Some vestige of rationality returned to me and I slammed the door.

"Bah, what a fucking coward," he said behind me as I lifted another few logs onto the fire. "'Is man no more than this? Consider him well.'"

I burrowed back under the blankets, and tried to ignore him. I was circling the drain down into oblivion when it finally came to me. "Anosmia," I blurted out, opening my eyes to stare up at the ceiling. When he didn't answer I shivered.

"That's why I can't smell the fire. My brain...it's..." I stammered, trying to drag a pearl I knew to be important out of the mud. Something about a brain swelling in a skull contracted from the cold. It was there for a flash, then gone. A blurry form effervesced in the shadows above me. Only its eyes were totally visible, shining in the firelight like keyholes into worlds where the worst things always come to pass.

"And there are objects that knock and are never answered, and a ceaseless movement, and a confused name," he whispered, a chorus of chthonic voices sibilating nonsenses on a deeper track.

"You are insane," I managed, before slamming my eyes closed tightly.

"I am wine," his voice spiraled down with the wind. "You, as Yeats might have said, are mere wine-breath."

There was laughter, and then, for a time, there was nothing.

An indeterminate number of hours later, I woke to find sunlight flooding through the two windows on the east wall. I saw there for a time watching the sacks cast strange shadows on the opposite wall, looking like nothing more than gargantuan mutant bats. The fire had mostly burned itself out, and that brought me back to my present peril. I fought my way to my feet and set a few more logs on the fire before stoking the embers. Food, I reasoned. That was now the new first thing. I wasn't hungry but I knew that I needed fuel. Then the ax, I said to myself, which would bring more warmth. As long as I could keep that cycle up, I would make it. I detached the line from the first sack I had surveyed the night before, and it fell heavily to the ground. I dragged this until it was directly underneath the second, the one with the eggs. This fell just as heavily as the first, but it didn't fall as far. I rooted around until I found the thankfully unbroken eggs, a wedge of yellow cheese, and some sausage. I removed a pack of now frozen flour tortillas from one of the bags I had brought with me, plus the shovel. I laid this directly over the embers and fried the eggs on it. I don't know why I did this. There was a perfectly decent disco as well as a small grill right there on the table, but the shovel just insisted upon itself and the circuitry upstairs was still barely avoiding the big 404 Error screen.

I felt a renewed sense of confidence once I was suitably fortified, and put on my jacket. I fished around in my gear until I found a pair of leather work gloves, and put them on. The ax was still where I had left it by the floor, and I felt like manifest destiny personified as I pulled the door open and first surveyed my domain in the light of day. If I had felt like I'd been living in the shadow of mountains in Cerralvo, I was clearly in them now. The Hammer's escondrijo appeared to be situated in a wide valley between several rocky outcroppings. None were high enough to be completely free of trees. Indeed, in a departure from the semi-arid expanses of land around Cerralvo, where nearly everything living was covered in thorns, the land here was covered in trees: some were familiar like oaks and a few pines, while others were beyond my classification abilities. What mattered, I remember thinking at the time, was that they would burn - damn their names. A particularly dense copse stood to my left, near what was very obviously the hideout's well. The sun was out, the sky a deep azure, and while the temperature was still clearly below freezing, I didn't think it would stay that way for long. I felt oddly pleased, again still unable to appreciate just how much damage the barrel of that pistol had done to my head.

The set-up for the well was exactly the same as found at la ranchita, to the extent that I was almost certain it had been drilled by the same firm. I noticed a small spigot roughly eight feet of the ground, just in case I wanted to take a shower and subsequently freeze to death. I decided to pass for the nonce, and headed off towards the west, hoping to find a tree that I could cut while still feeling the warmth of the sun. I found it shortly, a mesquite tree of roughly 15 feet in height. It didn't look too thick, while at the same time easily large enough to provide enough warmth for at least a few days. I steeled myself for the task, practicing swinging the ax in such a way that my arms did most of the work.

"You have to do this," I told myself, broadcasting my best imitation of nonchalant badassery. Then the first blow landed with a heavy thunk, and my chest detonated, feeling like shrapnel had shredded my lungs. I dropped to my knees, the ax left forgotten, wedged firmly in the mesquite. I lay there gasping, willing the pain to pass, oblivious to the tears that were streaming down my cheeks, soon to freeze. In the distance I thought I heard what sounded vaguely like cowbells, but they soon faded away. My knees had grown frigid from the contact with the ground, but I couldn't move. I just gripped myself and stared at the stony earth, imagining myself slowly falling through it, dissolving, into I knew not what.

"These violent delights have violent ends, I see," he said, from somewhere behind me.

"Shit," I gasped.

"Indeed. We were told once that pain is the vaccine against death. You recall? Yes, I know you recall. I'm curious to know if you find this now to be true."

"Please," I begged through clenched teeth. "I can't handle your crazy bullshit right now."

"Crazy bullshit?' Insights into deviant behavior tend to come quickest to those that have a guilty share of them. You know that mesquite is one of the densest woods in the forest."

Did I know that? I had to, I screamed at myself. "You're me...just...just an increase in activity in Broca's or Wernicke's, maybe a swelling of the posterior gyrus of the left hem-"

"I might be as mad as a sack of ferrets, but at least I know enough to aim for that Ochroma lagopus over there if I were attempting to cut down a tree in your condition."

I looked where he was pointing. "I didn't remember balsa looked like that."

"Yes, you did," he said softly.

"Leave me alone," I commanded him.

"Fool," he hissed. “Alone is all you've ever been. All you'll ever be."

I stumbled back to the cabin and slammed the door. I don't even recall falling onto the cot but I must have because I awoke there hours later, shivering as the sun began to set. I staggered outside, collecting fallen branches, sticks, anything to add to the fire that might buy me some time for my body to heal. After an hour or so of this, I had amassed what seemed to be a sizeable pile. I dragged everything inside and sealed the door. I relit the fire and fed it a good meal, and then doddered over to the cot and collapsed. Somehow when I opened my eyes again, the flames had mysteriously put themselves out, but I was too tired to get up and deal with it. Later, I heard bells again and then someone calling out a greeting. I moved clumsily to the window and found it was day again. Several million shaggy goats seemed to be swarming the cabin, and I stared at them glassily for several minutes until I heard a voice again. I looked to the left and saw a man waving at me, but I didn't respond.  The glass was old, wrinkled, with occasional fields of small bubbles trapped within various sections. I found if I shifted my head an inch or so, the man would vanish into one of these occlusions. I banished and resummoned him a few times before falling back under the covers. I didn't even bother with the fire at all that night.

Outside, inside: a coma of fog and sleet. My breath seemed to take on a life of it’s own in the starlight, and I played games with it.

"That's probably not going to help much, you know."

"Perhaps not. Tomorrow I might be an icicle, but you will still be a dick."

He nodded. "A cabron nadie me gana."

"Do you ever feel like your perceptions of the things around us have become automated?" I asked.

"Now who's nuts?"

I dispelled him by falling back to sleep, but he kept waking me up.

"Do you remember the bouillabaisse?“ he asked me at one point.

"Bool-ya-baise," I mimicked him, then started laughing until the little pieces of glass under my skin made me stop.

"From Dickens on the Strand, in Galveston. They were cooking it there in that little restaurant right on the street. You wept. Surely you remember

I didn't weep," I responded angrily. "I've never wept a day in my life.”

“Very funny. Cried like a little girl, or at least you wanted to, which is the same thing. They were throwing all of these little crabs in there, and they were still alive. Then they tossed in the lobster. You recall."

"It ate a crab," I said in a dead voice. "It was turning red, and the lobster snatched up one of the little crabs and ate it. And we were just all standing there while the cook tossed in some red pepper."

"Why did you freeze up like that? They yelled at you."

"Because I saw it then. Nobody else was paying attention. Nobody ever pays any attention to anything."

"Yes," he whispered, the saddest voice I'd ever heard.

"Everything's a lie. In the pot was the only truth. It's all just samsara, over and around, always moving, never arriving, forever and ever, Amen," I crossed myself in mockery.

"Right analysis. Wrong conclusion."

"What's to conclude? We're all either the lobster or the crab. Sometimes we get to play both. Better to be the lobster. I'm the crab now."

"No," his voice bled into the wind whistling through the rafters. "It's better to be the cook."

"I was the cook, once. One single time. And I repeated his actions, praying that the god of both lobsters and crabs would show and prove to me that He existed. My only choice."

"No," he said, followed by silence. "You could have put them back in the sea. "That's the only truth."

"Get out!” I shouted.

And he did.

The temperature spiked the next morning, and by noon it was warm enough for me to sit on the doorstep with only one blanket. I felt numb, but also vaguely human for the first time in awhile. My memories of the preceding week paraded with hazy embarrassment through my mind, and for the first time since the beating I was able to comprehend just how seriously messed up I had been. The real question was: had Gelo known I was delusional, or had he attributed my loopiness to the drugs? Because if he had known, then this little excursion really was meant to be a death sentence of the plausibly deniable sort. I would only ever know for certain if nobody ever came to pick me up. Two months, he had said. I decided that I really needed to sit down and organize my supplies, so I knew exactly how much of everything I had. If the end of February came around and nobody had come to retrieve me, I was going to have to hike my way out of here. I had no idea what I would do at that point. Retrieve the rest of my stuff from the taller, and then leave the Hammer and his little narco-paradise behind. It was a plan. Not much of one, but it's a little easier to be knee deep in the trenches if there is at least some ghost of an objective flitting about.

A new problem presented itself as soon as I began to organize my supplies. All around the mesh bags I found tiny crumbs - some from the pastries, others from the tortillas, still more from unidentifiable sources. I stared confusedly at the mess before sifting through some of the packages. I started noticing that many of them had been ripped open in a particularly savage manner, like I'd torn them apart with my incisors. I picked up a nearly empty wrapper of Bimbo "Donas" and found only two of the six inside. Why the hell would I have eaten two thirds a package of donuts? When in the hell had I eaten them? I wondered. I grew increasingly concerned about how much damage I had done to my reserves as I emptied each of the mesh bags. It was almost random, the packages I had dipped into. I was nearly finished with my inventory of the third bag when the last horse finally crossed the finish line: fucking mice! That's why everything had been set up to hang from the rafters, I realized tardily. While I had been sparring with some demented alter ego, my neighbors had been pilfering my loot. A rookie move, I admitted to myself. Stupid. "Survival is not mandatory, idiot," I berated myself, half expecting to hear a voice agreeing with me. Fortunately, only the wind moaned in assent.

Most of the damage was concentrated in the second bag. I separated out the items that had been nibbled on, and placed them in a pile by the door. The clean items I set on the table. The first bag mostly escaped their attention, perhaps because the second sat directly on top of it and nearly covered the opening at the top. I still hadn't even bothered to untie the fourth by this point, and decided to leave it hanging until I could get the first three organized. All told, I'd lost about ten percent of my pastries, one loaf of bread, and some seeds. Amazingly, they hadn't even touched the slabs of cheese wrapped in wax paper, a fact that left me oddly demoralized. It's a sad world when you can't even trust childhood cartoons.

I reorganized the mesh bags in what I perceived to be a more rational manner, and then sat down in the fading light and calculated how much I could eat each day if I had to stay here 70, 80, or 90 days. It was, I thought, either the 21st or 22nd of December. The first of March was therefore either 69 or 70 days down the road. I decided that if no one had shown up by the 5th of March, I was going to take matters into my own hands, so I crossed out the numbers for the 90-day plan and circled the ones for 80. The temperature was plummeting outside, but I felt oddly warmed from the immersion in the world of numbers. They've always done this for me, a tiny plot of certainty in a sea of baseless opinion.

The positive vibes dissipated as I tried and failed to rehang the bags a safe distance from the floor. I was alarmed by the lack of healing that seemed to be going on in my chest, unaware that I was going to be feeling instances of pain in that area for most of the next decade. The best I could do was to push the table over to the rafter and then set the cot up as a ramp. I was able to stand on the other side of the table and use the rope to pull the bags up onto it. From there I hung each of them and tied the rope to the hooks on the wall. I wasn't sure how high a mouse could jump, but I didn't think they could manage more than three feet - and in any case, that was the best I could do so there wasn't any point fretting about it.

I pushed the table over until it was underneath the final bag, and then let it plop down onto its surface. Inside I found more food, some tools, a length of the same rope used to hang the bags, a set of worn but functional cooking knives wrapped in a length of leather, a whetstone, six odd contraptions that would turn out to be rabbit snares, seven bottles of mezcal, and an electric lime green fanny pack. This last seemed particularly out of place. Almost as soon as I touched it, I knew exactly what was inside. Guns have a certain heaviness that may or may not be entirely physical, depending on what you've done with your life. The pack made a heavy thunking sound as I set it down on the table, and I knew. The CZ-75 that l pulled out was from a maker I'd never heard of before, but the thing was well made and well cared for. I found a box with 100 9mm rounds, and when I ejected the clip I found the weapon was already loaded: 10 in the clip, one in the chamber, a killer's load. I stared at the thing for a few minutes before placing it back in the pack. I had no idea what the Hammer thought I might need to shoot out here. If he was planning on leaving me out here to die, this would be the last thing he'd have wanted to put in my hands. Or perhaps he expected me to use it on myself? Either way, it comforted me a little, just having such a thing nearby.

The days passed in numb silence. I contented myself by collecting fallen branches for the fire and by watching the icicles grow from the corners of the roof outside the windows. I set crappy mousetraps of my own design. When those failed, I contented myself by turning on the screen of my iPod when I heard rustling in the packages I'd left out for them. Their little beady eyes would freeze for a few seconds and then they'd be off, little brownish flashes in the gloom. I tracked them to their lair, which was someplace in the recess underneath the fireplace. It was dark as hades back there, and I was in no condition to go spelunking after them. In any case, I figured they had as such right to be there as I did, and left them little snacks as a holiday greeting.

The day after Christmas I began to regain my sense of smell. It wasn't much at first - more the ghost of the scent of smoke than the thing itself, but its return nearly brought tears to my eyes. The weird thing about losing one of your senses is that you can't really feel the loss. You can't explain smell without directly referencing it. Intellectually, I knew there was such a thing as olfaction, and I could remember describing a certain bottle of wine's nose, but in those cases I was accessing memory, not the sense itself. Regaining this was like feeling the world open up into a new dimension. It wasn't all good, as I hadn't taken a shower in a few weeks by this point. The cure for that problem was nearly as bad as the disease, I discovered, as standing under a nearly freezing torrent of water long enough to soap off had me trembling so hard that it felt like my ribcage was going to crack.

I began walking in the afternoons, when temperatures usually settled for a time on the happy side of the freezing point. There were trails all over the place, I discovered, though most appeared to be seldom used. What I didn't see were any fences, not a single one, for miles and miles. Whoever owned this land, I remember thinking, was incredibly wealthy, far richer than Papa Ramos. I eventually found several homesteads sprinkled randomly about the wilderness. Each of these was a testament to the most unrelenting poverty, ramshackle huts that were constructed out of every conceivable form of material, from mud and adobe to plastic, wood, and concrete. My cabin was clearly the nicest building in miles by several orders of magnitude, and I felt a deep species of shame descend upon me that I had ever considered it to be "below" me. I recalled the impact the shantytowns had had on me during my first trip to Monterrey. Why do I need to keep having the same epiphanies over and over again, I lamented. How many times do I need to see a truth before it settles in?

My birthday passed, then New Year's Day. Sometime the following week I managed to cut the balsa tree down without it feeling like an alien was about to burst out of my torso. It felt great to replenish the woodpile rather than take from it, even if the balsa seemed to produce more smoke than actual heat. The experience so emboldened me that the following day I retraced my steps and located the mesquite that I had failed to bring down. It was a bitterly cold day, the sky the color of lead with the sun straining to break through. I prepared myself for the fireworks, and then swung. Pain came, of course, but not so much that I couldn't handle it, even enjoy it a little as proof of life. And despite the cold and my injuries, the ax dug deeper and deeper, and with it, my confidence soared. I began to taunt the tree, my giddiness overwhelming my good sense.

"Not so tough now, are you Mr Mes-kee-tay?" I mocked it, digging the blade out after a particularly deep wound. "Thought you had me a few weeks ago, didn't you? I'm going to eat over your burning corpse tonight, you bastard."

"Porque estas hablando con un arbol?" The voice interrupted my gloating, the first actual words I'd heard in weeks from a mouth other than my own. I turned to see a man standing roughly twenty feet away. He was accompanied by a few dozen goats, who seemed content to munch on the bushes, thorns and all, and leave crazy lumberjacks to their own devices. I considered the shepherd’s question, and then lifted up my sweater to show him the still livid bruises that marched across the map of my chest. He winced a little at the sight. "Because I need to pretend that this isn't hurting like a son-of-a-bitch," I told him in Spanish. He sat there for a moment, before nodding and sitting down on a large boulder. He was clothed in a sweatshirt, old jeans, and a hooded jacket, everything a dull gray color, as if all he owned had had the color either bleached away by the sun or ripped away by the wind. He wore strange animal hide straps around his wrists and lower legs, an almost medieval addition to his wardrobe. He removed several foil wrapped packages from an animal hide satchel and set them down on a handkerchief before looking at me and pointing to his mouth. I hesitated, still watching him. His hands looked corrugated and the skin on his face almost like parchment. I wanted to like him instantly, but when you are a fugitive on the run from two different governments, it's basically a truism that you are going to end up liking more people than you can trust. Equally true is that you are going to need to trust more people than will ever be comfortable to you, and the trick is figuring out how to juggle these concerns. After another moment's pause I went and sat down next to him. He offered me a taco, clearly made from a former member of the very herd that was currently munching on the underbrush around us, before removing a battered thermos and a tin cup. He poured me some bitter coffee in the cup, and then drank straight from the thermos. I nearly smiled at the sheer pastorality of the scene, but I kept this to myself in case I offended my guest.

After our repast we merely sat there for a time in the sun. If the shepherd was angry with me for blowing him off the day he waved to me, he never said so. Neither did he ask me who I was or what I was doing there, even though he had to be at least peripherally aware of who owned the cabin I was staying in. For all I knew, all of this belonged to the Hammer or his bosses (whoever they were), and the homesteads I located on my hikes existed because of his benevolence. Once this thought crossed my mind, I remembered how the narcos at the coyuntura had allowed the local peasants to profit greatly from their presence, how this ensured their loyalty, if not their outright devotion. Maybe this shepherd was waiting for a similar act of noblesse oblige, I thought, giving him a renewed inspection. If this was the case, he was being very coy about it, just sitting there contentedly and occasionally calling to his flock.

I excused myself and told him not to run off. Looking through my meager supplies, I tried to decide what a poor mountain shepherd might care to eat. Then I remembered the mezcal, and decided he could do worse than a warming drink; it was certainly better than a bunch of refined sugar, so I unlatched the appropriate sack and selected a bottle. As an afterthought I grabbed another pack of donas and returned outside. The man's eyes lit up when he saw the bottle, and happily emptied out the tin cup on the ground.

"Eeey-guey-su-pinche-madre!“ he exclaimed after taking his first swig. The stuff went down like a smart bomb wrapped in a cloak of battery acid and left my eyes watering. I  poured him a few more cups before he wiped his hands over his face and then stood, needing a moment to find his balance. He smiled at me, and I only saw a few teeth. This reminded me of the donuts, and how I was going to be responsible for him losing what few he had left, but I couldn't just not give him the things since I'd clearly brought them out there for him. He accepted them graciously, before lifting the packet close to his eyes. He spent a long moment with them pressed almost to the tip of his nose, as if he were a priest communing with the gods of sugar desserts. Finally he dropped them into his satchel. "Para mis hijas," he said, smiling, before whistling for his goats. They obeyed him to a degree that was almost canine in nature; a thing I didn't know was possible.

He waved one last time and started off to the south. I picked up the bottle and watched him go. This was the longest stretch of time in my life that I had been without human contact, and it amazed me how empty I felt as he departed.

"Oye!" I called after him, trying to keep the desolation settling upon me out of my voice. "How art thee called?" I asked, deploying the seldom utilized vosotros tense to show respect.

"Me apodan Juan el Chivero!"

"Me llamo es...Conrad," I stumbled, a little unsure which alias to use.

"Conrad el mezcalero, es mucho gusto de conocerte!" he shouted, laughing at his own joke, before moving down the ravine.

And so it was that I met Juan the goatman, quite possibly the only man in all of Nuevo Leon completely without a shred of guile.

To be continued...

Thomas Whitaker 999522 Polunsky Unit 3872 FM 350 South Livingston, TX 77351

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A Thank You To The Tried And True Who Got Me Through

February 9, 2017, 5:32 pm

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By Santonio D. Murff

I sprang out of bed in mid-November with a joyous spirit! I threw a combination of punches and did a bobbing and weaving, socked-feet shuffle that would've done one of my idols, Muhammad Ali, proud. I danced around my cubicle, casting a challenging scowl upon the room of hardened criminals brave enough to meet my eyes, as I let them know in no uncertain terms: "I am the greatest! Ali ain't gone! He lives on! In the heart and hands of Mr. San-Man!"

A few chuckled at my Ali-ish poetry and posturing. Then they all laughed as my socked-feet shot out from beneath me and I hit the floor--Hard!

"Down goes the champ!" A heckler cried to everyone's merriment.

"Who mopped this damn floor and didn't put up a wet floor sign?" I moaned.  More ribbing laughter. "I'ma sue!" More raunchy laughter.

"Come on, Champ!" My brother in the struggle, Donnie Young, rushed over to help me up. It took me a minute. My whole left side was hurting. The continued laughter didn't help.

"You alright, Big Bro?" Lil Cleve, another Houston native, strolled up, unable to mask his own broad smile. "You was looking good, until your feet went high and your body went low!" Young's gold grill flashed as they fell into each other with laughter.

Mr. Williams, my elderly, constantly complaining neighbor in the adjoining cubicle tore away from his western to add his smile and two cents. "You're getting up there in age. Better be careful with all of that joy--bust a hip!"

I bounced back up off my bunk, did a quick jig and threw my hands heavenward with a fresh scowl that said it all: I'm still the greatest!

"The Champ will survive!" Lil Cleve announced to scattered applause and more laughter.

…....And, so began another day in the Belly of the Beast!

Prison can be a dark and depressing place. Prison can be a bright and beautiful place of growth and development. Prison can be whatever you choose to make out of it. I chose long ago to utilize this time wisely to educate and better myself. I chose long ago to make a difference and not excuses. I chose to refuse to allow this place to define me, my character, or my future.

That being said, I realized early on that T.D.C.J. is more about warehousing than rehabilitating. I learned how imperative outside assistance, love and support are to a prisoner attempting to accomplish outside objectives. I also quickly learned just how few people could be depended upon to actually invest their time and resources in helping me to do so.

Many have let me down. They lied, broke oaths and promises, and disappeared without so much as a goodbye. A few stayed true. They got me through. They proved that, with real love and loyalty, it is never “out of sight, out of mind.” They helped me not only survive, but to succeed...against all odds and expectations.

So to give an escape from the constantly complaining, the dark and morbid, this holiday season I choose to pay tribute to those compassionate souls, those tried and true family and friends who've brightened my darkest days, lifted my spirits when I was sunk low, and helped me to manifest my dreams and do the impossible behind these closed doors: love, laugh, and continue to progress. All I am, all I become, is due to the love and light that you blessed me with and I thank you!

Skin like a Milky Way, soft and sensuous curves, and a sassy walk that demands attention, Toni is beyond beautiful inside and out. A true superwoman, she has overcome incredible challenges to become one of the world's greatest mothers and testifies to how far faith and hard work can take you. I never believed in Cupid's arrow until I poured into her black pearls and saw those luscious lips curve upward, knowingly. He'd gotten her too!

Truly an old soul with a heart of gold, Toni was everything I ever wanted and dreamed of in a woman and a wife. Her laughter is as rich as molasses and sweet as honey to my spirit. In the 21 years I'd been incarcerated, I've never come close to loving another woman with such wild abandon and passion. No one has ever loved, spoiled, and catered to me the way that Toni did. No matter what I faced, Toni always had a prayer and a Bible verse that nurtured my spirit and kept me on track.

A dream come true, a prayer answered, I used to break out her pictures in the middle of the night to just bask in her beauty, and marvel at how lucky I was. After accepting my proposal in November of 2012, Toni wrote to me almost every single day for months. I wrote her more. We couldn't get enough of each other. The intimacy and honesty we shared far surpassed anything I'd ever known.

If not for the sadistic games played by this criminal injustice system when I returned to the county in 2013 on appeal -- delaying my departure from its claws -- Toni and I would be happily married, building our dream home, and providing opportunities for foster children who may otherwise go without. But, I must pay tribute to her, one of God's greatest blessings to me in my lifetime. For over two years, she reached down into the pits of hell to dispel the darkness with a love and light that led the way to paradise. And, it was a great pleasure to travel that road with her. Thank you, Chocolate Star! Wherever you go, whatever you do, just keep shining, Boo...

Donnie Young, Montego Jordan, Anthony Johnson, Travis Spivey, Cleveland Palmer, Nelson Chavers, and Patrick Lewis! Only seven. Seven, from a cast of thousands of so-called, thought to be family and friends. The only seven in two decades of this struggle for survival and success who proved that the love and loyalty extended beyond the walls of this concrete jungle after their release. The only seven who reached back to aid and assist their brother still in captivity.

Whether for a season or a few, an encouraging word, a good deed or two-- each of you contributed in a major way to my progression and for that I thank you all. I sincerely pray that you all will continue to push The Righteous Movement as hard on the outside as I surely will on the inside. "Don't make excuses. Make a difference! Survive and Succeed!"

 I call her the Marvelous One! An absolutely gorgeous blend of Irish and Native American mystique, Marlene lit up my life like a super nova. She reached out to me with a love and light that affirmed my earnest belief that there is nothing as precious and priceless as a good woman. Throughout 2016, it was Marlene's love and light that sprung me out of bed with a flurry of punches and that unbridled joy that could bust a hip.

Her long, passionate, and enlightened letters revealed a kindred spirit who'd not only survived, but thrived, after a tumultuous childhood to make this world a better place. I remain in awe of someone hurt so much who chose to heal so many. Who chose to give so much of herself to serve our veterans, be a Big Sister to challenged young ladies, and a beatific blessing to prisoners. Marlene's love is like her insight--ethereal!

I could never thank her enough for how she moved me along in my understanding of human nature and self...and women! I can't count the times, she reached across hundreds of miles to make me laugh out loud. She bathed me in praise and showered me with support and encouragement that I desperately needed after a disappointing ending of 2015. But, more than simply making prison bearable, she took me far, far away ....

As steeped in experience as wisdom, Marlene could easily be a successful romance writer, the way she creates scenes and moods with her poignant writing. Through her wise words and dozens of post cards, she took me from the snow-capped mountains of Montana, to the five-star resorts of Coeur D'Alene, Idaho! We travelled down the Oregon Coast to the beautiful plains of The Dulles together! She introduced me to the hidden beauties of America that most of my peers will never see.

We explored the ancient caves of the sea lions together! The power of her pen is so strong I can still hear the unbelievably loud volume of their barking. She introduced me to the beauty of Hicks's "Penny a Bunch," and Hal’s "The Bohemian Girl". She enriched my soul with a fresh culture, new cuisine, distant travels, and intimate laughter that broadened my horizon and healed my weary heart.

Magazine subscriptions, ecomms, post cards, passionate letters, priceless photos, and megadoses of compliments and compassion--Marlene more than lived up to her title as The Marvelous One and earned her spot in my heart as a tried and true friend. And, for that, I'm eternally grateful. Thanks M&M!

  

WILKALAND is my hood (community), my heart! To my life-long homegirl, Kimberly Jack and all of those Wilk-A-Land soldiers who've proved that true love and loyalty does not fade or die--recently rallying together to support my debut novel The San-Man: Love, Loyalty, & Vengeance (scheduled for release by Dog Ear Publishings in early 2017!)--what's understood need not be said, but thank you! We are family for life and I love you!

  

I must send two tons of love and gratitude to my cousin Dorothy who's always been more like a mother to me, rallying the family when I needed them most, and encouraging me to never give up on my dreams when I needed it most. Your love, faith, and support truly got me through and to the manifestation of my dream of being a successfully published author. Thanks cousin.

 I call him soldier boy when I'm irritated with him, but my little brother Sgt. Kenneth Martin is 100% man. The most peaceful and progressive periods I've had in this place is due to his faith and investment in me. He believed in my skills enough to cover half of the cost for the publication of The San-Man.  That faith in my gift was affirmed by The San-Man out the gate winning The DEP Literary Excellence Award which only I% of their titles receive! But his love goes far beyond the material.

My little brother used to drive through several states to pick up my sons and our mother to make my year with a visit after every deployment. Two tours to Iraq, one to Afghanistan, North Korea, and Africa--I lived for his letters. I'd lie back on my bunk, my eyes tightly closed, writer's mind working overtime, imagining Saddam's humongous gold-encrusted mansions sitting right in the middle of all of his people's poverty.

More so than anyone else, I must accredit my little brother for helping me to do exactly what we scream within The Righteous Movement: "Survive and Succeed!" So to the best of lil bros, I say thanks, FAM!

I call her "Drew the Truth" because l've never known a woman as real! Drew couldn't be more family if we came from the same womb. No matter what, I know Drew has my back. No matter what, I know that I can turn to Drew and she will come through. She knows the same. There are no adequate words for some bonds--that's the kind we have. Prison has a way of destroying relationships so to protect your heart you learn not to put too much faith in them, but I'll bet my heart and sanity that our love and loyalty lasts till my dying day. It's just how we're built. The real stay real! Thanks for being a true friend to the very end. I love you, FAM!

The V-3s (Vivacious Vanilla Vixens) of Team Righteous are voluptuous beatific blessings from above. As beautiful on the inside as the out; Dina, Danielle, and Kerri, whose compassionate spirits and loving support has kept me smiling and reaching for the stars. From Kerri setting up a Facebook page, to Danielle opening a twitter account, to both contributing to The Righteous Ice Cream Fund (to benefit indigent offenders)--My Queens "D" and "K" are always there to put action with their words and contribute to the success.

Dina, The Vanilla Angel, has outlasted family and fiancés! She's contributed to the best and nurtured me through the worst. She says that she's my biggest fan, not having a clue that I am hers too. It was from her that the blessings of Kerri and Dani sprouted, and I am eternally grateful. You three lovely ladies are my trinity to triumph, energizing me, encouraging me, and empowering me to be all I can be, as a writer and a human being.

In you all and those adorable children, I see the best that this world has to offer. You all have given me a multitude of reasons to be thankful and merry this holiday season. Please know that I am immensely thankful for your friendship and couldn't love you more if I were their husbands We are forever family!

Yes! Yes! Yes! I've saved the best for last. Nothing and no one can compare to the Supreme Queen! I truly do have the very best mother in the entire world. The proof is in the fact that most mothers must carry their children for nine months. My mother has carried me without complaint for over 40 years!!!  ;)

Two years I spent in the county before being taken to trial, two weeks I spent in trial, nearly a decade I spent in solitary confinement, two decades of incarceration—Mama was there through it all. Through the peaks and darkest of times, through the highs and lows, Mama was there keeping that sometimes small light of hope aglow. My mother once told me, "When ain't no one else there, Mama going to be there!" She's proved true to her words in so many ways that go beyond the call of duty.

There is no love like a mother's love. And, I'm so so thankful, because you not only gave me life, but your love sustained my life when it seemed that everyone had given up or given out on me. (Singing like 'Pac) "And, there's no way that I can pay you back/but my plan is to show you that I understand/and you are appreciated." No words would do you justice so just know that you are my greatest gift from God and I love you; eternally and unconditionally .... just as you've loved me.

It was a few minutes past midnight. The televisions had been turned off. The lights were dimmed low. Everyone had retired to their cubicles as policy dictates, but no one could seem to sleep. My voice cut through the silence, "It was the week before Christmas/ and all through the dorm/everyone had that feeling/...fuzzy and warm!"

Mr. Williams groaned over the bubbling laughter at my doctored fable. "Dude, you're killing me," he added in case I missed it.

I chuckled at the neighboring Scrooge and went back to writing this ending. Kerri, my Queen "K", recently wrote about how hard it is for her to enjoy the holidays, knowing that I'll be in here. Her feelings of helplessness had reduced her to tears. I had to enlighten her, as I now enlighten you, that she is far from helpless. You readers are far from helpless. You have the power to give a prisoner reason to be thankful on Thanksgiving. You have the power to put the Merry in Christmas for a prisoner. And, you have the power to put the Happy into The New Year for a prisoner.

You have no obligations or responsibility to do so, but you have the power to do the impossible, to make a Mr. Williams smile. The reality is, if you allow this system to confine your mind as firmly as they've confined you body, then you will be miserable. You are physically sequestered 24 hours a day, everyday, with some of the worst human beings society has to offer. Many individuals who have absolutely nothing going for themselves. They live to be negative, dream killers, because they've given up on their dreams. And, we haven't even gotten to the prisoners yet!

Prisoners need outside stimuli to keep from succumbing to the madness, the depression, the depravity that pass as the norm within these walls. We need good people to remind us that someone cares. That love and light still exists for us. A mere $10 ecomm can bounce a man who has nothing, who expects nothing, from the pits of despair. A mere perfumed letter or card from a compassionate soul can lift up a lonely spirit for months as he revisits it again and again.

I know, because I've been there. I'm no superman who's immune to the ignorance and idiocies that run rampant within these walls. I've merely been immunized, blessed with the love and light of supermen and women, compassionate souls who reaffirm my own humanity even as they restore my faith in humanity. Truly good people who've laid the foundation and provided the motivation for my rehabilitation. Angels, vixens, stars, Queens and kings-- who've led me from the darkness by example, giving too much of themselves for me not to give my very best. For me to not want to keep them smiling with my positive progression.

As we start the new year, I encourage you all to activate your own power and adopt a prisoner. Be the love and light, the foundation and motivation for his or her rehabilitation. It doesn't take much to show a lot of love. You may find yourself receiving more than you ever expected. I am a firm believer in P.E.A.C.E.! Positive energy always creates elevation! Let's flood this place with it and watch us all rise as a nation; as a race--The Human Race!!!

I believe in us! Do you? If so...Thank you!

Santonio D. Murff 773394 French M. Robertson Unit 12071 FM 3522 Abilene, TX 79601

Did the Death Penalty Die with Justice Scalia?

February 16, 2017, 4:41 pm

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By Michael Lambrix

Call it a twist of irony that I'd like to think would have made the ornery old bastard smile, but within hours of my own scheduled execution, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (affectionately known to his friends as Nino) – perhaps the most vocal and unapologetic proponent of the death penalty– was found dead from natural causes at a ranch in West Texas. I am alive today because of one of Justice Scalia´s last decisions, rendered only a month before is death, in Hurst v. Florida.

It´s easy to think we live in a black and white world, one defined by political polarizations.  But in reality, we live in a world painted in shades of gray.  Most would characterize Justice Scalia as an unyielding conservative committed to his unique brand of strict constitutionalism siding with the state on most criminal issues, especially the death penalty.  And he made no apologies for his opinions advocating for the state´s power to execute prisoners by any means necessary.

But in all fairness, Justice Scalia was not simply unyielding.  His opinions were primarily guided by a commitment to uphold the fundamental principles set in stone when framers wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights.  Under his philosophy, the courts were obligated to merely interpret the Constitution as it was written.  If any subsequent changes were to be made reflecting the evolution of societal values, such changes could only come through the democratic process.

Prisoners in America have longed for the day the marginally conservative Supreme Court would politically shift to the left.  Many times cases having a direct effect on us came down to 5 to 4 votes.  Conservative justices rallied around Scalia´s gift for prose, justifying prosecutors who knowingly convict innocent people, since the constitution gave prosecutors immunity from accountability.  At the same time the court insisted that the constitution provided no protection from being put to death. even if evidence established one’s innocence.

To us, it seemed Scalia´s true gift was in speaking with a forked tongue. He always found a way to justify his primary objective of protecting government and big business from accountability at the expense of those least able to defend against Big Brother.

But then I pause for a moment and remember George Porter, an elderly man I came to know on Florida´s Death Row over the past few decades.  George was convicted and condemned to death for a double homicide resulting from a domestic dispute that escalated out of hand.  When the dust settled, George´s recently estranged girlfriend and her male companion were dead.  George pled guilty and threw himself at the mercy of the Court.

Problem is, Florida courts are not known for showing capital defendants mercy and compassion. It surprised few when George was sentenced to death.  Notably, neither the prosecution nor the Court made allowances for the fact that George Porter was a decorated war hero who had long suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”) and many years of alcoholism; his attempt to drown the ghosts of battlefields he’d fought on so long ago.

For almost two decades George´s capital case continued its trek through both Florida and Federal Courts, each court expressing open contempt towards his claims that his trial lawyer was constitutionally ineffective for failing to present evidence establishing George as a bona fide war hero.

Finally, George reached the end of the line, his last hope to be spared execution resting with the Supreme Court.  After almost a quarter of a century in continuous solitary confinement on Florida´s Death Row, George was now 75 years old and largely dependent on others around him to perform daily functions.  Throughout his odyssey, not one of the lower courts exhibited even a suggestion of compassion for this broken old man.

Then an unusual thing happened.  The Supreme Court granted review of his case and heard arguments on whether the lower courts were wrong in denying him relief.  By law, it wouldn’t be enough to find the lower courts were simply wrong -- the Supreme Court would have to find their decisions “objectively unreasonable,” a threshold nearly impossible to meet.

In the early summer of 2009 the Supreme Court handed down its ´per curium´ decision in Porter v McCollum, unanimously ruling the state and federal courts were wrong and in their failure to consider George Porter´s battlefield experiences that left him a broken man, Omitting grounds that may have spared him from the death penalty was contrary to the basic fundamental principles of constitutional law.

It was the right decision, but what surprised legal experts and prisoners alike was that Justice Scalia sided with a death row prisoner, sparing his life. More importantly, the Court has established a precedent many more would subsequently rely on; even those condemned to death are entitled to constitutional protection, the Court had ruled.

A few years later Justice Scalia became the driving force in a capital case out of Arizona affriming the principles of constitutional law established a few years earlier in Aprendi v New Jersey, in which the Scalia-led court made clear that only a jury could decide facts allowing for the enhancement of a sentence based upon the use of a firearm during the commission of a crime.

In Justice Scalia´s view, right to have such facts decided by a jury was fundamentally written into the Constitution, and therefore could not be circumvented by procedural rules placing such decision making in the hands of a sentencing judge.

But many wondered whether Scalia would follow his own law when Ring v Arizona came before the Supreme Court in 2002.  As a staunch proponent of the death penalty, Justice Scalia´s scorching indictment of a judicial process allowing those condemned to death to pursue appeals, made it seem unlikely he would rule in favor of finding unconstitutional Arizona´s process of imposing death sentences by judge rather than jury.

After long months of speculation and anticipation, the decision was rendered.  To the surprise of many, Justice Scalia stood his ground and sided with the majority, that Arizona´s capital sentencing scheme unconstitutional. For the first time since the landmark decision holding the death penalty unconstitutionally “arbitrary and capricious” in Furman v Georgia (1972) the Supreme Court had found a state´s death penalty process to be unconstitutional – and did so upon principles of law campaigned by Justice Scalia.

Unfortunately the decision in Ring v Arizona would have very narrow application.  The following year Scalia´s Court decided in Summerlin v Schiro (2003) holding that the principle articulated in Ring v Arizona was not retroactive to cases already “final” in appeal.  Once again it appeared that Justice Scalia was speaking with a forked tongue.

Immediately, lawyers representing almost 400 prisoners on Florida´s Death Row argued that Ring v Arizona applied to Florida.  Just like Arizona, Florida also left to the trial judge the ultimate decision whether “statutory aggravations” justified a sentence of death.  The judge alone decided whether or not to impose a sentence of death – not the jury.

But in political sleight of hand, the Florida Supreme Court quickly decided that Ring v Arizona did not apply to Florida and proceeded to execute Amos King and Leroy Bothson just to prove their point.  The Supreme Court refused to intervene and Florida decided the Supreme Court´s silence gave them the green light to kill all they wanted.

From 1974 to 2002 Florida executed 53 prisoners, averaging nearly two executions per year.  That was before Ring v Arizona was decided, calling Florida´s process into question.

Immediately following Ring v Arizona, Florida accelerated the rate of executions. Between 2002 and today (Feb. 2016) Florida has put to death 39 more prisoners, averaging 3 per year.  During this period numerous Florida Supreme Court justices repeatedly called upon the Supreme Court to address whether Ring v Arizona applied to Florida, but in every case the Court declined review.

Then in 2010 a self-made billionaire under investigation for Medicare fraud decided to buy his way into office. Embraced by Tea Party Republicans, Rick Scott spent over a hundred million dollars to win the election, becoming Florida´s new governor.

Governor Scott wasted no time cranking up Florida´s killing machine with the signing into law of Florida´s infamous “Timely Justice Act” (Read: “The List”) expediting executions. Governor Scott earned a reputation for harboring no reservations to killing people.  Despite the continued controversy surrounding the constitutionality of Florida´s death penalty process, Governor Scott zealously signed death warrant after death warrant.

In 2015 Governor Scott made Florida history by putting more people to death than any Florida governor, ever.  And still, the lawyers were knocking on the Supreme Court´s door, trying to convince the Court to address whether Florida´s death penalty process was constitutional.

And then finally – the Supreme Court granted review on whether Florida´s death penalty process remains constitutional in light of Ring v Arizona. The case would become known as Hurst v Florida, and arguments were scheduled for October 2015.  But such a minor inconvenience as the legality of putting people to death wouldn´t slow Governor Scott down any more than executing an innocent man (read: “That Slippery Slope to State Sanctioned Murder”). Despite the Supreme Court granting review Governor Rick Scott continued his campaign to kill, carrying out at least 4 more executions while this Hurst v Florida case remained pending (Chadwick Banks, Johnny Kormandy, Jerry Correll and Oscar Bolin).

On November 30, 2015 Governor Scott signed my death warrant, only hours after the Supreme Court denied review of my actual innocence claim (Inre Cary Michael Lambrix, ussc case No 15-6163).  My execution was scheduled for Thursday, February 11, 2016, and I was moved to death watch (you can check out my weekly death watch journal at www.deathrowjournal.blogspot.gr) 

Each day the appointed time of my own death drew nearer.  While I was on Death Watch they carried out the execution of Oscar Rey Bolin as I sat silently only a few feet away. They planned to kill me next. (read: “Execution Day – Involuntary Witness to Murder”)

All the while we kept wondering whether Justice Scalia would put a stop to this madness.  It had now been over 13 years since Justice Scalia had steered the Court in Ring v Arizona and was going on a year since the Court granted review in Hurst v Florida.

Then that bolt of lightening unexpectedly struck on  on January 11, 2016, only days after they put Oscar Bolin to death - and the long awaited decision in Hurst v. Florida issued and by an 8 to 1 decision, the Supreme Court declared that its 2002 decision in Ring v Arizona did not apply to Florida and effectively recognized that the Florida death penalty process was unconstitutional.  The Court adopted Justice Scalia´s persistent argument: under the sixth amendment, only a jury could determine the facts necessary to justify the death penalty.  Florida´s system, which had allowed a judge to make this determination since 1977, was unconstitutional.

But not even the Supreme Court could slow Governor Scott down. As a self-made billionaire, he knew that laws don´t always apply to the rich.  Not only did he refuse to put the Florida death penalty on hold until new laws could be written, but he signed yet another death warrant on Mark Asay, scheduling his execution for March 2016.

I remained on death watch , preparing to accept my fate, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had declared Florida´s death penalty unconstitutional.  I had no doubt that Governor Scott and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi would not hesitate to continue carrying out executions under the pretense that since the Courts hadn´t actually told them to stop, they could continue. It was an election year after all, and in the Deep South nothing wins votes like a good state-sanctioned lynching.

Finally, on February 2, 2016 the Florida Supreme Court took up my case as I had a little more than a week until my scheduled execution.  The Court held “oral arguments” and a few hours later entered an order postponing my February 11 execution date until it could decide whether the Hurst v Florida decision applies to older capital cases, or only to the more recent cases.

Time dragged by as I remained in the prolonged state of uncertainty, not knowing if I would live or die.  I spent that cold winter steps away from the execution chamber. Spring brought the absence of any decision, and with it the growing hope that maybe, just maybe, the Florida Supreme Court would do the right thing and recognize that Scalia´s final death penalty decision required all Florida death sentences to be vacated.  Even the typically pro-death penalty media and former Florida Supreme Court justices publicly advocated a decision that would do away with Florida´s death penalty.

Courts have a long history of speaking with a forked tongue - on one hand recognizing a process used to condemn a person as illegal, and on the other declaring that finding only applicable to future cases so that even if someone was illegally sentenced to death the state could kill them anyway. (please read: "Death by Default”)

2016 was an election year, a fact that could play heavily in any decision.  The death penalty is not so much about administering justice as it is about the politics of death. In a state fanatically favoring capital punishment, the political climate would presumably affect heavily a judicial the outcome.

Summer slowly passed and as fall brought cooler weather, I began to relax. It appeared the Florida Supreme Court would wait until after the November elections before deciding our fate. I laughed a little bit more and my loved ones cried a little bit less. We wanted to believe the delay was a sign the court would rule favorably.

On Friday, October 14, 2016. I was sitting on my bunk in my solitary cell amongst other condemned men, each in their own concrete crypt. One, then others yelled out to the wing: “Channel 4 – The Court ruled!” The wing grew silent, each of us eagerly absorbing every word the reporter said, holding our breath...

But it wasn't the news we were waiting for, not entirely. The Florida Supreme Court released its decision in Hurst v State (the same capital case the United States Supreme Court ruled on), acknowledging that under the Supreme Court´s January decision the Florida death penalty process was illegal. The Court went a step further, finding that in addition to the Sixth Amendment's requirement that a jury find each element relevant to imposing death (not the judge), that the Eighth Amendment (constitutional prohibition against infliction of cruel and unusual punishment) required this jury decision to be unanimous. Florida, Alabama and Delaware allowed a death sentence by majority rather than unanimous vote – making Florida´s death penalty statutes unconstitutional.

The Court recognized that any "error" in illegally condemning a person could be deemed "harmless" if it was found beyond reasonable doubt that the person would have been sentenced to death anyway.  That scared the hell out of us, since it appeared to create a way around granting relief.

Thanks to an issue that a proponent of capital punishment advocated, Florida had no legal death penalty. The presumption would be that every person sentenced to death since 1974 – including the 92 men and women actually executed – were all illegally sentenced to death.

The question left unanswered was whether the Florida Supreme Court would rule that this historic decision to be retroactive affecting those already on Florida´s Death Row, or they limit relief to only those whose cases were still pending on direct appeal?

The elections threw yet another unexpected twist into this already complex situation. After Justice Scalia passed away, President Obama nominated his choice for Scalia´s successor only to have the Republican controlled senate refuse to allow any confirmation hearings to take place.  Especially in election years, politics trumps justice. Now that Trump has won the election (Hitler also won the support of a majority of Germans when he campaigned upon his own agenda of hate and intolerance!), the question of who will take Justice Scalia´s seat on the Supreme Court remains to be seen.

One thing is certain...Senate Majority Leader Chuck Shumer is not going to roll over and allow an uncontested confirmation of anyone nominated by Trump.  Whoever Trump nominates will certainly face the most hostile confirmation process since Clarence Thomas.

Among Americans, the death penalty is not as popular as it once was, despite numerous states voting in favor of keeping it.  Given yet another conservative appointment to the Supreme Court, we hope that whoever replaces Justice Scalia will not possess his passion or persuasion.

And if the Florida Supreme Court does rule in coming weeks that the Hurst decision spawned -- by Justice Scalia´s conflicted ideology is in fact retroactive, which would vacate the majority of Florida's 386 death sentences, then we progress towards seeing the death penalty abolished.

I am still alive because of an issue Justice Scalia believed in even more than the death penalty. His rulings will play a big part in deciding whether the death penalty will survive – or whether it died with Justice Scalia.

Florida has the second highest number of death sentences prisoners (386). Only California has more (740).  If Florida holds that Hurst is retroactive, it will vacate approximately 15% of all death sentences nationwide. The Courts must then confront the issue of whether capital punishment is tenable. Is it time to acknowledge the death penalty cannot be morally or judicially sustained?

Many will remember Justice Scalia as “a monster, an intellectual bully, a bare-knuckled conservative, a homophobic, a gun rights fanatic unable to overcome or even acknowledge his own biases” (“Scalia Played the Monster,” by John Strand, USA Today, February 15, 2016) I choose to remember that I am alive today because, even while I held very little common ground with his vies of constitutional law or his unwavering support for the death penalty, in the end his ideology of strict constitutional constructionism laid the foundation for giving us the hope that within the foreseeable future, the death penalty will be laid to rest beside him.

Michael Lambrix 482053 Florida State Prison P.O. Box 800 Raiford, FL 32083

An Excerpt from Control Units and Supermaxes: A National Security Threat

February 23, 2017, 3:12 pm

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By Joseph Rodney Dole II

HISTORY

In 2007, the International Psychological Trauma Symposium was held in Istanbul, Turkey.  It adopted “The Istanbul Statement on the Use and Effects of Solitary Confinement,” which lists four criminal justice circumstances around the world in which solitary confinement is used:

As…a disciplinary punishment for sentenced prisoners; for the isolation of individuals during an ongoing criminal investigation; increasingly as an administrative tool for managing specific groups of prisoners; and as a judicial sentencing. In many jurisdictions solitary confinement is also used as a substitute for proper medical or psychiatric care for mentally disordered individuals. 

(Istanbul Statement, 2007: p. 63)

Solitary confinement has existed in some form or another for centuries.  Citing The American Encyclopedia the United States Supreme Court noted in an 1890 opinion that “The first plan adopted [using solitary confinement as punishment for crime]…was the solitary prison connected with the Hospital San Michele at Rome in 1703” (In re Medley, 1890: p 167- 168, 386). Similar to the isolation units today, the court noted that it too was “little known” (Ibid.). America began its first experiments with solitary confinement shortly after the birth of the country. In 1787, solitary confinement was used in the Walnut Street Penitentiary in Philadelphia (Ibid.).  Just three years later, “[i]n 1790, legislation authorized the construction of 16 small individualized cells at Walnut Street where prisoners were kept in isolation” (Friedman 2012: p1).

According to Sharon Shalev, who compiled A Sourcebook on Solitary Confinement, it was the “Boston Prison Disciplinary Society” which helped devise the “Separate” or “Pennsylvania”  System of Solitary Confinement” (Shalev, 2008: p 10) .  Under this system, “prisoners were held in solitary confinement and segregated from each other almost all of the time including meals.  The Pennsylvania System was intended to induce penitence and reformation by providing prisoners with time alone to contemplate their sins” (Friedman, 2012: p1).  Philadelphia was also home to America´s “first prison exclusively dedicated to solitary confinement” (Tietz, 2012: p3).  This was the Eastern State Penitentiary which was built in 1829 and served as “a model for more than 300 prisons in the United States and Europe” (Ibid.).

After decades of experience with solitary confinement though, people realized that “instead of its intended role of ´helping to cure the disease of crime´ solitary confinement was creating illness in prisoners” (Friedman, 2012: p 12).  This “played a central role in  the dismantling of the isolation prisons on both sides of the Atlantic by the late 19th century.” (Ibid.)   Although solitary confinement was still used as a management tool of the prison system,  entire prisons dedicated to isolation didn´t reappear until the latter half of the 20th century. 

The impetus for the return of prisons using large-scale isolation – the efficacy of which had been disproven decades earlier – was manifold.

The return began with the control unit.  Basically a control unit is a prison inside a prison where all inmates are in solitary confinement of one kind or another (Kamel and Kerness, 2003).  As Bonnie Kerness noted in Win Magazine, “one of the first control units established in the late 1960´s (Kerness, 2009: p21).  It was located in San Quintin Prison´s O Wing (Ibid.).  It is commonly misreported that the first such unit was at the Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois in 1972 (Magani, 2008).  This can be attributed to how well these units are kept hidden from the public.  Marion established their “infamous H-Unit made up of cruel boxcar cells (Kerness, 2009: p 21), after a guard was killed that year (Magani, 2008).  Numerous other states, such as New Jersey and Massachusetts also established similar  control units in existing prisons around the same time (Kerness,2009: p21).

The rationale for these units was that a small portion of the prison population was uncontrollably violent and had to be kept isolated and secure to protect both staff and other inmates. Once established, though, prison administrators expanded the criteria to include: anyone they label as a gang member; jailhouse lawyers who garner the animosity of the administration by filing grievances or lawsuits in order to protect their civil rights; anyone they think may commit a staff assault; inmates who require protection from other inmates; illegal immigrants; and inmates who continuously break prison rules.  More often than not, the latter are mentally ill people who are incapable of following such a strict regimen.  Most people still think of only men being subjected to isolation, but America spares neither women nor children this punishment.  Although placing children in solitary confinement is a violation of international law (Clark and Maki, 2014), the practice is all too common in the United States (Liebelson, 2015).  From California to Florida, hundreds of women also languish in solitary confinement (Law,2014: p12).  Often it is because they are victims of sexual assault by guards (Ibid.: p 14).  When they report the assault, they are labeled trouble-makers as part of the cover-up and isolated in retaliation.  Therefore solitary confinement can go by many names – Disciplinary Segregation, Administrative Detention, Protective Custody, etc.  This is done in an attempt to disguise them from the public, but also makes it difficult to collect data.

Beginning in the 1970s, tough-on-crime rhetoric blossomed throughout the country. Accompanying this rhetoric were laws that made more crimes punishable with imprisonment and extended sentences and/or the percentage of time people must serve in prison. This resulted in severe over-crowding in prisons throughout the country. Additionally, the country´s hatred of prisoners caused it to abandon most attempts at rehabilitation. Therefore, most educational, vocational, and re-entry programs disappeared, leaving prisoners idle.

Furthermore, as Art Leonardo, the executive director of the North American Association of Wardens and Superintendents, noted, “We began in this country to stop institutionalizing people who had mental illness.  We just put them in jail.  Jails are really not prepared or staffed in most cases to deal with them” (Associated Press, 2012).  Add to this toxic brew the passage  of The Prison Litigation Reform Act.  This decimated the prisoner´s ability to seek redress for violation of their constitutional rights, thereby encouraging prison administrators and guards to violate those rights.  All of these factors contributed to rising levels of violence inside prisons.

Writing on the Bangor Daily News website, Terry Kupers and David Moltz explain that:

There was a good research showing that overcrowding and idleness result in sharp rises in the rates of violence; psychiatric breakdown and suicide in prisons. But instead of alleviating over-crowding, re-instituting rehabilitation and finding somewhere that individuals suffering from mental illness could receive needed treatment, authorities took a wrong turn and reacted to the rising violence by locking down prisoners, they castigated as “the worst of the worst” in their solitary cells   

(Kupers and Moltz, 2010).

Over the next three decades the nation went on a prison-building spree to try to keep up with the unprecedented increase in the prison population. Along with the increase in prisoners and prisons came in an increase of the number of prisoners who the administration deemed required isolation.  Therefore, not only did control units expand and multiply, but an entirely new segment of the prison-building  industry was created – the design and building of entire prisons dedicated to the complete isolation and control of prisoners.  These prisons took the name of “supermax”.

The first supermax was Marion.  Instead of being built from scratch, though, it was an existing prison converted to pure solitary confinement in 1983 “when the whole facility went on lockdown after two guards were murdered there (Felshman, 2008).  Shortly thereafter, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) built the first contemporary prison dedicated solely to being a completely controlled environment when it built the ADX in Florence, Colorado (Eisenman and Reynolds, 2009).  By 1997 – the year that “California opened a supermax at Pelican Bay State Prison” (Felshman, 2008), and construction was completed on Tamms Supermax Prison less than an hour´s drive from Marion in Illinois – all but five states in the union, along with the District of Columbia, were operating control units, supermax prisons or both (Kamel and Kerness, 2003: p 2; Kerness, 2009: p 21; and Magani, 2008: p 3).

The nation is now to the point that, although solitary confinement has been around for centuries,  we use it more often and for longer periods of time than anyone else in the world ever has. Never before has it been used on such a massive scale and with such indifference towards the consequences for society at large. Although there were hundreds of prisons in the 19th century that used solitary confinement as their model, none of them were on a scale that they are today.   Mass incarceration is a current phenomenon and so too is mass use of isolation, where tens of thousands of people are isolated for years or even decades.

Joseph Dole K84446 Stateville Correctional Center P.O. Box 112 Joliet, IL 60434

Joseph Dole is 41 years old.  Born in Saginaw, Michigan, he moved to Illinois when he was 8 years old.  He has been continuously incarcerated since the age of 22, and spent nearly a decade of his life entombed at the notorious Tamms Supermax Prison in complete isolation (Tamms was shuttered in 2013 after an intense campaign by human rights groups, and the families and friends of prisoners who were confined and tortured there).

Mr. Dole is currently serving a life-without-parole sentence after being wrongly convicted of a gang-related, double murder.  He continues to fight that conviction pro se, and has recently uncovered evidence suppressed by the State, which proves that the State´s star witness committed perjury on the stand.

His first book A Costly American Hatred (available at  both as paperback and e-book) is an in-depth look at how America´s hatred of “criminals” has led the nation down an expensive path that not only ostracizes and demonizes an overgrowing segment of the population, but is also now so pervasive that it is counterproductive to the goals of reducing crime and keeping society safe;  wastes enormous resources; and destroys human lives.  Anyone who is convicted of a crime is no longer considered human in the eyes of the rest of society. This allows them to be ostracized, abused, commoditized and disenfranchised.

Mr. Dole´s second book, Control Units and Supermaxes: A National Security Threat, details how long-term isolation units not only pose grave threats to inmates, but also guards who work there and society as a whole.

 He has also been published published in Prison Legal News, The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, The Mississippi Review, Stateville Speaks Newsletter, The Public I Newspaper, Scapegoat and numerous other places on-line such as www.realcostofprisons.org and www.solitarywatch.com among others.  His writings have also been featured in the following books: Too Cruel Not Unusual Enough (ed. By Kenneth E. Hartman, 2013); Lockdown Prison Heart (iUniverse, 2004); Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People´s Gude to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time (James Kilgore, 2015); Hell is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement (The New Press, 2016).

Mr. Dole´s artwork has been displayed in exhibits in Berkeley, CA, Chicago, and New York.  He has also won four PEN Writing Awards for Prisoners, among others.

He is both a jailhouse journalist and jailhouse lawyer, as well as an activist and watchdog ensuring Illinois public bodies are in compliance with the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

You can see more of his work on his Facebook Page

He will respond to all letters.

To place an order for Control Units and Supermaxes: a National Security Threat:

Go to: https://www.createspace.com/6269436

Or mail a check or money order to:
Midnight Express Books
P.O. Box 69
Berryville, AR 72616

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The Rain is Free Only in Falling

March 2, 2017, 3:20 pm

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“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

My Life
By Eddie D. Howard Jr.

When I was 15 years old I committed a crime and was locked up for murder/robbery.  I´m 30 years old now, but over the years as I grow up in prison, I realized that maybe if I had somebody older in my life that grew up the way I did, been through all the things that I was going through, just reach out to me and let me know I wasn´t alone and that they understood me and where I was coming from, then maybe I wouldn´t be writing this essay right now or be incarcerated.  So, I became a part of this program that my facility offers to the youth and their parents which allows me to tell my story speak about my past and hopefully put the kids on the right track so they can be successful, positive-minded and do something extraordinary with their lives.  By me being the age that I was when I caught my case, I didn´t really live much of a life.  Never experienced much, but the way I feel when I know I've had a positive effect on someone´s life is like nothing else I´ve ever felt.  Hopefully reading this it will have a positive effect on you or make you want to give back in someway too.

My story is one that is all too familiar in different communities across America.  I was born in El Centro, California to really, really young parents who were just starting to figure out life for themelves. Being as young as they were when they had me, they never really had a chance to live their lives. My grandparents ended up raising me, because as you may know, taking care of a baby is expensive. So, my mother sent me to live to Indianapolis, Indiana with my grandparents.  I don´t remember much about my grandfather because he passed away when I was 3 years old, but I would alook at all his pictures growing up, wondering what it would be like to have a real male figure in my life.  My grandmother tried to raise me the best way she could, but I was a little bit too much for her to handle.  So, she would send me back to Oakland, California to live with my mother, but that really only made things worse, because whenever she would get tired of me getting in trouble down there, she would send me right back to Indianapolis; and it would go on like this for the next five years of my life until I got tired of going back and forth.  That´s when I just left home, and at the age of 15, I ran the streets, sold drugs, committed crimes, and was around people I should´ve never been around.  You see, in those gangs or organizations, they will get you to believe that they care about you or that they have genuine love for you, when that´s not really the case.  They really just want to use you until there is nothing left.  I found this out the hard way.  I threw away most of my life away because of it.  These are years that I can´t get back.  I´m 30 years old now and I´ve missed out on a lot of things; things that you probably do living your everyday life or just things that you see in the free world on a day-to-day basis.  I never graduated high school, I never learned how to drive, I never been in love, I don´t have any kids, I never even had my own place; and the list goes on and on.  Those are just some of the things I chose to give up to live the street life and be a gangster.  When you´re in the streets, either one of two things will happen to you: If you´re lucky, you´ll end up in prison like I did and get another chance at life, you know, a chance to make things right.  Or you´ll end up like most of my friends did in the cemetery, gone for no reason at all.  I think about all those dudes every day, wondering “what if?”  I don´t miss the life or the things we were doing because none of it was right, but I do miss them; and I´d give up everything to bring ya´ll back.  Much love to all ya´ll that lost your life in the struggle.  Every day that I wake up I´m going try to make a change and do the right thing for all of us. 

Speaking about my past to other people was never something that I sought out to do, because I had always felt like it wasn´t anybody´s business, but I have this one cousin of mine, who just like me would stay in trouble 24/7 and his mom, every chance she got, would bring him down to visit me or would put me on the phone with him when I called.  And, believe it or not, I got through to him; he got his life together.  I think the day he graduated high school was the happiest day of his mother´s life, and mine too.  After that, she came to see me and expressed how she felt that I should reach out to the young people any way that I could.  She felt like that if I told my story to troubled youth it might help them the same way that it helped her son.  I wasn´t really feeling the idea but I thought about it a lot; sometimes all day.  When the chance finally came, I took it and ran with it.  The very first time I got in front of all those kids, I was nervous.  Once I started talking to them though, and I saw how interested they were in hearing what I had to say, I became comfortable.  Ma 

There were three of us speaking in the program. The other two guys would scream and yell in the kids´ faces, trying to scare them. Now, sometimes this would work, because I would see some of the kids crying. But for the most part I would see them laughing at the two guys, as though they knew it was all a show.  Plus, some of these kids were the worst of the worst.  Me, on the other hand, I would just talk to them like they was one of my homies or friends, and they would listen.  Eventually, the staff that ran the program started having me do it by myself, because they felt that I was what the program was all about: “change.”!  And most of the guards there knew me from when I first came to the facility.  They recognized that I had came a long way and wasn´t anything like I used to be.  But really, I had no choice.  I had to grow up or else I probably would´ve lost my life in here a long time ago.

The feeling that I get when I know I put one of these kids on the right track to be successful and change their life for the good is amazing.  Most of these kids that get brought to me are being raised by their grandparents, in foster homes, or by a single mother.  Their dads were never there from the beginning, either dead or in prison.  Most of them just want a male role model in their life; somebody that they can look up to or share personal stuff with that maybe they wouldn´t share with anybody else.

I have a few success stories and a few kids I still stay in contact with to this day. These kids are so young when they come in front of me, and they still have a chance. My main goal is to get them to stay in school and do something I never did: graduate high school.  Once they´ve done that, I kind of feel like my job is done, because I know after that point in their life, if they stayed focus enough to do that, then they´ll be o.k.  I tell all of them that the change starts with them, and before anybody else can trust or believe in them, they have do it themselves.  But as much as I wish that I could teach every kid and change every life I come in contact with, it doesn´t work that way.  And to be honest with you, I´ve probably lost more kids than I´ve helped.  I won´t go into detail about it because I don't like to think or talk about it.  It crushes my heart, but this is real life and I knew about this side of the situation before I started doing it.  Plus, I can´t save everybody, that´s impossible, but I´m grateful for the ones I help.

I really never asked for none of this.  And I kind of feel like I was born into it.  I´ll never force myself on anybody, but if a person wants to talk, I´ll listen, and if my sharing my story about my past or the mistakes that I´ve made in my life will help, then so be it.  A lot of things in life we take for granted and freedom is everything, but you´ll never fully understand that until you´ve lost it.  I made a change because I know once I get released from prison I can´t go back to the same life I was living. And as far as me reaching out to the youth I do this because nobody did it for me.  I feel like I owe society and this is my way of paying it forward.  If you can help somebody, then that´s just what you do, especially if you can.  Because stuff like that always has a way of coming back full circle.  The best gifts in life aren´t handed to people, but are shown to people.  So they can work hard and want it for themselves.

Eddie D. Howard Jr. 129850 Pendleton Correctional Facility 24-4A HCH 4490 West Reformatory Road Pendleton, IN 46046

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Reflections on Time 

by Tom Odle

When you read or hear about an individual having served over 20 years in prison, what is the first thing you have go through your head? “Whew, that is a long time...” or “I don't see how you could have done it... “or how about the old “I couldn't have done what you have done as far as time in prison...” These are the majority of the thoughts friends have shared with me through the years, when they find out that I am currently doing my 33rd year in prison.

What is it that you imagine when you think about having to do this amount of time? Do you think about isolation? Loneliness? Reflections on a past life? Maybe you think it’s fun and games? Is the punishment deserved? Is it the way humanity was designed to deal with those who break the rules of society and consider them unredeemable while locking them away for the remainder of their life or executing them for the greater good of society?

I recently read the book 1984 and found certain similarities in the storyline and a lengthy stay in prison, which could easily be shown to those who don't get it. Before you come to prison you have a way about you that is unique. Your thoughts are different and private until a moment comes and you act on them whether by will, impulse or by just sheer loss of control. Then comes prison, where you are broken down.  Mentally and physically, you are broken down to a point where you are ready to accept and live everything that society says you should be.

This is true with those who have done years in prison, not just a couple, but decades because there is more to the story that you don't realize.  They don't tell you about the isolation, the few steps you take to pace your cell for hours while reflecting on your life, playing back memories that are good or imagining bad ones replaced with different decisions to make good ones. The longer you watch the movie, the more you realize how you've hurt those who cared about you along the way. Personally, while pacing the cell,  I've lived my whole life over at least a dozen times, realizing my mistakes, changing them, being honest about what went wrong wrong, all the while facing loneliness, feeling caged and feeling hopeless about any future.

You learn and realize about loss while living caged and despondent. You want change because you can't stand who you were and the things you've done. You plan steps to be the better person going forward, but because of an incident on impulse, or loss of control, or sheer will, you pay for the whole of your life. I do not say these things to diminish the severity of a criminal act. I say these things to impress upon you that, given the opportunity, people can realize their actions and freely atone for their mistakes. My real question is why does it take us so long to come to that realization? It took me nearly 20 years to come to that conclusion for myself, before I realized my wrongs, the ripple effect it caused, and not to take things for granted.

This all came about when I turned 50 in December.  I've been in prison for 32 years, since I was 18 years old. What purpose does this serve now? Why do you think the recidivism rate for those who have done 20 plus years is less than one percent? Because we are changed, appreciative, educated, unlike our youthful selves who feeling immortal, knowing everything and being impulsive.  We grow into something better, someone with something to offer the world.  And now I wait for the chance to show this to the world.

Tom Odle N66185 Dixon Correctional Center 2600 N. Brinton Avenue Dixon, IL 61021

A Fatherless Child: “Dear Dad….”

March 9, 2017, 2:18 pm

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By Michael "Yasir" Belt

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.  This is a kind of death.”  - Anaïs Nin

How  many can understand, first hand, what it´s like to truly suffer growing up without a father?  What once could only be conceptualized by an esoteric guild, this intrinsic suffering has become common knowledge.  Regrettably, I am a pundit of this humor.

I always wonder if I look like him or if I really grew up to be just like him – like my mother always said I would.  I think my mother felt like, at that time, a woman scorned because every time I heard her make such statements, well, I guess that just meant she loved me; right?

I wonder, did he ever love me?  I wonder if he ever actually cared about me and wanted to be in my life?  Maybe he wasn´t afforded the opportunity.  All right, feel free to have a hearty guffaw on that last one, but it does happen in inauspicious circumstances.  Just not this time, in this unpropitious life of mine.

There are so many wonders concerning him though.  What ifs. Hows. Oh, so many whys.  We could conjugate them all into one huge mass and call it the eighth wonder of the world. Connoisseurs of wonder would come from afar, oogling and giving all sorts of connotations, yet no true answers would ever come.  No one would ever knowledgably speak on any of its parts.  No one ever could.  Except for one:  Him, my father.  So, these equations shall never be solved.

I never knew him.  I never really knew anything about him.  From what little my mother ever told me, I gathered that he was a no-good bad ass, maybe a Casanova type.  And, again with the wonders, am I really my father´s child; as was impressed upon me?  Are his characteristics embedded within my DNA. making me what I am, or more accurately, making me who I once was?

His side of my family is also mostly a mystery to me.  Our relationship is best described as estranged.  In earlier times, age seven being the earliest, I can remember, I used to spend the night or the weekend over at my father´s mother´s home.  My grandmother was a kind, loving and fully capable woman.  She had the air of a contrite mother who wanted to right the wrongs of her son.  I´d like to think her eye ailment gave her more insight than she would ever have had, were she not blind.  There were times though -- moments, late at night, that no sight could see nor should have to.

One night, when I was barely nine years old, I called my mother in tears, begging her to come get me.  She angrily consented and pushed my one year old baby brother in his stroller the dark miles to retrieve me.  And I heard her displeasure as I ran by her side, churning my little legs and trying to keep up during the long journey home.

If only she had known what atrocities I had been facing at the hands of my uncle.  Where was my father when I needed his protection from his brother?

That was the last contact I had with my father´s family until I was about 17.  Once I was old enough to protect myself, I reached out and found my grandmother once again. I visited her a few times.  My uncle still lived with her, attending college somewhere in the city.  He acted as if nothing had ever happened, and I didn´t bring it up. I was too young and hot-headed to go to jail for life.

There was one time when I got to meet my sister, who was ten at the time.  We sat around grandmother´s house that day waiting for our father to arrive.  My grandmother had planned to make a day of it.  We were all going to go out, eat, shop a little, and play the family game.  He never showed though and that was the first and last time I ever saw my little sister – as we sat around the dining room table and settled for eating cold pizza for dinner.  Shortly after that was the last time I´d ever see my grandmother again.  No, it´s not anything as tragically sad as her dying.  I just couldn´t do it; I couldn´t take it anymore.  Even years later, when my wife found her for me and begged me to contact her, I just couldn´t do it.

On one occasion I did get to meet my father; when I was maybe 5 – 7 years old.  He picked me up from his mother´s house.  We rode the # 34 trolley towards downtown.  I remember being shy and bashful, turning my attention out towards the passing scenery instead of meeting his smiling gaze.  He had been excited to make my acquaintance and took me to see his apartment.  I can recall riding up on a freight elevator; one of the ones that open from top to bottom instead of side to side.  The only thing I can recall aside from the way he opened the strange doors, is stepping off of the elevator and directly into the studio apartment and how pleased he was to show me, his son, where he resided.  And now I realize why I´ve always been fascinated by the layout of studio apartments.

The subconscious is astounding. I can no longer tell whether I am holding onto my sole memory of seeing my father, or a vivid dream. John F. Kihlstrom said: “Memory isn´t like reading a book; it´s more like writing a book from fragmentary notes.”

Even with the absence of my father, I managed to receive “fatherly discipline”. Though it was more like a “beat the little kid because I can” type of discipline than anything.  My mother used to date these rude dudes who didn´t find beating a woman and her child to be crude.  She never really said anything to them, though.  She was probably afraid that they´d do her worse than how they were doing me.  So instead, at times, she would just sit there with her head down, oblivious to my screams and pleadings.

One time one of my mother´s boyfriends, whose name I´ve scraped from my memory, beat both mother and me at the same time.  We were lying on his bed, side by side, both of us thrashing, curling and covering, trying to escape his menacingly blows.  After it was all over, I remember my mother and me sitting up side by side, licking our wounds. She turned to me, tears streaming down from her beautiful brown eyes.  “This is your fault!” she yelled at me, as if we were siblings and she blamed me for our plight.  Or she might have been sitting six feet away from me, holding herself as she said it.  “Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false occurrences of real events,” (Adrian Wrench).  One thing for sure though, the two of us certainly got our asses whopped.

It is imperative that I interject an understanding on my mother.  None of this would be proper without the insertion of my “Dear Mama” moment.  Some may say I am askew for speaking of my mother in the manner above and below.  Though this is more reserved than what I have revealed to a few, in confidence.  Which is why, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

My mother is a good woman.  No, a great woman.  Loving, caring, considerate, nurturing.  Highly protective of her children.  My lady, i.e. royalty.  That´s who my mother is and I love her to death.  She still has her ways and can be cantankerous at times, but she is nothing like she used to be.  And, just as I spoke briefly on my inherited traits, my mother´s upbringing was the opposite of functional.  

I was born to Lady when she was only 15 or 16.  Being no more than a child herself, how could she have any idea how to raise one?  We grew up together.  The stove burned both of our hands at the same time.  She is not to blame for her actions as a youth or a forcefully matured adult.  Just like I shall not bear the blame of how I felt nor what I perceived in my young mind.  Life was hell growing up with a single, inexperienced child who had no help, no support nor any guidance as to how to raise a young boy.  In all of us, subconscious psychological intricacies drive us to places where, once there, we have no idea how we´ve arrived at the unsolicited destination.

I love my mother.  I always have.  I just didn’t feel that she loved me.  Time is the teacher of us all, though.

We now return to my antipathy towards my father.

“Dynasty album, track 16.  Man, I can´t take back that 16.  We never kicked it at all.  We never pitched or kicked at a ball.”  Beanie Segal.  You know Dad…Is it sad or are you?  The fact that I don´t know anything about you except for what Mother told me, that you weren´t shit and that I´d end up being just like you.  Well, congratulations, Pops.  Your grown boy looks to have fulfilled the prophecy.  Aren´t you proud of me?

Dear Dad, I had to learn how to fight in the streets. I spent a lot of lonely nights in the streets.  Spilled blood on the same curbs I had to bite.  Is it all because we failed to meet?

Yes Dear Dad, this is the part where I blame all of my woes on you.  Someone has to take the blame, so….you can do something for a change.  All of my mishaps, all of my troubles, questionable decisions and qualms, are because you weren´t there.  You didn´t teach me right from wrong, so you allowed me to sell my soul for a song.  Through all my abuse and emotional distress, where were you?  When Mother threw me out into the streets and the wolves devoured me, where were you?  When I wanted to die, when I tried to die, when I needed a shoulder on which to cry, you were never around.

I´ve considered whether you could have prevented any of the turmoil that was my life had you shown a remote sense of consideration.  Would your presence have changed my outlook on life, the outtakes of what stemmed from behind the scenes?  If you had claimed me as your son, would my mother have hated you so vehemently and in turn despised my existence for so long?  Question after questions, all for a foregone conclusion.  None of it even matters.  Because you don´t matter.  I am my mother´s child; and she did her best with me.

Dear Dad, Did you know I wanted you dead?  For a very long time, when I wasn´t strong enough to stand up to life´s evils on my own, when I didn´t seem to possess the graces of my mother, all I wanted was my father.  Then once I was older, once hatred had ossified into malice in my heart, I couldn´t wait to finally meet you.  I used to say that the day I meet you would be the day you´d die; and in no way would I have felt contrite had it happened.  But, it didn´t. And you´re still alive.  Maybe.  I don´t know.  And that´s sad. What´s even sadder is the fact that I´ve been coming in and out -- more in than out -- of prison for most of my life and I´ve been searching for my resemblance in the faces of the older prisoners. Like I said, they told me I´d be just like you.  What reason do I have not to believe it if I know nothing else?

Dear Dad, I never knew you.  So how can I miss what I’ve has never known?  Deep down I always wondered why I was so sad; why I was always so mad.  Now that I am finally cognizant of its cause, of your effect, I am glad.

Recently I was having a conversation with my ex-wife.  Oh how I wish I could blame the ex part on you.  Nevertheless, mid-conversation I reflexively pulled out my daddy issue, blaming you for something or other. I said I´d kill you, in a tone as casual as if I´d said the word “cheesecake.”  She said, “Yeah, you need to get over it.” And she was right.  I need to get over you.  Therefore, this is our swan song.

Until now, your non-presence has haunted me.  Your solely mental existence has been malicious to my psyche.  You are a long, bloated, drunken night filled with fondue and White Russians and I just discovered I´m lactose intolerant.

Morning has come and I am dismissing you.  Or at least the 20% of you that I ever had.  As Woody Allen said, “80% of life is about showing up.”

To be continued in Part 2:“A Fatherless Child: The Next Generation”

Michael Belt KU8088 SCI Houtzdale P.O. Box 1000 Houtzdale, PA 16698

The Coloring Contest

March 16, 2017, 6:00 pm

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By Samuel Hawkins

I can't believe that I am writing this. It is shameful to me, that where I live, what was once called prison is having a “coloring contest.” An inmate just came by my cell with a piece of paper that had a pumpkin on it and “fall” written on it. It reminded me of what the teachers at school in the first or second grade gave us, and then hung up on the walls around the classroom.

This is what the administration has found to occupy our time. I have never seen anything like this. Mind you I am 42 years old, and have been in prison since I was 19. So it is safe to say that I have seen almost everything, the good and the bad in prison.

I have played Bingo, football, spades tournaments, chess, basketball, and weightlifting competitions. I have seen concerts on the yard, and family barbeques in the visiting area. I have had trailer visits, and been in cancer walks to raise money for cancer research. I have been in fights, assaulted others and been assaulted by them, been in riots, and witnessed death. What most people who have never been to prison can simply not grasp I have seen, from violence to sex. I have felt the cold air of being left naked in a cell for seven days with no clothing or other form of covering. I’ve felt the burn of pepper spray used to gain control of inmates who were fighting. I have seen good guys go bad and start snitching. And bad guys who thought they were good. Rapists and snitches that thought they could still be part of the click.

But I promise you this... This is the first time I have ever seen a coloring contest. This is disgusting and despicable to me, that the administration would feel that they could demean me or placate me with a children’s coloring book page, photo copied and handed out.  I reject this paper. 

Who do they think I am? This is more difficult to reconcile than anything I have experienced to date. A coloring contest, for convicts... Excuse me, inmates, no, offenders. That is what they call us now. Offenders. Imagine that. Offenders. It was a term once reserved for "Sex Offenders." But at some point in time it became a title, shortened, for all offenders. How this fits all prisoners, I am not sure. If I steal a car, I am a car thief. When arrested I am charged with auto theft. When I am convicted, I am a convicted felon. So when I come to prison, what makes me an offender? Now if I commit a sexual assault, I am a rapist, or child molester. When I am arrested I am charged with a sex offense, either rape or child molestation. I go to trial, am found guilty and while I am convicted, I am convicted of a sex offense and this makes me a sex offender. So it is natural that I would be referred to as a sex offender.

Now I may appear to have travelled far away from the theme of this short story, the great coloring book caper. But let me connect the dots. Sex Offenders are often viewed as having a sickness. Therefore they are patients who need therapy. I have also heard of similar situations occurring in mental health facilities, or with geriatrics in retirement homes. This is referred to as therapeutic living.  But where is the therapy for adults serving ten-…twenty-…fifty-year sentences, and life without the possibility for parole. 

And then you give me a coloring book page to fill in. 

Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, all I have is a three-inch pencil or pen to color this in. Is this what they expect it will take to take my mind away from the many grievances and issues that I have against the facility? The food cooked yesterday, reheated and served today, the zucchini that they have served for sixty-three consecutive days. The cold “boats” provided to us with our dinner meal each night that are meant for breakfast. They contain a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bran bar, a muffin, and a powdered milk pack with a cold cereal. They don't serve real milk at this facility. 

The coloring contest is meant to placate me, to cloud my vision of the bugs in the showers, and the three week period since the last time I changed my sheets, because last week a guard was assaulted in another unit, and this week they ran out of clean sheets. There are more issues but they apparently are deemed insignificant and hidden behind this sheet of paper with a pumpkin on it. 

Prison. To think they let me out early, I should be celebrating. But they only moved me to a worse place. I never would have thought there could be a place worse than prison. But what I am experiencing now is. It is a mental challenge today. The threats of yesterday still remain, though they are remote. What I am fearful of now is a goon squad with coloring books in hand telling me to cuff up or else.

Samuel Hawkins 706212 Washington State Penitentiary 1313 N. 13th Avenue Walla Walla, WA 99362

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Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction - Day Seven (Update)

March 23, 2017, 10:13 am

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By Thomas Bartlett Whitaker

To read Days One -Six, click here

Let us say that you have stolen a valuable piece of art. Yes, yes, 1 know: you are a good person, you volunteer at the soup kitchen, go to church, pay your taxes. Quiet for a minute - I'm trying to make a point. Let's pretend that while on the way to church or the soup kitchen, a Christie's truck goes a little too fast over a speed bump and a crate pops out the back. You take the crate home, open it up, and - holy crap - you've got a Pieter Brueghel II original. Your thoughts about quickly returning this to its rightful owner fray a bit once you check the internet and discover that it's valuable item to its estimated to be worth about two millions bucks. That's a lot of soup for Jesus, you tell yourself, or whatever justification seems sufficiently rational to convince yourself to keep the thing. Over the next few weeks, you carefully trawl ever deeper into the waters of the dark art web. Everyone's talking about the Brueghel. Everyone wants it. But there's one guy who wants it more than anyone else, to the tune of five million bucks. You do your research and find out that this guy, this Mr. ArtLover261, is a notorious figure. He's known to be intelligent, inveterately greedy, and unashamedly ruthless. But he's also loaded. You can't help yourself. He answers your encrypted email almost at once.

Artlover261 agrees to give you the money in non-sequentially numbered, unmarked $100 bills. He also wants to meet you in a deserted parking lot behind the horse track for the exchange, and insists that you come alone. Well, just because you are the treasurer of your HOA doesn't mean that you haven't watched an episode or ten of The Wire. You suspect that if you showed as planned, Artlover would just shoot you in the face and leave with both the painting and the cash, which would, I think it's fair to say, not be the most advantageous of outcomes for you. You instead propose the following arrangement: you will hide the Brueghel in a dumpster near the airport, while he simultaneously hides the cash in a dumpster near the football stadium, a good fifty miles distant. Then you will both go to a set of very specific pay phones and exchange directions on how to find what the other desires. You will therefore both have the incentive to move quickly to obtain what interests each of you the most - but not the time to grab both. You sit back and toast your genius. Clearly, Moriarty had nothing on you.

So, there you go, newly minted criminal mastermind that you are, skulking about the shadows of the airport, when a troubling thought suddenly pops into view. Why not just keep the painting? ArtLover26l won't have any way of knowing that you screwed him until he gets to the airport, by which time you would already be picking up the money. You could simply disappear with both, and never have to hear about that buffoon again.

Just as suddenly, an even worse thought nudges its way forward: Artlover must be thinking the exact same thing! He's smart and greedy and ruthless, remember, plus he has just as much incentive as you do to betray the other, and you would be just as incapable of retaliation as he would. It's a real dilemma.

I meant that literally: the above is just one of the sorts of dilemmas that game theory tries to schematize. You effectively have two choices: to cooperate (stick to the plan, be honest) or defect (screw your opponent), but how you decide depends largely on how you think your opponent is going to act. There are four solutions: in the first, you both cooperate, and both walk away with what you want the most. Second, you cooperate and Artlover defects, meaning you get bupkis and your opponent gets everything. Third, you defect and Artlover cooperates, meaning you get everything and he gets nada. Or, fourth, you both cheat, and end up walking away with exactly what you had in the beginning.

I studied aspects of game theory many years ago, long before I came to death row. I've written about the "prisoner's dilemma" on numerous occasions, the most well-known facet of game theory. Dilemmas like this are often studied in college ethics classes, something I have come to believe is a major mistake. I came to this field while studying John Von Neumann's minimax theorem in a computer programming class. Specifically, we were programming a war simulator. Minimax games are those involving two players in which there is always a winner and loser. Von Neumann proved that there is always an optimal way to play these games, if one could but discover it. Most minimax games are also zero-sum, meaning that the total payoffs of the game are fixed: no one ever wins a dollar at the poker table unless someone has lost it first. Whether money is involved or not, each player has a fixed set of preferred outcomes that he values over others. When you place these preferences on a numerical scale, they are called "utility." These can be thought of as "points" that you accrue; the central point of studying game theory is to learn to maximize one's utility quotient. But that's not what ethics is about, not at all. Ethics is about doing what one feels is right regardless (and in many cases in spite) of what happens after one makes a choice. Studying game theory as an exercise in ethics automatically structures the outcome to benefit whoever can manage to be the most ruthless; it inherently reduces values to utility. If what you care about is acting morally, the only way to win a zero-sum game is not to play. You don't steal the painting. You don't email Artlover261. You don't make millions of dollars. You call the police, and then go back to ladling out soup. 

If you want to know why our criminal justice system is so markedly broken when compared to many others worldwide, this is a pretty good place to start: we view justice as a binary, zero-sum game. Instead of seeing it as a field in which one's moral system can be worked out in practical terms, instead of carefully weighing all of the variables of a crime in order to seek that rare middle path where everyone, both victim and perpetrator, might "win" or be healed (the goal of restorative justice movements), the entire exercise in America is reduced to utility: who wins and who loses, and to what degree. I don't think 1'm saying anything outrageous when 1 sneer that "justice" in America has very little to do with right or wrong; today, it's more about egos, the raw application of power and money, and who has the best tricks stuffed up their incredibly expensive sleeves. I used to be really naive about these things. 1 truly believed that wrongs could be righted with the proper application of case law, that the scales would fall from the eyes of the mighty and the many, that realization would dawn and chains would fall away. 1 wanted to view the law the way Wallace Stevens viewed poetry, as an "imagination of the normal." But then I woke up on the morning after yet another execution of someone I knew got royally screwed by the courts and his own attorney, and I had to face the cold gale of realizing that the world I understood is not the world I actually lived in. Within the last year or so, 1 finally managed to kill the last wretched remnants of the romantic flights of fancy that once caused me to put my faith in human systems of justice. We're all positivists now, I guess, and I've finally seen the dark.

It actually makes things easier, seeing the law this way. In May of 2014, I reported extensively on the case of Jeff Prible. It took me a long time to write that series, not because the record was so extensive (though it was), but because I was deeply worried about somehow screwing up the case of someone that I had come to see was factually innocent of the crime that sent him to death row. I was still laboring under the idea that "justice" was somehow sacred, real in the Platonic sense, that I had to get everything perfect or else my mistake might somehow taint his quest. What rot. My view of his case has shifted, I think, to how an actual attorney might view it - not a matter of right vs. wrong or fair vs. unfair, but simply: who has the best strategy for gutting their opponent? Whose ego was too large to actually run their bluff? Whose train of lies ran out of steam before it could reach the station? It's so much easier to just slit your opponent's throat than to actually argue over ethics. What a fool I've been. 

In my original series, I wrote that despite all of the evidence I had attempted to present to you, smart money would probably still bet on the state eventually executing Jeff. I'm going to switch horses midstream, so to speak. Why? Because justice is irrelevant. Jeff simply has smarter attorneys now. Kelly Siegler turned out to be an even bigger idiot than I had initially believed, a fool with too many enemies capable of recognizing the personal benefits of feeding on her carcass. Jeff‘s not going to walk because it's right. He's going to walk because he finally managed to bring a bigger stick to the fight. He would disagree with me. He still deeply believes in God and right and justice, and that Truth has come to save him. As long as he walks, I don't even care that much anymore about which of us is correct. Too much exposure to the cores of the zero-sum reactor, I guess.

At any rate, there really isn‘t any way to easily summarize my original series. This case is monstrously complex, a cynical, twisted labyrinth built by one of America's most famously zero-sum prosecutors. Several of you seemed to think my treatment of the case was my initial foray into the realm of low-budget crime thrillers. Unfortunately, all of this is very real: the dead really are dead, the convicted really is awaiting execution. In order to truly understand the ins and outs of the following, you therefore really need to go back and reread the prior articles, especially parts 4-6.

The basic facts are these: sometime during the early hours of 24 April 1999, someone murdered Esteban Herrera and his fiancée, Nilda Tirado by gunshot. This person then set fire to the house, killing three little girls who were sleeping in their bedrooms. Jeff was a friend of the victims, and would later admit to a burgeoning intimate relationship with Nilda. During the subsequent investigation, it would be discovered that Jeff had robbed a series of banks in order to obtain the seed funding for a nightclub, and he would be subsequently arrested and sentenced to federal prison. While there, the notorious ADA Kelly Siegler would take an interest in the cold case, and thereafter artfully engineer a network of prison snitches tasked with procuring an admission of guilt for the murders - whether or not this admission was genuine or not. Jeff was convicted based on roughly three lines of attack: a report by a forensic expert showing Jeff's sperm in Nilda's mouth, the testimony from a fellow inmate at FCI Beaumont who claimed to have heard Jeff's confession, and the reputational trust that jurors naturally place in prosecutors.

We all live in the factually-challenged world that shows like CSI created, so it therefore seems appropriate to begin my update on the DNA issue. That I did not dwell more on this subject in my original series is something that I came to regret (<Day 4>), but I was attempting to keep a very tangled story streamlined, and delving into the science of DNA seemed a gratuitous detour. I intend to rectify that mistake now. When Jeff was initially investigated by the police, he admitted to having consensual oral sex with Nilda the evening preceeding the murders. During opening arguments at trial, however, Kelly

Siegler announced that her expert - a William Watson - would testify that, "when semen is in somebody‘s mouth...it goes away in minutes. It goes away with a small swallow. That's what the evidence is about in this case." She claimed that this indicated that the oral sex took place proximate to the murders, even stating at one point that Jeff ejaculated as he shot Hilda. Here are Siegler's actual words from the court record, if you are interested:

17 I would suggest to you what Bill
I8 Watson. a credible witness from an independent
I9 research lab. tells you is absolutely totally,
20 credible. There is no way in the world that that
21 semen wasn't deposited either moments before or
22 seconds later Nilda died. There is no way that
23 semen is not the semen of somebody who sexually

24 assaulted her just moments before or moments after
25 she died.

28RRll.

l I would suggest to you what the
2 evidence indicates is that the Defendant after
3 killing Steve forced Nilda to orally copulate him
4 at gunpoint and executed her as soon as he
5 finished.

Id. at l2.

4 Ifyou believe that story I guess
25 you've also got to believe that his semen is so
l tasty that she walked around savoring the flavor
2 of it in her mouth for a couple hours. 'l`hat's the
3 only way it's going to end up still in her mouth
4 alter she's dead.

Id. at 55-56.

"But the most compelling
thing [Dr. Watson`sl going to tell you is that you know
what. when semen is in somebody's mouth. in a
lady's mouth. it goes away in minutes. It goes
away with a small swallow. That's what the
evidence is about in this case."

2lRR1l.

Now, we all know that this is not true, that DNA residue can be found on many surfaces for far longer than minutes, but Siegler needed to insist upon her timetable and theory because Jeff actually had a very convincing alibi witness that placed him miles away at his parents' house at the time of the murders. Siegler was betting that junk science would trump the claims of a human witness, and this was a bet that she clearly won. It's worth wondering why this works so often. On this point, I think we, the public, must bear the burden of the guilt. We are a people that loves the idea of science while simultaneously knowing almost nothing about it. (Disagree? How does your cell phone work? How about a basic battery? What’s the seventh planet from the Sun? I rest my case.) Within such a deficit of actual knowledge, "science" is just another totem to be waved at the masses, a promise of proof devoid entirely of content. Propaganda , not actual power, but even fake power   is usually more convincing than nothing. As I said in my original piece, Siegler played the tune here, but she didn't force anyone to dance. We did that on our own.  We do that on our own.

The first problem with Siegler's DNA theory is that Watson didn't actually testify that Jeff had to be at the crime scene immediately prior to the murders. What he said was that he could estimate the perimortem interval between sex and death at around one hour. He based this opinion not on any professional or academic literature, but on his experience in "testing rape kits." He had no PhD and no actual experience in estimating such intervals, which speaks to a problem with how our courts relate scientific data to jurors: in court, interpretations are often presented as immutable fact, and this is seldom made clear to anyone at trial. As I reported in 2014, Watson was Siegler's hired gun expert, a reliable provider of whatever "science" Siegler required to secure convictions. Jeff's trial attorneys failed monstrously in not having a DNA expert of their own; I speculated previously that defense counsel had forgone this because they expected Watson to testify to widely accepted norms, only to be broadsided by these unscientific claims. They should have demanded what is called a Daubert hearing on Watson's testimony, but they failed to ask for this, somewhat inexplicably. I'm trying very hard these days not to Monday-morning-quarterback decisions made by trial attorneys, but I think it's very telling that an inmate in a solitary cell who has never spent one day at law school is capable of fashioning a better trial strategy than what these fools came up with.

At any rate, if Jeff's defense team had acquired their own expert, they would have found out that Watson's entire methodology was unsupported by any actual science, as confirmed by the affidavit provided by Dr. Elizabeth Johnson. Unlike Watson, Johnson has a PhD in immunology, plus four years of postdoc work at MD Anderson. She then established the DNA lab within the Harris County Medical Examiners Office, and became director thereafter The entire affidavit is worth reading, though I want to highlight two points in particular:

In this paragraph, Dr. Johnson basically states that there is no way for anyone to say how much sperm exists in a sample without first compiling an account of the spermatozoa present. She then torpedoes Watson‘s calculation and proves that the actual sperm present was more in line with a sexual encounter many hours before the murders, not minutes.

In this point, Johnson blasts Watson for not having read any of the academic literature on the precise point Watson was testifying to - the very point that would precipitate the execution of another human being. One would think that on such an important point the man would have done his due diligence and surveyed for at least a few minutes the accepted science on the matter, but one would be wrong. I think this attitude is very representative of the ethos that still dominates the offices of DA’s in the South. Before you object and claim that, I don't know, maybe this literature isn't easy to locate, just know that I was able to find reams of it from inside my solitary confinement cell. In fact, here's a perfect paper to read on the matter. The title is pretty self-explanatory. 

Given the fact that A) Watson's actual testimony didn't sync up with what Siegler claimed he was going to say and B) that his "expert" testimony has been totally debunked, Jeff's current attorneys contacted Watson on 31 March 2016. When asked point blank, Watson stated that Siegler's representation of his testimony during opening and closing arguments were not accurate, and that he did not hold the opinion that his analysis implied that Jeff had sex with Nilda within minutes of her death. He indirectly stated that he would not have said anything along these lines before trial, though he refused to sign an affidavit condemning Siegler‘s remarks, ostensibly because he was "not present" during opening and closing statements. Fortunately for Jeff, Watson’s statements regarding Siegler’s misuse of his testimony and conclusions is now on the record, and they will be available for Jeff’s counsel to use against Siegler during depositions which are to take place over the next few months. It may very well become necessary for the court to depose Watson, though for the moment the judge seems to feel his trial testimony falls so squarely under the rubric of “junk science” as to be clear error on it’s face. I would be very surprised if Jeff isn't given a new trial on this issue alone. As I noted in 2014, this is not the first time that Watson will have been discredited in open court, and it is my hope that he will finally have his credentials yanked.

Why, you might ask, would Watson attempt to cover for Siegler for all these years? He has known for more than 15 years that a man was sent to death row in part due to testimony that he had to have known was problematic. I think principally he is trying to cover himself, because once a forensic expert is shown to have repeatedly provided junk science testimony, he ceases to very quickly to be a forensic expert. For his opinion, Watson used to charge the court $3000 for a very short appearance, not bad work if you can get it. Beyond that, I'm not certain that all of you appreciate just how scary Kelly

Siegler was, or the sort of power she used to wield in Texas. I think this has diminished somewhat, now that she has chosen to dedicate her time to being the star of TNT's "Cold Justice," but there was a time in the not-so-distant past when she was one of the most powerful figures in the criminal justice sphere in the state. This is a woman who sent twenty men to death row, most of whom with little to no actual evidence of culpability. If you knew she was both willing and capable of such things, I'm not so sure that fear isn't the appropriate response.

To be fair to Siegler, Watson and his DNA delusions were never meant to be the centerpiece of her prosecution of Jeff. She simply used Watson to give her narrative the patina of certitude that science often engenders in the general public. Watson was merely the frosting; the cake was Michael Beckcom, an individual I reported extensively upon here. I cannot stress how convoluted Siegler's web is in this case; by simplifying, I feel I'm almost doing a disservice to her craft. In the interests of space, however, these are the basic facts of the snitch network she developed: in 1999, Siegler used an inmate named Jesse Moreno to convict Jason Morales to a life sentence. In the federal system, assisting the prosecution can produce what is called a Rule 35 time reduction, meaning that Moreno was given a time cut and had the state of Texas drop a first degree felony case of aggravated robbery in exchange for his testimony. On 4 April 2001, he called Siegler again, offering to testify against Hermilo Herrero in the unsolved murder of Alberto Guajardo. You can read the transcript of this meeting here.

There are several things to note of importance in this transcript. The first is that when Herrero supposedly admitted to killing Guajardo, a man named Nathan Foreman was present (see page 14); when Beckcom testified on the stand that Jeff had confessed to the murders of Steve and Nilda, he allegedly also did so in the presence of Beckcom and Nathan Foreman, a remarkable coincidence indeed. Second, on pages 19 and 20, Siegler ostensibly seems to be clarifying some identifying facts on Nathan Foreman. "Is he from Houston?" she asks. "White guy or black guy?" That all seems perfectly normal, save for the fact that Siegler already knew who he was: she'd already utilized him as a snitch witness in the past. For instance, Nathan and Bobby Ray Foreman were prosecution witnesses in the case against Carl Henry Evans in 1993. Bobby Ray was also an informant in the murder case of Porter Lee Bush - a case handled by Siegler. As soon as Moreno mentioned Foreman's name, Siegler realized that she had the perfect snitch in place to take a run at Jeff.

Moreno's transcript is more troubling than that, however. According to him, Herrero confessed to him and Foreman at the beginning of December 1999 (page 14). This is slightly problematic because Foreman didn't even arrive at FCI Beaumont until 28 February 2000, a fact that Siegler would have been keenly aware of. Worse, the details of Moreno's narrative do not sync up with the actual forensics of the Guajardo killing. In his story, Herrero supposedly meets Guajardo at a bar and gets him stone drunk. They then decided to leave, and Herrero somehow slits his throat from the backseat of the car. He then rolled Guajardo up in a carpet and repeatedly slammed a hammer into his head. That's all suitably dramatic, to be sure, save that Guajardo had no alcohol in his system at the time of his death and the blows to his head were made by feet, not something as dense as a hammer. Siegler had the forensic report on Guarjardo, so of course she would have known all of this; instead of seeing right through this opportunistic attempt at a time reduction, she lied to the jury about the extent of Guarjardo's injuries during opening and closing arguments. When Moreno sat on the stand at trial and testified to things that s e knew were untrue, she didn't bat an eyelash. Siegler didn't end up using Foreman to convict Herrero, interestingly, because she deemed his testimony "repetitious" to that of Moreno. In reality, she was already planning to use Foreman against Jeff, and didn't want Foreman's name popping up twice on her witness list. None of this stopped her from requesting a Rule 35 sentence reduction from Assistant US Attorney Tracy Batson for Foreman, which you can read here. You will notice that she also invented a threat supposedly directed against Foreman from Herrero. This was a brilliant move on her part, one that shows just how well she understood internal BOP protocol. When the officials at FCI Beaumont placed Herrero in solitary confinement for the remainder of his fed time, this allowed Siegler to A) convict Jeff with the same network of snitches without letting the rumor mill within the prison alert Herrero to what was going on, and B) to then give the BOP sufficient cause to break up her snitch network by sending each of them to different prisons. Some went east to Louisiana, some north to Oklahoma, some west to California. By the time Jeff reached death row, he only had the slightest concept of what had happened to him, and virtually no way to prove any of it or even to locate the people he knew from Beaumont. They had, quite simply, fallen into Siegler's black hole. Herrero would have understood exactly what was going on had he seen a news report of Jeff‘s trial, save that he was in solitary and had no access to local media. It would take him several months to connect the dots, but by this time, it was far too late to help Jeff.

Two days after Siegler's original meeting with Moreno, Jeff was indicted for the murders of Steve and Nilda using a ballistics report that was later shown to contain falsified information. That same day, she had Foreman removed from solitary confinement and placed in the medium security section of the prison. His cellie was Michael Beckcom. Long before Jeff was moved from the Low to the Medium, a group of snitches consisting of Moreno, Beckcom, Carl Walker, Rafael Dominguez, and Mark Martinez were informed of his imminent arrival by Siegler. We know she supplied this group with a huge array of details about the murders, information that only the killer or the police could even know, because several members of the network have since come forward to admit their part in the plot (Day 5), and have detailed this extensive communication between snitches and state.

According to Beckcom, Jeff confessed to him and Foreman on 24 November 2001- three months after Foreman had been transferred to Harris County on a bogus federal writ in order to testify in front of the Grand Jury that indicted Prible. (The transcripts from this testimony have since been illegally destroyed.  No one in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office can explain what happened to them.  All such records are required by law to be preserved until the cases they attach to are finalized, which in this case would mean Jeff’s execution.  It is extremely rare for a federal judge to order these sealed transcripts to be produced, which is what happened in this case.  It seems clear that Siegler asked one of her old friends still working for the County to destroy these once it started to become clear to her that the extent of her malfeasance in this case had become known.) Apparently no one noticed this remarkable violation of the law of causation. Even stranger: although Beckcom did not write to Siegler until 10 December 2001 with elaborate details of Jeff's confession, the state had already become mysteriously convinced of his guilt because on 29 November 2001 they filed an interstate detainer to have him transferred out of FCI Beaumont. That's a hell of a magic crystal ball, no?

At trial Siegler again decided not to use Foreman's testimony, instead favoring Beckcom's polished presentation. Although Beckcom has since made coded comments to Jeff's investigator about Siegler and his role in the snitch in the ring (Day 5), Foreman maintained his silence and repeatedly refused to meet with Jeff's attorneys. He's a crafty one, and understood better than anyone how his familiarity with the details of the Herrero and Prible prosecutions gave him a huge ax he could hang over the DA's office. This knowledge finally began to profit him after he was arrested again in May of 2013. On Christmas Eve of the prior December, Foreman and four accomplices kidnapped two men from a body shop in the 2500 block of Central Parkway in northwest Houston. The victims were beaten, had their hands bound with zip-ties, and were then dragged to a back room where they were tortured with a clothing iron. Foreman then had one of his associates pour gasoline on the victims, and taunt them with lit cigarette lighters. Eventually the pair were loaded into a van. Fearing that they were going to be killed, the two later escaped. Both victims were shot in this attempt.

Despite all of this, Foreman somehow managed to convince the ADA to release him on a $60,000 bond. I suspect that most of you know this, but ex-cons that commit violent felonies using weapons do not get bail in Texas, especially not the sort of bail that is normally commensurate with a much less serious violation of the law. Moreover, despite this case being pretty open-and-shut, Foreman was able to obtain set-offs for his trial - not once, not twice, but over a dozen times. How? I'm speculating here, but I suspect that he had a very frank conversation with the prosecutor assigned to his case about Siegler's past conduct. At the time of Foreman's arrest in 2013, it wasn't at all apparent that Jeff was going to be able to convince his federal judge to grant him an evidentiary hearing. It was still far more likely at that point that this entire affair would result in Jeff's rapid execution. I think that the Harris County District Attorney's office promoted these set-offs, expecting Jeff's case to be dealt with in the normal pro-forma manner, so that they could afterwards offer Foreman a plea bargain that would ensure his continued silence. When Jeff's case stalled out in the federal judiciary, the prosecution began to have a progressively more difficult time obtaining delays from the trial judge. Eventually they had no choice but to proceed to trial, where Foreman got the sort of sentence that will see him spend most of the rest of his days in the TDCJ, though not, I note, all of them.

There's nothing like a snitch scorned. Facing the realization that his erstwhile protectors no longer had his back, Foreman suddenly became more willing to speak with Jeff's attorneys. On 21 December 2015, James Rytting arranged a deposition with Foreman at the Harris County jail; he had already cleared this with county officials and was acting under a federal court order. Despite this, Foreman was "accidentally" shipped to the West Garza Unit in Beeville, Texas, before the deposition could take place. A new deposition schedule was arranged. Before Rytting could make it to south Texas, however, Foreman was again moved, this time to the Darrington Unit in Rosharhon. A deposition schedule was set for a third time, but - you guessed it – Foreman was yet again transferred to the Byrd Unit in Huntsville. By this point, Rytting was getting aggravated by the state's deranged three-card Monty routine, and took steps to have a "hold" order placed on Foreman. A new date for the deposition was set for Monday, 11 January 2016.

Texas wasn't quite ready to surrender, however. The Friday before the deposition was to finally take place, the part of the TDCJ bureaucracy tasked with handling such matters (creatively and somewhat ironically titled "Access to Courts") erroneously informed the Byrd Unit that the court reporter Rytting had hired for the deposition had an expired certificate, so her access was denied. This was, to use a highly technical term from the world of law, a steaming pile of bollocks: the reporter had recertified months before, a point the TDCJ would later concede, blaming the Texas Judicial Branch's website for the error. The state clearly expected Rytting to reschedule the deposition, but he faked them out by actually showing up to the Byrd Unit with a digital recorder. You will probably not be surprised to learn that during this conversation, Foreman denied having been witness to any confession by Jeff. He confirmed that a group of inmates was attempting to set Jeff up, that Michael Beckcom was amongst them, and that Kelly Siegler was the ringleader of this entire circus. When shown the letter Beckcom sent to Siegler purporting to describe the circumstances of Jeff's confession, Foreman denied the contents piece by piece. Just for good measure, he also torpedoed Siegler's use of the snitch network in the Herrero case. You can see these affidavits here and here. Jeff's federal judge recently authorized depositions for every last member of the snitch ring, meaning in the very near future this whole sorry cavalcade of scumbags is going to have to explain in minute detail how they attempted to reduce their sentences by sacrificing an innocent man on the alter of Siegler's zero-sum god.

What does Siegler think of all of this? We're about to find out, as the judge also ordered her to be deposed. We don't have to assume that she is nervous about all of this, as she was kind enough to show her hand to all and sundry last year. Long before he finally acquiesced to signing an affidavit, Foreman instructed his attorney Alan Percely to handle communications with Jeff's defense team. One of the attorneys handling the Hermilo Herrero case, Norm Silverman, was also present during these contacts. Silverman assigned his investigator Rudy Vargas to look into Siegler's conduct, and Vargas somehow stumbled over one of Kelly Siegler's trip-wires. Instead of acting, you know, sane, she attempted to save herself by threatening Vargas. This displays a mathematically inexpressible level of stupidity, because if you can count on anyone having a recording app on their phone, it's a private investigator. You can read the the transcript of this conversation here. Need I point out that honest prosecutors don't need to threaten other members of the legal community for having the temerity to look over their prior work? I hope not. 

The last year hasn't been all that rosy for our dear Kelly. She was sued twice over her role on TNT's "Cold Justice," for starters. In one case, Siegler managed to convince Paulding Country, Ohio authorities to arrest Steven Noffsinger for the 17 December 1981 murder of his ex-wife. They managed this despite the fact that Noffsinger had already been investigated in 1981 and no charges had been brought. Over the years, nearly all of the forensic evidence from the crime scene had been destroyed or lost, meaning Siegler and company had significantly less data with which to bring charges than the authorities had 35 years ago. How did she pull this off? 1 have no idea, save to remind you that pulling miraculous convictions out of her hat is what she does for a living. We do know that Siegler told the sheriff's office that "the television production would not be published unless an indictment was filed." Shortly thereafter a grand jury was convened and Noffsinger was arrested.

Things fell apart after that for the state. It turned out that there wasn't any actual evidence against Noffsinger, and the jury returned a not- guilty verdict after a short trial. Noffsinger is suing Siegler, TNT, and the sheriff‘s department for the year he spent in jail, plus the emotional toll of having a national television production paint him as a killer. A careful review of the episode in question shows that Siegler completely omitted any and all facts that spoiled her narrative; this turned out to be most of the original forensic findings and the impressions of the initial investigators, not to mention the elimination of any mention of two legitimate suspects the police interviewed after the murder. One of these had actually failed a polygraph test at the time, though you never would have known about it if you were casually watching the television on Friday night.

These are mere disturbances in the carefully planned flight of her ego. The turbulence that is going to rip her wings off concerns the case of David Temple. Temple was convicted in 2007 for the 11 January 1999 murder of his wife Belinda. Siegler and fellow ADA Craig Goodhart were the prosecutors, and they crafted a highly circumstantial case designed to punch a seven minute hole in Temple's alibi. This case began to fall apart on appeal, and Larry Gist, a visiting judge, was brought in from Beaumont to handle habeas proceedings. This judge, I should note, is highly respected in southeast Texas, and is by no means a bleeding-heart liberal: chair of the Judicial Advisory Council, he was a Rick Perry appointee to the board of the TDCJ. In a remarkable and vanishingly rare eruption of judicially responsible behavior, Temple was given a genuine hearing on his claims, an almost month-long affair that generated a 1319 page report that I had the fortune to be able to read in its entirety. Judge Gist released his ruling on 8 July 2015, which you can read here.

I have never read a judicial opinion quite like this before. After initially denying Temple's ineffective Assistance of Counsel and Actual Innocence claims, Judge Gist proceeded to list 36 separate instances of prosecutorial misconduct, nearly all of which fall squarely on Siegler's shoulders. Most alarmingly, Siegler stated outright that she believed she did not need to provide potentially exculpatory material to the defense if she "did not believe it was true." When noting this, Judge Gist actually underlined this section and even used a bold font. I've never seen that before in a ruling, not once, in more than a decade of reading legal opinions. Houston attorney Paul Looney told the Chronicle that "if Kelly's bizarre interpretation of that rule were ever to be the law, then all a prosecutor would ever have to do to keep any witness statement away from the defense is say, 'Well, I didn't believe it, so I didn't give it to the defense.' That's never been the law, it would totally eliminate law, but she just boldly stated it - and the only thing I can figure is she's trying to find some arguable basis to try to defend her law license from the ultimate scrutiny of the State Bar of Texas, which undoubtedly is going to happen over this case." I was hoping that it would be Jeff's case that cost Kelly her license. Alas, I suppose Jeff will just have to settle for having her sent to jail instead.

Through the lens of the Temple case, one can gain yet another view of Siegler's obsessive tunnel vision: once she has you in her sights, she absolutely refuses to look elsewhere, no matter what the evidence actually indicates. There were other suspects in the murder of Belinda Temple. One of the Temples’ neighbors called the police, for instance, to report that it was her husband who had committed the murder. Somehow, inexplicably, Siegler never reported this to the defense. Temple's attorneys attempted to show at trial that there was a group of local boys known to rob houses in the neighborhood for drug money; it became apparent, for instance, that several of these young men had been interviewed by detectives. They never learned, however, that the police had recovered a shotgun with a blank .00 buckshot shell still in the chamber - the exact sort of round that had killed Belinda Temple. Neither did the police ever inform them that this weapon was found wrapped in a blood-spotted towel, or that two of this alternate group of suspects had been overheard debating whether the placement of a pillow at the end of a shotgun barrel would muffle the blast of a discharge (it does). When Temple requested this information on 25 August 2005, the trial judge ordered the DAs office to turn over "any reports, documentation which contains tips, leads as to another person having committed this offense," adding “that's [all] Brady material." Despite this, the state claimed that none of this information existed. Afterwards, any time Temple's defense asked for records of any sort, the DA's office refused to make copies for them. Instead, defense counsel had to copy by hand the portions of the prosecution file the state was willing to share - a total of several thousand pages.

Judge Gist would discover during the habeas proceedings that even after Siegler left the Harris County DA's office in 2008, she influenced post-trial maneuvers by telling both the police and other prosecutors not to turn over any records that Temple might petition - a striking similarity to what has taken place in Jeff's case. Even worse, it now appears that she sought to manipulate a witness that came forward after the trial to tell Temple's defense team that he had overheard another man admit to the murder. This witness, a Daniel Glasscock, passed a polygraph test administered by investigators in the DA's office. Once Siegler learned about this, she ordered a Sheriff's deputy to contact Glasscock and another witness "before they could be contacted by the Special Prosecutor [in the habeas investigation]." The deputy did so, and immediately afterwards their stories became far friendlier to the state's narrative. Judge Gist found that they had been so frightened by this contact by Siegler's goons that their credibility as witnesses was "significantly impaired." One instantly recalls Siegler‘s menacing phone call to Foreman's investigator and cannot but wonder about the frequency with which she employed this tactic. Were any of her trials conducted honestly?

All of the above adds up to a very clear case of obstruction of justice, a felony under the penal code. In any other county in the state, I'd bet my last dollar on her being a felon in five years. Her old friend Devon Anderson is the current DA, however, so she's currently living with a fairly effective shield protecting her. Still, Anderson herself is in a bit of hot water at the moment, for locking up a rape victim in the HC jail to ensure her testimony. This victim, named "Jenny," was given the choice of staying in solitary confinement or being placed in a tank with other criminal defendants. She chose the latter, and it would appear that she was again sexually assaulted in the jail. At some point, you'd hope that the entire wretched ship would sink in Houston - prosecutors, judges, cops, the whole rotten circus. All we've seen thus far is the flooding of some of the lower compartments, however: a judge or corrupt cop here, a county official there. How many times do we have to see stories like that of Jeff or Temple before we realize that we have a far larger problem than just a "few rogue prosecutors"? 

Siegler is obviously the focus of much of my reporting on Jeff's case, but she wasn‘t acting alone. Take her partner in the Temple prosecution, for instance, a man named Craig Goodhart. He was involved in sending Linda Carty to death row in 2002. Recently, Carty was also able to obtain a rare habeas hearing on her case, where her counsel presented detailed testimony and more than 70 exhibits showing that Goodhart and fellow prosecutor Connie Spence destroyed case notes and emails instead of handing them over to the defense, had at least 18 recorded witness statements that buttressed Carty's claim of innocence erased, and coerced and threatened four key witnesses into changing their testimony in favor of the state's version of events. Does any of that sound familiar? I want to be very clear about something here. In both the Temple and Carty cases, the appellant was granted a hearing that allowed them to expand the record in very significant ways. Do not think that because these took place in these two cases that this is normal procedure. It isn't. Temple obtained his hearing because he was represented by some of  best lawyers the money can buy. He hired Dick DeGuerin as his trial attorney, for instance.  When I was initially arrested I sent query letters to most of the top-end attorneys in Houston, and was told that DeGuerin's estimate for my trial was $375,000 - and that was before the experts were even consulted. Carty got her hearing because she was born on the island of St Kitts, which at the time was a British protectorate. She has the full weight of the British crown backing her up, meaning she has the sort of attorneys that the rest of us poor saps can only dream of. Normal defendants do not get this sort of treatment. I've never had an evidentiary hearing in my own case, for instance, and Jeff still hasn't either. I'm mentioning this so that you do not misunderstand the situation here and relax in your concern, thinking that the problem with all of this corruption is being resolved. There's a good reason that so few defendants get these sorts of hearings, and that is that the system wouldn't survive in its current state if they were common. Until major changes are made, nearly all of us will be denied relief in absurdly brief rulings, such as one the Texas the Court of Criminal Appeals handed down in Jeff‘s case, which you can read here.

As depressing as the above may be, keep in mind that it's fairly easy to reform the judiciary. We get the opportunity every few years to throw the bums out, if only we would resolve ourselves to the task. It's a more challenging prospect to change the culture of the police department, though I will grant you that it would appear that many police agencies across the country are currently in the throes of some very important self-analysis, and I think good things are going to come from this. It bears noting that the lead investigator in Jeff's case has recently found himself in a bit of hot water. His name was Curtis Brown, and during Jeff's trial he and several detectives gave Keystone Kops excuses for why none of them seemed to have ever taken notes on the crime scene, each claiming that they thought the other was handling them. When asked why he never bothered to take samples of blood evidence that appeared to come from the perpetrator, he merely smiled and admitted to "poor detective work. "Despite all of this, and despite undeniable evidence that he colluded with Siegler in fabricating a fake ballistics report in order to bring charges against Jeff, Brown was never sanctioned for his shoddy tradecraft Indeed, at the time he was actually promoted for it.

The incompetence Brown displayed during the Herrera and Tirado investigation was not an aberration. In 1994, Brown was the lead detective in the death of 17-year-old Ruth Majewski. Ruth died at the home where her boyfriend Christopher Stoernell lived with his mother. The two teens and some friends had decided to skip school on this particular day, and passed the morning drinking before planning to go to Galveston. Stoernell had a history of sexual abuse against Ruth, and was known to be particularly violent when drunk. Sometime during the morning, he began to play Russian roulette with a revolver, and reportedly pointed the pistol at Ruth multiple times. The two soon moved to the bedroom, where minutes later the gun was heard to discharge. When the other teens rushed into the bedroom, Stoernell was heard to cry out, "I fucked up." Ruth blurted out that "Chris just shot me" before she died. Despite what would seem to be pretty clear evidence of at least manslaughter, Detective Brown refused to charge Stoernell, instead believing the boyfriend's story that Ruth had shot herself while playing around with the pistol.

Ruth's family was understandably confused by this course of action. When they attempted to meet with Brown, he repeatedly skipped out on them, at one point telling them, “This is homicide; I can't be here for meetings all of the time." When Ruth's older sister Jennifer brought a rose to lay down at the Stoernell home where her sister was killed, Brown called them and threatened to arrest them for trespassing. He basically dismissed Ruth's death by blaming her for having been drugged up and drunk - even though the  medical examiner's toxicology report found no drugs or alcohol in her system.

Years later, this case would be reopened by Sheriff Adrian Garcia's new cold case division, and it became quickly apparent that Brown had not even bothered to consult the medical examiner's report or a ballistics expert's analysis, both of which strongly suggested Ruth's death was a homicide. These reports determined with scientific clarity that the distance from the barrel of the gun to Ruth's body was of such a length that a self-inflicted wound was simply not possible. Brown himself later admitted that had he reviewed the reports, he would have sought charges against Christopher Stoernell. Instead a violent man was allowed to roam the streets for two decades, during which time he collected more than ten charges for violence against women. Brown is clearly responsible for whatever pain and suffering these women experienced over the years, a point alluded to by Sheriff Garcia when he reviewed this case. Still, for all of this accumulated pain, Brown was suspended for a measly ten days - a disciplinary sentence he is appealing. We may never know the tally that the guilty party in Jeff's case has racked up since Brown's careless examination of Steve’s  and Nilda’s deaths unfortunately. Nevertheless, it is worth a moment of quiet contemplation for each of you to think about just how much misery can accumulate in the world when a single police officer or DA decides to play by their own rules. If-you can then extrapolate outward to the combined suffering created by every rotten official in this nation, you might just begin to understand the task ahead of us. We have a long way to go.

When I began this update, I stated that Jeff's prosecution rested on roughly three pillars of support: the DNA testimony of William Watson, the snitch testimony of Michael Beckcom and Nathan Foreman, and the trust that jurors unthinkingly place in the honesty of the prosecutor. All three of these legs have now been snapped off. And yet: here Jeff sits, still in a solitary confinement cell on death row, still waiting on his federal judge to hold some sort of evidentiary hearing that will allow an expansion of the record. Do you understand now why 1 can no longer believe in "justice" the way I once did? 1 just shake my head when spectators to the criminal justice gladiator arena talk about "hope" and "reform." The problem's much larger than that. So long as we are a people that prioritizes victory over ethics, we are always going to have cops and prosecutors that cheat; their disease is our disease. If there‘s one thing that Jeff's case has taught me, it is this: there is no such thing as a winner in a zero-sum game. If you think otherwise, you aren't looking deep enough, aren‘t weighing the true effects of your triumph in human terms. Until this becomes common knowledge, the blood will continue to flow, just as it always has.

Ronald Jeffrey Prible 999433 Polunsky Unit 3872 FM 350 South Livingston, TX 77351

Thomas Whitaker 999522 Polunsky Unit 3872 FM 350 South Livingston, TX 77351

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Musings

March 30, 2017, 11:53 am

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By Michael Wayne Hunter

As one gets older, and I´m nearing sixty, you start to reflect on the past while relentlessly marching toward entropy.

Like a wild plant refusing cultivation, I grew in Sunnyvale, a suburb near San Jose.  My parents divorced, and my mother had to overcome challenges to find her way.  Although she had degrees in microbiology and math earned in the 1940s, she was unable in the 1970s to find work in her fields of study.  As a middle aged woman she returned to school and learned computer programming, and then worked at NASA´s Ames research writing code to interpret environmental data radioed back to earth from the Viking Mars Lander.  My mother had just been accepted to the Venus Project when she passed away from cancer.

My mother did not have an enemy in the world, freed from a dismal marriage she was just coming into her own personally and professionally when she was taken away.

I was twenty and in the Navy serving as an air crewman operating various avionics systems from the backseat of an aircraft carrier based jet.  After my mother´s memorial service, I returned to my squadron aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in the South China Sea.  I was not coping well, I was self-mediating with drugs and alcohol.

In a brief moment of clarity, I asked a chaplain about drug rehab, and he discourage the idea since it would jeopardize my flight crew status.  Increasingly alienated, my behavior became so erratic I was removed from flying duties and assigned during the midnight hours to a desk to watch a phone that rarely rang.  I remember reading an article in the middle of the night, thinking my mother would want to see it, but when I went to address the envelope, reality crashed in and I felt desolate.

Despite my poor performance over my last few months, I was honorably discharged.  As I was processed out, I felt hopeful.  I thought if I could find a special girl, decent job, a white powder bench with a pumping surf break, I´d be happy.  Fairly quickly I found all three but I was using more substances than ever and felt empty.

I went to the funeral of someone, who like my mother, died of cancer.  My mind disengaged as I internally raged much like Job 3: 24-26.

“Instead of eating, I mourn and I never stop groaning. Everything I fear and dread comes true. I have no peace, no rest, and my troubles never end.”

At the time of the funeral, I´d been accused by my father and his second wife of entering their house when they were gone, drinking all their alcohol, and stealing several inexpensive items.  All true.  In my alcohol/drugged mind I thought my actions a malicious prank, a screw you, not criminal behavior.  But of course, it was.  We exchanged threats, the police were investigating me, emotion was running high.

My father who I thought evil was alive, my mother who was good was dead and I could not reconcile this in my head.

The next day my father and his wife were dead, and subsequently I was sent to San Quentin´s Death Row for their murders.

On death Row, I went daily to an exercise yard with other condemned men.  Drugs/alcohol were available, and I chased chemical bliss.

Years passed as my appeal wended its way through the courts, and one day mother Teresa, the Catholic Saint, came to visit.  My life was so numb, I was indifferent at least until I met her.  I felt her warm spirit flow through me, and I watched in wonder when she said to a sergeant, “What you do to these men you do to God.”

Still, I was not ready to embrace any sort of Higher Power.  I lived in a place where my friends died by suicide or execution.

One day I was locked in the hole, charged with battery on an inmate with a weapon. My right hand was broken. While my hand swelled and turned black and blue, I clung to the notion my actions had been righteous.  Hands had been placed on me, so I handled him.  Case closed.

In the early morning hours, as the pain really hit, I started pondering all the opportunities I had passed on to avoid conflict.  My actions had made violence inevitable.  I had an epiphany, a moment of profound insight, and realized for the very first time my choices were leading me to violence again and again.  I made a resolution that night to do better, just simply do better, something I knew would not be possible if my thinking continued to be distorted by substances.

My hand was nearly healed when I went to my hearing.  The battery and weapon charges were dropped, and I plead guilty to fighting.

At first, I was welcomed back to the Death Row yard, but as it became clear to the fellas that I was no longer using they cut me loose.  No one invites a sober man to a party.  I was a buzz kill.

I started to take advantage of the opportunity to attend church in a fenced-in area of death row.  The service´s main message seemed to proclaim: “Our Mythology Rules!”  Kicks ass on all other myths/legends.”  Cynically I watched the condemned men who had littered the landscape with scores of corpses smugly boast that Jesus loved and forgave them their sins.  The unstated, but clear subtext was the State of California needed to get religion, see the light, and open the doors of Death Row and set them free.  I never drank the Kool-Aid, but the Bible study exposed me to concepts worth contemplating, lent me insight , as my mind free of substances began to clear.

The California Supreme Court denied my appeal.  I was served an execution order, and housed in a Death Watch cell. The chaplain came to see me, and I politely asked him to leave me alone.

The Federal Court accepted my appeal, stopped my execution, and eight years later ordered a new trial where I received life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Eventually, I was transferred to another prison where I had the opportunity to attend college and receive a degree.

I no longer attended church or studied the Bible, but I had remained substance free and disciplinary free since I´d broken my hand and made my resolution to do better.

I went to work as a clerk for The Sergeant.  The sergeant was not soft, far from it, a career marine corp sergeant until he retired and joined the Department of Corrections. He loved to talk about the corp.

“Marines are in the department of the Navy,” I scoffed.

“Men´s Department”, he shot back.

As I moved over the next six years from sergeant’s to lieutenant´s and finally the captain´s clerk, I watched the sergeant closely.  Highly respected by staff and prisoners, anyone could approach him with a problem, he´d patiently listen and usually find a solution.  A devout Christian.

I flipped on my TV to the local news one evening, and the sergeant sitting on a couch in his living room appeared.  The sergeant´s son, a marine serving in Afghanistan had been killed.

After taking time off to take care of his family, the sergeant returned to work, and it seemed that everyone, prisoners and staff, welcomed him.

In a private moment, I expressed how sorry I was for his loss.  Without a hint of anger or bitterness, he told me how much he loved his son and how proud he was that his son had served the United States.

Listening, I could not understand his sense of peace.  My mother and his son had lived good lives, and they were both taken too soon.  How could the sergeant´s loss strengthen his connection to family, community, country, God, while mine had broken every single link.

I asked the sergeant, shouldn´t one reap what they sow?  If so, why did our loved ones reap death?

Tilting his head one way and then another, the sergeant finally answered softly but firmly, “Sometime suffering is not the result of personal sin, but a consequence of living in a fallen world where God has blessed us with free will.  We are not privy to God´s mind, so we must lean on our faith to stand firm and trust God´s plan.”

The sergeant told me to read Job 23:10:

“He knows the way that I take when He has tested me, I will come forth as Gold.”

The way the sergeant lived his life every single day is what connected with me and made me seek out his words.  Our conversation took place several years ago, he´s a lieutenant now, and I´ve moved onto another prison.

I spend my days in a sewing factory assembling California Transportation vests and overalls, and in my spare time I go to devotion, church, veteran´s group and various self-help groups such as Communication, Anger Management, and recovery.

James 1:2 says: 

“My friends, consider yourself fortunate when all kinds of trials come your way.” 

When trials came my way, I did not come through as gold.  I was an angry young man, full of grievances and my actions profoundly hurt people and destroyed God´s gift of life.

I do know I have honored my resolution made more than two decades ago to do better.  Clarity of mind is a gift, and I´m grateful for what it´s brought to my life.

Michael Hunter C83600 Sierra Conservation Center 5150 O'Byrnes Ferry Road 5L-238 Jamestown, CA 95327

The Escape Hatch Below My Bunk: How Board-, Card-, and Role-Playing Games Help Me Leave Prison Whenever I Want

April 6, 2017, 3:33 pm

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By Rosendo Rodriguez III

“Es-cap‘ism, n. the avoidance of reality by absorption of the mind in entertainment or fantasy.”
-Webster's Dictionary

We humans are social creatures by nature, a characteristic that evolved within our ancestors when they were still living in trees, and refined later when they banded together to hunt woolly mammoths and fend off sabretooth tigers. It is deeply ingrained in our DNA, as well as our collective psyche. We would not be here today had traits in our primate forebears not been naturally selected: instinctive self- and group preservation, a deep seated desire to reproduce, and even aversion to ennui. When you are in a segregated environment in prison (such as Texas death row), where you spend 22 hours a day in your cell, similar instincts come into play, albeit in much different forms than when dealing with tigers, and mammoths. 

Physical survival here consists of merely having a healthy diet, good hygiene, and a daily fitness regimen of cardiovascular exercise. We are separated from one another no matter where we go and what we do, so it is rare to experience bodily harm. The struggle for mental and emotional survival and preservation however, is quite a different matter altogether. Some choose to escape the daily boredom by reading; others meditate and practice yoga.  Numerous gifted artists and writers create works of art on illustration art boards or through the written word. But if there is a ubiquitous hobby, one pastime everyone engages in to preserve their sanity and emotional well-being, it is board-, card-, and role-playing games.

"[Strategy] is more than a science: it is the application of knowledge to practical life, the development of thought capable of modifying the original guiding idea in the light of ever-changing situations; it is the art of acting under the pressure of the most difficult conditions"
-Helmuth von Moltke

Also located deep within our hominid DNA is the sense of competition, going back to when the first ape punched the second ape over the right to eat at a termite mound in Africa. This competitive spirit exists on death row, though there is no eating of termites and only the occasional shouting match. The day-to-day monotony of isolated prison life can bring pressures to bear on a person‘s mind, and can make one's existence difficult. Game-playing and competition can alleviate stress through the use of strategy. Neuropsychologists employing fMRI equipment have recorded the effects of strategic activity in the brains of game players. The level of activation of "reward-related mesolimbic neural circuits" (areas of the brain responsible for experiencing reward and motivation) was significantly higher than that of those who simply observed the game and did not participate. According to a 2010 study by the Department of Defense, findings showed that gamers have a ten to twenty percent higher cognitive function than people who do not play any types of games.  In addition to an increase in cognitive skills, there are also marked improvements in other areas such as problem solving and critical thinking abilities.  These are all beneficial side effects that oftentimes, are unbeknownst to the player during a gaming session.

We employ strategic thinking during games of chess, dominoes, Monopoly, Scrabble, Magic: The Gathering, and Dungeons & Dragons. (Although there are other types of games that are played, these are the most popular and widespread). We can play in groups or in pairs, depending on the game, and physical proximity to one another. On death row you play games either in front of your opponant’s cell (if you are in the dayroom), or with a partition separating you (if you are outside in the recreation yard), or while standing at your cell door along with other players. We can buy dominoes and chess sets through the commissary, a prison-run store that sells foodstuffs, hygiene supplies, correspondence materials, and the like. Other games are fashioned from commissary purchased supplies (paper, pens, cardboard, etc.) and the rules and information are derived from rulebooks that we can either order from outside retailers, or have them printed out from internet sources such as wikipedia.

Most here are creatures of habit and stick to only chess and dominoes. Some will expand into Scrabble and Monopoly. Some like myself, that run the gamut up to and including Magic: The Gathering, and Dungeons & Dragons.

"A novice chess player soon learns that it is a good idea to control the center of the board. This recognition will recur, in novel disguises, far from the chessboard. It may help to seek the equivalent of the center of the board in any situation, or to see that the role of the center has migrated to the flanks, or to realize that there is no board and no singular topology .... "
-Carl von Clausewitz

Chess, in one form or another, has existed over the millennia, and countless variants continue to be developed. We do not have much to do on a daily basis, and since playing the same version of a game can become rather dull, we rely on ingenuity and innovation in order to make it more interesting. For example, Iraqi chess employs a standard board and pieces, but has a novel exception: One piece is, unbeknownst to the opposing player, equipped with a "suicide bomb", and can be detonated only on one‘s own turn by yelling "BOOM!", resulting in the destruction of the suicide bomber and its surrounding pieces. This variant of traditional chess is quite handy, especially considering the limited amount of time (2 hours) that we have to spend during our indoor and outdoor recreation periods, since it considerably shortens an otherwise long and drawn out normal game.

Since dominoes requires both math and loud noise (the repeated slamming of the pieces, as well as "washing" them), two things I do not particularly care for, I will not be discussing it in this article.

Scrabble is an entertaining twofer: It is both fun and educational. By utilizing an extensive vocabulary (which you may not have had before), you can score the most points while confounding your opponents. Part of the appeal of Scrabble is the ability to bluff on the spelling of the word in question (and even the definition, if asked), and calling one‘s bluff by challenging the spelling (but not the definition). Bullshitting one's way to victory is cause for many a laugh; I once made up a word, "Junned" and it‘s definition, "v. the harvesting of summer vegetables in the month of June", to pull one over on my good friend Big Lou.

Monopoly, with it's ruthless seizures of real estate, massive amounts of money, territorial claims, detrimental and beneficial chance cards, and the ability to both go to and get out of jail, has a special appeal to those of us behind the walls. One variant, "Slumlord," takes place in an inner-city ghetto, and was, alternately, a sad and hilarious commentary on urban blight, crime, and gentrification that is for many here, all too real of an experience growing up.

Magic: The Gathering is a collectable card game that combines aspects of chess (forethought to plan several steps ahead), poker (the shuffle of cards, having the right combination in one‘s hand and on the table, as well as incorporating luck of the draw), baseball cards (the collectibility of over 7,000-plus cards, all varying in rarity, has not only an aesthetically pleasing value to hobbyists who collect for their stunning artwork, but also a monetary value ranging from just a few cents, up to tens of thousands of dollars), and fantasy (you represent a spell-caster that travels to different planes of existence, collecting creatures, spells, enchantments, artifacts and allies, all of which can be called forth at your command by utilizing "mana," the geomantic energy that resides within the lands of the worlds you travel to). Drawing from an infinite amount of card combinations and, players have endless amounts of opportunities to one-up their opponents, depending on how complexly or simply they want to customize their decks. I have played and won with one deck against an opponent, beating him soundly, only to lose minutes later using the same deck (and my opponent his) due to not being able to draw the cards I need. 

The element of chance is the great democratizer in Magic: The Gathering, because you can construct a deck of cards that (were we to buy the actual cards out in the world) would cost thousands of dollars, but it would all come to naught if you cannot get the right initial and/or subsequent draw. One of the most ingenious and fun mechanics of the game is that although there are a set number of rules that govern the game, there is the "golden rule"; i.e. if a card changes or even directly contravenes the rulebook, the card then takes precedent. New blocks of cards come out every year, create an ever-changing game that never lacks an appeal to any of us prisoners, from age 15 to 65 (which, incidentally, is the age range of the friends with whom I play).

"Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely. There is the science of the organization of armies in a nutshell"
-Colonel Ardant Du Pica

Dungeons & Dragons bears special mention here, since not only is it the game with the most comprehensive and complex rules we played on death row, but it is the way I have met fellow prisoners who have become my best friends here; men who I consider to no different than my own family. 

When I arrived here in 2008, I didn‘t know anyone. That quickly changed after being invited to be a part of a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) campaign. Although I had played strategic board- and card games such as Battletech, Warhammer 40,000, and Magic: The Gathering as a teenager, I had never played a role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons. 

D&D is a fantasy-based game that incorporates acting s a character you develop by interacting socially with others, all while following a storyline that takes place during both peacetime and war. Like in sports, the class of character you choose is vital to winning or losing contests and conflicts. Divided like football teams into offense and defense, both sides are further subdivided into specializations, sometimes having an overlap. 

Fighters are the main brawlers of any group, usually (but not always, especially when discretion is the better part of valor) charging into the fray with axes and swords swinging. Wizards employ arcane powers to cast fireballs and lightning, and even alter reality through the use of dusty spell books. Rogues are the thieves and spies, breaking into domiciles, gathering information and contacts within the underworld as well as high society, and are vital when disarming the myriad of traps that lay hidden in dungeons ruins. Clerics keep their fellow adventurers safe by praying to their deities for protection and healing, and should such measures fail, even bring them back from the dead. There are many other classes one can play, -- these are but a few D&D has to offer.

You also choose your character’s race, each with varying abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Orcs are big and very strong, but not very patient or intelligent. Dwarves are dour and standoffish, but are powerful in battle and are superb subterranean fighters. Humans are jacks-of-all-trades, easily adaptable to any group or situation, but possess no special traits. Halflings are small humanoids that are quick on their feet and have a natural affinity towards objects of value and as a result, make perfect rogues; Elves are dexterous and aloof, preferring to quickly strike with a sword or bow and arrow due to their frail bodies.

I created a multi-class character named "Samuel Elf Jackson" after one of my favorite actors, an amalgamation of his roles from "Pulp Fiction", "Snakes on a Plane", and "Jackie Brown". The character speaks, acts, and looks just him, as he portrays Catholic Monk/Cleric black elf that knows kung-fu and yells out lines such as "WHAT ARE THESE MUTHAFUCKIN' ORCS DOIN' IN THIS MUTHAFUCKIN‘ DUNGEON?!", and "HELL YES I KILLED THAT DRAGON, AND I HOPE HE BURNS IN HELL!!". Our adventuring group gets no small amount of commentary and laughs (as well as a few curse words of complaint and derision) from guards and neighbors here.

Over the years, I have had the honor and privilege of knowing guys who have had lives that are salvageable and worth knowing about. When the lights go out, and all is quiet, we all get together and grab the playing materials from under our bunks that qualify as an "escape hatch", enabling us to leave this place at the time of our choosing. How valuable is giving us a modicum of freedom in an otherwise infantile atmosphere, where actions, behaviors, food, and clothing are dictated on a daily basis. In the world of prison, where rules are fixed, the games we play afford us a chance to engage in world-building of our own design, giving us control of our own lives without interference from authorities. Games provide a rather wide latitude of choices and interactions that promote opportunities to leave the doldrums of real life, to obtain a reputation, and moments of recognition, and the chance to be a part of a community. The therapeutic value of playing games cannot be overestimated. Deep satisfaction and the resulting bonding experience that comes with overcoming a difficult mental and/or physical challenge is one of the main rewards. Friendly and even familial bonds are built here over the years and decades, and are often struck up over a game between strangers. 

I met a guy names of Arnold Prieto one night, during a D&D gaming session. We didn't know each other at all, but our characters were fighting alongside each other in a dungeon crawling with demons, undead, two chimeras, and a 7-headed hydra. There was an evil knight under a greater invisibility spell that kept giving our adventuring party hell. Samuel Elf Jackson pulled out a 2-pound bag of flour and threw it in the air, and immediately the knight's outline became visible. Prieto‘s character proceeded to whip the knight's ass six ways from Sunday. Afterwards, Arnold said, "The good news is, the knight is gone; the bad news is, no biscuits for breakfast." We all had a good laugh at that, and it is one of my fondest memories of him. Unfortunately, Arnold Prieto was executed by the state of Texas a few years ago. His writings can be seen here.

"While knowing that we will die someday, we think that all the others will die before us and that we will be the last to go. Death seems a long way off. Is this not shallow thinking? It is worthless and is only a joke within a dream... Insofar as death is always at one's door, one should make sufficient effort and act quickly."
-Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo

When it comes to any group of people who have formed a deep and abiding bond, mental states and emotions are highly contagious, and more often than not, joyous and humorous ones spread like wildfire. Being sentenced to death, these bonds and feelings make numbered days feel more worthwhile, and they cannot be stolen. With each final move of a chess piece, or final draw from the deck, or with your last throw of the dice, whether it is a game of skill or the game of life, make it count no matter what situation you may find yourself in. If you have nothing to lose, you won't. 

Rosendo Rodriguez 999534 Polunsky Unit 3872 FM 350 South Livingston, TX 77351

The Addict Speaks: My Long Road to Recovery

April 13, 2017, 5:18 pm

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By Christian Weaver

When I say that getting high was my first true love, I´m not just using an expression.  My earliest memory from age four, is of being dizzy, blurry trees and sky rushing past.  Every three or four seconds I would glimpse my smiling mother as she gave another push to keep the merry-go-round turning.  It was love at first spin.  When it was time to leave the park, I started to whirl around in circles to keep the dizzy feeling going.  I never wanted it to end.

I spent my teenage years in Crossville, Tennessee, a rural area near the Smokey Mountains.  My parents were probably upper middle class.  There were six of us in all living in a five bedroom house on a sixty-four acre farm.  During most of this period we were homeschooled by my mother.  Our family was a part of the local homeschooling community, about thirty or forty families that would gather once in a while cook-outs and field trips.  Apart from these events, we had little fellowship together.

My parents provided me with a unique childhood, including missionary travels to Guadalajara, Mexico, Uganda and Kenya; Brussels, Belgium, and even Switzerland near the Alps.  I remember once being bitten by a baby cobra and another time seeing children my age with machine guns and camouflage uniforms, and another hiking through ice caverns made from holes in melting glaciers.  Looking back on it now, I am shocked by how little I appreciated the experience.  I was simply too young.

Most homeschooling families were Christians, including the Amish and Mennonites. I led a sheltered life, with no exposure to alcohol, drugs, pornography, or even cigarettes.  I found myself rebelling against the Leave it to Beaver atmosphere.  At fifteen I was an A and B student, a serious poet, excellent athlete, and piano player, but I had zero interest in going to college like the other homeschoolers.  My heroes were rock-stars, dead poets, and even the psychopaths in movies.  I wanted to be reckless and crazy, the black sheep of the homeschooling community.  Christian morality, which of course included temperance, was my nemesis.

One evening, a church buddy introduced me to cough syrup.  You had to guzzle four ounces of it and it sent you on an intense, zombie-like, ten hour trip that seemed to last for many years. Your entire life was recapitulated through the span of one day.  Large doses can cause brain hemorrhaging and damage the liver.  I also gobbled dozens of caffeine pills and pseudoephedrine, a sort of over-the-counter speed that you could buy at gas stations. Between these and the cough syrup I was every bit as blitzed as a junkie doing speedballs.  I would crash our group events, the life of the party, ranting, laughing manically and falling over like a drunk.  I grew popular with the kids but shocked and horrified the parents.  Because my potions were still a secret, they just assumed I was evil or had a mental disorder.

When I was sixteen I ingested a lethal amount of seeds from a hallucigenic plant  called Jimson weed, or Devi´ls weed.  I ended up in the hospital for three days hallucinating insects on my skin – i.e. tubes and IV´s – and talking to people who weren´t there.  Though the doctors had pumped my stomach, they told my parents that I would probably have permanent damage from all the toxins.  I didn´t notice any difference.

I spent the next few months in Chattanooga in a long-term Christian rehab called Teen Challenge.  It didn´t take the staff long to see my heart wasn´t in it.  “In fact”, said one counselor, “I think you´re just getting started”.  On the Greyhound back to Crossville I met an older, attractive woman and talked her out of four pills…I blacked out for half the day and have a vague memory of my father finding me in a Hardees parking lot with a suitcase in my hand.

At age seventeen I actually started to huff gas (later I would experiment with lacquer thinner, airbrush repellant and the infamous gold spray paint).  It was a different buzz entirely, a sort of Disneyland Fantasia where inanimate (and for some reason, domestic) objects like brooms and tables would whisper and grin and even point with wooden fingers.  Several times I almost panicked when I forgot I was human and didn´t know my own name, home, planet, etc.  I only knew that I was conscious and that I therefore existed.  One time I found myself in my parents´ attic surrounded by two-by-fours and pink insulation.  With one hand I was smoking and with the other I was holding the yellow nozzle of a plastic gas container.  I was alternating between puffs from the cigarette and drags from the nozzle.  Miraculously, I didn´t burst into flames, burn the house to the ground, and kill my entire family.

When I turned eighteen, my father gave me three options:  enlist in the military, complete a long-term rehab, or get the hell out of his house.  Can you guess which one I chose?  Once emancipated from the homeschooling-Christian community, I finally had access to real drugs like alcohol, marijuana, and pills.  On my eighteenth birthday I passed out in the middle of a road and woke up in the county jail.  The officer who’d found me said he´d almost run me over.  For me, the entire year of 1996 was one prolonged blackout with spotty memories, mostly of girls and couch surfing, because I drank until I puked and always mixed it with pills.  I would take whatever drug I could buy or was given – no questions asked – and was hospitalized more than once for either overdoses or adverse reactions.  All I remember clearly from age 18 to 20 is multiple stretches in the county jail.  I was arrested nineteen times and racked up a pile of fines and charges for missed court dates, bail jumping, and drug-related misdemeanors.

Not only did I mix alcohol with other drugs, but I also drove my car around in that condition.  I perceived it as a challenge, as a skill to be mastered.  To me it was no different than one of those old school racing games in a video arcade. I was a very careful driver.  As long as I was conscious, I could drive without crashing. One night I dropped five hits of blotter acid and drove to Cleveland, Ohio to pick up my girlfriend.  I remember seeing faces in the mountains and clouds and even vehicles on the freeway melting into the pavement.  Another time I was huffing gas and driving through town when suddenly the road became a lake and my car became a hovercraft.  I started to swerve it back and forth enjoying the hum and the glide. I found myself parked on the sidewalk.  “Are you okay?” somebody shouted.  I had totaled my car – wrapped it around a telephone pole – but didn’t remember the impact.  How often I cheated injury and death.  I never even broke a bone.  Probably the stupidest thing I did, if I had to pick one, was getting drunk and lying down across a set of train tracks.  I nestled between the crossties and thought I´d rest a couple of minutes…

At age twenty two I moved to New Orleans.  I had relatives in the French Quarter who introduced me to  bikers, offshore workers, and alcoholic ex-hippies.  I started working on oil rigs and painting houses uptown.  A buddy talked me into trying heroin and it was love at first poke.  It was superior to any and all the other drugs combined.  I can only compare it to dreaming while being awake – Mother Poppy, Leading Lady…Soon I was doing speedballs and even breaking down and injecting crack cocaine.  The houses I had to paint were old Victorian-style mansions, like wedding cakes the size of castles.  Often I´d be found atop a forty food extension ladder, paintbrush in hand, trying desperately to keep myself from falling asleep.  Though I would nod for several minutes my feet remained on high alert.

An older couple I knew – a former merchant marine and his Cherokee wife, who were both alcoholics – won forty thousand dollars in an injury suit.  I crashed at their apartment for two weeks and we probably smoked about ten thousand dollars-worth of crack.  I remember my heart beating with bird-like intensity – in quick staccato bursts, like a machine gun – and my brain feeling like it was frying in a pan.  But the heroin was even scarier.  It was far less predictable.  The first time I OD´d I was out for three days; I sweated to dehydration and lost control of my bladder.  The second time was even worse: my head and chest began to pound like they were going to explode, like they would rupture or hemorrhage.  That was the only time I was surethat I would die.

By age twenty five, ten years of continuous inebriation finally began to take its toll.  I was filled with self-disgust, regret, and paralyzing grief about my wasted potential.  Delusional thoughts crept in.  I started to think I was dying from some mysterious disease, that I´d be dead in six months.  My last year in New Orleans – 2003, before I came back to Crossville – was when my sanity finally snapped.  I felt it break like a twig.

An old buddy from Crossville introduced me to meth; it made me hallucinate from lack of sleep and gave me the energy to keep drinking, eating pills, and smoking weed without stopping.  Suddenly, I grew convinced that there were people out there to kill me.  I began to carry a loaded pistol and rant and rave, starting arguments.  I could sense my own apocalypse, but I wanted to speed it up.  In December 2003, one of my handguns was stolen by a young man who I knew casually from drug circles.  After several weeks of complaining and making threats, I managed to lure him into my car, where I shot him, execution-style, three times in the head.  I dumped his body in the woods, burned the car to its frame, and started walking down the street like nothing had happened.  I was famished and barely conscious when the officers picked me up, so intoxicated that the murder seemed fake, like a movie.  But the nightmare became real when I examined my affidavit:  I discovered, to my shock and utter horror, that the victim was no man.  He was only fifteen.  Drugs had so deteriorated my perception and judgment that I actually mistook a child – a skinny child! – for a man.  What´s bizarre is that I couldn´t even remember his appearance.  I couldn´t have picked him from a line-up.

After a year or so in jail I had an encounter with Christ, a “Road to Damascus” experience, that made my attitude and nature and behavior change drastically.  It really filled me with love and desire for integrity.  I apologized to my victim´s family in open court and voluntarily pled guilty to First Degree Murder. I started my sentence at Turney Center (a fairly dangerous prison) and improved myself rapidly through church attendance, exercise, and intense self-discipline and education.  I had a column in the prison paper called “The Pen and the Sword” and was published in free-world magazines over thirty times between 2005 and 2012.  I also studied journalism and wrote two novels, four books of poetry, a full length play, and plenty of essays and aphorisms.

The biggest mistake I made at Turney Center was not joining the Narcotics Anonymous Program.  Unaware that obsessive and/or addictive behavior is a type of personality, like introversion or Type A, I just assumed that I was cured.  I didn´t know my own psychology.  By 2007 I could morally justify taking small amounts of non-narcotics like Baclofen and Neurontin.  I would take them as prescribed and never go up on dosage.  I had yet to discover that just the slightest shift of consciousness can prove virulent to the addict.  Any chemical that alters his awareness, even over-the-counter drugs, will start the process of dependence and addiction all over.  Soon I was smoking weed and rationalizing it to myself because I avoided the “real” drugs like morphine and meth.  I didn´t catch the growing pattern;  in my mind, I was a godly Christian whose only addiction was self-improvement and knowledge.

In 2012 I was transferred to Northeast prison.  In 2014, four months before my transfer to Bledsoe, my identical twin brother attempted suicide three times.  He nearly bled to death in a bathtub and even tried carbon monoxide.  Then his phone got turned off and he refused to answer letters.  The grief I felt was unbearable.  That week I stuck a needle in my arm for the first time in nine years.  When I came to Bledsoe in 2014 I was still sober about ninety percent of the time.  I didn´t need drugs daily, but I wasn´t strong enough to resist them when I felt depressed or stressed out.  Also, I couldn´t avoid them when they were right in my face.  If I could see them or smell them, then I would usually cave in.  My only method for staying sober was to hide from, or fearfully avoid drug users and situations. I was lacking in power.

From 2014 to 2016 I alternated between abstinence and intense binges of Seboxone and synthetic marijuana.  As usual, God protected me from the consequences of my actions: I never failed a drug test or got a drug-related disciplinary.  Though I was higher than Mount Olympus, couldn´t walk without swerving or even find my own cell, I wasn´t  snatched up and shipped like many other inmates were.  When I joined the NA program about a year and a half ago, I still continued to have relapses for the first ten months.  It took me hundreds of hours of applying and internalizing the NA philosophy before I believed it unconsciously.  For example, I knew that I was powerless over drugs (Step One), but unconsciously I thought I could smoke a little weed without falling off the wagon.  I also learned that having relapses -- so long as they are lessening in frequency and duration -- are not a symptom of going backward, but signs a battle is being fought.  Only addicts who are recovering are even capable of relapse.  Active addicts cannot stumble because they never try to quit!

In the last eight months I have found a new strength, the inner power of sobriety.  The same stresses and triggers – the same unchangeable situations – no longer push me to use.  Instead of numbing the sharp feelings, I am learning to bear their full intensity without changing or compromising my behaviors and beliefs.  Instead of running away from fear, I turn to face it without flinching…until I fear it no longer.  The attraction of getting high, like that of an ex-lover or spouse, is still present and real. But it is not overwhelming.  I have fallen out of love.  Gaining a new identity and peer group and being known on the compound as a member of NA has made it easier to resist the temptation.  Sobriety is no longer a state of mind to be endured, but a world – a new horizon – to be explored and discovered.  I´m not just leaving the old path but embarking on a new one.  A new city awaits.

Christian Weaver 271262 BCCX -24B-202 1045 Horsehead Road Pikeville, TN 37367

Forever Young

April 20, 2017, 5:04 pm

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By Craig B. Harvey

Say world, as you can see, I'm back working my pen. My goal this year is to write more. I was motivated to do so when, while doing some research in the library, an old timer shared  with me this African proverb: “Until lions learn to write books, history will always glorify the hunter.” In other words, I will never be given credit if I allow my enemy to write my history. I must write my own. 

The irony in struggling to be heard from behind walls is that prisoners are society's castaways, yet society is entertained and intrigued by criminal life and drama.  On television any given night, crime and punishment shows abound: Law and Order; CSI; Rosewood; Forensic Files; Cops; Lock Up; Jail and How To Get Away With Murder (Wow! What a name!). Even the first 10 minutes of primetime news sensationalizes murder, rape, robbery etc.. Society condemns us for living a life we were conditioned to live but gives awards (Emmys, Oscars, Golden Globes) to creators, writers and actors of shows that allow the viewer to live vicariously through us on screen. In essence, condoning the entertaining aspect of criminal life.

The “entertaining” world of prison is a unique environment to mature in. On average, we enter IDOC between the age of 17 and 24 (in my case 13yo), with an overwhelming majority of us having some sort of substance or alcohol abuse problem. A problem more social issue than criminal. Most of us will remain emotionally stuck at that age or younger. Prison was built to house young men. Policies are designed to punish and restrict NOT rehabilitate young men or give proper medical attention to ailing old men. 

Many will grow old with no sense of responsibility, spending a large portion of our lives being told what to do or not do, and when to do it. Many of us have never worked a 9 to 5 job, never learned how to communicate with a woman.  Hell, many were never taught how to wash clothes, clean our bedrooms, or maintain proper hygiene.  And prison is not a place these habits are learned without brothers of great compassion teaching them. 

Administrative rules are designed to perpetuate ignorance, dehumanize and humiliate able-bodied, strong-willed, young men. A few days ago, while I was handling my early morning “business,” I reached back to give the toilet a courtesy flush and it didn't work. My first thought was damn the toilet broke. The disappointing smell of the non-functional toilet hit me along with the realization of what was happening.  I tapped the bunk and said, “Cellie, wake up, they on their way.” Because of the smell and him being locked up 32 years he knows what “on the way” means.

The hot water was still on so I took a hurried bird bath in the sink and brushed my teeth.  My heart was racing, my stomach bubbling like I needed to finish my morning business but couldn't because before I could I heard the thunderous roar of 300 plus officers. Dressed in neon orange jumpsuits, black bullet-proof vests, black combat boots, black helmets and red mace canisters strapped to their legs, they yelled “GET UP, TURN ON THE LIGHT!” All while clanking three foot wooden sticks against the bars.

In front of each cell two officers instruct both occupants to strip nude: “open your mouth, stick out your tongue, run your fingers through your hair, lift your nuts, turn around, lift your feet and wiggle your toes, now bend at the waist, spread your cheeks and cough”.

After they search our blue pants and shirt we're allowed to get dressed. Just blue pants and shirt and flip flop shower shoes. No socks, boxers, coat or regular shoes. This is the attire, no matter the weather, rain, hail, sleet, snow and 10 degrees. We are then handcuffed and escorted to the chow hall where we'll sit from 8am to 2pm. Although I've been through this close to 20 times, and it's something I can never get used to. I have experienced the strip search procedure hundreds of times because it occurs before and after each visit. This entire episode is referred to as a statewide shakedown. Officers throughout the state are selected to search our persons, living space, and property. Really they destroy and confiscate approved items as a way to provoke and control, establishing order out of chaos. 

Please pause for a second and imagine how you would feel? If someone you loved endured this, would you still be entertained? Some find it difficult to feel compassion for prisoners. The lifestyle that led us here may not be your experience, the path of a very small percentage that lives a thug lifestyle.  Selective enforcement of law allows officers to feel comfortable shooting Black men and women, or tossing around Black school age girls, a system created with no compassion for the small percentage of us who insist on thuggin' and trappin'.

Until the community develops compassion for the so-called “thugs,” the guilty, the innocent will continue to be gunned down. Why? Because society views all Black people, that look or act in a certain way, as being guilty. What is compassion? It is defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as; “Compassion – sympathetic consciousness of others distress together with a desire to alleviate it” Do you have compassion? With compassion our social ills would be healed. Until next time, peace. 

Craig B. Harvey R15853 Stateville Correctional Center P.O. Box 112 Joilet, IL 60434