Prison Journal: Day 7,961
May 27, 2009
Today would have been my father’s 74th birthday. He passed away five years ago on June 11, 2004. I had not spoken with my father since 1998, as he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and couldn’t carry on a conversation over the telephone. Traveling to visit me was not an option. The last time I saw my father was in 1994, when I was still confined in USP Atlanta.
Death is the natural extension of life, though the death of family members can feel difficult for those in prison. Besides my father, I’ve been saddened with the death of my grandfather and the death of two mentors who were close to me during the first decades of my imprisonment. I’ve never grieved properly for those deaths of people I love, as my prison adjustment brought the ancillary consequence of drying my emotions.
Besides my father’s birthday, today is also the birthday of my niece, Isabella. My younger sister Christina gave birth to Isabella 20 years ago, when I was in the early stages of this sentence. I learned about Isabella’s birth from a telephone call home, and I still remember the flood of tears that fell. It was the first confirmation I received that family life was going on without my inclusion. During my imprisonment I’ve visited with Isabella fewer than a dozen times, and I’m sad to acknowledge that I don’t even know the young lady she has become. I missed her childhood and I missed watching my sister mature as a wife and mother. Those losses of family connections represent the real pain of a lengthy prison term.
I don’t like losing work productivity; this dizzy sensation interrupted my writing progress today. I completed an article for PrisonTalk today that I titled Prepare For Release. My progress on the manuscript I’m writing doesn’t merit reporting. I reported for sick call and the nurse scheduled an appointment for tomorrow.
I did manage to continue my running. I ran 10 miles, boosting my tally to 1,468 miles over the past 166 days.
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Prison Journal: Day 7,944
May 10, 2009
Last night I went to bed at five in the afternoon. I woke at 3:00, which meant I was well rested with nearly 10 hours of sleep. That made for a productive writing session. I have written an estimated 9,000 words on this second version of the chapter. I feel pleased with the work though I will wait for responses from my first reader before I express too much optimism. I’m sending the documents to Carole today for typing.
Tomorrow morning I will continue writing. I have another 3,000 to 5,000 words I want to write in the opening section. Then I must return to the proposal itself and spend several days refining it. My hopes are to have the entire document ready for the ltierary agent who represents me by mid-summer. We’ll see.
Following my morning writing, I went to run. I ran 10 miles at a much faster pace than usual. I now have 1,317 miles logged over the past 149 days. I spent the afternoon writing a new article for change.org. I wrote about the parole system and expressed my thoughts on why prison reform ought to bring back parole. I wrote a similar article last week for PrisonTalk. My new article for change.org ought to run on Monday, 18 May 2009.
It is Mother’s Day, and I’m sad that I do not have access to sufficient phone minutes. I cannot use the phone to call my mother, my grandmother, or my two sisters. I hate this terrible disruption to my family and community as a consequence of this phone system. In fewer than three more years, this will end for me.
Sunday, 10 May 2009
Prison Journal: Day 7,391
April 27, 2009
Both my case manager and my counselor have implied that prison has dehumanized me. They spoke more tactfully, and were polite, but I’ve thought about what they meant when they observed that I had suppressed my emotions for too long. As I was in the midst of my work today, I knew they were right.
Yesterday I spent time interviewing a man who served a four-month sentence for human smuggling. The name of the crime sounds more sinister than what he did, which was to make an attempt to bring a Mexican citizen into the country illegally. I wrote a story for the profile section of this blog, but as promised, I read the story to Ricardo before I sent it home. As Ricardo listened to me read, he began to cry.
I felt sad for Ricardo, though I didn’t really grasp the tears. He had been in prison for one month, and he would return home in three months. This was a 35-year-old contractor, weighing north of 200 pounds. He had life experiences, a wife, two children. The story I wrote was more descriptive of how normal citizens can make decisions that ensnare themselves in the criminal justice system through poor judgment. Nevertheless Ricardo could not withhold the tears as he listened to the story.
Prison no longer elicits such emotions from me. As a survival mechanism, I have conditioned myself to life with expectations of loss, sadness, helplessness, hopelessness, loneliness, and pending discomfort. I expect to face some type of conflict or assault on my sense of self every day. It doesn’t always come, but I expect it.
In retrospect, the tumultuous events that uproot my life come less frequently than they did earlier in my prison term. That may be because I have conditioned my adjustment, or because I have transferred to minimum-security. Still, during the six years I’ve served in camps, prison administrators have disrupted my life on numerous occasions without prior warning. They have transferred me twice, they have locked me in segregation, they have changed my job assignment. The interruptions have come because of my writing about the prison experience, as administrators would prefer to contain information about what transpires inside these boundaries. As an American, I feel more allegiance to people in society than to preserving what I consider the absurdity of prison cultures.
Prison administrators may disrupt my sense of peace, but they cannot elicit an emotional response from me. Too many years of trying to condition myself to live within this system has dehumanized me in that way. I expect administrators to make decisions that will determine where I live, how much contact I may have with my family and community, how the hours of my day pass, what food I eat, what clothes I wear, what I read, what music I hear, when I can feel natural elements and when I must exist within the confines of a concrete cage. I have to know that whatever privileges I enjoy today may not exist tomorrow, or in ten more minutes.
Whereas Ricardo feels the natural shock of imprisonment and loss of liberty, for me prison has become the only life I know. It is not punishment, it is my life and I have conditioned myself to live within the system administrators create. It means I don’t allow the institution to pull highs and lows or normal human emotions from me. Only my family can influence my emotions, though my conditioning has even tempered those feelings. I will have to learn how to live with such feelings again, because as a prisoner I’ve had to suppress them.
The exercise of will has taken precedence over feelings. Today I exercised that will by rising to begin writing at 3:13 AM, and adding another 10 miles to my running tally. I have extended my record of daily exercise to 136 days.
Monday, 27 April 2009
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