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Category: On My Block

Posted
February 22, 2023
Category
interconnectedness, kindness, life philosophy, My Story, On My Block
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6 Responses

Take Me to Church

Man praying beside a lake at sunrise.

The Florida Department of Corrections was established in 1868. It says so right on the logo. That’s 155 years of misery bound up inside these razor wire fences; 155 years of blood and tears and beatings and cover-ups, of roach- and rat-infested dormitories, sub-standard medical care, untreated mental illness, salmonella diets, and a workforce trained to hate.

Not complaining. People have been complaining since 1868 and it’s done no good. This is just the way it is. This is the prison system I grew up in. I first arrived at Lake Butler on a county van in 1993 to serve a decade. Then I returned in 2005 and I’ve been locked up ever since. I’ve wasted most of my life on the rec yards and in the dayrooms of the Sunshine State’s correctional institutions. Close to 30 years. Damn near one fifth of the Department’s bloody history. Lots of changes during that time: secretary changes, legislative changes, policy changes, uniform changes… But if there has been one constant over the years, it’s the good Pentecostal and Baptist folks that come in every Sunday to minister to my broken brethren.

“Fellers,” I remember one old country preacher saying as his wife beamed at us from the piano, “I could be wearing them blues just like you. And sitting in them same pews. The onliest difference is I didn’t get caught. And I found Jesus before that old devil could get his hooks in me good…”

Sunday after Sunday, rain or shine, they would arrive with a message of love and hope and forgiveness. Some of the greatest hits: that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that Paul was a murderer and the Lord still used him to do great works in the early church, that Jesus was crucified between two common criminals and he promised them a place in paradise on that fateful day…

These people would hug you, call you “brother,” pray with you, make you feel less alone in the world. God’s love was more than just an abstract idea in those services, more than just some ancient mythology on a Dead Sea Scroll. It was a palpable presence that filled the room, emanating from their smiles and pulsating in their hugs and handshakes.

But then a darkness crept over the land. Religion and politics intertwined. God’s all-encompassing love was suddenly limited. There were terms and conditions to salvation. Sure, the Sermon on the Mount was still relevant and, yes, Jesus’s greatest commandment was still to love one another. But there was also Levitical fine print that could not be ignored. Certain restrictions applied.

At least this is what I assumed was going on in recent years. Especially when the evening news ran a segment in 2019 about a pastor getting booed by his congregation for calling out former President Trump on his lack of humanity. Compassion was dead and division ruled the day. No shelter, no quarter, no love. Even the Church had succumbed. Matthew 25:35-45 had no place in the modern American landscape. Not in these hateful and hyper-partisan times. But again, this was all conjecture. All theory. I haven’t been to church much over the last couple decades. Practically zero attendance on this bid. Up until recently. (More on this in a couple paragraphs.)

Everyone is Christian when the handcuffs get slapped on. God is like Momma—the last person you think about when you’re out there doing dirt and the first person you call when they throw you in a holding cell. Lord knows how many calloused and trembling hands I held in county jail prayer circles back in the day. Full of desperate men like me petitioning the man upstairs for a little mercy. Staring down the barrel of life in prison will make a born-again Christian out of even the most devout agnostic.

But then we get sentenced and sent down the road. And as we work our way through the post-conviction process, our hope and faith evaporate with every denied appeal, every deceased loved one, every unaccepted phone call and unanswered letter. Not everyone though. My friend Lester Wells has not missed a church service since he came to prison in 1983 for a crime he insists he did not commit. Forty years in a cage and his faith has not wavered. Even though he’s lost everything. Hard not to draw book of Job parallels when I see Mr. Wells praying in the mornings.

My situation is different. I am not an innocent man. I’m guilty of 99% of the crimes I’ve been charged with, and the list is substantial. Not proud of this but there’s no getting around it. No one to blame but me. In fact, that one percent that I’m actually innocent of is offset by the few things I managed to get away with. So it all balances out. Especially when you factor in the crimes that weren’t technically crimes but in many ways were worse than the burglaries and robberies that put me here—the women I used for sexual pleasure and ego gratification, the lost souls that I could have affected positively but instead infected with the miserable slavery that is addiction, the lies I’ve told, the people I’ve let down, the disgrace I’ve brought upon my family… So when that great white-bearded cosmic wish-granter in the sky opted not to rescue me from the colossal mess I made of my life, I accepted my fate with no hard feelings. After all, I’m the one that put me here.

But I haven’t been hanging out in church. For these last eighteen years I’ve just been making the best of this bad situation—playing soccer, playing poker, doing pullups and dips, gambling on football, hanging out with Momma on Saturdays, doing my time… Then, a little over a decade ago, I started writing these essays and books which proved to be a watershed moment on the timeline of my incarcerated journey. This led to an interest in self-improvement, the study of philosophy, mindfulness meditation, neuroplasticity. The Law of Momentum is not just the working title of book three in the Miranda Rights trilogy, it’s a powerful force that can carry us to both dizzying heights and crushingly low depths. It all depends on which way you get moving.

But momentum is also a strange and mercurial current. It can shift like the wind. This is especially evident in sports. Take football, for example. One team is racking up chunk yardage, going up and down the field, scoring almost effortlessly. But then the opposing team digs in and forces a goal line stand, then drills a long field goal just before the half, then forces a turnover to open up the third. Suddenly, they’re only down ten points with the ball at midfield and an entire half to go. What happened? Momentum shifted.

I experienced a momentum shift of my own recently. Things were humming along. I was working on my seventh novel, pumping out these essays, surging toward the finish line of this lengthy prison sentence, when I made a couple questionable decisions. Nothing major—a joint here, a bottle of buck there, cranking up my old parlay ticket for one last run. But it was enough to stall my momentum. And after a few repetitions of these old behaviors, I was moving in a completely different direction: backwards.

Things got real bad, real quick from there. (For a more detailed account of this unraveling, check out Divine Intervention Part Two.) The point is that I had to do something drastic to shift the momentum. I needed a goal line stand. So on Sunday, November 13th, 2022, I signed up for church. First time in forever. Just to change up the energy. Just to escape the hovering dope smoke of my unit and sit in a pew for an hour. Just to be around some positive people.

And do you know what I discovered? Those same volunteers are still showing up every weekend. Those same country preachers and their piano-playing wives. And they’re not interested in politics, or who’s Baptist or Catholic or a Messianic Jew. They definitely ain’t in it for the offering plate. They’re just living Matthew 25, spreading a message of unconditional love and hope to us, the least of their brothers.

I’ve been going for a few months now. I won’t pretend it’s always awesome. Sometimes it’s boring, sometimes I disagree with the message, sometimes I’m grumpy because I have to miss football. But I always feel better for going, I remain clean, and most importantly, I got the momentum shift I was seeking.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite passages from Michael A. Singer’s The Untethered Soul.

“Your relationship with God is the same as your relationship with the sun. If you hid from the sun for years and then chose to come out of your darkness, the sun would still be shining as if you had never left. You don’t need to apologize. You just pick your head up and look at the sun. It’s the same way when you decide to turn toward God—you just do it. If, instead, you allow guilt and shame to interfere, that’s just your ego blocking the divine force. You can’t offend the Divine One; its very nature is light, love, compassion, protection, and giving. You can’t make it stop loving you. It’s like the sun. You can’t make the sun stop shining on you; you can only choose to not look at it. The moment you look, you’ll see it’s there.”

Posted
October 17, 2022
Category
extremes, life philosophy, My Story, On My Block, the middle way / moderation, writing
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1 Response

TICKETMAN

Twelve years, six novels, and more than a hundred essays ago, I found myself living between a landfill and a shit plant at a Florida panhandle prison called Walton Correctional, commonly referred to as Wally World by the 1200 men toiling away inside its razor wire fences.

Fresh off lockdown after nine months of miniscule food portions, minimal sunlight, and three tepid showers a week, I hit this new compound at 132 pounds of malnourished skin and bone, white as the paper I’m writing this on. Dudes I’ve been doing time with since I was a teenager didn’t recognize me.

Since most of my property was either confiscated or stolen during the transfer, I was starting this next chapter of my incarcerated journey with very little—a stack of letters, a transistor radio, my address book. Even my sweet momma was banned indefinitely from coming to see me during that time, the spiteful aftermath of a prohibited relationship with a female staff member at a previous prison. But I had a little money in my inmate account, access to Danny Sheridan’s Vegas lines in the USA Today, and a reputation for having an iron word that preceded me. More than enough to survive.

After all, I had a pretty decent hustle.

Running a parlay ticket in prison can be a lucrative endeavor. Anyone who’s ever bet on a football game knows how difficult it is to pick four teams against the spread. In the joint, that’s what you have to do: Pick four. Usually at 10-1 odds, meaning that if you win, you’ll receive ten dollars for every dollar wagered. If you win. The advantage is definitely slanted in favor of the house, much more so than any casino on the strip. That was me, by the way. I was the house. Only instead of Caesar’s or Harrah’s, I was Bond Money. If you were on any prison yard in the Florida Panhandle between 2006 and 2011, chances are somebody passed you a highlighted Bond Money ticket with the weekend’s games and odds. For those of you who have never lived beneath the gun towers, here’s a brief explanation of how the ticket game works…

I had writers in every wing of every housing unit who passed out tickets, collected money, and jotted receipts that were then turned into me before the games. Writers make a quarter on every dollar they write. That may not sound like much but if you’re stuck in this place and you’re broke, it’s good money. Survival money. The average writer pulls anywhere from $100 to $200 worth of coffee, tuna, and other canteen items from his respective wing over a weekend. (Canteen is currency in a cashless prison system.) Sometimes they write more depending on the financial climate of their dormitory. Regardless, they get their 25% off the top. Then any hits are subtracted. The remainder is mine. And it’s usually substantial. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some brutal weekends, days where the stars aligned and I was forced to empty out multiple lockers. Occasionally, but not often. The key is to always sock it away, so when those bad weekends happen you can cash every ticket with a smile. Along with a flyer for the next weekend’s games and odds.

Within a month I had five lockers full of canteen. After two months I doubled that number. Soon, I began converting those bags of food and hygiene into real money, $100 at a time. All while making sure that every hit was immediately paid as well as running free pools here and there to keep my name ringing. A year passed. Football season bled into basketball season, and basketball to baseball to football again. Money flowed. Life was good. Or as good as it could be for a guy serving decades in prison. So why did I feel so empty?

I couldn’t see it at the time, but a storm was brewing inside of me. An existential crisis. I was 35 years old and all I had to my name was a bunch of lockers full of coffee and tuna and an inflated ego from people telling me what a brilliant ticketman I was. Never married, no kids, no employment skills, no retirement account. I had built nothing, made nothing, grown nothing, done nothing with my life except run a chaingang parlay ticket.

There’s a line in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. It comes after the young Brahmin has left home and goes into the forest to become an ascetic, then a beggar, then a traveler where he meets Buddha in a grove but decides against following the master teacher. After his first encounter with the ferryman, after surrendering to the flesh with beautiful Kamala, after becoming a successful businessman and gambling large sums of money, after years go by and his face gradually assumes the expression so often found among the wealthy—the expression of discontent, displeasure, idleness, lovelessness—Siddhartha becomes disgusted with his life. “…But above all he was nauseated with himself, with his perfumed hair, with the smell of wine from his mouth, with the soft flabby appearance of his skin. Like one who has eaten and drunk too much and vomits painfully and then feels better, so did the restless man wish he could rid himself with one terrific heave of these pleasures, of these habits of his entirely senseless life.”

I was with Siddhartha on the one terrific heave thing. I was feeling nauseated myself. All this dissatisfaction timed up with mom being reinstated to my visitation list. She finally wore down the warden after almost two years of relentless phone calls and stakeouts in the prison parking lot. That sweet lady can be a force of nature when it comes to her boy. The fact that she was ever suspended in the first place is indicative of the FDC’s heartlessness and draconian modus operandi. Especially in that era. Mom is a taxpaying, law-abiding citizen. She’s never even had a traffic ticket. I remember walking laps with her in the grass around the pavilion that first weekend. I asked her a question that would change everything. “Hey mom, if I wrote a book, would you type it?”

The following week I shut down Bond Money and bought a stack of lined paper and Bic pens from the inmate canteen. Then I retreated to my bunk and began writing Consider the Dragonfly. I didn’t really know how to write at the time. I remember grabbing Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins off a table in the dayroom to see how she wrote dialogue. Did the comma go inside or outside the quotation marks? But day by day, week by week, chapter by chapter I began learning the craft. Soon, I was falling asleep reading Writer’s Digest magazines and waking up to jot down plot points that bubbled up from my subconscious in dreams. I disengaged from cliché prison conversations and activities. Conversations with the characters in my head were much more fascinating anyway. Gradually, I moved further and further away from my old life. Like a continental drift. Until one day I looked up, and what was once a tiny stream was suddenly the Atlantic Ocean.

For over a decade I wrote, read, meditated, exercised, disciplined myself, addressed every character defect I could find and yanked them out by the roots like weeds. Age 40 came and went. Then 45. Patches of white appeared in my beard. People started calling me Old School and Pops and Unc. My compound VIP status as ticketman diminished as time marched on and Bond Money faded into the past. Every once in a while I would cross paths with someone who knew me from back in the day and they would inevitable ask why I shut down the ticket. My stock answer was that a good year in the ticket game meant fifteen lockers and maybe a grand in my account. But if I wrote a bestselling novel???

I was so confident that success would come with Consider the Dragonfly. But the world looked at it and yawned. In 2013, I began writing With Arms Unbound. Surely this one would blow them away. (I doubt it sold 100 copies to date.) By the time I wrote the prologue to On the Shoulders of Giants—2015—I was beginning to grasp the concept of the long view. “Just keep writing man,” I told myself. “The world will catch on eventually. And when they do, there will be an entire backlog of novels awaiting them.” It was also around this time that it dawned on me that the work was its own reward. I was happiest when I was lost in a project. And miserable when I was idle. Three more novels would follow in rapid succession—Sticks & Stones, Year of the Firefly, and The Weight of Entanglement. Twelve years after I shut down the ticket and bought that first pack of paper and pen, the transformation felt complete. Worldly definition of success notwithstanding, I was a multi-published author. I am a multi-published author. Miles away from my old self.

But how far is too far? If we’re talking armed robberies and crack cocaine and momma crying in courtrooms, I don’t think a million miles is far enough. But that doesn’t apply across the board. A little balance and moderation can be a good thing in certain circumstances. This younger generation of prisoners only know me as the grumpy old boomer who spends all day scribbling in a notepad. They don’t know the old me. They don’t know CC the ticketman. They only know the writer, Malcolm Ivey. My past was calling.

This NFL season, my 18th and final in state prison, I’ve decided to resurrect Bond Money. As of this writing, I’m up to seven lockers and it’s only week 6! Why go back? For one, I could use the money. Two, because I don’t want to retreat so deep into myself to write these novels that I end up missing out on the real life happening all around me. I feel like this was a consequence of sequestering myself to my bunk all these years. Those real-life experiences, even if they’re heavy—especially if they’re heavy—are the very experiences that inform the stories I write. But mostly, I’m cranking back up because I want to leave a legacy. Not just as an incarcerated writer who once walked the yard… but as the legendary ticketman who ran it.

I realize that this is partly an ego thing. (Okay, mostly an ego thing.) Siddhartha would not approve. I’m still a big believer in humility. That hasn’t changed. And I’ll never stop writing. But as the great Steven Pressfield observed in his fantastic War of Art, sometimes you gotta throw down a 360 tomahawk jam to let the boys know you’re still in the building.

Posted
August 11, 2022
Category
Criminal Justice Reform, gun criminal, gun violence, interconnectedness, kindness, life without parole, My Story, On My Block, parole, prison reform, raising children
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Groundhog Day

One desperate afternoon in 2005, a skinny and addicted version of myself was scanning the lawn care equipment and power tools in mom’s garage for something I could pawn for dope money when suddenly I was struck by a bolt of inspiration: Why deprive mom of her weed whacker when I can easily rob a neighbor? There was far more honor in that, right? I went in through the bathroom window.

First thing I found was a loaded 9mm. Fate crackled in the barrel. I tucked it into the waist of my jeans then made a quick check for jewelry and money before slinking off into the March afternoon to do what the broken people do. (Legal note—Since I armed myself in the commission of a crime, this simple burglary became an armed burglary. A first-degree felony punishable by life in prison.)

Over the next 36 hours in a dope-fueled tailspin, I used this weapon to jack various area drug dealers as well as two convenience stores. In the parlance of Narcotics Anonymous, this phenomenon is referred to as “a case of the fuck its.” Luckily no one was harmed in my unraveling. I never even fired the gun. And because I spared the State the expense of a jury trial, the State spared me the misery of a life sentence. (Legal note—According to Florida’s 10-20-Life law, brandishing a firearm in the commission of a felony carries a mandatory ten years, firing the weapon carries twenty, shooting someone triggers a life sentence. There is no parole.)

I ended up with twenty years in the department of corrections along with more than a quarter century in the federal system. For a more detailed account of the night of my arrest, check out the Divine Intervention essay at malcolmivey.com. But please do not mistake my tone as flippant or unremorseful. This could not be further from the truth. I am deeply humiliated by the weak and pathetic actions of that miserable little crackhead. It’s just that all this occurred almost two decades ago and when you spend so many years pacing cells, alone in your head, relentlessly scrutinizing your life and the moment things went south, over and over and over again, it all becomes a little mechanical. Like a movie you’ve seen a million times. Groundhog Day.

I am a gun criminal. Embarrassing to admit this with all the recent ugliness on the evening news, but my record speaks for itself. No getting around it. I was actually classified as an Armed Career Criminal by the United States government until a 2016 Supreme Court ruling resulted in my federal sentence being overturned.

Although the above debacle was my first taste of armed robbery, it was not my first rodeo. I’ve been sleeping on hard institutional bunks and eating cold food on dirty trays since I was a pre-teen in juvenile detention. I don’t pretend to know a lot about the outside world because I’ve been removed from it for so many years, but if there’s one subject I’m fluent in, it’s the criminal justice system. I’ve written six books and over 100 essays on life behind the razor wire.

With this recent spike of violent crime—not just the tragic and headline-dominating mass shootings but also gangland drive-bys, ambushed police, and robbery homicides—many old guard politicians are already dusting off their tough-on-crime speeches from the ‘90s. And the public will predictably respond at the polls. For good reason: something has to be done. But I would argue that the solution will not be found in tougher laws. How much tougher can you get than consecutive life-without-parole sentences? The death penalty? We’ve got that too. And the robberies and car-jackings and murders continue to surge. Einstein famously said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Another approach might save us from where we are headed.

All across this great nation, impoverished young people with mothers and fathers either in early graves or serving lengthy prison sentences are walking the same lonely roads as their parents. Why would anyone choose such a miserable existence? Maybe it’s not a choice. I know they’re not getting much help from their countrymen. Especially not our nation’s two political parties. The liberal message which blames systemic racism for every bad break and poor decision provides zero viable solutions and runs counter to American ideals of self-sufficiency and accountability. The conservative pull yourself up by the bootstraps narrative is unrealistic as well. When you’ve never met your incarcerated father and your mother alternates between violent dopesickness and being slumped on the couch, when your world is confined to the project buildings and trailer parks where you were born, when most of your neighbors supplement their government assistance income with some form of hustling, when your normal consists of scrapping and stealing just to survive, when this is all you’ve ever known, you don’t just wake up one day, crack your knuckles, and decide to go to vocational school. It may happen occasionally. But as the exception, never the rule. So what? you’re probably thinking. Why should the average American care? Why should you care? I mean, we’re talking about a bunch of criminals and slum dwellers, right?

Well…

If Covid has taught us anything, it’s how interconnected we all are. Conspiracy theories aside, a virus from Wuhan China has circled the globe and killed millions of people. An incident in a laboratory on the other side of the world has wreaked that much havoc. And we’re still dealing with the aftermath—supply chain issues, factory shutdowns, inflation, mutations, political unrest. The shockwaves are inescapable. Even the remote Panhandle prison where I sit and type this essay is not immune. Outside my cell door is a beleaguered workforce, rising canteen prices, diminishing food portions, rampant drug abuse… But our interconnectedness is not limited to global pandemics. Look how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has affected the price of fuel, and how the price of fuel has affected world markets, and how plummeting markets have affected people’s 401(k)s. Like it or not, we are all in this together.

So it follows that if events in Asia and eastern Europe can have an impact of this magnitude on Bible Belt America, then what about that other section of your very own hometown? What about fentanyl, what about meth, what about gangs, what about an ideology and culture that places no value on human life? It doesn’t take an epidemiologist to recognize that violent crime is spreading exponentially. And it is no longer confined to those neighborhoods across the tracks. A generation of unraised and unloved children are coming of age. You see their faces every night on the local news. And on their way to life sentences in prison and fatal gunshot wounds, they’re making babies who will also grow up fatherless, motherless, hopeless… America has extremely broad shoulders. But at some point she will collapse beneath the staggering weight of her broken citizens. And the world’s longest running democracy will finally come to an end. That is, unless we do something. But what can we do?

I have two suggestions.

The first is so simple that it seems inarguable. We need to love our kids. And by “our kids” I mean America’s kids. We need to teach them the value of honest work, discipline, and respect. All of them. No child among the 330,000,000 of us should grow up without a rock-solid support system, without consistent direction, without love… Imagine a coalition of teachers, athletes, business professionals, community leaders, neighbors, moms, dads, police officers, even reformed ex-prisoners committed to stepping up and assuring the abandoned and forgotten that there is love in the world. Not by throwing money at the problem or writing preachy and long-winded disquisitions like this one 🙂 but by rolling up our sleeves and investing our time and our hearts and our energy in the coming generation—and doing this with the same sense of urgency and conviction that Christian missionaries carry on their voyages to foreign continents every day. If we don’t, then the only ones who will suffer the consequences is us.

You will disagree with this second suggestion. And I totally understand. But I can only tell you the truth as I see it. And what I’ve seen every day for decades in prison is young unaffiliated men stepping off county vans, wide-eyed and green to prison life, ready to do their time and get home. Only to exit the system years later as full-fledged gang members with the requisite crowns, stars, and swastikas tattooed on their heads and necks. Why? First of all, prison is a dangerous place and there is always safety in numbers, but there is also the allure of dope, money, cell phones, respect, and brotherhood. Five years ago I wrote about this emerging crisis in a series of essays called Fixing a Broken Prison System. At the time, gang members made up about 10% of my dorm. Today it’s closer to 25%. Again, who cares about a bunch of prisoners and low-income trash, right? But these same hardened young men are returning to their neighborhoods as heroes home from war, and many are indoctrinating the young people in their communities. That’s not just a problem. That’s systemic failure.

The Florida Department of Corrections cites public safety as a top priority. This is emphasized in their mission statement, core principles, and pretty much every press release regarding prisons and prisoners. Yet on this, they are failing the public on a scale so spectacular that it boggles the mind. There’s a relatively easy fix for it, but it flies in the face of every stump speech being made by every tough-on-crime politician on the Florida Panhandle right now. Be tough on crime. Hell yeah. Be merciless on crime. But bring back parole.

Aww Malcolm… you’re just trying to get your buddies home.

This is true. And if you knew some of my friends (and their mommas) you would see why. Good people. Men who changed their lives decades ago and are now just hanging around, waiting to die. Many of the guards who work here would attest to this. But allowing men and women to earn their way home would have ripple effects far beyond my circle of friends.

Imagine a prison system where every person arriving at the reception centers—barring pedophiles and clinically diagnosed sociopaths—would be given a series of diagnostic tests to gauge IQ, reading and math levels, vocational skills, emotional intelligence, etc… Once their history and aptitude are established, a team of psychologists, educators, and trained classification officers would set a number of almost impossibly high benchmarks to be reached over time. A final meeting with the incoming offender would sound something like this: “Okay, young man, you’ve been sentenced to life in prison. Life means life in the state of Florida. This means you will die behind these fences. But that will probably be 70 or 80 years from now since you’re only 18 years old. During that time everything you love will be taken away. However… there is a faint possibility that you might be able to one day earn your way home. But only if you accomplish the following. Get your GED, get your bachelor’s degree, complete these 50 courses, log in 10,000 hours of anger management, keep a clean disciplinary record… And, by the way, if you join a gang you are automatically eliminated from the program.”

Something like that. If this idea were implemented, prisons would be safer, guards would have a legitimate management tool, and gang affiliation numbers in Florida would plummet within a decade. Amazing what a little hope can do. Of course, there will be some who try to game the system, but over time I think even those men and women would be converted. I know from my own experience that a strange thing happens on the road to education: the more learned you become, the less likely you are to do harm to your fellow man.

I mentioned all this to a teacher at the prison where I’m doing my time. Really cool guy—an Army Ranger with a bachelor’s in political science. He identifies as a fiscal conservative but leans slightly left on matters of social justice. His response: These are not kitchen table issues for the average American. People are worried about inflation, the price of gas, illegal immigration. Not the plight of inner-city kids or criminal justice reform.

He’s probably right. The human brain is not wired for distant threats. This is why things like rising sea levels, ballooning national debt, and evaporating social security are such a hard sell to so many. In his spectacular book, Focus, Daniel Goleman illustrates this phenomenon perfectly. “We are finely tuned to a rustling in the leaves that may signal a stalking tiger. But we have no perceptual apparatus that can sense the thinning of the ozone layer, nor the carcinogens in the particulates we breathe on a smoggy day…”

Ditto the long-term effects of the school-to-prison pipeline and the broken criminal justice system it feeds.

I’m guessing many of you disagree with all this. I probably would too if I hadn’t lived in here for so many years. But I can’t unsee these problems and potential solutions. Aside from writing books and enjoying the people I love, the rest of my life will be dedicated to improving this social condition. Maybe I can pay my proverbial debt to society in this way. A few years ago these concepts might have found more traction. There was an empty Supreme Court seat, bipartisan momentum for criminal justice reform, and conservative politicians like Jeff Brandes roaming the Capitol halls. That time has passed. Violent crime is soaring and hardliner rhetoric is the message of the day. The pendulum has officially swung. But popular or not, I will continue to bang this drum until someone hears me. Groundhog Day.

Posted
April 14, 2022
Category
character sketch, Criminal Justice Reform, life without parole, On My Block, Supreme Court
Comments
1 Response

Bobby and the Supremes

A prison visitation park is not a park at all. Just a cinder block room packed with folding tables and chairs. Maybe a box of dirty and well-used toys in the corner, a couple of 80s-era microwaves. But it’s the place to be on the weekends. Who wouldn’t want to hug their momma or steal kisses from their old lady or play with their kids? These connections are vital. They remind us that we are human in an increasingly savage world. Plus it’s nice to get away from the fights and stabbings and squawking PA system and just be with family, mask off.

Unfortunately, not many people in here get visits. Some are too far from home and the trip is too expensive or they burned too many bridges on the way in. Others had the years whittle away their remaining loved ones until they found themselves alone. There are roughly 900 inmates in the gated community where I reside and maybe ten are in the visitation park with any regularity. Twenty on Christmas. Some of them I know from other prisons. Their mommas and wives have stood in line with my momma and braved the weather, the pat searches, and the ever-changing rules of the Department of Corrections for close to three decades.

This is how I met Bobby.

He used to come and visit his son J, who is serving a natural life sentence for felony murder. J didn’t kill anyone, but he was party to a crime where shit went bad and a codefendant snapped and did the unthinkable. By 2008, Bobby and his wife had sold their home and pretty much everything else they owned to pay attorney fees. J had exhausted all of his post-conviction remedies. Natural life. He accepted his fate but his family would not. They remain vocal opponents of the felony murder law. Both parents have spent a few afternoons rallying for change on the Capitol steps.

Bobby is a good old boy who lived on the Blackwater River and claimed to have done time himself at Raiford back in the day. His narrow views on race and religion and the world are consistent with the views of other rural white Southerners his age. I don’t hold this against him. People are more than their fears and insecurities. Bobby was a product of his times. I still remember his face when I tried to convince him and his wife to vote for Obama. “I ain’t voting for that socialist…” He may have used a couple other descriptive words as well. This led to a vigorous debate on presidential politics and who represented who.

My position, then and now, is that the only power a president wields that directly effects state prisoners is the ability to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court and judges to the lower appellate courts. That’s it. And for prisoners and their loved ones, whose hopes rest on future rulings of this court, it’s all that matters. It transcends race, supersedes party affiliation, and nullifies petty grievances. A couple years ago, my Christian nieces didn’t understand when I spoke out against Trump’s SCOTUS appointees. For them, abortion is a major issue. For my second amendment buddies, it’s guns. I get it. And I respect their conviction. Climate change, affirmative action, a robust military, national debt, nuclear nonproliferation, transgender bathroom laws… These are all complex issues that voters must grapple with, but they’re not my issue. I’m trying to get my friends home.

I once read a case where conservative Justices Scalia and Thomas said that a prisoner in Louisiana who got his teeth kicked out by guards in a confinement unit at Angola could not seek punitive damages. This is not the exception; this is the tradition. The conservative wing of the court is extremely consistent when it comes to ruling against prisoners, while liberal justices tend to have a more human rights-oriented monocle through which they read and decide cases. If you ever get the chance, read Justice Sotomayor’s masterful dissenting opinion in Jones v. Mississippi, where the conservative majority shot down the possibility of parole for a young man who was 15 when he committed his crime.

I was thinking about Bobby in 2016 when there was an empty seat on the Supreme Court (because the senate majority refused to hold confirmation hearings on Obama’s pick until after the election). During this time there was bipartisan momentum for criminal justice reform. Crime was at a record low and the war on drugs was in a death spiral. For all her warts, if Hillary wins that election she gets to fill not only that opening but also two more during her term. Plus hundreds of open federal seats across the nation. Instead, the biggest upset in the history of American politics occurs and Donald Trump goes on to stock the courts with a record number of young conservative judges who will shape the landscape of the judicial system for years to come. His appointees were former prosecutors by a whopping 10:1 ratio over former defense attorneys. This was obviously horrible for prisoners.

Equally depressing is the fact that violent crime is once again rearing its ugly head. It was a matter of time. Between the opioid epidemic, extreme poverty, and the merging of gang culture with the entertainment industry, no one I know is really surprised. Tough-on-crime politicians are already dusting off their old speeches. Prison profiteers are salivating over the financial possibilities. Here’s what you should know: America is already tough as nails on crime. We are the world’s leading incarcerator. I’m sure you’ve heard the numbers. We make up 5% of the world’s population, yet 25% of the world’s prisoners are caged right here in the land of the free. Getting tougher on crime will only spend more tax dollars to build more prisons that teach people how to be professional criminals. What America needs is a mechanism in the penal system where men and women can earn their way home. Back into the communities that need these reformed mothers and fathers to take up their places in the families they left behind. If their kids are already lost, maybe they can reach their grandkids. The bleeding has to stop somewhere.

Enter Biden. During his first year in the White House, the world watched as desperate Afghans hung from American planes in the botched pullout of our twenty-year war. I think even his most staunch supporters would agree that he gets a triple F minus on his handling of that situation. No other way to spin it. Same goes for the lack of a coherent policy on the southern border. And inflation. And gas prices… Little fires everywhere. He’s had his successes too. Infrastructure, plummeting unemployment, keeping his promise to lower the national temperature. But I’ve got to give it to the old man. He knocked it out the proverbial park with his Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The fact that she’s the first black female appointed to the highest court in the land is obviously monumental. Volumes will be written about this. But the honorable Judge Jackson is also a Miami native with relatives in prison and in law enforcement. She has a firm grasp of the state of Florida and its broken criminal justice system. For prisoners and the families of prisoners, this is astroseismic. More importantly, she’s a former public defender. This means she’s actually been inside jails and prisons to meet with clients who could not afford counsel. A life sentence is not some abstract idea to her. And by the way, she’s not just any public defender—she’s the first public defender nominated to the Supreme Court. Ever.

The typical path to a judgeship is to be a prosecutor or work for some big law firm. Then with a little luck and the right connections, you might get tapped. Public defenders and civil rights lawyers are generally left out in the cold for these positions. Of the 880 federal appeals court judges in the US, a whopping 318 are former prosecutors. More than a third. As opposed to the 58 former public defenders who make up 7% of all judges. When PDs do get nominated, they are usually grilled about their ability to be impartial. As if their prosecutorial counterparts are beacons of truth and light who put justice ahead of their coveted conviction rates. No need to inquire into their impartiality. Right. For those keeping score at home, three of the nine current Supreme Court justices are former prosecutors: Alito, Gorsuch, and Sotomayor. The Biden administration appears determined to address this disproportion as he continues to nominate more public defenders than prosecutors for all federal judgeships for the first time in history. Time will tell.

I heard Bobby died a few years ago but I haven’t been able to substantiate the rumor. I hope not. I would love to be able to talk smack to him when none other than Ketanji Brown Jackson authors some future majority opinion that renders his boy’s life sentence unconstitutional and sends him home.

It’s not as far-fetched as it was a couple years ago. A glimmer of hope has arrived. Her name is Ketanji Brown Jackson. And it’s official—she’s Supreme.

Posted
June 16, 2021
Category
character sketch, Criminal Justice Reform, On My Block
Comments
1 Response

Mr. Wells

“Hey Mr. Wells, how’re you doing today?”

“Just right,” he tells me in that Southern-fried, Florida Panhandle accent that has not faded a lick over the years.

Just right. I love that. Not outstanding or living the dream or groovy. But not worn ragged and world-weary either. Not too up, not too down. Just right. Such a cool answer. Especially for a man who’s been locked up almost four decades for a crime he still maintains he did not commit.

“Sure,” you may be thinking. “What prisoner admits he’s guilty?”

I do. So do most people I’ve met in over a quarter century of doing time, at least to each other. We may search for technicalities and discrepancies in our cases and try to get back into court while legal windows are open, but there comes a time in every prisoner’s life when we toss our court transcripts and resign ourselves to fate.

Mr. Wells has never stopped fighting. Neither has his family. Before his mom and dad died, they sold off countless acres of family land to pay attorney fees. They believed their boy was innocent. His brother was up here in the visitation room most weekends, before he got sick. I’ve watched them both turn gray over the years. This place will do that to you. Life will do that to you. But neither has given up hope or lost faith.

I first met Mr. Wells in 1995 at this very same prison. I was 21 and he was well into his forties back then. I got assigned as a laborer to build the new chapel and Mr. Wells was on the crew. Most of us were doing typical extracurricular prison stuff on the job site—cooking wine in the drywall, smoking weed in the rafters, gambling on breaks. Mr. Wells was always off by himself, reading his pocket New Testament.

Our paths crossed again in 2009 at another prison in nearby Defuniak Springs. I had gotten out and pissed away my freedom smoking crack and committing robberies to support my habit. Mr. Wells was still reading his Bible, still passing out religious material on the rec yard.

Now here we are again. At the prison where I first met him 26 years ago. Same old Mr. Wells. Never misses a church service (in the chapel he helped build.) Spends most of his days with his hands in the earth. He can grow anything. Brings back fresh turnips and kale from the garden and shares with guys who have nothing.

I have a lot of good Christian people in my life—ministers, missionaries, worship leaders—but I’m not sure if I’ve ever come across faith as strong as Mr. Wells’. Sometimes I wanna say “Dude! Give it up. He ain’t listening!” But it wouldn’t do any good. His belief in his God is unshakeable… Job-like.

This is not meant to depict him as a saint. Small birds don’t gather at his feet. He’s made his mistakes in life. His gardening talents were once used to grow some of the best bud on the panhandle. That’s where his troubles began: a long-standing Hatfield/McCoy type feud with a family of dope growers in the area. The state used this as a motive in a 1983 double homicide on the Escambia river that attracted national attention. Throw in a couple crooked Southern cops who have long since been removed from their posts, and an ambitious small-town prosecutor who built a case around the facts that fit his narrative while discarding everything to the contrary, and the result is an old man with nothing left to cling to but his innocence and Jesus.

I was reading his transcripts the other day. What a mess. Missing affidavits, bullied witnesses, a bungled crime scene, exonerating forensic evidence conveniently ignored, a shape-shifting prosecutorial crime theory… No wonder there was a mistrial followed by a reversal from the District Court of Appeals. If these trials were held anywhere other than the rural South in the 1980s, he would’ve been home. If he were anyone other than an old pot farmer from Jay, Florida, home of the peanut festival and the redneck parade, some social justice movement out there would have snapped up his cause faster than you could say Black Lives Matter. Instead he’s in here with me. Two cells down.

Something has been tugging at me to write this for a couple years now. A force almost gravitational in its power. I’ve been putting it off to work on my novels but the pull has gotten consistently stronger over time. To the point where I can no longer ignore it. Maybe something intended for me to write this essay at this exact moment so that some person out there (you?) might be touched, moved, inspired. Maybe you were even meant to help. The Universe is crazy like that. Although Mr. Wells would never call it The Universe. He’d just call it Jesus.

Posted
June 2, 2021
Category
Criminal Justice Reform, juvenile life without parole, life without parole, On My Block, Supreme Court
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0 Responses

Dead end kids, Lifetime bids

Who were you at age 15? Do you remember that kid? Were you a wild child? Did you ever skip school, or sneak out, or play mailbox baseball? Did you experiment with drugs? Who did you love with your teenage heart? Was it that all-consuming apocalyptic brand of high school love? Where is that person now?

I can no more imagine myself into the head of 15-year-old me than I can imagine my 47-year-old body in his parachute pants. We are two different people. One of us has grown, evolved, failed, rebounded, loved, lost, lived. The other is a little hard-headed know-it-all. Loaded with potential but not there yet. He’s just a kid.

Kids are impressionable. They follow crowds. They want to be cool. They want to fit in. And without solid and consistent leadership, they are easily led astray, sometimes never to return.

My world is full of kids serving life sentences. From baby-faced 18-year-olds just starting out, to men in their fifties who have been locked up since the advent of the internet. Barring some miracle, they will all die in prison for something they did when they were children… for impulsive choices made when their brains were not yet fully formed. And an 18-year-old brain is by no means fully formed. I doubt there is a neuroscientist alive who would debate this. Many believe that age 25 is a more realistic mile marker between adolescence and adulthood, especially in males.

Unfortunately, the United States Supreme Court cares nothing about neuroscience. In a recent decision that split justices 6-3 along ideological lines, the court ruled that minors don’t need to be found “permanently incorrigible” before being sentenced to life without parole. Ironically, it was Justice Kavanaugh who wrote the majority’s opinion, a guy who knows a thing or two about youthful indiscretions.

But the Supreme Court doesn’t make laws. That responsibility falls on the legislature. You’d think that between reform-oriented liberals who at least strive to create the illusion of compassion, and fiscally responsible conservatives who understand that you can’t have “small government” with a gluttonous criminal justice system bursting at the seams, common sense laws might be passed. Especially when it comes to kids and life sentences.

Nope.

Not down here in the South, at least. Our politicians are either too fearful of appearing soft on crime or too busy lining their pockets with the campaign contributions of prison profiteers to do the right thing. There are exceptions. Republican Jeff Brandes for instance. He seems to understand that prisoners and the families of prisoners are citizens of Florida too. And that if anyone can be rehabilitated, it’s our youth. But every legislative session, his innovative ideas die on the House floor.

America remains the world’s leading incarcerator—25% of planet Earth’s prisoners are caged right here in the U.S. Yet our nation only accounts for 5% of the world’s 8 billion inhabitants. Think about those numbers for a minute. Such a staggering statistic for a country that prides itself on being the land of the free. In order to shake this dubious distinction and relinquish it to China or Russia or some other authoritarian government where it belongs, our lawmakers must take an honest look at our outdated and draconian criminal justice system. What better starting point than the kids we’ve been throwing away.

There is no them, only us.

Posted
February 24, 2021
Category
miscellaneous, On My Block, prison reform
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0 Responses

The Covid Equation

Memory has always been my strong suit. You want the theme song to Diff’rent Strokes, Facts of Life, or any other 80s TV show? No problem. The lyrics to “The End of The World as We Know it” by REM? Which verse? The wide receiver depth chart for any of the NFL’s 32 teams? Coming right up. Yet lately I’ve been having these little moments. Times when my prefrontal cortex is unable to scroll or double-click. Times when I can’t remember shit. Let’s call them glitches.

I keep thinking… maybe it’s some sort of mid-forties brain recalibration thing, or because I’ve had a massive head injury, or the residual effect of squandered gray matter from years of drug use. Maybe. But the more I read up on the pandemic, the more I wonder if it’s something else entirely.

I know I’ve had Covid. Half my dorm was waylaid back in October, the third time we were quarantined. A friend of mine ended up going to an outside hospital for a month and when he returned to the prison, he died within a week. The official line was that he recovered from the virus but couldn’t survive the ensuing pneumonia. That’s why it wasn’t ruled a Covid death on the institutional scorecard. If that sounds sketchy to you, join the club.

No Covid tests were conducted on the other 70 men in my dorm. Just daily temp checks. Not that we wanted them. Quarantines are a massive inconvenience in prison. More punishment than precaution. No rec, no canteen, no movement (which translates to no hustling). Just a biohazard sticker on the door for fourteen days. They do nothing, solve nothing, protect no one. As long as guards are coming in everyday for shiftwork, the virus will circulate. No getting around it. Not in open bay dorms where there’s 12 inches between your feet and your neighbor’s head. It’s gotten to the point that no one reports symptoms. When you have a life sentence, global pandemics mean about as much as presidential elections.

But the way we knew something was up — aside from feeling like hell — was that no one could taste or smell anything. You know those cologne advertisements in men’s magazines like Esquire and GQ? My friends and I would wave strips under each other’s noses. Nothing. It’s a strange experience to breathe deeply through the nostrils and not register a scintilla of scent. Especially in a prison dorm where pungent smells are abundant.

But even stranger are the memory lapses. At least in my experience. Neuroscientists are just now starting to understand the effects of Covid on the brain. I recently read an article by Dr. Sanjay Gupta about some of the devastating long-term and short-term neurological complications of the virus including delirium, depression, temporary brain dysfunction, headaches, brain inflammation, and meningitis. He cites a report in the journal Nature that details the symptoms of a woman in her fifties who saw lions and monkeys in her house and accused her husband of being an imposter.

I guess my forgetting the lyrics to “Come On Eileen” pales in comparison to zoological hallucinations, but it’s still cause for alarm in my little corner of the multiverse. What if this is the beginning of a tumble into the abyss? I researched enough about dementia while writing Sticks & Stones to understand what a terrifying prospect it is.

Covid or no Covid, my defense against cognitive decline remains unchanged: exercise daily, meditate for ten minutes, learn new things, do plenty of crosswords, and write with my hair on fire. (Yeah, I’m bald. 5 books. Where do you think it went?)

As Leonard Pitts once so eloquently put it, “Without memories what are we? We are the equation after the blackboard has been wiped clean.”

Posted
October 22, 2020
Category
character sketch, Criminal Justice Reform, kindness, On My Block, prison reform
Comments
1 Response

Pickatree

This time last year a little old man moved into the bunk at the end of my row. Amphetamine thin with no teeth and two faded teardrops tatted under his right eye, barely visible in the wrinkled roadmap of his face. It was obvious from day one that he was a character.

“Where you from, pops?”
“Pasco.”
“Oh yeah, I know a few people from down there. Where at in Pasco County?”
“Pickatree Lane… I just pick me a tree and go to sleep under it.”

Donny has been homeless for most of his adult life. This is his seventh time in prison. He’s been in and out for the last fifty years, doing life on the installment plan. Because he fits the profile, many of my fellow inmates assume he’s a pedophile. He’s not. He’s one of us. He just got old.

Although he’s not really all that old. Seventy. There are men his age doing pull ups on the yard. But Donny’s seventy is a hard seventy. His pull-up days are long gone. He can barely get off his bunk without help, he pees on himself in his sleep, his hands shake, he’s damn near blind, and his brain is clouded with dementia. But you wouldn’t know that from all the smack he talks.

“Hey George. Does your mother know you’re a damned queer?”
“My mother died last year.”
“Yeah, mine too. Get over it.”

There is not a politically correct bone in the old man’s body. He drops n-bombs without a second thought, mocks my Latino friends by talking gibberish, and openly ogles every female guard on the compound. Some would say Donny’s filter is broken, but I’m not convinced he ever had one. He’s just a relic from the rural south who’s spent most of his life in a cage. Or sleeping on sidewalks.

I had just received a job change from impaired assistant to administrative clerk when he moved into my dorm. I was writing a novel, the first in a series, about a young woman who takes the fall for her dope dealer boyfriend, finds herself in prison, learns her way around the law library, and discovers that she’s a natural in the process. But I knew I couldn’t write convincingly about something as complex as the law without learning it myself. So I got a job in the prison library for research purposes.

I kept seeing Donny shuffle by the window every morning for legal mail. He wasn’t difficult to spot. He’s got one of those Rollator things; sorta like a walker with wheels. One day he banged on the library door demanding assistance. I explained to my free-world boss that he lived in my dorm, had a touch of dementia and was in really poor health.

He entered the library shivering. “Damn it’s cold out there!” (It was maybe 75 degrees. Early October Florida Panhandle weather.) He looked at me. “I need your help, young feller.” He pronounced help like “hep.” When I asked what I could do for him, he slapped a letter on the counter. It was from an attorney representing GEICO.

Between the letter and a maddening hour of circular and sometimes nonsensical discussion with him, the details emerged. He was hit and dragged by a car before he came to prison and the insurance company was offering $50,000 dollars. Problem was, the hospital had placed a lien on him for the weeks he spent recovering. After checking with a couple of the inmate law clerks, it became clear that his chances of ever seeing the money were slim. Even if the hospital mercifully forgave the lien, the Florida Department of Corrections would come after him for all the free room and board. Either way, the consensus was that he would never get a dime. An exclamation point to a lifetime of bad luck.

I wrote the hospital for him anyway. Just to do something. They never responded. I’m not even sure if the letter reached its destination. I’m not even sure I wrote the right hospital. But just after Christmas, fifty grand was deposited into his inmate account. And my status was sealed in his eyes.

Months passed. I was caught up in the world of my characters. He was caught up in his new-found wealth. Occasionally I would look up and see him smashing a honeybun or a nutty bar. Once in a while I would walk into the bathroom and be confronted by a horrific scene involving him, feces, and bad aim. I knew that the guy caring for him was more interested in enjoying Donny’s canteen food than making sure he was okay. But at least he changed his sheets, cleaned up his messes, and walked him to chow. I rationalized what I saw by telling myself that it was a mutually beneficial relationship. Dude was doing something that nobody else wanted to do.

Because Donny saw me as advocate and ally, he would sometimes hobble over to my bunk and say things like “I want to go to the infirmary.” Why man? What’s up? Are you sick? “Naw. I just don’t like it in here…” Well hang in there. You’ve only got 18 months left. “Damn, that’s a long time!” He was always surprised when I told him his release date. He could never remember. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. He had no idea what year it was. I pacified him by telling him I’d write the warden requesting a transfer to his hometown of Zephyr Hills. But I never got around to it.

Then Covid hit and the library closed. I was in the dorm for six extra hours a day. Suddenly all the things I conveniently ignored were constantly in my face. Donny weighed less than 150 when he got off the bus. Skin and bones. Now he was easily 250 from pounding sweets all day. Itchy red sores littered the landscape of his body. His feet were swollen and purple. His area reeked of urine. His pendulum swung from listless mumbling to angry ranting with fewer moments of clarity in between. The medical department was indifferent. The guards saw but didn’t see. And all his caretaker seemed to care about was eating his canteen food. My conscience grew louder. He needed me. But how could I let the other guy know that his services were no longer required? Especially since relieving him of his duties meant taking food out of his mouth.

In the end, the Universe intervened. A corona outbreak in the kitchen dorm prompted the need for 100 new food service employees. Shady caretaker guy was one of the lucky lottery picks. So he packed his shit (and probably half of Donny’s) and moved to another building. A few days later, someone in my dorm tested positive and we were placed on quarantine. During those 14 days, the old man must’ve peed in his bed 21 times. I’ll spare you the details of some of our other adventures but believe me when I say it was not your typical male bonding experience.

That was three months ago. Today, I’m proud to report that my good friend Pickatree is back to his old gruff, womanizing, politically incorrect self. A steady diet of oatmeal, tuna, eggs, peanut butter, trips to the rec yard, regularly scheduled bathroom visits, and basic human kindness have made all the difference. Sometimes I worry about what’ll become of him when he gets out, but I try to stay focused on the things I can control. My mission is to get him to the door. The rest is in God’s hands.

“Donny. You’re worth 50 grand! What’s the first thing you’re gonna buy when you get out?”
“Ice cold Busch beer. When do I get out again?”
“Right around fifteen months.”
“Damn.” He shakes his head. “That’s a long time.”

Posted
April 30, 2020
Category
interconnectedness, miscellaneous, My Story, On My Block, prison reform
Comments
2 Responses

2020

They passed out masks at my prison last week. Triple-ply polyester squares made from uniform pants that are mandatory when we’re not eating, sleeping, or bathing. As if the barren, windswept Times Square footage on the evening news was not eerie enough, or the daily death toll on the GMA news ticker, or the images of shiny, late-model SUVs in five-mile-long food queues… Prison life just went from dark to dystopian in the elastic snap of a mask.

Although I’m convinced that a third of my dorm already had the virus back in February (myself included), the pandemic has not officially reached the prison where I am housed. Not since authorities began keeping track, at least. But it has ravaged two of my previous camps. Sumter Correctional had one of the biggest outbreaks in the state, and Blackwater Correctional has had four deaths with hundreds under medical quarantine. I have so many friends trapped in those places. We’ve grown up together in the prison system. Their families and my family brave the weather and the rudeness and the indignity on the weekends in order to spend a few hours with their sons and husbands and brothers. Or they did until visitation was canceled almost two months ago.

I’ve been hesitant to write about the corona virus. In this era of daily televised White House briefings, where Dr. Fauci is a household name and the president is faced with an enemy he can’t dismiss as fake news or a witch hunt, where the NBA playoffs have been canceled and the NFL draft is held online, where everyone is talking about hot spots and flattening curves and social distancing, what can I possibly add to the conversation? I’d rather talk about books and music and football.

But these essays are more than social commentary. They are chronicles. Mile markers. One day I will read over them as a free man and remember where I was when each was written. What was going on. And as much as I want 2020 to be known as the year Tua took his talents to South Beach, the year Brady became a Buc, the year I finally finished writing this novel… all these will be footnotes in the annals of history. 2020 will forever be known as the year of the pandemic. The year when everything changed. The year the handshake died, the mall breathed its last gasp, and the world was reminded of just how interconnected we all are. Rich and poor, black and white, American and Chinese, convict and guard, conservative and liberal. If we learn nothing else during these troubled times, hopefully it will be to put data and science before politics, to say “I love you” while we have the shot, and to take better care of our grandmothers and grandfathers. There is no them… only us.

Stay safe out there.

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