notesfromthepen

[notesfromthepen]

The Grinch

The 'Grinch Who Stole Christmas' came on last night and my heart hung heavy with nostalgia and regret. A gravity tugs at my chest around the holidays . A pull, that gains weight at the sight of Christmas commercials and holiday jingles, has forced me to try to untangle this knot. The holidays in prison are strange times indeed. At best, they're nothing more than days on a calendar. At worst, they're unwelcomed, hollow reminders of life outside of these walls. The television specials, the commercials, the parades, the tree lighting ceremonies, the New Year's ball drop. All just reminders of the missing parts of life. Another chance to regret the things you once took for granted.

After coming to prison, I neither cherished the holidays nor wished them away. I had become indifferent. A position of safety: Indifference over reality. A quality that has its roots in a time even before I was incarcerated.

But as I've learned over and over again, the problem wasn't with 'holidays'. It was a faulty perspective. A misunderstanding of purpose. 

Like most of us, I've viewed holidays through a lens subtlety tinted by personal gain or loss. How fun will it be? What food will I get to eat? What gifts will I get? How much work will I have to do? How long will the drive be? Will my crazy family make it a hectic pain in the ass? Not that I'm a sociopath, that has never enjoyed holidays. I did. I showed up and even had the occasional good time. Though, at the time, I was blind to a real appreciation for the oppritunites of the holidays. A blind spot that has since been lifted.

The phrase "It's all about family" Has been said many times, in many ways, and is undoubtedly repeated at nearly every holiday gathering. Usually as a coping mechanism to deal with the headache, hurt, or chaos, that is inevitable in a family get-together. I've heard these words often. And on occasion they've come from my own lips. I thought I understood them but they were more of a meaningless mantra, to be repeated, rather than understood.

Like the broken record I've become; I've realized, in the absence of the good, the bad, and the 'family', I have come to miss it all: The terrible music, the gawdy decorations, and the long drives to an inevitable family fued (and not the cutesie Steve Harvey kind).

It's become clear that the 'bad' parts are just as important as the good and probably even more meaningful. I promise you that if I could only have the things I used to dread, I'd take em without a moments hesitation: The arguments, the drunken fueds, the crying babies, the tacky Xmas sweaters, the crowded kitchens, the kids table with two grownups hunched over a plate of burnt green bean caasrole, parking down the road, smoking outside on a tiny porch in the cold with the other degenerates lacking self-control, and the depressing realization that in a fucked up family you might be the worst one of all. 

I miss every single moment. I pine for it all. The worst part isn't that prison took these things away, but that I never realized I had them when I was free. I avoided the frustration, I overlooked the beauty... I missed the point. So, this year, rather than change the channel when a Xmas commercial comes on TV or when someone sings a Christmas song on 'The Voice', I'm going to remember this feeling. I'm going to sit, right here, with this gravity in my chest, and God willing, I'll bring it home with me and make up for the lost time and missed opportunities. 

Even the Grinch got his chance to make things right... I'm just waiting for mine...  So, HAPPY HOLIDAYS from the penitentiary!!!!. And take time to cherish what you have, warts and all, because none of it's guaranteed, nothing is for sure, and I promise you, you will miss it when it's gone...

Originally written Dec 2017

[notesfromthepen]

A Prison Message Of Love

Well, another holiday is approaching and I didn't get you anything.

No flowers.

No chocolates.

No card.

No dinner.

No spa day.

No fancy jewelry.

I can't even give you a hug today. 

All of these things you deserve ten fold and someday, whether you'd prefer it or not, I will be able to shower you with all them. This I promise. But right now this is all I got. I hope you like it:

---------------------------Judy Ann: A Love Story for MOM.---------------

Somewhere around the time that the 70's were giving way to a new decade. In the last months of 1979, to be more accurate, two young and excited hearts danced. It wasn't the longest song but the music was unique. And those two different personalities, from two different worlds, with their lives ahead of them and their hopes grand with the hubris of youth, had a moment together. The momentum of their briefly intertwined paths tumbled forward, fusing into creation. 

On July 31st 1980, with no care for their plans or expectations a completely new energy sprouted between them. This new energy was not only between them but also of them and though it was entirely new, it wasn't entirely separate.

This is the day Judy became a mother. A day that all other mothers should have rued for what would eventually be the dimming of their stars in the presence of her shine.

There she was, still a kid herself, and a single mother in the city of Detroit with a ten pound bowling ball with slanty eyes, a lopsided head, and an ever increasing appetite. She never had it easy, not as long as I can remember anyway. But she never complained and she almost always made it look easy.

Her son, the boy who made her earn the title of MOM, was a lot of things but easy or simple were never the word used to describe him. He would grow up with all kinds of flaws and short comings, and none that I can think of were her fault, except maybe one. 

As he got older he became cynical. He felt almost constantly let down by, first, the adults around him, then by his peers, and finally even society failed to live up his expectations.

You might ask how this was her fault. Let me tell you.

It was by no means her intention but she set a level of expectations in the young boy that could never be met. And as he moved through life he was constantly reminded of the failures of the fruit to live up to the potential of the roots they sprouted from. 

He assumed that all women were just as strong as his mother. Able to hold down multiple jobs and provide the food and shelter and clothing, and everything that he needed, without ever complaining, without ever feeling sorry for herself.

He wrongly assumed that all adults were thoughtful and intelligent people. He thought this because she always explain the things he had questions about. And if she happened to not have an answer to something, she would figure it out with him, leading him along with patience, critical thinking, and logic.

He imagined that everyone was humble because of the way she could admit mistakes, deflect compliments, and praise others.

He thought everyone must have a sense of humor because of the way she could laugh at herself and find humor in almost everything.

He figured that everyone was compassionate because of the way he saw her treat people. She always tried to point out what someone else's point of view might be, before acting self righteous, even when she could have. Like an alchemist, he saw her use empathy to transmute anger into compassion. When he would cover the hurt he felt because his father abandoned them she would tell him that his father was just a scared kid with pressure from his family and insecurities. She would tell him that it wasn't because he didn't love him. She would give him all kinds of reasons not to hate his father, even if it might've been what he deserved.

He naively thought that everyone was loyal because of the way she always had his back, as long as he was right, no matter who she had to stand up to, or what they had to go through. Because for as long as he can remember it was the two of them against the world.

He thought that everyone had virtue because she would stand up for what was right, even if it was unpopular.

He thought that when he got older that everyone would be a free spirit not held down by the opinions of others because she was a rad punk rock chick who wasn't afraid to express herself.

He stupidly thought that everyone was open minded because she was never afraid to try new things, like getting tattoos, or riding motorcycles. Because she never looked down on people just because they were different. And she was always eager to learn new things.

And maybe his most naive assumption was that everyone had a mom as special and amazing as his.

He was wrong.

He was wrong about all of these things, but if you asked him today if he'd change any of it he'd emphatically tell you NO.

Because even though the adults turned out to not live up to his mom's example, because his peers could certainly not come close, and because society in general failed to reach the amazing qualities she seemed to exhibit so effortlessly, she did teach him that all of these things are POSSIBLE.

Just by being herself, she gave him an ideal to strive towards...and when he feels especially frustrated, disheartened, and cynical he can hear her voice telling him to be more understanding, to be more loving, to be more compassionate...he sees that it's possible to be better. And has all the tools to work towards the example that she set.

And for that, and a million other reasons, he loves her to death and wants her to know what she truly means to him. He owes everything that he is and ever will be to this lady, and while the rest of the world can call her by any name they want, he's proud to call her MOM...

MOM!!!! I LOVE YOU XOXO.

[notesfromthepen]

Happy Thanksgiving From The Prison Industrial Complex

It's 7:35, Thanksgiving morning. I'm sitting on a stack of plastic chairs in the unit bathroom waiting to take a shit.

I hate holidays behind bars.

I passed the dayroom on my way here. It is already buzzing with activity. Empty packets of Ramen noodles fill out the trashcans, even in the bathroom. Their former contents fill out the bowls.

Stuffing.

People I never see up this early are already stirring, pouring, chopping, mixing, and microwaving, while I'm trying to get my wits about me. Celebrating holidays in the joint are an attempt at normalcy, I guess, or an excuse for gluttony, depending on your level of cynicism.

Mine has been a little high of late.

Sometimes I bring my tablet into the bathroom when I'm shaving or shitting. Mood music. Which is why I have it now, but while I'm waiting I figured I should drop a few lines, among other things, cause I'm feeling some type of way.

We have four toilet stalls on our side of the unit. Tradition dictates that only two stalls are used at a time, to keep an empty stall between active shitters. It's stupid, but most traditions are. It's a tradition I adhere to only when time and biology permits. I'm afforded both this morning, so I'm waiting, and writing.

Deuce dropping is the latter phase of my morning ritual before getting ready for whatever it is I'm going to do for the day. Today it's a weight-pit day. I'm hoping it'll be empty out there due to the holiday, and the snow. I'm hoping no one wants to work out on Thanksgiving. Before it's my turn on the porcelain, I want to finish getting this not-so-festive mood out of my head and into this tablet. I could pick out almost anyone in the unit from their footwear and pants alone. From this knee-down line up, I'm guessing I'll have some time to figure out what it is I'm feeling this morning. When you share a bathroom with a 159 roommates you get to know each other in ways you'd rather not.

It's not even eight O'Clock and the floor is already plastered with islands of wet toilet paper and discarded TP tubes.

Every year that passes I get a better understanding of the sub-dermal angst and general pissy-ness of many of the elder convicts around here. Anger, roused as retaliation against the happiness in others, for the misery it reflects in you, must seem easier than finding happiness yourself. I've felt this way before. I think we all have. Only now, I understand it. It's a secondary emotion, a transmuted sadness; to be FELT, sure, but to not to be LIVED in.

You can't let the things that seem to come so easily to others, like general happiness, be the fuel for your frustration. It will kill you. It almost did. On several occasions, it was almost the end of you. It WAS undoubtedly the end of your life as you knew it. Letting that weight overwhelm you; It's what landed you in here.

The beauty is that you already know what to do when this feeling threatens to lay siege to your mind state. You already know that negativity begets itself, as do half-full glasses. So stop focusing on what's empty and start--

Oh, a stall just opened up.

We'll talk later.

Other priorities.

Happy holidays from the Prison Industrial Complex. 

Oh, and go easy on the relatives this Thanksgiving. It may be the last time all of you are together like this. Focus on the love out there, be glad for the chance, and I'll try and do the same in here.

[notesfromthepen]

Reduction Of A Moment

When all is said and done, after all the results have been tabulated, the votes counted, it turned out that I was just a lost soul...A lost soul just stumbling through this chaotic and terrifyingly beautiful, existence called Life.

All the while I held the best of intentions in my heart and the heaviest of baggage on my back. 

I shudder to think that, along the way, more pain was caused than love inspired...I hope beyond words that I'm wrong, but the gravity in my chest says that I'm not.

So now I find myself, pushing and pushing, in a perpetual attempt to tip the scales in the other direction.

Whether or not I am successful in this endeavor cannot be my goal. I have been blessed to discover that the small bits of salvation, that lighten the load on my heart, come from the process itself. And so I continue...for nothing more that the sake of the process.

How little control we may actually have. 

I've come to suspect that the totality of life, all the planning and preparing, hoping and wishing, the thinking and fearing, may just boil down to a single moment of choice. Just a single instant of actual freewill...The rest feels like the actual choices and decisions that you make but, in reality, are nothing more than the clever self deception of determinism. 

What a frightening prospect.

When your moment comes, I pray that you can recognize it, that you are prepared for it, but I fear that almost none of us are.

So we here we are. Doomed to live the rest of our lives in the aftermath of our failure. 

Originally written 2017

[notesfromthepen]

Killers and Monsters...and Regular People Everywhere

Killers and Monsters...and Regular People Everywhere

I like to think of myself as a realist. Never will you hear me say that there is no need for prisons, that no one should be incarcerated. Without question, there are individuals whose freedom is detrimental to the functioning of a safe and healthy society, who, once arrested, cannot be safely released back into society. Though the percentage of these hopeless cases are far more rare than some would have you believe.

There are arguments to be made—not necessarily by me—about where these people belong, and what the purpose their incarceration is to serve, whether it is about punishment or rehabilitation, or some combination of the two. I'm not here to tackle these issues today. What I aim to do, is much simpler. As with most of my writings, I aim to reveal a better vantage point on a reality, a more complete truth (as much as is possible when coming from the perspective of a flawed human being) and to dispel myths and misinformation through the knowledge gained of personal experience. 

This piece is titled Killers and Monsters because being in prison has shown me that there is a difference between the two, and it's a difference that needs to be shouted to the masses...or at least needs to be made more clearly to those willing to listen.

Rarely are complex issues laid out in plain black and white. If they were, they wouldn't be very complex. Admittedly, it would be much easier if everyone in prison were actual monsters, if the nature of the crime matched the person who'd committed it and you could identify a bad guy by simple appearance. Unfortunately, life isn't a Steven Segal movie. No, real life is much more nuanced. Get close enough and you will see that crime and punishment is a picture, much too intricate, to be painted in simple black and whites.

The illusion that our prisons are full of boogie men, blood-thirsty killers, and heartless drug lords, allows us the comfort of sleeping sound at night while nearly two million of our brothers and sisters rot in prison. (America has the highest incarceration rate in the world: 5% of the worlds population yet 25% of the world's prisoners). This painting of inmates, as maniacal killers and evil degenerates who deserved to be locked away, is a masterful propaganda technique used to manipulate a population into supporting the injustices of a system that will eventually, directly or indirectly, oppress the same population it relies on for survival. It would be death for the status quo if these incarcerated men and women were not looked upon as villains, but were thought of as they actually are: our brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers. It's easy to subjugate the "other," much more difficult to oppress someone you know or can relate to.

Would it surprise you to hear that you could not, with any degree of accuracy above random chance, guess the crimes of the inmates in prison based on their appearance alone? (Other than child molesters, they seem to be more susceptible to superficial giveaways of their criminal proclivities, such as appearance and demeanor.)

Maybe, maybe not.

Would it surprise you if I said that you could not increase your chances of guessing correctly, even after observing the inmates for extended periods of time? Or even if you were allowed comprehensive conversations (excluding direct questioning about their actual crimes) with an inmate, would you be able to accurately predict the nature of their offense?

Growing up, I had an idea of what a murderer would look like. I was raised in the 80s when our pop culture had clearly defined, however unrealistic, depictions of heroes and villains. So I grew up thinking, for the most part, you could tell what a killer looks like, what a thief or drug dealer acts like (most of them wore black clothes, had scars on their faces, shifty eyes, and a snarl.) When I was younger I used to wonder if anyone I knew had ever killed another person. It was a reoccurring thought that would usually end with the false assumption that, "of course not, I'd know if someone was a killer." But how would I have known? By their shifty eyes?

After coming to prison I realized how wrong I was. It is both inspiring and terrifying, the moment you realize how unreliable our beliefs can be. 

In prison you generally only ask about another inmates case under certain circumstances. 1: If you are bunkies, and 2: If you are a fellow gang member...and that's about it. In both cases it's to ensure that you're not living or associating with a child molester or a rat.

It's definitely not an icebreaker; you don't just come out and ask. Nearly all of the interactions in prison are with people that you know nothing about, or knew nothing about initially. It's only after time, after a level of trust and comfort is established, that you learn about someone's case. In a way it's kind of beautiful; there is less to be prejudice about; it's only after you've become close with somebody that you learn about the worst moment of their life, of the worst act they've committed. By then there's a context, a face and a story to the person who committed the crime. Too bad life isn't like this. We should get to know someone first, judge them on their personality and nature before we judge them on their past.

It's easy to hold onto idealistic beliefs when you keep your distance from the reality. It's easier to hate black people when you've never known, really known, a black person...etc.

I've watched shows like Date Line and 20/20 and gotten all worked up about the senseless and brutal murder of a helpless woman or an innocent child and thought things like: if you willingly take another persons life you should be put to death, or at least you should never, ever, get out of prison. This was just more belief at a distance, based on nothing but reactionary emotion, uninformed, safe from scrutiny, belief. It was ignorant. I'd never known anyone who had killed someone, or anyone who'd had a family member killed.

But the salacious crime stories, meant to play on fear and intrigue, are often the only ones that get told. So it’s easy to see the fault line that these beliefs rise from.

Over the last few years I've learned that the wall we imagine separating us, the free citizens from the degenerate criminals, is much thinner than you think. Often it's only a stroke of bad-luck, a moment of impulse-control between us.

Don't agree?

If you have ever drank more than a beer and found yourself getting behind the wheel of a vehicle without waiting at least an hour to drive, you could be right here in the bunk next to me.

My two time bunkie/best friend is in here for vehicular manslaughter in which he blew a .09 blood alcohol level (just .01 over the legal limit, roughly half a beer) The person driving the other car involved in the accident was also intoxicated, much more so than him but, because the guy died and my friend lived, he was charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 13 years in prison, on his 1st prison sentence. And make no mistake, there are plenty of people in here for similar cases. A sixteen year old, who thought he was giving a friend a ride to steal a twenty dollar bag of weed, finds out that his friend killed somebody in the house while he waited in the car and is sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Thrown away for a stupid teenage mistake.

The point is, we're not all monsters. By my—completely unscientific but nonetheless reliable—calculations, the percentage of monsters, assholes, douchebags, slime balls, lazy fucks, hard workers, generous, ingenious, lucky, funny, genuine, unlucky, selfish and selfless men in the prison system is the exact same as it is in anywhere else in the free world.

The two main differences seem to be upbringing and luck but, surprisingly, not their nature. Without going into a series of examples I'd ask you to trust me when I say that there are people who've committed murder, the most serious of crimes, that I'd trust with my life, and that my mind would be blown if I found out that they'd stole a candy bar after they were released.

But they're almost never the ones we hear about. It's always the escaped convict who kills someone that makes the news, or the inmate who rapes someone after their parole. In these cases, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy; truly reformed inmates rarely ever attempt to escape prison, and they certainly don't hurt people if they do, so you're never gonna hear about them. And there IS no salacious story to be told about the inmates who are successfully released. This is why we only ever hear about the terrifying minority. But this inaccurate exposure leads to the false narrative of prison being populated by blood thirsty monsters.

You never hear about people like another one of my bunkies: One of the best people I've known in my entire life is in here for killing someone eighteen years ago in an act of perceived self-defense. He understands his crime, and himself, in a deep and profound way that many of us will never know. He fully accepts the responsibility of his action and the pain it's caused and it breaks his heart. And after living with it for all these years, he admits that, though he may have felt threatened, he could've, should've, handled it differently. And not because he got thrown in prison for it but because he took someone's life. Trust me, it is the most sobering act you can commit. And though I didn't know him eighteen years ago, in the years that I have known him, it's hard to imagine him hurting anyone. He's a funny, generous, thoughtful person who does anything he can to help other people with no expectation of personal gain. You might think you’d be able to bullshit the parole board for fifteen minutes, but I've lived with this man 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 2 years straight. It is not bullshit.

This is just one example of many, since I've come to prison, that has shown me how easy it is to think about crime and punishment from a distance, and how wrong I was about my opinions. People make mistakes, some really stupid and hurtful mistakes, but some really change, and everyone deserves that chance.

Let's be honest, there ARE “monsters” in here: child rapists and baby killers, sociopaths, remorseless murderers, and heinous heartless criminals, but they are an unequivocally small minority. During the six years I've been in prison, in the three joints I've been to, from maximum to minimum security facilities, I've run across maybe a handful of, what most would consider, "evil" people beyond rehabilitation. Many inmates are ignorant, impulsive, immature, and emotionally stunted, but very few are actually bad people. And unfortunately this place does almost nothing to help them get better.

It's so easy to throw monsters away, it's easy to turn your back on people you think, because they're in prison, must deserve whatever their punishment is. But the reality is you're throwing away your brothers and sisters, you're turning your back on your neighbors and friends, and you're wrong about who it is behind these walls. 

I'm ashamed that it took me coming here to realize just how wrong I was, how naive I was, how willfully ignorant my beliefs were. I can only hope that it doesn't take an up close experience like mine for you to take a second look at some of your untested beliefs.

Because it's never so black and white as to think the fence separating prison and the free world has nothing but monsters and killers on one side and regular people on the other.

This picture here calls for more color.

[notesfromthepen]

Million P1us

A Million P1us

They ignore us because they can.

I've been in prison going on seven years now. I started getting serious about writing when I came down. At first it was just about expression; an attempt to hold onto a little bit of freedom in a place otherwise designed to kill such things. A few years in I started writing about the shit that was happening in here. Figured, somebody should do it.

I wrote about corrupt officers, nonsensical policies, the cruelty of solitary confinement, the censorship, corruption, and the dangerous parole process. I wrote about the slave wages and the financial fleecing of inmates and their families. I wrote about the benefits of good time and Michigan's failure to offer positive reinforcement to inmates. I wrote about everything I saw, the ridiculous, hilarious, and serious alike. I wanted to give a full voice to this experience. Something deeper than stereotypes.

And then I realized that none of it mattered if no one was reading it. So I started a Facebook page, well Mama C started a Facebook page. I connected with amazing people, but it was clear Facebook wasn't the best platform. So we took what little money we had and started a website. Mama C, the saint she is, learned how to put it all together. And finally, a few moths ago, we entered the Twitersphere (they should bring back the electric chair, just so they can strap me in for writing Twitersphere). This is where the magic happened (can you be electrocuted twice?). In a few short months I linked up with so many like minded people, interested and passionate about what was going on in here, which inspired me to push even harder. After every new piece, I felt the sense of relief that comes from getting something off your chest. But whenever I'd see something written, or said about prison reform or mass incarceration, this responsibility, almost a guilt, would settle on me. I was getting good at pointing fingers, but I wasn't offering any solutions. I figured I'd try to put everything I knew together in a single, comprehensive, piece about the American prison system— to see if that would get rid of the feeling for good.

I spent months writing this pain-in-the-ass tome and, when it was finally done, I felt genuine relief. Everything I knew about the fiasco of incarceration was distilled down to single, coherent, piece of work. Dare I say, I was even proud? I was proud…but I was even more relieved.

Now it was time to get it in the hands of people who could actually make some change. Prison reform, after all, is the ONE bipartisan issue in the county.

With magnum opus in hand, Mama C tracked down all 110 Michigan State Representatives. She sent them each their own personal copy, along with a plea for the reinstatement of good time, and an open letter offering assistance. Twitter friends & the Facebook family sent links and messages to the Governor's office all the way up to federal lawmakers. There was even this amazing degenerate, who also claimed to be a famous comedian, who took notice. And he helped spread the word.

Not a single politician responded.

If this ex-telemarketer and procrastinating, but excellent author, who claims to know Joe Rogan, can't get any of the powers that be to listen, then what chance do the rest of us have?

ZERO. The answer, as it stands now, is zero.

And then I got to thinking.

I've always had love for the underdog, the oppressed, the voiceless. And now I was one. I wasn't surprised at the inaction I seemed to inspire in the political landscape. More often than not, these "leaders of men" do the RIGHT thing, only as often as it is incidentally attached to what they're FORCED to do.

They IGNORE us because they CAN.

Which got me to thinking more; what if I was IMPOSSIBLE to IGNORE?

At first it was just this funny little day-dreamt hypothetical; what if a currently incarcerated inmate had a MILLION PLUS followers on social media? What would that look like? The possibilities cascaded. It felt like a paradox, an impossibility, a glitch in the matrix—for an inmate to have that power.

The first thing I thought was, the system couldn't allow it. Then I wondered if could they stop it? Sure they'd try, but what could they actually do? Any attempt would likely back fire. It's a 1st amendment issue. The biggest strength we have at the bottom, is how little we have to lose. 

The fact, that this impossibility wasn't actually impossible, was hypnotic. I couldn't stop thinking about it—about what it meant.

Corruption rarely survives the light of day.

An inmate with a Million P1us followers on Twitter, for instance, would be like one of those nanny cams for the prison system. Knowing you're being watched will significantly curb a babysitter's urge to beat a kid into submission. Trust me, the first severe beating of my life was at the hands of a "baby sitter." I was so young I don't remember but Mama C says my whole face was swollen, that I could barely open my eyes. Then again I am half Asian, with baby eyes like slits, you ever think of that mom? Maybe this case of child abuse was just a simple case of racism. In any case, if ol' Rocky Marciano (he was Italian) had known there was a camera, he might've just let me cry myself to sleep without out the vigorous use of the five-fingered sleep aids.

Over share?

The point is, that without the ability to covertly fuck us over, they'd be forced to stop fucking us over, or at least cut back significantly. Politicians could no longer simply throw us away and ignore our pleas without repercussion. They could no longer anonymously give contracts to these abusive corporations who price gouge the hell out of us, while filling their campaign coffers—at least not without a Million P1us witnesses. From the lawmakers down to individual employees, they'd finally be forced to practice what they've been hypocritically preaching for decades: Personal Accountability.

It was fun to think about, but I wasn't actually going to do it. It was just something to think about during the commercial breaks of Rick & Morty. Just another game of "What If?"

Right?

My mischievous side disagreed; it absolutely loved the idea—wouldn’t let it go.

I'd be trying to watch TV and it'd chime in with shit like, "Why not? What are you scared of?" And the little bastard wouldn't shut up about Kim Kardashian. Kim this, and Kim that. "Kim snaps her fingers and people walk out of prison."

I did my best to remind my mischievous side that I'm not Kim Kardashian.

It reminded me I'm more of a Courtney anyway. And that Snooki, Guy Ferari, and half the cast of The Real Housewives all have a million plus followers.

I wondered how my mischievous side knew this but I didn't.

It said, "The whole point of prison is to silence us. Why not grab a megaphone and be louder than we've ever been? Ariana Grande:67 mil, Justin Beiber: 107 million followers on Twitter."

It was a good point.

"Ralphie May, Channel West Coast, Grumpy Cat..."

I don't know how accurate the research was.

All I'm trying to do is take a shit when I hear the subtlest voice say, "We've been waiting for this our entire lives. We are literally MADE for this. The ultimate thorn in the side of authority—of oppressive, corrupt, authority! An epic middle finger to the entire system."

The constant interruptions are starting to get to me but at this point I'm still unsure.

And then my mischievous side, that rebellious little bastard, says something undeniable, something it knows will kill every excuse I could ever muster. Slowly, fully aware of what it's doing, it says, "J-E-R-E-M-Y R-E-N-N-E-R has FIVE MILLION followers!"

And just like that, I'm in. My mischievous side wins for the first time in a long time.

I tell myself, if all these people have figured out how to get a million plus people to follow them, just so they can sell spanks, talk about their next hair color, or just BE a displeased cat, then what kind of coward would I be not to take a shot. Even if it's an air ball, or whatever clunky sports metaphor you'd prefer, if it means the chance to expose corruption & abuse, the government waste, inhumane practices, family separations, and the mass incarceration of those with mental illness, addicts, black, brown, and poor white people, not to mention the chance to knock Jeremy Renner off his high horse, and make the occasional poop joke...then I have to try.

I mean why can't it be done?

If we can rally enough rebels & misfits, the bleeding heart liberals and the stone cold conservatives alike, these conscientious men and women, Millennials, Baby Boomers & Gen-X'ers, to take a few seconds to tune in, then we'll have done something that has never been done before.

We'll have created a blueprint for other inmates and underdogs to fight for change, to show that redemption is real and that you can affect the world around you, even if you're actively being stepped on, if you work hard enough, think outside the box, and reach out to a few friends, who reach out to a few friends, and so on and so on until you become impossible to ignore.

Plus it would be hilarious, for politicians to have to take into consideration the opinion of a convict they'd all but thrown away...And most important of all: to stop Jeremy Renner from using Jeep commercials to force us to listen to his shitty band.

The goal is to get to a #Million P1us followers before I'm released. Which, if nothing changes, gives us 'til 2025.

We can do it.

In a world of click bait and countless distractions, this FOLLOW and SHARE can be your little contribution to prison reform and ending mass incarceration, a small, but not meaningless, drop in the bucket that gives you something to pat yourself on the back about. I'll take it. Or maybe you're just a rebel who's looking for another middle finger to stick in the air. Maybe you're a troll that thinks it'd be hilarious. Or maybe you're just tired of the same old meaningless bullshit on the news, Twitter, and social media in general. Whatever your reason, you'll be a part of giving a MDOC inmate a REAL chance at grabbing the world by the ear, and letting it know what's actually going on in here.

You already know I can't do this alone. If successful, this will be OUR achievement. Anyone who throws in will be a part of this absurd and exciting movement, and together we'll loom larger than we do alone.

I hope you're in.

We can't live in a world where Grumpy Cat has 1.6 million TWITTER followers, and Jeremy Renner is strutting around like he's the cock of the roost —but a convict on the forefront of the ONLY bipartisan issue of prison reform, with a saint for a mother, an amazing group of friends, and a real penchant for subversive, often ridiculous, writing— can't muster up Million P1us people to pay attention. Whatever God you believe in will not likely spare such a world for too long.

Ok, so: inspiration, outright begging, guilt tripping and fear mongering; ticked all the boxes.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention; most important of all; it's actually a really GOOD Twitter account, on its own, regardless of it being about some convict writer.

So there's that as well.

Please link, share, mention, follow, or whatever you think would help. You already know groups and people that I'd never think of who'd be worth reaching out to. Oh, and CONTACT me...I want to know who you are, and what you think. I'm serious about this being OUR project.

Your friendly neighborhood convict, Bobby C. 

'til next time, appreciate the small things...even the annoying ones.

#MillionP1us

[notesfromthepen]

Prison Tales; The Ballad Of Juan Jose Garcia

During my tenure as a convict I've crossed paths with countless characters, any one of which you could drop into a packed stadium and be confident that their exceptionality amongst the crowd would stand unrivaled. And although prisons are fertile fields, there have been just a few individuals I've felt compelled to write about. And even then, it's only been superficial scribblings. 

My bunkie, Juan Jose Garcia, whose name should belong to a grizzled Mexican ranch hand not a pudgy white kid from Grand Rapids, has forced my hand. His behavior will no longer allow me to shirk my moral responsibility to document his existence for the sake of human psychology, sociology, education, and genetic mapping...as well as writers of comedy, satire, and tragedy. And makers of human leashes, helmets, and adjusters of IQ. 

I was really struggling on what to call him, both for anonymity as well as convenience. His government name is so poetically appropriate when taken into context. Juan Jose Garcia, is a doughy teenager, who alleges to have Puerto Rican and Mexican DNA stacked somewhere in the rungs of his double helix, but short of him volunteering this information, or checking his prison ID, you'd never guess at his Latino heritage. His nickname is Guerro, which is Spanish for white boy; a language he doesn't speak. It's not like he's Aryan white. He looks more like one of his parents could be part Italian, or Greek maybe. He looks "American white." If that's such a thing. But he definitely doesn't look like what our culturally prejudice ideas of what a Juan "should" look like. But that's not what has me wondering about what to call him here. It's all nicknames in here, no one goes by their government names. So I figure I'll just call him whichever name feels right in the moment; Juan, Guerro, dummy, but mostly I'll call him bunkie, which is what I actually call him anyway. And though he's no longer a teenager (he turned 20 a few days ago) I will most likely continue to refer to him as such. A decision I stand by; partly because he was a 19 when I met him, but mostly because, in a way, he always will be.

In full disclosure this is a proclamation/insult my very own sister frequently hurls in my direction. "Forever seventeen," as she puts it. I'd feel compelled to argue with her on the subject if she didn't have the advantage of being right. This immaturity is the common ground on which me & my bunkie meet. It's our love language. And it is the ONLY quality we have in common.

I want to make clear that I love the kid. In the way an older brother loves a pain-in-the-ass younger brother. He's got a great heart and sweet nature, rivaled only by his devastatingly prolific quality as a complete and utter airhead. Unfortunately, like many inmates, the environment and circumstance he grew up in actively sought to kill his softer nature at every turn (and apparently, a majority of his working braincells.) But nature is a stubborn bitch and will always find a way.

As frustrating as it can be at times, I'm glad he's my bunkie. And I'm trying my damnedest to get him together before he is inevitably sent to another joint, unit, or cube, where the likelihood of a relatively patient and understanding, slightly asshole-ish bunkie he respects, is practically nil.

He calls me his dad. A moniker I insistently rebuke, to no avail. He's also stubborn; quite possibly a side effect of the airy environment cultivated between his ears; and he's highly susceptible to peer pressure. Which is why—I like to tell myself—I use shame in my attempt to curb his behavior. He turned 20 this month. With the excuse of being a teenager, all-but gone, I've really tried to focus my guidance, hoping he will absorb something before we part ways. Again, to no avail.

What follows are simply a few tales of what it looks like to raise a teenager, that's not yours, behind bars. Care has been taken to make as little alteration to the actual events as possible, while still protecting the guilty an innocent alike. So without further adieu:

Raising Juan Garcia; The Taffy Hustle

My bunkie came to prison a few months ago. A full-fledged fish. Though it is his first prison bid, he's not completely unfamiliar with institutional life. Much of his adolescence was spent in group homes and juvenile detention centers. Though you wouldn't know by watching him stumble through this experience.

Tall Rob stopped at my window. Which isn't a window as much as it is just the space between the foot of my bunk bed and my locker where they but up against the chest-high divider wall that separates the eight-man cube and the hallway.

The imposing figure that so frequently darkens this prison window is Tall Rob, a 6'6 ex hitman/fixer for the Russian mob. Supposedly, other than Tall Rob, there's only one other inmate at this prison serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, after copping out (pleading guilty) to a 1st degree murder charge. Not taking a 1st degree murder beef to trial is like being all in on a pot of Hold 'Em and folding before you see the river. You've got nothing to lose by playing the hand out. The other guy is a serial killer, who copped out because they already had him on a bunch of other murders. What's another life sentence when you're already doing three. Tall Rob, on the other hand, copped out because he's a standup guy. Dragging his case to trial would mean a lengthy investigation. And I don't know what you know about the Russian mob, but they don't really like investigations. So he copped out to quash the investigation and is serving a natural life sentence. 

So Tall Rob's at my window when he notices my bunkie, covered in flop sweat, attempting to cut, separate, and wrap his 1st batch of prison taffy. Tall Rob asks, "Where are your gloves?"

With the excitement of a puppy that just saw something new, my bunkie says, "I asked the CO. He wouldn't give me any."

Any convict knows that latex gloves are for officers, and officers only. And, though not always enforced, gloves are unquestionably labeled illegal contraband when possessed by an inmate. But you must remember—I must remember, daily—that my bunkie isn't just ANY inmate.

"You asked the cops?…" I ask, between sips of morning coffee.

"Yeah, they wouldn't give me any."

I glance to Tall Rob. My eyebrows say, "You see what I gotta deal with?"

Fighting off a grin, Rob commences to inform my bunkie that not only will the cops not give him gloves, they could write him a ticket just for having them. He goes on to explain what, I assumed, was basic inmate knowledge of the importance of wearing gloves; how it’s mainly to show potential customers that your particular brand of prison taffy was crafted with at least some thought of personal hygiene.

While my bunkie was nodding along to the lecture, I dug out the pair of contraband-blue gloves I keep stashed in my footlocker and dropped them in his lap.

Rob headed back down the rock towards his cube, convinced his point was made.

One small step to my right and I retreat into the sanctuary of my bunk. Not so convinced. I pull the makeshift curtain, a shirt hanging from my bunkie's bed, closed, and wait for the caffeine to kick in. Robin Meade delivered the news.

My bunkie, I assume, continued whatever it was he was previously doing.

Ten...fifteen, minutes later, with instant coffee coursing through my bloodstream, I'm reasonably awake.

Open curtain.

Standing up puts me chest level with my bunkie's bed. A once clear Tupperware bowl, the one I gave him as a loaner two months ago when he first got here, is resting on his bunk covered in pink & purple splotches of taffy like some Jackson Pollack-inspired line of prison Tupperware. In the midst of the sugary melee, welded to the borrowed bowl, are the contraband-blue gloves I just gave him.

My bunkie was at the table, still wrestling the taffy with his bare hands, as if he'd never left.

With the timing of a shitty three-camera sitcom, Tall Rob stops at the window.

He's looks at the bowl, smothered in gloves, smothered in taffy.

He looks at my bunkie.

He looks at me.

I ask my bunkie about the gloves. He tells me the hot taffy stuck to 'em when he was pouring the bowl onto a flattened out chip bag. He tells me he couldn't get them off.

"Why were you wearing the gloves?!…" I ask, "You don't need..." I rub my eyes with the palms of my hands. The rest of the sentence comes out as a whisper, "...gloves when your pouring the taffy out." Approaching normal volume, maybe slightly louder, I tell him, "You need the gloves for when you're actually HANDLING THE TAFFY!"

Blank stare.

My frustration with the exchange is directly proportional to Tall Rob's joy at being there to witness it.

At hearing Rob's laughter my bunkie gets up and walks over, right up next to me, so he can see Rob at the window. So he can start performing. "It was hot as shit," he says, poking the taffy-covered gloves. "They're still good," he assures us. He runs his sticky fingers through his hair.

He's been growing his hair out since he came to prison. It's 1970s Elvis length. Somehow he has accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of producing a bountiful, never-ending, source of dandruff, while still having, otherwise, greasy locks. When you're on a bottom bunk, gravity is your enemy, hair is a weapon. Many altercations, leading to very real consequences, have started with falling hair. Bunkie's big dream is to get it braided. I don't know what he's waiting for; its been long enough for weeks. (I've since learned he's waiting until it's long enough to have two long braids, one on each side, hanging down past his shoulders before he gets it braided. Meaning another year of growth at least.)

Tall Rob tells him he needs to cut his hair.

I second the proposal.

"No way," he says, "I'm growing it out." This time he runs both hands through his hair. He looks at his palms before wiping them on his shirt.

"You should cut it," I say.

"Why?"

"It's greasy. And you're always touching it. And now you're handling food."

"I washed it yesterday."

“OK?..."

"With what?" asks Rob.

"With water. Tomorrow I'm using soap." He said it as if he was revealing a plan of sheer brilliance.

"Water?!" I'm approaching the edge, "You mean, you got it wet! You didn't WASH your hair, you got it WET!"

Tall Rob's eyes go wide.

"And TOMORROW..." I'm talking to Rob at this point, "he's going to wash it, not with shampoo," I grab one of the tiny state-issued bars of green soap from the top of my locker, "but this! “ HAND soap! And what does that have to do with not cutting your hair?!"

"Nothing. You said it was greasy."

"It is!" I say, "And to prove me wrong, you say you got it wet yesterday?" 

Everyone's laughing but me.

My indignation is equal parts performance and genuine frustration.

—Just now, as I am writing this, a C.O. leaned in the window and says, "Do you know where Garcia is?" My back is to her and I'm distracted. I assume she's talking to someone else. "Do you know where Garcia is?" I look over my shoulder. She's talking to me. "They need him to pick up his store bag.

Store day is once every two weeks and it’s an EVENT. It's payday. They go cube by cube calling inmates to go stand in line to pick up their commissary. If you miss it, because you're in class or at a healthcare appointment they'll send your bag back to the warehouse. If your lucky you'll get it a few days later, otherwise they'll send it back to the company and refund your money. That means another two weeks without food or hygiene. NO ONE misses store day.

"They're about to leave," she says, "if you know where he is you should get him."

Store day isn't something that you can sleep through or can pass by unnoticed. Especially when people owe you money. Especially if YOU owe people money.

Even more especially, when you owe your bunkie money. All of which apply to my bunkie's investment in not missing store day. 

I take the tablet with me, trying to finish that last sentence, as I look for this kid. I'm wondering where he could be. What emergency could account for his absence? Is he at class? Maybe his dumb ass is in the shower or passed out in a locker or dead on the back forty. None of which would be worthy excuses for missing store. I'm headed to the bathroom first. The day room is on the way, but I decide it'd be a waste of time to check there. There's no way he could be in the day room and not know it's time for our side to get store. Remembering who it is I'm looking for, I glance in the day room window on my way to the bathroom. And I'll be damned! There he is, in the first fucking row, laughing obnoxiously at a scene from Hell Boy. I thought it was Fast and the Furious, but he later corrected me as I was chastising him.

Hell Boy!!!

He made it there just as they were packing his bag up to take to the warehouse.

He reacted like he reacts to everything: Slightly oblivious, completely careless.

This is the shit I have to deal with. Everyday, two, three, times a day he gives me something that out does the last thing I figured I'd tell you about. His buffoonery rears its head so often that I get interrupted writing about previous buffoonery with current buffoonery!—

OK, back to the Taffy.

He finished separating, cutting, twisting, and wrapping the individual pieces of taffy courting mini disasters every step of the way. I did my best to talk him through the difficulties. Taffy was my hustle when I first came to the joint. I wanted him to succeed. He spent five hours doing what should've taken forty-five minutes, but eventually he got it bagged up and on the market.

I later found out that he had an investor that bankrolled his little endeavor. It wasn't his money he was gambling with. Which means he has less to lose, but it also means he's beholden to somebody. There is more pressure on his profit.

As I write this I can hear him in the cube kitty-corner from us, explaining the mathematics of his endeavor to his benefactor.

It's been about a week since his product hit the market and I get the feeling this will be his first and last venture into the confection game. It requires more than a couple hits of commitment. But who knows? Last night he told me, after paying to have pockets sewn into his pants, hands tucked deep into his newest obsession, that he was going to start investing in, "a ton of property." Whatever that means.

The timing of this piece seems like fate. Today is store day. Which is payday in the joint. That means he'll be collecting his taffy debts. I started writing this, unsure of my conclusion, and now an ending reveals itself.

My bunkie just plopped down in the chair next to my bed, the one he uses to get up and down from his bunk. He has a pen and a yellow legal pad. A debt sheet.

"Are you still writing?" he asks. It's a rhetorical question. He knows I'm still writing. It means he wants to talk to me but knows by now not to interrupt me when I'm doing something; a hard fought lesson, but a lesson learned nonetheless. Progress.

"Yes, I'm still writing," I say, "but I'm writing about you, so I can talk and still consider it work." I put down the tablet. "What's up?"

He looks at the legal pad, "I'd have to sell twenty-one pieces to make back the 7 dollars (the price of the materials)."

"How many did you sell?" 

"Eighteen," he says. The realization, that all his work was for less than nothing, dawns on him. He doodles something on the paper. "I don't think I like selling taffy bunkie." Defeat.

Now I feel like shit.

Like most kids his age, he's a blind optimist. And REALITY is—well, reality doesn't exactly follow suit. A quality he refuses to acknowledge.

He's a young dummy; It's his job to be all pie-in-the-sky about getting rich selling taffy. And It's my job to bring him back to earth, to tell him there are already three people in here who sell taffy, that there's only so much money in the candy market and most of it's cornered, to let him know that taffy doesn't sit well, so if he doesn't sell it fast he'll be sitting on a product with depreciating value. All of which I said.

Still, I don't want to see his spirit completely crushed. There's no fun telling someone you like, "I told you so." Especially when you actually told them so.

A beat later, before I can think of something to say to resuscitate his spirits, he looks up with a smile and says, "I guess I'll just stick to selling drugs." He chuckles at his comment, and heads out, onto the next adventure. He's only half joking. And just like that it's over. He's completely washed his hands, emotionally, of the entire situation. Any stress, wiped away in an instant.

Chipped, cracked, or caked in shit, his glass is always full, even when it's empty.

Part of my frustration with the shit he does, the shit he says, is out of some begrudging envy for how carelessly he moves through life. Setting fires as he goes. The best and worst thing about being a shark is the ten minute memory.

The gloves, the taffy, the hair, none of them are exceptional events in the life of Juan Garcia but I had to pick something to write about, something to give you a little glimpse into life with my bunkie.

As I'm finishing this up, I hear him across the hall trying to give the remaining taffy back to his benefactor, the smushed, stale, falling-out-of-the-wrapper taffy. He's out. Investors be damned.

Oh, to be a shark.

[notesfromthepen]

Prison Notebooks

2 Notebooks And A Moment of Imperfect Humility

I wrote exclusively in composition notebooks when I was in the real world. For whatever reason, we're not allowed to order these notebooks in here, or notebooks of any kind. We can order legal pads, the kind that you have to flip each page over the top of the pad when you're done; I can't stand them. In the six years I've been in prison I've only managed to acquire two composition notebooks, one green and one black.

The green one, I got for signing up for the leader-dog program; a program me and my partner were kicked out of. Allegedly, my partner's slouching grew to unacceptable levels. Laid back in his chair at our weekly meetings must've been offending the dogs. At least that's what they told us. The real reason they kicked us out was because someone got hit with a combination lock on the end of a belt. The one slinging the lock somehow ended up on the worse end of the altercation, though they both required minor medical attention. After the attack, the one with the lock—ironically—locked himself out of his cell. After frantically pulling at his door to no avail, he slid into the open cell next door. Our cell. Long story short, the ever competent administration deduced that me and my bunkie must've had something to do with the altercation and we were promptly removed from the dog program. But I still had the notebook so all in all it was worth it.

The other notebook, the black one, was an easier acquisition. I got it here, at this joint, for two dollars. I didn't ask where it came from. I didn't care. I only asked if he had anymore. He didn't. 

I keep them both on the little TV shelf at the end of my bed, mostly for scribbling down ideas that come to me in the middle of the night. Last night I flipped the black one open looking for a blank page.

This is what was written on the page in front of me. I only vaguely remember writing them, but I thought I'd share some of them with you. You know, enter it into the eternal, and never regrettable, record of the internet, the public. 

So here it is, unedited and uncensored:

Random Thoughts, on a Random Page, in a Random Notebook.

—The intersection where love & pain mingle, that place they become indistinguishable is such a treacherous yet fascinating place to play.

—Tonight I close my eyes, contented but weary, in the unshakable knowledge that when they open again in the morning, the person attached to them will be anything but content.

—The me who chooses sobriety, to not kill himself, isn't the one holding the needle, it won't be the one wielding the pistol tomorrow.

—This thing that I have with disaster, it's more than a flirtation; the years of courtship have turned this love into a life long relationship...an abusive relationship.

—I cannot go to sleep without a pen and notebook nearby.

—Every morning that greets me unbroken from the night before is a costly rising of the sun.

—If I'm not producing, creating, expressing, do I even exist?

—There are not enough hours in the day and yet somehow, still far too many.

—A slave to validation, my writing is done in chains.

—When will the rest of the world wake up to the fact that I'm a fucking genius?!

—I give them GOLD, yet they treat it like LEAD.

—Where else can you be this good at something and still struggle to make it? Publishers should be knocking my cell door off its track to be the first to get to me. With my back story, the gravity of my history, my ability, my depth, my style, my look, my VOICE! There is no other author on the planet like me. NONE!.. Somewhere out there, unaware of who I am, is a literary agent that I'll make a MILLIONAIRE. Someone who has the drive to cultivate and the foresight to understand what I am, what I'm capable of...who I can be?

—“Sometimes it's more about the frame than the painting."

[notesfromthepen]

Originally posted Aug 1, 2019

Six Years Under Water

The first few years of prison aren't so bad—at least they weren't for me. Sure you're thrown into a jarring, unsettling, circumstance, and adjustments have to be made. But at the beginning of a twelve year prison sentence you don't have the luxury of faltering. You start out strong, steeling yourself for the penance to come. You forsake comfort and commit to loneliness as a bedfellow, you swear that self neglect will become your cutlery.

This self-empowered fortitude lasts a couple of years—at least it did for me. Six years in and I can feel my shield slipping.

Time outlasts us all.

Halfway through my struggle, I'm finally home sick. I mean genuinely homesick.

In the beginning, the daily phone calls and visits were more for them than me. At times they were almost chores to be finished, deeds to be done in the purchase of reassurance for those who love me.

Something has changed.

I can't catch my breath.

Now the phone numbers are dialed, the letters are written, and the visits are attended in a desperate attempt to keep from fading into the ether. Out of sight out of mind is a mantra that had bled many a convict into nonexistence.

Now, I miss EVERYTHING. My heart aches with absence. With every cell of my being I miss it all.

I miss waking up late, milking a few more guilty minutes of sleep next to a person who cares. I miss the hurried breakfast, the cold coffee and stale cereal. I miss the traffic and shitty DJs of the morning commute. I miss stopping for gas and buying a Red Bull, maybe a pack of squares. I miss going to work and dealing with people, even the ones I don't like. I miss the half an hour lunch, dining on terrible vending machine food. I miss clocking out exhausted. I miss waiting for the car to warm up in the winter, to cool down in the summer. I miss leaving it all behind on the drive back. I miss coming HOME. 

I miss the outside world of freedom and EVERYTHING that entails. The shit you'd never even notice until it's too late.

TV and music have become bittersweet reminders of a place I can no longer frequent, of company I can no longer keep.

I've been waiting six long years now to take another breath and I'm running out of air. Phone calls, letters, and the occasional visit are the closest I can get to breaking the surface. Until they open the gates and kick me out, I'll be here struggling for air while holding my breath...

All I can do now is hope that water recedes before I burn through what's left in my lungs...

They say, it's not the first few seconds of drowning that kills you; it's the last.

[notesfromthepen]

Prison Tales Of Simplicity; The Ballad of Juan Jose Garcia

During my tenure as a convict I've crossed paths with countless characters, any one of which you could drop into a packed stadium and be confident that their exceptionality amongst the crowd would stand unrivaled. And although prisons are fertile fields, there have been just a few individuals I've felt compelled to write about. And even then, it's only been superficial scribblings. 

My bunkie, Juan Jose Garcia, whose name should belong to a grizzled Mexican ranch hand not a pudgy white kid from Grand Rapids, has forced my hand. His behavior will no longer allow me to shirk my moral responsibility to document his existence for the sake of human psychology, sociology, education, and genetic mapping...as well as writers of comedy, satire, and tragedy. And makers of human leashes, helmets, and adjusters of IQ. 

I was really struggling on what to call him, both for anonymity as well as convenience. His government name is so poetically appropriate when taken into context. Juan Jose Garcia, is a doughy teenager, who alleges to have Puerto Rican and Mexican DNA stacked somewhere in the rungs of his double helix, but short of him volunteering this information, or checking his prison ID, you'd never guess at his Latino heritage. His nickname is Guerro, which is Spanish for white boy; a language he doesn't speak. It's not like he's Aryan white. He looks more like one of his parents could be part Italian, or Greek maybe. He looks "American white." If that's such a thing. But he definitely doesn't look like what our culturally prejudice ideas of what a Juan "should" look like. But that's not what has me wondering about what to call him here. It's all nicknames in here, no one goes by their government names. So I figure I'll just call him whichever name feels right in the moment; Juan, Guerro, dummy, but mostly I'll call him bunkie, which is what I actually call him anyway. And though he's no longer a teenager (he turned 20 a few days ago) I will most likely continue to refer to him as such. A decision I stand by; partly because he was a 19 when I met him, but mostly because, in a way, he always will be.

In full disclosure this is a proclamation/insult my very own sister frequently hurls in my direction. "Forever seventeen," as she puts it. I'd feel compelled to argue with her on the subject if she didn't have the advantage of being right. This immaturity is the common ground on which me & my bunkie meet. It's our love language. And it is the ONLY quality we have in common.

I want to make clear that I love the kid. In the way an older brother loves a pain-in-the-ass younger brother. He's got a great heart and sweet nature, rivaled only by his devastatingly prolific quality as a complete and utter airhead. Unfortunately, like many inmates, the environment and circumstance he grew up in actively sought to kill his softer nature at every turn (and apparently, a majority of his working braincells.) But nature is a stubborn bitch and will always find a way.

As frustrating as it can be at times, I'm glad he's my bunkie. And I'm trying my damnedest to get him together before he is inevitably sent to another joint, unit, or cube, where the likelihood of a relatively patient and understanding, slightly asshole-ish bunkie he respects, is practically nil.

He calls me his dad. A moniker I insistently rebuke, to no avail. He's also stubborn; quite possibly a side effect of the airy environment cultivated between his ears; and he's highly susceptible to peer pressure. Which is why—I like to tell myself—I use shame in my attempt to curb his behavior. He turned 20 this month. With the excuse of being a teenager, all-but gone, I've really tried to focus my guidance, hoping he will absorb something before we part ways. Again, to no avail.

What follows are simply a few tales of what it looks like to raise a teenager, that's not yours, behind bars. Care has been taken to make as little alteration to the actual events as possible, while still protecting the guilty an innocent alike. So without further adieu:

Raising Juan Garcia; The Taffy Hustle

My bunkie came to prison a few months ago. A full-fledged fish. Though it is his first prison bid, he's not completely unfamiliar with institutional life. Much of his adolescence was spent in group homes and juvenile detention centers. Though you wouldn't know by watching him stumble through this experience.

Tall Rob stopped at my window. Which isn't a window as much as it is just the space between the foot of my bunk bed and my locker where they but up against the chest-high divider wall that separates the eight-man cube and the hallway.

The imposing figure that so frequently darkens this prison window is Tall Rob, a 6'6 ex hitman/fixer for the Russian mob. Supposedly, other than Tall Rob, there's only one other inmate at this prison serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, after copping out (pleading guilty) to a 1st degree murder charge. Not taking a 1st degree murder beef to trial is like being all in on a pot of Hold 'Em and folding before you see the river. You've got nothing to lose by playing the hand out. The other guy is a serial killer, who copped out because they already had him on a bunch of other murders. What's another life sentence when you're already doing three. Tall Rob, on the other hand, copped out because he's a standup guy. Dragging his case to trial would mean a lengthy investigation. And I don't know what you know about the Russian mob, but they don't really like investigations. So he copped out to quash the investigation and is serving a natural life sentence. 

So Tall Rob's at my window when he notices my bunkie, covered in flop sweat, attempting to cut, separate, and wrap his 1st batch of prison taffy. Tall Rob asks, "Where are your gloves?"

With the excitement of a puppy that just saw something new, my bunkie says, "I asked the CO. He wouldn't give me any."

Any convict knows that latex gloves are for officers, and officers only. And, though not always enforced, gloves are unquestionably labeled illegal contraband when possessed by an inmate. But you must remember—I must remember, daily—that my bunkie isn't just ANY inmate.

"You asked the cops?…" I ask, between sips of morning coffee.

"Yeah, they wouldn't give me any."

I glance to Tall Rob. My eyebrows say, "You see what I gotta deal with?"

Fighting off a grin, Rob commences to inform my bunkie that not only will the cops not give him gloves, they could write him a ticket just for having them. He goes on to explain what, I assumed, was basic inmate knowledge of the importance of wearing gloves; how it’s mainly to show potential customers that your particular brand of prison taffy was crafted with at least some thought of personal hygiene.

While my bunkie was nodding along to the lecture, I dug out the pair of contraband-blue gloves I keep stashed in my footlocker and dropped them in his lap.

Rob headed back down the rock towards his cube, convinced his point was made.

One small step to my right and I retreat into the sanctuary of my bunk. Not so convinced. I pull the makeshift curtain, a shirt hanging from my bunkie's bed, closed, and wait for the caffeine to kick in. Robin Meade delivered the news.

My bunkie, I assume, continued whatever it was he was previously doing.

Ten...fifteen, minutes later, with instant coffee coursing through my bloodstream, I'm reasonably awake.

Open curtain.

Standing up puts me chest level with my bunkie's bed. A once clear Tupperware bowl, the one I gave him as a loaner two months ago when he first got here, is resting on his bunk covered in pink & purple splotches of taffy like some Jackson Pollack-inspired line of prison Tupperware. In the midst of the sugary melee, welded to the borrowed bowl, are the contraband-blue gloves I just gave him.

My bunkie was at the table, still wrestling the taffy with his bare hands, as if he'd never left.

With the timing of a shitty three-camera sitcom, Tall Rob stops at the window.

He's looks at the bowl, smothered in gloves, smothered in taffy.

He looks at my bunkie.

He looks at me.

I ask my bunkie about the gloves. He tells me the hot taffy stuck to 'em when he was pouring the bowl onto a flattened out chip bag. He tells me he couldn't get them off.

"Why were you wearing the gloves?!…" I ask, "You don't need..." I rub my eyes with the palms of my hands. The rest of the sentence comes out as a whisper, "...gloves when your pouring the taffy out." Approaching normal volume, maybe slightly louder, I tell him, "You need the gloves for when you're actually HANDLING THE TAFFY!"

Blank stare.

My frustration with the exchange is directly proportional to Tall Rob's joy at being there to witness it.

At hearing Rob's laughter my bunkie gets up and walks over, right up next to me, so he can see Rob at the window. So he can start performing. "It was hot as shit," he says, poking the taffy-covered gloves. "They're still good," he assures us. He runs his sticky fingers through his hair.

He's been growing his hair out since he came to prison. It's 1970s Elvis length. Somehow he has accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of producing a bountiful, never-ending, source of dandruff, while still having, otherwise, greasy locks. When you're on a bottom bunk, gravity is your enemy, hair is a weapon. Many altercations, leading to very real consequences, have started with falling hair. Bunkie's big dream is to get it braided. I don't know what he's waiting for; its been long enough for weeks. (I've since learned he's waiting until it's long enough to have two long braids, one on each side, hanging down past his shoulders before he gets it braided. Meaning another year of growth at least.)

Tall Rob tells him he needs to cut his hair.

I second the proposal.

"No way," he says, "I'm growing it out." This time he runs both hands through his hair. He looks at his palms before wiping them on his shirt.

"You should cut it," I say.

"Why?"

"It's greasy. And you're always touching it. And now you're handling food."

"I washed it yesterday."

“OK?..."

"With what?" asks Rob.

"With water. Tomorrow I'm using soap." He said it as if he was revealing a plan of sheer brilliance.

"Water?!" I'm approaching the edge, "You mean, you got it wet! You didn't WASH your hair, you got it WET!"

Tall Rob's eyes go wide.

"And TOMORROW..." I'm talking to Rob at this point, "he's going to wash it, not with shampoo," I grab one of the tiny state-issued bars of green soap from the top of my locker, "but this! “ HAND soap! And what does that have to do with not cutting your hair?!"

"Nothing. You said it was greasy."

"It is!" I say, "And to prove me wrong, you say you got it wet yesterday?" 

Everyone's laughing but me.

My indignation is equal parts performance and genuine frustration.

—Just now, as I am writing this, a C.O. leaned in the window and says, "Do you know where Garcia is?" My back is to her and I'm distracted. I assume she's talking to someone else. "Do you know where Garcia is?" I look over my shoulder. She's talking to me. "They need him to pick up his store bag.

Store day is once every two weeks and it’s an EVENT. It's payday. They go cube by cube calling inmates to go stand in line to pick up their commissary. If you miss it, because you're in class or at a healthcare appointment they'll send your bag back to the warehouse. If your lucky you'll get it a few days later, otherwise they'll send it back to the company and refund your money. That means another two weeks without food or hygiene. NO ONE misses store day.

"They're about to leave," she says, "if you know where he is you should get him."

Store day isn't something that you can sleep through or can pass by unnoticed. Especially when people owe you money. Especially if YOU owe people money.

Even more especially, when you owe your bunkie money. All of which apply to my bunkie's investment in not missing store day. 

I take the tablet with me, trying to finish that last sentence, as I look for this kid. I'm wondering where he could be. What emergency could account for his absence? Is he at class? Maybe his dumb ass is in the shower or passed out in a locker or dead on the back forty. None of which would be worthy excuses for missing store. I'm headed to the bathroom first. The day room is on the way, but I decide it'd be a waste of time to check there. There's no way he could be in the day room and not know it's time for our side to get store. Remembering who it is I'm looking for, I glance in the day room window on my way to the bathroom. And I'll be damned! There he is, in the first fucking row, laughing obnoxiously at a scene from Hell Boy. I thought it was Fast and the Furious, but he later corrected me as I was chastising him.

Hell Boy!!!

He made it there just as they were packing his bag up to take to the warehouse.

He reacted like he reacts to everything: Slightly oblivious, completely careless.

This is the shit I have to deal with. Everyday, two, three, times a day he gives me something that out does the last thing I figured I'd tell you about. His buffoonery rears its head so often that I get interrupted writing about previous buffoonery with current buffoonery!—

OK, back to the Taffy.

He finished separating, cutting, twisting, and wrapping the individual pieces of taffy courting mini disasters every step of the way. I did my best to talk him through the difficulties. Taffy was my hustle when I first came to the joint. I wanted him to succeed. He spent five hours doing what should've taken forty-five minutes, but eventually he got it bagged up and on the market.

I later found out that he had an investor that bankrolled his little endeavor. It wasn't his money he was gambling with. Which means he has less to lose, but it also means he's beholden to somebody. There is more pressure on his profit.

As I write this I can hear him in the cube kitty-corner from us, explaining the mathematics of his endeavor to his benefactor.

It's been about a week since his product hit the market and I get the feeling this will be his first and last venture into the confection game. It requires more than a couple hits of commitment. But who knows? Last night he told me, after paying to have pockets sewn into his pants, hands tucked deep into his newest obsession, that he was going to start investing in, "a ton of property." Whatever that means.

The timing of this piece seems like fate. Today is store day. Which is payday in the joint. That means he'll be collecting his taffy debts. I started writing this, unsure of my conclusion, and now an ending reveals itself.

My bunkie just plopped down in the chair next to my bed, the one he uses to get up and down from his bunk. He has a pen and a yellow legal pad. A debt sheet.

"Are you still writing?" he asks. It's a rhetorical question. He knows I'm still writing. It means he wants to talk to me but knows by now not to interrupt me when I'm doing something; a hard fought lesson, but a lesson learned nonetheless. Progress.

"Yes, I'm still writing," I say, "but I'm writing about you, so I can talk and still consider it work." I put down the tablet. "What's up?"

He looks at the legal pad, "I'd have to sell twenty-one pieces to make back the 7 dollars (the price of the materials)."

"How many did you sell?" 

"Eighteen," he says. The realization, that all his work was for less than nothing, dawns on him. He doodles something on the paper. "I don't think I like selling taffy bunkie." Defeat.

Now I feel like shit.

Like most kids his age, he's a blind optimist. And REALITY is—well, reality doesn't exactly follow suit. A quality he refuses to acknowledge.

He's a young dummy; It's his job to be all pie-in-the-sky about getting rich selling taffy. And It's my job to bring him back to earth, to tell him there are already three people in here who sell taffy, that there's only so much money in the candy market and most of it's cornered, to let him know that taffy doesn't sit well, so if he doesn't sell it fast he'll be sitting on a product with depreciating value. All of which I said.

Still, I don't want to see his spirit completely crushed. There's no fun telling someone you like, "I told you so." Especially when you actually told them so.

A beat later, before I can think of something to say to resuscitate his spirits, he looks up with a smile and says, "I guess I'll just stick to selling drugs." He chuckles at his comment, and heads out, onto the next adventure. He's only half joking. And just like that it's over. He's completely washed his hands, emotionally, of the entire situation. Any stress, wiped away in an instant.

Chipped, cracked, or caked in shit, his glass is always full, even when it's empty.

Part of my frustration with the shit he does, the shit he says, is out of some begrudging envy for how carelessly he moves through life. Setting fires as he goes. The best and worst thing about being a shark is the ten minute memory.

The gloves, the taffy, the hair, none of them are exceptional events in the life of Juan Garcia but I had to pick something to write about, something to give you a little glimpse into life with my bunkie.

As I'm finishing this up, I hear him across the hall trying to give the remaining taffy back to his benefactor, the smushed, stale, falling-out-of-the-wrapper taffy. He's out. Investors be damned.

Oh, to be a shark.

[notesfromthepen]

A Reason

Sometimes I get high because when I'm sober, this vitality, this beautiful sadness, this unquenchable drive and painful appreciation for life, for this whole crazy fucked up, perfectly twisted, human experience, this thing, that I can never quite capture, it comes to life and threatens to burn a hole in my chest. And it's easier to ignore than to exercise.

This energy, this thing, I've spent years subduing with substances, it's tied to the gravity I so often and clumsily translate into words in my desperate attempt at finding relation. I've begged and pleaded for someone else to tell me that they feel it too, that someone else knows what I'm talking about, what this burning, tumbling tragic joy feels like. My pleas have only ever fallen on deaf ears unwilling or incapable of granting me comfort. Don't get me wrong, I love this feeling, it is PURPOSE itself, it lets me know I'm alive and there's still some magic left to be found. But it's a hard thing to hold on to. It burns a little too hot. It feels a little too much...though, in no way could I find meaning without it.

Opiate-induced inebriation can subdue this feeling for about 36 hours before it comes rolling back, usually on the wave of a song or wrapped up in a bout of nostalgia. I know it's back because I get choked up in the realizations it brings. The memories it stirs. I've spent so many years in a constant state of rendering this unspoken force irrelevant, that I'd forgotten what it feels like. I'd forgotten it was even a thing. Now that it's back, I don't always know what to do with it. The only other way to find any relief, other than annihilation, is to do its bidding. That's what this is all about. Every word is just an attempt to give IT what it wants, a shot at satiating this thing that won't ever leave me alone.

A part of me suspects that once I've done all I can do in service to this cause, when I've emptied the well, I'll go the way of Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin.

This isn't another plea for understanding—I’ve all but given up hope on that front—this is a sign-post for fellow travelers who've been cursed with this blessed connection to source, this demanding purpose of EXISTENCE, so at least they'll have a place to pin notes to.

My fellow travelers, I know you're out there, I can see it in your work, I can hear it in your songs, and I can feel it in your words. Please say something so I know I'm not alone...or at least that I'm not crazy.

[notesfromthepen]

Surprise Surprise...A College Bribery Scandal

Who is it that's actually surprised by this college bribery scandal at USC? Where do you think we are? This is America; did you really think that this is the land of the free and equal? Tell me you didn't actually believe that shit. Aww...how cute.

It used to be injustice that stoked my fury but that fire fell to ashes long ago. Nowadays it's the willful ignorance, the hypocrisy and mock indignation that gets to me. And it's not fury as much as it's a frustrated disappointment.

All I'm asking for is a little honesty so our brothers and sisters, who are less adept at CRITICAL THINKING, can stop running around under hypnosis blindly believing this false narrative that everything is equal and fair. Please, for my sanity, stop using words like justice and equality so loosely.

I'm not making some whiny bleeding-heart judgment either way. I'll say it again: I'm a realist. Or at least I think I am. It's all ones and zeros when I look at the scale and sadly, the qualities of injustice, corruption, and greed seem to be an inherent aspect of our collective human nature left UNCHECKED; an aspect that's anything but new.

If any of this is ever going to change we, as a society, have to wake up to this reality. We have to let go of the childhood beliefs of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Class Equality and Honor.

When you really look at these complex forms of corruption, where the guilt is diffused over many people, all just individual cogs in a much bigger wheel, it becomes harder to pin down a single evil doer.

Who are the Cruella Devilles in this scenario?

The parents? They aren't boiling puppies to make fur coats; they ARE exerting their influence and exploiting greed to get their little spoiled underachievers into a college they may not have otherwise been accepted to. I'll give you that; it was 100% honor less, but I wouldn't exactly call it evil.

So is it the kids? Those dimwitted blue-faced zombies, with the latest smart phones surgically grafted to their selfie hands, tweeting and snap chatting about the consistency of their latest bowel movement? Come on, at best, they're entitled dolts, not masterminds.

The college administration officials? If it was a single person who guarded the gates--then maybe; if it was some blue-blooded dean of admissions who was simply green-lighting any applications that had a reputable last name and a hundred dollar bill attached, then maybe. But that's not what it was. From my understanding it was an intricate, multi-tiered system of deception involving forged SAT scores, fraudulent athletic credentials, and outright bribery.

I'm not saying that there's not blame to go around, there almost always is, and rarely will you hear me side with the wealthy and the privileged. I just wish everyone would stop acting so surprised and save their outrage for the actual problem and not just two WASPy trophy wives who were trying to get their little dummies into a better school. This "SCANDAL" is a SYSTEMATIC problem that reaches so deep into the bedrock of our culture that it's bordering human nature.

We are in a honor less culture, so stop doing a spit take every time someone acts dishonorably. Try and offer some solutions, or at least try to understand the problem with a little more depth.

Unfortunately, without a complete recalibration of our compass, things like this will continue to happen. If we want real change, we have be more than just consumers chasing the biggest shiniest piece of cheese at any and all costs.

This never-ending rat race, where money is the end-all-be-all, is the soil that will consistently produce the fruits of corruption so bountiful. (Major QUOTE ALERT!!!!! [DJ Khalid] BERNNN-BERNNN-BERNNNNNNNN [hip hop air horn]

This is one of the major differences between a society where MONEY is god and a society where HONOR is god. The legendary samurai, Miyamoto Musashi, wasn't taking bribes and rigging sword duels for his more wealthy students. Hell, the guy was barely showering...but he never lost a duel and was always respected.

If we want to really stop this type of shit from happening we have to get our hands dirty, our backs sore, and change everything, from root to leaf... but that's not what we want, not really anyway. It's just enough for us to show a little mock outrage, string up a few sacrificial evil doers, and keep it moving...after all, the new episode of the Real Housewives of Hollywood is about to come on and we still gotta take pictures for varsity baseball. Oh and softball. Oh, and I almost forgot about football, and track, backgammon, flag folding, volleyball, golf club, water polo, actual polo, tennis, beach volleyball, home ec', bowling, chess, swimming, diving, and year book committee.... oh and photo club too.

Wake the fuck up; The game is rigged and you know it. The only way around the bullshit is to stop playing entirely; stop chasing a piece of cheese they'll never let you reach. Stop running their race and game, and maybe the game will finally change...or at least stop acting so surprised every time a rat steps on another rat to get closer to the cheese.

[notesfromthepen]

The Calling

This need to produce, to exercise my ability, to write, to fulfill what it is that I'm meant to do, is all consuming. An unquenchable fire always burning. Never fully extinguished. At best, it’s smoldering. At worst, it’s a raging inferno. Something that I envy to be without and yet couldn't imagine its absence. A tumultuous relationship.

     A constant pulling. A constant nagging. First calling, then knocking, and finally pounding, at the door of my conscious mind until I acquiesce and finally put pen to paper. And then, for the briefest of moments, I can breathe again. 

     I often write of this feeling, of this experience. Hoping to find someone who knows this gravity. Someone who has felt its pull. Someone who can finally tell me how to free myself from the weight. Or at the very least how to carry it without collapsing.

     Today I realized that I've got it all wrong. That I'm gazing from an obstructed vantage point, a distorted view. 

     So many of my writings have been motivated by an attempt to feel the brief reprieve that follows the exercise of my craft. I've become an addict. Using just to keep from getting sick. The whole time blind to the fact that the beauty is in the burden. That this gravity is what's tethering me in time, to this rock, to this body. A purpose. How lucky I am to know beyond doubt what my calling is. To know why I wake up and what it is that I need to be doing. To have a compass that's accurate and true.

     I was wrong. Life isn't about experiencing the least amount of resistance and the most amount of comfort. Life is more than just existing. Make no mistake, there is work to be done. And though there is a Hell in searching for your work, there is a Heaven in finding it. 

     And, as is so often in life, it turns out that my blessing is my burden.

SEEKING THE MUSE:

Frantically spinning the dial in a hopeless

attempt at reaching synchronicity, 

at picking up the frequency heavy with gravity

yet faint of sound.

The same eternal siren who whispered her song

into the ears of the masters.

I wait for you,

never once remembering the details of your

embrace,

but knowing beyond touch that yes we danced, 

and for a moment we were one.

           FEEDING:

Whenever I go for an extended period of time without writing, without  creating, I cannot help but to feel like a vampire that hasn't fed in far too long.

My energy, my passion, my ability, slowly drains until I am a husk of my normal self.

The longer I go without feeding, the more difficult it becomes to stalk down and conquer prey.

 A downward spiral begins its spin, pulling me deeper I to the depths of stagnation.

Eventually an injured field mouse or sickly rat will cross my path, in the form of a letter or journal entry that provides me enough sustenance to remind me of what I once was. 

What I am capable of, on a full belly and steady diet of my life blood.

This, right here, is just one of those sickly rats. I put the pen down with just enough energy to start hunting again.

IDES Of MARCH:

     What do you do when you have a burning desire to create? To express something that you're not even quite aware of. A force deep in your chest that's aching to get out, to be communicated. But you don't even know what to say or how to say it. The muses are frustrated with me. Tonight they lean on me but don't speak to me. I don't know what you want!! I Do you know that the gravity in my chest is yours…that it is all I know right now? Give me something, point me in a direction or let me be.

     What a strange feeling this is. Is this how rain feels falling to earth, driven by gravity and physics towards the ground? Do the rain drops long to arrive on the surface of the ocean…a dune in a dessert? Do they feel incomplete until they finally come to rest? Do they feel the irrepressible need to fall, not  knowing the destination, or even if there is one? Is just falling enough? I’m being drawn towards something. To what, or by what, I cannot say…but tonight just falling isn't enough. Hopefully these words will be just enough to placate the muses. To buy me some time while I tumble to Earth.

    Sitting here in my prison cell, just as I finished writing this, I picked up my copy of the "Portable Emerson" and opened it to a random page. To dare fate. As I tend to do. This is what the old man had to say: 

"Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken away and he sweeps sternly over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which the general soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him and good when it is done, but which no other man can do. He has no rival. For the more truly he consults his own powers , the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is exactly proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base. Every man has this call of the power to do somewhat unique, and no man has any other call. The pretense that he has another call, a summons by name and personal election and outward ‘signs that mark him extraordinary and not in the roll of common men’ is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that there is one mind in all the individuals, and no respect of persons therein.”

    Emerson writes so well that he simultaneously inspires as well as overshadows those writers unfortunate enough to be born after his mastery of our craft…is everything post Emerson just an epilogue at best? 

Originally written Dec 2017

[notesfromthepen]

Ides Of March

What do you do when you have a burning desire to create? To express something that you're not even quite aware of. A force deep in your chest that's aching to get out, to be communicated. But you don't even know what to say or how to say it…the muses are frustrated with me…tonight they lean on me but don't speak to me. I don't know what you want!!I I do know that the gravity in my chest is yours but that is all I know right now. Give me something, point me in a direction or let me be.... 

What a strange feeling this is. Is this how rain feels falling to earth, Driven by gravity and physics towards the ground? Do the rain drops long to arrive on the surface of the ocean or a dune in a dessert. Do they feel incomplete until they finally come to rest? Do they feel the irrepressible need to fall not knowing the destination, or even if there is one. Is just falling enough? I’m being drawn towards something. To what or by what I can not say. But tonight just falling isn't enough. Hopefully these words will be just enough to placate the muses. To buy me some time while I tumble to Earth.

Originally written March 2017

[notesfromthepen]

THE REFORMATION OF AMERICAN INCARCERATION; An Inmates Perspective

INTRO

It's Not Like This is New.

There's no shortage of opinions these days—not even when it comes to something as complex, and formerly taboo, as prison reform. From the masterfully crafted philosophical treatises of antiquity to the late-night drunken posts of the Twittersphere, people are finally talking about prison reform.

Only never like this.

All you have to do is look and you'll find readied articles, posts, and blog entries, Sunday-morning sermons, YouTube documentaries, ill-informed water-cooler talk, and even feature pieces for the 24hr news cycle, all on criminal justice reform.

The broad strokes and generalizations of reform are easy to find. They're everywhere. The detailed pieces—though much fewer in number—are still out there if you take the time to look.

In researching this project I came across plenty of contributors willing to point out the failures of our current criminal justice system, less who were willing to take on the details of the problems they perceived; and I was only able to find a few articles, written by passionate and committed minds, that actually offered up some solutions to the fiasco of our current prison system. What I have NOT been able to find is someone on the inside, with first hand knowledge of the successes and failures of our prison system; someone who is willing to wrestle with it all, who starts with questioning the very need for reform, examines the resulting answers, explains the problems, offers in-depth solutions and even lays out the actual mechanisms of reform and what the results would look like.

Not-a-single-one.

It's easy to point out the failures. But I want to know what would you do different? Given the chance, how you, specifically, would you make things better?

Radio silence.

Electronic silence.

In this absence I figured I should start writing.

FML.

Upon coming to prison I've repeatedly heard some version of the following: "What are you doing here? You're not supposed to be here..." They mean it as a compliment, but it's bullshit. They like it to mean that I'm somehow beyond this place, beyond these walls—out of place in the best of ways—but they're wrong; their perspective is skewed.

I AM supposed to be here.

And I know EXACTLY what I'm doing.

However reluctant I may be, I'm here to add another voice to the cacophony of opinions and ideas that have already sounded on the matter of incarceration in America; to add one of OUR voices to the mix. And regardless of my purpose—perhaps in addition to it—I have no choice but to get this off of my chest. My only chance of breathing a little easier is knowing that, whether or not anyone hears these muted cries behind these automated steel doors and razor wire, that at least I said something while I still had breath in my lungs.

THIS is why I'm here.

With that being said, I am no social scientist, no statistician, no professor of law, psychologist, therapist, addiction counselor, behaviorist, or criminologist—or any other type of accredited specialist qualified to write this article.

I am however an experienced inmate serving a twelve-year sentence, for involuntary manslaughter, in the American prison system, with a penchant for subversive writing, delusions of grandeur, and big-picture ideas...

This is what I've learned so far.

Morality and Criminal Justice

If we are indeed a nation of laws, a nation that aspires to uphold a just and fair society, then it is our duty to fearlessly and frequently check the moral source of our laws, and consequences. If what we uncover is a spring that has remained pure then we must ensure that no entity, idea, or political movement—popular or otherwise—is allowed to corrupt the systems of justice that flow forth. However, if we discover a spring that has grown contaminated, whether by manipulation, short sightedness, ignorance of the electorate, the leadership, or any other fault that draws us away from a foundation of morality then we, as a society, must pledge to reestablish a more worthy source from which to our justice system flows—for nothing is more important to a society's health and validity than a genuine and upstanding moral foundation.

The Question of Reform

Like many things, self reflection comes down to a question, for which the answer must be sought with honesty and fearless diligence.

The question—the hundred BILLION DOLLAR question—at hand is whether or not our current criminal justice system is in need of reform.

Now I could assume that we all agree the answer is yes, and I could skip over this next section, but that would miss the point entirely. The problems we're trying to fix here were allowed to grow in the darkness of people not asking questions and seeking answers. This article will not be another in a long line of false assumptions.

As far as I can tell, a successful modern criminal justice system should be judge by two major criteria, both of which must be met for success to be claimed and reform to be deemed unnecessary.

1. Is our criminal justice system successfully and efficiently providing the safety and security of its citizens to exercise certain inalienable rights—in our case, set forth in the Bill of Rights—of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? 

2. Is our current criminal justice system, designed to protect the rights of citizens, true to the ideals, moral standing, and virtues this country was founded upon? And if so, can these original ideals carry us into a future with the same moral standing that lifted America up as a beacon for freedom & justice throughout the world? Or will our current path, left unchanged, lead us into a future again clouded by the shame and regret of the lesser moments of our history, such as the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, the Japanese internment camps of WWII, and our lag in the human rights revolution in general?

If the answer to just one of these questions is no, then it proves to be an indictment of a system in need of reform. You can't have safety and security at the cost of humanitarian atrocities and Draconian rule and expect to call it a success. Inversely, you can't have a moral foundation so liberal that it paralyzes a state into a lawless free-for-all without consequence for criminals and call IT a win.

Answers

1. Success & Efficiency.

Considering America's "Tough on Crime" mentality this should be the easier of the two qualifiers to prove in the affirmative. But like nearly every question simply worded, it excludes a genuine answer from being anything but simple. The question itself is lacking in specificity; sure SOME people are provided with the security that our criminal justice system is intended to provide, yet still, many OTHERS are not. 

It shouldn't surprise you to learn that affluent, predominantly white, areas enjoy some of the lowest crime rates in the country. Ask the members of an exclusive country club and they will likely tell you the prison system's success rate is nearing perfection. Ask the same question of in an impoverished neighborhood in DC, or a holler in West Virginia, and you would likely hear that the system is anything BUT successful at providing these basic so-called inalienable rights.

But even if the lower income areas were to somehow miraculously be redeemed into safety by extreme versions of mass incarceration and severe punishments—which they're not—that would only push the problem back, not solve it. For mass incarceration to be viewed as a truly "successful" solution to crime, there is an inherent assumption, that the inalienable rights of the millions of incarcerated American citizens somehow don't factor into the equation, that the failure to protect THEIR rights are not to be added to the scales of success.

Look close enough and the answer to this question is actually rather simple; if millions of citizens must lose their "inalienable rights" to ensure the rights of others then that, my friend, is a system of in need of reform.

To gauge efficiency, let's take a look at what our our current criminal justice system is costing us.

America spends roughly182 billion dollars annually, on criminal justice; just so you can see the zeros, that's 182,000,000,000 EVERY year. At this rate, every man woman and child in the county would have to kick in over $600 dollars every year. And a family of four would pitch $2,400 tax dollars into the coffers of the current criminal justice system.

Undoubtedly, there are many differing factors that go into determining the likelihood of criminality. But, many would argue, none more so than education. And our leaders know it. Studies show that as quality education rises, crime falls; and inversely, as incarceration rates rise, crime rates often follow. Still, education spending lags far behind funding for incarceration. In over thirty years, from 1980-2013, West Virginia increased its education budget by only 58% while its prison budget has grown 483%, out spending education eight fold. Arizona's education budget grew by 188% while its prison budget ballooned 491%, Colorado saw a 103% increase in education compared to 513% for incarceration, Oklahoma's difference was 60% 341% and Kentucky did slightly better with 102% to 259%, still more than double the investment into incarceration than education.

So what are we actually getting in terms of SAFTEY for all this spending? Oklahoma and Louisiana have some of the highest incarceration rates, yet maintain similarly high rates of crime in comparison with other states. In addition to the lack of correlation between spending and crime rate, is the ineffectiveness of actual incarceration. A 2005 study revealed that, after serving their sentence, nearly half of all inmates were rearrested within twelve months of their release. Another study showed that, within three years of release, two-thirds of inmates had reoffended. And given a nine year window the percentage of inmates who reoffend jumped to 80%. Yet instead of rethinking these outdated and ineffective policies, like a degenerate gambler, we consistently double down on our misguided efforts.

America's prison population has more than quadrupled since the early eighties. And though it is true that criminals tend not to commit crimes against society while they're incarcerated—mostly because they physically can’t—once they are released they're actually more likely to commit increasingly dangerous crimes after serving a prison sentence.

But just for arguments sake—taking into consideration the drop in violent crime since the 80’s—ignoring the numerous statistics pointing away from prison retribution and harsh sentencing as reasons for the drop in crime—let’s say that the criminal justice system, when it comes to providing the safety & stability for law abiding citizens is at least somewhat functioning, while being efficient is an undoubted failure. In this case we'll give America's prison system a generous C+, lest I come off as biased (when comparing America's crime rate to other western countries with a similar standard of living, studies suggest that most experts would agree this is indeed a generous mark). Nonetheless a C+ is a passing grade.

And thank god. If it wasn't I wouldn't have a high-school diploma stuffed in a junk drawer somewhere to use when I got out as a makeshift place-mat when I have company.

2. Morality and Incarceration.

These are just a few statistics to be added to the scales of morality when it comes to our criminal justice system.

America, the home of the free, has the highest incarceration rate on the planet.

2.3 million American citizens are currently incarcerated.

4.5 million are on probation or parole.

1 in 32 American citizens are under some form of state supervision or incarceration and 2.7 million children have parents currently incarcerated.

More than 10,000 US inmates are serving life sentences for nonviolent offenses.

Roughly 50% of all federal inmates are incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses.

85-90% of those ensnared in the criminal justice system register below the poverty line.

With over 5,000 facilities of incarceration, America has more jails than colleges.

65% of households with an incarcerated family member are unable to meet their basic needs.

With the systematic closing of mental institutions, a considerable percentage of current inmates are mentally Ill. About 37% of people in prison have a history of mental health problems, according to a 2017 report from the U.S. Department of Justice. 

These are just a fraction of the quantifiable statistics that point towards the moral failings of our current system. The tip of a terrifyingly deep iceberg.

The problem is, how do you really quantify suffering? How do you put a percentage on the hunger of an inmate who goes to bed without eating because a vindictive CO refused to unlock their door at chow time? How do you make a statistic of an inmate who has his visits permanently revoked because his cellmate had a bottle of spud juice hidden behind the toilet, in HIS designated area of "control"? How do you gauge the level of suffering on the years that pass without a parent seeing their kid, or a kid seeing their parent?

Forget the question of how these injustices could be quantified and, just for a second, ask yourself how they could ever be justified.

These aren't obscure examples collected by rumor and hearsay; these are all-too-common examples that I have witnessed or experienced first hand.

At this point, this could turn into a never-ending list of the moral failings I've witnessed since my incarceration, but since it is neither the sole purpose of this article, or entirely necessary, I digress. All we are doing here is determining if our justice system is operating on a morally upstanding ethos. I need only one example of a systematic moral failing of our current criminal justice system to show a need for reform.

No problem.

In 2010 Juan Méndez was appointed as the as the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, degrading, and inhumane treatment by the United Nations. His specific mandate was to "expose and document torture wherever it exists on the plant today."

In 2011, Méndez wasted no time issuing a report criticizing the use of solitary confinement as a form of torture, stating that 22-23 hours a day of isolation for more than fifteen consecutive days can cause permanent, lasting, psychological damage. He also noted that extended and overly-used solitary confinement is particularly severe in the American prison system.

Méndez then sought to tour America's prison system to get a better understanding of it's excessive use of this practice. He has yet to be granted access to a single isolation unit by any U.S. prison.

But I have.

I spent years at OAKS, a facility infamous for their disciplinary practices and liberal use of the Hole. HALF of the six housing units were designated Segregation Units (Seg) with the sole purpose of isolating inmates for extended periods of time. Because there were so many cells dedicated to solitary confinement the institution, rather than using the THREAT of isolation as tool to dissuade inmates from committing more serious infractions, with the ultimate goal of the Seg units becoming increasingly empty due to the change in inmate behavior, making the practice of isolation less and less necessary, the facility began placing inmates in the hole for relatively minor infractions, just to make use of the facilities. I guess the mentality was, "Why have a hole if you're not gonna use it?…Even if you have to drum up the bullshit reasons."

The minimum stay in the hole, for the lesser infractions was 90 days. Tattoo equipment, substance abuse, disobeying a direct order, or a threatening behavior (which is never a physical altercation and is used as more of a loophole for correction officers to lock up the inmates they "feel" are a problem, or if they simply feel slighted, confronted, or embarrassed by an inmate who also happens to be right). Segregation is 23 to 24 hours a day on lock down, with no personal property, clothing, commissary items, shavers, TV, or radio. Showers are a brief ten minute affair, three days a week. You're shackled and led down the rock to and from the caged showers in shackles wearing nothing but a towel.

And remember, this is the punishment meated out to the inmates who commit the "less serious" disciplinary infractions.

I once saw an inmate pick up a traded chocolate chip cookie from another inmate's tray while in line for lunch. Upon witnessing this egregious act, a CO ordered him to throw out his entire tray and immediately return to his cell. Hunger is a very real struggle in prison. When the inmate explained what he was doing and why he should be allowed to eat, the CO pulled out his taser and ordered him to the ground. He was swarmed by five other COs and promptly disappeared.

It was almost five months before anyone saw him again. If I wasn't so familiar with the physical transformation caused by the hole, I wouldn't have recognized him. He was a gaunt thirty pounds lighter with sunken in eyes. He wore the distorted hue that human skin takes on in the complete absence of light. His face was covered in months of unchecked hair. But the most disturbing mark left on the inhabitants of solitary confinement is the thousand-yard stare. It's like the person in front of you is no longer the person you saw disappear into one of the many isolation units.

The mid level infractions would get you laid down (as they say) for longer stretches. A fight, which is nearly unavoidable in here, would most often get you six months to a year (though someone I knew did eighteen months in Seg for a rather violent altercation). The more serious infractions could land you in there indefinitely. A friend of mine, an inmate who was teaching a commutation class I took, served twelve consecutive years in solitary confinement. 

As terrible as it is to admit, these are not isolated examples—on the contrary, they are so common that it was difficult for me to decide on just one example of unnecessary isolation to use

I wonder if Juan Méndez has ever gotten into a prison to see what time in the hole is like. If he did I hope it was at a distance and he was able to maintain his sanity.

If this does not persuade you of a moral failing of our criminal justice system, then I fear your heart has grown so callous, so compartmentalized, that no example would suffice. It remains clear that for justice to be fair, JUST, and moral it must be administered blindly. Hence the depiction of a blindfolded Lady Justice holding her set of scales. It has become impossible to ignore the overwhelming statistics that reveal our justice system is anything BUT blind, that it always has one eye open, and that it is increasingly unjust. When all else is equal, our criminal justice system out prosecutes and out convicts our poorest and darker hued citizens at a staggering rate. This system has deeply ingrained mechanisms that specifically target the poor, such as our cash bail system. Apparently if, while innocent until proven guilty, you're deemed releasable by a judge to await trial so you can maintain employment and take care and provide for your kids, we don't think it's a good idea for you to actually be released unless you have a few thousand dollars of spare cash and collateral lying around to grease a the wheels of justice. There is no other way to spin this other than to admit this is a blatant, unashamed, example of outright classicism. How is that moral justice?

And this is to say nothing of the fact that a system that has to incarcerate or monitor 1 in every 32 citizens in the name of safety, must be considered a moral failure by the use of simple arithmetic.

If our myopic analysis, made while weighing the SUCCESS and EFFICIENCY of our current prison system resulted in a passing grade of a C+, then the evaluation of the second aspect of reform, the MORAL success or failure of the same system, could only result in one conclusion: 

America's current criminal justice system operates as an unmitigated moral failure on behalf of its citizens, perpetrated upon by its wards.

So where does that leave us? Moderately passing in one aspect, and miserably failing in the other. We've already established that a passing grade in a single category is no mark of actual success. A Totalitarian Dictatorship and a state of complete ANARCHY would both score stellar marks in one of the two categories. With that in mind, a failure on either side of the coin, moral or otherwise, makes for a worthless token of criminal justice.

Reformation then becomes the only logical solution.

The Problems

It's not enough to simply admit that our current system is in need of reform. Just ask any addict. There's a reason they say the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. It's a great first step but it's not enough. That's why they have eleven more, pain-in-the-ass, steps to sobriety.

Before entertaining the idea of any solutions, we must first delve into the actual problems they are supposed to address. It is only through a deep understanding of the troubles you wish to conquer that you can gain the vantage point to clearly see the potentials solutions.

In an attempt to come to an analytical decision regarding the need for criminal justice reform, we've merely pointed out a few symptoms of a failing system. Each successive step in laying out the map of reform will grow in importance and as well as complexity as we work towards change—but one thing at a time. First, if we hope to find a cure, we must get to the deepest underlying causes of the problems belying our current system. Like any malady left untreated, an illness can cascade into many symptoms, making a swift diagnosis difficult to pinpoint.

Diagnostics

I've spent six years pulling at the strings of every systematic problem I've come across during my incarceration only to consistently—and rather surprisingly—find that they all led back to a single source. Only recently has this realization, nourished by intense contemplation, grown into the confidence to finally admit that there was indeed a preemptive root cause from which nearly every preventable problem facing our prison system arises.

Initially, a realization of this magnitude can seem daunting, but look close enough and you can find the upside. ONE overarching problem, though large in stature, provides the opportunity for ONE overarching solution. This means we can search for an actual cure rather than just treatments.

Every time I reverse engineered a problem back through the chains of cause and effect, I would always look up to see it wasn't an evil administrator, lack of money, corrupt corrections officer that had spawned the issue—not originally. For the first time, I saw clearly the preemptive flaw in our system. The entirety of our failures lie firmly in our PUNITIVE APPROACH to criminal justice. Retribution is the poison tainting the well of our justice system. A poison flowing from our choice of punishment over rehabilitation.

Since the inception of our county, our justice system, for all intents and purposes, has been operating on some form of punishment as a solution to crime.

Actually, this has been the dominant form of justice for most of recorded history. Although forward thinkers throughout time have long recognized the problems with this approach, these insightful minds were in the minority. As we've evolved culturally, over time, in nearly every area of human rights, science, technology, logic, reason, general knowledge and understanding, America has experienced a stagnation in our evolution of criminal justice to match the rest of the industrialized world.

Now I'm the first to admit that, in an attempt to keep up with popular movements, many of our practices have changed over time—especially as it pertains to types of punishment. In the case of the Humanist movement in Europe, which saw a sharp decrease in the use of torture as punishment, this evolution was a good thing. On the other hand, in the case of the Tough On Crime, fear-stoking, era of the 1990s, this regression was not such a good thing, as even the architects of the '94 Crime bill now ruefully admit. There are many current politicians who will be all-too-eager to tell you that the shift from punitive justice is, or has, taken place. But this is where theory departs from practice. Being in prison, I can tell you one thing for sure; Incarceration is NOT about rehabilitation. There are sparse and entirely ineffective programs tossed about here and there. I'm assuming, in an attempt to claim the progress of evolution. But on the ground level there has been no marked difference.

The reform I'm talking about isn't in simply addressing the individual methods of transportation here, those change over time with innovation, money, and technology. I'm talking about changing the actual destination.

Choices

Punitive Justice focuses on punishment as a deterrent to crime.

Rehabilitative Justice focuses on restoring the offender to the degree that criminality is abandoned.

Restorative Justice focuses on the offender-victim relationship in an attempt to repair any damages, monetarily, physically, or emotionally.

The fact that punitive justice is not the most efficient, effective, and definitely not the most humane form of criminal justice is an understatement that has become increasingly difficult to ignore.

The urge to treat illegal or unwanted behavior with harsh punishment is understandable on a base, instinctual level, just ask any parent (until very recently) what their preferred method of deterrence is. It wasn't until modern studies began to reveal that punishment alone, as a tool to curb behavior, is not only ineffective but actually harmful to the development of the child.

It is only through knowledge and insight, guided by logic, that we can overcome our baser instincts of our nature as factors in determining how to deal with the problems we face as a society. Violence as a teaching mechanism, murder as revenge, stoning adulterers, and pistol duels to project ones honor, are all real world examples of how following our lesser instincts over logic and reason can break bad.

Not only does punitive justice not work as a system, many studies show that jailing people without a focus on rehabilitation makes them more likely to commit increasingly serious crimes with the propensity to branch out into new ones. Not to mention the failing recidivism rates of inmates who have little opportunity and less capability to become productive members upon reentering society.

One only need look to a dog trainer, who's job is entirely dependent on the successful curbing of behavior, to understand the failure of our current thought process. Positive reinforcement works, negative reinforcement doesn’t—not in any meaningful way in which the positives outweigh the negatives. You don't beat a dog into a heel position and get to act surprised when it bites someone. You TEACH a dog that a heel position is a positive sum game in which all parties benefit; that a biscuit is better than a beating.

Save your hate mail, I'm allowed to compare inmates to dogs because I am one—an inmate, not a dog—though it's not too far off from the way we're treated in here.

Until we shift our current policy from a focus on punitive justice to a more effective and efficient mixture of rehabilitative and restorative justice we will be rendered incapable of accomplishing any reform worthy of donning the name JUSTICE.

As I mentioned earlier, our misguided approach to criminal justice is the cause from which all of our other related problems flow. Each consecutive problem, slightly smaller, leads to still more numerous and still smaller problems, and on and on, until an all encompassing solution seems impossible.

The initial problems spawned from punitive justice are the evil twins off, (1) mass incarceration and (2) lack of resources. And though they grew in the same womb, mass incarceration was the first to take breath.

Mass Incarceration & Warehousing 

What inevitably happens with a system focused on punishment, is that our laws are drafted and passed with punishment in mind.

At the legislative level, this becomes a scatter-shot, or better-safe-than-sorry, approach to locking people up. Since the avalanche of mass incarceration, which reached a fever pitch with the 94 Crime Act, this has been the modus-operandi of lawmakers. Politicians who let killers, rapists, junkies, and thieves roam the streets don't often get reelected. Politicians who keep a few extra (thousand) people in prison, on the other hand, have little to fear in the form of political backlash.

This politically expedient approach has lead to a prison population rivaled by no other nation on the planet. Our prisons are pushed beyond capacity, both physically and financially, due to PUNITIVE policies. The three-strike laws, habitual sentencing guidelines, and mandatory minimums all but guaranteed that we would eventually find ourselves with a severely overpopulated prison system.

The real problem with Mass Incarceration is neglect. When you lock EVERYBODY up, the system is stretched so thin that NOBODY gets the proper attention needed for rehabilitation. Which, would be fine (effectively though not morally) if inmates were never released from prison. But mass incarceration cannot abide by indefinite detention of so many inmates. There simply isn't enough money or bed space. And so, when a system that's already pushed beyond capacity is expected to perpetually take in the new inmates demanded by punitive legislation, something has to give. This means that most inmates, far from being rehabilitated, are kicked back out onto the street as soon as they're eligible for parole, regardless of their readiness to return to society.

Statistics show that, in comparison to other westernized countries, we aren't any safer for our practice of mass incarceration. In addition we're out spending every other nation on the planet.

Unless we're willing to reinstitute the death penalty with a medieval fervor, or we some how find the funding, bed space, and utter lack of morality to lock people up for the rest of their lives for minor infractions, then we must move from a system focused on punishment, to one based on genuinely fixing people—not for some moral high ground, or a bleeding heart compassion alone but, at the very least, in a pragmatic attempt to ensure the duties that our elected officials have been elected to uphold are successfully met. 

The fact remains that this society we're all a part of including you, me, and your loved ones, is infinitely safer when people are released from prison in better standing than when they came in, not worse.

Facts.

Lack of Resources

The latter born evil twin of Punitive justice goes by differing last names, depending on who you ask; "capital," "funding," "money," or "resources." Its first name, "Lack Of," is always the same.

First comes overcrowding then comes underfunding.

It didn't take long for states with overcrowded prisons to realize that their budgets couldn't keep up. Sure, most politicians did what they could to allocate resources, usually by cutting funding to sectors like education, infrastructure, and social programs. But it's never enough. At which point, their lack of "adequate" funding goes from a problem to a crutch. The go-to rally cry, or outright excuse, of every politician facing the results of failing policy and declining poll numbers is a lack of funding, resources, money, or capital...another "lack of" problem.

It's a good excuse. I understand why they use it ad nauseam. At first glance it does seem to come down to money; "If we just had more resources, we could solve these problems." But lack of funding isn't the problem.

Not really.

The REAL problem is where the money is going.

Michigan spends a higher percentage (20%) of its annual budget on its prison system than any other state in the Union, just short of $2 billion dollars, without much to show for it in lowered rates of violence or crime prevention when compared to states who spend much less. This is because, it's not LACK of funding, it’s the EFFICIENCY of the funding. If a train is on the wrong track, pointed in the wrong direction, no amount of coal heaped into the furnace is going to change the shitty town at the end of the line that no one wants to visit.

Money becomes a problem when you're using it in ineffective ways. Specifically, when you introduce a population, so massive, that the prison system is crippled into simply housing inmates rather than rehabilitating them. Then money IS a problem. However, more money is not always the solution—not a feasible one anyway. There isn't enough money in any state's budget to successfully address crime using our current technique of simply housing inmates until release—not without neglecting every other civic duty in the meantime.

Idle Hands

Left to their own devices, the twin children of punitive justice—mass incarceration and lack of resources—will come together in an incestuous affair to birth the ever-dangerous grandchild called Idle Hands. And you know what they say about idle hands. Though it's rather anticlimactic, apparently, they are the devil's play things.

If you were to contact a prison administrator they would likely be quick to tell you about all the programing they, not only offer inmates, but actually require for parole eligibility. Most prison systems have required programming based on the nature of your crime: violence prevention, substance abuse, thinking for a change, GED, and sexual offender class for instance. Which sounds good in theory.

This what it looks like in practice: 

Due to overcrowding, the limited programming they do offer are in such high demand that you can't even be considered for enrollment eligibility until you're within 24 months of your ERD (Earliest Release Date). And then, you can only enroll in the programming courses specifically required in your classification paperwork. There is no space for a motivated inmate with a desire for self improvement to seek out additional programming.

Twenty years of idle hands warehoused under the negative influences of an inmate-designed prison subculture, is—apparently—supposed to be undone with a six week class on welding or a hundred hours of a violence prevention program taught by a former corrections officer a few months before release.

And even if you manage to get into a class in time for your first parole hearing, the level of commitment and expertise involved in the design and operation of these classes leaves something to be desired to say the least. Many classes have to be extended for weeks on end due to instructors taking off obscene amounts of personal days which further extends the wait time of the already strained resources. And when they do show up, the classes are basically guided workbook lessons taught by under qualified, apathetic, "Instructors" with all the enthusiasm and commitment of a second-rate funeral director.

Offering these programming opportunities in the hopes of actually rehabilitating inmates is like giving a hospice patient, with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, a handful of generic aspirin, a pat on the malnourished ass, and telling them to get well.

I've been down for six plus years and have yet to see the inside of a single classroom that offers any hope for actual rehabilitation. Trust me, in theory it might sound good but rehabilitation is not the prerogative of this prison system. The actual operating procedure of your average American prison system, though you might not find it etched into their mission statement, is to warehouse inmates until release and cross all fingers as they're pushed out the door.

Once incarcerated, aimless inmates, most of which have never had any structure in their lives, are left to fend for themselves—to choose what to do with their never ending time. To expect anything other than frivolous actions and impulsive decisions by these inmates is ridiculous. At best, they spend their time reading, working out, playing dominoes, cards, or chess in a state of suspended animation. At worst, the majority of inmates fall into gang culture and other vices (see "From Junkies to Gangbangers” at https://www.notesfromthepen.com) spending their time embroiled in a mixture of mob mentality, extremely negative peer pressure, violence, theft, addiction, substance abuse, and gambling, just to name a few traits we pick up on the inside. With idle-hands syndrome most inmates fall into a state of perpetual regression until it's time to see the parole board.

When 95% of the prison population will, one day, be released, the practice of simply warehousing these inmates is a dangerously short-sighted and reckless approach to criminal justice.

Parole

The next domino to be toppled by punitive justice, or whatever clunky metaphor tickles your fancy, is the current parole process. 

The way it works here in Michigan is that a few months prior to your ERD you will be called in for your parole hearing. Most inmates spend the weeks leading up to this monumental event replaying every little detail of their case, analyzing their institutional record down to the simplest infraction, and painfully, fruitlessly, trying to predict the thoughts and attitude of the lone parole board member who will decide their fate. Many sleepless nights will pass leading up to that fateful day. When it finally comes, you'll head over to the control center with ten to twenty other inmates in the exact same shoes—literally. You'll line up, side by side, outside the door leading to the room where the hearing will take place, and wait. You'll watch, one by one, as each of your fellow, clammy handed, inmates head into the hearing room to plea their case of rehabilitation. You'll sit by and watch, hoping your heart won't explode before finally getting your long awaited chance to beg for mercy. As each bewildered inmate returns, their face painted in flop sweat, you'll try to guess their fate based on nothing but their expression. Finally, once it's your turn, you'll be lead into the room and sat down in front of a TV with a tiny camera perched on above the screen. This is the face of the parole board. The face you will plead to for mercy.

Currently there are over 40,000 inmates in the Michigan prison system and roughly a dozen parole board members. Each panel is made up of three members but you will only ever speak to the one on the screen who will then relay his or her thoughts to the other two members. The idea is that majority rule will decide parole or denial but the truth is that the likelihood of the other two going against the recommendation is highly unlikely.

So, there you are with the decider of your fate in front of you, his or her head three times its normal size on the TV screen, the decider flipping through your pre-sentence (PSI) report with all the interest of someone reading a weeks old newspaper in the waiting room of a dentist's office.

The PSI report is a document every inmate is issued covering the crime and ensuing investigation often written decades, earlier by a stranger with the same commitment to factual veracity as a Russian Twitter troll. My PSI, for instance, says that I'm Native America. I'm not. At least I wasn't before I came to prison. However, I WAS sentenced in a county where most of the brown people ARE Native American, and seeing as I'm part Korean, I guess it was close enough. Since coming to prison I've tried, numerous times, to correct this blatant, and slightly racist, mistake. I have been repeatedly told that, "There is nothing we can do. It's already in your PSI" as if it was etched in stone and laying next to the ten Commandments in the lost Arc of the Covenant. I make this point because the only two sources of information the parole board members have to go on when "determining" your parole is your PSI and your institutional record. Neither of which are exactly gospel.

The oversized head on the screen will then spend fifteen to twenty perfunctory minutes asking you questions that he or she already knows the answers to—or at least what the PSI is telling them is true. The one rule of parole hearings is to NEVER, EVER, contradict your PSI. If they ask me if I am Native American, I will have to, if I expect to get a parole, agree that I am. I just hope they don't ask me what tribe I'm from. The PSI never told me that. After your allotted time you will be dismissed with a ambiguous comment about your crime, your history in prison, and whatever you need to keep doing, or cease doing. After which you will then have to wait an indefinite amount of torturous, sleepless, time before receiving the fateful decision in the mail.

This is your run-of-the-mill Michigan parole hearing.

Just think about this for a second. An inmate comes to prison at 18 years old and does over a decade behind bars and, without any frame of reference as to who they were when they came in, we expect these parole board members to accurately determine if an inmate's subtle and meaningful personal evolution, if the shift in their thinking, their understanding, their compassion and self awareness is genuine. In the time it takes to check your email they're expected to decide if the inmate on the screen in front of them has undergone a deep, genuine, rehabilitation, or if they've just mastered the art of fifteen-minute deception.

I want to make clear, that the current parole process is not the fault of the individual board members. It's just another resulting flaw of this system. They parole board members are undoubtedly overwhelmed with the sheer number of inmates and equally underwhelmed with the options they have at their disposal.

But it is a problem nonetheless, in dire need of a solution.

The problems I've described are by no means the only issues facing our criminal justice system in need of reform. They are simply some of the larger problems that cascade down through the prison system. Thankfully, other writers with more expertise, experience, and general resources than yours truly, have addressed many of the problems I've been forced to omit in the name of crafting a (somewhat) readable piece of reasonable length. 

Cheers to those writers.

Solutions

Now I'll be the first to admit that pointing out problems is the easy part of change. Solutions are difficult. Any halfwitted jackass at your local pub can give you a three hour dissertation on the problems of the NFL's ever-softening concussion rules or how the local plumbers union is actually run by a satanic sect of the Illuminati and why that's a bad thing. Ask these bar flies for CTE or plumbing-related solutions and, more often than not, you'll be greeted with silence. In fact, I often find the quickest way out of a marathon gripe session is to ask the runner for solutions. Make the mistake of asking me, on the other hand, and I'll give you the ear beating of a lifetime that usually starts with…"Actually I've given it some thought."

Yet Another Disclaimer:

Again, I am by no means claiming to be an expert criminologist, statistician, political scientist, or any other professionally qualified expert in handling the details and minutia of the changes in policy and procedure I will be proposing. I don't have access to the resources, research materials, or expertise to fully elaborate on each and every detail that a successful implementation would require. That being said, I stand by these proposals as honest and valuable insights into the possible solutions of our current state of criminal justice and mass incarceration. The proposals to follow should be viewed as the first broad chisel strikes to a block of marble, from which a more detailed and realistic depiction can be brought to life by sculptors with the tools and expertise far exceeding my access and abilities.

Now, let's get down to business.

The Rehabilitative Scale.

The first pebble to fall in the avalanche of criminal justice reform must be in the switch from PUNITIVE justice to REHABILITATIVE justice with a RESTORATIVE twist.

Rehabilitation focuses on fixing people rather than punishing them. The idea is that maybe we shouldn't define people by their worst moment, that change is—I don't know—entirely POSSIBLE if you work for it, and that in understanding the causes of shitty behavior we can do what it takes to successfully address the causes of these behaviors, and to make sure the people we release are actually ready to reenter society. This alternative form of justice serves a multitude of mechanisms for positive change, all of which are bolstered by the fact that it actually works.

Restorative justice focuses on victims and reparations. Offenders work towards repairing the damage they've inflicted on victims and society alike. The purpose of this process is for offenders to gain a better understanding of the up close and personal consequences of their actions. And to then be guided through the process of restitution, in which the offender makes a genuine attempt to give the victim whatever they need to be made as close to whole as possible, for what is, ideally, a healing experience for all involved.

To institute these changes we must learn to clearly differentiate between those who absolutely NEED to be incarcerated, those who are ready for release, and those who would best be served through alternative options. This shift in justice will serve as the source from which all other change flows. It will both free up the funding as well as establish a more streamline, moral, and ultimately effective criminal justice system to serve this country.

Being aware that the following proposals would lose credibility if its success was dependent on a larger budget than is currently available, I will make my proposals within the current fiscal limitations, or perhaps lighter, maybe even much lighter.

The final word will be for the economists and accountants to have, for even though I'm half Asian—the complete and comprehensive tabulations are slightly (entirely) beyond my abilities of calculation. 

First, a few numbers.

In 2017 the Michigan Department of Corrections reported a prison population of 38,678 inmates with an annual cost $36,106 per inmate. For the fiscal year of 2017-18 the state allotted $1.95 billion to the Michigan Department of Corrections. These are the financial lines between which I will attempt to draw up the solutions to our problems of criminal justice as it pertains to incarceration.

The most obvious answer for allocating capital would be to simply let a bunch of inmates go. So that's my plan.

Gasp!

Now settle down. I'm not talking fast and loose widespread release. But if the ultimate goal is to lower the prison population, then that will eventually mean releasing inmates.

Before you grab your go-bag and retreat to your underground bunker, you should know that it's already happening. It's BEEN happening. Inmates are released from prison everyday, only currently it's done without a genuine attempt at reliably gauging rehabilitation.

Now, you can panic.

The way it currently works is that the prison system has been forced into a Faustian deal in which locking up all these people comes at the cost of a financial inability to keep most inmates past their first or second parole hearing. The terrifying reality is that the decision of who gets released is a rather arbitrary selection process. Ready or not, the system simply can't afford to keep inmates incarcerated beyond a certain point.

A wise man once said—a few pages ago—that when you choose to lock up EVERYBODY, you can't afford to truly help ANYBODY.

It is with this guiding realization that I will suggest a more in-depth, reliable, protocol for releasing inmates which would both free up the resources needed to begin addressing the fundamental problems of our current state of incarceration as well as to ensure the safety of our fellow citizens.

We need a better system.

And, as you may have guessed by now, I have a few ideas.

First we need information. I believe it was the great American hero, the immortal, GI Joe who said, "Knowing is half the battle."

The first step would be to undertake a federally funded study, where a panel of psychologists, sociologists, criminalists, behaviorists, addiction specialists, neurologists, social scientists, therapists, family counselors, psychiatrists, and any other pertinent experts in the surrounding fields would be formed with the primary purpose to design and oversee a comprehensive study on criminal recidivism, in an attempt to gain a more hearty understanding of the myriad of factors that come together in determining the success or failure after an inmate's release.

Next, we would use the results to come up with reliable methods for predicting each inmates chance of recidivism.

This information would then be entered into an algorithm that would also incorporate factors such as—I assume—the nature of crime, level of rehabilitation, mental health, familial and societal support system, meaningful remorse, level of education and any other aspects deemed necessary to make reliable determinations of rehabilitation. Each inmate would then be given a Release Eligibility Score, or RES. These results would then be used to create a graduating scale of rehabilitation.

The purpose of the scale would be two fold: (1) to allocate the funds for reform, by creating a safer mechanism for releasing inmates, there-by significantly lowering the prison population (2) while simultaneously providing the much needed incentive and structure for genuine rehabilitation and victim restoration. Both of which will provide a more effective criminal justice structure for a safer, more humane, society.

Adjusting the Scale; a brief aside.

If it sounds like this new scale could be too complex, I should tell you that the MDOC already operates using a scale system of its own (that, and "it's too complex" is the unofficial, all encompassing, excuse of the MDOC for everything from a mailroom policy that prevents me from getting my work mailed back into me for editing purposes, to why we can't get Good Time reinstated). The difference is that the current scale is a five tiered security classification scale based on a PUNITIVE approach. This system is a perfect example of ineffectiveness of negative reinforcement as a preferred tool of the MDOC for curbing behavior.

The individual prisons here are separated by security classifications 1-5, from minimum to super maximum institutions. Level 1 is minimum security, 2 is medium, 3 no longer exists, 4 is maximum, and 5 is super-max.

Inmates are separated into these varying security levels based on two factors: Disciplinary Points and Length of Sentence.

1. Points

Inmates are issued points for disciplinary infractions. A spectrum ranging from assault, to loaning & borrowing, and misuse of state property will result in disciplinary tickets and points being issued. Stack enough points and your security level will increase, and you will be relocated to a higher security facility This is one, of many, ways to get from a minimum, to a maximum security prison in the MDOC.

2. Length of prison sentence

This security classification tool is completely baffling. And frankly, it's ridiculously dumb! If you come to prison with a sentence of seven or more years you automatically go to a level 4 (maximum security) facility until you've either come within seven years of release OR until you've been in prison for at least three years. Which, coming down with a twelve year sentence, is how long I had to stay in a maximum security facility.

It doesn't matter what you do if you come to prison with over seven years—you CANNOT earn your way down to a lower level facility. No matter how closely you follow the rules, how much you changed or how many classes you complete, you're not getting out of max until you serve your three years or get below seven. In this reality, there is absolutely ZERO incentive for inmates to alter their behavior. So most don't. This is the reason level 4s and 5s become self-fulfilling prophecies of chaotic arenas of extreme violence and reckless behavior.

There is this unexplainable, almost mystical, quality of the MDOC that consistently reveals itself behind these walls. There is a total disconnect in the Department's ability to observe the natural relationship between cause & effect.

The stove is hot.

If I touch the stove it will burn me.

As far as the MDOC is concerned these are two entirely unrelated statements. The fact that they're both true is nothing more than coincidence to those tasked with the lives of over 40,000 of Michigans citizens.

It is terrifying, confusing, and utterly maddening to watch the administration willfully trigger a cause only to, later, show a genuine disbelief and confusion when the inevitable, and completely predictable, resulting EFFECT of their CAUSE takes place. For their first three years in prison, many inmates are forced into maximum security facilities that are populated by those hardened who've EARNED their residency through violence, gang affiliation, and countless other examples of a lack of manageability. Like the inmates in maximum security, the officers at these facilities have adapted their own demeanor and general lack of fucks-given, based on the environment and caliber of the inmates they're forced to interact with.

What a beautifully planned recipe for disaster.

How the MDOC can both, force this experience and then have the huevos to proclaim innocence and feign ignorance, to the causes of the inevitable effects of the continuing problems of the MDOC, is ridiculous.

I took this little aside to simply show that a newly scaled rehabilitative system is not something beyond the limited capabilities of the MDOC's current prison system when I unwittingly found myself with the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the frustrating, counterintuitive, and all-too-common policies of our current system of punitive justice.

Now where was I?…

Right! The rehabilitative scale.

The following is a mockup of a hypothetical scale of rehabilitation.

The Scale

Tier 1: Release eligible.

Those inmates with an RES (Release Eligibility Score) in the 90-99th percentile range of rehabilitation would be placed in the first tier, the highest category on the scale. These inmates, the truly reformed, would be eligible for unconditional release, as they if they'd served their maximum sentence. And in addition, after paying their debt to society, their rights would be reinstated.

Tier 2: Parole-able release.

The second-tier is for those inmates with A RES between 80-90%. They would be eligible for release with similar guidelines for current parolees: employment, reliable housing, no drugs, no guns...etc, and a parole officer to report to. The main difference is that, in the switch from a punitive standpoint, is that, if an inmate violates the conditions of parole (aside from new crimes) the de facto response wouldn't be to reincarnate but to find other methods of compliance.

Tier 3: Conditional Release.

Inmates with a RES of 70-80%. Upon release inmates would be subjected to stricter guidelines and safety measures, such as the use of electronic tethers, community supervision, frequent drug testing, employment requirements, counseling, community service, curfew, no alcohol consumption...etc. These stricter conditions must be designed as a TEMPORARY tool with reasonable and completable guidelines that, if failed to meet, are not then used as justifications to re-incarcerate.

Tier 4: Low security-level incarceration.

A RES between 60-70% These inmates who are on the cusp of working their way to conditional, or unconditional, release who, though still incarcerated, would have more access to family and social reentry programs, victim restoration projects, more visits, supervised furlough, conjugal visits (if married), AA/NA meetings, anger management, counseling, therapy, intensive training in trade and employment skills, education courses such budgeting, financial responsibility..etc 

Tier 5: General population

RES of 0-59%.The last tier is for the remaining prison population and should be broken down into still smaller sub categories based on their individual Release Eligibility Scores. These subcategories should be designed with extensive behavioral, educational, victim restoration, employable trade and skill programming, and, ultimately, rehabilitation, all designed to MOTIVATE inmates, as well as give them the tools, the responsibility, and the freedom to graduate up the scale to gain a better understanding of the consequences of their previous actions all while gaining opportunities and privileges as they ascend the internal levels.

Level C: inmates scoring 40-60% 

Level B: inmates scoring 20-40%

Level A: inmates scoring 0-20%

This rehabilitative scale, put into practice, would make just those inmates in the top three tiers, at the highest 70% of rehabilitation, eligible for release. In order to prevent a flood of newly released inmates, each of the three tiers would be addressed individually with a predetermined amount of time between each tier's release—six months to a year, for example—to allow for minimal disruption to society. Over the next few years, in Michigan alone, that would be roughly 11,600 rehabilitated people placed back in society. At a cost of $36,106 per inmate the initial savings would be $418.9 million.

Reallocation of funds

Safely lowering the prison population by nearly 12,000 inmates in under three years and approaching half a billion dollars saved is a decent start.

Now it’s time to get SOMETHING for our money.

The newly allocated funds should be divided into 3 categories for investment/distribution.

1. Alternatives to incarceration.

With the switch from Punitive justice we can let go of punishment as being a motivating factor for the policies we cultivate. Specifically, we can provide alternatives to incarceration for two widespread afflictions, both identified in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), that beg for more compassionate and effective policies: Mental Health and Addiction.

If only 10% of inmates (an extremely conservative number), with a history substance abuse and related charges, could be better served through intensive inpatient addiction treatment, and another 10% of mentally Ill patients (again, very conservative) could be eligible for inpatient psychiatric care as an alternative to incarceration, at 20% of current inmates, that would free up another 7,734 inmates. That's $279.2 million of the state's annual prison budget, more than enough to pay for the construction, personnel, and operation of these facilities.

2. Supervision requirements 

This would be the funding needed to add and retrain personnel and provide equipment and service for inmates on conditional release and parole. 

3. The actual institutional changes to make the transition from punitive justice to rehabilitative justice.

This is the big one. Most of the newly allocated funds would go to providing the resources, programing, and structure for the remaining inmates of tiers 4 & 5, as well as hiring the professionals, experts, and the additional staff needed, in addition to retraining the instructors, the corrections officers, parole board members, and the prison administrators in behavioral modification, sensitivity training, cultural and racial bias, deescalation techniques..etc, to equip the staff with the ability, knowledge, and mechanisms to implement this new directive.

Rehabilitation in action

The inmates in this reformed prison setting would have their Unit Parole Counselors (UPCs), caseworkers, psychiatrists, therapists, counselors, teachers and instructors to guide, monitor, and evaluate them. But it will ultimately be up to them to earn their way to freedom through action and progress. Inmates would be given the tools and assistance to change their lives, to prove they're ready and capable to be productive members of society.

If, for instance, you came to prison with a ten year sentence and you wanted to sleep all day, gang bang, gamble, fight, and steal, then you could do every single day of your sentence (possibly more). If you wanted to participate in the bare minimum of available classes and programming then you would do a portion of your sentence commiserate with your effort and progress. If, however you wanted to commit yourself to 10+ hours a day of education, counseling, group therapy, solo therapy, work detail, skill development, job training, communication courses…etc, you would have the ability to reduce your sentence significantly. This new system would be a proactive Rehabilitative Meritocracy.

The way I see it, from the inside looking in, there are a certain percentage of inmates that you could release today with little chance of recidivism (some of which are currently doing life sentences). There are still MANY more that need rehabilitation before being released. And a small minority, maybe 5-10% of inmates, deemed "unreleasable" who can, likely, never be released without posing an immanent danger to society. However, if these same inmates ever show the signs of change nothing would keep them from climbing the rehabilitative scale. The goal should then be to get the prison population down to as close to that unreleasable percentage as possible while rehabilitating those who need it.

After the initial release of the top 30% of inmates, as well as the 20% eligible for alternative treatments (addiction/psychiatric) the rehabilitative scale should then be incorporated into the guidelines for judicial sentencing to prevent the immediate return to mass incarceration. The remaining prison population would use the scale, as a ladder to climb, with yearly evaluations determining their progress. To prevent a system where nearly every inmate is placed on conditional release with supervision as soon a they reach the second or third tier, they would be given the option to stay and attempt to further progress until they reach unconditional release, surpassing the tiers of supervised release and avoiding the more stringent guidelines and regulations.

My experience in prison has lead me to wholeheartedly believe that the majority of inmates are looking for avenues—but more importantly—tangible reasons, to evolve and progress into better lives and better actions. It is on us, the electorate, as the mechanism that lifts our leaders into the positions of power, not to stop until we've given them the tools and motivation to do so.

Programming

I will keep this section on programming short in saying only that comprehensive overarching programs should be created combining many fields of expertise, presumably based on the original recidivism study, and customized to meet the rehabilitative needs of individual inmates, taking into consideration a variety of factors such as mental health history, criminal history, current criminal case, social development...etc.

This comprehensive programming comprised of a litany of courses, classes, and groups would serve as the rungs of the ladder inmates would use to ascend the rehabilitative scale towards release eligibility.

I'll leave it to the experts to create the actual mechanisms in which this aspect of reform will operate. Not that it has stopped me up to this point, but my lack of general knowledge when it comes to the fields such as behavioral science and criminology would undoubtedly make any hypothetical planning or specific ramblings in this area sound under informed at best and outright silly at worst.

Plus I can't do it all you lazy fucks. After all, I'm just a lowly convict.

Parole

The success of the switch to rehabilitative justice after the implementation of the rehabilitative scale would then be dependent on creating a more efficient and successful parole process.

We have to rethink the parole mechanism as a whole and redefine the service it provides in this updated system.

We must find a way to give the parole board the time, resources, and ability to gain a more comprehensive, hands-on, understanding of each inmate and their case file during their entire incarceration, if we expect them to make informed decisions. The parole board, in this new system, would see their responsibilities shift from that of glorified doormen to involved sponsors and advocates for inmates as well as qualified decision makers. In addition, certain positions would be created and designed to provide guides and gatekeepers to lead inmates through the rehabilitative scale.

This comprehensive shift would be impossible with just the dozen or so parole board member currently working for the MDOC. The entire department would need to be expanded, requiring many new positions and serving several different capacities in the rehabilitative process.

We would need to hire more Parole Board Members (PBM) and we would need to create new positions such as Unit Parole Counselors (UPC) who would work directly in the inmate housing units to serve as a more direct contact with the inmates (we have unit counselors now, only their job descriptions are very different and seem to be predicated on being constantly annoyed, dismissive, or outright indignant with the inmates they some their days trying to avoid).

The insight into the progress of rehabilitation should flow upwards through the parole structure, starting with unit officers and the programming professionals—the therapists, psychologists, instructors, and teachers who have daily interactions with the inmates, up to the UPCs, who would forward their recommendations up to the actual PBMs. The board members would still serve as decision makers in regards to release but as well as in determining the programming modifications tailored to individual inmates, all based on the recommendations of the UPCs.

Nuts & Bolts

The way I see it, in order to build and maintain a meaningful and informed relationship, the UPC would need to meet with each inmate in his caseload at least once a month. In addition, the board members would also have at least one annual session with each inmate in their caseload, in order to become familiar with those individuals as well as to gauge their progress throughout their entire incarceration.

I figure in an eight hour day a UPC could manage five inmate sessions, leaving a few hours for paperwork and personal time. That's 100 inmate sessions a month per UPC. The Board Members would only have to interview two inmates a day, allowing for more comprehensive sessions.

Even if we were to get the prison population back down to 20,000 inmates, as it was in 1985, we would still need 200 UPCs and an additional 35 Parole Board Members to meet these needs.

Not only would we need to hire significantly more parole board employees, we'd also need to pay them significantly more in order to ensure that enough exceptional, qualified, candidates would seek to fill the necessary positions.

The importance of quality control in this aspect of rehabilitative justice CANNOT be overstated. All it takes is one wrong hire to result in a system tainted by an abuse of power. It would be good policy to have the parole board members check the individual UPC recommendations against broader UPC averages of success rates on inmates on the rehabilitative scale in order to prevent some vindictive or simply misunderstood asshole from corrupting the system and refusing to advance deserving inmates. Not quotas, but a safeguard in place to spot anomalies. Remember, an institution is only as good as the people comprising it.

Two hundred new UPC hires, at competitive annual salaries of $70,000, comes to $14 million dollars a year, and the additional 35 PBMs at an annual salary of $100,000 comes to $3.5 million, for a grand total of $17.5 million dollars a year.

Sounds like a lot.

And it is a lot, depending on what you're spending it on; if it's beer money, then I agree, it's slightly too much; if it's for safe, practical, and effective criminal justice reform, then I'd argue it is a more than reasonable price. To put it in perspective, these expenditures, in TOTAL, with new hires and increased salaries amount to less than 1% of the MDOC's current annual budget.

An important benefit of a more manageable prison population is that, in addition to freeing up the resources to pay for these reforms, it would also free up the bed space that would allow the parole board to make actual decisions concerning the inmates assigned to their caseload. If an inmate proves to be too dangerous, at the time of their first, second—or twentieth parole hearing—to be released back into society then that option would now be effectively back on the table with the resources to make it sustainable.

The point is that the parole board should be genuinely involved throughout an inmates sentence not just at the very last moment of their incarceration. That's like telling someone to learn how to swim and leaving them to their own devices for years, with no tutorials, no instructor, not even a pool, and then, just before throwing them into the ocean, asking them if they ever figured out how to tread water.

I haven't thought of everything—far from it. These reforms are simply meant to be the backbone of a rehabilitative system of justice that will focus on providing the tools, opportunity, and—most importantly—the motivation for change, for the betterment of the institution and inmates alike, and, ultimately, society as a whole.

This piece cannot continue forever. And since I'm not doing a life bid, I only have so much time—roughly six years—to get these proposals accepted, hashed out, and put into practice if I want to witness the benefits or failure of this maddening need to truthfully convey this experience. Luckily, for you, it's almost over.

I promise.

Plugging the Holes

Federal prisons vs State prisons.

Federal prisons and state prisons are completely separate entities. The recently passed bipartisan prison reforms of the 1st Step Act took place at the federal level—affecting federal inmates and, ONLY, federal inmates. These reforms do nothing for the inmates in state prisons who account for 90% of America's total prison population.

The difference is a source of frequent heartbreak for those of us in state prison. Especially those of us in states that are exceedingly behind the curve of cultural and social progress in the way of affective prison reform run by politicians who drag their feet as a political practice.

My home state of Michigan currently makes Texas look like a liberal safe haven by comparison. That's right, I said gun toting, everything's bigger, more inmates executed than all other states combined, Texas.

Not a typo.

For meaningful change to spread to the individual states one of two things would have to happen; the passing of federal laws forcing states to adapt reformative prison policies (highly unlikely), or citizens—like YOU—demanding change from their elected officials (only slightly less unlikely. But still infinitely more possible.)

Restorative Justice

There has been a recent push for a switch to Restorative justice, and though aspects should undoubtedly be integrated into the Rehabilitative reforms of our current criminal justice system, a single minded focus on Restorative justice would, I fear, fall short of addressing the comprehensive change we need. Restoration should be one part of rehabilitation while attempting to make reparations, whenever possible, to the victims.

The SOLE focus on the victims of crime, however, is to miss the point. Rehabilitation HAS to take a prominent place in the hierarchy of justice to ensure the benefits of a lowered crime rate and safer societies can produce an outcome with ultimately LESS victims who would need restoration in the first place. This is by no means a dismissal of the benefits of restorative justice. On the contrary, it is an inclusion into the process as an indispensable tool for rehabilitation. I'm simply making the argument of "Yes...and then some" when it comes to the tools at our disposal

Reality and Perception

It's important that, in my descriptions of the prison experience, I don't perpetuate the narrative that where we are today, when it comes to criminal justice, comes from evil men by evil design.

If only it were that simple.

The roots of our criminal justice system, though misguided, are far from evil and even somewhat understandable when taken in the context in which they were created. The lack of perspective and understanding, the limited knowledge of the fearful men and women, the religious fanatics, the judgmental and injured citizens forged by daily hunger and struggle, and the outright lack of viable alternatives to crime prevention all came together to inform this now archaic form of punitive justice. Remember, it wasn't that long ago that we were holding witch trials in this country. The point is, we must not make the mistake of confusing the ignorance of our past as actual EVIL. 

If evil does exist in our current criminal justice system it lies not in the ignorance of those men and women who came before us but in the clarity of those of us who no longer have the excuse of ignorance to stand aside and do nothing as injustice is perpetuated on a mass scale. Outdated concepts become evil when ignorance turns to understanding, when blindness gives way to sight, and when confusion resolves into clarity. Evil isn't in the misguided, unintended, creation that led to a system of oppression; it is in every moment that passes in which we sit ideally by and do nothing after the ignorance of our ways turns to clarity and we finally understand that there is a better way to do things, yet do nothing.

This is the only article of its kind. Trust me, I looked everywhere in an attempt to find a reason not to have to write this—to no avail. So I sat down and got started. While the rest of the prison yard swirled around me, I actively avoided gang fights, crooked COs, stabbing-happy convicts, buck-fifties artists, spud juice enemas, and lady boys with large hands—or I at least cut back a bit—while I wrote what needed to be written.

With that being said,

I am not perfect.

GASP!.

Neither is this piece.

Obviously.

There is no realistic way to address the cause, effect, and solution for every problem in our criminal justice system in a single article—no matter how verbose and drawn out it was originally written, or charismatic the author.

Admittedly, as in any system of change, many of the solutions I have proposed—all of them in fact—carry with them potential flaws. Even as I write this, I can think of details to be worked out before implementation. No system of change, no matter how necessary, has ever been instituted flawlessly. Slavery, desegregation, women's suffrage, and the civil rights movement all had detractors who stoked and exploited the fear of unforeseen problems in their attempt to lobby against change.

It's the mantra of the status quo, to accept the flaws we know rather than institute a change we don't.

This cannot be OUR mantra.

I'm OK knowing that perfection has not been drafted between these pages. This isn't about perfection. It's about recognizing the need for change, envisioning the possibilities of a better way, and putting forth the ideas to maybe, one day, get us there.

Let's be honest, the reformation of our criminal justice system will not lead us into a thousand-year utopia with us spinning through rolling green fields to the Sound of Music. Change isn't to be undertaken for the SAKE of perfection, it's to be undertaken in the DIRECTION of perfection. Which starts with incremental steps towards a better future—not a perfect one.

There will still be crime. And there will still be the need for mechanisms to deal with crime. The fact remains that, for the foreseeable future, some form of institutional segregation will likely be necessary. What is UNNECESSARY is the way in which we currently operate these mechanisms. Our knowledge, understanding, and insight to the factors leading to crime, as well as the rehabilitative techniques leading away from crime, has outgrown our mechanisms for dealing with crime. And so it is time to abandon this practice in place of something more compassionate, more efficient, more EFFECTIVE, and yes...MORE better!

That's all this is. The first few clumsy chisel marks on a slab of marble containing a criminal justice system we ALL deserve. It might not be pretty, it's definitely not done, but hopefully it will help you imagine the sculpture within.

In any case, I'm finally done! To never again broach the subject of prison reform, to never again opine on the theories of criminal justice..I'm finally FREE!...Right?…oh please tell me I'm right...

Now before you get back to binge watching the Bachelor or the next level of Candy Crush:

Call to Action

It all essentially comes down to what we are willing to accept, and at what cost. So I guess you have to ask yourself what it is you're willing to give up for an illusory sense of safety? Cash, votes, your fellow citizens...your moral integrity? How willing are you watch your money build prisons rather than fix schools? How willing are you to turn a blind eye to injustice as long as it's not happening to you? How willing are you to accept ideas because they're more comfortable than the truth? How willing are you to accept fuckery until it happens to you? How long are you willing to wait do something?...Until it’s too late?

And if you are willing to give all this up for a false sense of security, then I have to ask, what are you willing to sacrifice for a system that actually works? A system that can provide security without bankrupting the budget, our sense of self respect, or our humanity? Maybe it's not so much what we are willing to sacrifice but what were willing have taken from us.

But there is a better way—there has to be—we just have to make it happen.

The terrifying part is that NONE of this matters if we can't get the attention of those in the position to institute change.

If you've ever felt the NEED to fight against injustice, to help those who can't help themselves, or if you're just tired of politicians who won't stop taking your money under the guise of protection but who could give a shit less about you or yours as long as they can "count on your support," if you've ever given money to help a shivering puppy or malnourished cat but have stopped short of helping the actual people from your community, NOW is the time.

I don't want your credit card number.

We don't need your money.

We need your VOICE.

Please, spread, share, retweet, link, promote, do whatever it takes to make this thing go APE-SHIT viral—because it HAS to, and because we can't wait any longer! Write, text, email, snail mail, call, blog, drop a message in a bottle, or a smoke signal to everyone you know, your local representatives, morning radio DJs, Instagram models, any and all Kardashians, CNN anchors, Van Jones, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmir, Johnny Depp, the ghost of Tom Joad, the President, or one of his kids, Bill Maher, the editors of Rolling Stone, Playboy, the New York Times, the Washington Post, your local newspaper, and any magazine, celebrity, or website who will post, rerun, or share this piece and let's FINALLY do SOMETHING.

I like to think of my self as somehow above leaning on other people's quotes to end a piece, but considering the source, and the fact that there's simply no better way to put it, I'll swallow my remaining pride and simply say that MLK, a man much better than me, once said that injustice ANYWHERE is a threat to justice EVERYWHERE.

This is one last plea from those of us in the darkest corners of ANYWHERE, for justice EVERYWHERE.

'Till next time, if there is a next time, remember to appreciate the small things. Now stand up and FIGHT!

Your friendly neighborhood convict…Now I gotta go, it's chocolate chip cookie night.

Please help share this important message. Listed below are just a few people who are committed to prison reform.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer Twitter: @gretchenwhitmer FB: @gretchenwhitmer Office: 517-373-3400

John Legend Twitter: @johnlegend

Meek Mills Twitter: @MeekMill

Van Jones Twitter: @VanJones68

Bill Maher Twitter: @billmaher

Jay-Z Twitter: Mr. Carter @S_C_

Michael Moore Twitter: @MMFlint

Geraldine Sealey (The Marshall Project) Twitter: @geraldinesealey

Joe Biden Twitter: @JoeBiden

Elizabeth Warren Twitter: @SenWarren

Bernie Sanders Twitter: @SenSanders

Senator Kamala Harris Twitter: @KamalaHarris

Pete Buttigieg Twitter: @PeteButtigieg

Contact info for Robert Caldwell: Twitter: @notesfromthepen FB: Notes From The Pen

Further prison reform pieces written by Robert Caldwell:

Good Time, Killers Monsters and Regular People Everywhere, From Junkies to Gangbangers, and Slavery. https://www.notesfromthepen.com

[notesfromthepen]

The Void (Understanding and Conquering Addiction)

Understanding and Conquering Addiction.

In all of my years of addiction-treatment one thing was made perfectly clear; that I was an addict. But never was a substantial answer given, to WHY I was an addict. At most, a combination of brain make up and experience was explained as a cause. Which no doubt plays a role but is all too limited in scope. I have come to realize that a more complete picture must be utilized in the understanding and overcoming of addiction. Its taken me a long time to reach an understanding of my addiction. Way too long. My ignorance to the reality of my affliction has cost me in immeasurable ways. Since being incarcerated I've had the opportunity to really examine my addiction. It took time, perspective, and a lot of self-awareness To get my head around it in its entirety.  Every thing in life, including addiction is influenced and affected by the culmination of prior events. As they say: nothing exists in a vacuum. To understand addiction, first you have to discover its origin. You have to go back to the root and uncover the need that addiction is trying to address. What its misguided purpose is. On the surface the answer seems to be different from addict to addict: whether it's dealing with trauma, depression, pain or boredom..etc. But these are all just symptoms of a more fundamental ailment. Continue to dig, past the symptom, and you will find the cause.  Behind it all is a void. THE Void. To some, Its just a lingering feeling of incompleteness. Of something missing. The need for something more. To me it was a subtle yet ever present pull. Never wavering or relenting. And though it was always there I never understood it for what it was. This is the root from which addiction springs. I had to sit with this void. I had to examine it and find its origin. No matter how far back I pushed my memory I couldn't recall a time when it wasn't there. Through intensive meditation and a desire for understanding and self-awareness I came to a set of realizations concerning this void. Through finally understanding it, I was able to see my addiction clearly for the first time in my life. I came to understand the cause of this void, the inability to successfully fill it with substances, and finally the remedy that I'd been searching for.  At its core it is a void of an unfulfilled nature. As humans we have a connection to a metaphysical aspect of the universe and our existence. This is an integral component in our lives. The failure to live up to the deeper meaning for our existence results in the sensation of a void. A void which, when misidentified, we try to fill externally. This is the biggest misconception perpetuated in modern society: that meaning and happiness can be gained externally. No god must be worshipped to understand this. No religion must be followed. This isn't one of those pitches. All that must be agreed upon is that we, as conscious beings, are more than just the aggregate of our five senses and our biology. That there is [something] else to our existence more than just random chance. Something outside of a purely materialistic explanation of the universe. Dare I say it?…that we are 'spiritual' beings.  I use the word spiritual reluctantly. Not because it is inadequate but because of the dogmatic associations that maybe be unfairly attributed to it. If that word turns you off I understand. A few years ago it would have had a similar affect on me. But as I look back at the time that I held such a limited perspective I must admit that I had done almost no REAL work towards discovering if that perspective was warranted. I read a lot and gained limited information, which I based assumptions on, but I never gained the wisdom that only comes from knowledge confirmed by experience. In my dismissal of anything metaphysical I was speaking from a naive perspective. No doubt limiting myself. In any case I want to be perfectly clear; I don't espouse a belief in any specific religion, God, or 'new-age' feel good belief system. I’m familiar with materialist philosophy.And their, often reactionary, explanation of the universe. It falls short of adequately explaining many things like; the placebo effect, inspiration, creativity, true altruism, and selfless love. Not to mention the anomalies within their own field like; quantum entanglement and Schrdinger's uncertainty principle. So if you simply can't accept the possibility that there is something more to our existence, then what I say may be irrelevant to you. In a purely materialistic (physical) universe addiction and its fundamental causes can only be addressed and remedied by materialism. i.e.: medicine, surgery, or therapy. Which most addicts have had plenty of experience with. And though they can be successful in subduing addictive actions they seem to always fall short of truly eradicating their cause. Which leads to either the constant suppression of triggers and impulse or the eventual recurrence of the addictive behavior. The void manifested, in me, a feeling that something fundamental was missing. A subtle but constant knowledge of incompleteness and lack of fulfillment. A feeling that I've had forever. A feeling, I suspect, most of us have but that some manage to ignore or repress. This sensation of a void comes from a misalignment with our higher nature, our higher self, our unfulfilled potential and purpose.  This misalignment is especially heightened in our western culture. Here we are taught that success is measured and found externally from ourselves. Specifically in material acquisitions. Which is the antithesis of our higher nature. We are conditioned to be consumers and producers, in a never ending cycle of earning and buying.  We are taught that happiness and meaning is something to be acquired. We go about this external acquisition of meaning using different methods. However most attempts at filling the void fit into three distinct categories. The first and most glaringly fruitless example of this is acquisition through material objects: foreign cars, clothes from Italian designers, mansions, boats, electronics, jewelry, etc.. The second, seemingly a little less frivolous, is to fill the void through experience: Expensive vacations, parties, strip clubs, sky diving, fighting, sexual conquest. And the third type of attempt at filling the void, which is even harder to recognize as external, is the seeking of meaning through others: Relationships. The "perfect" mate, best friends, the acceptance of peers, the adoration of coworkers, Fame for fames sake and notoriety. For those of us who have realized the ineffectiveness of these methods or just never bought into them in the first place substance abuse often becomes our preferred coping mechanism. Now that is not to suggest that these things cannot be gained and even enjoyed. They can, but the meaningful happiness, the truest feeling of fulfillment, cannot be found externally. Which is the nature of all these things. They are inherently external. Which doesn't make these things bad it just means that they are in adequate at filling the void. Realizing the void, and knowing that it comes from a misalignment of our higher nature caused by our misunderstanding, is not enough. Just understanding that there is an ailment doesn't eradicate it.  Many times I've gotten "sober". Or more accurately, I had times when I wasn't acting on my addiction. The stints of 'sobriety' varied in quality and duration depending on the distractions I employed. Sometimes a few weeks, sometimes several years. But what never varied was the presence of the void. It was always there, waiting, growing, needing more. Every time, it eventually led me back to my favorite coping mechanism. This cycle repeated time and time again because I never truly understood the void and so I never did anything to fill it with something internally meaningful. The next step, after gaining understanding, is to discover the lasting meaning and happiness we need. Something that will truly fill the void and not just cover it up. First I had to discover my purpose, our purpose, in this existence and in this life. And then I had to learn how to fulfill this. This is what I mean by the alignment of our higher nature. By realizing the failure of the external search, to produce the meaning needed, we must go inward. This is the first step in finding true fulfillment.  The benefits of this practice CANNOT be gained by reading words or listening to speeches. It can be gained in no other way than experientially. If you are not willing to go beyond the words you are currently reading, if you are not willing to take an active part in finding meaning, finding YOUR meaning, then you stand no chance of breaking free from illusion and addiction. I cannot give you meaning or align you to your nature. All I can do is attempt to describe my experience of finding it.  There is no combination of words that I could string together that would be able to adequately convey the meaning and magnitude of the insights that I've gained through my meditative search. So I will spare you from any attempt at a drawn out explanation. You will either have to take my word for it or go in and uncover these things for yourself. Everyday I went inward in meditation. There, I came to a set of cascading realizations and truths: I saw that my everyday reality was an illusion. I saw non-duality, that the separateness between individual people was just a part of the picture. I saw that the struggles and pain that I had been through were largely self imposed and that I possessed the ability to put an end to it. I saw clearly that my perspective was completely skewed. That my attachments and desires dictated my life. That the freewill that I assumed I exercised daily was just an illusion. That I was a slave to my impulses and not just drugs but sex and food and anything I could consume. I saw the futility in these endeavors. And I saw all the beauty that slipped past me in my ignorance. The blessings I turned my back on But I also found, in the deepest recesses of my being, a profound, all encompassing, and compassionate love. A forgiving and understanding wisdom. I glimpsed an internal nature. My true nature. A part of me that has no beginning and no end. A part of me not rooted in space-time. A part of me that is the same as that part in you. I touched our common link and the idea of ME and YOU as being separate evaporated. And in this experience I realized that the only lasting investment is Love and the only thing truly worth losing yourself in is Love. Immersed in that connection I found my higher nature. My true self. This was just a first step in aligning with my higher nature. A part of the whole. Immersing yourself in this nature is the beginning, not the end. The realizations gained are priceless. They are the knowledge necessary for fulfilling your nature. The MEANING, however, is found in the ACTIONS that come from the knowledge. They are based on your realizations and without them the journey is pointless. The knowledge you posses must bear fruit. You must start living out your nature.  This is the second half of conquering the void and moving into alignment with your intended state. It starts with meditation but blossoms into many acts: The development of the will, used to gain freedom over impulse. The expression of selfless acts of compassion and love. Self sacrificing for the benefit of others. The spreading of your understanding in humble and honest ways without ego and nothing but pure intention. etc. The opportunities to fulfill your nature will come in many different forms and with perfect timing. I've found that when acting with humility and purity of purpose the Universe will unfold to meet you. It will start simple: a friend who's hungry when you have only one soup to eat. (clearly a prison example. Substitute money for food if need be) Your initial response is that you need to eat the soup. But to your higher-self that soup will never be of more value than when given away. Your friend still thinks that he NEEDS to eat a soup every night. That he must have a soup. YOU know that his thought is just conditioning and illusion. You know the truth. You know that WANT and NEED are two separate things. And what YOU need is gained only by selfless acts. So you give away the soup.  That's the easy version. Later, just as its barely within your capability, it will be more difficult. It won't be a friend, it will be a perceived 'enemy' that you will need to help. The chance to fulfill your higher nature through actions will vary in form and difficulty in proportion to your progress. It will always be perfect in scope and importance. Remember, that with the purity of intention, the Universe will unfold to meet you. But also know this: Once Truth has been found, to treat it with willful ignorance will be met with the harshest of lessons. They will be there for you to either seize or ignore. With every opportunity seized you will slowly fill the void with lasting substance. This, accompanied with a sincere meditative practice, is when the pull of addiction will begin to leave you. The chains will weaken until they are no longer able to control you. You will find a meaning and fulfillment deeper and more permanent than any drug could induce. The struggle to stay sober leaves you and becomes an after thought. And a peace ever deserved yet never attained is finally yours.  This new outlook and perspective must turn into a lifestyle. To be lived in action. It isn't something attained for a moment and then discarded. The alignment must be maintained.  This is the key to addiction. This is how, after being the 'worst' of junkies, I was able to overcome addiction. This is how I gained my freedom. And I have to believe that the path that I have laid out, if followed with humility and unflinching dedication, will work for anyone, no matter what addiction you are trying to fill your void with. Whether it is material objects, experiences, relationships, or illicit substances. None are adequate and all can be overcome...

[notesfromthepen]

Immigration...Starting Now

(This was originally posted in 2017 & worth re-posting again.)

If you're an American citizen of any ethnicity other than Native American it’s hard to have a hard-line stance against immigration without sounding like a hypocrite. So, most Americans with anti-immigration leanings have a 'starting now' policy. 

It works like this: 'Immigration was fine when my grandparents made the trip to this country and set up shop. But that was a different time and now it needs to stop.' When pressed about when immigration should have ended, I have a feeling that most, if being honest, would answer: 'Preferably the instant after my ancestors stepped off the boat.' But most would only admit that: 'Immigration should end, starting now!' 

Like a kid playing the silent game... "OK, I'm serious this time. Everybody quiet. No talking... Starting Now!"

I have a feeling that this caveat is given to mask the real details of most peoples stance against immigration. Which is, somewhere deep in their core even if they don't realize it, that immigration is fine, as long as the immigrants look like me. As a matter of fact, I'll bet that most people don't even consider people who look like them to be immigrants. Not in the real ‘immigranty' (brown) way they like to imagine.

Now I'm not saying that there should be no regulations on who comes into this country but the blatant hypocrisy makes me fucking sick. Every reason we give to justify keeping immigrants out of this country, could have been, should have been, and probably was used by the Native Americans; The prevention of violence, alcohol use, drug use, sexual depravity, rape. The threat to language, to culture, and to a way of life, that immigration would pose. 

Every single one of these things happened as a direct result of the European immigration that took place hundreds of years ago. So the idea that 'those’ things are an acceptable byproduct of immigration, as long as its 'my' ancestors who were bringing them over, is ridiculous. This is what makes the 'starting now' argument so absurd.

So when we decide to kick out the immigrants how do we decide who goes? The 'illegals'? When taken in the context of this country's history, the designation of 'legal' and 'illegal' becomes arbitrary. I'm pretty sure that all of the original immigrants were 'illegal' in the eyes of the natives. 

Now that I think about it, the 'starting now' defense seems to be applicable In all sorts of circumstances.

No 'illegal' immigrants 'starting now!'

No breaking our word when it comes to treaties, 'Starting now'.

No seriously this time, you can keep this land, 'starting now'.

This time we really mean it, scouts honor, 'starting now'.

Obstruction of justice and lying under oath aren't illegal, starting now.

I bet there were people on the Titanic who were all for equal and unrestricted access to the life boats until they got on one. Then it was "We need to start regulating the spots on the life boats! There's not enough room for everyone to fit comfortably. I like to put my feet up."

To which some deck hand replied "When should we start sir?" 

"Starting now you idiot!" replies the man using a seat as a foot rest.

No doubt we need to figure something out when it comes to immigration. But at this point hypocrisy is as American as apple pie, the Star Spangled Banner, or voting against your interests. So maybe, to prevent the blatant and ridiculous hypocrisy in our nature, we should consult the Native Americans about who should stay and who should go. Maybe we should ask them about immigration starting now!