PRISONER EXPRESS

My patience has grown short as my tolerance for solitary has grown long. My chances of making parole were never good, Texas doesn’t parole violent criminals with multiple counts of Attempted Capital Murder of Police Officers. My disciplinary history assures I’ll do every day of my 35 year sentence. With 17 years done and 18 more to go there isn’t much left to threaten me with. I’ll be 66 if I live long enough to discharge. Then there are charges to face in Alabama and Virginia.

I’m not getting out, not even if I kiss the warden’s hairy butt daily. Why should I live in g.p when I have no hope of parole? They’ll require me to work. Slave labor. They pay good time credits that I can’t even use to become eligible for parole. They’re useless to most prisoners, so why work? Then there would be cellies (roommates) to contend with. What would I gain by putting up with insane eccentricities from ignorant, disrespectful young men unwilling to better themselves?

Add to this days spent in line for every necessity of life. All three meals, twice-a-day medication, clean clothes, and commissary all require hours daily in line. Every line is cut by the young and disrespectful in violation of prison rules. Officers ignore it unless you take matters into your own hands, then you are the one to be punished.

In ad-seg those things are delivered to my cell door. The only thing that would make g.p. worth the hassle would be contact visits, but after this long in prison I have no family left to even hope will come see me. If not for the two yankees that adopted this southern boy eight years ago I’d be all alone.

My greatest solitude is caused by my inability to understand my peers. They speak an incomprehensible language filled with the slangs of street and prison and the clichéd phrases written by Hollywood script-writers. Most have little interest in anything except sex, television, movies, sports, and sex. I’d rather discuss politics or history or both in context to one another. My interests are not theirs and we can’t communicate without a mutual ground to meet on.

What is missing in my life is physical contact. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for a simple hug. Though inured to my hermitic existence, I crave the small kindnesses that are so rare here. Smiles are beyond value. Kind words an ecstasy. They return me for a moment to the society of humanity. The shame is how scarce these shows of compassion are in a world where they mean so much.

The longer a prisoner lives in solitary conditions the less-likely it is that he’ll prosper in society. You forget how to relate to others as you turn more introspective and alienated. If solitary confinement causes prisoners to become incapable of coping with prison society, where they are more acceptable, then how much harder will it be for those same prisoners to cope with society once they are free when that society is often unwilling to accept them at face value?

What Texas sees as punishment has become my greatest comfort. No doubt they’ll send me back out to g.p. one day and there is nothing I can do about that. As always, I’ll carry myself in the same quiet, courteous manner I always have and act with kindness where I can if circumstances will allow it. At some point some officer or prisoner young enough to be my child will see my civilized manners as a chink in my armor. They’ll choose to verbally abuse me or physically assault me. My patience will end. There will be no courtesy for a time and I will return to my solitary life.