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Essay: "Fresh Air"

by Jackey Sollars
Fresh air comes in many forms. Prison is an enemy to freshness, preferring the stale effects of decades in privacy. Prisons hate it when a lawyer, judge, or even a noteworthy news program pokes their nose in and finds that the putrid atmosphere needs some air. Politically, this is judicial fresh air. Political fresh air forces change in a place that doesn't want to hear about it. This fresh air breathes new life into ghostly individuals, forgotten in the shadows. A new life brings fresh air to society, men, once antisocial, become productive members of society. You'll never hear about them, but they do happen more often than the public thinks. The simple fact is, prison bureaucrats don't want success stories, nor do they publicize these successes. The success of a prison system is in the continual failure of those released from it. Still, occasionally, a breath of fresh air is blown into the system.

Texas prisons, regaining their plantation choke hold on felons to promote their own propaganda-prison growth- have been steadily closing all windows. The stale air is quickly rising to fill the once potentially positive environment. Their agenda, promote homosexuality to spread the HIV virus. Continually they stir up the cauldron of racism playing one race against another, and they encourage inmates to use racism as an excuse for failure. Filth permeates in all living areas because the system no longer is required to maintain healthy living standards. Food, the great delicacy which many Americans believe to be so great in prison(this is a myth that rivals the idea of an air conditioned prison) has been cut back in order for the Texas Department of Justice to purchase the multi-meat, multi-desert entries that guards are fed three times a day at a personal cost of one dollar per month. This 30 million dollar menu is one of the hidden perks of the Texas Prisons.

Ah- but there is a supposed "breath of fresh air" in the breeze. The Texas taxpayers are led to believe that the ACA (American Corrections Association) is going to force the Texas prison system to release its plantation strangle hold and enter the 21st century. But this is just a farce of good ole boy politics designed to open the door for Texas to start collection tax dollars from the federal government. As I said, there are different forms of fresh air. The most positive lesson I've learned in prison is the ability to know what is truly fresh air and what is just another false breeze over the cesspool. It doesn't take a brain scientist to run the prison system effectively. It takes carpet baggers of an associative nature to keep lying to the public.

Fresh air comes when death permeates from a plague. When all the politicians and carpet baggers have choked all life out of the prison coffers, the corpse of a dysfunctional bureaucracy will again be resurrected by some judiciary of heroic stature who is willing to breathe fresh air into it.