PRISONER EXPRESS

Ad-Seg took another victim yesterday. He fell off the edge into deep water and now is in the hands of the psychiatric ward. With the drugs they'll give him he may never surface.

This writing is to assuage my guilt for not trying to save him. Am I my brother's keeper? No, but when you're in the same boat, floating down the same stinking river without a paddle, you feel a responsibility to help your shipmates. At least you do if you're human.

Some are more capable of living in these conditions than others. In this tiny cell you have to get to know yourself and my theory is that "Stump" found something at his core he couldn't get along with. In recent months he had alienated most of us and those who might have helped him had been moved to other wings. In the end, when left alone, he didn't have the resources to deal with his situation. Instead of doing time his time did him.

The first sign of his coming fall was when he stopped going to recreation. "Stump" is one of the physical types who is dependant on activity to stay sane. In recent weeks I heard him laughing with the spirits but I thought he might be listening to the radio or reading a good book. Now I think he was slipping away to a place no one could follow. He had become withdrawn, not talking to anyone.

When I heard him telling officers he was discharging yesterday there was no doubt he was going under and it was too late to save him. Having seen his court papers I knew discharging was out of the question. He is out of here, but it's debatable whether he is in a better place now. He is not the first to be broken by one of these seclusion cells. He will not be the last either. The most important question in my mind, and the minds of all of us, is "Who will be the next to fall off the edge?" There is a limit to what any of us can bear and no warning sign when the edge is growing near or ready to collapse. No one is so strong that he can't be broken. All it takes is a letter revealing a loved one's death, divorce papers, or one denied parole more than you can stand. When that moment comes the edge we all walk crumbles beneath your feet and you find yourself falling.

It's doubtful we'll ever know what one thing broke his mind. Maybe it was the accumulation of losses that we all suffer over time. It's not unusual to see the weight of time destroy the prisoner. That is what makes the long term housing of prisoners in these "Supermax" prisons so inhumane. There is no way to judge how much is too much. For each of us it's different. You have to wonder if the goal is to break the spirit. If that is their goal then this is torture by any standard.

Today I'm making myself a promise. Never again will I allow this system to break one of my fellow prisoners without a fight. Whether we like each other or not is irrelevant. We should dislike the system, our common enemy, more and unite to deny them the satisfaction of another broken mind. When I see signs of the next mans impeding fall, even if we're not speaking, I'm going to throw him a lifeline. In the end all we have to depend on is ourselves and our fellow prisoners. If we fail each other we fail ourselves. For that reason we have to try to help each other. Not for the person we reach out to, but because helping another might be the only way we can save ourselves from the same fate.