Imagine getting a piece of mail from a friend in prison that reads like this:
I got a new bunkie Thursday. He was actually with me on the bus from Walton when I first came here in 2021. About 6 months ago he got stressed out with all the violence here and went psych…
(“Psych” means walking up to a corrections officer and telling them that you’re going to kill yourself or someone else if they don’t get your ass out of there and somewhere else…even if that means putting you in a small cell all by yourself.)
They sent him to Lake CI’s Crisis Screening Unit for evaluation and then to Dade CI’s Temporary Crisis Unit to get stabilized…
(Guaranteed he did some time in solitary confinement, or some form of it.)
When he got here, he was very skittish. PTSD to the max. I thought he was going to go psych again until I explained that Bay has calmed down a lot since the worst assholes mostly all got shipped…
(“Shipped” as in sent to another prison camp with other inmates of similar temperaments.)
Then this afternoon a young kid got stabbed twice right in front of my door. The knife looked real and was definitely big enough to do serious damage. The kid got hit in the side and right in the center of his back. He is very lucky it did not hit his spine or any organs. The guy who stabbed him took off out of the dorm. There was blood everywhere. I was mopping it up, trying to not freak out, when they came and locked us down. Honestly, I am good with lockdown right now. Fuck it. I have some food and books and my tablet. At least with the door locked I can relax, process the event. I worry that I am storing all this trauma in my mind and body. What happens if I get too full of it?
Right?!? And the funny thing is it’s not actual USPS “mail” any more, it’s email. Florida prisons stopped using paper mail entirely when people started mastering the art of smuggling drugs into prison hidden in the paper itself, like LSD. But it wasn’t LSD they were getting in. It was some analog drug like Flaca or bath salts or some shit.
I went to prison for trafficking LSD in 2007. I served 8 and a half years in a handful of Florida prisons from then until 2016, when I was released to then build a new life.
But Sonny is still in there, and he will be until 2034. He went down the same year I did. He will have served 27 years when he gets out. Don’t ask how old he is. But I think he’ll make it. He used to rob banks with notes. No violence. Just a note threatening violence.
I’ve met worse people. A lot worse. Even before I went to prison, I’d been consorting with all the wrong sorts of people for years. Drugs had the best of me, and I’ve been arrested 16 times = jails, rehabs, mental hospitals…
I know bad people when I see them.
In prison, I kept to myself. I kept my nose in books and my hands on pen and paper. Sonny noticed this and brought me a copy of Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road one day. In my memory, it was out of the blue. I don’t remember talking to him before that. But I set to reading that book then and there.
My mind was blown. Here I was, trying to read and write as much as I could. And this guy hands me an inspiration of the highest caliber. We became fast friends and started playing Scrabble regularly. He’d served federal time before for the bank notes; this was my first and only time in prison. He helped me wise up. And we reflected on how we both got the same amount of time for wholly different things, and how unfortunately his time was 100% inside, while mine was mostly on paper (meaning probation), and how Sonny would be getting out the same year my probation is over.
Now read this:
I think my luck might be changing, finally. They transferred me from Jefferson to NWFRC (Washington) Thursday (the 11th), less than a week after I signed out. I should be back at Bay next Thursday (the 18th). I am already feeling and thinking much better as a result of the change in environment and I am writing again. I started rewriting the prison piece last night as “Plantations Reimagined: a (very) brief history of the causes and effects of FDOC: from the 13th Amendment and Jim Crow to the Racial Prison Industrial Complex.”. I know that kinda sounds like a dense doctoral thesis but I am (hopefully) writing simply enough a stoner can comprehend my exposé of FDOC as a 150-year-old tool of the Establishment to extract capital from convicts. I really don’t know what I will end up with until I get there though. Anyhow, I apologize for being abrupt in my last email. I was just so stressed out from the bullshit. I am sure you are even more swamped now that you are a captain but give me a shout when you can. Peace, brother.
Sonny and I have been working on this piece for you…for years, actually. But I wanted you to meet him first. This is probably the best we can do. Unless you want to go through all the crap involved in getting on his Visitation List just to go see him in uniform in some backcountry town of Florida.
Until next time.
