Random advice to anyone who ever finds themselves on the wrong side of the law and confined inside an institution: keep a low profile. Don't distinguish yourself in the eyes of the correctional staff. All they need is an excuse to give you a hard time.
Try to stay under the RADAR. It's a skill I'm still working to develop.
My grandfather was a journalist in Brazil at a time when the country was being ruled by a military dictatorship. An outspoken opponent of the junta, one day he disappeared. Noone ever heard from him again. There's no way to know what happened, whether he ran off with a woman, left the country, or died for his opinion of the government. We just know he was gone.
I have no pretensions of being a journalist, but like my grandfather, I object to the heavy hand of the state meddling in our daily lives. They get involved in too much and get away with too much. I don't think that will ever change, but it's good to shine a light on their behavior. You can't put anything past these people. Power corrupts.
Whitworth is a miserable place by any honest account. I guess it would be classified as a detention center, but it's actually a fusion, incorporating elements of boot camp and county work prisons. To someone used to Level 5 chaingangs, it's a total clash of cultures. There's nothing going on, no drugs, gambling, or phones. Time crawls by. The majority of the officers go above and beyond to disrespect and belittle the paroles. The whole game is to see if they can force a reaction from you. Bite the bait and you to to prison for the rest of your sentence. They have us at a serious disadvantage, and there's nothing we can do about it. Every day is a new surrender.
I don't know what the thinking is behind this high-intensity shock camp ethos. Probably something innovative like "let's make them suffer, treat them like livestock, demean them, ridicule them, and in so doing, we will reform them, rebuilding these criminals into better men". Maybe the penal masterminds believe the torment of 6 months in this place will be persuasion enough to keepus on the straight and narrow, determined never to return. Or maybe it's just punishment, reprisal for being stupid enough to fuck up on parole.
Sitting in jail, waiting to return to Whitworth for my second tour, I certainly question my intelligence on a daily basis. Evidently some slow learners don't internalize the whitworth value system in a single 6 month dose. Any day now, I'll be going back to repeat a grade.
Like most prisons, Whitworth offers behavior modification classes. Depending on the whims of the counselor and the parole board, certain lucky convicts are mandated to attend courses with names like "Thinking for a Change". What these classes amount to are half-baked attempts at rehabilitation. One called "Moral Recognition Therapy" attempts to teach felons morality. Ridiculous. The counselors who teach these bogus classes are not exactly gushing with enthusiasm, and that's understandable. They're in over their heads.
Let's think about it logically. Here we have lawbreakers of all types, riddled with emotional wounds, mental problems, and every addiction you can name. Over the course of a few months, meeting a couple times a week, inmates confront their demons, analyze self destructive patterns and make use of Venn diagrams and flowcharts in a quest to be cured of a lifetime of flawed thinking, anger management problems, and slavish devotion to piper, needles and bottles. Presumably, through powerful learning exercises like making a list of the pros and cons of using crack cocaine, we are expelled to derive some sort of benefit. Facilitating this growth process are counselors who are variously pompous, airheaded and uninterested. The success rate of these therapies has got to be so negligable as to be nonexistent. It's window dressing for the department of corrections, something that they can point to as proof that they try to help us. A sham.
Whitworth is proud host to a special drug program, so special that I can't remember it's name. One of the reasons I went to Whitworth last time was because the parole board determined that I should complete this class during my stay there. Twice a week for 90 minutes, a group of abut 20 of us met in a classroom for sessions guided by a greasy 50-something counselor named Mr. Vickory.
I won't waste too much time describing this clown. He is a recovering addict who has been sober and active in AA for many years. A self-described wealthy man, he has distinction of having designed the curriculum of the class. It is his brainchild, his masterpiece, and it's been recognized by the state as a viable treatment product.
I should note that I have some experience in rehab, halfway houses, AA, and recovery outside of institutions. My first 12 step meeting was in 1998. I've never managed to stay clean for long, but I'm well versed in the concepts of recovery. I know that thousands of people have overcome their addictions through working the steps. I believe that it works.
Maybe it's because of this that I'm skeptical of any form of treatment that takes a classroom approach. I don't think there's a way to educate drug problems out of people. It's deeper than that. After 5 months of the class with the forgotten name, they had a graduation ceremony and gave us certificates, as if we'd learned to operate forklifts or something. That would've been such a better allocation of tax dollars. Leave the drug rehabilitation to the private sector.
It quickly became obvious that counselor Vickory thought a lot of himself. A self-styled ladies man, he bragged about his conquests ad nauseam, in between monologues about his cars, jewelery, sobriety, and general success in life. Stomaching his bullshit wasn't easy, and his attempts at humor rarely hit the mark. In his defense, he let us have open discussions about various topics completely unrelated to staying sober. This made the class a little bit less of a drag than it would have been otherwise.
One day, after Mr. Vickory got done with another gripping tale of victory in his lecherous pursuit of women, I guided the conversation towards the topic of sex with AA girls. Having deemed drugs and alcohol too costly in terms of the consequences involved, women in recovery are usually eager to get high on life. It's safer, and sex is still not illegal. A good alternative to chemicals.
This suddenly inflamed Mr. Vickory's paternal instincts. He flustered, saying something about how wrong it is to take advantage of 12 step girls while they're trying to get their lives back together.
His rapid metamorphosis, from sleazy old pervert to defender of female virtue, was pure comedy. Finally, inadvertently, he'd said something funny. I explained to him that it wasn't "taking advantage", it was casual sex between adults, something he didn't have a monopoly on, in spite of his many, many triumphs. From this day forth, he had an unspoken grudge against me.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
I'm blessed to say that this time around, I won't be required to take any useless classes, since I've already taken them all. I'll have to be cleansed and purified through the therapy of incarceration in itself, without the extracurricular learning component.
My parole officer came to see me again, to let me know that I'm going to Whitworth next week. My 180 days begins tuesday. One step closer to having all this behind me forever.
My entire 10 year sentence should rightfully be behind me on April 24th of this year. On that date I will have served 120 months in the custody of the state of Georgia, aside from the 18 months I spent on parole. I agreed to serve 10 years, and not a day longer, but the Department of Corrections has my max. out date set for November 15th, 7 months beyond the completion of my custodial sentence. Requiring me to serve extra time is probably unlawful and definitely unjust, and I'm trying to figure out what I can do to get credit for those months. Then I can go home in a little over 50 days.
I have proof of incarceration, legal documents that show I never got out on bond, never did anything but sit in jail and prison from April 2002 until I made parole. I'm not sure exactly what to do with them. Filing a writ of habeas corpus would get me into court, where I could call attention to the facts, but the time limit for filing is four years after the conviction, so I can't take that route. Because of the seriousness of my initial charges, I'm not allowed to go to the law library here; the only thing I can think to do is file some kind of notion for the computation of my sentence, or something. Really, I'm fucked. It's almost over with anyway: I'll only be incarcerated four months longer than I should be and that's my debt to society, paid in full (and then some).
Like most indigent prisoners with a valid complaint, my poverty and ignorance of how to proceed legally keep me stuck under the state's heel, without recourse. The only thing to do is take my licking and keep on ticking. Better that than bemoan my fate for the next 6 months or hold onto a vain hope for deliverance. When you're beat, your beat. Sometimes the only thing to do is keep my head up and take it like a man.
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