On 3/28/20 though I never use the telephone in here because I can never hear over all the noise, I just felt like I needed to call home. I just needed to hear moms voice. My older brother answered the phone and after a few minutes of painfully awkward conversation he choked out “Marky… Mommas gone.” Here it was…the moment of my most horrific fear. My 69 yr old momma died right at the start of the Coronavirus Pandemic while I was locked away in prison. I wasn’t there for her at the end when she needed me most… I let her down. A letter from my Mom: 4/4/08 Dear Marky, I am sitting out here on the front porch swing writing you this letter. The sun is shining, the birds are singing and there are flowers blooming all over the yard. The buzz of hummingbirds wings and blossoming honeysuckle fill the air and “Puppy”, Dads little hound doggie is curled up with one of my old house shoes asleep in the warm spring sun… It’s a beautiful day Son but only one thing is wrong… You are not here sitting beside me like you always did. That was always something I could count on… my sweet little Marky always stuck to me like glue. Oh how I wish that you were still my little baby boy…my unfaltering shadow. I would give anything to have you sitting right here with me again and hear your sweet little voice singing those pretty Sunday school songs that I always loved to hear you sing. I realize now what your Granny meant when she would say “The first heart a little boy breaks is always his mother’s.” Just simply by growing up and not always being there anymore telling momma that he loves her or bringing her a bouquet of fresh picked flowers, bugs, weeds and all. I miss you so much my precious Son. I wish I had known how things would turn out and how unfair life would be to us. I wish I would have had the insight to warn you that there were women out there in the world that would punish you and try to destroy you when they finally realize that you will never be able to love them the way a woman wants to be loved by a man. I knew the first time I saw that woman look at you that she was desperately obsessed with you and I could see that she truly believed that she was the one woman in all the world that could make you want to be with a woman. I have laid awake nights worrying and wishing that I had just said something…anything to let you know that your new best friend was the type of woman who would lie and manipulate and hurt anyone who stood up to her or got between her and what she wanted. Son I can’t for the life of me figure out why her husband didn’t try and stop her from stalking you. He had to have known what she was doing. Maybe he was afraid of her? Maybe he was just as trapped as you ended up being by her? Maybe… maybe… maybe… I don’t know. Son, I just feel like I should have been able to keep you safe and not let you end up in that horrible place when you didn’t even hurt anyone! That’s what makes me so angry with the criminal justice system… You make one small mistake and Some Olivia Benson wanna be Prosecutor manipulates and twists things so far away from the truth that it’s no longer about what’s right or wrong…Its about who puts on the most interesting and entertaining show in the the courtroom. That’s who the judge sides with. Anyway, I guess I’m preaching to the choir. Marky I hope you know that no matter what, me and Dad are so proud of the way you are handling and bearing this burden and that we love you Son more than you will ever know. You are the reason I get up every morning and me and Dad and your brothers just can’t wait til our Marky comes home to us. Dad says for you to stay strong Son and he loves you… You know I do too! Love always, Mom
A lifetime ago, I was a member of my airlines Crisis Response Team and unfortunately I have had to provide grief support to crash victims families. I’ve always found that the only sure way to process grief is to talk about it and share your feelings. So you are helping me already more than you know in just being a sympathetic listener. I don’t think anyone has all the answers when it comes to something so complex and individually personal. I have seen men who are the epitome of masculine strength handle the death of their daughter with stoic concrete resolve in front of others only to dissolve into tears and hysterics when they are alone for more than a few moments. I’ve also witnessed how coworkers of mine came together and beautifully celebrated the lives of Capt. Katie and First Officer Jonathan who died in a U.S. Airways crash in 2003…They were both in their 20’s and it was just so unbelievably tragic. The key to overcoming grief for me is just being able to share but that is a dangerous thing to do in here. Just minutes ago I was interrupted from writing this email in my cell to find another inmate knocking at my door to see if (since everyone has gone outside for rec) I want to go to the shower with him and “help him out.” This is a predator that targeted me when I first got here a few years ago and I have made it abundantly clear to him that I’m not interested but he came to me under the guise of “I’m sorry you lost your mom.” And like a fool I took the bait and said “Thank you.” So now he thinks its ok to start talking to me and trying again. So he rolls up and asks with fake concern if I am alright, and then the very next thing out of his mouth is “I can make you feel better and get your mind off of it if you want to go to the shower sometime.” I got more than a little upset and told him to get away from my cell and he was a second and a half away from me dialing #55 on him. So he left but of course he came back 10 minutes later to apologized and said he just couldn’t help it sometimes that when he thinks about me he starts “getting up” and he just can’t control it… all the while he’s touching himself inappropriately through his clothes and moving closer and closer towards me! I held up my hands to signal stop and told him to get the “F” away from me and the next time he came near me I would start screaming “Rape!” at the top of my lungs. He bolted out of here and now all I have to worry about is when the “notes” will start being dropped on me or when contraband might be planted in my cell…this guy and his co-predator friends are notorious for that kind of thing. So much so that I was warned about those same guys when I first got moved over here from friends who know I’m gay. I’m not worried about him doing anything physically because he’s so small in stature that I could break him in half if I wanted to. Its just so damned aggravating to have to deal with that crap every time I turn around. You don’t really dial #55 on them either…Nothing will come of it except you’ll get moved or locked up in segregation and loose your job and then the C.O.s will tell everyone that you’re a snitch. I learned that lesson all to well 4 yeas ago at Pocahontas when a C.O. called me up to my cell and told me that “The word on the yard is that’s not your TV you’ve got up there on the shelf.” I told him “It was, and I have the receipt for it.” He said for me to hand him down the TV so he could look at it and while I was standing up on the table (to reach my shelf) looking for the receipt I looked over my shoulder and he massaging his crotch while he said, “Think I’m going to have to take this,” and it was clear to me that there was an unspoken ultimatum of “if we can’t work something out” hanging in the air. I knew as soon as he stepped in and the door closed behind him and the lights turned off what was up. I thought I was going to be forced to give him oral sex or be raped. I guess he saw the panic in my eyes and decided it wasn’t going to work out like he wanted so he handed the TV back to me and called on his radio for the officer in the control booth to open the cell door. Later on that day he called me down to the Sergeant’s office and in front of the officer that locked him in the cell with me earlier and a female C.O. (who could always be found working the control booth every morning at the same time so she could look down into the showers and watch the guys masturbate for her…Everyone knew not to go take a shower when she was in the booth and there was a line of guys waiting to shower one at a time.) Where he said “You’re going to throw away the TV in front of me or you’re going to the Hole, where you won’t like what happens to you…and, I’ll take your job.” I did what he said…My mom wasn’t going to hear that I had been beaten to death in prison accidentally for resisting as long as I could help it. Anyway, I waited til their shift went on their 5 day break and reported it to the institutional investigators. Shortly after that I was called late one night to go to medical for transport for a procedure. When I got to medical they told me they had no idea why I was sent and when I got back to my cell I found that they had moved a psychopath into my cell who had been shuffled from building to building and cell to cell because he couldn’t get along with anyone and of course a few days later I was called to the Sergeant’s office once again and told that low and behold my new cell mate had complained that I said I was going to kill him and that he didn’t feel safe with me in the cell! I’ll bet you can’t guess who got moved out of the cell they had been assigned to for 6 and a half years…Yep! you guessed it! Me. And since I was being moved across the yard to another building I was also loosing my job in Delta Building as inmate advisor. Imagine that… I had been housed in the same cell for over 6 and a half years where I worked my way up from sweeping floors to scrubbing the filth of just under 100 men off the walls of the showers (bear in mind that female C.O.’s admirers and where they performed) to buffing and waxing floors, all the way to the coveted job of Offender Advisor at top pay of .45 cents per hour with not a single instance of violence toward another person in the 11 or so years that I’d been locked up at that point. I wrote a letter to Walter Supple who was the Federal Investigator in charge of P.R.E.A. (the Prison Rape Elimination Act). He came to Pocahontas and conducted interviews where I told him everything that happened but I never heard anything back from him or his office though in the interview he asked me if I wanted to transfer. I told him that I did and that I wanted to go to Powhatan to the work program. Shortly after that I received a letter from the institutional investigator that said “The investigation has determined the allegation is unsubstantiated, meaning that an investigation produced insufficient evidence to make a final decision on whether or not the event occurred.” I asked the investigator after I got the letter, “How is it that you told me that you saw on the pod cameras everything I said happened as far as dates and times. Him going into the cell alone with an openly gay inmate, the cell door closing, him staying in there with the lights off, and then him leaving after 15 mins and calling me out later and having me right in front of a camera throw away my tv when if he was really just doing his job that he was supposed to confiscate the TV and write a confiscation form? It seems to me that he spent an extraordinarily amount of time and trouble to avoid filling out only one form! Furthermore, you even told me that when you saw his female cohort and her admirers up to their shenanigans on camera that her explanation was that she didn’t know why all those men were doing that to her…She tells them to stop but they just don’t.” He said that, “We saw every thing that you told us, just like you said but there was no evidence of sexual misconduct on either of their parts.” I was transferred shortly after that to Powhatan. I’m glad I got away from there but from what I understand, I may have to go back there for the required reentry program before getting out in 8 years. I was so unhappy that I lost all that money so unfairly. It took me 6 years of being locked up before I could save up the $200.00 to buy that TV. A little more context on the first 2 letters… The first was from my mom, of course, and it was the first letter that I received from her after I first arrived in prison. The second was from my dad and it was the first time he has written to me in many years. You might imagine from the faithful duplication of his spelling and phrasing that its hard for him to write… Mom always did the letter writing until she got too sick. I think the last letter I got from her was in 2013. She wrote me and told me that she was “just wrote out”, that she has spent her whole adult life writing prison letters to my father, her sons and too many other people she loved to mention. I understood. Her writing was almost illegible at that point and her vision was very bad. I’ve been depending on my brother to read the emails I’ve sent but knowing him I’m sure he just told her that I emailed and said “Hi and I love you.”…My oldest brother… boy that’s a long story. Anyway, I hadn’t heard from them except maybe 4 or 5 times over the last several years. Lack of communication and having been locked up for 15 years now; having gotten only 2 visits from them (the last in 2012) coupled with not having been there to see her get older and see her in her coffin at her funeral…It just seems like it never happened. I can’t feel it because I wasn’t there to experience it. I have been so far removed from home and family for so long that it just feels like when you hear on the news about someone you don’t know dying and you think for a second, “What a shame,” and that’s if you’re emotionally available to empathize at all. It just doesn’t feel real to me. I guess that’s the first stage of grief (denial) but not because I can’t believe mom is gone…just because I have been conditioned by VADOC, through little or no variation in my life and the lack of meaningful human interaction, to just accept blindly any instruction, command or mental/verbal abuse or bad situation and not ask why. After all, inmates don’t get the luxury of a choice or a say in anything. All of your choices are made for you and you are trained to immediately comply without knowing what is happening and that can be terrifying in many situations in here. Also, I guess because my mom had been gone and buried for over a month before I even found out about it, and that is just because I had a strange feeling that I needed to get in touch with home or I still probably wouldn’t know she died. I was left out of the entire process and didn’t get to have any input…any closure. I don’t suppose I will be able to get that until 8 years from now when I go home and see that she’s really not there. Incidentally a long lost and once very close and much loved cousin just sent me a picture of her and my mom in an email. I don’t even recognize or know the people in the picture. Life was going on without me out there at an unbelievably fast rate. How did they get so old? How do you grieve for people that you don’t even know anymore? I fear that VADOC policies that are designed to discourage and inhibit anything outside of censored, recorded, and supervised interaction that is completely sterile, unnatural and devoid of human intimacy or physical bonding have had a damaging effect on my ability to love and connect with people. How does one continue reinforcing and strengthening familial bonds when VADOC doesn’t allow you to? Physical presence and contact is imperative to maintain a healthy human connection with your loved ones. You can tell someone that you love them time and time again, but if you hug them and tell them that you love them then your emotions are not only heard but also physically felt. Just words are not enough. If that were the case then an “I’m sorry and I’ll never do it again” to a judge would have gotten me out of a 25 year journey of emotional misery and mental desolation. Now to be fair, VADOC does offer, only at it’s own convenience, a few ways to stay in touch with your family but what happens when your loved ones are poverty stricken and cannot afford: a.) A reliable car to travel out of state hundreds of miles to visit you, b.) The funds for gas, food, lodging or unforeseen expenses like car repairs, c.) cannot afford a home phone, computer, internet service or a smartphone let alone posses the capabilities of understanding how all those electronics work? Yes people, here in 2020, there are still folks out there who have no idea what social media/networking is or know anything about alternative modes of communication like video visits. The sad fact is that one of the most important and vital failsafes of the prison machine is that the ignorant and naive don’t know how to turn it off or manipulate the controls. So unfortunately for people like myself, my father, my 3 brothers and thousands of others, the monster machine cycles endlessly, picking up and devouring the already victimized and disenfranchised while it’s appetite is only rivaled by that of the judges, prosecutors, politicians and corporations who facilitate the feeding of it. Really, just look around you. How many people do you know or can count, famous or just regular folks, that have gone to jail/prison? I’ll bet its more than you would have thought. My point is that a lot of times not every person gets treated fairly by the criminal justice system. An open bunk in a prison that isn’t making money could be the only reason a sentence is handed out. My question is…Might you be next? It only takes one mistake before the vultures descend. Complacent magistrates and ladder climbing prosecutors have twisted minor misdemeanors into headline grabbing felonies before. Let’s face it…One hand washes the other. If you don’t have enough prisoners to lock up then you have to manufacture them. Prisons and the criminal justice system can’t exist without prisoners. That would put a heck of a lot of people out of a paycheck or returns on their investments. #1200240 |