Dateline: 08/20/10
LIFE IN A ROACH MOTEL
Notes and Observations From the Prison Front Lines
WARNING: if you are insectophobic, you might want to skip this part.
Something woke me in the middle of the night, a soft tickle on my face. It had been a restless sleep anyway, with a heat index of 106 degrees in Daytona Beach that day. It didn’t seem much cooler now. At four AM, lying on top of my thin mattress, my pillow sweat-soaked and musty, my dreams of freedom fleeing, if someone was playing games and waking me up, I would be very angry. I looked around the crowded dormitory, a large room jam-packed with narrow bunks and sleeping prisoners. With the exception of two Cubans smoking cigarettes across the room, I was the only person awake. What had been tickling my face?
It never gets dark in prison. Lights are always on. I’ve been told by friends “on the street,” that when one flies cross-country at night, the sickly-orange square beacons beaming into the sky in otherwise dark landscapes delineate the proliferating prisons everywhere. It is no different inside the “housing areas,” the polite word for cell blocks. Glaring fluorescent light banks burn from 5:30 AM till 11 PM daily, running up incredible electric bills. During the so-called “sleeping time,’ a few dozen lights are cut off, replaced by lesser fluorescent “night lights.” It is still bright enough to read by, and to see everything going on. Most men wrap their heads in t-shirts or towels to block out the light, so they can sleep for a few hours.
I looked over at the man sleeping on the neighboring bunk, scarcely two feet away. Close quarters. He lay on his back, mouth open, snoring. A cockroach crawled across his cheek and stopped, its feelers flickering, like it knew it was being observed. It continued creeping across my neighbor’s face, pausing on his lip, peering down into the gaping maw.
I didn’t know what to do. Waking a sleeping prisoner can be an iffy proposition. You never know how they might react. I’ve seen men freak out, wake up rolling and screaming in fright just from someone bumping their bunks. What if I woke him, he closed his mouth, and trapped the roach inside?
The roach did it for me. It tickled the man’s lip, interrupting his snorting snore. A hand rubbed his face. His eyes opened, confused. He looked at me.
“You’ve got a roach on your face.”
“What?”
“He slapped at his face in panic. The roach leaped to the floor and scurried beneath the bunk. Two more cockroaches crawled up the wall by his bed. A barehanded slap smashed one. Ugh! The other got away.
“I hate these effing roaches!” he said. “This place is infested.”
“You don’t hate them as much as I do.”
We moved from Texas to Florida in the 1950’s, when I was a child. I’d never seen a roach in Texas, and didn’t know what they were. I was about to learn.
My father rented a little wooden house on a hill surrounded by orange groves in the country east of Tampa. It had been sitting vacant for some time. Before we unloaded the U-Haul trailer containing all our furniture and belongings, my mother swept and mopped the floors. It didn’t matter. Little did we know that hordes of giant cockroaches, also known as palmetto bugs, lurked in hiding, waiting for darkness.
Hour later, we went to the grocery store to stock up on food. It was November, and night came early. When we returned, the little house was pitch black inside. Grabbing grocery bags, we climbed the steps and entered. My mother hit the light switch and screamed.
The wood floor was covered in a living carpet of roaches, thousands of them. The light interrupted what they were doing, and for a moment the tableau was frozen. My mother’s scream set them off, and they rushed helter-skelter in every direction. In moments they disappeared, as if they had never been there.
Heated discussion ensued between my parents. My mother was rethinking the wisdom of moving to Florida, freaked out by our unwanted house guests. My father drove to the store for a can of roach spray. Little did he know that the huge roaches would be hardly affected by the spray. All he did was stink up the place when he sprayed the baseboards.
Sometime during the night I woke up and stumbled through the dark house toward the bathroom. With every step, something crunched beneath my bare feet. Turning on the light switch, I stifled a scream of my own. The floor, toilet and sink were crawling with the stinking, detestable palmetto bugs. For an instant they froze, then scuttled out of sight. Beneath my feet I saw the crushed corpses of more cockroaches that hadn’t gotten out of the way, when I’d stumbled, half asleep, through the darkness. I left the bathroom light on as I made it back to my bed.
The next day, my father related the events to a neighbor who came to see who we were. He laughed and told my father about a product called “Holiday Fogger.” He said to buy two Holiday Foggers, wait until dark, close all the windows, set off the foggers, and take the family to the drive-in movies. When we got back, the roach problem would be gone.
It worked. The foggers were like poison gas for roaches. Upon our return later that night, my mother nervously entered the house and hit the light switch. Again, the floor was carpeted with roaches, this time, however, they were dead and dying, on their backs, some twitching.
My mother cussed and swept, cussed and swept, sweeping up dead roaches with a dustpan and dumping them in the trash. I would have never believed that little house could hold so many giant cockroaches if I hadn’t seen them myself. That night, when I tiptoed to the bathroom, not a roach was to be seen.
Eventually, the foggers gave way to the Orkin Man, who came out once a month and sprayed for roaches, ants, and fleas, and every other creepy crawly that infests Florida. It is a battle we can’t hope to win. The cockroaches ruled the planet millions of years before we showed up, and they’ll probably still be creeping around after we are gone.
Unfortunately in prison, the humans in charge have given up without a fight. Roaches are everywhere. Not so many of the giant palmetto bugs, although we smash a few every week, but the smaller, peskier German cockroaches, which crawl everywhere, even on our faces when the lights are out.
When a prisoner goes to lockup, they carry his locker to the officer’s station, a glass-enclosed work area, where the guards inventory and pack up his personal belongings to send to him in confinement.
A sergeant told me recently that four prisoners in one dorm on the other end of the compound went to lockup at the same time, resulting in four steel lockers lined up in the officer’s station for inventory. As the various belongings, photos, legal papers, books and Bibles were taken out of each locker, hundreds of the small, half-inch German cockroaches ran everywhere, freaking out the guards. They’d been busily breeding for months and months, unmolested by non-existent spraying for insects, doubling and redoubling their populations, merrily building up their forces, a “roach surge.”
They are everywhere. Don’t get me started on the prison chow hall! They are even worse there.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a pest control person spray for roaches inside the dorms. It has been a couple of years at least. The guy ran through there like he was in “The Amazing Race,” trying to pump out as little of the watered down juice along the hallways as fast as he could, and get out of the Roach Motel before the cockroaches rallied their forces and counterattacked. Forget about spraying the lockers. Those bad boys have used the stuff for mouthwash.
The prisoners, at least, are making a half-hearted grass-roots effort to knock back the roach population. I went to the water cooler and waited until another prisoner, who was on his knees poking around the baseboards, grabbed something and stood up.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Catching roaches for my lizard.”
Grinning, he held up a squirming cockroach trapped between his fingers, then dropped it in a plastic baggie holding several other cockroaches. Ugh!
A number of prisoners are obsessed with “pets,” lizards, spiders, even small snakes, any critters they can catch and keep in small boxes or carry around. Some of the spider-lovers will put two spiders together, betting on which one will eat the other. Some men spend their days trying to catch flies to keep their spiders fed, while others have a cottage industry catching grasshoppers on the recreation field and selling them to the owners of spiders and lizards. It seems that cockroaches have become the “food du jour” for the pet lizards. They are abundant, easily caught in the daytime when they are groggy, and the lizards readily eat them.
As someone who grew up with dogs and cats, more sentient creatures, it actually gives me the creeps to watch another prisoner have conversations with a small, cold-blooded lizard, telling him “to eat that damned roach,” or he’ll be punished.
One prisoner bought a lizard from another, and I watched amazed as he petted and kissed it, talking to it like it was a baby.
“I never had a pet before,” he said.
“No?”
“We lived in an apartment in New York. It wasn’t allowed.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m learning how to take care of her.”
“Her?”
“Yeah. I’m not too good at catching roaches yet, but I’m getting better.”
“Keep up the good work.”
Perhaps we can blame it on those silly Geico commercials with the talking gecko. Impressionable prisoners believe whatever they see on TV. Perhaps they think that the lizards actually understand them, and hope for one to respond with a British accent some day. Or they are so lonely and isolated from society that feeding roaches to a pet lizard provides them with a lost connection, memories of a family, and being the breadwinner. At least they are trying, and their efforts are knocking down the burgeoning roach population a little bit.
The prisoner whose face the roaches used as a playground filed a grievance, complaining that federal prison standards required regularly-scheduled pest control. Someone in authority responded, stating that a work order would be submitted, but when the technician, an outside contractor, came in to spray, they said the prisoner would not be allowed to talk to him. That was weird. A subsequent complaint resulted in the statement that the work order was filled two weeks ago.
Funny, but no one saw a bug sprayer, and the cockroaches were out in force last night. One man killed twelve crawling around his bunk. Perhaps the new pest control contractor is Casper the Friendly Ghost or The Invisible Man. Meanwhile, the roaches run this motel. We are just visiting.
Charlie
Monday, September 6, 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
PRISONER UNEMPLOYMENT PROMOTES IDLENESS AND UNREST
Dateline: July 29, 2010
PRISONER UNEMPLOYMENT PROMOTES IDLENESS AND UNREST
“Back in the day,” as they say, when the judge sentenced someone to “life in prison at hard labor,” that’s exactly what he meant.
My first job upon my arrival at the reception and medical center at Lake Butler was washing pots in the kitchen. When we came out of there at the end of the day, soaked in sweat, greasy, exhausted, all we wanted to do was take a shower and fall in a bunk for a few hours before starting all over again.
At Raiford I watched the prisoners come in the gate after working since daylight on the three “gun squads,” punishment details of prisoners who marched outside the prison gate every day slinging “bush axes,” clearing ditches, dodging snakes, watched over by a couple of shotgun guards who wouldn’t hesitate to fire a load of buckshot at any prisoner who got “rabbit” in him and tries to runoff. The chain gang expression I heard most often from those exhausted men was, “They got the butter from the duck today,” meaning they had nothing else to give. When they came in the gate, each man had to shout what squad he was on, to get checked off. The gun squad’s actual title was “outside labor squad, number one, two, or three,” but when the prisoners returned, they called out, “outside slavery squad!” Those days are long gone.
When I came to prison, the total population was about 20,000. Today it is over 100,000. Forget individual “treatment plans,” or any semblance of proper utilization of manpower. The old woman in the shoe, as the nursery rhyme went, who had so many children she didn’t know what to do, had nothing on the bursting-at-the-seams Florida prison system, or any of the other overburdened state and federal prison systems. Whereas, years ago, virtually every prisoner had a job, and many worked hard and were proud of their work, today’s prison have become massive holding pens, fenced-in camps crammed to overflowing with bored, idle, unemployed men with little productive activities for their time. Where men once learned skills they could turn into jobs in free society upon their release, now thousands of bored prisoners meander in circles on hot, unshaded cow pastures (euphemism: “rec yard”) for hours, or are cooped up in human warehouses (AKA: dormitories), growing more and more frustrated and short-tempered every wasted day.
Only a small percentage have actual “jobs,” and much of that is busywork, or just on paper. The hardest-working prisoners are still washing pots and trays in the kitchen, stirring 80-gallon kettles of boiling beans or grits, pulling hot pans out of ovens, mopping floors or serving meals to 1200 or so fellow prisoners three times a day, but they are in the minority. Not even one-tenth work in the kitchen, and most of those are scheming of ways to get out, reassigned to less-strenuous tasks or none at ll.
Although on paper, perhaps three hundred prisoners are assigned to “inside grounds,” which used to mean that hordes of men with rakes, brooms or buckets would swarm across the entire prison grounds all day, like locusts descending, raking, sweeping, picking up paper and cigarette butts, in actuality the vast majority of those men never report to work. A small squad of men with lawnmowers, supervised by one guard, keep the vast expanses of lawn neatly trimmed, working hard at a fast pace all day, but they are the exception. It is a privilege for them.
When I went to work in the GOLAB program at Raiford over thirty years ago (one of the very best programs ever to grace the prison system –long-gone), one of the eye-opening revelations was how much brain power was wasted in prison. It never ceased to amaze me how many really smart people were intermingled with all the rest. I met doctors, lawyers, successful businessmen, even a NASA rocket scientist, all serving time. In the GOLAB program, all those varied minds got a rare opportunity to sit down in a classroom together for a week or so and concentrate on positive activities. Thousands of men’s lives were changed for the better during those years, and many got out, applied the principles they’d learned in prison, and became successful, contributing members of society. No more.
At this point in time, with our society in flux, let us address the incredible waste of “manpower” that goes on every single day. Look at the recent “Disaster in the Gulf” as an appropriate comparison. Who can forget the nightly news images of millions of gallons of crude oil bubbling out of the broken pipe a mile beneath the surface, costing billions of dollars in damages and lost wages? The waste of manpower in our prison system is no less destructive, albeit in a different way, than the billions in oil damages.
Let’s look at some simple math. Let’s say that only half of the 100,000-plus Florida prisoners are physically capable of working full-time jobs. There are many sick, debilitated, dying, or elderly prisoners who have too many medical conditions to do “hard labor.” Fifty thousand men times forty hour per week equals two million manhours of labor per week! Two million! Think what could be done with that much labor, spread across the state. As it stands now, only a small percentage of prisoners are actually working at manual labor jobs that benefit the cities, counties, and citizens, rather than busywork.
I look out at the green expanses of prison lawns that nobody sees or ever walk on, that would be the pride of many private country clubs, and I wonder why we don’t have a couple hundred prisoners out there digging, planting vegetables, growing their own food, saving millions of tax dollars, as they used to in Florida, and still do in places like Texas. Instead of the “TVP,” textured vegetable protein they pawn off on us as “food,” prisoners could be growing their own food, eating better, and glad to do it. The Lord loves a working man. The prison system has thousands of acres of land that sits as idle as thousands of prisoners. Too bad we can’t put the two parts together.
Why can’t something be done, these issues addressed? Instead of prisoners sitting idle, being recruited into criminal gangs just for something to do, why can’t we put them to work in positive activities that will benefit society, the prisoners, and their families? In a word, it is “mismanagement.” The old woman in the shoe doesn’t know what to do. The people who run the prisons are so overwhelmed by the job, so underequipped to deal with the sheer mass of over 100,000 prisoners, they are so paranoid that “something” is going to happen, that they will be criticized, that they will lose their jobs, their carefully managed careers ruined, that all they can do is hold on, like a rider on a galloping runaway horse that has gotten away from them.
When I came into the system, wardens and “colonels,” the top “security” chiefs, most all had gray hair. Most had been in the military for a few years and knew how to work with men. They worked their way up through the ranks under more experienced mentors, and learned every aspect of the job, dealing with prisoners and guards, before being slowly promoted to higher positions of authority.
Those times are gone. Those “old pros” retired years ago. In their places, their children and grandchildren applied for jobs, got through their probationary periods, learned the finer points of sycophancy, held on, and got promoted as fast as Jack’s beanstalk grew, right into the sky. The “Peter Principle” kicked in hard. Positions opened up at new prisons that had to be filled. The median ages of high-ranking administrators trended lower and lower. Just because someone was awarded a title didn’t mean they knew what they were doing. The “skills pool” has been diluted and watered down to dangerous levels. On-the-job training doesn’t suffice.
What are we to do? Hopefully, somewhere in state government, a strong, wise leader will emerge and take charge, and solutions will be sought. Perhaps that person will even seek answers to the prison crisis from within. As we learned years ago, a lot of brain power is wasted in prison. Let us hope something is done before it is too late for all of society.
Charlie
PRISONER UNEMPLOYMENT PROMOTES IDLENESS AND UNREST
“Back in the day,” as they say, when the judge sentenced someone to “life in prison at hard labor,” that’s exactly what he meant.
My first job upon my arrival at the reception and medical center at Lake Butler was washing pots in the kitchen. When we came out of there at the end of the day, soaked in sweat, greasy, exhausted, all we wanted to do was take a shower and fall in a bunk for a few hours before starting all over again.
At Raiford I watched the prisoners come in the gate after working since daylight on the three “gun squads,” punishment details of prisoners who marched outside the prison gate every day slinging “bush axes,” clearing ditches, dodging snakes, watched over by a couple of shotgun guards who wouldn’t hesitate to fire a load of buckshot at any prisoner who got “rabbit” in him and tries to runoff. The chain gang expression I heard most often from those exhausted men was, “They got the butter from the duck today,” meaning they had nothing else to give. When they came in the gate, each man had to shout what squad he was on, to get checked off. The gun squad’s actual title was “outside labor squad, number one, two, or three,” but when the prisoners returned, they called out, “outside slavery squad!” Those days are long gone.
When I came to prison, the total population was about 20,000. Today it is over 100,000. Forget individual “treatment plans,” or any semblance of proper utilization of manpower. The old woman in the shoe, as the nursery rhyme went, who had so many children she didn’t know what to do, had nothing on the bursting-at-the-seams Florida prison system, or any of the other overburdened state and federal prison systems. Whereas, years ago, virtually every prisoner had a job, and many worked hard and were proud of their work, today’s prison have become massive holding pens, fenced-in camps crammed to overflowing with bored, idle, unemployed men with little productive activities for their time. Where men once learned skills they could turn into jobs in free society upon their release, now thousands of bored prisoners meander in circles on hot, unshaded cow pastures (euphemism: “rec yard”) for hours, or are cooped up in human warehouses (AKA: dormitories), growing more and more frustrated and short-tempered every wasted day.
Only a small percentage have actual “jobs,” and much of that is busywork, or just on paper. The hardest-working prisoners are still washing pots and trays in the kitchen, stirring 80-gallon kettles of boiling beans or grits, pulling hot pans out of ovens, mopping floors or serving meals to 1200 or so fellow prisoners three times a day, but they are in the minority. Not even one-tenth work in the kitchen, and most of those are scheming of ways to get out, reassigned to less-strenuous tasks or none at ll.
Although on paper, perhaps three hundred prisoners are assigned to “inside grounds,” which used to mean that hordes of men with rakes, brooms or buckets would swarm across the entire prison grounds all day, like locusts descending, raking, sweeping, picking up paper and cigarette butts, in actuality the vast majority of those men never report to work. A small squad of men with lawnmowers, supervised by one guard, keep the vast expanses of lawn neatly trimmed, working hard at a fast pace all day, but they are the exception. It is a privilege for them.
When I went to work in the GOLAB program at Raiford over thirty years ago (one of the very best programs ever to grace the prison system –long-gone), one of the eye-opening revelations was how much brain power was wasted in prison. It never ceased to amaze me how many really smart people were intermingled with all the rest. I met doctors, lawyers, successful businessmen, even a NASA rocket scientist, all serving time. In the GOLAB program, all those varied minds got a rare opportunity to sit down in a classroom together for a week or so and concentrate on positive activities. Thousands of men’s lives were changed for the better during those years, and many got out, applied the principles they’d learned in prison, and became successful, contributing members of society. No more.
At this point in time, with our society in flux, let us address the incredible waste of “manpower” that goes on every single day. Look at the recent “Disaster in the Gulf” as an appropriate comparison. Who can forget the nightly news images of millions of gallons of crude oil bubbling out of the broken pipe a mile beneath the surface, costing billions of dollars in damages and lost wages? The waste of manpower in our prison system is no less destructive, albeit in a different way, than the billions in oil damages.
Let’s look at some simple math. Let’s say that only half of the 100,000-plus Florida prisoners are physically capable of working full-time jobs. There are many sick, debilitated, dying, or elderly prisoners who have too many medical conditions to do “hard labor.” Fifty thousand men times forty hour per week equals two million manhours of labor per week! Two million! Think what could be done with that much labor, spread across the state. As it stands now, only a small percentage of prisoners are actually working at manual labor jobs that benefit the cities, counties, and citizens, rather than busywork.
I look out at the green expanses of prison lawns that nobody sees or ever walk on, that would be the pride of many private country clubs, and I wonder why we don’t have a couple hundred prisoners out there digging, planting vegetables, growing their own food, saving millions of tax dollars, as they used to in Florida, and still do in places like Texas. Instead of the “TVP,” textured vegetable protein they pawn off on us as “food,” prisoners could be growing their own food, eating better, and glad to do it. The Lord loves a working man. The prison system has thousands of acres of land that sits as idle as thousands of prisoners. Too bad we can’t put the two parts together.
Why can’t something be done, these issues addressed? Instead of prisoners sitting idle, being recruited into criminal gangs just for something to do, why can’t we put them to work in positive activities that will benefit society, the prisoners, and their families? In a word, it is “mismanagement.” The old woman in the shoe doesn’t know what to do. The people who run the prisons are so overwhelmed by the job, so underequipped to deal with the sheer mass of over 100,000 prisoners, they are so paranoid that “something” is going to happen, that they will be criticized, that they will lose their jobs, their carefully managed careers ruined, that all they can do is hold on, like a rider on a galloping runaway horse that has gotten away from them.
When I came into the system, wardens and “colonels,” the top “security” chiefs, most all had gray hair. Most had been in the military for a few years and knew how to work with men. They worked their way up through the ranks under more experienced mentors, and learned every aspect of the job, dealing with prisoners and guards, before being slowly promoted to higher positions of authority.
Those times are gone. Those “old pros” retired years ago. In their places, their children and grandchildren applied for jobs, got through their probationary periods, learned the finer points of sycophancy, held on, and got promoted as fast as Jack’s beanstalk grew, right into the sky. The “Peter Principle” kicked in hard. Positions opened up at new prisons that had to be filled. The median ages of high-ranking administrators trended lower and lower. Just because someone was awarded a title didn’t mean they knew what they were doing. The “skills pool” has been diluted and watered down to dangerous levels. On-the-job training doesn’t suffice.
What are we to do? Hopefully, somewhere in state government, a strong, wise leader will emerge and take charge, and solutions will be sought. Perhaps that person will even seek answers to the prison crisis from within. As we learned years ago, a lot of brain power is wasted in prison. Let us hope something is done before it is too late for all of society.
Charlie
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Mourning the Passing of a Great Man
Dateline: 08/17/10
“Mourning the Passing of a Great Man”
The first time I read a newspaper column by James J. “Jack” Kilpatrick, I was locked up in a solitary confinement cell. It was 1992. It was the first time I’d been locked up “on the house,” as a result of my prison writings. It wouldn’t be the last.
Jack Kilpatrick’s column concerned the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, focusing on freedom of speech and the press, inviolate freedoms that separated us from our colonial oppressor, England, and made us strong. Since I felt I was being wrongly punished for exercising my First Amendment rights, as a result of publishing an award-winning essay in “The Insider,” a prison literary journal I edited, paid for and sponsored by the Department of Corrections, I was compelled to write Mr. Kilpatrick and tell him what had happened to me. I did not expect a reply.
A week or so later, after my lawyer, Gary Smigiel, made phone calls to Tallahassee, exposed the lie, and got me sprung from lockup without charges, lo and behold, at mail call I was handed a letter from the famous man.
I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was to the effect that in the annals of the First Amendment, what had happened to me was a new chapter in that book. He went on to say that few editors or writers in America are privileged to go to jail for their writings, that I was in a select group now, singled out by the government for oppression, that it takes a special person to provoke such actions. He had referred my letter to the “Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Freedom of Expression” in Charlottesville, Virginia. I beamed with pride. So began an unlikely friendship that continued for the next eighteen years, through thick and thin, an exchange of letters and correspondence that ended this week with my dear friend Jack Kilpatrick’s death at eighty-nine. It is a week of sadness and mourning for me as I reflect on my relationship with this kind, generous man.
I remember Jack (“don’t call me James”) Kilpatrick from “60 Minutes,” 1975 or so, face-to-face with Shana Alexander, debating, later supplanted by Andy Rooney. They called him a “conservative columnist and wordsmith,” but he called himself the last of the Whigs, a throwback to an earlier time in our nation.
He wrote a weekly column about the English language, and another one covering the U.S. Supreme Court, to whom he coined the term, “The Supremes.” Every letter I sent him, he answered, and he became a mentor, coach, and encourager to me. He said he wouldn’t edit anything anymore, except for his family, but for years he patiently read and edited everything I sent him, adopting me under his strong wing.
I learned a lot from Jack Kilpatrick. He wrote me a letter once, stating, “I want to introduce you to something that is very useful.” He proceeded to type three lines of periods…………….., and so on, telling me that particular literary effort, comprising long paragraphs and long sentences, should be broken down into shorter sentences. He was right. He rewrote part of the offending paragraph with much shorter sentences with more punch, illustrating his point. I took his advice to heart, rewrote the piece, sent it back for his approval. The piece wound up winning a national writing award. I owed it to him, and told him so. His praise gave me the confidence I needed to progress.
Jack Kilpatrick had a fine legal mind, became interested in my case, and investigated it on his own. He felt so strongly about my innocence that he wrote a newspaper column specifically directed to then-Governor Lawton Chiles in 1998, urging him to grant me clemency before he left office. The column was placed on Governor Chiles’ desk, and he read it. He was convinced. Sadly for all of us, before the Governor took action, he dropped dead of a heart attack in the exercise room of the Governor’s Mansion, ending that opportunity for release. (Click here http://www.freecharlienow.com/files/entire_Kilpatrick_article.doc to go to the article.)
Undeterred, Jack wrote new Governor Jeb Bush, recounted his friendship with Jeb’s mom and dad, how he’d flown in “Air Force One” with the Bush family, and told him about my case. Didn’t do any good. Jeb Bush “was not inclined to grant clemencies,” as one of his aides said.
Even though his congestive heart failure worsened, and he struggled to care for his incapacitated wife, Jack never stopped trying to help me. We kept up our correspondence almost to the end, even as his vision failed and he could hardly see to type. Expecting the end did not make it any easier.
One of the worst things about serving—and surviving—decades of imprisonment is the aging and death of loved ones. The attrition rate rises as the long years mount up. With only a few exceptions, those family, loved ones, and friends who were with me when this nightmare began have fallen by the wayside, gone to their just rewards, given up the ghost. The prisons are filled with thousands of lonely old men who have lost virtually everyone who cared about them, and they are just waiting to die.
I have suffered the same losses, but have been fortunately blessed to have encountered and been befriended by new people over the years, kind, decent, souls who saw something in me that caused them to walk alongside me on this long journey, sometimes for short times, others for long years. Like Jack.
Jack Kilpatrick was a good man who loved his wife, children, and grandchildren, retaining enough goodness in his soul to share some of that love with me. He became an old friend to me. I’m sorry, Jack, that I haven’t been able to get out yet, despite our best efforts, to come see you, as I promised, to shake your hand and thank you in gratitude for all you did for me. I will pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you close as you go to a better place. I will never forget you.
Charles Patrick Norman
“Mourning the Passing of a Great Man”
The first time I read a newspaper column by James J. “Jack” Kilpatrick, I was locked up in a solitary confinement cell. It was 1992. It was the first time I’d been locked up “on the house,” as a result of my prison writings. It wouldn’t be the last.
Jack Kilpatrick’s column concerned the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, focusing on freedom of speech and the press, inviolate freedoms that separated us from our colonial oppressor, England, and made us strong. Since I felt I was being wrongly punished for exercising my First Amendment rights, as a result of publishing an award-winning essay in “The Insider,” a prison literary journal I edited, paid for and sponsored by the Department of Corrections, I was compelled to write Mr. Kilpatrick and tell him what had happened to me. I did not expect a reply.
A week or so later, after my lawyer, Gary Smigiel, made phone calls to Tallahassee, exposed the lie, and got me sprung from lockup without charges, lo and behold, at mail call I was handed a letter from the famous man.
I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was to the effect that in the annals of the First Amendment, what had happened to me was a new chapter in that book. He went on to say that few editors or writers in America are privileged to go to jail for their writings, that I was in a select group now, singled out by the government for oppression, that it takes a special person to provoke such actions. He had referred my letter to the “Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Freedom of Expression” in Charlottesville, Virginia. I beamed with pride. So began an unlikely friendship that continued for the next eighteen years, through thick and thin, an exchange of letters and correspondence that ended this week with my dear friend Jack Kilpatrick’s death at eighty-nine. It is a week of sadness and mourning for me as I reflect on my relationship with this kind, generous man.
I remember Jack (“don’t call me James”) Kilpatrick from “60 Minutes,” 1975 or so, face-to-face with Shana Alexander, debating, later supplanted by Andy Rooney. They called him a “conservative columnist and wordsmith,” but he called himself the last of the Whigs, a throwback to an earlier time in our nation.
He wrote a weekly column about the English language, and another one covering the U.S. Supreme Court, to whom he coined the term, “The Supremes.” Every letter I sent him, he answered, and he became a mentor, coach, and encourager to me. He said he wouldn’t edit anything anymore, except for his family, but for years he patiently read and edited everything I sent him, adopting me under his strong wing.
I learned a lot from Jack Kilpatrick. He wrote me a letter once, stating, “I want to introduce you to something that is very useful.” He proceeded to type three lines of periods…………….., and so on, telling me that particular literary effort, comprising long paragraphs and long sentences, should be broken down into shorter sentences. He was right. He rewrote part of the offending paragraph with much shorter sentences with more punch, illustrating his point. I took his advice to heart, rewrote the piece, sent it back for his approval. The piece wound up winning a national writing award. I owed it to him, and told him so. His praise gave me the confidence I needed to progress.
Jack Kilpatrick had a fine legal mind, became interested in my case, and investigated it on his own. He felt so strongly about my innocence that he wrote a newspaper column specifically directed to then-Governor Lawton Chiles in 1998, urging him to grant me clemency before he left office. The column was placed on Governor Chiles’ desk, and he read it. He was convinced. Sadly for all of us, before the Governor took action, he dropped dead of a heart attack in the exercise room of the Governor’s Mansion, ending that opportunity for release. (Click here http://www.freecharlienow.com/files/entire_Kilpatrick_article.doc to go to the article.)
Undeterred, Jack wrote new Governor Jeb Bush, recounted his friendship with Jeb’s mom and dad, how he’d flown in “Air Force One” with the Bush family, and told him about my case. Didn’t do any good. Jeb Bush “was not inclined to grant clemencies,” as one of his aides said.
Even though his congestive heart failure worsened, and he struggled to care for his incapacitated wife, Jack never stopped trying to help me. We kept up our correspondence almost to the end, even as his vision failed and he could hardly see to type. Expecting the end did not make it any easier.
One of the worst things about serving—and surviving—decades of imprisonment is the aging and death of loved ones. The attrition rate rises as the long years mount up. With only a few exceptions, those family, loved ones, and friends who were with me when this nightmare began have fallen by the wayside, gone to their just rewards, given up the ghost. The prisons are filled with thousands of lonely old men who have lost virtually everyone who cared about them, and they are just waiting to die.
I have suffered the same losses, but have been fortunately blessed to have encountered and been befriended by new people over the years, kind, decent, souls who saw something in me that caused them to walk alongside me on this long journey, sometimes for short times, others for long years. Like Jack.
Jack Kilpatrick was a good man who loved his wife, children, and grandchildren, retaining enough goodness in his soul to share some of that love with me. He became an old friend to me. I’m sorry, Jack, that I haven’t been able to get out yet, despite our best efforts, to come see you, as I promised, to shake your hand and thank you in gratitude for all you did for me. I will pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you close as you go to a better place. I will never forget you.
Charles Patrick Norman
Thursday, July 22, 2010
CHRIST IS ALIVE AND WELL IN PRISON
Dateline: Saturday, July 10, 2010
"CHRIST IS ALIVE AND WELL IN PRISON"
Today, I made it to the “Kairos Reunion” program at the prison chapel.
The monthly follow-ups to the Kairos prison weekends were called “Ultreyas” for many years, and that’s what we old-timers still call them, but like everything else, it seems, new times redescribe and reinvent old events.
A dozen or so Christian volunteers from communities surrounding Daytona Beach and Tomoka C.I. come in once a month to participate in a two-hour program of testimony, prayers, songs, and discussions with forty or fifty prisoners who have attended the Kairos Weekend at various prisons throughout the state. This follow-up program gives the prisoners a chance to reinforce the faith and spiritual lessons they experienced during the three-day Kairos Weekend, sometimes called a “short course in Christianity.”
I attended Kairos #9 at Union C.I., Raiford, in May, 1982, and have volunteered in many programs during the intervening years. I also need that reinforcement and fellowship that such gatherings offer to the men. In the midst of such worldly evil and degeneracy that dominates prison life, to maintain one’s hope, faith and belief in a Supreme Being that will deliver us from all this is crucial to one’s survival, physically and spiritually.
Several prisoners with guitars and other musical instruments led an introductory hymn, “Victory In Jesus.” As I sang along with the group, rattling the rafters, eyes closed, I could imagine that I was a child in Redwater Baptist Church in East Texas in the 1950’s in the comforting midst and security of family, hearing those same words for the first time.
“I heard an old, old story, how a Savior came from glory,
How He gave His life on Calvary, to save a wretch like me.
I heard about His groaning, of His precious blood’s atoning,
Then I repented of my sins and won the victory…”
I opened my eyes and saw that I wasn’t a child in Texas, surrounded by Memaw and Bebaw, Cherry, my mother, Alice and Patsy, but instead it was 2010, I was in a prison chapel filled with convicted murderers, rapists, child molesters, burglars, robbers, thieves, drug addicts and drug peddlers, drunks and fools, as well as a handful of well-meaning citizens who see beyond these sins and exercise their faith by coming through the razor wire and prison gates to share their faith and encourage men who society has written off and cast aside.
I’d been at Raiford two years before I was finally pestered enough by my friends that I reluctantly signed up to attend the Kairos Weekend. Over and over again, I heard men tell me, “Charlie, you’re a good guy, but you need to go to Kairos.” They were right.
I had arguments against it, though.
“I don’t want to go down to that chapel with all the child molesters, phonies, and hypocrites,” I said.
Jack Murphy told me, “Are you going to let some child molesters stand between you and God?”
Joe Miller gave me a different insight, that the church was more a hospital for hypocrites than a showcase for saints. I finally realized that I needed to get past my own shortcomings, that it would be better if those I considered despicable people were to go to church and have a chance to change their lives, become better men, to give up their evil ways, than to stay the way they were, obsessed, and return to society only to victimize more innocent people. In the process I became a better man, and did my best to keep my judgmental nature in check.
I’d seen all those volunteers coming in at Raiford, and had issues with how happy and friendly they were. More objections.
“Man, I’m not going up there and have all those men hugging me, calling me brother, acting like a bunch of sissies,” I complained.
I got past that, too, when I discovered that those men were actually glad to meet me, considered me a brother, and were only sharing the joy they felt when they hugged me and told me Jesus loved me. It might have sounded hokey, but they were for real. The feelings were contagious.
Twenty-eight years later, there I was, walking into another prison chapel, hugging grown men, Larry Harrington, Hank Pankey, Henry Arnold, Manny Bolanos, and others I’d met at the Kairos here, and wondered where all the other old friends were, realizing that many had died and passed on to their just rewards. I met new friends, and shared my faith, comparing the prison chapel to going down to a river on Saturday morning.
Something was happening down by the river. People came from all over to see. Some stayed on the bank and watched those who waded out into the water. The observers had a choice, to stay dry and uninvolved, or to get out there and get wet. John the Baptist was there, and a man named Jesus. People crowded around, wondering what it was all about. I’d stood on the sidelines too long, parched and dry, so now it was time to plunge into the cool water, find out what it was all about.
A prison chapel is not like any church you went to “on the street,” in free society. There’s a noticeable absence of women. They don’t pass the offering plates. There are other differences, too. At the end we don’t get in our cars and drive home, but the guards line us up on the sidewalk and march us to our cells. Then they count us all, to make sure no one sneaked out.
Before that happened, though, we had a couple of hours when we couldn’t see the fences, the guard towers, and the gun trucks cruising around, but instead could see the best in our fellow man, as we continued to sing:
“O Victory in Jesus, my Savior forever,
He sought me and bought me, with His redeeming blood.
He loved me ere I knew Him, and all my love is due Him.
He plunged me to victory, beneath the cleansing flood.”
After that, I walked out of the chapel with my friend and fellow prisoner, Karl Stephens, one of the finest men I know, in prison or out, wondering when we’d each return home.
Thank God Christ is alive and well in prison.
Charlie
Monday, July 12, 2010
“Poems Written on the Backs of Envelopes”
Dateline July 10, 2010
“Poems Written on the Backs of Envelopes”
Ink and paper are always in short supply in prison, especially when you go through writing materials as fast as I do.
I’ve discovered a good way to recycle mail and write poems, too, a technique I call “Poems Written on the Backs of Envelopes.” It is a good discipline strategy—starting and finishing on the blank side of a #10 envelope, having something to say, and saying it. (This blog is written the same way).
I hope you like this first example below. Let me know. Out of paper—have to stop.
Charlie
HOW ODD, HOW SMALL
Giants walked the land
in those days—uncles,
grandpa and dad.
Grasping their knees with
my arms, embracing
the tree trunks of
their legs, peering
skyward at their distant
smiling faces looking down
at me from the clouds
I raise my hands,
beseeching, and they bend,
lifting me up, higher
and higher to the land
of the birds and trees
and distant landscapes.
I feel their scratchy
faces against my soft
cheeks, smell the lingering
acrid smoke of Camels,
Prince Albert and Bull
Durham on their breaths.
They lift me higher, toss
me into the upper air and
laugh with me.
How odd, how small
they became, withering,
weakening and shrinking before
my eyes, ‘fore dying,
the giants.
Copyright 2010 by Charles Patrick Norman
“Poems Written on the Backs of Envelopes”
Ink and paper are always in short supply in prison, especially when you go through writing materials as fast as I do.
I’ve discovered a good way to recycle mail and write poems, too, a technique I call “Poems Written on the Backs of Envelopes.” It is a good discipline strategy—starting and finishing on the blank side of a #10 envelope, having something to say, and saying it. (This blog is written the same way).
I hope you like this first example below. Let me know. Out of paper—have to stop.
Charlie
HOW ODD, HOW SMALL
Giants walked the land
in those days—uncles,
grandpa and dad.
Grasping their knees with
my arms, embracing
the tree trunks of
their legs, peering
skyward at their distant
smiling faces looking down
at me from the clouds
I raise my hands,
beseeching, and they bend,
lifting me up, higher
and higher to the land
of the birds and trees
and distant landscapes.
I feel their scratchy
faces against my soft
cheeks, smell the lingering
acrid smoke of Camels,
Prince Albert and Bull
Durham on their breaths.
They lift me higher, toss
me into the upper air and
laugh with me.
How odd, how small
they became, withering,
weakening and shrinking before
my eyes, ‘fore dying,
the giants.
Copyright 2010 by Charles Patrick Norman
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
A FOURTH OF JULY PHOTO FROM PRISON
Dateline: Sunday, July 4, 2010
A FOURTH OF JULY PHOTO FROM PRISON
Against all odds, I have survived my thirty-third Fourth of July in captivity. A long, long time ago, when I narrowly avoided the death penalty for a murder I did not commit, corrupt prosecutor Mark Ober was quoted as saying, "Norman will never survive a life sentence." Sorry to disappoint you, Mark, but you were wrong again.
As you can see from the accompanying photo taken today at Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach, Florida, I am alive and well, and still have much of my hair, in much of its natural color. I pose next to one of the last two oak trees left standing by the chain-saw-happy prison administrators over the past five years, but not too close to the razor wire that confines me.
I did not achieve the ripe old age of sixty (sixty one in September) on my own. I have survived this hell on earth only with the support and intervention of a small army of angels including Gary Smigiel and Henry Wulf, private investigator Dick Rivett, some great literary folks from "PEN" and the Anne Frank Center in New York, retired Reverend Bob Anderson and others whose names they'd probably prefer went unmentioned.
I am a loyal American. Despite being denied some of the unalienable rights guaranteed all citizens by the Founding Fathers, I love my country and all it stands for. Despite enduring varying degrees of censorship by prison authorities over the years, and suffering the consequences, with the help of friends I've been able to exercise my First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and expression to an extent possibly unparalleled by an American prisoner. Google searches of Charles Norman, Charlie Norman, Charles P. Norman, and Charles Patrick Norman, reveal over 200,000 listings of my literary works available. People from twenty-eight countries, many states, most of the Canadian provinces, The Department of Corrections are regular readers of the Free Charlie Norman Now blog. Truly I am blessed to live in this time.
On behalf of Libby and myself, I wish you a Happy Fourth of July at home, surrounded by loved ones, and pray that next year I will be able to do the same.
Charlie
A FOURTH OF JULY PHOTO FROM PRISON
Against all odds, I have survived my thirty-third Fourth of July in captivity. A long, long time ago, when I narrowly avoided the death penalty for a murder I did not commit, corrupt prosecutor Mark Ober was quoted as saying, "Norman will never survive a life sentence." Sorry to disappoint you, Mark, but you were wrong again.
As you can see from the accompanying photo taken today at Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach, Florida, I am alive and well, and still have much of my hair, in much of its natural color. I pose next to one of the last two oak trees left standing by the chain-saw-happy prison administrators over the past five years, but not too close to the razor wire that confines me.
I did not achieve the ripe old age of sixty (sixty one in September) on my own. I have survived this hell on earth only with the support and intervention of a small army of angels including Gary Smigiel and Henry Wulf, private investigator Dick Rivett, some great literary folks from "PEN" and the Anne Frank Center in New York, retired Reverend Bob Anderson and others whose names they'd probably prefer went unmentioned.
I am a loyal American. Despite being denied some of the unalienable rights guaranteed all citizens by the Founding Fathers, I love my country and all it stands for. Despite enduring varying degrees of censorship by prison authorities over the years, and suffering the consequences, with the help of friends I've been able to exercise my First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and expression to an extent possibly unparalleled by an American prisoner. Google searches of Charles Norman, Charlie Norman, Charles P. Norman, and Charles Patrick Norman, reveal over 200,000 listings of my literary works available. People from twenty-eight countries, many states, most of the Canadian provinces, The Department of Corrections are regular readers of the Free Charlie Norman Now blog. Truly I am blessed to live in this time.
On behalf of Libby and myself, I wish you a Happy Fourth of July at home, surrounded by loved ones, and pray that next year I will be able to do the same.
Charlie
Thursday, July 1, 2010
HIS WRITERS’ WORKSHOP? A PRISON CELL
Dateline: June 27, 2010
HIS WRITERS’ WORKSHOP? A PRISON CELL
I read an interesting article in the June 8, 2010, “New York Times,” by John J. Miller, about a famous writer who served three years in prison. Although his imprisonment had a great effect on his writing, he considered it a mark of shame, carrying his secret to the grave, never even telling his daughter.
Years after his death, when Prisoner #30664’s secret was revealed by a professor, the public became fascinated by his story rather than shunning him as a criminal. All his worries about his posthumous reputation were for naught.
Reading about such a man gives me pause to consider our differences and similarities, one hundred years apart. Rather than hiding my imprisonment of over 32 years, I make no secret of it, and have steadily recorded my experiences, thoughts, and stories, the entire time. In this new world of the Internet, there are few secrets to be kept by anyone anyway.
Wonder what someone is in prison for and when they’re getting out? Check the web site. The molesters and perverts can no longer fool people into believing they are in state prison for tax fraud. It used to happen all the time. I could tell you stories! And I will.
That man who was ashamed of his imprisonment was named William Sidney Porter. Ironically, another point we share is that most likely he was innocent of the charges he served time for.
While in prison he began submitting stories to New York magazines, some of them inspired by his fellow prisoners. They were best known for their unexpected conclusions. Mr. Miller compares reading Mr. Porter’s works is like watching episodes of “The Twilight Zone.”
Being ashamed of his prisoner status, Prisoner # 30664 did not want to publish his work under his own name, so he possibly borrowed an alias from a prison guard named Orrin Henry, calling himself, “O. Henry.”
Two of my favorite writers as a youth were Edgar Allan Poe and O, Henry. Who can ever forget “The Gift of the Magi,” or “The Ransom of Red Chief?” Little did I know all those years ago that one day I would have something in common with William Sidney Porter?
It’s a good thing you aren’t around in this modern world, Mr. O. Henry. Times have changed. If you’d been serving time in a Florida prison like Mr. Charles Patrick Norman, you might have been thrown into solitary confinement for your writing, like I was.
Perhaps I should have taken a hint from O. Henry, and used an alias, calling myself A. Gordon or T. Melton or S. Wellhausen. Alas, those names just don’t possess the ring of “O. Henry.”
Charlie
HIS WRITERS’ WORKSHOP? A PRISON CELL
I read an interesting article in the June 8, 2010, “New York Times,” by John J. Miller, about a famous writer who served three years in prison. Although his imprisonment had a great effect on his writing, he considered it a mark of shame, carrying his secret to the grave, never even telling his daughter.
Years after his death, when Prisoner #30664’s secret was revealed by a professor, the public became fascinated by his story rather than shunning him as a criminal. All his worries about his posthumous reputation were for naught.
Reading about such a man gives me pause to consider our differences and similarities, one hundred years apart. Rather than hiding my imprisonment of over 32 years, I make no secret of it, and have steadily recorded my experiences, thoughts, and stories, the entire time. In this new world of the Internet, there are few secrets to be kept by anyone anyway.
Wonder what someone is in prison for and when they’re getting out? Check the web site. The molesters and perverts can no longer fool people into believing they are in state prison for tax fraud. It used to happen all the time. I could tell you stories! And I will.
That man who was ashamed of his imprisonment was named William Sidney Porter. Ironically, another point we share is that most likely he was innocent of the charges he served time for.
While in prison he began submitting stories to New York magazines, some of them inspired by his fellow prisoners. They were best known for their unexpected conclusions. Mr. Miller compares reading Mr. Porter’s works is like watching episodes of “The Twilight Zone.”
Being ashamed of his prisoner status, Prisoner # 30664 did not want to publish his work under his own name, so he possibly borrowed an alias from a prison guard named Orrin Henry, calling himself, “O. Henry.”
Two of my favorite writers as a youth were Edgar Allan Poe and O, Henry. Who can ever forget “The Gift of the Magi,” or “The Ransom of Red Chief?” Little did I know all those years ago that one day I would have something in common with William Sidney Porter?
It’s a good thing you aren’t around in this modern world, Mr. O. Henry. Times have changed. If you’d been serving time in a Florida prison like Mr. Charles Patrick Norman, you might have been thrown into solitary confinement for your writing, like I was.
Perhaps I should have taken a hint from O. Henry, and used an alias, calling myself A. Gordon or T. Melton or S. Wellhausen. Alas, those names just don’t possess the ring of “O. Henry.”
Charlie
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