On Wednesday morning, Oct. 26, 2011, the Florida Parole Commission will decide whether I will be released on parole or remain longer in prison, after 33 ½ years of incarceration.
I don’t know exactly who will be making the long trip and standing up on my behalf. Attorney William J. Sheppard of Jacksonville will lead our presentation. He is a fine lawyer, believes in my case, and is well-prepared to briefly argue for my release. Our side only gets 10 minutes, and most of our evidence has been sent to the parole commission in advance. My dear friend, Libby, who has tirelessly worked for months to prepare the parole plan, photo exhibit, letters and other documents, at considerable personal expense, will be there with Bill, to provide answers to any questions that might be thrown at us. I ask that anyone who goes to the hearing let Libby and Bill know you are there. Bill will ask for everyone who is there on my behalf to please stand when it is our turn.
Since the “opposition” has gotten away with making false, malicious, and highly-prejudicial and improper statements at previous hearings, we will have a court reporter present to make an official transcript, if we need it.
Jack Murphy will be batting “clean up,” and will speak after Bill Sheppard presents the legal points. I met Murf at Raiford over 30 years ago, when I first came to prison, and I was there when Frank Costantino took him out of Zephryhills C. I. in November, 1984. He is standing up for me now. Gary Smigiel has been there for me all along, and I am sure better days are ahead for us.
A lot of people will be praying for my release Wednesday. Even were they to grant me a much-deserved parole, it would take a couple of months to actually get out. I have been accepted at the “Prisoners of Christ” residential program in Jacksonville , and hope to get out and get a job and make the most of every minute I live, in freedom, just as I have done these past 33 years in captivity.
If they decide against my release, we will deal with that with dignity. We are already preparing a court suit, “just in case.”
I ask that you keep my situation in your thoughts and prayers on Wednesday, and pray that those who are making that trip will return home safe and sound. I am thankful and grateful to all who have helped me, and promise not to disappoint you.
Charlie
Monday, October 24, 2011
Sunday, October 2, 2011
AN INVITATION TO A PAROLE HEARING
Dateline: October 2, 2011
Wednesday, Sept. 21, I had a phone call with attorney William Sheppard in Jacksonville about my October 26, 2011, parole hearing in Tallahassee.
Bill hopes that some of my family and friends will attend the hearing, as a show of support, even though there’s not much opportunity to speak, with the ten minute time limit for our side. At my January, 2002, parole hearing, Gary Smigiel asked everyone to stand who was there on my behalf, and over twenty people stood. Since that time, people have grown older, become disheartened, or passed on, and the numbers have diminished. I’m not asking anyone to attend who doesn’t really want to, but we are praying that enough people will be moved to go there that it will have a positive effect on the commissioners. If few people care enough about my release to make the trek to Tallahassee, why would the parole commission care?
For those who do plan to go, I express my heartfelt gratitude. Your support and faith in me is not misplaced. The address of the hearing site is 4070 Esplanade Way, Tallahassee, FL 32399. Visitors need to sign in by 8:30 AM the day of the hearing, and you can leave after my portion of the hearing is over, most likely well before Noon. I’d appreciate it if you let Libby know of your intentions. Sorry, but I won’t be able to attend. Unlike some other states, Florida doesn’t allow us to attend the hearings.
For those who do not support my release, I’d like to remind you of some of Florida’s famous attractions where you can spend the day and have some fun. Busch Gardens in Tampa is always a good choice, and Weeki Wachee Springs has live mermaids, or at least they did when I was last out there. By now, those mermaids are probably in their seventies or eighties, and long gone, but perhaps they’ve been replaced by the younger generation.
If you’re in the North Florida region, I hear St. George Island is nice, and so is Wakulla Springs State Park. For that matter, New Orleans isn’t that far away. Whatever you do, in the interest of justice, please leave Leon County off your itinerary on that date.
Thanks,
Charlie
Wednesday, Sept. 21, I had a phone call with attorney William Sheppard in Jacksonville about my October 26, 2011, parole hearing in Tallahassee.
Bill hopes that some of my family and friends will attend the hearing, as a show of support, even though there’s not much opportunity to speak, with the ten minute time limit for our side. At my January, 2002, parole hearing, Gary Smigiel asked everyone to stand who was there on my behalf, and over twenty people stood. Since that time, people have grown older, become disheartened, or passed on, and the numbers have diminished. I’m not asking anyone to attend who doesn’t really want to, but we are praying that enough people will be moved to go there that it will have a positive effect on the commissioners. If few people care enough about my release to make the trek to Tallahassee, why would the parole commission care?
For those who do plan to go, I express my heartfelt gratitude. Your support and faith in me is not misplaced. The address of the hearing site is 4070 Esplanade Way, Tallahassee, FL 32399. Visitors need to sign in by 8:30 AM the day of the hearing, and you can leave after my portion of the hearing is over, most likely well before Noon. I’d appreciate it if you let Libby know of your intentions. Sorry, but I won’t be able to attend. Unlike some other states, Florida doesn’t allow us to attend the hearings.
For those who do not support my release, I’d like to remind you of some of Florida’s famous attractions where you can spend the day and have some fun. Busch Gardens in Tampa is always a good choice, and Weeki Wachee Springs has live mermaids, or at least they did when I was last out there. By now, those mermaids are probably in their seventies or eighties, and long gone, but perhaps they’ve been replaced by the younger generation.
If you’re in the North Florida region, I hear St. George Island is nice, and so is Wakulla Springs State Park. For that matter, New Orleans isn’t that far away. Whatever you do, in the interest of justice, please leave Leon County off your itinerary on that date.
Thanks,
Charlie
Monday, September 19, 2011
THE CASE OF THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PRISON TOILET PAPER
Dateline: August 1, 2011
Someone stole my roll of toilet paper. Don’t laugh─it’s not funny.
I am sitting on a lidless, stainless steel toilet inside the bathroom of a maximum security prison in Florida. Take my word for it─seatless stainless steel toilets are cold! Raise the seat on your toilet at home and sit on the bowl rim, or, better yet, drive to the sleaziest, most rundown gas station in town, get the bathroom key, tread carefully to the toilet, raise the seat and sit down. That will possibly approximate the gross-out factor that I deal with every day when I must use the communal toilets that several men before me with bad aim used as urinals.
Before you sit, there are some preliminaries: flush first!─this is mandatory; ‘tis better to discover that your toilet of choice will flush when you need it to, or if it is clogged and won’t flush, or, horror of horrors, will overflow and flood when you flush it, than find out while you are perched there.
After trial flushing, make sure you have toilet paper. It may be difficult to call for help when you are stuck there indisposed, a situation that reminds me of the old joke about the intellectually-disadvantaged traveler who realized there was no toilet paper in the bus station stall just as the public address speaker announced last boarding call for his departing Greyhound.
Wondering what to do, the man heard someone enter the bathroom and use the urinal. “Hey, buddy, would you see if there is some toilet paper in that other stall, please?”
“Sorry, not a bit.”
“Well, how about some paper towels?”
“Nope, all they have is a hot air hand dryer.”
"Uh, how about the trash can? Are there any scraps in there?”
“It’s empty.”
“What am I going to do? My bus is leaving, and I can’t wipe my butt.”
“Do you have a dollar?”
“A dollar? Yeah.”
“There you go. You don’t want to miss your bus. Use a dollar to wipe with, and just throw it away.”
“Good idea. Thanks.”
A couple of minutes went by. The gentleman was washing his hands when the traveler emerged from the toilet stall, his hands smeared with stinky mess.
“My goodness!” the man said. “What happened? I told you to use a dollar.”
“I did,” the traveler said. “Have you ever tried to wipe your butt with three quarters, two dimes, and a nickel?”
I didn’t have a dollar, or any change, for that matter. We use canteen debit cards in prison, but I wasn’t going to use that, either.
The problem is that with the state budget deficit and funding crisis, there is a toilet paper shortage in prison. Up until recently, the guards issued each prisoner one roll of toilet paper a week, along with a tiny bar of motel soap and a disposable “Bic” razor for the mandatory daily shave. In June, a memo came out with a schedule decreeing that henceforth all male prisoners would receive a roll of toilet paper every ten days. Women prisoners would remain on the seven-day plan.
Why do women prisoners still get toilet paper every seven days, while the men do not? No one knows for sure, but speculation is that the women are more “stand up” than the men, more adamant about the erosion of their limited prison rights, and they won’t abide arbitrary edicts like limiting their ability to maintain their basic human hygienic needs. This theory is born out by the package permit experience of the late 1990’s.
When I came to prison a hundred years ago (it seems), at Raiford, we could send out a package permit to our families once a month (later, it became once every three months). Our families could send us six items: a pair of shoes, a package of three T-shirts or underwear, socks (four), a bottle of shampoo, deodorant, watch, radios, towels, things like that. It saved the state money by not having to furnish a lot of shoes, toiletry items, or other personal property, and it enabled us to have the satisfaction of having our own things sent to us from home. At Christmas we could receive a 15-pound box of food from home: fruit cake, cookies, candy, and nuts. That meant a lot, and provided a strong emotional connection.
Times changed. The “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” mentality of the ‘nineties came to the forefront. Mandatory drug laws and harsh sentencing filled up new prisons as fast as they could build them. The prison budget expanded exponentially. Build them, and they will fill them. The package permits that so many had come to expect became threatened by new prison administrators who found one more thing they could deprive us of, to separate us from family and loved ones and the support that gives us. In 1997 a memo came out stating that the Christmas packages that year would be the last ones. At least they were for the male prison population. For the women, it was a different story. Didn’t I tell you that the women were more “stand up” than the men?
Whereas the men just rolled over and accepted fate, the women said, hell no, you’re not taking our packages. They raised holy hell.
Today, if you go to the Laws of Florida, Florida Administrative Code, Chapter 33, the Department of Corrections rules, and look up the listing for official D.O.C. forms, under “property,” you will find “Package Permit, Female Institutions.” Don’t look for “Package Permit, Male Institutions.” You won’t find it. Fourteen years later, the ladies are still getting their packages from home.
I said all that to explain why the men can get one roll of toilet tissue every ten days, while the women wait seven days. They simply won’t accept the extreme toilet paper rationing.
In years past, toilet paper was dispensed on an “as needed” basis. Bring the empty cardboard roll and trade it in for a new one from the guard as needed. That made sense. What if you had a bad cold, sinuses, or the flu, and had to blow your nose all day, for several days? Or perhaps you caught some salmonella or e. coli from the leftover, re-heated “sloppy Joe” meat that went into the spaghetti, got food poisoning, and suffered through a couple of days of dysentery-like diarrhea. That scrawny roll wouldn’t last long. You could become as desperate as the bus traveler, or as I was, sitting on the cold stainless steel toilet bowl rim wondering who stole my toilet paper.
Supposedly, according to the memo, anyone who found themselves without toilet paper before the ten-day date could do the same as before─present the empty roll and get a new one from the officers’ station. In practice, the answer is usually, “We don’t have any.” Such responses have led to a cottage industry of some prisoners selling spare rolls for food, coffee, or cigarettes, or, like in my case, snatching a roll off the concrete divider between toilets. These unsportsmanlike acts contribute to hard feelings and retribution. Someone stole mine, so I’m stealing yours.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had such shortages in prison. In the mid-1980’s, at Zephyrhills C.I., the shortage got so bad after a couple of weeks that men were ripping out pages from magazines and Bibles to wipe with, causing clogged pipes that kept the plumbers busy. I got so desperate that I wrote a request to the warden:
“Sir─would you please send me a roll of toilet paper? The dorms have been out for two weeks, and if anyone has toilet paper, I know you have an extra roll in the executive bathroom out there in the Admin. Bldg. Thanks.”
The next day the Major and a sergeant appeared at my cell door. The Major had a request form in his hand. The other hand was behind his back. “Step out into the hallway, Norman.”
I did. He nodded at the sergeant, who proceeded to search my cell. He finished, nodded “no” to the Major.
The Major held up the request. “You wrote Mr. Henderson a request for toilet paper.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You asked him to send you a roll from the executive bathroom.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He told me to search your room, and if you had any toilet paper, to lock you up for lying to staff. Otherwise, here.”
He produced a roll of toilet paper he’d been holding behind his back and handed it to me. Charmin! Hmm. Life was good in the executive bathroom. Smiling, I took it. They left. I retrieved the partial roll of scratchy state toilet paper I’d hidden, that the sergeant had missed, and gave it to a grateful neighbor.
Perhaps my plea to the warden had embarrassed him. That night a couple cases of toilet paper were delivered and passed out. The drought was over. I squirreled away a spare roll, just in case. You never know.
A few years ago, at Tomoka, where the pistol target range is only blocks from the prison, during another tissue drought, several of us marveled at the firepower as thousands of rounds of ammunition blasted away for hours on end. It sounded like the Taliban and al Qaeda were trying to attack Daytona Beach, and dozens of trigger-happy prison guards were mounting a valiant defense.
An old-timer groused, “Didja ever notice that they can’t keep toilet paper in this place, but they never run out of bullets?” The truth, as they say.
The present supply problem is exacerbated by the incredible shrinking roll of prison toilet paper. Not only have they decreased the frequency of issuance, but they have also shrunk the rolls! When they passed out the new rolls, they were noticeably smaller in dimensions than the old rolls. How low can you go? The old paper was nothing to brag about─tear off a sheet and place it over your newspaper, and you can read the printed text easily, without difficulty. It is that thin. You can’t do that with Charmin. Where does this stuff come from─North Korea? I’m getting worried now. I saw the prison canteen operator change the tape in his adding machine printer (yes, Virginia, they still have those old things in prison), a paper roll about three inches wide and three inches in diameter, and for a moment there, I had a flash of the future─that’s what they’d be handing out to us if we weren’t careful.
Back to the present. There I sat, seething. They’d be calling “count” soon, and I’d be required to go to my bunk. Eight men stood at the metal sinks, four or five feet in front of me and the line of other toilets, brushing their teeth and washing their faces. Gross! Did I tell you that there is little or no privacy in prison? It’s like that old joke, “How do you tell when the honeymoon is over? She brushes her teeth while he does his business on the toilet.”
I didn’t want to ask the guy in the next stall to borrow his roll. People are funny about such things in here. Fortunately for me, a young prisoner approached me, smiling, and handed the missing roll back to me. It had been his idea of a friendly joke. I had two ways to respond: I could become angry, scowl, and castigate him for taking the toilet tissue, which is probably how his father treated him before slapping him around every week of his formative years, or I could do what I did, smile, reach out, take the roll and say, “Thanks.”
Sometimes the best solution is the easiest solution.
Charlie
Someone stole my roll of toilet paper. Don’t laugh─it’s not funny.
I am sitting on a lidless, stainless steel toilet inside the bathroom of a maximum security prison in Florida. Take my word for it─seatless stainless steel toilets are cold! Raise the seat on your toilet at home and sit on the bowl rim, or, better yet, drive to the sleaziest, most rundown gas station in town, get the bathroom key, tread carefully to the toilet, raise the seat and sit down. That will possibly approximate the gross-out factor that I deal with every day when I must use the communal toilets that several men before me with bad aim used as urinals.
Before you sit, there are some preliminaries: flush first!─this is mandatory; ‘tis better to discover that your toilet of choice will flush when you need it to, or if it is clogged and won’t flush, or, horror of horrors, will overflow and flood when you flush it, than find out while you are perched there.
After trial flushing, make sure you have toilet paper. It may be difficult to call for help when you are stuck there indisposed, a situation that reminds me of the old joke about the intellectually-disadvantaged traveler who realized there was no toilet paper in the bus station stall just as the public address speaker announced last boarding call for his departing Greyhound.
Wondering what to do, the man heard someone enter the bathroom and use the urinal. “Hey, buddy, would you see if there is some toilet paper in that other stall, please?”
“Sorry, not a bit.”
“Well, how about some paper towels?”
“Nope, all they have is a hot air hand dryer.”
"Uh, how about the trash can? Are there any scraps in there?”
“It’s empty.”
“What am I going to do? My bus is leaving, and I can’t wipe my butt.”
“Do you have a dollar?”
“A dollar? Yeah.”
“There you go. You don’t want to miss your bus. Use a dollar to wipe with, and just throw it away.”
“Good idea. Thanks.”
A couple of minutes went by. The gentleman was washing his hands when the traveler emerged from the toilet stall, his hands smeared with stinky mess.
“My goodness!” the man said. “What happened? I told you to use a dollar.”
“I did,” the traveler said. “Have you ever tried to wipe your butt with three quarters, two dimes, and a nickel?”
I didn’t have a dollar, or any change, for that matter. We use canteen debit cards in prison, but I wasn’t going to use that, either.
The problem is that with the state budget deficit and funding crisis, there is a toilet paper shortage in prison. Up until recently, the guards issued each prisoner one roll of toilet paper a week, along with a tiny bar of motel soap and a disposable “Bic” razor for the mandatory daily shave. In June, a memo came out with a schedule decreeing that henceforth all male prisoners would receive a roll of toilet paper every ten days. Women prisoners would remain on the seven-day plan.
Why do women prisoners still get toilet paper every seven days, while the men do not? No one knows for sure, but speculation is that the women are more “stand up” than the men, more adamant about the erosion of their limited prison rights, and they won’t abide arbitrary edicts like limiting their ability to maintain their basic human hygienic needs. This theory is born out by the package permit experience of the late 1990’s.
When I came to prison a hundred years ago (it seems), at Raiford, we could send out a package permit to our families once a month (later, it became once every three months). Our families could send us six items: a pair of shoes, a package of three T-shirts or underwear, socks (four), a bottle of shampoo, deodorant, watch, radios, towels, things like that. It saved the state money by not having to furnish a lot of shoes, toiletry items, or other personal property, and it enabled us to have the satisfaction of having our own things sent to us from home. At Christmas we could receive a 15-pound box of food from home: fruit cake, cookies, candy, and nuts. That meant a lot, and provided a strong emotional connection.
Times changed. The “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” mentality of the ‘nineties came to the forefront. Mandatory drug laws and harsh sentencing filled up new prisons as fast as they could build them. The prison budget expanded exponentially. Build them, and they will fill them. The package permits that so many had come to expect became threatened by new prison administrators who found one more thing they could deprive us of, to separate us from family and loved ones and the support that gives us. In 1997 a memo came out stating that the Christmas packages that year would be the last ones. At least they were for the male prison population. For the women, it was a different story. Didn’t I tell you that the women were more “stand up” than the men?
Whereas the men just rolled over and accepted fate, the women said, hell no, you’re not taking our packages. They raised holy hell.
Today, if you go to the Laws of Florida, Florida Administrative Code, Chapter 33, the Department of Corrections rules, and look up the listing for official D.O.C. forms, under “property,” you will find “Package Permit, Female Institutions.” Don’t look for “Package Permit, Male Institutions.” You won’t find it. Fourteen years later, the ladies are still getting their packages from home.
I said all that to explain why the men can get one roll of toilet tissue every ten days, while the women wait seven days. They simply won’t accept the extreme toilet paper rationing.
In years past, toilet paper was dispensed on an “as needed” basis. Bring the empty cardboard roll and trade it in for a new one from the guard as needed. That made sense. What if you had a bad cold, sinuses, or the flu, and had to blow your nose all day, for several days? Or perhaps you caught some salmonella or e. coli from the leftover, re-heated “sloppy Joe” meat that went into the spaghetti, got food poisoning, and suffered through a couple of days of dysentery-like diarrhea. That scrawny roll wouldn’t last long. You could become as desperate as the bus traveler, or as I was, sitting on the cold stainless steel toilet bowl rim wondering who stole my toilet paper.
Supposedly, according to the memo, anyone who found themselves without toilet paper before the ten-day date could do the same as before─present the empty roll and get a new one from the officers’ station. In practice, the answer is usually, “We don’t have any.” Such responses have led to a cottage industry of some prisoners selling spare rolls for food, coffee, or cigarettes, or, like in my case, snatching a roll off the concrete divider between toilets. These unsportsmanlike acts contribute to hard feelings and retribution. Someone stole mine, so I’m stealing yours.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had such shortages in prison. In the mid-1980’s, at Zephyrhills C.I., the shortage got so bad after a couple of weeks that men were ripping out pages from magazines and Bibles to wipe with, causing clogged pipes that kept the plumbers busy. I got so desperate that I wrote a request to the warden:
“Sir─would you please send me a roll of toilet paper? The dorms have been out for two weeks, and if anyone has toilet paper, I know you have an extra roll in the executive bathroom out there in the Admin. Bldg. Thanks.”
The next day the Major and a sergeant appeared at my cell door. The Major had a request form in his hand. The other hand was behind his back. “Step out into the hallway, Norman.”
I did. He nodded at the sergeant, who proceeded to search my cell. He finished, nodded “no” to the Major.
The Major held up the request. “You wrote Mr. Henderson a request for toilet paper.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You asked him to send you a roll from the executive bathroom.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He told me to search your room, and if you had any toilet paper, to lock you up for lying to staff. Otherwise, here.”
He produced a roll of toilet paper he’d been holding behind his back and handed it to me. Charmin! Hmm. Life was good in the executive bathroom. Smiling, I took it. They left. I retrieved the partial roll of scratchy state toilet paper I’d hidden, that the sergeant had missed, and gave it to a grateful neighbor.
Perhaps my plea to the warden had embarrassed him. That night a couple cases of toilet paper were delivered and passed out. The drought was over. I squirreled away a spare roll, just in case. You never know.
A few years ago, at Tomoka, where the pistol target range is only blocks from the prison, during another tissue drought, several of us marveled at the firepower as thousands of rounds of ammunition blasted away for hours on end. It sounded like the Taliban and al Qaeda were trying to attack Daytona Beach, and dozens of trigger-happy prison guards were mounting a valiant defense.
An old-timer groused, “Didja ever notice that they can’t keep toilet paper in this place, but they never run out of bullets?” The truth, as they say.
The present supply problem is exacerbated by the incredible shrinking roll of prison toilet paper. Not only have they decreased the frequency of issuance, but they have also shrunk the rolls! When they passed out the new rolls, they were noticeably smaller in dimensions than the old rolls. How low can you go? The old paper was nothing to brag about─tear off a sheet and place it over your newspaper, and you can read the printed text easily, without difficulty. It is that thin. You can’t do that with Charmin. Where does this stuff come from─North Korea? I’m getting worried now. I saw the prison canteen operator change the tape in his adding machine printer (yes, Virginia, they still have those old things in prison), a paper roll about three inches wide and three inches in diameter, and for a moment there, I had a flash of the future─that’s what they’d be handing out to us if we weren’t careful.
Back to the present. There I sat, seething. They’d be calling “count” soon, and I’d be required to go to my bunk. Eight men stood at the metal sinks, four or five feet in front of me and the line of other toilets, brushing their teeth and washing their faces. Gross! Did I tell you that there is little or no privacy in prison? It’s like that old joke, “How do you tell when the honeymoon is over? She brushes her teeth while he does his business on the toilet.”
I didn’t want to ask the guy in the next stall to borrow his roll. People are funny about such things in here. Fortunately for me, a young prisoner approached me, smiling, and handed the missing roll back to me. It had been his idea of a friendly joke. I had two ways to respond: I could become angry, scowl, and castigate him for taking the toilet tissue, which is probably how his father treated him before slapping him around every week of his formative years, or I could do what I did, smile, reach out, take the roll and say, “Thanks.”
Sometimes the best solution is the easiest solution.
Charlie
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
SPECIAL VISIT FROM OLD FRIENDS FROM FAR AWAY
Dateline: August 10, 2011
A four-decade-plus friendship was renewed Sunday, July 31, 2011, when my dear friends, Sombat, Keila, and their son, Andy, made a trek from the other side of the world to visit with Libby and me at Wakulla Annex C.I. Homeland Security has nothing on the Florida D.O.C. when it comes to bureaucratic red-tape and paperwork. It was easier to travel 12,000 miles from Bangkok, Thailand, to Tampa, than it was to get to and into this place, but they persevered.
I met Sombat at the University of South Florida in 1968, through a mutual friend from the Yucatan, Mexico, who enrolled in King High School, not speaking any English. Since I spoke Spanish, I helped Tony Puerta learn to speak English well enough that he graduated from King, enrolled at USF, and eventually became a rocket scientist at Sperry-Rand. He repaid the kindness by introducing me to Sombat, who was studying engineering, thus beginning a life-long friendship.
Sombat and his beautiful wife, Keila, were there for me during some of the worst times of my life, offering non-judgmental friendship when I had nowhere else to turn. I hope I was able to do the same for them.
During college, Sombat played on the USF soccer team, and I was in the martial arts business, tae kwon do and Karate schools in Tampa and Lakeland, and tournament promotions. We played golf at the USF golf course, but I didn't know Sombat had been a champion kick boxer in Thailand until he offered to be a sparring partner for Florida black belt karate champion Ron Slinker, one of my partners in Martial Arts Institute, Inc., who was training for a professional kick boxing (PKA) match with the American kick boxing champion. After Sombat put on a "Muay Thai" kick boxing exhibition against the hapless Slinker, sending him to the hospital, Ron decided kick boxing was not for him. Slinker went on to become a professional wrestler with Vince McMahon's WWF. His biggest claim to fame was teaching "The Rock," Dwayne Johnson, to be a professional wrestler. "The Rock" is now known as a highly-paid movie star. In his biography, "The Rock" talked about Slinker, calling him the baddest fighter he's ever met. Obviously, "The Rock" never went three rounds with Sombat.
I was there when Andy, Sombat's and Keila's first child, was born. Until 1989, when they moved back to Thailand, Andy and his sister, Adrie, grew up visiting me in a sucession of prisons, dragging their parents along.
It was a very emotional time for all of us when my old friends and their now-grown son, who towers over all of us, entered the visiting park to hugs and tears. The years in between truly fell away. Afterwards, Libby, who had met them for the first time at the visit, said she felt like she'd known them all her life and was humbled in the presence of such special, loving people, whose feelings and words were so obviously genuine.
In the midst of such repression and negativity omnipresent in here, it was an incredible boost to my sinking morale to be in their presence for a few precious hours. Truly I am blessed and thankful for such purely good people in my life, who validate my own worth as an individual.
Charlie
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
CANADA GEESE MAKE A HOME IN PRISON
Dateline July 18, 2011
Early one subfreezing January morning in North Florida, eighty state prisoners lined up outside to march to the chow hall for a breakfast of two pancakes and a cup of hot oatmeal.
I was one of those prisoners. In the predawn darkness, glaring orange security lights mounted on tall concrete towers illuminated two Canada geese nibbling on the brown grass blades of the exercise yard. The anomaly of the wild goose pair juxtaposed with the razorwire fence beside them struck me. I couldn’t take my eyes off them as we headed for the chow hall, craning my neck to catch a last sight of them. I hadn’t seen a Canada goose in decades, since my imprisonment, and I didn’t know when I’d see one again, let alone two. It wasn’t that long a wait─just until the next day.
On the way to the law library to do legal research the next morning, there they were again, nibbling at the dry, dead grass in a different exercise yard adjacent to the prison school, oblivious to the activity around them.
Twice in two days! My lingering memory of Canada geese went back to my childhood in Central Florida and a group of children gazing skyward at a large V-shaped formation of honking wild geese migrating southward, far overhead. The image epitomized freedom, unrestrained by time, place, or national boundaries.
The following day the geese treated me to the sight of them taking to the air, their six-foot wingspan lifting them easily over the high steel fences that encaged the humans below. The continuing daily proximity to the wild creatures prompted me to find out more about them to satisfy my curiosity as to why, with all the Western Hemisphere to choose from, they’d selected a maximum security prison for their winter vacation.
The National Geographic Field Guide to Birds informed me that although Canada geese prefer wetlands, grasslands, and cultivated fields within commuting distance of water, they have adapted successfully to man-made habitats, such as golf courses and farms to the extent that they will chase off other nesting waterbirds. National Geographic can add prisons to that list now.
I also discovered that the Canada goose winters in the Northern Panhandle of Florida, from the Atlantic Coast to the Gulf Coast. That explained it. I also found that they were closely related to the endangered Hawaiian goose, or néné, best known as a crossword clue, and had become so prolific in the last few decades that they are considered pests in some areas. Not in my area, they aren’t.
My paternal feelings of regard for the pair (mated for life─no divorce for geese) became conflicted, however, after I read an article with a recipe for roast Canada goose, said to be the tastiest of all geese. After a deprived bland prison diet of daily beans and soybean patty substitutes, my visions of the majestic birds with their black heads and white chin straps interspersed with the enticing image of a roast goose and all the fixins’ as the centerpiece of Christmas dinner at home with my family. I shook it off.
After several weeks of almost daily sightings, I realized that I hadn’t seen the geese in awhile. I speculated that they had relocated to (literally) greener pastures. Then one day a friend informed me that the geese were nesting in the prison farm field west of the law library. I surveyed the area from a window in the library, and lo and behold! There they were, the female sitting on a ground-level nest, the male a few feet away on guard duty, black neck stretched high to observe any possible threats.
Over the next few weeks I learned from prisoners who worked the farm plot of cabbages, squash, and collards, that the female sat on a clutch of four eggs. The prisoners kept a small drainage pond in the field filled with water, which the geese took turns visiting, the nest never left unprotected.
One morning I put down my legal documents on a table in the law library and hurried to th window to see “my” geese. They weren’t there! The nest was abandoned. What could have happened? Across the field in the distance, I spied a long black neck extended above a height of unmowed grasses by the drainage pond. A few minutes later, another Canada goose appeared, then I noticed a movement of something brown and small following the mother. A baby!
The geese headed across the farm field, the mother followed by the tiny gosling, the father maintaining a vigilant watch at the flank. But where were the other three? All I saw was one baby goose.
The farmworkers informed me that only one egg had hatched. After a couple of days the mother abandoned the cold eggs, focusing her attention on the survivor.
In the days and weeks ahead, the baby bird grew quickly. It went from timidly following the parents around to racing ahead for some tidbit. When a curious crow flew over the field the father launched himself into the air for a direct intercept of the surprised predator. No F-16 Air Force jet took off so fast with such singleminded purpose as that protective male.
Before long the gosling had lost its immature brown camouflage coloration and looked more like a slightly smaller version of its parents. The trio is inseparable as I watch from my window today, none of them ever more than a few feet apart. I thought that humans could learn some parenting lessons from geese, whose attentiveness to their young’s needs and protection never wavers. Scientists say they operate on instinct. Perhaps we’ve lost some of our important instincts along the way. The only geese I’ve ever seen in prison were there by choice, and could leave whenever they decided to take wing.
I haven’t seen the young goose fly yet. It is approaching full size, so it won’t be long. I do know that mom and dad aren’t going anywhere until their offspring can go with them. Perhaps ne day a V-shaped formation will appear overhead, and the wild geese will answer the honking calls of their kind, flying away home. Would that I had wings, and could join them, free at last.
Charlie
Postscript: They flew!
Early one subfreezing January morning in North Florida, eighty state prisoners lined up outside to march to the chow hall for a breakfast of two pancakes and a cup of hot oatmeal.
I was one of those prisoners. In the predawn darkness, glaring orange security lights mounted on tall concrete towers illuminated two Canada geese nibbling on the brown grass blades of the exercise yard. The anomaly of the wild goose pair juxtaposed with the razorwire fence beside them struck me. I couldn’t take my eyes off them as we headed for the chow hall, craning my neck to catch a last sight of them. I hadn’t seen a Canada goose in decades, since my imprisonment, and I didn’t know when I’d see one again, let alone two. It wasn’t that long a wait─just until the next day.
On the way to the law library to do legal research the next morning, there they were again, nibbling at the dry, dead grass in a different exercise yard adjacent to the prison school, oblivious to the activity around them.
Twice in two days! My lingering memory of Canada geese went back to my childhood in Central Florida and a group of children gazing skyward at a large V-shaped formation of honking wild geese migrating southward, far overhead. The image epitomized freedom, unrestrained by time, place, or national boundaries.
The following day the geese treated me to the sight of them taking to the air, their six-foot wingspan lifting them easily over the high steel fences that encaged the humans below. The continuing daily proximity to the wild creatures prompted me to find out more about them to satisfy my curiosity as to why, with all the Western Hemisphere to choose from, they’d selected a maximum security prison for their winter vacation.
The National Geographic Field Guide to Birds informed me that although Canada geese prefer wetlands, grasslands, and cultivated fields within commuting distance of water, they have adapted successfully to man-made habitats, such as golf courses and farms to the extent that they will chase off other nesting waterbirds. National Geographic can add prisons to that list now.
I also discovered that the Canada goose winters in the Northern Panhandle of Florida, from the Atlantic Coast to the Gulf Coast. That explained it. I also found that they were closely related to the endangered Hawaiian goose, or néné, best known as a crossword clue, and had become so prolific in the last few decades that they are considered pests in some areas. Not in my area, they aren’t.
My paternal feelings of regard for the pair (mated for life─no divorce for geese) became conflicted, however, after I read an article with a recipe for roast Canada goose, said to be the tastiest of all geese. After a deprived bland prison diet of daily beans and soybean patty substitutes, my visions of the majestic birds with their black heads and white chin straps interspersed with the enticing image of a roast goose and all the fixins’ as the centerpiece of Christmas dinner at home with my family. I shook it off.
After several weeks of almost daily sightings, I realized that I hadn’t seen the geese in awhile. I speculated that they had relocated to (literally) greener pastures. Then one day a friend informed me that the geese were nesting in the prison farm field west of the law library. I surveyed the area from a window in the library, and lo and behold! There they were, the female sitting on a ground-level nest, the male a few feet away on guard duty, black neck stretched high to observe any possible threats.
Over the next few weeks I learned from prisoners who worked the farm plot of cabbages, squash, and collards, that the female sat on a clutch of four eggs. The prisoners kept a small drainage pond in the field filled with water, which the geese took turns visiting, the nest never left unprotected.
One morning I put down my legal documents on a table in the law library and hurried to th window to see “my” geese. They weren’t there! The nest was abandoned. What could have happened? Across the field in the distance, I spied a long black neck extended above a height of unmowed grasses by the drainage pond. A few minutes later, another Canada goose appeared, then I noticed a movement of something brown and small following the mother. A baby!
The geese headed across the farm field, the mother followed by the tiny gosling, the father maintaining a vigilant watch at the flank. But where were the other three? All I saw was one baby goose.
The farmworkers informed me that only one egg had hatched. After a couple of days the mother abandoned the cold eggs, focusing her attention on the survivor.
In the days and weeks ahead, the baby bird grew quickly. It went from timidly following the parents around to racing ahead for some tidbit. When a curious crow flew over the field the father launched himself into the air for a direct intercept of the surprised predator. No F-16 Air Force jet took off so fast with such singleminded purpose as that protective male.
Before long the gosling had lost its immature brown camouflage coloration and looked more like a slightly smaller version of its parents. The trio is inseparable as I watch from my window today, none of them ever more than a few feet apart. I thought that humans could learn some parenting lessons from geese, whose attentiveness to their young’s needs and protection never wavers. Scientists say they operate on instinct. Perhaps we’ve lost some of our important instincts along the way. The only geese I’ve ever seen in prison were there by choice, and could leave whenever they decided to take wing.
I haven’t seen the young goose fly yet. It is approaching full size, so it won’t be long. I do know that mom and dad aren’t going anywhere until their offspring can go with them. Perhaps ne day a V-shaped formation will appear overhead, and the wild geese will answer the honking calls of their kind, flying away home. Would that I had wings, and could join them, free at last.
Charlie
Postscript: They flew!
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
TAKING A HIT FROM THE FLORIDA PAROLE COMMISSION
DATELINE: 06/12/11
The Ku Klux Klan prison guards are still getting their punches in, for over ten years now, since I had my first run-in with them. They don’t all fit into the popular stereotype of the ignorant, tobacco juice-spitting rednecks with pick-up trucks. The most dangerous and treacherous of their breed got “eddicated,” majored in “criminal justice,” got good jobs at the prison, clawed their way up through the ranks, and now wear white shirts and ties in their higher ranks. When a guy like me comes along though, their masks slip and their slips show, and every now and then they will reveal themselves. Their power and influence extend far in the South.
Thursday morning, June 9th, at 11 AM, I got called up front to the classification office, ostensibly to have an interview with a secretary. I was sitting outside the offices on a stainless steel bench, when two people came through the gate from the outside: a thirties-something white male wearing a dress shirt and tie, and a much younger woman who might have just stepped out of “Cosmopolitan” magazine. Russ Gallogly and Alexandra Campbell from the Florida Parole Commission, here to conduct my “parole interview.” Thanks for giving me notice that you were coming, I said. I could have brought some paperwork I wanted them to consider. Didn’t matter. The verdict and decision had been predetermined before I showed up. Like jaded old married couples contemplating divorce, we were just going through the motions.
The man asked the secretary for my prison file. The secretary brought him a photocopy paper box filled with my files going back over thirty years, and added an inch-thick packet of documents consisting of my most recent paperwork, a summary of “new information” to be considered by the parole commission, my parole release plan, list of accomplishments, literary body of work, my PEN World Voices keynote speech from April, etc. When we sat down in the tiny “interview room,” the guy absently flipped through the pages (not even Elaine Powers could read that fast) while I talked, then opened one of the thick “inmate files,” left it lying there on the table. According to law and rules, the parole people are required to review and consider all information, new and old, before making an informal decision concerning what is best for the prisoner and society. R-I-G-H-T. As my New York friends say, Fuhgeddaboutit.
The law says that there are two things the parole people are supposed to consider in deciding when to release someone─can this person live a law-abiding life and can he support himself and not be a burden on society? If you compare my case with dozens of others who have been paroled, been out on the street for years, served much less time than I have (over 33 years now), and accomplished far less, the question is why? The opposition of the corrupt state attorney, in a few words.
This time, I had to deal with the specter of the KKK prison guards haunting me.
You know the story. I’ve told it all before. The Anne Frank Center USA Prison Diary Project in 2008. Associated Press interview by Jessica Gretsky and Suzette Laboy. 3,000 media outlets. Thousands of web sites republished excerpts. A 2400 word excerpt from a couple hundred handwritten pages title, “To Protect The Guilty,” recounted my experiences with retaliation by KKK prison guards at an unnamed North Florida prison years before. That was in 2008. That memoir, a short story, and a poem I wrote were published in a book. In January, 2010, a copy of the book was sent to me and confiscated by a vengeful prison mailroom clerk who held a great deal of personal animosity toward me. She declared it a “threat to security.” Three months later, the Literature Review Committee in Tallahassee, consisting of educated, intelligent library types, reviewed the book and said it was not a threat to security, and ordered them to give the book to me.
The mailroom clerk failed to follow the rules, failed to give me a confiscation form, just took the book. She’d sent it to the assistant warden, Hodgson, who wanted nothing to do with it. He didn’t file the confiscation paperwork, either. Finally, she and her boss lady took the book to the warden. “Look what that Norman’s sayin’ about yo’ kinfolks, warden. Let’s git that sumbitch.” And they did!
After I filed grievances seeking the delivery of my book, the book I’d never seen, the warden directed the other assistant warden to write a disciplinary violation for “mail regulations violations.” Since she must have come straight from her college basketball team to a good job in prison administration (it’s hard to find a white woman as tall as Shaq, especially in the piney woods), she didn’t have a lot of practice writing “D.R.’s” as they are called, and made enough mistakes to fill up several pages of grievance appeals. Didn’t matter. A sergeant told me, “The warden wants your ass in jail.”
When I went to the kangaroo court hearing, it was a “fait accompli.” Thirty days in solitary, thirty days loss of gaintime. All appeals summarily denied. Since last August, I’ve been fighting head-to-head against state lawyers and all their resources with a lawsuit I filed in court in Tallahassee.
It was all retaliation for pursuing my First Amendment rights, even though a guard once told me, “The Constitution ain’t in effect in Columbia County.”
Back to the “parole interview” on Thursday, the 9th. I covered all the bases, my parole plan, going to the “Prisoners of Christ” program in Jacksonville. Outstanding record of accomplishments. I told them the whole tawdry tale of the KKK prison guards and me that resulted in the retaliatory D.R., solitary, the punitive transfer from Tomoka.
I asked him to hold the D.R. penalty in abeyance, since it was in court, being appealed, unwarranted, and to penalize me for it by jacking up my date would be unfair, not allowing me to pursue my due process. Besides, I’d already been wrongly penalized with an incorrect and improper “death penalty aggravator” that tacked ten extra years to my parole date, anyway. Taking off that wrongful ten-year aggravation would have made my release date 2004, not 2014.
Didn’t matter. Gallogly smashed me with an extra “36 months” because of the KKK D.R. giving me a “July, 2017” release date, next hearing, April, 2017. Wrong, wrong, wrong. All I can do now is prepare the best I can for the actual parole commission hearing in Tallahassee in 90 days─sometime around September, for what it is worth.
I still need letters of support, and to find out who wants to attend the hearing, to make the arrangements for September. We are still working on putting documents together, like the updated photo exhibit. Expenses are mounting. Miracles do occasionally happen, though.
If the commissioners rubber-stamp the parole examiner’s adverse release date, I am preparing for a court appeal, on that issue. Meanwhile, I just hope all the KKK members take their sheets and crosses deep in the woods somewhere far away and leave me alone.
Charlie
The Ku Klux Klan prison guards are still getting their punches in, for over ten years now, since I had my first run-in with them. They don’t all fit into the popular stereotype of the ignorant, tobacco juice-spitting rednecks with pick-up trucks. The most dangerous and treacherous of their breed got “eddicated,” majored in “criminal justice,” got good jobs at the prison, clawed their way up through the ranks, and now wear white shirts and ties in their higher ranks. When a guy like me comes along though, their masks slip and their slips show, and every now and then they will reveal themselves. Their power and influence extend far in the South.
Thursday morning, June 9th, at 11 AM, I got called up front to the classification office, ostensibly to have an interview with a secretary. I was sitting outside the offices on a stainless steel bench, when two people came through the gate from the outside: a thirties-something white male wearing a dress shirt and tie, and a much younger woman who might have just stepped out of “Cosmopolitan” magazine. Russ Gallogly and Alexandra Campbell from the Florida Parole Commission, here to conduct my “parole interview.” Thanks for giving me notice that you were coming, I said. I could have brought some paperwork I wanted them to consider. Didn’t matter. The verdict and decision had been predetermined before I showed up. Like jaded old married couples contemplating divorce, we were just going through the motions.
The man asked the secretary for my prison file. The secretary brought him a photocopy paper box filled with my files going back over thirty years, and added an inch-thick packet of documents consisting of my most recent paperwork, a summary of “new information” to be considered by the parole commission, my parole release plan, list of accomplishments, literary body of work, my PEN World Voices keynote speech from April, etc. When we sat down in the tiny “interview room,” the guy absently flipped through the pages (not even Elaine Powers could read that fast) while I talked, then opened one of the thick “inmate files,” left it lying there on the table. According to law and rules, the parole people are required to review and consider all information, new and old, before making an informal decision concerning what is best for the prisoner and society. R-I-G-H-T. As my New York friends say, Fuhgeddaboutit.
The law says that there are two things the parole people are supposed to consider in deciding when to release someone─can this person live a law-abiding life and can he support himself and not be a burden on society? If you compare my case with dozens of others who have been paroled, been out on the street for years, served much less time than I have (over 33 years now), and accomplished far less, the question is why? The opposition of the corrupt state attorney, in a few words.
This time, I had to deal with the specter of the KKK prison guards haunting me.
You know the story. I’ve told it all before. The Anne Frank Center USA Prison Diary Project in 2008. Associated Press interview by Jessica Gretsky and Suzette Laboy. 3,000 media outlets. Thousands of web sites republished excerpts. A 2400 word excerpt from a couple hundred handwritten pages title, “To Protect The Guilty,” recounted my experiences with retaliation by KKK prison guards at an unnamed North Florida prison years before. That was in 2008. That memoir, a short story, and a poem I wrote were published in a book. In January, 2010, a copy of the book was sent to me and confiscated by a vengeful prison mailroom clerk who held a great deal of personal animosity toward me. She declared it a “threat to security.” Three months later, the Literature Review Committee in Tallahassee, consisting of educated, intelligent library types, reviewed the book and said it was not a threat to security, and ordered them to give the book to me.
The mailroom clerk failed to follow the rules, failed to give me a confiscation form, just took the book. She’d sent it to the assistant warden, Hodgson, who wanted nothing to do with it. He didn’t file the confiscation paperwork, either. Finally, she and her boss lady took the book to the warden. “Look what that Norman’s sayin’ about yo’ kinfolks, warden. Let’s git that sumbitch.” And they did!
After I filed grievances seeking the delivery of my book, the book I’d never seen, the warden directed the other assistant warden to write a disciplinary violation for “mail regulations violations.” Since she must have come straight from her college basketball team to a good job in prison administration (it’s hard to find a white woman as tall as Shaq, especially in the piney woods), she didn’t have a lot of practice writing “D.R.’s” as they are called, and made enough mistakes to fill up several pages of grievance appeals. Didn’t matter. A sergeant told me, “The warden wants your ass in jail.”
When I went to the kangaroo court hearing, it was a “fait accompli.” Thirty days in solitary, thirty days loss of gaintime. All appeals summarily denied. Since last August, I’ve been fighting head-to-head against state lawyers and all their resources with a lawsuit I filed in court in Tallahassee.
It was all retaliation for pursuing my First Amendment rights, even though a guard once told me, “The Constitution ain’t in effect in Columbia County.”
Back to the “parole interview” on Thursday, the 9th. I covered all the bases, my parole plan, going to the “Prisoners of Christ” program in Jacksonville. Outstanding record of accomplishments. I told them the whole tawdry tale of the KKK prison guards and me that resulted in the retaliatory D.R., solitary, the punitive transfer from Tomoka.
I asked him to hold the D.R. penalty in abeyance, since it was in court, being appealed, unwarranted, and to penalize me for it by jacking up my date would be unfair, not allowing me to pursue my due process. Besides, I’d already been wrongly penalized with an incorrect and improper “death penalty aggravator” that tacked ten extra years to my parole date, anyway. Taking off that wrongful ten-year aggravation would have made my release date 2004, not 2014.
Didn’t matter. Gallogly smashed me with an extra “36 months” because of the KKK D.R. giving me a “July, 2017” release date, next hearing, April, 2017. Wrong, wrong, wrong. All I can do now is prepare the best I can for the actual parole commission hearing in Tallahassee in 90 days─sometime around September, for what it is worth.
I still need letters of support, and to find out who wants to attend the hearing, to make the arrangements for September. We are still working on putting documents together, like the updated photo exhibit. Expenses are mounting. Miracles do occasionally happen, though.
If the commissioners rubber-stamp the parole examiner’s adverse release date, I am preparing for a court appeal, on that issue. Meanwhile, I just hope all the KKK members take their sheets and crosses deep in the woods somewhere far away and leave me alone.
Charlie
Sunday, May 8, 2011
CHARLIE’S NEW YORK PEN SPEECH RECEIVES “THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE”
Dateline: May 6, 2011
I couldn’t be there, but I heard about it from Libby, Stephanie, my literary mentor/editor, and others.
On Thursday, April 28, 2011, John Lonergan, read my keynote speech, “The State of Prisons and Prisoners in America,” at the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival at the Desmond Tutu Center Refectory in New York City.
Mr, Lonergan was an interesting choice to read my work, as he retired in June, 2010, as governor of Ireland’s Mountjoy Prison after 42 years working in service to the prison system. He has written a book, The Governor, about his experiences in a very hard place. He had some comments of his own that had the ring of truth in them. Here is a link to his web site http://www.johnlonergan.ie/
Salman Rushdie, award-winning author, had some introductory comments before the presentation of my speech:
“Charles Norman is unable to be with us as he is in jail. He says in a message, ‘I survived over thirty years in Florida prisons for the wrongful conviction of a murder I did not commit. He says he has poetry, short stories, essays, memoirs, and plays that have won numerous national writing awards… He says, ‘I love the elasticity of English, how words can be pulled, shaped, and re-formed to express the thoughts and feelings in my mind. I view the good folks at PEN as benevolent hacksaw-wielding elves who’ve been steadily slicing through the cage bars that confine me, setting me free.’ ”
I’m taking the liberty of sharing excerpts of my friend, Stephanie’s, comments:
“… an update on Charlie's speech. Well....it was spectacular. His words took on so much meaning when I heard them live. Though I know it wasn't Charlie himself, I felt nevertheless like he was speaking to me. …
He received a thunderous round of applause...It was so special.”
We also heard from Shaun Randol, editor in chief of The Mantle web publication at www.mantlethought.org
This is an excerpt of what he had to say: “…Among other things, we covered the PEN World Voices Festival.We heard your statement, as delivered by John Lonergan, and we would like to publish your text on The Mantle. Will you be willing to share your story with The Mantle and our global leaders? It would be our honor to publish you.”
I gave my permission for the publication and the story is at http://mantlethought.org/content/pen-2011-working-day-panel-discussion
It has been a great honor to have been included with such lofty literary figures in the World Voices Festival. Perhaps something positive will come of it. In approximately a month or so─sometime in June─a parole examiner will come here to the prison to interview me prior to my parole in Tallahassee. He will wnt to know what accomplishments I’ve had in the last five years, since my last hearing, and what I have to say for myself. I continue to cast bread upon the waters.
If you’d like to hear my speech delivered by Mr. John Lonergan in his fine Irish brogue, there is a recording for an mp3 file at http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5694/prmID/2126
Click on “John Lonergan” next to the heading, “Clips.” To listen to all the keynote speakers, click on “Listen.”
The text of my speech is below if you’d just like to read it.
I welcome and appreciate any and all comments. Thanks.
Charlie
THE STATE OF PRISONS AND PRISONERS IN AMERICA
My name is Charles Patrick Norman. I am a prisoner of war, a political prisoner of America’s war on crime. I live in a world far different from the one you live in, but you may find that our worlds are becoming more and more alike. My words come to you from inside a maximum security prison. The warden refused my request to travel to New York to give my speech in person, even though I promised to return.
Let me take an informal survey, by a show of hands.
If you are thirty-two years old or younger, please raise your hand. Now look around you at how many of the upraised hands you see. Thank you.
I ask that question for a reason. For those who raised their hands, I have been serving this life sentence for a murder I did not commit since before you were born. I have served your entire life, and over half of mine, in prison—one-third of a century.
If you did not raise your hand, take a moment and think how old you were and what you were doing 33 years ago, when I came to prison. Jimmy Carter was the American president. Jim Jones had not yet poisoned his followers in the Jonestown Massacre. Some of you were little children. Some of you were teenagers. Some were adults and had families—husbands, wives, sons, daughters.
Think about how your life has changed in the past 33 years, how different you are now from who you were then, and think about me as a man, a fellow human being with hopes and dreams, a 28-year old who woke up that Wednesday morning of April 5, 1978, never suspecting that was the last time he would awake in freedom, in his own bed, lying next to a woman who loved him.
I am 61 years old now, and have been in some of Florida’s worst prisons over the last 33 years. I have endured and survived horrors you do not want to imagine. The corrupt prosecutor was thwarted in his efforts to electrocute me, but was overheard saying, “Norman will never survive a life sentence.” I am determined to prove him wrong.
I am not the same person I was in 1978. I have changed. I have seen good men and bad men die, some easily, giving up the ghost, relieved to be free of this life at last. Others died hard, fighting to live and breathe, to stay a little longer in this world, but nevertheless, die they did, as each of us is destined to do one day.
You might ask, “what kind of person are you, Charlie?” As hard as it may be to believe, I am a better man now than I was then, better in virtually every way. Rather than allow the monolith of prison to crush and destroy me, I entered the flaming furnace and emerged, refined, purified, the base metals burned away, against all odds. I am stronger in mind and spirit, if not body. I refused to let them break me down, as they do to so many.
I am not the only one. Others, extraordinary women and men, have survived long imprisonments and emerged with their humanity intact. Even before his release from 27 years confinement, Nelson Mandela was one of my personal heroes. If he could do it, I could do it.
A dead man named Tex McClain told me once that we (prisoners) were defective, like automobiles that came out flawed from the factory, and each of us had been recalled to prison to be repaired. Imagine a long line of broken people on a conveyor belt entering a huge building, and another line of people being cast out on the other side.
The problem, said Tex, a chain gang philosopher who had served what seemed like an unimaginable twenty years at the time, was that when we got inside the factory—the prison—we weren’t being repaired, but damaged worse. If we’d been thousands of cars with faulty transmissions or fuel lines returning to the factory, when we emerged we were missing wheels, with sputtering engines and clouds of smoke coming out of the exhausts. If prisoners were cars, when they were released from the factory, many would run off the road and end up in the ditch, while others sped up and crashed into trees or veered across the double yellow line and hit some innocent drivers head on. Perhaps half could keep it in the lane, make it through all the stop signs, red lights, and obstacles in their paths, and make their way home. That’s not a good statistic.
I once went on a tour of a General Motors factory in Detroit. The number of autoworkers on the assembly line amazed me, bolting on bumpers, attaching doors, doing their jobs quickly before the vehicles moved to the next stations. Now I see the modern auto factory assembly line on TV, but I see no humans. All I see are machines, robots, welding, bolting, assembling, like a futuristic scene from “Terminator.”
Prison has changed in much the same way as our factories. When I came to Raiford, “The Rock,” a notorious penitentiary in North Florida immortalized in “Cool Hand Luke,” and other stories, the Florida prison population was only one-fifth what it is today. As bad as it was, Raiford was better then than prison is today.
If life in prison can be called good, amidst the ever-present threats of being stabbed, raped, murdered, or shot, life in prison then was good for those who knew how to serve their time, to be strong, to mind their own business, to not get involved with drugs, alcohol, gambling, or loansharking, or other deathtraps guaranteed to bring men down. One could go to school, earn a high school equivalency diploma, study college correspondence classes, take vocational classes and learn a trade, take self-improvement programs to learn to be a better person, go to religious services, attend AA, learn how to create works of art to earn spending money through classes in arts and crafts, share relaxed visits on weekends with loved ones, behave themselves, and earn their release on parole. They could go home. The reality today is far different.
The war on drugs began our destruction. The cartels flooded our shores with cocaine, and found a willing market among our nation’s youth. How do you convince a sixteen-year old inner city youth he should stay in school and get his high school diploma, hope to get a full-time job that pays above minimum wage and has healthcare benefits, when he can stand on a corner in the ‘hood for a few hours and make a thousand dollars selling crack rocks? When he winds up in an adult prison in a year or two with a mandatory sentence, selling the same drugs he sold on the street that were provided by a corrupt guard, what message is he receiving? Crime pays. Over two million prisoners nationwide are receiving the same message.
Prisons began administering psychotropic drugs strong enough to stun a mule, chemical Tasers, resulting in prisoners looking like walking cadavers.
As the politicians cranked out harsher penalties for every type of crime, they had to fund a prison building boom to hold the backlog of convicts in jails. Build them, and they will fill them. Find people to work there.
The prison population doubled, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled. Society was no better for it. The poverty, economic conditions, joblessness and drugs that fueled the crime wave only got worse. No one thought to intervene with the children, the collateral damage, to divert them early on from the path to crime, addiction, and prison. It did not occur to the politicians that the money eventually spent to incarcerate the children after they became adult criminals could have paid for college educations. Instead, after getting shuffled through a failing foster care and juvenile justice system that inflicts even more damage, the courts ship the disadvantaged, drug-addicted youths off to prison for a decade or two.
Then came September 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda entered our vocabulary. The Twin Towers fell. We went to war. The world will never be the same, and neither will the prison system.
We learned new words: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo. Waterboarding. Rendition. I.E.D., TBI. It was only natural that the same labor pool that drew prison guards would be tapped to fill the increasing ranks of soldiers, sailors, and Marines. Guards joined the services, and the Reserves were called up. When they came back to the States, they were different, changed. The experience damaged them.
Is it any surprise that those involved in the Abu Ghraib prison brutality scandal were members of a West Virginia National Guard unit composed mostly of state prison guards? Apparently, they applied the lessons learned in their prisons to the Iraqi detainees. Then we get the benefit of their experiences over there when they return to civilian life.
The prisons are filled to bursting. Like the auto factories in our economic heyday, production is up. And like the auto factories, it’s hard to find any humans working there. The robots have taken over. At least, they act like robots. They have been trained to show little human emotion. As the conveyor belt whisks us along the line, the robots don’t see humans. They see inventory, serial numbers, not names. My serial number is 881834. My human name is superfluous. Ask any ex-con you meet who has been free for twenty years what his prison number is, and he will rattle it off without hesitation.
How do we change the dysfunctional prison system? First we must change the “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality that dominates society’s fears of crime and violence. We must close prisons, not fill them. We must stop using prisons as warehouses to store the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, the addicted. We must stop dehumanizing the disadvantaged.
In today’s prisons, the dehumanization process is complete. Strip someone of their humanity and you no longer have to treat them humanely. Dehumanize a group or race of people and you can commit genocide with a clear conscience. It’s okay, they’re not human.
Once someone has been dehumanized, how do you get them back, restore them to their human condition? That is a more difficult problem. All I can do is speak for myself, from my own experience, and perhaps provide some insight.
A good friend asked me recently, considering all that I’ve endured and suffered through over the past 33 years, how have I resisted the damage, maintained my character, integrity, and sanity in the face of this barbaric treatment? A lot of people, she says, marvel that I haven’t thrown in the towel at this point. How have I been able to survive, seemingly unscathed, continuing to be creative and productive, writing, reading, educating myself, helping others? Able to share my thoughts with groups of people who have little conception of harsh prison realities beyond “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” without embarrassing myself or them? I did not do it alone.
It will take a book to fully explain how I became the man I am, but I can give you the short answer in one word—love. The act of loving and being loved—feeling and experiencing love in a world of hate has kept me alive, has helped me prosper, has kept me human, given me the strength and resolve to resist the corrosive effects of dehumanization that have eaten away at so many of my fellow prisoners, as well as the guards.
To love and be loved—that is to be human. I have been blessed to have felt the love of fellow humans. Love has protected me, guided me, inspired me to write, to reach out, to communicate with the outside world despite attempts by officials, who put me in solitary confinement for my writings, to silence me, to share my thoughts and feelings, to become a better man.
Over the past twenty-five years a succession of people from PEN have helped me, encouraged me, taught me things that have changed my life for the better, as they have done for countless other prison writers aspiring to have their voices heard above the din.
Beginning with the late Fielding Dawson, who became a true friend, Jackson Taylor, Susan Yankowitz, Bell Chevigny, Hettie Jones, William “Chip” Brantley, and the amazing Stephanie Riggio, have reached through the razorwire, extending their gifts of knowledge and love to me. They are people I have never met, yet I feel closer to some of them than I do to members of my own family. They have read my thoughts, my words on paper, and still they accepted me. That is love.
On a closer front, for the past eleven years, I have been loved by a remarkable woman who taught by her selfless example, committing herself to seeing me free. Without her love I would have been silenced, my voice unheard, and I would not be sharing my thoughts with you today. Libby Dobbin. Please applaud her for me.
For all that and much more, for the opportunity to remain human in the face of great opposition and adversity, to be one of you, I thank you and salute you. I ask only that you continue the fight, to help and love others—many who may seem unlovable—to save their lives, to reach out to those less fortunate than yourselves.
I include myself in that category. Although I remain strong, resolute in mind and spirit, if not body, it has been a long battle against the odds. I have incurred damages, and I am tired. Prison is a young man’s game, and this old man is ready to go home.
* * *
Charles Patrick Norman PEN World Voices Festival
#881834 Thursday, April 28, 2011
Wakulla Correctional Institution Annex
110 Melaleuca Drive
Crawfordville, FL 32327
I couldn’t be there, but I heard about it from Libby, Stephanie, my literary mentor/editor, and others.
On Thursday, April 28, 2011, John Lonergan, read my keynote speech, “The State of Prisons and Prisoners in America,” at the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival at the Desmond Tutu Center Refectory in New York City.
Mr, Lonergan was an interesting choice to read my work, as he retired in June, 2010, as governor of Ireland’s Mountjoy Prison after 42 years working in service to the prison system. He has written a book, The Governor, about his experiences in a very hard place. He had some comments of his own that had the ring of truth in them. Here is a link to his web site http://www.johnlonergan.ie/
Salman Rushdie, award-winning author, had some introductory comments before the presentation of my speech:
“Charles Norman is unable to be with us as he is in jail. He says in a message, ‘I survived over thirty years in Florida prisons for the wrongful conviction of a murder I did not commit. He says he has poetry, short stories, essays, memoirs, and plays that have won numerous national writing awards… He says, ‘I love the elasticity of English, how words can be pulled, shaped, and re-formed to express the thoughts and feelings in my mind. I view the good folks at PEN as benevolent hacksaw-wielding elves who’ve been steadily slicing through the cage bars that confine me, setting me free.’ ”
I’m taking the liberty of sharing excerpts of my friend, Stephanie’s, comments:
“… an update on Charlie's speech. Well....it was spectacular. His words took on so much meaning when I heard them live. Though I know it wasn't Charlie himself, I felt nevertheless like he was speaking to me. …
He received a thunderous round of applause...It was so special.”
We also heard from Shaun Randol, editor in chief of The Mantle web publication at www.mantlethought.org
This is an excerpt of what he had to say: “…Among other things, we covered the PEN World Voices Festival.We heard your statement, as delivered by John Lonergan, and we would like to publish your text on The Mantle. Will you be willing to share your story with The Mantle and our global leaders? It would be our honor to publish you.”
I gave my permission for the publication and the story is at http://mantlethought.org/content/pen-2011-working-day-panel-discussion
It has been a great honor to have been included with such lofty literary figures in the World Voices Festival. Perhaps something positive will come of it. In approximately a month or so─sometime in June─a parole examiner will come here to the prison to interview me prior to my parole in Tallahassee. He will wnt to know what accomplishments I’ve had in the last five years, since my last hearing, and what I have to say for myself. I continue to cast bread upon the waters.
If you’d like to hear my speech delivered by Mr. John Lonergan in his fine Irish brogue, there is a recording for an mp3 file at http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5694/prmID/2126
Click on “John Lonergan” next to the heading, “Clips.” To listen to all the keynote speakers, click on “Listen.”
The text of my speech is below if you’d just like to read it.
I welcome and appreciate any and all comments. Thanks.
Charlie
THE STATE OF PRISONS AND PRISONERS IN AMERICA
My name is Charles Patrick Norman. I am a prisoner of war, a political prisoner of America’s war on crime. I live in a world far different from the one you live in, but you may find that our worlds are becoming more and more alike. My words come to you from inside a maximum security prison. The warden refused my request to travel to New York to give my speech in person, even though I promised to return.
Let me take an informal survey, by a show of hands.
If you are thirty-two years old or younger, please raise your hand. Now look around you at how many of the upraised hands you see. Thank you.
I ask that question for a reason. For those who raised their hands, I have been serving this life sentence for a murder I did not commit since before you were born. I have served your entire life, and over half of mine, in prison—one-third of a century.
If you did not raise your hand, take a moment and think how old you were and what you were doing 33 years ago, when I came to prison. Jimmy Carter was the American president. Jim Jones had not yet poisoned his followers in the Jonestown Massacre. Some of you were little children. Some of you were teenagers. Some were adults and had families—husbands, wives, sons, daughters.
Think about how your life has changed in the past 33 years, how different you are now from who you were then, and think about me as a man, a fellow human being with hopes and dreams, a 28-year old who woke up that Wednesday morning of April 5, 1978, never suspecting that was the last time he would awake in freedom, in his own bed, lying next to a woman who loved him.
I am 61 years old now, and have been in some of Florida’s worst prisons over the last 33 years. I have endured and survived horrors you do not want to imagine. The corrupt prosecutor was thwarted in his efforts to electrocute me, but was overheard saying, “Norman will never survive a life sentence.” I am determined to prove him wrong.
I am not the same person I was in 1978. I have changed. I have seen good men and bad men die, some easily, giving up the ghost, relieved to be free of this life at last. Others died hard, fighting to live and breathe, to stay a little longer in this world, but nevertheless, die they did, as each of us is destined to do one day.
You might ask, “what kind of person are you, Charlie?” As hard as it may be to believe, I am a better man now than I was then, better in virtually every way. Rather than allow the monolith of prison to crush and destroy me, I entered the flaming furnace and emerged, refined, purified, the base metals burned away, against all odds. I am stronger in mind and spirit, if not body. I refused to let them break me down, as they do to so many.
I am not the only one. Others, extraordinary women and men, have survived long imprisonments and emerged with their humanity intact. Even before his release from 27 years confinement, Nelson Mandela was one of my personal heroes. If he could do it, I could do it.
A dead man named Tex McClain told me once that we (prisoners) were defective, like automobiles that came out flawed from the factory, and each of us had been recalled to prison to be repaired. Imagine a long line of broken people on a conveyor belt entering a huge building, and another line of people being cast out on the other side.
The problem, said Tex, a chain gang philosopher who had served what seemed like an unimaginable twenty years at the time, was that when we got inside the factory—the prison—we weren’t being repaired, but damaged worse. If we’d been thousands of cars with faulty transmissions or fuel lines returning to the factory, when we emerged we were missing wheels, with sputtering engines and clouds of smoke coming out of the exhausts. If prisoners were cars, when they were released from the factory, many would run off the road and end up in the ditch, while others sped up and crashed into trees or veered across the double yellow line and hit some innocent drivers head on. Perhaps half could keep it in the lane, make it through all the stop signs, red lights, and obstacles in their paths, and make their way home. That’s not a good statistic.
I once went on a tour of a General Motors factory in Detroit. The number of autoworkers on the assembly line amazed me, bolting on bumpers, attaching doors, doing their jobs quickly before the vehicles moved to the next stations. Now I see the modern auto factory assembly line on TV, but I see no humans. All I see are machines, robots, welding, bolting, assembling, like a futuristic scene from “Terminator.”
Prison has changed in much the same way as our factories. When I came to Raiford, “The Rock,” a notorious penitentiary in North Florida immortalized in “Cool Hand Luke,” and other stories, the Florida prison population was only one-fifth what it is today. As bad as it was, Raiford was better then than prison is today.
If life in prison can be called good, amidst the ever-present threats of being stabbed, raped, murdered, or shot, life in prison then was good for those who knew how to serve their time, to be strong, to mind their own business, to not get involved with drugs, alcohol, gambling, or loansharking, or other deathtraps guaranteed to bring men down. One could go to school, earn a high school equivalency diploma, study college correspondence classes, take vocational classes and learn a trade, take self-improvement programs to learn to be a better person, go to religious services, attend AA, learn how to create works of art to earn spending money through classes in arts and crafts, share relaxed visits on weekends with loved ones, behave themselves, and earn their release on parole. They could go home. The reality today is far different.
The war on drugs began our destruction. The cartels flooded our shores with cocaine, and found a willing market among our nation’s youth. How do you convince a sixteen-year old inner city youth he should stay in school and get his high school diploma, hope to get a full-time job that pays above minimum wage and has healthcare benefits, when he can stand on a corner in the ‘hood for a few hours and make a thousand dollars selling crack rocks? When he winds up in an adult prison in a year or two with a mandatory sentence, selling the same drugs he sold on the street that were provided by a corrupt guard, what message is he receiving? Crime pays. Over two million prisoners nationwide are receiving the same message.
Prisons began administering psychotropic drugs strong enough to stun a mule, chemical Tasers, resulting in prisoners looking like walking cadavers.
As the politicians cranked out harsher penalties for every type of crime, they had to fund a prison building boom to hold the backlog of convicts in jails. Build them, and they will fill them. Find people to work there.
The prison population doubled, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled. Society was no better for it. The poverty, economic conditions, joblessness and drugs that fueled the crime wave only got worse. No one thought to intervene with the children, the collateral damage, to divert them early on from the path to crime, addiction, and prison. It did not occur to the politicians that the money eventually spent to incarcerate the children after they became adult criminals could have paid for college educations. Instead, after getting shuffled through a failing foster care and juvenile justice system that inflicts even more damage, the courts ship the disadvantaged, drug-addicted youths off to prison for a decade or two.
Then came September 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda entered our vocabulary. The Twin Towers fell. We went to war. The world will never be the same, and neither will the prison system.
We learned new words: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo. Waterboarding. Rendition. I.E.D., TBI. It was only natural that the same labor pool that drew prison guards would be tapped to fill the increasing ranks of soldiers, sailors, and Marines. Guards joined the services, and the Reserves were called up. When they came back to the States, they were different, changed. The experience damaged them.
Is it any surprise that those involved in the Abu Ghraib prison brutality scandal were members of a West Virginia National Guard unit composed mostly of state prison guards? Apparently, they applied the lessons learned in their prisons to the Iraqi detainees. Then we get the benefit of their experiences over there when they return to civilian life.
The prisons are filled to bursting. Like the auto factories in our economic heyday, production is up. And like the auto factories, it’s hard to find any humans working there. The robots have taken over. At least, they act like robots. They have been trained to show little human emotion. As the conveyor belt whisks us along the line, the robots don’t see humans. They see inventory, serial numbers, not names. My serial number is 881834. My human name is superfluous. Ask any ex-con you meet who has been free for twenty years what his prison number is, and he will rattle it off without hesitation.
How do we change the dysfunctional prison system? First we must change the “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality that dominates society’s fears of crime and violence. We must close prisons, not fill them. We must stop using prisons as warehouses to store the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, the addicted. We must stop dehumanizing the disadvantaged.
In today’s prisons, the dehumanization process is complete. Strip someone of their humanity and you no longer have to treat them humanely. Dehumanize a group or race of people and you can commit genocide with a clear conscience. It’s okay, they’re not human.
Once someone has been dehumanized, how do you get them back, restore them to their human condition? That is a more difficult problem. All I can do is speak for myself, from my own experience, and perhaps provide some insight.
A good friend asked me recently, considering all that I’ve endured and suffered through over the past 33 years, how have I resisted the damage, maintained my character, integrity, and sanity in the face of this barbaric treatment? A lot of people, she says, marvel that I haven’t thrown in the towel at this point. How have I been able to survive, seemingly unscathed, continuing to be creative and productive, writing, reading, educating myself, helping others? Able to share my thoughts with groups of people who have little conception of harsh prison realities beyond “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” without embarrassing myself or them? I did not do it alone.
It will take a book to fully explain how I became the man I am, but I can give you the short answer in one word—love. The act of loving and being loved—feeling and experiencing love in a world of hate has kept me alive, has helped me prosper, has kept me human, given me the strength and resolve to resist the corrosive effects of dehumanization that have eaten away at so many of my fellow prisoners, as well as the guards.
To love and be loved—that is to be human. I have been blessed to have felt the love of fellow humans. Love has protected me, guided me, inspired me to write, to reach out, to communicate with the outside world despite attempts by officials, who put me in solitary confinement for my writings, to silence me, to share my thoughts and feelings, to become a better man.
Over the past twenty-five years a succession of people from PEN have helped me, encouraged me, taught me things that have changed my life for the better, as they have done for countless other prison writers aspiring to have their voices heard above the din.
Beginning with the late Fielding Dawson, who became a true friend, Jackson Taylor, Susan Yankowitz, Bell Chevigny, Hettie Jones, William “Chip” Brantley, and the amazing Stephanie Riggio, have reached through the razorwire, extending their gifts of knowledge and love to me. They are people I have never met, yet I feel closer to some of them than I do to members of my own family. They have read my thoughts, my words on paper, and still they accepted me. That is love.
On a closer front, for the past eleven years, I have been loved by a remarkable woman who taught by her selfless example, committing herself to seeing me free. Without her love I would have been silenced, my voice unheard, and I would not be sharing my thoughts with you today. Libby Dobbin. Please applaud her for me.
For all that and much more, for the opportunity to remain human in the face of great opposition and adversity, to be one of you, I thank you and salute you. I ask only that you continue the fight, to help and love others—many who may seem unlovable—to save their lives, to reach out to those less fortunate than yourselves.
I include myself in that category. Although I remain strong, resolute in mind and spirit, if not body, it has been a long battle against the odds. I have incurred damages, and I am tired. Prison is a young man’s game, and this old man is ready to go home.
* * *
Charles Patrick Norman PEN World Voices Festival
#881834 Thursday, April 28, 2011
Wakulla Correctional Institution Annex
110 Melaleuca Drive
Crawfordville, FL 32327
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