"I LIED!" CONFESSION OF RUDOLPH HARRIS, JR. ON YOUTUBE

"I LIED!" CONFESSION OF RUDOLPH HARRIS, JR. ON YOUTUBE

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It has been 47 days since I last blogged. They have been consequential days, though, and much has happened while I continue to spend my life in prison. Much I can't talk about at this moment, but I will, I will.

When my friend, Dan Faulkner, visited in June from Seattle, he obtained a video tape of the infamous rapist/liar/state witness, Rudolph Harris, Jr.'s confession, in which he admitted that he and fellow liar, James Edward Grayes, perjured themselves at my trial. John Middleton, Esquire, made the original video tape at Florida State Prison in 1982, shortly after Harris went to prison for brutally raping eight women in Tampa.

When Harris' partner, Grayes, refused to make a corroborative statement unless the attorney "did something" for him, the confession of Harris languished for years, waiting for an audience. The James Grayes interview is something beyond belief, and one day soon I'll recount for you what revelations he made about committing perjury for the state attorney's office.

Dan had the original tape digitized and converted to a DVD, and put the first five minutes of the seventeen minute confession onto "YouTube." You can see it for yourself at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4-jfO4_0_4

Dan is quickly mastering tech stuff he has never worked with, to my great benefit and thanks, and as soon as he gets the YouTube logistics figured out, the entire seventeen minutes will be available for viewing. I will talk more about this, too, in the near future.

Since I last blogged, we had the state funeral of the murdered correctional officer, Donna Fitzgerald, which drew close to 2,000 mourners at the local Catholic church. Virtually every guard at Tomoka attended, which resulted in volunteer guards coming in to fill in for the day from prisons across the state. You can't close down a prison, not even for a day.

The local guards prepared us, told us that the entire prison would most likely be locked down that day, we'd be confined to quarters, but that wasn't what happened at all. Instead, the replacement guards came in and ran the place like it hasn't been run in a long time - correctly!

The day went without a hitch, telephones and TV's on, canteens open, rec yard open, tennis and handball courts open, chow hall ran in record time, everyone fed, no hassles, only one person went to lockup, no screaming or threats. It was amazing. Then four PM came, they left and were replaced by the regular crew, and things went back to abnormal.

We just finished dealing with Tropical Storm Fay, who moseyed up the Florida peninsula and parked over Melbourne and Daytona Beach for a few days, causing widespread flooding. We were locked in Tuesday through Friday, work cancelled and weekend visits also cancelled, which was especially disturbing.

The days of steady rain brought thousands of frogs out of their holes and hibernation, and we were rewarded with extremely loud day and night concerts. It was particularly hard on the prisoners from New York, New Jersey, Chicago, and other northern locales who've never been serenaded by thousands of rainfrogs, who were driven to distraction and couldn't sleep for the distraction. One guy from the Bronx asked me, "What are they DOING?" And I told them, "They are breeding!" He added, "Do they have to do it so loud?" Nature's way. Frogs are screamers, male and female.

For the inspired occasion, I wrote a Haiku -
Rain frogs sing all night,
Country music symphony
Drives city boys nuts.

Another prisoner asked, "How can you sleep through all that racket? I was awake all night." I told him when you grow up in the rural South, the sounds of frogs, of rain on a tin roof, of crickets buzzing, becomes the perfect sleep aid.

Meanwhile, check out the confession of Rudolph Harris, Jr., and let me know your thoughts.
Charlie

LIFE IN "THE TWILIGHT ZONE"

Dateline: Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Location: Deep inside a prison cell in Florida

LIFE IN "THE TWILIGHT ZONE"

Life in prison is like living in "The Twilight Zone," only without the spooky music, "Da da DAH da, da da DAH da, - da Doom!" The normal rules don't apply. Trapped in the Twilight Zone - the only thing missing is Rod Serling's mellifluous voice. Weird things happen. The hero is an anti-hero. There is an invisible dome, like a giant soap bubble that shimmers occasionally when the sunlight hits it at a certain angle, extending beyond the razorwire fences, that "normal" people can't see as they pop through, in and out. For those of us who are trapped in the Twilight Zone the dome is an impenetrable exit, and we are doomed to spend our lives inside it.

Right now it is "count time," when everyone is locked behind steel doors waiting for the count to "clear," meaning all the chicks are in their roosts, not one is missing, and if they can add up the numbers correctly, the guards will soon let us loose to go to "chow," lunch consisting of a slice of turkey ham, one cup of boiled, bland black-eyed peas, four ounces of canned greens, a smidgen of coleslaw, and two slices of white bread. Umm, Umm good.

We are supposed to be quiet right now, but a heated conversation is going on down the hall with Bean, Heather, Halle Barry, and Slim Jim. Two of those are female names, but I assure you that the bearers are not female, except in the twisted world of the Twilight Zone.

Pity the real Halle Barry were she to cast her eyes on her prison namesake. She would either start screaming or laughing, at what the horrid grotesqueness has spawned, or at the sheer lunacy that anyone could ever attribute the beauty, talent, and grace of the real Halle Berry to such a caricature.

Imagine a nightmare filled with monsters, each monster with a stick-on name tag on its chest, "Hello - I'm _____ " Clark Gable, Brad Pitt, Sophia Loren, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Heather Locklear, or any other handsome or beautiful sex symbol you can think of. Visualize, these misnamed monsters strutting around their cages, noses in the air, pretending they are the real owners of the identities they have stolen. It's like everyone's insane, and they're each living in the other's fantasy world.

Many years ago I saw a movie - was it "King of Hearts?" Something like that. World War II, a deserter wandered into a French town where all the citizens had fled, and the inmates at the insane asylum had gotten loose, come down to the town, moved in, took over, and were leading the lives of the townspeople. It was pretty confusing for the deserter, trying to figure out what was going on. That's how it is in prison. Confusing. Like the Twilight Zone.

Bean is a huge, fat, shaved-headed white guy who grew up in the black inner city projects of Miami. That has a particularly warping effect on some people, and they tend to suffer from an identity crisis. He looks white, like a red-neck, but he sounds and acts like an inner city project kid. So who is he?

He's arguing with Heather - you figure it out - about slinging his/her pack of "Rip" under the door and across the hall to Bean's cell, so he can roll a couple of RIP's for them to smoke. "RIP" is tobacco, the small boxes of loose tobacco called "Top," and stands for "rolled in prison." RIP. Rest in peace. Smoke RIP's for so long, and you will rest in peace, on Boot Hill or Gopher Ridge, the interchangeable names for the prison cemetery in Union County.

Many years ago the Florida Department of Corrections packaged their own brand of cigarettes to issue to prisoners. The county sheriffs bought them, too, and passed them out in the jails. You were given so many packs of RIP's a week, and the nonsmokers either sold their allotments to the heavily-addicted or gave them away.

When I was in the county jail in the 1970's, they were still passing them out. White packaging with an orange state of Florida logo and "DC" (Department of Corrections) overlay. They looked like Camels. I never smoked, so I don't know what they tasted like, but the secondary smoke was rank.

The prison had five tobacco barns next to Florida State Prison at Starke where they made the RIP's. As the prison population boomed in the late 1970's, they closed the cigarette operations and converted the five tobacco barns into crude prison housing, high-ceiling warehouses filled with bunks, called "BTU," Butler Transit Unit. You could still smell the tobacco.

I spent a week there on my way to Raiford, and we called it "Wild Kingdom," for all the huge moths, weird flying insects, bats, and birds that wandered through the cracks, roof, and ventilation gaps at night. It was already scary, fresh in prison, in a huge room in the dark, filled with weird people, trying to sleep, and have a giant, buzzing, flying cockroach land on your face. The nights were punctuated by screams as bugs and other vermin freaked out the prisoners.

The tobacco barns have been gone for thirty years, but men who weren't even born then are still arguing about RIP's, which became the generic name for any tobacco in prison. What's stupid is that ten minutes before the argument, the cell doors were open, men walked up and down the hall, and Bean could have taken three steps and been in Heather's cell, to burn the tobacco directly rather than get angry because he/she didn't want to slide it across the hall on the floor.

Yesterday morning, an older white prisoner named Paul went to the canteen, bought a laundry bag full of food, tobacco, and toiletries, and was attacked, knocked down, and robbed of his purchases by two young black prisoners. Paul had been waiting for weeks to receive the $65 he could spend at one time, but he didn't even get a cold soda out of the deal. Word is that the two robbers were also from the Miami projects, and Bean put them up to it to help pay off his huge debts.

Right now he is arguing with another prisoner down the hall, known as "Diamond Head," who is not Hawaiian. I won't even go there. So much for life in the Twilight Zone.

RAPE AND MURDER IN PRISON

Dateline: June 27, 2008
Location: deep inside a prison cell in Florida

RAPE AND MURDER IN PRISON

This is one I surely wish I didn't have to write, a terrible crime committed here at Tomoka C.I. Wednesday, June 25, 2008. A prisoner serving two life sentences for kidnapping and rape, Enoch Hall, raped and murdered a female prison guard inside the PRIDE prison industries building. I'm not going to mention her name yet - you can find out about it on the local TV web sites, local6.com or wesh.com, or the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

This has deeply affected most everyone here, staff, guards, and prisoners, touched so closely by such a heinous, calculated act. up until about six weeks ago, I worked with this officer for several hours a day, Monday through Friday, for three years. Needless to say, we'd had long conversations on a variety of topics, and though we had our differences, she saw things from the guards' perspective, I saw them from the prisoners,' there was mutual respect.

She had gone through many difficulties in her personal life in the past three years, and was often stretched thin emotionally, and subject to strong outbursts when she was irritated or aggravated, which was often. She was much more educated than most of the guards, having once been an English teacher, and a couple of years ago I first offered one of my writings to her to read, "Fighting the Ninja," about AIDS in prison. When I asked her if she wanted to read a manuscript of something I'd written, that I'd like her opinion of it from a "correctional" point of view, she almost snatched it out of my hand.

I went back outside to work in the garden, pulling weeds in the hot sun in the area behind her "caustic office," where all the cleaning supplies for the prison are kept and dispensed daily.

I was busily bent over and sweating when she came running out of her office shouting my name several times, my papers clutched in her hand. She seemed in such a tizzy that I knew I must be in serious trouble, but couldn't imagine what I'd done, unless she was offended by my writing. that has happened in the past.

I stood up and walked toward her wondering what it could be. She got right in my face, held up the papers, and asked, "You wrote this?" the thought went through my head that perhaps she was going to accuse me of plagiarizing, of copying someone else's words, but I didn't see how that could be it, because the essay was so personally my own, that no one else could make any claim on it.

"Yes, ma'am, I wrote it. Why? Is something wrong with it?"

She took a deep breath. "Wrong with it? It's unbelievable. I've never read anything like this. I couldn't stop. It fucked me up."

Yes, she was known for "earthy" language at times, and wouldn't hesitate to use profanity to get her point across. I suppose part of that was her extra-duty job, working as a bartender in a biker bar in Daytona to pay her mortgage. She was a study in contradiction.
"This is the most powerful thing I've ever read. this is all true?"
"Yes."
"Can I borrow this, or make a copy of it? I want some of my friends to read this."
"Sure."

I knew then that perhaps I'd written something pertinent, to get a reaction like that from a tough prison guard.She asked me to let her read whatever else I wrote, and I did. I asked her for her feedback, and it was generally praiseworthy. "You're a great writer." Well, in her opinion.

I gave her a copy of my poem, "Remembrances of Five," and she brought it back to me with tears in her eyes. "It must be good - it made me cry. I can't stop thinking about it."

Months later I told her it had won first place in the Tampa Writers Alliance poetry contest, she embraced herself, shivered, and said, "I just got goosebumps thinking about that poem. My hair stood up on the back of my neck. Can I get a copy of it?"

I'm not going to go into all her struggles with life, the recent brain cancer death of her father, the jailing of her 19 year-old son on drug charges a few months ago, her frustrations with how she was treated at the nearby county jail every day at lunch when she went to visit him ("Now you know how our families feel when they get a hard time trying to visit us," I said.), having to tell her son that her ex-husband, his father, had died, dealing with the infidelities of her most recent ex-husband, struggling with part-time jobs to pay her bills. Maybe later.

The PRIDE prison industry here refurbishes school buses and fire trucks, along with other large government vehicles. Guards who work security there get a separate check from PRIDE. She had been working there a couple of afternoons a week to fill in, and wasn't even supposed to work Wednesday. She got a call a little after three PM that the guard there had a family emergency, could she fill-in for a few hours? Yes. Her fate was sealed.All the PRIDE "free people" left, and she was in effect supervising 15 prisoners alone from a little after three until six PM or so.

That would seem like a serious security failure, a woman alone with prisoners who had a variety of rape convictions, even though she had a tiny pepper spray canteen and a so-called "body alarm" panic button, to call for help.The details aren't clear yet. They will come out. Apparently, Enoch Hall hid in a shed when everyone else left, she went looking for him, he ambushed her, raped her, and stabbed her to death with a knife he made from sheet metal.

Terrible, terrible crime, and we all now suffer from his actions.

Twenty five years ago at Raiford a guard was murdered, and I saw a similar response. The entire prison was put in lockdown. We all suffer for one person's crime. Now, as then, this changes the atmosphere at a prison. Where before certain guards are friendly, easy-going, suddenly they are grim and serious, realizing that this is a prison, there are dangerous people here for a reason, this is not a game (although many are playing games), and your life is on the line every day.

I've always realized that, and behaved accordingly. I know I am deep in enemy territory, with no back-up, and I watch behind myself, keep my radar on, and stay in survival mode. one slip is all it takes. you never see it coming.

I've told men to be on their "P's and Q's," not to make a fuss, keep a low profile, that when this happens, the guards are angry, looking to retaliate, to strike back. Run your mouth and suffer the consequences.

Yesterday lunch was delayed because "EVAC" (the ambulance) was called to take a prisoner to the local hospital. Something happened, and he "got his ass whipped" by several guards, as another guard bragged, bad enough to be hospitalized.Yesterday, the day after, I went to work in the chow hall at eleven AM and didn't get back to my building till about 9:30 PM. Long day. They were in "not mode," one wing of each housing area slowly escorted to the chow hall, single file, served their trays, then sat there for awhile, escorted back, half hour of dead time, escort the next group.

We're usually finished serving lunch no later than one PM. Yesterday it was after 4 PM. Then we turned right around to serve supper, and got the last group fed by 8:30 PM.The guards on the four to twelve shift come in about 3:30 PM, and hang around the captain's office for instructions before they relieve the day shift.

Yesterday the two prison chaplains hung around doing their "grief counseling," I suppose they'd call it, hugging a couple of the female guards, talking to the men.When I saw that, it struck me that it is doubtful if any of those people even knew the victim beyond the most superficial of relationships, working at the same prison, but having little contact or conversation.

It seems odd, perhaps, to think that some of her closest relationships were with the prisoners who worked under her supervision for hours every day. About seven of them either delivered cleaning supplies for her or worked as clerks in her office. The delivery guys only worked one or two hours, early and late, and spent the rest of the time in her office, "jawboning," drinking coffee and sucking up the air conditioning. She spent a lot of time talking on the telephone to girlfriends, sharing virtually every detail of her private life, who she liked, who she despised - on more than one occasion some arrogant male guard who deluded himself into thinking he was God's gift to women would come in and "chat her up." She would do all the appropriate grins and giggles, then when he would leave, she'd walk over to where I was working - I emphasize, working - I wasn't one to sit there and be one of her sycophants - and tell me, "He is such as asshole. I despise that creep. He makes me sick." She would snarl this out.

I asked her once why she acted so friendly to those creeps if she felt that way. She just tossed her head like the answer was obvious, and dialed another number on her cordless phone as she walked back to her office.

The point I was making is that there is no consideration whatsoever for offering any type of grief counseling to the prisoners who knew her better than most of the guards, who no doubt are going through the grieving process more acutely than most others. I've only had a chance to speak with one of them so far, and only briefly, but I'll do my best to make the rounds, talk to as many as I can.

I want to talk about this some more in another blog perhaps, but want to mention that this incident will most likely result in many changes here.

First, heads will roll. The top dogs - warden, assistant warden, colonel, and captain will be required to fall on their swords. Scapegoats. Fact - it is their fault. They are responsible.

Two things that graphically illustrate a failure in prison security - first, an escape, obviously. The whole purpose of security is to keep the prisoners inside the fence. If someone gets out, someone else has to bite the bullet. Second - the murder of a prison guard. That is definitely a no-no. The system failed. While these geniuses were having all the trees cut down and hedges pulled out and building more steel doors and caging in the wings in "B" dorm in the name of security, a lone woman was raped and murdered in the shadow of a gun tower by a convicted kidnapper/rapist, and no one even knew about it for who knows how long, at least an hour. Most likely those guys are out of here, demoted. Huge wrongful death lawsuit potential for her son. Get a lawyer now, Kyle.

Enough of that. The phones are back on and visits are scheduled for Saturday. Life in prison goes on. See you later.
Charlie

COMMUNIQUES FROM A DEAD MAN

Dateline: June 17, 2008
Location: deep inside a prison cell in Florida

"FIGHT FOR FREEDOM OR DIE TRYING"

One beneficial side effect of all this focus on my writing, short stories, poems, memoirs, prison diary project, and the recent internet interview by my new friend, Hettie Jones, is there has been a sort of "literary cross-pollination," in which one topic or study has spun-off into others. For me it is a productive process - I can't seem to write fast enough - which may be driving my dear friend, Libby, to distraction, since she types all this output and translates it into legible English.

The Anne Frank diary project makes me think about my day, my thoughts, actions, and the thought and actions of those around me. Documenting all that - and I can only scratch the surface - spawns more ideas for stories and plays and brings back remembrances of prison experiences that I want to document and not allow to be lost in the ether.

This morning I wrote one of the few studies of what being "institutionalized" means, how it affects prisoners and the prison system, which will (hopefully) lead to discussion on how it negatively impacts society, and what to do about it.

Many people in prison are institutionalized, which to me means becoming so broken in spirit that they are unable to function on their own, that they accept and obey whatever the "authorities" tell them, right or wrong. They become like domesticated farm animals, neutered automatons who have no will of their own, part of the prison machine, content to absolve themselves of hopes and dreams for the future.

The shame for America is that is the way the system has been set up, to break people's wills. so they can more easily control them. One problem is that when they take a person's free will, their ability to think and make independent decisions and break their spirit, they are left as empty husks. They don't replace what has been removed with anything. It might make prisoners more docile and easier to control, especially with the wide-spread dispensing of psychotropic drugs that dope them up, but what does this say about how our fellow Americans are treated?

The vast majority of prisoners will be released one day. Who do you want as your neighbor? Institutionalized, drugged out prisoners who've spent decades in cages are not going to rejoin society and become productive, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens. They will most likely become homeless bums or commit more crimes and return to prison, where they fit in and can function in a fashion.

When I first came to prison, I was the clerk to the prison laundry manager, C.D. Connor. He asked an older black prisoner who'd been in and out of prison several times in his life what he was going to do when he got out this next time. I'll never forget what he said.

"Mr. Connor, I don't do too good on the street. I can't get a job. I eat out of the garbage cans behind McDonald's. I'll find me a cardboard box, maybe sleep under a bridge. In prison, it's different. I'm somebody in here. I've got a good job, I got money, a hustle, pressed clothes, a white boy, good food, cigarettes and coffee. What do I want to go out on the street for?"

No doubt that man was institutionalized. He was the product of the system. There are thousands.

I am not one of them. Many people are amazed when they talk to me, and I tell them I have been continuously incarcerated for over thirty years. How is that possible, all that time in prison, yet not be like most everyone else who has had a similar experience?

They say I don't act like I've been in prison that long, and I say, how am I supposed to act? I can only be myself.

The state offers little "paper programs," transitory programs, pre-release, etc., which are of little value in actually preparing long-term prisoners for release. I asked one man who attended a year-long pre-release program what he learned, and he said how to hold a fork, how to eat properly. Heaven help us if that's all he came away with.

No one ever expected me to make it this far. They figured I'd be long-dead. But, they didn't account for my strength of will and resolve. I am not institutionalized, and I never will be. I will continue to fight for my freedom, or die trying. Watch this space for more details on how.
Good night.
Charlie

COMMUNIQUES FROM A DEAD MAN

Dateline: June 16, 2008
Location: deep inside a prison cell in Florida

"EVEN WITH A LIFE SENTENCE, THERE'S NEVER ENOUGH TIME"

I feel bad that it has been about six days since I wrote my daily blog, but sometimes it just can't be helped. Even in prison, often there's not enough time. Working in the chow hall is a six day-a-week, 48-hour chore that is more than exhausting. I come in, get out of my wet clothes, shower, and fall out. The mornings are so crazy that the time before work is complete chaos. Prison is bedlam.

I've been busy writing, at least, as fast as I can. I started and finished a new prison memoir, "They Kidnapped Thurgood!" about racist guards confiscating a sculpture I was working on, and I've been steadily making entries in the "Anne Frank Center USA" prison diary project. I'm really getting into it, and wanted to share an excerpt from the first entry, since it might be awhile before the project is unveiled.

"Tuesday, May 13, 2008

My friends call me Charlie. Others call me a convicted murderer,
but that is only half-true. I am convicted, but I am not a murderer.
I have been in jail and prison for over thirty years for a crime I did
not commit. If I do not get out soon, I am liable to die in here.

When I got the letter at mail call from the Anne Frank Center USA
asking me to write a prison diary, it affected me deeply. When I first
read the Diary of a Young Girl so many years ago, it had a great
impact on me. I was in the county jail in Tampa, Florida, facing a
murder charge, going through great emotional turmoil. I was drawn
to books about people who had suffered imprisonment. I read a couple
about American P.O.W.'s held captive by the North Vietnamese, and
one about Nelson Mandela. I couldn't imagine how long he'd been wrongly imprisoned in South Africa. Little did I know that I would surpass
the twenty-seven years he would spend in captivity."


Already, I've filled the little 90-page journal they sent me to write in, and I still have 2 1/2 months to go! Interesting dilemma.

on a more personal level, my sister-in-law, Sandy Norman, was stricken by a very serious stroke several weeks ago, and was not expected to survive. Many people prayed for her (thanks!), and she has been making a miraculous recovery. No paralysis, and she can speak a little.

I'm very excited about the prospective visit of my old friend, Dan Faulkner, from Seattle, this week. I haven't seen him in over 30 years. We went to the University of South Florida at the same time, and were involved in tae kwon do at Martial Arts Institute, Inc., in Tampa, in the mid-1970's. Dan has put a lot of time and expertise into the "FreeCharlieNow" web site, and has strived to help me on my ride toward freedom. Recently, he revamped the "photo exhibit," adding more family photos. Check it out. www.freecharlienow.com

Back to work. The chow hall beckons!
Charlie

COMMUNIQUES FROM A DEAD MAN

Dateline: June 11, 2008
Location: deep inside a prison cell in Florida

LESSONS OF LIFE IN PRISON

"Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows but Jesus..."

One of many things I've learned in prison - a "Revelation," you might say, is that the words of all those songs we sang in church so many years ago float back to the top of my consciousness with a particular relevance to my captivity. Perhaps it is the the recurrence of themes of damnation and salvation, death and rebirth, the battle for dominance of good versus evil, the struggle of hope and faith over surrender and despair, the natural desire to live free, the urge to give voice and express one's feelings, no matter the repression.

So many times I hear a "church song" on the radio in the prison chapel, or in my head, my memories ignite with images, feelings, recollections of times past when we sang those songs ourselves, with the attendant emotions of longing and a sense of loss. Virtually all the faces I see are gone now, long dead and buried, hopefully onward to their just rewards. The angels I hear singing, "I once was lost, but now I'm found,..." which has a particular relevance for many prisoners whose lives were once hopelessly entangled in disorder, but have achieved a focus with a return to religious faith, are not faceless masses, but the ghostly images of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, school mates, friends, and neighbors who impacted my life.

When asked how I imagine Heaven to be, I don't hesitate. I don't see St. Peter or some long-bearded Jehovah on a gold throne with a scepter. I see my grandmother, "Memaw," standing inside the gate patiently waiting for me, two of her beloved dogs, Butterball and Gomez, milling around her feet, holding a fresh-baked blackberry cobbler and saying, "Where have you been, boy? We've been waiting for you for a long time."

I've missed over thirty family reunions, which get progressively smaller each year as more family patriarchs and matriarchs pass on, but the assurance that "one day we'll be together, yes we will,' as Diana Ross sings, (not normally considered a religious inspiration), gives me the additional strength to resist evil and continue to live a forthright life, even in prison.

I've learned it's okay to be weak sometimes, even in prison, to allow the shield to lower, to expose one's self to humanity. In a recent TV show, a group of children singing, "Jesus loves me, this I know, "cause the Bible tells me so...we are weak, but He is strong,..." brought tears to my eyes as thoughts of innocence lost, but hope restored, jolted loose childhood images and recollections. Wiping my eyes, I looked around and saw several hard men wiping theirs, a shared experience not unique under the harshest conditions of imprisonment.

In the artificial prison camp environment of captors and captives, where the captors eagerly slip on the mantels of institutionalized hatred and domination, where sadism rules over weakness, love is often in short supply, a dwindling resource. It becomes difficult to feel and express love in an "appropriate" manner, but one discards the yearning for love at his own risk. When guards threaten to lock up a prisoner or terminate his visit for kissing and embracing his wife or loved one for more than a few seconds, watching the clock's second hand moving as they meet in the visiting park on Saturday, questions inevitably arise. One does not need to be accused of being homophobic to ask why hundreds of high risk prison sex acts are virtually ignored, if not encouraged, while surveillance cameras and a dozen eagle-eyed guards pace the visiting area trying to catch someone touching their loved ones' shoulder or stealing a surreptitious kiss.

"Looking for love in all the wrong places" could be a prison theme song. I am deeply fortunate to feel and experience "the right kind of love," even in prison, and am saddened that so many others are deprived of it.
Charlie

COMMUNIQUES FROM A DEAD MAN

Dateline: June 19, 2008
Location: deep inside a prison cell in Florida

"MORE RIDES ON THE PRISON ROLLER COASTER"

I want to recap some more of the prison roller coaster ride I've been on lately and add that I'm so fortunate to be a strong-minded person. If I were weak, I would have freaked out a long time ago. When I'd been in prison about seven years, while speaking to a group of "free people," one asked me, "How in the world have you been able to do all that time in prison?"

After spending over thirty years in prison, someones amazement that I had been able to successfully serve over seven years of imprisonment might seem laughable, but it's not, and the answer remains the same: "Like a man." you must be a man in prison, withstand all the challenges and travails, or not. The "not" is unacceptable.

After being subjected to threats and harassment by a verbally-abusive sergeant whose personality disorder requires all the unfortunate prisoners under his flawed "command" to be subservient snitches and sycophants, which I am not, I realized I had to get out from under his evil authority or see his threats of unwarranted lockup and writeups reach fruition. I requested a job change, and quickly found myself in food service, the chow hall, their version of punitive action.

"Please don't throw me in the briar patch!" That cry is especially relevant in prison, when dealing with hateful, angry, spiteful people. Racism is alive and well in prison, but every few years, when I'm at loggerheads with some hateful guard who deems it his role in life to make life miserable for prisoners, and in particular to teach me a lesson, invariably it is a "white" guard, usually of the "redneck" persuasion, whose attitudes, speech, and manner make it very easy to visualize him in his peaked hat and robes, at night, dancing around a fire, burning a cross with his cohorts. Guards like that just don't like me, and do everything their little pea brains can concoct to vex me, provoke me to respond in a way that will justify the escalation of their negative actions.

So when they found themselves supposedly spiting me by sticking me in the kitchen, it became a "briarpatch moment" for me, and I vowed to make the very best of it, to be the MVP in the kitchen, even though I am by far the oldest prisoner working in the kitchen, a job dominated by young, strong black prisoners.

Now that I've been there almost a month, it is time to pack up my sore back, neck, and aching feet, and to move on to a less strenuous line of work than the six day, 48-hour work week in the kitchen.

I keep saying that the people running the prisons have no idea what they're doing, but if the goal is to provoke already psychologically-challenged prisoners to flip out, "go psych," or commit acts of violence against themselves or others, they are doing a good job.

Every day there are fights, the stress levels and tensions have been pumped so high. As many as nineteen prisoners have been under suicide watch at one time in recent days, requiring a separate guard to sit and watch each one, virtually crippling prison operations. Yesterday, one prisoner in a wheelchair cut the throat of another wheelchair-bound prisoner, and reports are mixed as to whether he lived or died.

Every day it gets worse. They reassign the worst harassers to be in charge of the housing area with the worst "psych three's," prisoners with the shakiest mental problems, on the most medication, asking for incidents, and I live right in the middle of all that. It is very tough.

Some good news, though - my friend, Dan Faulkner in Seattle, continues to add material to the "FreeeCharlieNow" web site, most recently, "pre-prison" photos to the photo gallery, and he will be visiting Florida soon. I successfully completed my e-mail interview with Hettie Jones in New York, a singularly amazing woman in her own right, great poet and writer, who performed a "literary MRI" on my brain with her incisive questions. Her interview will appear on the "PEN" international literary group's web site soon (July) at www.pen.org

Even with all the trials and attacks, or perhaps ignited by them, in part, I have been going through a remarkably productive period of creativity, the past couple of months. I've sent out for typing and editing several short stories, poems, essays, and memoirs, including my latest prison account, "They Kidnapped Thurgood," of how and why redneck guards confiscated a sculpture I was doing of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and how I got it back.

The "Anne Frank Center USA" prison diary project I'm participating in has been particularly thought-provoking and insightful, resulting in a creative cross-pollination with the blogs and stories. If you haven't read Anne Frank's "Diary of a Young Girl," or it has been a long time, you should. She was an amazing writer who I admire greatly.

Time for work. Keep in touch, and let freedom ring for all.
Charlie