Welcome back and my apologies for the absence. My sponsor was taking a much needed vacation (who wouldn’t need a vacation from me? :)) and myself, I was busy writing up a comprehensive Federal Civil action challenging the unconstitutionality of Florida’s capital post conviction review process as being deliberately dysfunctional and fundamentally unfair. But now I’m back and I plan on writing more regularly again.
Let me first begin by thanking Tanya for the great comments she regularly leaves. As she doesn’t leave an email address for a response I can only thank her in this manner. It means a lot to me to know that what I write is being read and that people out there care. So thanks Tanya.
Now to what I’d thought I’d write today. The other day I was reading the newspaper and couldn’t help but notice the small front page article entitled “white collar cons ask the pro’s” (USA Today, July 15, 2009) In this article it talked about the “growing market” for ex-convicts who are paid substantial amounts of money to provide “consultations” to recently convicted “white collar” criminals so that they will know what to expect when they are sent to prison and how to survive that experience without getting their throat cut or becoming someone’s “bitch”
This has to fall under that “only in America” category. Some rich mommy boy’s ripped off banks and embezzles millions from clients who trusted them and plead in exchange for a relatively light sentence and what do they do? They then hire an ex-convict as a “consultant” and pay up to $ 20.000 to be told what to expect when they go to prison and how to fit in with the hardened criminals they will soon share a cell with.
According to this article, this is now a growing industry with ex-cons establishing consulting firms and making millions of dollars teaching these momma boys how to play nice with real convicts. One particular company “Wall Street Prison Consultants” says that the course they offer to white collar criminals “covers everything” and “helps offenders avoid assault, cope with the daily grind, decode prison lingo, and even avoid bad prison jobs” Their website even provides photos depicting the harsh transition from the exchange floor (Wall Street) to the prison yard.
You know, sometimes you see or read something and then it hits you – hey, why didn’t I think of that? That’s the kind of moment I had when I read that article, why not hire myself out as a “death row consultant”? Since capital punishment is a growing industry not only in America but China, Iran, North Korea and other countries where basic human rights don’t matter much, there might just be a pretty good market for a death row consultant.
To hear the state tell it, anyone coming to death row had to have planned to commit a crime and kill somebody, so as they plan this murder they can give me a call and plan the consequences of their action too. I could put ads in all the major newspapers…”Planning to commit a murder? Call Mike and I’ll tell you how to survive death row”
If you think about it, it kind of makes sense. If you are planning to commit a murder, then you should also plan on the consequences right? Of course, my first piece of advice would be that anyone planning to come to death row should be put in a mental hospital as this place sucks. And in the past 25 years that I’ve been here I can’t think of any that actually planned to come here. Well, that’s not quite correct = there’s been a number that all but begged the court to sentence them to death after they were convicted as many guys prefer the solitary life on death row over doing a mandatory life sentence out in the general population.
But what words of wisdom can I offer to the soon to be condemned? What advice could I provide to help them make that transition from the real world to a concrete cage, where it will be their fate to slowly rot away for decades at a time and inevitably they will reach the point where they will wake up in the morning and just pray to God that the nightmare will soon end and even death itself will become a means of escaping from the harsh reality of death row.
Death row is not like the general prison population where they are allowed out of their cells each day to work a job, go to the library, to the chow hall, and even the prison chapel, or maybe play a game of softball on the yard. Here on death row you sit in your cage all day, everyday and rarely are allowed out. We eat our meals in our cells and only get a couple of hours a week on the concrete yard. Like so many others who have been here for many years I stopped going to the yard and haven’t been outside for years now. Arguably I’m now the whitest man in America, my skin so pale I could easily be mistaken for the dead.
But unlike others I have not yet “bugged” out. That’s what we call it in here when a guy slowly slips over that cliff and loses touch with reality. In some ways I actually envy those guys as in here reality sucks. So maybe I should teach the soon to be condemned the art if “selective psychosis”, how to control the periodical escapes from reality without falling completely over the edge and into the abyss of insanity. I do think it’s that ability of retaining hope and purpose that keeps a person going in here.
Then by far the biggest and most important advice I might give is to read Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, especially ‘Act II’ so that you can appreciate Shakespeare’s words when he wrote “The first thing we got to do is kill all the lawyers” Of course, we can’t actually kill them – but you’ve got to accept that for the most part you cannot trust them! Like so many others here I have come to learn the hard way that all too often the lawyers appointed to represent death row prisoners are more interested in providing nothing more than a pretense of representation and are a far greater threat to you than even the prosecutor.
Then there’s family. Unless you want to go insane, forget about everyone you knew out in the real world as with very few exceptions they will all drift away. If you want to survive death row, you will have to form new friendships and most of them will come and go as nobody lasts forever. But the blessing in this is that many of the friends who will reach out to you while you’re on death row will become your surrogate family and they will stand by you even when your own family has long given up and gone their own way. These friends will become your strength and you will come to value these friendships above all else.
Then there’s the food – it sucks! That’s why when it comes down to it, if I were to hire myself out as a death row consultant I think I’d gladly work for food. I can’t even remember what real milk or real meat tastes like. But most of us do take the crap they feed us and mix it up with stuff we buy from canteen and cook up our own meals. So yeah – I’d work for food…real food!
Well there it is. Now who knows someone planning to come to death row as I’m ready to play death row consultant and I can tell you all about what to expect and how to survive. But you better bring some good food, cause you won’t get it here and by God I’m hungry!
Please check out my website
http://www.southerninjustice.net
2 comments:
thanks for the thanks and as usual, beautifully written.
love tanya
Great site Mike (and web guru). Enjoyed reading your thoughts. I am thinking you should send some of your stuff into the SUn Magazine for publication. It's up their alley.
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