Wow
I was reading a post through various links about one guy’s experience in prison – it was basically story after story on a forum where poeple asked this guy questions just after he got out of two years in a MI supermax facility. It was all pretty disturbing and, of course, pretty filthy, but the guy says his parents were academics and he got a BA while in Australia before screwing it all up with a stick-up, and I’m coming to believe it.
Anyway, I read one post that really gave me food for thought, and I wanted to reproduce it here. If you’d like to read the whole thing, message me privately and I’ll send you the link – it’s really that bad.
There was a kind of ‘mini-riot’ in our dorm not long before I got out. A fight started over something in the yard, I didn’t see what, and the boss, who must have been new or something, decided the best way to deal with it was to coral convicts back into the common area and push everyone back into their cells. Me and about three other guys were all ready in our cells, which were on the top tier of our block, and so we’re looking down at about 20 COs trying to push about 50-60 convicts through a set of double doors.
One of the COs was getting his face smashed in by two guys on either side of him, so another CO has gone to hit one of them with his taser.
Now I don’t know what happened, I think this one boss forgot he still had a cartridge loaded – mostly in a situation like that, the COs use the ‘contact’ taser, which is the little pistol but they have to press it into you to shock you – so he’s gone to do that, but fired off a cartridge, the one that sends off the two spikes into the target. As best anyone could figure it, one of the prongs has gone into the convict, and another has gone into the CO being pummeled. So when the convict tries to grab him, it closes the circuit and they both get zapped.
It was like dumping a bag of bloody mince into a shark pool. As soon as the boss went down, every convict in the fray just pounced on him, and even guys who couldn’t possibly have seen it from our vantage point dived in, as if they could smell the sudden weakness. Me and a few other guys just watched – because we could hear the rapid response team coming. The guys with whom you did not fuck.
I turned to this old timer, and by old timer I mean he’s probably 30 or so, but he’d been in a decade – and said ‘there are people in the free world that would pay money for shit like that’. He’s nodded sagely and said ‘son, life is not an extreme sport.’
I guess, in a roundabout kind of way, that’s how I feel on the whole ‘adversity makes you stronger’ kick. Life is not an extreme sport.
Before I went away, I was kind of an adrenelin junky. That’s one of the factor’s that lead me to commiting my crime in the first place. I used to think you couldn’t truly know yourself until you’d put your body and mind through intense experiences. But prison taught me this isn’t true. That’s privlidged, middle class logic.
What prison taught me was that some people are born into a life where they’re going to be subjected to intense life experiences and personal tragedy on an almost daily basis.
So no, I don’t think you get enlightenment after something like that. I think all anyone really wants, if they’re honest with themselves, is a quiet, easy life surrounded by people that love them. Anything else is a conceit.
Those last few lines really do put it into perspective.
Those last few lines really do put it into perspective.