Death Over Slavery

December 1, 2010

Billy is suicidal, and I’m not surprised. I still feel that way at times, and I’m serving a mere six-and-a-half years. (I’m considered a “short-timer” by federal inmate standards.)

As for Billy, the judge gave him thirty-five years. That’s more time than he’s been alive. He’s only twenty-five. He’ll be almost SIXTY by the time he gets out. His youth will be long gone.

He doesn’t want it to come to that, though, and he intends to commit suicide before prison life drives him mad. I can’t really blame him for that. Even when he gets released in 204X, Billy will still have to register as a sex offender, take random drug tests, and submit to his house being searched for the rest of his life. So why should he stay around for that?

Will I stop him if he tries to take his own life? No. I’d be a hypocrite if I did that. I did ask him, however, to at least wait until after his appeals had gone through, in the hope that he gets a sentence reduction. Billy regularly complains about the length of the appeals process, but I told him to be patient. I can only hope that he listened.

Going through the process of entering prison is a mentally hardening experience. A convict could have just been handed a life sentence, and you wouldn’t see him shed a tear. Incarceration changes a person at the core; I’m afraid that I won’t leave prison as the same person that went in. When I look at Billy, he’s just as hard as everyone else. That is the law of the land here.

I now know this hardening for what it is. It’s like cooking a steak with too much heat. Too much time is making inmates tough as a rock on the outside, while the inside is left raw and bloody.

[EDITOR’S NOTE:  This post is the one that got Joe in so much trouble with the Psych department. (See the posts Unwanted Trouble and Crisis Averted from December 3, 2010.) I didn’t receive the post via snail mail until December 20, 2010.]