Chase the Carrot
What do you get when you cross a broken system with a broken individual? Answer: The D.O.C.
This does not include administration only, but also prisoners, staff, and everyone in the system. No body is excluded. This system is broken, has been, and will continue to be. The problem is, too many people with bad ideas are running the show, on the backs of the people they say they are rehabilitating? Bull-shit! You are exploiting them. You are exploiting us.
These people say they are helping keep society safe. From who? I think I understand your game. You take incarcerated “adults” give them life sentences, or similar to one, and keep your foot on their necks as long as you work for the D.O.C. See, these people like to play head games with us. It is the easiest way to keep a person broken. Act like you are building them up, but in a suttle way shame and humiliate them. This will keep them from actually believing they could achieve the success you offer. You offer an education, but don’t want people to practice what they learn. You want us to expose our traumas, but don’t want us to heal from them. Chase the carrot!!! If you know our traumas and how we came to prison, or why we chose these lives and the poor decisions that led us this way? Then you can help us heal right? Oh, my fault, you only use it to throw back into peoples faces. See the D.O.C. uses its employees to continue the cycle of abuse. Only they do it psychologically.
Pick any 20 prisoners, men and women. Ask them their story. I’m willing to bet everyone has some real traumatic story in their lives. I don’t think anyone woke up one day and chose a date on a calendar to go to prison or commit their crime. Most stories start from a fucked-up childhood. Take the kid that goes to prison at 18 for murdering his live-in girlfriends 4 month old son. How easy is it to forget him in the system ’cause you know he will die in prison? He should die right? At least he should never leave prison, right? Who cares if he saw his mother thrown from a building, who cares if his step-father beat him and locked him in a closet while he pimped his mother out. At 18 he should have had a strong grip of life. Every young man who is raped until the age of 12 should know how to discuss his emotions by the age of 18. This kid was too busy pissing his bed of fear from his grandfather who beat him every day till he finally, found his mother at 11. How selfish of him.
What happens when this kid becomes a father at 16? He does what he knows best, what he was taught. Run! It is too easy. Especially when you are now running with your mum. You ran so much you’d think Nike came out with a crack-pipe. Yeah, this 18 year old kid had every opportunity.
So at 40, after recognizing how good he had it in life, when an officer verbally abuses him, and puts his hand in his face, he should take it as a privilege. Don’t tell anyone, wait, where have I heard this before? You can abuse me, but it is our secret. Yeah it sounds very familiar, but I’m the safe bet, use what you were taught. Go ahead, be confident, assert yourself in a calm non-violent way. Practice humility. The D.O.C. will do right by you. They will remove you from a job you love, they will remove you from your private cell, they will humiliate you and rape you again. They want people to become better citizens with no actual reality of becoming a real citizen again. They can use the skills of this same person to raise $20,000 N.E.A.D.S. dogs for free, while the N.E.A.D.S. program rakes in the cash. But don’t talk about that, we don’t share our dirty laundry with people outside of the house. Especially when the head official endorses the hustle. I wonder how many officials own a $1,000 – $3,000 failed dog?
That is a good trade to keep the workers pickin cotton, I mean training dogs. Do not dare expose it! ‘Cause your 20+ years of good behavior could vanish, parole could banish. Lose that false dignity you were made to believe was ok to nurture. I see the inner child, I’m just not allowed to listen to his voice. It is a scary situation when a case-worker tells you she is going to do what she wants, and the powers that be will believe her. So why open your mouth. Live in silence, ’cause that 18 year old kid, never had a voice, he was fucked from birth. And the D.O.C. officials are there to do the “masters” job and never, ever, let me forget it.
By Hector M. Santiago