[Fathead] had been poked-up 3 times. It was the winter of 2010 and it seemed like the temperature was about 100 degrees tension-wise in the “N-2” maximum security facility at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center (SBCC). Not long after, my man [Dró] got hit with a broomstick while walking down the tier, he commenced to disarm his attacker and proceeded to administer severe justice on him with his bare hands until the guards came in to restore a bit of order. The attack against my friend had led to a series of other situations that amounted in hand to hand melees. That’s just what it was and believe it or not, I wasn’t one bit surprised by the day to day havoc occurring before my eyes. At the time, I had already been incarcerated 5 years and started to become inoculated to those random acts of high activity. I figured, what can be expected from individuals who’ve been stripped of everything that makes them whole (self-worth and dignity) and thrown into a cage and told it would be 15, 20, 25 years until they could be released? And, we haven’t even considered those serving life sentences also stuck within that same cage.
In such conditions, the state of chaos is almost a constant due to the high levels of uneducated occupants. Most of the men who reside in Massachusetts DOC exist in a state of what the author Paulo Freire called “silent culture.” Silent culture can be interpreted as a people suffering from a culture of abject torment and opposition who lack the educational awareness to confront their circumstances so they can someday rise above it. Prisoners’ inability to identify the social factors in place that made it more likely they would end up incarcerated is what relegates them to a state of silent culture and prevents opposition against the status quo.
Unfortunately, for most prisoners, life viewed through the lens of their own eyes is synonymous to the life of the pet gold fish trapped within the torture chamber of her aquatic coffin. For the goldfish, like the prisoner, nothing changes and the twilight of uniformity actualizes itself into a hell of its own within their limited space of mobility. It is not long before her whole life becomes centered on the basis of her owner (prison guard) dropping dull pellets of fish food at the surface of the fish bowl. After weeks and months of swimming from one end of the glass bowl to the other, absent the joy of spontaneity or happenstance, the liveliness and/or spirit of the fish begins to erode. The fish no longer even frantically swims around the bowl searching for a way out. In fact, she no longer even swims at all, she just remains in one place, lifeless—although the owner perceives the fish to be resting or sleeping. Her owner’s indifference to the hellish conditions of the little goldfish’s reality represents a complete unawareness that the fish has become zombified, only reacting to the splashes of the dull pellets being dropped within her aqua prison cell. I guess the goldfish’s state of “silent culture” is enacted through her motionless state of existence—it would only be a matter of time before she is found floating side-up at the surface of her once living coffin, waiting to be taken out and dumped into a trash barrel and replaced.
A great deal of brothers behind these prison gates exist in their own state of silent culture not too different from the pet gold fish. These men have such great intellectual potential but suffer from a general ignorance. Not because they are dumb or stupid—but ignorant in the sense that they lack basic knowledge and education to expand their way of looking at the world. Trust me, I’ve seen the genius in many prisoners—I know of one guy who plays chess and is almost always 10 moves ahead of his opponent. I know of other guys who play dominos and are capable of calculating the rocks (fechas) with a degree of precision tantamount to most mathematicians and will predict who has what and how the game will end as a result of their amplified levels of perception. No doubt some of the greatest untapped minds are confined to these prison cages. Sadly, most will never have the opportunity to truly repay whatever debt to society that is deemed to be owed because they’ve been defined by their worst act and may die a slave of the state.
Surprisingly, most of the men in here who act violently are not inherently violent men but are victims of violent circumstances. To put that in context, violent simply means “unexpected force or injury rather than by natural causes.” For one to not be able to attend a close relative’s funeral, be in the presence of the opposite sex, move about freely, hug your parents, raise and nurture your own children, and be sent to a distant region surrounded by bars and concrete allocated to a cage with a total stranger (cellmate) while being constantly watched by hateful prison guards, doling out inhumane orders for years and decades of your life, is one of the most mind altering violent experiences a living creature could ever face. The food is garbage (like fish pellets), healthcare nearly obsolete, water is coffee brown, and the mode of the environment is deeply depressing. I would argue that anyone living under such conditions, even the most educated and cultured among us would struggle not to reciprocate the violence they are daily afflicted by against each other or themselves. With that said, the answer is not to severely punish single violent acts by displacing violent offenders into a world of violence—that will only indoctrinate them to become more violent (especially if they came into such environments with little understanding of the world around them already). No, the answer is to allow them to be accountable by addressing their [single] violent act[s] and the community the crime was committed in. Accountability can be achieved in a number of different ways. The author Danielle Sered, who recently wrote a piece titled “Accounting for Violence: How to Increase Safety and Break Our Failed Reliance on Mass Incarceration” provides some clear direction for a new vision for justice. She outlines four principles to address society’s criminal justice practices concerning violent offenders in her theory of “Common Justice.” I’m just glad to know that there are people outside of these walls who do possess somewhat of an understanding of the hell this environment creates, not only within these confines, but with individuals themselves—fostering a cycle of violence in our society and our prisons.
Look here people, shit is rough in here—but all is not so grim. All I alluded to earlier, these environments do breed the brightest of minds and these pains of exclusion does work to bring out the best in some of us. With that, shout outs to all the intellectual warriors behind these walls fighting today for a better tomorrow—so big ups to: SuGanni, Fu-Quan, Arnie King, Tim Muise, Wayland Coleman, T.G., Foxx, M.T., Justice, Jersey, Glorious, Divine-Truth, Troy, Carlos, Vinny Nunez (Universal), Supreme, ARAB, Ely, Braze, Jake, Banger, Strokes, Malcori, Andy, Rashad, Johnson, Troop, Big Country, Al-Ameen, Al-Hajj, Nate, Zakaryah, Gordon, Murder, Muhammad, Jabir, Shorty Mack, Rolando, D-Boy, Tamik, Sammy Garcia, Evans Auguste, Timmy Faruq, Mahdi, Shep, Phil, Darul, James, J-Rock, Jaime, Hush, Francis, and all the other unknown but not forgotten change agents relegated to the confines of Massachusetts Department of Corrections slave/prison institutions!
Your Champion
Derrick Washington
My Slave Narrative