only a little while here

Written after a year in prison, back before either all of my friends had become corpses, or I had become a corpse to them, this letter captures the last vestiges of optimism I had.

Not the prison yard

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It's funny the things I remember from these past twelve months. How easily my belt slipped out of my suit-pants in court as I took it off and passed all my personal belongings to my parents - despite all the weight I'd gained the belt had still somehow sausaged me into my suit, and in taking it off there was a bit of a reassurance: Well, at least fitting into nice clothes is one thing you won't have to stress about anytime soon.

I remember how puzzled I was at how friendly the sheriffs deputies were in the holding pens in the basement of the courthouse. "Looks like we got an offensive lineman coming through, just hang tight for a few minutes Big Guy and we'll get you processed into the system," as I sat in a hard plastic chair and handcuffs clicked into place around my right wrist.

They didn't look at me with disgust or hatred or revulsion, they simply seemed curious. I realize now where that comes from now - there aren't too many bespectacled clean-cut un-tattooed white guys in our state prison system. All in all I haven't seen any evidence at all of Zimbardo's notorious Prison Experiment, where mild-mannered college students were turned into cruel and hateful guards in a matter of weeks. The guards here are largely just bored, and once they decide an inmate isn't perpetually trying to bullshit them or angle-shoot, they're surprisingly reasonable and respectful - at times even apologetic if the system screws you over somehow.

Waiting to be moved from my first stop after the courthouse, the Seven Locks Detention Center, some of us were on our way into the system and others were on our way out. A funny sort of camaraderie was palpable, we only got zo minutes for meals and an hour of TV-time out of the cells each day so everyone sought to socialize as hard as they could for what little time we got to feel human - and all of us heading into the system sought as much information as we could about what spending time in prison would be like.

Pretty much all of that information turned out to be wrong. And that would be the last time I'd feel camaraderie that didn't come along with a wary, tentative sense of conditionality.

A few days after that, waiting for a few days alone in my cell at the Clarksburg County Jail to be transferred here to MCTC, I remember laying on my bed and jamming-out to Shake it Off on the small jail-issued radio with headphones that kept popping-out of my lumpy wrestling ears, and telling myself I should savor being alone in the cell since it might be one of the last times I'd get any extended privacy.

Which proved to be good advice, as the next time I felt fully isolated from humanity was about nine-months later on out on the Yard. Sadly, "the Yard" no longer refers to "Harvard Yard."

For whatever reason the usual cart full of soccer, basket, and footballs didn't make its way outside that day, and so the large central grassy part of the Yard was empty as opposed to being full of various pick-up sports games like it usually was. And for whatever reason just about everyone was avoiding the open central area, and instead the vast majority of convicts were strolling along the half-mile track that runs just inside the concertina wire-topped twenty-foot tall fence.

After jogging a bit, I walked out into the open grassy area and tried to position myself as far away from everyone else as I could. After adjusting my position to be as far away from anyone as I could get, I just stood there under the sun, feeling totally disconnected for the first time since I came in. I spent several minutes breathing deeply and enjoying the solitude, a yellow butter{ly flapped lazily past me, and I wondered how many more months it would be until I felt so comfortably alone again.

Even during my weeks here in solitary there was a constant clattering of gates and cages and conversations - despite the isolation I never really felt alone. But out in the middle of Yard, finally, I felt detached from this place and just a little bit closer to home.

I could close my eyes and imagine I was surrounded by my family and friends, instead of a population of people whose norms of behavior seem so entirely detached from anything I'd ever experienced before in my life. If I hadn't been here to experience prison life for myself, and I'd instead watched video-footage of life here - I would never, ever have believed that I wasn't watching some spoof documentary made by a bunch of unknown British stage actors, trying as hard as they possibly could to be obnoxious, entitled, and preposterously self-centered.

Prisoners here aren't really violent, cunning, and cruel. They trend much more towards selfish, cowardly, and stupid. But that latter group of characteristics, when recursively perpetuated hundreds and hundreds of times, like the fractal lattice-work of a really scummy snowflake that reads at a third-grade level, creates a culture that's almost unimaginably obnoxious and anathema to everything I'd ever known before.

But, in a sense, that's a good thing. Because for however many more years I have left on this earth I will never again take the community I'm surrounded with for granted.

If I'd never come to prison, I would've gone to my grave having absolutely no idea how incredibly fucking good I'd had it, I would've carried blissfully on - fully unaware at how lucky I'd been to be born into a family and a community full of what comparatively seems like unbridled altruism, as opposed to ignorant, doltish, entitled assholes.

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Standing in line in the chow hall one day watching how some guys would just stand planted yelling at someone five tables away and holding up everyone behind them, and others simply bypassed the line altogether to get to their tray faster - it clicked: school isn't so much about teaching academics, it's about inculcating culture. It teaches you about saying please and asking before taking and how to interact with your community at large - all behaviors I'd assumed were simply part of all human nature, and not something that I, and just about everyone I'd ever interacted with before getting here, had been taught. As near as I can tell there must be some horrible hood-rat version of Sesame Street where Oscar is constantly choking his handler out, Snuffaluffagus and Big Bird are teaching the kids the best way to light a crack-pipe, and Bert and Ernie have Elmo shorn bare and tied up in their basement.

And after several months of tutoring a wide range of inmates, maybe the saddest and most dangerous thing I've discovered is that the schools which fail to teach simple social courtesies also utterly fail to teach academics: not simply producing SAT scores that are a few-hundred points lower, but grown-ass men who can barely read Dr. Seuss or do arithmetic on their fingers.

Determining who exactly is to blame for the state our inner-cities have found themselves in certainly isn't the place of any one person, but in less than a year around the products of those failed inner-cities it's abundantly clear to me that the failure isn't just largescale and systemic, more insidiously it's familial and granular - a matter of broken individuals as much as broken institutions.

A lot, if not most, of the men here shouldn't be allowed back outside these walls. Twenty to thirty year terms seem to work since most of the retirement-aged inmates seem to be both mellow and remorseful, but despite all the journalistic and political rhetoric: so far I haven't met a single genuinely non-violent drug-offender. They may have been only been arrested or dealing or possession, but they all tell stories of armed robberies, assaults, beatings, and other violent anti-social behavior. The drug trade is a black market, and by definition black markets use interpersonal violence to enforce their rules.

Exhibit A of that would be Bolo, a guy on my tier who spent five-minutes complaining about how it was bullshit that his Intent to Distribute charge was considered violent by the State of Maryland, and then went on to tell stories about riding around downtown Baltimore in an SUV full of fellow drug-dealers, all of whom felt safe since each had a handgun and Bolo had an AK-47 in his lap. Turns out you don't actually need to use an AK to deter inner-city threats, simply flashing it does the trick.

So taking some guy from the hood in his late teens or twenties and locking him up for five to ten years puts someone with no plans and next to no ability to earn a simple honest living and who has very little impulse-control, empathy, or intelligence, into an environment that reinforces all the worst things about him for several years, and then sends him back out into society a much more broken and maladjusted man. The heavy majority of inmates aren't guys you'd want living anywhere near your friends and loved ones, even before they ended up behind bars - and they emerge even worse.

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On the walk to pick-up my commissary order one day I overhead the following: "Man, I really wish I could get my damn lithium refilled - the voices have started to say some seriously fucked-up shit." If the mental health care here is so backwards it doesn't even ensure schizophrenics get their drugs, you can imagine how the less vividly mentally ill are handled. There is no individual counseling to speak of, and when piddling efforts are made to provide "group therapy" - it's a farce. Group therapy cannot function without trust, and sticking a bunch of inmates who don't know each other into an air-conditioned room and asking them to automatically trust each other is preposterously ignorant of the distrust and suspicious that permeate prison culture.

Textbook mental health issues aside, there are many inmates who are just shifty humans. With maybe 7o% of the guys in here coming from abject poverty and at least another 50% from run-of-the-mill poverty - exactly who ends up here from the broken neighborhoods they come from seems to mostly be a function of bad luck and stupidity.

The guys in here are largely a random sampling of a larger population, all of whom were doing the exact same shit. For every dude locked-up in here, I'm fairly sure there are at least four or five others still running around carrying-out the exact same offenses - and just not getting caught and convicted, simply by way of blind luck or being mildly more discerning in their crimes.

Hopefully in a generation or two society looks back at the prison system the same way we now look back at public floggings and amputations: "Holy shit, we really thought taking the products of broken communities and just hiding them behind concrete walls for a few years instead of working to repair the places that were producing them was a good idea?!"

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And so the terrible part of this place isn't really the lack of freedom or the terrible food or rooted in anything physical. The terrible part of prison is the nearly absolute absence of social trust. On the outside you can trust that those in authority will, for the most part, act transparently and rationally - if you get pulled-over by the cops or scolded by your boss, although they may be priggish about it, you know any punishment will be limited and at least vaguely rational. And you can trust that the friends and loved-ones you keep around you will be trustworthy and dependable - you aren't on your own, you have people watching your back.

But in here you can never be sure if the administration will randomly decide to move you from building to building or even compound to compound, and there is very rarely a true-blue friend in here - or even many people who you can depend on to act with anything other than their own self-interest.

Until I got here I'd totally taken for granted the social trust that'd been ever-present in my life: I almost always knew that the people in charge of me would behave reasonably, and I surrounded myself with friends and family who I trusted and who nearly always acted with my best-interests in mind. Even if the altruism around me wasn't absolute, I could trust that my friends and family would have my back and look out for me if need be.

So perhaps it's fitting that I'm in here, because I violated this social trust - which now means so much to me, and that I'd previously taken totally for granted as a universal given. I allowed a relationship that should've simply remained one of protection and support, without any other emotions or actions coloring it, to become confused and complicated. And so in a sense I do belong. Because although I didn't engage in the inevitably violent black market drug trade, beat the shit out of anyone, physically invade anyone's privacy and sense of security by breaking into their home, or traffic in any services or products whose production or distribution damages anyone - like everyone else in here, in my own way, I acted against the trust that keeps a community glued together.

So as much as I'm looking forward to coming home, if society needs a dragnet that catches the people who commit my sort of offense as well as everything else and puts us all behind the same walls - I'm happy the walls are there to keep the other criminals in here and away from the rest of you, even if it means I'm stuck in here with them for a bit.

If nothing else I'm gaining an invaluable awareness and gratitude for the life I've been separated from the past year. I didn't realize how good I had it, and if you're reading this it means you're someone who was part of that good - so if it hasn't already been said: I won't let you down again, and I'm going to do my utmost to take everything I can from this experience and use it to get as much good done as I possibly can once I get out of here.

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Luckily, there are bright spots and fleeting moments of humanity. Despite the fact that walks to the chow hall are the tensest time since it's when most of the stabbings go down, back during winter when someone lost their footing on the ice everyone chuckled and there was some good-natured teasing. When I had to get strip-searched and then fully secured, shackled-wrists to shackled-ankles, before I was transported across the street for a medical appointment, the whole thing took on the air of a fraternity kidnaping once the guards realized I wasn't a threat - especially after I got into the transport van by sitting on the door-frame and then ridiculously inch-wormed myself up inside the half-opened doors and backwards into the seats like Jim Carey jamming himself back inside that rhino.

And in the gym I've had a couple different gang-members who I'd never interacted with before surreptitiously get my attention, making me assume I was about to be offered some tasty drugs or extorted, but instead quietly compliment me on my weight loss. As jarring as the overall culture can be, moments like that have reminded me that - despite our differences - everyone in here is a product of their upbringing as much as their choices, and at times most guys seem able to disentangle themselves from prison culture and treat each other decently, if only for a moment.

As much as I feel very separate from nearly everyone around me, I have met a handful of relatively decent guys and made one true-blue friend - and there's always an abiding sense that we're all just people collectively put into a truly shitty situation, which can inevitably bring out our worst at times. But then almost as a rule, soon after I find myself getting all wistful about human frailty and our shared struggle as inmates - someone will be a straight dick for no apparent reason and I'll be reminded of how much I'm looking forward to getting the hell out of here.

In about nine more months, give or take a month or two in either direction, I'll be in front of a parole officer. Should they say no, I'll be able to ask my judge for a sentence modification. And should that not work I'll be looking at a little less than two more years from that point until I'm back home - roughly the spring of zor8.

Whenever I do get out of here, if the criminal justice is down with it I'm hoping to speak to as many fraternities and male college sports teams as possible to try and prevent other guys from making the same mistake I did - as far as deterrence goes news stories are one thing, but I think my living breathing testimony about the realities of prison life and the lifelong impact this sort of crime has will serve as an incredibly potent deterrent.

But regardless of how the next few years unfold, thank you so much for your continued support and faith in me, and for all that you've done to form part of a world that I'm looking so forward to getting back to. And since it's a relative term, and since time does funny things in here, I hope it makes sense to say that after a little while longer here: I'll see you soon -Dan

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There was no one waiting for me when I got out besides my parents, the community I’d been a part of mourned my death at my arrest - Despite not ever informing me that they’d all be considering me dead going forward.