Author: NeverGiveUp
I’m 69 years old. I pee through a tube because of prostate cancer. The guy in the middle bunk has a heart machine inside his chest. The guy on the bottom bunk huffs and clears his chest continuously in this irritating manner because of extended exposure to black mold in GDC facilities. Just in my three-person cell, there’s more than 100 years of incarceration served. Me with 45 years. The other two old men in their late 60s with more than thirty years each.
All of us are sentenced to life with parole under the 7-year law. Seven denials for me. Three to five year set-offs every time. They always say the same thing: due to the nature and circumstances of the offense. That’s it. That’s all they ever say.
In Georgia, I don’t even go before the parole board. I simply get a letter.
I was 22 when I came in. Bibb County, Georgia. 1980. As soon as the hammer drops, that’s when it reveals itself to you for the first time. Going through the arrest and county jail and court appearances you feel anxiety, but not the constant and never absent presence of it like it comes when you’ve been sentenced. Hope of a different outcome is gone now. Once the judge drops the gavel on your conviction, a sense of anxiety and threat is from then on your constant companion.
Since my sentencing in 1980, my life has been consumed by anxiety and threat.
In prison there is always the looming fog of potential violence and this creates a never-ending static crackling of danger which keeps the fog thick and your nerves on edge. That never lifts, never fades. It may shift and change shape from time to time, but from sentencing on a prisoner is constantly plagued by what surrounds him or her.
The threats that are uncontrolled peak my anxiety the most. What others may do can consume you once you’ve experienced the extremes men can reach when supervision is not adequate. I’ve seen a man decimate his best friend and sit down in his blood and eat a nutty bar waiting for the guards to come take him to seg.
Your stay in prison could be extended based on someone else’s actions and your need to defend yourself against those actions. Knowing this gives me a lot of anxiety.
These young gangsters are so prevalent in the GDC and lately they are killing older guys. Gang wars and stabbing is now common. There’s been so many in just the past 12 months. Several times I’ve stood and looked at guys being assaulted. As older, infirm prisoners we exist under daily threat and anxiety. I just want to make it out of prison.
These types of threats are compounded by the knowledge the medical care is not adequate either. Being taken care of by for-profit medical providers means the increase of bare minimum care to shave expenses could result in you getting worse instead of better.
There is no going around why most of us are in this situation but it doesn’t mean we should be handled as if we are a lesser being just because we may made a mistake in our lifetime. We were sent here to learn a lesson from our mistakes and come out a better person. In most cases, that is the opposite of what happens due to the accepted culture of the prison system itself.
The threats are not all just about violence. When in the system stepping out of your own desperate frustrations to accommodate your relationships and friendships outside those walls can be very difficult. It creates a crack in the bridge that connects me to them and in most cases, that crack becomes a gap that is too big to hop over, and too hard to repair on my own. Parents get torn from their children, significant others or spouses from their partners, and relatives from their loved ones.
When you are sentenced, there is an automatic essence, a stigma that sticks to you like fly paper. Yes, in my own personal instance I handled a situation inappropriately, to put it mildly, which caused me to be in here and I am not excusing myself for it, but the reality is these walls kill your relationships outside them.
There are more subtle threats too. These include having no commissary money or not getting assigned to a decent housing unit. There is rarely an assigned bunk mate that you will get along with. They do not house you based on the crime you commit, or based on their mental stability, so every time your double cell has the other bed empty anxiety rises and creates an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach. Threat is constant and sticks to you like the damp droplets of condensed fog.
Unlike someone struggling to find work outside these walls, the anxieties within them are not escapable. I have no control over others actions or how someone reacts to situations bestowed upon them. The other inmates within these walls are more action than talking, in most cases, and those that do try to restrain from action are eventually short of patience so even they go to action pretty fast. In the free world there are far more opportunities to just get a little distance from an issue.
They keep pointing back to the original offense even after 45 years. And that 1983 incident where I hit one guard but got charged with 13 counts of assault while the rest of the 13 beat on me. That was over 40 years ago. They always say due to the nature and circumstances of the offense. Always.
When that letter comes—and I’ve gotten seven of them now—what does that do to me? Exhaustion. That’s what it does.
I’ve been in 45 years. Almost half a century. I am a man who, at this moment, has no purpose to his existence on this earth. If I lay down tonight and meet death before I rise in the morning I will know I have fully wasted this time in this human body. I served no purpose. I was here. I ate and drank and crapped and moved about but nothing was made better because I was here. Nothing was made cleaner, happier, holier, improved in any manner.
Nobody did this to me. I did this to myself. My choices and impulsive acts which I could have restrained and chosen not to do but did anyway. How could someone with a brain that ostensibly works as well as mine does have done this to himself? I look every single day at the wasteland I’ve made of my life with the most profound sense of regret and loss. Loss is so prevalent it just sits on the edge of my prison bunk staring me in my face and makes me lower my face in shame.
But I’m trying to understand what could be the reason for this unrelenting refusal to grant parole to old people like us? Why isn’t there a solution for old offenders like us not to be here in this situation?
I’m exhausted with all of this.
Let me go or just execute me.