Scene: Death Row – a Christmas tree, ornamented, tinseled, well-lit, complete with phony gifts beneath. It crowds one half of the hall as we shoulder on around en route from and to chow. Most guys walk on by – eyes ahead; but some press close to thump a tiny colored light bulb hard enough to darken it, pinch needles into zees, or brazenly slap the crap out of plastic dec- orations, as if to say, “I’m hurting you because you’re hurting me.” Still other men oohhh and aahhh, like little kids, eyeing mint-condition memories that are kept shelved except for special occasions. Never- theless, the Lord is my shepherd- I shall not want.
II.
The other day an officer stood there peering deep into its depth of plastic branches, then grabbed it roughly, angrily even, and shook-shook-shook the fuck out of it, rattling off a noisy mess of decorations. “Nope, Sarge, nothing!” he hollered up the hall, his voice rolling over scattered ornaments and turning a sharp corner to enter the office, from where a faint, unconcerned reply returned: “Okay.” The officer scanned the wreckage. Then looked at us and shrugged. He goosestepped back back to the office. We rebuilt our tree.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. George Wilkerson lives on Death Row. He is a talented writer, always keeping us on our toes. He is an occasional contributor to WITS, a co-author of Crimson Letters, an eye-opening book released in 2020, sharing the voices of those living on North Carolina’s Death Row, and his writing can be found on several other platforms. I’m happy to say, he is also the third place winner in WITS’ final writing contest of 2020.
Mr. Wilkerson can be contacted at: George T. Wilkerson #0900281 4285 Mail Service Center Raleigh, NC 27699-4285
It’s been a crazy year, and with only 21 days left, I’m done chronicling it. I’m fortunate to see the end.
I was thirty-two years old when I came to prison. I wasn’t a fighter, wasn’t ready for the predatory violence associated with being locked up. I had to learn how to unlearn all the societal norms I grew up on.
In prison – up is down, right is wrong, and vice-versa. If you’re a male, you can’t show weakness of any type. If you do, you are lunch. You might as well don a neon green jumpsuit and carry a placard saying, ‘Take advantage of me. I’m new. I’m vulnerable.’
I navigated that. Not easily, mind you, but I survived.
It makes me wonder about how females manage. They aren’t just preyed upon by inmates, they also have to run the gamut of officers, more often male, who can be known to take advantage of their positions of power. It brings to mind a few women I’ve known. Three gems. I’ve changed their names to protect the innocent.
Tara. I was assigned to a hospital facility during my COVID experience. I was sent there because I couldn’t walk. I was brought low by an amputated toe and the long-haul effects of COVID-19. The facility was basically a female unit, but the hospital part was both male and female.
Females were assigned there, so they worked in the kitchen, the laundry, for maintenance, and also as utility workers. You never saw them or were permitted contact or to converse with them, and they were escorted through male areas to ensure this didn’t happen.
I first saw Tara while I was being escorted from my hospital room to a video appointment with a doctor about thirty miles away. Tara was locked in a holding tank, and she couldn’t communicate with anyone because she was deaf. I knew this because of the big yellow tag on her shirt, ‘HEARING IMPAIRED’.
A lifetime ago, I had a friend who lost her hearing and had to learn sign language to communicate. I’d had to learn how also. I wasn’t very good, but I understood the basics, and she was always patient with my underachiever status.
I took a chance with Tara. After all, the rules said I couldn’t talk to her, they didn’t say I couldn’t sign to her.
“How are you? Are you okay?”
She explained she was being punished for disobeying a direct order, not packing her property and refusing housing. There were tears in her eyes. She was young, had cropped hair and looked, in a word, vulnerable.
“Don’t give up. Look up, you’re not alone.”
She rolled her eyes. “I have two years left to do. I don’t think I’m going to make it.”
Diane. She was sentenced to forty-five years for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I befriended her while she was incarcerated at a woman’s prison in the mid 90’s. Back then, inmates could write to each other in other units.
I encouraged her to take programs to show she wanted to change her life. She did, and she ended up getting her GED.
Then the ‘system’ shut down letter communication between inmates, supposedly to eliminate communication between gangs.
A dollar for the swear jar, please – bullshit.
I don’t know if Diane ever went home. All of my efforts to find out have been hindered by the system. You see, in Texas, the reality is, they don’t want inmates to be rehabilitated, and they don’t want inmates helping each other.
Melanie. The third side of the coin? Melanie was incarcerated in Kentucky and committed suicide after doing almost ten years. I had her home address, and after not hearing from her for a month, I wrote her mom. Melanie had given up. Many have before her, and many more will after if things don’t change.
Coins are meant to be protected, put in a bank, shown their worth. Priceless…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. John is currently doing another one-year set off, after almost thirty years of incarceration. He is an insulin dependant diabetic, he’s lost a toe to his disease, he’s survived COVID-19, and he is still viewed as a threat to society apparently, since he just got turned down for parole once again. I visited him once in prison. When I left an officer stopped me. He wanted to tell me what a good and amazing guy John Green was. John Green has been a frequent contributor to WITS, and he is also author of Life Between The Bars, a unique and heartwarming memoir described by Terry LeClerc, “This book is so good because each chapter is short, has a point, doesn’t whine. It’s an excellent book.” John can be contacted at: John Green #671771 Jester III Unit 3 Jester Road Richmond, Texas 77466
I lost my way sometime after 2006. I’m a Marine Corp veteran and father of four amazing children, as well as two beautiful grandchildren, but I still lost my way. I felt like I was on a train, headed down a mountain, without breaks, not realizing pride and selfishness were pushing the train faster, not to mention greed, alcohol and drugs. I thought I was in total control though. My train took me to prison for the first time in 2014.
Before that happened, I had tried to convince myself the people who meant the most to me didn’t notice the condition of my train as it passed them every day. I told myself, ‘I got this.’ I’d pay half the rent one week intending to pay the rest the next week and justifying it all with, ‘Well, at least I paid something.’ Next week would come, the utilities would be due and the other half of the rent, plus the three kids that looked up to me needed lunch money, and the refrigerator was empty. I was so ‘in control’, I didn’t realize the fifty dollars I just spent on drugs was taking food out of their mouths.
Life kept picking up speed. My GPS stopped working, and I was headed in a direction I never saw coming. I’ve tried, over the years, to figure out what made me lose focus on what was really going on. What I finally figured out was – it was me. I was the conductor. I derailed myself at the age of 48-years-old. I have no one to blame but me. And I needed help. I found help in God.
And I had to start believing I was worth happiness, love and forgiveness. I also figured out I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Looking back, I think prison may have saved my life. I could have died on my path. I think it was a sign from above, telling me to steer in the direction of freedom, family and forgiveness. The most important change I’ve ever made is letting God take over as my conductor.
ABOUT THE WRITER. Charles Butcher is new to our writing family, but has said what many writers have shared – ‘prison may have saved my life’. That sometimes get lost in the debate of how to improve conditions and the system. I hope he shares more of his wisdom and perspective with us in the future, acknowledging we can take what’s good and make it better, while fixing or removing all that is broken. Mr. Butcher can be contacted at: Charles D. Butcher #166023 21000 Hwy. 350 East Model, CO 81059
For over three years I’ve been writing for Walk In Those Shoes, a sounding board for prisoners whose voices would otherwise be muffled behind prison walls, as well as a call to action for readers. In a world of social statuses, cultural practices and racial characteristics that serve to divide us, we remain connected through our human experiences. We’ve all lost a loved one. We’ve all dreamed. We’ve all had childhood crushes for that special someone that turned our words to mush. We’ve all done something we wish we could take back, and we all have something yet to attain. Our experiences link us in a way that voids our differences, the fabric of our worldly relationships woven in our stories.
It was after reading personal and thought-provoking essays by writers like John Green and Charles Mamou, that I recognized the importance of Walk In Those Shoes. Each piece was thoughtfully edited and kept true to its writer while providing a visual nexus that was soulful, stories not told with rhetoric but the realism of childhood abandonment, abuse and regrets. There were also tales of familial joys, kindness and compassion. I could hardly wait to join such an astonishing cast of writers whom I’d come to admire through their shared vulnerability.
On October 5, 2017, Walk In Those Shoes featured a piece titled I’m Still Breathing, an homage to Dr. Maya Angelou. In addition to the message, there was an image of a rusted manacle laid bare on granite siding. This visual selection was a symbol of empathy meant to resonate with my words. It was my first writing to be published on Walk In Those Shoes, my induction into a brotherhood of writers and one of my proudest moments.
Simply put, Walk In Those Shoes is a proverbial reminder that we are not without empathy. It is a platform for writers with broken pasts to make whole their productive future. I’m grateful for my fellow contributors for their courage to share their experiences. Our stories are not meant to suffer in silence, our stories are meant to heal.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Terry Robinson often writes under the pen name ‘Chanton’, and his creative resume is rapidly growing. His is a co-author of Crimson Letters, Voices From Death Row, a book banned from prisons in North Carolina; he is an active board member of Walk In Those Shoes as well as one of several frequent contest judges; and he continues to work on his memoir, as well as a book of fiction. His writing abilities are amazingly far reaching, and we are fortunate to have his voice and input in the direction of WITS. Terry Robinson has always maintained his innocence, and after studying his case file and transcripts WITS also believes in that innocence. Mr. Robinson can be contacted at: Terry Robinson #0349019 Central Prison 4285 Mail Service Center Raleigh, NC 27699-4285
I. My block housed only 18 to 24-year-olds. For my one hour of recreation on my first day there, weighted with full-restraints (hand- cuffs, ankle-shackles, waist-chains connect- ing them) I clank-paced the tier. Each cell door had an eight-inch square of window, some framing faces that peered at me. Marko, a feral-looking latino who had come from home to hole as a pretrial detainee, flagged me as I passed. He was breathless with excitement and blinking rapidly as he testified: “God speaks to me.” He’d tried but failed to pluck out his eyes, so, to receive divine enlightenment, he instead had committed to hand- copying the Bible’s one thousand three hundred and eighty-nine chapters, every jot and tittle using crayon-sized floppy- rubber pens that were approved (suicide-proof) for segregated inmates. He’d been at it two years, during which his hair and beard grew like Jesus’. His eyes widened, crackling with supernatural energy as he showed me a waist-high tower of babbling pages.
II. Skyler, freckled and well-muscled from toting hay bales, had never traveled past city limits until he got arrested. An accent is not an accent in one’s hometown – it’s invisible – but Skyler’s tobacco bent even further into ‘baccer. At first. Six months in, we were friends. I called his name from behind my door, since it’d been several days since we’d spoken. I pressed my ear to my door’s steel crack to catch his answer. That’s not my name. My name is Fahbo (Fabulous, in short) from New York. I’m an ahtist. I could feel his tongue wrang- ling his identity, twisting it’s straight but tilted spine into a kind of personal scoliosis, figuring nobody would care to remove his corselet. He was right.
III. This one guy loved the hole. He’s been in and out of many holes since age fifteen. This manimal fancied himself a hunter. He’d cover his cell’s light fixture, and his rear-wall’s strip of window; so, to see in, an officer was forced to shade her eyes from the tier’s glare while leaning face against the eight-inch door window. They’d hear a faint but steady friction: ch-ch-ch-ch-ch- and suddenly a milky roar would splat into the Plexiglas at mouth- level, followed by a weaponized penis thudding and rubbing it in. The guard would scream a variation of, “Oh, you nasty muthafucka! Get your sick ass down from there!” He’d built a ‘deer stand’ he bragged, by stacking books on either side of his door so he could get a clear head shot. He seemed shocked when I admitted I didn’t do it too, as if I were some strange beast.
IV. Evidently, prison administrators have figured out how to remove evolution’s rev-limiter and take off its restrictor plate. Its transformative mutations now take place in as little as six months using Therapeutic Seclusion – also known as THE HOLE, in prison lingo. No one who passes through ever leaves the same person if he entered a year ago. The hole is a tool designed to break man down to his quintessence. It hyper- bolizes by creating a parody of one’s character. I’ve seen it strip away the masks and games of faith – no time for masquerades when insanity is gaining – forcing a sort of apotheosis. I have watched it petrify pretense into cement, making men fake forever. I’ve even witnessed it dissolve humanity in atavistic acid: acting like an animal now comes naturally to him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. George Wilkerson lives on Death Row. He is a talented writer, always keeping us on our toes, and an occasional contributor to WITS. Mr. Wilkerson is a co-author of Crimson Letters, an eye-opening book released in 2020, sharing the voices of those living on North Carolina’s Death Row.
Mr. Wilkerson can be contacted at: George T. Wilkerson #0900281 4285 Mail Service Center Raleigh, NC 27699-4285
“My mind was racing with thoughts I couldn’t even grasp mentally. I went home and sat in the house with all the lights out, scared to move, didn’t know what to do nor to say. My mom was gone to a choir convention in Mississippi during the time of the incident. While I sat in our house quietly and somberly in the front room, my mother pulled up with no clue of what just happened. When she came in the door, turned to lock the door, I was sitting there in the dark room. I scared her out of her wits. As a mother who knew her child, she instantly asked me, ‘Boy, what’s wrong with you sitting in here with all the lights out?’ I was so discombobulated I honestly couldn’t speak, it seemed like somebody had my soul…”
It’s been twenty-six years for me now. I’m in solitary confinement and have been for almost six months. It’s the first long stretch I’ve done in lock-up, and I’ve learned if you aren’t mentally strong, it can break you. I’ve thought about everything from being three years old, to that day, to this place I am in now. I’ve probably aged ten years in the last six months, but I think I’ve made it. My blood pressure is crazy, but I think I’ve put it under control by relaxing and focusing on better things.
I was seventeen and still in high school when my mom came home that night. I’d just shot at some men. For months I’d been shot at, intimidated, ‘bullied’, by an adult. I’d sat in a car as it was beaten with a crow bar. I’d had a gun pointed at my head. My parents knew, the school knew, the police knew. They all knew. I can never take back what happened that night.
I now understand what they mean when people talk about the school to prison pipeline. Things are a little different now in Mobile, Alabama, where I came from. I hear there are anti-bullying laws in place to protect kids like I was. There are laws to keep kids from being followed around and shot at, as well there should be. No kid should ever have to grow old in a place like this. No kid should ever be expected to know how to make people stop shooting at them.
I went from going to high school, playing football and dreaming, to living in a nightmare. No, I can’t take it back. I should never have had to. It should have never gotten to that night in my living room.
ABOUT THE WRITER: Mr. Singleton’s story has been shared here, but this is the first time he has written for WITS. I hope he continues to write about his life in the Alabama Department of Corrections. Louis Singleton can be contacted at: Louis Singleton #179665 0-24 Fountain Correctional Facility 9677 Highway 21 North Atmore, AL 36503
I don’t remember my mother’s face. Not the warmth of her smile or her loving embrace. In fact, I don’t have one memory of her at all. Sherly Ann Lacey. In a drugged-out rage, my sister’s father took her life one night while she slept. Using a shotgun, he blew her brains onto a wall. She was due to have his second child any day.
Naturally the event devastated my, her, family. She was the first of my grandmother’s eleven children to be lost so early in life.
Many will believe it was my mom’s murder that first shaped my life, but that’s not true. It was people’s reaction to it that molded who I became, shaped the conclusions I would draw in life and how I’d react to pain, loss and various levels of devastation that serve as markers in every life.
Nature verses nurture? Nurture wins hands down every time. It’s people who shape people. Hard scrabble environments do not create hard hearts or ill-formed souls. People do.
Louise Lacey, my grandmother, herself a quiet, ‘nurtured’ woman, raised my sister and I. A beauty in her day, giving birth to eleven children by three different men, and being subject to my great-grandmother, who might well have been the basis for a character from Walter Mosely’s Los Angeles, my grandmother eased into a grand-motherly figure. Love.
By the time of my mother’s murder, my granny was an old hand with children. Panic after a miss-deed or the bright blood from an accident didn’t send her reeling. When her brother beat his wife, she’d complain about the noise – after a while…
Hers was the knowledge of survival. Coming of age in the 40’s and 50’s as a black woman was as hard as it was complex. You cried when you couldn’t hold it in any longer. Then you simply dusted yourself off and did the next thing needed to survive. Tough.
I’m surely being too simple, short, and impatient with the telling of her depth of spirit, her staunch faith in God and her unshakable commitment to her family. Like the moon, she’s a silent force that has affected every part of me.
If my granny’s footprint in life was quiet, it was only because my great grand-mother’s, Josie Frederick-Hintz, was so loud. At six foot in her socks, ‘Big Joe’ was a demanding, sharp-tongued, physical woman. She chewed tobacco, ran a whore house and carried a .38 revolver until the day she died – not for show or as a bluff.
Born in 1911 in Louisiana, Big Joe had owned a grocery store, bowling alley, brothel, after-hours gambling den and a total of five different rental properties throughout Los Angeles. She pinned her money in a silk pouch to her bra.
Josie gave birth to two children and raised her brother’s son after his murder. Systemic racism, sexism, abject poverty, rape, molestation, robbery, abuse, beatings, murder, jealous, insecure and ambitious men, their equally motivated, if shrewder, counter-parts in women – Josie not only survived it all in the big city as a veraciously stunning beauty, she was also able to, at times, win herself a few slices of pie.
But those pieces of ‘white only pie’ come at a cost. Josie’s size in life demanded control and that others, people she loved, be smaller in life to make room for the demands of who she needed to be – the boss!
Her biological son, my great-uncle Bill, Jr., was a con who became a homosexual after being violently raped in prison. He was serving time for counterfeiting U.S. Treasury notes, five dollar bills. Her brother’s son, Lemule, would become a vicious, small time pimp.
Large personalities, small egos, violent drama, they were characters you couldn’t make up. My grandfather was from a cattle ranch in Texas, a pimp and hustler who discharged from the army in California.
They were all largely uneducated people save by life itself. Like the rest of us, they had flaws. The one that has been a prominent force in my life was their silence. They seemed to need to marshal their energies to hold it all in and to move forward.
Through my self-education while in prison, I’ve become fairly articulate, but I remember the silence of a time before I became a reader, before I saw the value of language and communication, before I learned to read, comprehend and apply ideas to further my own understanding of me, my world, my actions. Silence.
I know how the lack of the ability to express one’s self in words pushes the thunder of action deep into one’s ears. You’re not deaf… there is no sound!
I came up in the 80’s, MTV, BET, videos, PC, crack victims, empires and hip-hop culture. My family’s silence was a foreign language subtitled on silent film.
Now listen! We all believe our own struggles to be the worst. It’s that forest through the trees thing. But by growing up never having a single meaningful conversation with the adults in my life, I kind of raised myself. I sat waiting for something or someone to influence me, but no one ever took notice.
We are all born into motion. That’s what life is – motion. A body in motion will stay in motion until it’s acted upon by an equal and opposite force. I crashed into Mr. Michael B. Huston.
Teenagers, kids, are like vacuum chambers that suck up everything indiscriminately. Facts, emotions, ideas, words, anything floating through their lives. Sadly, sometimes, the adults who rear them contribute the most trash to the bombardment when they are the primary force policing the intake. They may sit back, looking confused and even offended as the young life bursts for lack of any meaningful release. At around thirteen to fifteen or so, they act out, rebel at the mistreatment.
Now, I grew up on violence without ever being told it was wrong to do this or that to people. Not simply the violence put forth by the men of my family and neighborhood against the women of my home and in my world, but poverty creates its own hellish acceptance of might as a viable means, be it for respect or fear.
When my father, the Baptist preacher, found out I’d been doing robberies when I’d shot and paralyzed Mr. Huston – then an Assistant Attorney General to the State of Oregon – he expressed shock and hurt. “How could you do something so obviously wrong?!” I remember him blurting over the phone as I sat in a juvenile detention center.
The answer, though I didn’t know how to articulate it as a seventeen year old, was that I really didn’t know that it was all that big a deal, that people would place such a huge value on life.
That will sound twisted to some, but as a child it was extremely remedial to me. This may go a long way in explain the Black Lives Matter movement to some. I’d just tried to kill ‘myself’ a few months earlier. There was no panic, anger, or fear from the community. There was no rush to review the issue before various boards. As a child, I never received care or treatment for my mental health.
I’d ingested a small mountain of heart, blood pressure and pain pills. Then I got into bed. I remember passing out. Kids test the boundaries of their world. I didn’t believe I wanted to deal with any more pain in my life, so as no one was ever looking, I sought to move on.
If my life, my ‘black life’ didn’t matter to the world, why would I come to the conclusion as a child that his white one did? Not that race was a factor for me or Mr. Huston at the time. The justice system made that point emphatically.
I was thoroughly and completely confused. As I sat in Court, it was like returning to Central Park, only to find it’s been moved! You know the address, turn the corner, and it’s not there! But how could you, I, be that wrong?
“How could I do something so obviously wrong – ‘toanother’?” is the unspoken end to the question.
It’s a question of value(s). Poor, uneducated black boys and girls are taught in a plethora of ways that they have little to no value. So why does it come as such a shock when their value of others falls short in word or deed?
The best lies ever told take place in the vacuum of the mind, there’s no one other to refute, challenge, or evaluate them. So, speak the thought, the feeling, and force the conversation out into the ‘now’. It’s the thing that gives value to human beings… love spoken into a life that is loved – valued, even.
ABOUT THE WRITER. Mr. Jones has an honest and thought provoking style of writing that is exciting to work with. I look forward to hearing more of his insight as well as more of his life’s experiences. Mr. Jones has served 32 years for a crime he committed when he was seventeen years old. He can be contacted at:
DeLaine Jones #7623482 777 Stanton Blvd. Ontario, OR 97914
As a Boy Scout grasping the basics of wilderness survival and hiking through buzzing, mosquito-infested forests while life as I knew it faded behind, I first had to grapple with transience and the pain and fear interwoven with impermanence. Everything I carried served a practical function, and after being rolled up, tucked, folded, stacked and packed, it altogether occupied six cubic feet, or so my canvas rucksack advertised.
An object’s value was the sum of its utility minus its volume and mass, measured in cubic inches and ounces. The less I had, the freer I felt. My sense of liberty kindled when I was limited to basic necessities, my creativity sparked to life by the demands of simple survival. One of my handiest items was twine, a fat spool of the sturdy kind for starting fires, building snares, catching fish, dangling food from a tree branch, wrapping tourniquets, and generally for binding. Many things find a higher purpose when bound.
Now I camp in a cell with the square footage of a tent. According to prison policy, I should be able to fold tuck, roll, stack and pack all my belongings into three boxy, flimsy, white plastic shopping bags about the size of brown paper grocery bags, all amounting to a total of six cubic feet.
Books qualify as personal property, no more than ten. It takes ten books to adequately study my faith, but it also takes ten law books to adequately work on my legal appeals and get my body off death row. That’s 2.5 cubic feet of mental and spiritual acuity for me.
I own one cubic foot of hygiene items, luxuries to prevent odors, rashes and to preserve dignity, to soothe my itchy need to feel neat and clean. Two more cubic feet are crammed with my creativity – paper, pens, poetry, essays, drawings, notebooks full of ideas.
That leaves half a cubic foot for commissary food and sentimentality. I own a large brown envelope packed with tattered pages scrawled on by my dad before he died and crappy-but-cute kindergarten drawings by my nieces who swear I’m the world’s best uncle even though I was already here when they were born. I also have a two-inch stack of photos of my brothers and me when we were little boys, of our parents prior to their divorce, of people I’ve never met and places I’ve never been but that are important to my friends or family and therefore important to me.
That’s how I fill and maintain my six feet of cubic space, carved from a hard place. Technically, then, my commissary food is actually considered contraband and could be confiscated. To keep anything new is to discard something old.
I keep my life packed up in bags that tear easily, which is fine by me. In the end my real treasures – my faith, my memory, my love and my creativity – they all inhabit the infinite space inside my soul, incorruptible, ethereal, eternal… and free to bloom.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR. George Wilkerson lives on Death Row. He is a talented writer and occasional contributor to WITS. Mr. Wilkerson is also a co-author of Crimson Letters, an eye-opening book released in 2020, sharing the voices of those living on North Carolina’s Death Row.
Mr. Wilkerson can be contacted at: George T. Wilkerson #0900281 4285 Mail Service Center Raleigh, NC 27699-4285
There are all kinds of reasons to want a pen friend from the free world, some wholesome and some not so wholesome. Obviously it’s nice to receive mail now and then. It’s cool to be included. Most guys receive mail, and it sucks when everyone except you… okay, ALMOST everyone… gets word from people that care.
Mail also let’s people know where you are on the proverbial ‘totem pole’. If you don’t get mail, you most assuredly don’t get money to go to store and don’t get visits. This is also true for phone use. People that don’t get mail rarely use the phone.
I once built a parole package for a friend, and in return he had his fiancé purchase me a profile online in the hope of correspondence. For the most part people write and we are friends for a short time before life’s requirements pull them away.
This is a letter I got from Stephanie, a really cool motorcycle-loving cowgirl – she has her own bike. We wrote back and forth for about four months…
Hi Jeremy, I read your e-book, ‘The Monster Factory’, and I was touched by your honesty and will to survive. It brought tears to my eyes and disgust about the people who run such an awful place and the people who are imprisoned. I sent you some money to help you through your struggles. Please stay strong! Happy Holidays, Stephanie
I enjoy hearing from and reading about my pen pals’ ups and downs. It’s a vicarious way of living myself, of getting to know people and hearing about activities I can’t experience for myself. Sometimes these activities are big things, sometimes small, sometimes happy, often sad. But it’s REAL life, not prison life, and valuable to me because my pen pal has chosen me to share it with.
Every now and then I make a friend that continues to write over a lengthy period of time. Often my correspondence with them provides strength and hope, but every now and then I get a negative reply – made even more sad to me because it’s justified and true. And it hurts.
This letter is from… I’ll just call her P. She was curious and funny. We wrote back and forth for just a few months.
Jeremy, I broke down and read that report. I don’t understand how you could go along with someone who said that he was going to set fire to a night club when he had no control what his ex-wife was going to do. Setting fire to a business was stupid. You’re an idiot for going along with ‘your friend’. So what if your buddy was fighting over his kid, did he threaten you or twist your arm, saying you have to do this or this is going to happen to you? There were other ways to get back at her. Did you know there were three fireman that got hurt that day?? Kevin W. Kulow, 32 years old, died because of you guys. One captain sustained critical respiratory injuries, he was hospitalized. Another team captain had sustained serious burns to his face, knees and hand. Kevin Kulow was a rookie, seven months on the job, seven months! He was 32 years old. Fuck! All I can say to you guys is, you’re all f&%$ing stupid idiots. You got what you three deserved. I hope you ROT IN HELL for all your actions, all three of you!! DO NOT WRITE TO ME AGAIN. I DON’T WRITE TO PEOPLE WHO KILL FIREMEN OR POLICE MEN!!! P.
Don’t judge her letter, she has family that are employed as first responders. Without P. and Stephanie, and without being able to hear from people in the free world, I would quickly become only aware of this world…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jeremy Robinson is author of Monstor Factory and also a frequent contributor to WITS and part of our writing family, his work is always heartfelt and honest. Mr. Robinson lives in a Texas prison and can be contacted at: Jeremy Robinson #1313930 Michael Unit 2664 FM 2054 Tennessee Colony, TX 75886
I went to trial not because I was innocent but because in my adolescent mind I assumed a jury of my peers would go easier on me than a judge.
I was sixteen years old on December 12, 1995. Me and another guy were out getting high. We were walking down a street in a gang infested neighborhood, and we saw some people that were clearly not from the area. I took part in an unplanned and uncoordinated robbery.
After the jury found me guilty, they recommended thirty years for the three robberies, fifteen years for kidnapping, fifteen years for assault with non-serious bodily injury and five to fifteen years on attempted robbery and armed criminal action. Prior to my trial, the state offered me a plea bargain of a soft life sentence, the equivalent of thirty years.
At my sentencing hearing on February 28, 1997, it was left up to the judge to run my sentences either concurrently, thirty years, or consecutively, 241 years.
“You made your choice, you will live with your choice, and you will die with your choice because, Bobby Bostic, you will die in the Department of Corrections. Do you understand that? Your mandatory date to go in front of the parole board will be the year 2201. Nobody in this courtroom will be alive in the year 2201.”
In February, 2018, the Judge who said those words and sentenced me to die in prison came forward and tried to help me get out of prison. She now says the sentence was too harsh. She regrets it.
My adult co-defendant was given thirty years – 211 years less than I was – and he would have been home now, but he died in prison in 2018 at the age of forty, may he rest in peace.
I’m very sorry for the crimes I committed. I changed my life despite being sentenced to die in prison. I’ve taken over fifty rehabilitation classes through the Department of Corrections and outside entities. I have self-published five books and written ten more. I have an Associates of Science degree and have a few classes left to get my Bachelor’s Degree in Social Work. None of that means anything to the State of Missouri. What matters to the state is that I die in prison for a crime I committed at sixteen years old where no one was seriously hurt.
I feel myself growing old. My bones ache from the steel bunks and concrete floors. Nieces and nephews that weren’t born when I was on the street have kids taller than me now. I’ve watched them grow up in the prison visiting room. I was sixteen – all I want is one second chance. It’s all I would need…
ABOUT THE WRITER. Bobby Bostic was sentenced to die in prison for a crime commited when he was 16 years old. His co-defendant and the leader of the two was an adult and received thirty years. At sixteen years old, in a crime where no one was seriously injured – Bostic was given essentially – a death sentence. Mr. Bostic spends his time writing books and educating himself. If you would like to show your belief that his sentence is unjust, you can sign his petition here.
You can contact Mr. Bostic at: Bobby Bostic #526795 Jefferson City Correctional Center 8200 No More Victims Road Jefferson City, MO 65101
