A prison story

I haven’t written in a few weeks. Frustration, anxiety, pesky illnesses, and new passions really take a toll on you. I still feel partly censored in what I can divulge here, so let me tell you about the new passion I’m trying to develop. I’m learning to play guitar. And more than learning to play it, I want to know everything about them, about music, and just really feel my blood pulsate differently when I think of it. I have even bought an electric guitar I’m taking apart, modifying, and (hopefully) put back together again. I love the feeling it gives me to be in control of such a versatile instrument. Just thinking about it gives me a buzz…

Another passion of mine is humanity, yet I say that more in the Fyodor Dostoevsky sense of “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular”. I like watching prison documentaries for the stories about a different version of humanity you may or may not encounter every day. And there is one story that keeps bouncing around in my head which I would like to share because I found it so intriguing.
There’s this prisoner serving a sentence that will mean he spends the rest of his life in prison with no possibility of parole. He starts off by telling the story of how he has been a criminal for a very long time. He was selling drugs, stealing, using drugs, etc. He had been in and out of prison since he was a teenager until eventually he managed to score his final life-long sentence.

Anyhow, while he was in prison, his son got arrested for murder. At one point the son was in the jail next to the prison his father was in. What the prisoner’s son and some other men had done was they killed someone, and for that crime they were up for the death penalty. But the son's lawyers organized for his father to testify at his son’s trial, saying how he gave a bad example to him, and that he wasn't there to teach him right because he was always in and out of prison or high and drunk as the son was growing up. Also, the family was very poor because the father wasn’t able to work because of his criminal lifestyle, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. The co-defendants in the son’s murder trial didn’t have the opportunity to have their sentenced reduced from the death penalty because their fathers weren’t in prison.

 When the son's trial date came up, the lawyers thought they'd do a charitable act by both father and son and organized to pick them up in the same prison van so they could ride together to the courthouse. In the prison van, the guards and lawyers were all feeling very warm and fuzzy that they had granted this father and son to sit together even for a short trip (though no one knows who specifically asked for this). While in the prison van, the son held his father’s hand through the handcuffs behind their backs. He was grateful to his father for helping get him off death row. Afterwards everyone who had helped organized this great gesture between father and son, were feeling really good about themselves.

Then someone asked the father if he was happy to see his son, and was he excited to be able to help him out, etc. The father answered and said he'd never ever felt worse in his life! He said never had he felt more ashamed and like an absolute worthless human being. He had never felt as low as he felt that day. He said he was disgusted at himself; truly hated himself for the experience. He said he would have preferred never to have seen or heard or touched his son again in his life than to see him like that: in the back of a prison van while up for the death penalty for the disgusting crime he had committed. He said never had he felt like the worst father and the worst person in the world than that day. He said to him that it felt like it was his own death sentence that day, knowing he had failed as a human being. That day he truly repented of all his own wrongdoing and he wished he had never been born so at to give life to someone like or worse than him, even if he was his own blood.

He cried at how embarrassed of himself as a human being he was, and the fact that people thought of him as a hero or a good man for having gotten his son off death row. (Yes, the son had his sentence reduced to life without the possibility of parole.)

Wow, this story touched me very much and I can’t even really explain why.