...trip on the man’s real! (You can follow the authorities rules when it suits your game plan, but don’t ever start believing in those rules! That will get you in a shit-wreck quicker than anything short of believing your attorney, or the system!)

Grab a ball and shoot, some hoops (play basketball) and that will take your mind to a safe level. Take short-cuts in all you do; jump line (get in front of other people in lines), steal everything you can from the institution and from soft inmates; be sure they are soft, because some players get crazy when you steal their shit, or get in their way. Keep it like the streets, go for the weak and helpless.

Play the guards and staff everytime you can. Make them laugh and let them feel superior. Just remember that they are soft-ass holes who are lazy and stupid. If they were true players, they wouldn’t be working for a living; especially in a joint (prison). High ranking officials like to be played on by a "pet niggah," white or black; don’t matter. The important thing is to pick up on the que if the "man" gives it to you. Then you can Jeff (patronize) your way through to a good hustle position, if you can get him or her to like you. Remember! It is important to let them think they know you better than you know them; always let them feel superior at all times.

Play your loved ones to the max, because someday they might be in prison themselves and may need your help whether you are inside or outside prison. They know how important "image" is in the prison setting, so make sure they put together some happening packages and money orders together for you so the other players see you are about business. Don’t worry if Mom, wife, or whoever is on welfare; they can get by somehow. If they drag their feet (delay or ignore your requests or demands of them) make them feel guilty or put a little fear in their ass by reminding them that you will be out there again someday.

If that don’t work, you can use the suicide, or turning into a punk or snitch for profit will usually bring them back into line because they don’t want to ruin the family name inside of prison because of the "good" tradition set by your older brother, Dad, or "Uncle Joe" had set years before in that same prison. New, top-line tennis shoes, new, plush valour blankets, top-brand sweats, some realistic fake jewelry, and money in your account for commissary are life-blood in prison. Drugs are always available to a player; in fact, a true player can make drugs happen through his own resources. Hooking up a cop, male or female, for sex and/or drugs is the hallmark of the top-gun player! Leave the pretty bitches alone, because they usually get all the attention they want or need from cops and robbers alike. Get with the fat, hog-head female employee! Play the bitch for her Joneliness. You can pull the hole (win her over) if you sell her a dream; bring her fantasies to reality. Be a true Mack (womanizer).

If you ever begin to lose track of who you really are, look around until you see another muh-fukker who let the system break him down! Watch the kiss-ass, soft-assed bitch "walk the line." Makes ya wanna puke, right? Stay Hard! F.T.W. (Fuck The World), Baby!

Kind of a mean, "How Not To..." pamplet, right? Nothing nice in any stretch of the imagination, right? But it is very much the theme of things in prison as I find it to be today. Before we can ever realistically ask the question, "Where does it end...," we have to ask...

Where did it all begin? Who knows for sure? Part of the problem is that we fall back into the P.O.V. (point of view) theory that I’ve learned to mentally embrace in much of my thinking. There’s the rich man’s concept; the poor man’s concept; the non-criminal, and the criminal; the intelligent and the less-intelligent to mix into what hopefully might measure up to approaching a common truth. Where would the "rich" man say it all began? Would he say, "people get shitty attitudes and behave disgustingly because they choose to do so," or would he own that there are socioeconomic factors at wor which diminish alternatives in making choices? Would the "poor" ma say it all began anywhere? Would he say in a wisdom which would fa exceed his education, that "Shit happens; as it was in the beginning--is now--and ever shall be; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." (There are "uneducated people" I have found to possess, and act on high levels of intelligence; especially in terms of conventional wisdom or common sense.)

This speculation could go on and on, without ever establishing a consensus of reasoning. Reasoning which could explain and possibly even excuse where sociopathic thinking and behaviors originate in human beings. I think there is good argument that we are not "born" into sociopathic thinking and behavior. Lyrics to a song, The Way Of The World, sang by Earth, Wind, and Fire, stated, ". . .a child is born with a heart of gold; the ways of the world makes the heart grow cold...

Professionals who study human growth and development as well as human thinking and behavior would probably provide "dime-a-dozen" theories assigning such maladaptive thinking and behavior to "human nature," or the "dark side of human nature." That isn’t hard to believe, but what actually triggers or provokes this dark side of human nature into being? What makes that nice little boy, Adolph Hitler, become a world-power leader who is responsible for mass human deaths? Mrs. Manson’s sweet little boy, Charlie? Of course, no one really thinks about such issues because it would appear as though such thinking was an effort at defending the character of such "bad guys." So it simplifies matters for our concerns to determine that both of the aforementioned, and all those who meet such measure, became who they became by their own volition; their own free will; their own choice.

There was a time I bought into that thinking, only I applied it to everyone--victim and victimizer alike. Think about that! Fertile ground for rationalizing all kinds of shit! The scary part of such thinking is that there is basis for such surmising. The victim’s roots in such thinking shows strong evidence of being rooted in the "turn the other cheek" concept when facing a victimizer. A victimizer loves the concept, and the victim can legitimately feel a glow from "suffering gracefully." Naturally, it isn’t that simplistic, nor clearly defined, but the logic therein does become apparent to one who looks deeper than the surface issues. Sometimes this phenomenon is best illustrated in the "battered wife syndrome." Burly Curly, the hubby works all week; gets paid; starts a fight with the wife so he has an excuse to get drunk; come home and proceeds to beat the shit out of her when she complains about what he has done. By the end of the big regular weekend fight, they make up, make love, and life goes on, until the weekend shows up again; then repeat the above sometimes through an entire marriage lifetime. Wifey, Susie Sweetie, is so content to be abused and to complain to all who will listen to her that it becomes evident, for the most part, that change is out of the question. This is how she and Burly Curly have learned to do their thing to themselves and each other and call it "love."

On the more traditionally criminal side of things, the raped lady lolls in gore of her self-pity compounding the injury she suffered in the first place. This poor woman can be encouraged into playing the forever-after victim, to where she cannot enjoy sex with anyone, ever again. She can become fat, ugly, and rabid in her "anti-penis" crusade for the rest of her miserable life. She won’t recognize that her life is miserable, because she will be locked into the "martyr mode." This is not said to diminish the evil perpetrated by the rapist, but more to illustrate the further damage done by the seeming over-reaction of the rape victim. In my opinion, staying a "victim" is the crime of the victimized; not the victimizer. The victimizer’s role is complete when the victim culminates the rape with securing criminal justice revenge, or is at least removed from...

A 7, continuing: October 13, 1996

...the rapist’s physical power. She has every right to get totally pissed, seek revenge through the criminal justice system or tough family member or friend, to get medical assistance in "cleaning up the mess," from unwanted sperm (to avoid unwanted pregnancy) to venereal disease(s), to healing from the physical violence she may have endured in the rape process. Beyond all that, she simply invites the tragedy to continue so that she may suffer at leisure for the rest of her life.

Granted, not every raped woman will have the internal strength to pick herself up and go on with her life in a normalized manner. Society and Culture play a big part in helping her to "catastrophize" the hurtful event. Other people help her to take it to another level beyond the physiological occurance of coitus or other sexual activities perpetrated by the rapist. They help her to take it to her "core," where her psyche becomes obsessed with the "Ain’t it awful; I’m not worth anything anymore--because my only worth was my sexual selective ability. Someone "had" me that I didn’t want so now I’m going to be miserable for the rest of my life. I’ll live among others who will play into my tragedy and help me feel sorry for myself for the rest of my life. It’s almost delicious; might even make/ it on to an Opra Winfree show where I can cry and re-live the hateful experience for perhaps millions of viewers. Yes!; this is good!, etc. The public in general loves to be horrified.

Please understand that I am not saying that all raped women respond in the manner I have described above. Nor am I attempting to say that suffering and indignation should have generally prescribed time-limit to deal with and let go. Each woman is forever an individual to that extent. All I am attempting to point out is that we--as a society/culture--encourage such unfortunate women to press the pain beyond the physical into the level of psychosomatic realms where the pain is much more devastating. My understanding of physical pain is that it is part of our human nature’s warning system that something is wrong and needs to be taken care of; to be gotten away from; to do away with. I think the psychological pain element is the same in that we need to seek and secure a "cure."

Naturally, we cannot "turn back the clocks" and undo a harm to ourselves or to others. That "cure" is not available to any of us that I know anything about.

My thoughts lean in the direction that we may best serve ourselves and those around us if we strove to stay healthy with our inflamed emotions. Too much or too little of anything usually isn’t healthy in regard to being in touch with our feelings. It is something like, "too bright a light will blind the eyes; just as too little light will blind our eyes. If a woman gets raped, she should scream in rage, fear and disgust. If she survives the ordeal with her life, she should seek redress in any legal form available; even illegal, if she should choose. But under no circumstances should she embrace the shame and pain and stay drunk on it’s poison juices so that she becomes addicted to the obsession.

This example of crime is more obvious as to how blatant we can emerge ourselves in self-pity. There are other crimes as well. Especially when a loved one is killed/murdered. There are cases where the grief for this loss is carried to a height of sickness. Example: "A black man killed my (white) dad, and I have hated all black people ever since!" Or, "My older brother was killed in Viet Nam by a Vietnamese. I hate all those slant-eyed bastards!" Even to, "White man killed black African slaves 400 years ago, and I hate all these white bastards for what they did to my racial ancestors!"

My point is that we raise our indignation and sustaining rage levels to pure lunacy. I don’t say to forget or ignore such calamities, but rather we should take measures to attempt to keep such atrocities from ever occurring again. This would be a much healthier approach than to perpetuate the past tragedies by never resolving the hurt and then going on with our regular lives.

There is a "push" going on in the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections to cut down the amount of personal property that an inmate is permitted to possess. The directive being enforced is the "2.4 cubic feet space" locker box to contain all an inmate’s personal property. The rationale is that crowded space with additional property clutter is a fire hazard and prevents the Correction Officer from making timely, thorough shake downs for contraband items and weapons. This is all well and good for the Corrections operations, but what of the inmate who is forced to be in prison, year after year, for periods of five, ten, fifteen, twenty or more years. Their whole lives of personal possessions to be held in 2.4 cubic feet of space? This is like two 12" square boxes with one 6" square box to hold their personal items.

For purposes of pack ups for transfers to other institutions, all the inmate’s personal property items are to be secured in that 2.4 cubic foot locker box. This means your personal clothing as well as state clothing, shoes, pictures and letters, books, commissary items, radio and earphones, typewriter. Anything that will not fit in this locker box must be sent home (outside) or destroyed. While in an institution, the locker box is where personal property is to be stored; nothing is to be kept under your mattress.

This sounds neat and controlled, but think about the inmate. If he complies with this mandate, his personal world is shrunk to that tiny space. If all inmates were only doing 6 months or a year, this kind of deprivation would be in order if for nothing else than to keep the prison setting from being "comfortable," in relation to his world of personal property possessions in the limited world of prison life. When the prison experience is made even more austere where the inmate has nothing to lose, these inmates may become more difficult to manage and control.

Much of the dehumanizing processes in prison settings are coming into play because of politics. There have been inmates released from prisons who have gone out and appeared on various TV talk shows and have told the public how "plush" they had it while they were in prison because of the fruits of corruption.