From The Literary Hub:
As I write this piece, March Madness is taking place. It is 7 am and my fellow prisoners are gathered in the dayroom of the Cayuga Correctional Facility around a flatscreen TV, reliving last night’s basketball game. The final score was tallied eight hours ago, but the men are still fighting for points and disputing calls. Last night, a battle took place on the basketball court and in the dayroom. Men cheered, jeered, shouted and cursed.
Because it was still too dark in the dorm room to write—on the weekends, the lights don’t come on until 2 pm—I chose the dayroom, a raucous romper room of men watching sports, arguing and playing dominoes by slamming the plastic tiles down onto a Formica table. Here, even chess is a trash-talking contact sport.
Prisons are not set up to inspire writers; I have few choices of where to put down my piece of paper and write. That’s the whole idea of prison rehabilitation—limit the choices and temptations that daily life offers, and hopefully, men will learn to make the right decisions. But the reality is that many of us simply find a way to get what we want. Prison makes us smarter criminals.
Medium-security prisons offer many advantages over maximum-security prisons, but privacy, quiet and solitude are not among them. Sixty men are housed in a dorm at Cayuga, and for my first two months there, I had no desk or chair. My five neighbors were 30 inches from my face. I was in a double-bunk cubicle with two steel bunk beds, two metal lockers and 24 inches of “free” space. My bunkie had to leave the cubicle every time I sat on the bed.
Eventually, I was assigned a single cubicle, which offers a steel bed with an ultrathin “mattress,” a chair and two small lockers. It is delineated by four-foot-high metal partitions, the kind normally used to form bathroom stalls. Sometimes I write in the cubicle now, on top of my locker, in the shadows, as men snore through their ESPN hangovers. From a distance, I listen to the dayroom dialogue—the phrasing, expressions, prison slang—and catch myself repeating sentences out loud to remember them, to practice their sounds.
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub
Poor Baby. Life is just sooooooo hard… 🙁
And, hey, unlike many struggling writers, he doesn’t have to worry about food, shelter, or enough time to write.
Since when is incarceration supposed to be conducive to writing or anything else? It’s punishment for wrongdoers. It’s to protect society from the dangerous. It’s not supposed to be like someone’s den or a nice, quiet library.
Screw him. A woman is dead because of him. She can’t get to pay $5 for coffee …or write…or do anything…because of him.
He can just do us a favor and drop dead in prison, because I do not believe for one second he has changed, feels compassion, etc. He’s still conning folks, this time with letters and articles.
One can begin to forget why the “literary” world is so thoroughly disgusting at times. Then one hits an article like this one – such a wonderful person. That “first degree assault” was actually murder, after a long career of criminality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Faiello
Sorry, but nowhere near the same kind of person as Nelson Mandela, Dr. King, or Dr. Frankl. Poor baby – he had to live on cheese sandwiches for a few days.
Yeah, I was wondering what he was in for the whole time I read the article. And then I saw that “first degree assault.” Ugh. Being in prison because you killed someone in the course of a career of criminal activities is very different from being in prison because you took a stand of principle (or were wrongfully imprisoned by a despot).
I hope the man has repented and is now giving some thought to atonement, but he did not talk about either of those things in the OP, just about the challenges he faced as a writer.
“assault” has lost all meaning when people use it for everything from poking someone with your finger to murdering them. This is actually true for a lot of words that describe crimes.
But yeah, even in this excerpt, it kinda sounds like this guy wants us to feel sorry for him that his life became slightly inconvenient after he did something that rightly got him put in prison.
I think what he did merited execution. That he only got 20 years was a huge break/favor/injustice, imo.