Take Action on Long-Term Imprisonment

Perceptions of time puzzle me. I’m about to begin my 23rd year in prison, and since I’ve been living inside for so long, prison feels completely normal for me. When I write that I’ve been incarcerated since 1987, that doesn’t sound like such a long time ago.

To put the term in perspective, I have to think back to when I was first locked inside a federal prison. Had I met someone then who had served as much time as I’ve served now, he would have begun his term in 1965. From that perspective, I can understand how much time has passed.

Another way for me to put how much time I have served into perspective is to contemplate my age. Yesterday I saw a photograph from much earlier in my term, when I was still in my early 20s. Today I am 45. Although I feel physically fit, the photograph provides incontrovertible proof that I am aging.

When my parents were the age that I am now, they owned a beautiful home, a thriving business, and they had nurtured my sisters and me through our high school graduations. I’m incapable of contemplating such experiences. The decisions that brought me to prison mean that I am well into middle age, though I do not own a home, a business, and I will never know the joy of rearing a child with my wife.

Sometimes I think about how much time has passed. I need these kinds of benchmarks to help me understand what I’ve missed. When I was a teenage boy growing up, I remember, I eagerly anticipated my first sexual encounter. It seemed like it would never come. Now, I chuckle when I realize I’m waiting again. In fact, I’ve waited for sex much longer as a grown man through imprisonment than I waited as an adolescent. When my wife and I make love for the first time, it will be as if we’re virgins.

Since I’ve been in prison, the world has changed in dramatic ways. The first big change I remember was when the Berlin wall came down, and when the government in Russia changed. Then I remember when Saddam Hussein led his troops into Kuwait, and thus inviting our country into a seemingly endless conflict in the Middle East; war was not a part of our culture while I was growing up, but national security has been a concern throughout my imprisonment.

Technology represented another huge change, though until I’m free, I will not appreciate the full scope of how much more advanced society has become. When I began serving my sentence, the relatively few Americans who did own computers stored their files on floppy discs, using MS-Dos technology. The Internet, e-mail, ubiquitous cell phones, video games, and digital music files had not yet hit the market; I don’t know whether they were even in development. The founders of Yahoo! and Google were still in junior high; the founders of Facebook and MySpace were wearing diapers, still crawling.

Our society has taken giant steps forward during the decades I’ve been locked in prisons, though in some ways, progress has either stalled or regressed. With regard to social issues, for example, the news I read suggests that the poor have become even more disenfranchised from the mainstream.

Certainly, I know the prison system has become much more punitive, more costly to operate, and more crowded. Our country confined fewer than 600,000 people at the time of my arrest. The Pew Charitable Trust reports that America now confines more than 2.3 million people; an average of more than 1 in every 100 American residents serve time in jails or prisons, while more than 1 in 35 is under some form of supervision by the criminal justice system.

Whereas it once was unheard of for nonviolent offenders to serve multiple decades of imprisonment in our enlightened society, now we accept long-term imprisonment as the norm. That is why Senator Jim Webb calls America’s criminal justice system a national disgrace. It is the reason I ask you to take action by joining Matt Kelley in supporting the National Criminal Justice Act and joining Thomas Kinney in supporting A Second Chance for First-Time Non-Violent Federal Offenders at Change.org.