13 March, 2024

The Great Spork Shortage of 2024

Call them disgusting, call them malnourishing, or call them gross, but prison meals, regardless of the facility serving them, have been consistently eaten at the same times of day for as long as the carceral system has existed. Routine is the foundation on which prisons traditionally operate; however, time changes all things, and even the most fervently held tradition is no exception.

There used to be a time when a prison meal being postponed for anything less than a full-on security breach was unimaginable. The phrase "like clockwork" applied very well. And now? It can be argued that there's no good time to come to prison, but this is an especially bad time for it — at least in Missouri, and particularly at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic & Correctional Center, where it seems that everything is in a perpetual state of falling apart. This includes the dining experience.

We eat from brown, five-slot plastic trays. When I arrived at ERDCC, in 2018, cafeteria-style utensil cups occupied a cart, midway through the line, where there were bright orange sporks to eat your food with and eight-ounce aubergine tumblers for drinking the watered-down Kool-Aid. But allegations of utensil theft eventually prompted the kitchen staff to relocate the sporks to the serving line, where they began doling them out, one per tray. This worked fine but did little to stop anyone from taking stuff out of the dining hall. A person used to catch a conduct violation if they brought their own cup or utensil to the dining hall — or anything personal, for that matter, including canteen-bought condiments. That policy hasn't changed. The second rule painted in big, black letters on the beige brick wall (right after "NO HEADGEAR") still clearly reads, "NO PERSONAL ITEMS," it's just that no one enforces it anymore. Less than a year since I last saw someone turned away for having a coffee mug in his hand, bringing one's own personal cup and spork is now actively encouraged. Guards frequently make announcements over the intercom before releasing the housing unit to a meal, saying that the kitchen has no clean sporks or cups. Consistency in the institution's day-to-day operations has slowly, frustratingly, eroded since I arrived here, but this just seems ridiculous. Irregular mealtimes and staff's frequent failure to announce important events are bad enough, but when institutional amnesia about mealtime must-haves takes complete hold, what's a hungry guy to do? I purchased my own sturdy plastic spork from the canteen for 23¢, but I'm not always packing. Yesterday morning's oatmeal presented a challenge that I didn't care to answer, but when they caught me off guard on chili mac day, a couple of weeks ago, I was happy to have clean hands. My fingers smelled like onions and spices for the rest of the day, but I didn't miss that meal.
The odds of not getting a spork with any given tray are now close to fifty-fifty. I should know better than to come unequipped, but stubborn expectations keep winning out. The DOC's new fiscal quarter starts in April; maybe they'll invest in a remedy to this issue then.

07 March, 2024

Losing: It Gets Easier with Practice

Just a week and some days after my last post, the Missouri Court of Appeals issued a two-paragraph opinion denying my motion to recall the trial court's mandate. The judge's ruling said, in essence, that my claims of fraud on the court weren't appropriate for that venue. It wasn't that the issues I brought to them were invalid but that another court would have to decade them.

This is exactly what the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, under a different judge, decided about different issues, the last time I filed anything in my case. In my appeal of the Missouri Court of Appeals' 2004 mandate, the court declined to make a ruling and passed the buck to the US Supreme Court with all the judicial thoroughness of someone in a hurry to get back to his lunch. I was as confused as I was angry. <<i>>They get to just do that!? They get to just say, "Nah, I don't feel like deciding"!? After that, I spent a several weeks preparing to submit my case to the highest court in the land — which rubber-stamped it the first day back from its summer recess. My lawyers scheduled a call with me last week. On the phone, they sounded nervous about breaking the news of this latest denial. I can't imagine how difficult it must be, delivering that kind of message to someone who's entrusted you with winning back their freedom. They did a good job. They always do a good job. "How are you feeling?" one wanted to know. "It gets easier," I told them. After twenty-three years of this, I'd be in a pretty pathetic state if I hadn't developed a decent level of resilience. My first line of defense against crushing disappointment is refusing to let hope develop into expectations (which are by their nature always unrealistic). The American court system is going to be the American court system, a source of some illogical, unjust, or otherwise shitty rulings. When that happens and deals a blow to hope, it helps to be okay with sitting in sadness awhile, giving myself permission to feel the all-over hollow ache of such a loss. It's been a week since the ruling. My lawyers are already hard at work, retooling our motion to submit a habeas corpus petition. The same day that I learned about the court's non-decision, I had to chair a business meeting in Gavel Club. Then I had to meet with the chaplain and try to arrange reinstatement of Buddhist services, which were suspended in January due to low attendance. Then I had to conduct interviews for onboarding a new hire at my job. Then I had work of my own to do — TV programs to produce, events to organize, data to crunch, deadlines to meet. Then I went to sleep. I did more the next day. The show must go on. So must I. At this point, going on is just kind of my thing.

22 February, 2024

A New Hope

A motion to undo my wrongful conviction was filed in the Missouri Court of Appeals in December. Katie Moore, the reporter for The Kansas City Star who interviewed me for her article about the filing, wanted to know how it felt to have my case back in court for the first time in thirteen years. Was I hopeful, she wanted to know.

I'd begun the interview feeling prepared to answer any question she asked about my case. That question, though, caught me by surprise. Was I hopeful?

For a stretch of recent history, having hope has been considered a blessing. Philosophers and theologians in our modern age tend to believe that hope is a great virtue. But older cultures had a different view. The ancient Greeks, for instance, considered hope an especially nasty flavor of self-deception, a corrupting evil. That age-old story about Pandora opening the box containing all the world's woes? (It was actually a jar, not a box, but whatever.) Hope was in there, unloosed upon the earth thanks to Pandora's curiosity, to humanity's great torment. An Italian proverb holds that a person who "lives by hope will die by despair." Referencing this, Addison wrote, "If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is." Although a young Nietzsche wasn't too keen on hope, either, he did come around in his later years. By the end of his essay on the ultimate futility of life, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus accepted hope, but only begrudgingly. The biblical proverb about hope deferred could provide the basis to an argument against hope. A comparable notion can be found in Buddhist teachings, which hold that wishing circumstances be otherwise ignores reality, the opposite of an enlightened mindset. Although there's been a general shift toward the line that hope is a good thing, it's not without detractors. There's always a cynic somewhere. I know because I used to be one. "Byron the Black-Hearted, Dark Cliffs upon Which the Waves of Hope Break," one clever friend dubbed me. I'll just say, you don't get that kind of moniker bestowed on you for being fun at parties. If that was then, what am I now? I want out of prison, of course, but I no longer feel desperate for that outcome. It's been so long since I had a fighting chance at freedom. Since my lawyers' filed our motion to the court, a chance has presented itself. I feel like a dog with a grape in its mouth
Is it food or is it a toy? and I don't really know what to do. The poet Marianne Moore wrote, "Hope isn't hope until all grounds to hope have vanished." (I've probably quoted that line on this blog before; what can I say except I like it that much?) I don't know what Moore intended by it, exactly, but her line nevertheless makes sense to me. You can't truly know hope until you've stared into the abyss which, as Nietzsche famously wrote, stares also back into you then continued moving forward anyway.
Right now, I'm just moving.