Business at Sing Sing

By Joseph Kim

It wasn’t what I had expected it to be like at all. The hall was full of bright color and lined with great windows. To the left were shelves of toys and books and straight ahead were several vending machines. It was full of visitors, but it was quiet and oddly peaceful. There were many children, but none of them crying or screaming like they would at an airport or at a theater.
The room was full of intention. I was able to feel it the very second I stepped in to the room. There is only one real reason to visit a prison; to see someone you love.
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Interview With “Rob”

I would like to start this entry by asking all of my readers to say a prayer for Vada Vasqez. She was a victim of a stray bullet from a 16-year-old boy’s gun. Vada is currently in a coma from a gunshot wound to her head. Hopefully her circumstances will have improved by the time this entry is posted. I hope and pray that young Vada finds the strength to pull through this situation. I would also like to apologize on behalf of all of the prisoners who may have contributed in influencing the young man’s actions. Many of us on the inside the role that we played in helping create the environment that exists in our communities and we accept the fact that we are partly responsible for the negativity that takes place in our communities.

Situations like this are extremely unfortunate and they happen all to ooften. Incidents wehre innocent children become victims of misplaced anger and bullets by young gang members are dishearteningly common. We can only imagine how the family and friends of the victims feel. We know how we feel when we read about situations like this in the papers, but how does the killer feel? How do they live with the weight of a child’s body on their consciences? How can they live with themselves? A friend of mine has been faced with these questions for the past 18 years.
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New Neighbors Suck Sometimes

By Jerzey

So I guess this guy’s on his way out – maybe. He is five cells to my left when I’m on the bars. Last night at 1:50 AM I awoke to a man screaming, moaning and crying in his sleep from a nightmare. It woke me up out of a dead sleep. I gotta say it was very upsetting and a horrible. Thing to hear and listen to. All I kept thinking was this guy is about to “hang out”. His cries went on for a good two minutes; I had mixed emotions. I wanted him to shut the fuck up so bad; to go back to sleep and make like it never happened. One of my neighbors finally got him to shut up, or woke him up. I’m not sure which one.

For the next half hour I was lost in thoughts. It hurt me to hear that guy like that. Crying and sobbing like a baby. What kind of problems and what kind of bid does he have. Does he have daylight at the end? They say pressure bust pipes and at that moment I understood all too well. I thought about my family, my lady – the love of my life. All that I lost, from her and everything else I was stripped of. Where I am and what my life has become. A con in the worst prison in the state. I wanted to cry but couldn’t. Wanted to sleep but couldn’t. Wanted to be in my lady’s arms so bad, but couldn’t.
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I Miss My Boy

By Zachary Miller

I first met Mike in the spring of my freshman year. That’s not to say that I didn’t know who he was by then—he was a pretty recognizable figure on campus, being one of a dozen or so black kids in the entire school. I was always intrigued by him; he seemed like a real enigma: a tennis prodigy in baggy tennis attire.
I was trying out for the tennis team; he was the captain and the best player on the team, already getting looks from top division one schools as a junior. The team was flying down to Florida to train for the upcoming season, and it just so happened that me, Mike, and another kid, were to be roommates.
I improved my game in the hot Florida sun, but I most remember the nights I spent talking, playing cards, and watching TV with Mike. As the only two in our room who stayed up late, we formed a kinship of necessity, sprawled out on our separate couches in a dingy common room littered with food, watching History Channel documentaries on Bonnie and Clyde and Al Capone. The first night, we didn’t talk much, but by the third night, the TV had become a pretext for our conversation. We talked about life, about school, about girls. He told me about his home in the most dangerous neighborhood in Boston. He told me how much he hated tennis, even though he was so good. He told me how hard it was to adjust as the shyest of the few black kids at our tony prep school.
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Immortal Technique Interview Pt 1

The Criminal Class Contributions to Fashion

By Mark E. Dixon

For decades, the criminal class has influenced the way civilians have dressed, and styled their hair. From the wise guys wearing “matador” slacks in the seventies, to the new generations, opting for the work clothes look, found in all prisons.

As a youngster in the seventies, I found it hard to ignore the fact that anytime I caught a glimpse of a wise guy type, they always had the same style pants and shoes on. It was not until I was well into my twenties, that I found out the fitted waist slacks, nicknamed “matadors,” because there were no belt loops, or any need for a belt, were more than just a collective choice of style. The “matadors” and slip on leather shoes were more like a Mafioso’s work clothes. Reason being, is that once a perpetrator was headed to the system, their shoelaces and belts were removed, to minimize the chances of them hanging themselves.

The idea amongst them was to always be prepared, just in case they got pinched. There would be no belt to turn in, or laces to remove, which allowed them to focus on their real problem, instead of the fact that their pants were falling, and their shoes flopping.
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Letter from a Birmingham Jail

16 April 1963
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.
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Immortal Technique Interview Coming Soon

Prisonpenn sat down with Immortal Technique in Harlem to discuss his experience in prison, his opinion on the current state of hip hop, and much more. Check out the teaser for the interview here:

Immortal Technique Trailer

Spineless in California

From the New York Times

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California was on the mark when he said this week that the state needed to change policies that spend more money on prisons than on the state’s once-vaunted higher education systems, which are being bled to death in budget cuts. But Mr. Schwarzenegger was way off the mark when he suggested that the answer was to privatize prison services or to pass yet another constitutional amendment, this time to limit prison spending.

States that privatize prisons sometimes save money, but they can also buy trouble by ceding control to companies that put profit first and inmate welfare a distant second. That would be disastrous for the California prison system. It is already under pressure from scores of court orders that require it to reduce its growing prison count and provide adequate mental, medical and dental services, as well as better care for the disabled.
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Holiday in the Big House

Today is Christmas, a day of celebration and happiness, but my day was nothing of the sort. Instead it was extremely depressing and violent. It started first thing this morning, when I was awakened to the screams of a man being beat half to death by the sticks of correctional officers. The screams were so loud and piercing that it snatched me out of my slumber and made the hairs on my arms and legs stand at full attention. This was at 6:30 in the morning so the block was dead quiet. The screams of the prisoner echoed throughout the entire block. They started off as piercing screams which became somber cries. As the beating continued, the somber cries turned into pathetic whimpers, and all I could do was lay on my bed and thank God that that was not me. The beating lasted for about three minutes, which is a long time when you are getting beat with night sticks. Every time the sticks struck its mark, the walls vibrated. You could hear the cracking and crunching sounds that the sticks made when landing on the prisoner’s skull, ribs, and face. It was so quiet in the block that the sounds of the beating were almost in high definition. The sounds were so disturbing it made me flinch with each crack and crunch. Merry Christmas indeed.
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Love

By Kenyatta

Do I write too much about love?

I sometimes wonder if you tire of hearing how I love my family or babygirl (my purple bass player: ). I wonder if I should write about other things, like the thunderous clap of a C.O slamming shut my cell gate or the daily frisking of my body. These things are real. They hurt me, I suppose.

But they never harm me. I am so well defended by love that I am nearly invincible.

You know how some people hear hellfire preaching and get God, or maybe they get to feeling holy or whatever, I don’t know. I mean, everybody has their own reasons, and they’re perfectly valid. But the whole hell thing never bothered me. I mean, okay. It’s hot. Really hot, and for eternity. But no matter how bad it might be, you’ll get used to it, right? Seriously. After the first million years or so, it would be like, “Okay, I’m on fire. As usual.” I suppose this just show how messed up my mind was.

The point is, fear would never bring me to God, ’cause I was too stupid to be afraid. But one day, He revealed Himself to me in His love, and I was blown away. I’ll tell you about it sometime, but for now just know that I’m talking about a love so vast, so absolute, that it is beyond imagining. Love literally rules the universe, binds and keeps it in its form and function. And the incredible thing is that once you know, you can see it working all the time, in everything. There is nothing greater than love. God is love. Seriously.

No, seriously.

So if it seems that I am overly concerned with love, it is only because it is so important. I just can’t think of anything better to talk about.

Time

By Kenyatta

Baby girl has ruined my time perspective.

It’s crazy how you start to think about time in prison. When people ask you how much time you have left to do, and you say, “About four or five years,” their reaction is always the same. “Damn,” they say. “That’s a long time.”

And it is a long time. But if you tell a prisoner you’ve got five years left, he’s happy for you. Five years? Man, you’re damn near home already. I guess it’s all a mater of perspective. When you compare five years left to fifteen done already, well, it just doesn’t seem that long.

See, when Einstein said that time is relative, he knew what he was talking about. When you measure time, its passage is charted in relation to the position of of observation. Most people look at time from ‘now’. So they’re living n now, which is crazy short, and comparing it to then stretching back forever. They think, “Damn, that’s like a billion nows.” And when you get sentenced, that’s how you feel, like that five or ten or twenty years is just forever, a billion nows that you’ll never see the end of.

But after a while — and I don’t know if this is beautiful or sad, but it is survival — now isn’t as short as it used to be. Because when this now looks and fells and lives just like the last now did, and every now in the foreseeable future promises to be exactly like this one, well, it’s all just one giant now. We don’t count time in minutes or hours, or even days and weeks. Prisoners count time in months and years, and rejoice at single digit numbers. Were it not for that, we could not maintain sanity, I think. How can you look ahead to decades of nows that promise futility and loneliness and not go crazy?

And now she’s here, messing up my sense of time. I see her so infrequently, for such a little while, that each moment is so precious I can hardly enjoy it, because I’m constantly aware that this now will soon pass, and the next now will be spent without her, and then I’m left counting nows until I’m with her again. As difficult as it is to look at all those years stretched out ahead of me, each one is broken up into a legion of nows, I don’t know that I would trade it for what she makes me feel. It’s a moot point, really, because I don’t have any choice but to feel what I feel.

Until I see her again, I count the days.