B
Title: A Letter Back to The Future
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
If I could write a letter to my 17-year old self about what prison would be like, to warn myself not to commit the crime I did commit, this is what it would have said.
Prison is where you will go if you commit this crime. It may seem okay to spend donors money to the congressman because everyone else in the office is doing it, including the congressman, but you are not them. You have no wealth or power to keep the gears of the justice system from grinding you into something even you wont be able to recognize after awhile. And you will get bored in there because you always were too smart for your own good, and you will think it a funny attention-getting prank to write a letter threatening George W. Bush thinking its not such a big deal. But the sentences they will hand down will be dripping in misery, not humor, and you will choke on the dish the Government serves you ice cold when the letter writing is long over with. You will feel powerful because you can trigger all those federal agents to come running - dancing to the rhythm of your pen - but beware the truth which is that they are dancing on your grave.
There will be nothing hilarious or powerful feeling about prison. Getting raped in prison. You are transgender so prison will transform you into a fat, juicy rabbit in a jungle full of Lions, Tigers and Bears who lust for the taste of a rabbit every day. Being raped is a savage, brutal affair. After it happens to you the very first time you will spend years losing your very mind over it. You will spend a decade feeling nothing but bitter anger and fear and an all-consuming shame and self-loathing that you couldnt stop their knives or their penises from penetrating your flesh in a painful and forceful manner. Rape is not like sex at all, it is about control, power and humiliation that these lions crave from their rabbit.
Noone will feel sorry for you. Your own mother will send you a single card over it and move on to her next and latest beef with her coworkers about who is the best worker or entitled to which computer or desk or some such trivial dispute she will utterly agonize over. She cannot help you, so it will make her uncomfortable to even hear about your pain which in her eyes you brought upon yourself anyways so why feel sorry for you? But your rape will not trigger the reaction you think from her and that will drive you even crazier, that your own mother could care less what the lions do to you. You are a criminal now, mommy doesnt care anymore because she cant care. The lack of power to help you will make her force herself to distance her emotions from your pain and suffering, so get used to it. And lest you think the guard or prison administrators, or heaven forbid the federal judges and attorneys who run the civil justice system, will care any more than your mother did, just dont because that will be the next raw lesson you learn about being a criminal. That label "felon" stripped you of your human rights, civil rights, your right to decency and dignity, no matter what the law books say about the rights of prisoners.
But lets talk about that for a moment. The civil justice system is a labyrinthe and maze of rules, laws, and customs that you wont learn quickly. There are no classes on it, so you will learn the do's and dont's through trial and error. Which means you will lose most of your early cases, and be labelled a serial filer (aka serial loser). They passed a law in 1996 called the Prison Litigation Reform Act for people like you and it comes with a label every judge and government attorney for the rest of your time in prison will try to use to discredit you for sticking up for yourself. The more you fight, the more the system will punish you for your tenacity. The federal judges and attorneys will not feel any empathy for you, they will look upon you with irritation, skepticism and sometimes open contempt and loathing. They will call your every claim frivolous, dubious, meritless and implausible on a good day and false, frivolous, and fiction on a bad day and on both of those days they will say these things before the evidence is even on the table yet. But its how they feel about prisoner allegations so dont personalize it. And even when you manage to suffer through it all and win they will still argue that whatever money in damages a criminal deserves, its not much. Laws are only as strong as the people entrusted to ensure they function and the same people who hold up the criminal laws as sacred cows will look at civil rights laws with scorn because most judges are appointed from the offices of federal or state prosecutors so they have a set point of view before they even sit on the bench and it is unkind to those who bear the scarlet letter of criminal. There are 10,000 criminal laws in the United States Code, but you will have more fingers and toes then civil rights laws.
It wont be any better getting stabbed or beaten than being raped. The pain and suffering of those will be even worse than the cruelty of rape. And once it happens, you will live in fear of it happening again, and that fear will drive you crazy. So crazy in fact, you will set down the pen you once toyed with fate with and you will pick up a knife for the first time in your life planning to stab the first lion that comes for the rabbit next. And every time you are forced to use it, you will lose a chunk of your innocence and your soul it will seem. You will stop laughing at all, and crying, and enjoying anything. You will become dour and bitter. Every drop of blood you spill will make you enemies faster than Donald Trump. The system will create a Prison Rape Elimination Act standard by which it will be tasked to hold itself accountable and admit its mistakes the same year that you turn 25 and your adolescent brain finally stops developing. PREA wont be there when you are raped at the age of 17 nor for the next 8 years of your life. You will have great hope in PREA, but I'll save you the heartache now by telling you that PREA will be useless. The cops will resent the paperwork, they wont admit their mistakes or make changes to protect you that would be tantamount to an admission they somehow failed, so in every scenario but the most egregious they will always blame the victim or label the victim less than credible. It doesnt matter how obvious they are wrong, or how many victims pile up, they are the only ones that can hold themselves accountable within their own system so they will find every possible way to proclaim that they never make a mistake and there will be very little to do to change that. The inmates who insist on justice for their victimization will live in solitary confinement because the guards will view them as troublemakers trying to get staff in trouble. You personally will spend more than 5,000 days of your life in solitary for daring to question the status quo.
Eventually you will grow older. You will slow down as your body slows down. You will try to take programs to shorten your sentence, but the system will deny you because programming is just another empty promise the system has. You will find that your record of protecting yourself, in their eyes, is a reason to deny any good thing you try to obtain or accomplish, even if you only did what was necessary to stop being a juicy rabbit. They will not listen, and when they listen they will not care, about what would have happened to you if you had not fought back against the predators you will fight with. It doesnt matter, unless you take your victimization in silence you will be labelled an irredeemable troublemaker and have nothing coming from the system.
You will lose yourself in books. That's how you eventually learn the law so well you regularly trounce government lawyers with law degrees who will sit in pairs and triplets trying to shut you down in the courtroom when you fight for your rights and to change the system for others so the rabbits dont have to live in fear anymore. You will learn and be inspired by Ghandi, King, and the kind of people who refuse to bow to tyranny. Books will be your awakening and you will realize that you had great potential if you had just not broken the law.
You will sometimes grow so sad and hopeless that you will take death into your own hands and try end your misery. You will swallow hundreds of tylenol, and cut your wrists open to the bone, you will cause your colon to be perforated in a suicide attempt and surgeons will work frantically to save your life. You will awaken and realize death did not want you, and you will cry in anguish that surviving means you must go back to the prison when the infection is gone and you are healed enough to be rolled into a cell in a wheelchair. You will go on hunger strike and after 17 days of no food the cops will show up in boots and helmets, drag you from your cell by your ankles, and strap you into a chair where they will run a tube from your nose to your stomach to force feed you the nutrients you need to survive. Death will evade you every time you call her name, but misery will come even as you scream for her to go away, every day of your life in there.
Eventually you will reach middle age. You have been in those dungeons for more than 20 years. You will begin to share your story, because society will change a little and there eventually will be people interested in hearing about the inside and what it is really like. You will become a fierce advocate for change, and you will file court cases that will dramatically change the system once you partner with law firms willing to spend the money to make change a reality. It will never be a one and done, it will be a struggle that consumes you for years. But you will be a relentless fighter because you know the worst the system had to offer, and you will want to prevent anyone from going through the same again. The cops will know your name, it will be infamous within the prison system. You will dare to speak truth to power, and you will not wilt under the heat of their glares as they listen to the truth you utter. They will loathe you for it and punish you every way they can, but you will not be deterred, you have already survived too much to be intimidated by anything anymore. The world will change many times. One day you will watch Mr. Art-of-the-Deal kick all of your transgender sisters out of the military, no matter how brave or courageous has been their service to the country. You will watch him lead hundreds of politicians to target children, and pass laws to criminalize the very things that are at the core of being trans and transitioning. You will know that these are the people you must fight, these are the same kind of people running the prison system. It is the same mindset.
You will come to worry in the end that you will never escape the scarlet letter of criminal. That the other social justice warriors will not want you to march with them, because they cannot be seen with one of your kind. You will think that even if the pope named you a saint, the community would still reject you because you bear the mark of felon. That you will bear the stain of criminal forever and all of your potential will be lost, buried under the weight of the past.
So, hear me now Grace while you are still 17 because in a few months comes the first time you are held down in a cell by two men and raped by a third. I am you, and you are me, so trust my words when I say: whatever you do, do not break the law. You cannot begin to understand at 17 the price you will pay for your victimless crimes. You love mom more than anyone in the world but she will grow old and alone without you if you take that money they let you have or write those letters you think are so funny. Even mom will not support you for a long time in there in that jungle full of lions, because she was raised to believe that if you commit a crime, everyone should shun you- even your mother. It will take her more than a decade to change her mind about that. She will bitterly resent you for what she sees as an act of abandonment, and the rest of your family will act as if your conviction and sentencing was a funeral and they will ignore your very existence. You will beg attorneys for help, but there is no money in fighting the cruelty of the justice system. You will get down on your knees and beg god for forgiveness, but there will be no reply. You will seek reporters to tell the public what is being done in their name with their tax dollars, but the public does not care so the reporters will mostly ignore you. There is no end to the misery and suffering in there.
So please, whatever you do, do not break the law.