How can a prisoner transform himself into a good man?
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Why have I taken personal action to rehabilitate?
What I did with my life coming into prison under 21 years of age, some 37½ years ago, was first to take responsibility of my own life, my own mistakes and my own way of seeing things.
I somehow innately knew that I had been awakened to life in a way that was incredibly crazy, tragic, sad, and disarming. I took full responsibility for the life I took and that somehow opened me up to my life journey, to growth and realness.
Like I’ve said in By Heart,
“I really wanted to make amends for what I did, but knowing there is no way to bring a life back, the best I could do with the rest of my life is to nurture myself and nurture others, and make sure I do not get caught in the game of California’s prison system of just providing you with ways of sinking deeper into the prison abyss, the prison darkness that the Department of Corrections and Punishment provides.”
It was inmate economics and the state prison system fostered it, the more inmates they lock up the more jobs for correctional officers and the people that support them. Rehabilitation has not been a part of the California prison system since they began to phase out what little rehabilitation programs that existed in the late 1970’s.
Self-rehabilitation had to be any prisoner’s chance for redemption because abuse, segregation, racism, and gang violence was a part of keeping prison population in California growing even after “rehabilitation” was placed behind the words California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in 2006.
It has mostly been a farce so far. There’s been a trickle of self-help programs like Arts In Corrections, Men’s Groups, and some religious programs that still provided some self-help roads but even those like Arts In Corrections have been banned. And visiting programs that have proved to be self-rehabilitating in all ways have been cut back to two days a week.
Because once you realize that prisons are a business and to them you are a commodity, you become an inanimate object used by prison government to make money.
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So, for me, I had to choose books as my rehab teachers and people. Mentors, poets, actors, musicians, singers, and other artists have helped my self-rehab. I had to choose Mother Earth and had to go deep inside myself and travel the universe. Because once you realize that prisons are a business and to them you are a commodity, you become an inanimate object used by prison government to make money. I knew then I might as well like my life no matter what, because prisoners are seen as a means to an end. I mean people are making a living off of keeping hundreds of thousands locked up and to free people would be a loss of their meal ticket…
…like letting millions maybe billions of dollars float off a cliff.
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Photo: Brett Jordan/FLickr