Between the year 2009 and 2015, I witnessed the most violent period of my incarceration. The amount of blood shed and violence was beyond words. It had gotten so bad that staff members didn’t take away weapons anymore when they found them, they simply pretended not to see them. The only thing worse than having an inmate with a knife was to leave one without one.
There are some memories that I try to not think on, but there are some that no matter how hard I try they always give me an encore in the darkened theaters of my mind. I can’t count how many times I’ve laid down in an effort to pray only to have my eyes fly open because a scene from a ghastly bloody fight erupted in my mind. It’s nearly innumerous, the amount of times my prayers were interrupted by the sight of four of five men stabbing each other up in gang warfare.
I have followed the dried splatter of blood as it led to the prison’s medical building 150 yards away, and remember watching wobbly legged men struggling to get to the only place they know that will give them a fighting chance of surviving after being severely wounded by knives and ice picks. Too many are the men who have died from wounds which none should have survived, and amazing are the ones who lived when all physical and medicinal reasoning deemed them qualified for the valley of the shadows of death. Of all the cosmetic programs supposedly implemented to help inmates return to society, why aren’t therapies for witnessing violence part of the requirements? Why are drugs and alcohol, the only coping mechanism left for inmates to rely on to cope with the violence they have seen and been targets of? It’s no wonder men are leaving prisons and having to get drug rehabilitation on the streets.