10. Excerpt from Earl Bishop’s Prison Journal

08-27-08 (continued):

 

I went in for my weekly group therapy session last Tuesday and the doctor had the nerve to tell me I’m living in a dream world. That I need to “check in to reality.”

 

So I asked him what the hell he would choose if he was in this place—dream or nightmare?—and he changed the subject, completely ignored me. Started yapping about all the reasons we’ve got to come to these meetings, says we’ve all got “behavioral issues” we need to work on.

 

Really?

 

A bunch of grown ass men sitting around in a fucking circle, each of us locked up for different bullshit that none of us deserve to be imprisoned for, and we’re the ones with “behavioral issues”?

 

If you could’ve seen the look we all gave the doctor—like he’s the one whose got the issues. How he sees things the way he does, I don’t get it. You listen to the guys in that room, there’s not an unjustified one in the lot.

 

Tom, the guy who sits next to me, he’s in for armed robbery, some real Wild West type shit. Way he describes it, I’m thinking like an Ocean’s Eleven type situation. Or better yet, since he was by himself, more like that old school flick Thief, only in that film James Caan knew what the hell he was doing, and Tom’s not the sharpest knife on the cutting block. He got a tip that a jewelry shop owner was transporting half a pound of diamonds from one of his stores to another, and the guy making the move was some pompous fuck out of Jacksonville, taking the whole load over in the passenger seat of his ’91 Camaro, wrapped in a velvet bag with a tie around the neck. That’s it, all the security he had. Practically begging for it. Tom was in deep with some Russians over a high-stakes poker game he’d played drunk one night—they’re sitting there threatening his wife and all that—so he did what he had to do. Don’t know how he got caught—I’m assuming he didn’t plan it out right—but the point is its survival of the fittest in here and out there, and anybody who thinks otherwise is being willfully ignorant.

 

It’s most of us in here, though. All of us trying to live our lives and constantly being told what we’re doing’s not good enough.

 

Like the guy on my other side, Juan; couple of months ago, his girl slammed his baby son’s head into a wall because the baby wouldn’t shut up. So Juan slammed his girl’s head into the same wall a couple times, asked her if she liked how it felt. He’s got three years for that.

 

Another guy across the room, Jim, he’s always talking like he just stepped off the set of The Fast and the Furious. Shot his brother in the leg for stealing and crashing his brand new Mustang GT. In the leg. And he’s doing twenty.

 

And another guy, Fred, he’s doing ten years for pulling the plug on his father’s life support machine without getting his mother’s signature on the release forms. Says he didn’t want to see his old man go out like that, didn’t think it was right that he and his family couldn’t just let him go with a little bit of dignity. His mother pressed charges (which was, as I told Fred, some truly cold-blooded shit), and now he’s here in this place, visiting the same room every week with the rest of us, with me doing two years on a b.s. arson charge.

 

And they’re telling us we’ve got to go to these meetings, write in these journals, because we’ve all got “compulsive behavioral issues.”

 

Load of bullshit. These are not people with compulsive behavioral issues. These are people surviving the only way they know how.

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