21. Excerpt from Earl Bishop’s Prison Journal

10-2-08:

 

The guards here, they’re the worst though. They’re completely brainwashed by the entire system.

 

They stand up in the rafters looking down at us, judging and giving us those smug grins, bristling like over-content pigs ready for slaughter, like they’re not being looked down on themselves, demigods with tasers.

 

Either they’re too stupid to realize the truth or too incompetent and self-absorbed to care. They think they’re on top of shit, that they’re completely in control. They have no idea what’s going on half the time though. It’s all balls and muscle with them, like army drill sergeants only with less power.

 

Can’t say I didn’t expect it. I’ve seen the inside of too many prisons to be surprised. Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins. Life, Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, the lighter side of things. The Hurricane with Denzel, another good one.

 

You see that shit and then you turn around and see something like, say, Full Metal Jacket, Sergeant Hartman breaking those kids down for Vietnam, and there’s not much difference.

 

A prison’s a prison. Prisonalways plays out the same, and so do the prisoners.

 

The ones here are just as pissed off as the rest too. Just the other day this one guy they call T-Bone (his head really does look like one, I gotta admit) broke this other dude’s jaw playing ball out on the court. Rammed the guy’s face into a pole, twice. T-Bone said the guy fouled him too hard. I was watching the game. Dude didn’t touch T-Bone.

 

Everybody’s gotta find their own ways of releasing things.

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