Read by Willam Kunstler
When I hear politicians bellow about getting rough on crime and barking out, “Three strikes, you’re out!” several images come to mind. I think of how quickly the tune changes when the politician is on the receiving end of some of the so called toughness, after having fallen from grace. I am reminded of a powerful state appellate judge who, once caught in an intricate, bizarre web of criminal conduct, changed his long-standing opinion regarding the efficacy of the insanity defense, an option he once ridiculed. It revealed in a flash how illusory and transitory power and status can be, and how we are all, after all, human.
I also think of a young man I met in prison who was one of the first wave of people imprisoned back in the 1970s under new, tougher youth certification statutes that allowed teenagers to be sentenced as adults. The man, whom I’ll call Rabbani, was a tall, husky 15-year-old when he was arrested in southeastern Pennsylvania for armed robbery. The prosecutor moved that he be judicially certified as an adult, and the court agreed. Tried as an adult, Rabbani was convicted of all charges and sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison for an alleged robbery with a CO2 air pistol. His first six or seven years in this man made hell found him constantly locked in battles with guards, and he logged more years in the hole than he did in general population status.
He grew into manhood in shackles, and every time I saw him, he seemed bigger in size but more bitter in spirit. When we took the time to converse, I was always struck by the innate brilliance of the young man, a brilliance immersed in bitterness, a bitterness so acidic that it seemed capable of dissolving steel. For almost 15 years, this brilliance had been caged in steel; for almost two of these years, he tried, largely in vain, to get a judge to reconsider his case, but the one-line, two-word denials, “Appeal Denied,” only served to deepen his profound cynicism.
For those critical years in the life of a male, from age 15 to 30, which mark the transition from boy to man, Rabbani was entombed in a juridical, psychic, temporal box branded with the false promise, “Corrections.” Like tens of thousands of his generation, his time in hell equipped him with no skills of value to either himself or his community. He has been “corrected” in precisely the same way that hundreds of thousands of others have been, that is to say warehoused, in a vat that sears the very soul.
He has never held a woman as a mate or lover. He has never held a newborn baby in his palm, its heart a-thump with new life. He hasn’t seen the sunrise nor the moon glow in almost 15 years, for a robbery, armed with a pellet gun, at 15 years of age. When I hear easy, catchy, mindless slogans like “Three strikes, you’re out,” I think of men like Rabbani, who had one strike if not one foul, and are for all intents and purposes, already outside of any game worth playing.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
