About Scourge
People call me Scourge. It’s not an ironic nickname. I’m a 39 year old rebel without a cause who... found a cause. I’ve been in prison for going on 11 years. Whether my imprisonment for robberies and a little organized crime is justified, or anyone's really is... well, that’s kind of my aim in writing on here. I’m sure I’ll also rant about the sadism of guards and the idiocy of the proverbial 'kitchen full of chefs', but I mostly want people to see the daily nonsense that we endure in here. Maybe marvel at the scale of incompetence and inhumanity, or have a laugh, commiserate, or wonder with me how anything good or whole could be churned out of this meat grinder.
I’ve been a musician since I was a kid. I started off playing prog black metal and toured with bands throughout my teens and 20s until I came to prison. These days, I mostly write classical/jazz-fusion. You really do mellow out as you get older.
Due to prison restrictions and further restrictions for covid(going on 2 years as of the writing!), I don’t get the guitar much. I can count how many times I’ve played in 2 years on 2 hands. Luckily I have a few outlets and another is art. I can sometimes get supplies here, but I’ve been through it all with using colored pencils ground up for paint to regular lead pencils to draw on walls while I am in solitary for months. The prison loves my massive landscapes and trompe l'oeil paintings on their walls. That was sarcasm.
I am in a relationship with a beautiful woman that makes my days and years meaningful. She not only makes me feel worthy and cherished, but she makes me feel like a human. This in contrast to the prison people, both staff and inmate, that make me feel either or like an animal or a warehoused product. I also have healthy-considering-my-imprisonment relationships with my parents and my 18-year-old son and a handful of friends who have stuck it out with me for the going on 11 years I’ve been in prison and even before.
On a good day, I have access to a prison email service for a few hours so I’m hoping to be able to post to this blog a couple of times a week. My best friend does this for me. TO clarify, because prison officials would LOOOOOOVE to punish me for saying anything other than hostage lines like "I’m doing well" and "because of lots of exercise once a week (and NOT starvation) I’ve lost those pesky love handles and... 30lbs" I HAVE NO ILLICIT DEVICES and I am not posting from some satellite routed through Switzerland or... whatever. I have no way to subvert the edicts of my overlords.
If we are locked down, I won’t be able to post. And they do so enjoy locking us down. In my years, I’ve maybe been locked down 100 times and only ONCE thus far was it anything I could have controlled or influenced. The last one was about a month ago for a football riot in a cell-block I’ve never been to filled with people I’ve never met. With tongue-in-cheek names for their prisons and systems like "Dept of Corrections" or "Federal Correctional Institution", they systematically make us worse, all while writing their book titled "How to Make Someone thoroughly confused, disordered, damaged or ruined".
If these places fixed us, you wouldn’t be afraid to sit next to an ex-con on the bus or keep us from living in "crime-free" neighborhoods. But because everyone "knows" from their favorite media how prisons are with the violence and gangs, it’s no surprise that anyone walking near me on the sidewalk would give me a wide berth if they knew.
But I think if I can show you the reality of this place, the apathy of both staff and prisoners, the anger, the boredom -- OH, the boredom! Maybe if more people knew that there are damaged human beings thrown in here every day where we live only to be left to social retraining from OTHER damaged inmates... maybe if that were known, we could drum up some sympathy for these devils behind the walls... the very same who are released by the thousands back into society.
Where you live.