First Day In Prison: Perspective

I was reading the first few pages of my Grades of Honor book, and I was reminded of some questions a few readers asked: What was it like in prison? So I decided to share the first parts of my book with you because it makes a very strong point about what it was like.

Be sure to email me at derf4000 (at) embarqmail (dot) com if you have any other questions or want to support my writings….

Those of you that have my first book already know this, but for those who do not, this is from my first “Grades of Honor” book, one of a current 3. This describes what it felt like when I went to prison:

The following is from “Grades of Honor” book 1:

Life temporarily ended for me that day I was called from my single cell in county jail. My heart jumped when from behind the steel door of my cell a female officer called to me and told me to start packing my belongings since I was about to be shipped. It was the end of my faith that some miracle could turn this situation around. My faith in a God that hears prayers ended, and shock shot through my body. I could not even answer the first time. The female officer had to call me a second time, to which I then answered. This was it; I was going to prison.
Up until then, I had spent close to 17 months in county jail, and for nearly every hour I fought internally for hope against hope that something, anything, might change this terrible situation to something I can shout for joy over. I will not go over the first year and a half here; maybe another time, because to me, the prison system begins here. I sat down on my bed in the small cell and felt numb all over. If there was a way I could kill myself at that moment and quickly, I may well have done it, and welcomed death far more than I would have welcomed this God I was praying to for so long.

You get a very good idea of how I felt in those first moments and in that transition from jail to prison, from faith to failure. I am not going to paint you a pretty picture of how things went bad for me but I just believed and believed and everything went perfect.

No, that didn’t happen at all.

And a lot of you will look at that and immediately judge me as a hypocrite, since I sit here trying to get you to be positive. But ask yourself, WHY are you trying to be positive? Because things are very negative at this period in time. Heck, if you didn’t have a loved one in prison, would you even be reading my stuff now?

No, of course not.

I often run across some new posts when I was a member of other sites where a person joins and one common thing they say is that “they never thought they would ever be posting on a prison support site”. Why? Because nobody every looks forward to doing that.

It does not become a necessity until it really becomes a necessity. Right now, there are mothers, girlfriends and wives that would never think twice about reading my foolish blogs, and might see me as a con man trying to get you to send me stuff. But for some of those people, life will bring some very challenging turns that involve jail or prison, and those people will be online googling for prison help…some of them will come across my blogs.

So understand that just because you may feel one way today does not mean you will do a 360 the next. Things can change for the worst in a moment just as things can change for the better. At the beginning of my book, I wanted to make it very clear how my faith plummeted when I realized that I was now going to prison. In that quick moment, I went from hopeful to hopeless. It can happen folks, and often does.

In fact just last night the opposite happened. While I was watching the Tennessee vs. UCLA football game, the starting quarterback for UCLA was put in a tough position. He was the THIRD quarterback in line but had to play because the other two were injured. In the first half of that game, he looked TERRIBLE, throwing 4 interceptions. It just looked awful and I watched that feeling sorry for him.

But if you saw that game, you also saw what happened in the second half. He was like a brand new person, and MUCH better. No interceptions and his passing was very good. His team won that game, and a big upset over #18th ranked Tennessee. His performance was like night and day, and very inspiring.

(inside moral here folks…NEVER give up on someone you care about)

I don’t think UCLA could have seen that kinda turnaround any more than I could have seen my life now, as opposed to when I sat in that cell that very day I was shipped. Sometimes bad things happen and all you can do is go with the flow. If I thought I had the time, I would have fallen on the floor in that cell and cried. Or, as I said in the book, if I thought I could kill myself, I certainly would have tried to.

And that upsets some of you because you wonder if your loved one would think the same way. Suicides in prison DO happen, but they don’t happen as much as people think. Don’t quite know why I was like that and few others were, maybe something more spiritual or mental that I need to uncover someday. But I am sure a lot of you worry about your son or husband or boyfriend after he gets that sentence, and you wonder how he will take it.

I didn’t take it well. But I think in the numbness of the situation, all I could do was just go with the flow. I packed my stuff, gave it to my mom to take home and left the cell I spent 17 months in…it was like leaving home again and there was such an emptiness that I could not even describe it.

It was almost like dying…in fact, my first few words were, “life temporarily ended…” I really had no feeling, no real thoughts, just an emptiness and an anticipation of something I didn’t want. You also notice what I said about my faith. I gave up on it.

And a lot of you may find fault with it, as if YOU never been in a real critical situation before and things didn’t work out. You have to understand what I was doing in those 17 months. I tried to write to any prison ministry that I could find to find some level of faith, I read scriptures, prayed often on my bed and did everything I could to try to stay in faith. I had a bunch of faith booklets, books, and magazines that helped me to focus on the positive, not the negative.

You see, some people like to criticize inmates because they claim that “they don’t care about God until they get in jail”. Well, part of that might be true, but I can counter that a bunch of people started looking for God when Katrina hit too…

And how about 911...

I don’t think what inmates do to find God is any different. When a very troubling situation comes, often times we quickly turn to a source that can either help us understand it, or deliver us from it. So yeah, many inmates do “find God” while in prison, but not all of them. Many of them knew God but still had very difficult situations. And EVEN if they did find Him while in prison…isn’t that better than never finding Him at all?

But the other side of this is that people only look for Him when WE need Him, and once we get what we want, we slide away. It’s like one guy told me during that 17 months in jail. He said he saw guys that found religion while in jail and prison, but the day they got out, he said he actually seen guys throwing the Bible in the trash can as they left the prison.

“That’s terrible!”

Yeah it is…but I’ve done that myself before. I cannot say I threw away a Bible, but I have thrown away a lot of faith books while in that jail when things just felt so terrible. There was one time in that cell I felt very burdened, and one night I took my Bible and slammed it to the concrete floor of my cell and said under my breath, “WHERE IS GOD??”

I smashed that Bible so hard the spine of the book broke.

How many of you understand what it takes to push somebody to those ends? It’s easy to say, “well, you sinned so you deserved what you got” or “well, you didn’t wait long enough for God” or something like that. Anybody hiding behind a computer can say that, put how would YOU fair if in the same situation? Not so easy, is it?

Many of you have loved ones in similar situations.

My faith up until then was like a 3-tiered cake, kinda like those nice ones you see on “Ace of Cakes” on Food Network. Very pretty, very nice and probably taste nice too. But then imagine having a big horse jump on that cake, and stomp it into the ground. All that time, money and energy invested is gone, with nothing but a mess to show for it.

In a way, that is what I felt.

As you read more of my first book, you will clearly see how I felt about God during my first several weeks in prison. I really felt that He let me down, and that maybe I was all alone to begin with. But something wasn’t making sense about my situation.

Years before I ever landed in this mess, during my rising senior year in college, I was working as a co-op in Raleigh as a media specialist. I was tithing and being as faithful as I could but let’s not go crazy and put a halo around my head…I was a college student and subject to parties just like anybody else.

But one afternoon I was cleaning up at work and I “heard” something. Now don’t get all spiritual on me, I don’t mean I audibly “heard” something, but clearly what I heard was so clear it might as well had been audible, even though it wasn’t. Inside of me I heard a short phrase:

“Write for me”

I immediately looked around, and nobody was there, but I KNOW I heard something. So I went to a desk and took something to write with and wrote a spiritual poem. I just felt that I had to write something. Later on that evening I wrote a couple more. During that summer I wrote several more, until I had to prepare to go back for my senior year in college. Those of you who heard me talk about the miracle I got know what happens there.

But from that moment I always felt that I was supposed to be writing something, but I didn’t know what. Now again, I am NOT trying to make myself any saint or anything, I’m just me. But I KNOW I heard something, even if not audible. So my senior year in college I thought I should be writing something with a spiritual or Christian theme. I wrote poems and short stories and stuff, but I never knew why or even if this was what I was supposed to be writing.

For the next few years, I wrote but it was never read by anybody, I just kinda kept it to myself, although I tried to send poems out to those cheap contests, never winning anything. Then later when I ended up in jail, I had another debate.

I was completely split on what was going on with me. On one side, I believed that if the Bible was true, then the scriptures had to be as well. There were numerous scriptures of how God could deliver those that ask. Lots of people might mock those “faith based” religions, but my senior year in college was direct proof that God does answer prayers. If so then, why not now? I really needed a miracle. I wanted to go home.

But there was another side.

What if God, in His wisdom, needed lights in a dark place? Few places are darker than prison, and it is not God’s will for those in prison to suffer without some help. Not every inmate would seek God, or even care, but clearly there were many that did. Yet for those that were looking for help, mercy or even friendship, who would help them? Visits are only for a few hours out of a weekend, phonecalls are for a limited time and even churches were limited to how much they could spend in a prison.

What if it was God’s will to get people IN prison for a longer period of time to help others. Not necessarily to “save souls” although that could happen, but if nothing else, to be a pleasant person in a dark place?

Would YOU go? Of course not. Would anyone in a church congregation go? No, because to GO TO PRISON means forsaking their life and respect. It’s one thing to visit, but completely another to actually BE in prison. Nobody in their right mind would do that…even for God.

And that includes me.

Then how does God get help to those in prison? Somebody has to bring it, right? It does not just “fall” from the Heavens. God always works through other people, so to bring some help inside the prison, someone has to be there to bring it. Who then shall He send?

Folks, there are lights in prison, guys and women that are actually cool to be around, inmates (and sometimes officers) that can give you a sense of calm. Not everybody is some raging evil criminal that hates the world and everybody in it. Imagine how bad prison would be if all inmates were like that, and consider that in every prison there must be somebody that God is working through…even if they don’t know it. It shows in how they act and how they treat other inmates.

But if this is true, then it implies that God may have to override a prayer. If someone was praying to go home (like ME), what if God was saying “permission denied”. What then was the point of praying to God if my prayers would be ignored? But at the same time, how do you “turn down God”?

It caused me a LOT of nights of thinking, praying and trying to understand. Deep down, I didn’t want to refuse God, and in fact the 17 months I spent in the county was some proof that I would help others for Him. There are a lot of juveniles that liked being in the cells near me just to have somebody to talk to or share canteen or keep them calm after they had been moved to the cells for a suicide watch. One kid I literally gave him the shirt off my back because he needed one. There are a LOT of things that happened in those 17 months from my single cell that were quite interesting.

But how could I give up my life and freedom to go to prison? Why would I even want to do that? Nobody would weigh that option of “do I want to go home or maybe go to prison to try to be a model person and help others in prison”.

For months it bothered me, and then there was this continual thought of writing. I still had not really written anything of value, so I was lost on that thought. But the day I was called to go to prison, I felt I lost everything. My dreams, my faith in God, my respect…everything.

I held on so long, hoping for a miracle like I got when I was in college, but it was not to be. I thought maybe God didn’t care about my prayers, and turned His back on me. It really sucks to be hated.

But from then to now maybe I am starting to see something else…maybe God didn’t refuse me…maybe He made a compromise.

I didn’t do NEARLY as much time as originally thought, meaning perhaps He did hear me, and because I wrote so much in prison, I was able to bring that out after I left prison in 2001...and consequently write so much here on these blogs and other sites.

Is it possible that maybe THIS was what I was supposed to be writing? It kinda makes sense, it clearly has helped thousands of people, and even though I am not anywhere near a top-ranked Christian, it has indeed helped a lot of people looking for help. And surely we can agree that it is God’s will that everyone gets a chance to get help. So maybe, just maybe I am where He wanted me to be. I mean, I got through prison ok, and helped a lot of guys through it as some have been a help to me.

But on that day, in that cell, there was no way I could have seen this…nor would I have wanted to. If you told me that I would be writing prison books, blogs and posts, I would have thrown something heavy at you. I had absolutely NO desire to write about prison; I only wrote my journals because it gave me something constructive to do. But oddly, those journals now give me a strong foundation to talk about prison because even though it has been a few years, those journals are quite precise. From the letters, grievances, journals, poems and such, I have only really shared a small fraction of what I have experienced. There clearly is much more to write and share.

Which perhaps, is what I was supposed to be writing anyway. Now, if I can just turn that into a business so I can pay bills and stuff, it would be a win-win all the way around. Anyway, email me at derf4000 (at) embarqmail (dot) com or visit my book link or the Zazzle link. Any support helps a lot.

http://theprisoncell.embarqspace.com

http://www.zazzle.com/Nolaw97