Sometimes when I look out my narrow cell window at the nearby Jeep auto plant as its workers load the vehicles onto a delivery train, I imagine myself in a movie scene as a stowaway hidden in the back of one of the Jeeps after having just covertly escaped from the custody of my captors.
I know my imagined scene probably sounds crazy to the politically correct segment of society who aren’t in my situation of adversity, but after being confined for over 22 years inside of a corrupt prison system, and being held hostage by a rogue parole board that refuses to release me from my outdated old-law prison sentence for aggravated robbery and felonious assault, my imagining of self-liberation isn’t insane at all.
To the Ohio Parole Board and the hierarchy of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections, I’m nothing but a “revenue-generating expendable inmate.” My existence outside of being a human commodity, means absolutely nothing to them. If it did, then surely they would have taken action to rectify the egregious acts of injustice that I’ve been subjected to over the course of my incarceration.
Instead of them taking action to rectify the acts of injustice, which include once being framed by the prison administration of a then-warden who subsequently participated in one of my parole hearings, and once being framed and beaten by a squad of correction officers, they chose to sweep the injustice under a rug, right along with their integrity and my human rights.
The blatant disregard for my human rights as a person in prison, however, is not an anomaly. Prisoners in Ohio’s prison system are treated unjustly on a consistent basis. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the media is reluctant to report on issues of injustice related to prisoners, as prisoners have become an ostracized and invisible class of people. While the general public, courtesy of smart phones and social media, is now becoming increasingly aware of the corrupt and racist practices of various police departments throughout the United States, the general public has yet to be fully enlightened as to the existence of the corrupt and racist practices that prisoners are being subjected to by prison officials, parole boards, and the like.
As a means of coping with situations of adversity during times that often seem hopeless, as prisoners, sometimes we have to uplift our morale any way we can, even if it’s by imagining oneself in a Harrison Ford-like scene from the movie The Fugitive, making a daring escape (Note: without harming a soul) to a place that we’re being unjustly kept from: freedom!
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