I was checking out a new magazine Topic, which devoted the
entire issue to a specific topic (the latest being "prison")
and found an essay by a convict currently serving life
without parole.
The convict writes:
"You aren't going to do anything, you punk." He called me a
punk. Me, the unbeatable giant of the neighborhood; in my
park I was being called a punk. In addition to its other
connotations, a punk in juvenile jails in California is a boy
that other boys screw in the ass. I immediately swung on him
in a big, arching left hook that failed to connect with
anything. Now I was doubly mad. In the next 30 seconds or so,
I broke Mr. Fellowes into a bleeding lump on the concrete.
The coroner said he was probably dead after the first punch,
it was so ferocious a shot. Before I left the park, I threw
all his property on the roof of the building, on the
assumption he was merely knocked out. I wanted him to have to
scramble to recover his belongings-just as I had to recover
my pride. For this act of savagery I was sentenced, after a
two-day trial in which I was represented by a bored public
defender, to life without the possibility of parole. That was
23 years and several lifetimes ago.
Check it out.
Frederick Zackel
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 07 Jun 2004 EDT