Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

breakfast. It doesn’t have much taste, but enough vitamin C to keep your teeth from falling out.
    In the end, it’s not the fruit I miss most, though if you rolled all the deprivations into one thing, it would be this: I miss being treated like a human being.
    F EBRUARY 12
    This place is hell on the body. One of the reasons I cannot write letters the way I used to is that living in this cell twenty-four hours a day has destroyed my vision. I used to read three or four books a week. Now I average about one a month, if the print isn’t too small. The eye works like any other part of the body—use it or lose it. A person confined to a small space never has a chance to see anything that’s more than a couple feet away, so the first thing to go is your ability to see at a distance. Even with my glasses on, I can see maybe ten feet. Without glasses, maybe four inches—anything beyond that is color and movement.
    The teeth go because dental care is practically nonexistent. Several years ago I was brutally beaten by a pack of sadistic guards, which caused nerve damage to several of my teeth. The prison gave me the choice of living with the pain or having my teeth pulled out. I’ve been in pain ever since (prison policy says no root canals, even if the guards themselves cause the damage).
    Diabetes and heart disease come about from being unable to move. These cells are just big enough to take two steps forward and two steps back. Even if you work out for an hour a day, that leaves 23 hours when you are practically not moving at all. Add to that the cheapest diet you can find—plain noodles, white rice, white bread, grits, et cetera—and you’ve created a recipe for disaster. If you don’t work very hard, and aren’t very, very careful, you’ll die in here.
    Last year there was a brief mention on the news about a sick prisoner who had to be put on life support after he was left lying in his own feces for several days. They eventually fired two guards for it, but only because it was mentioned on the news. Just about every guard in the prison had to pass that man’s cell on a daily basis. They all saw him. The two guards who got fired were simply scapegoats.
    I don’t want to complain. No one likes a whiner, I know. Sometimes I just get so tired, though—tired of the abuse, tired of the cruelty, tired of the apathy. It wears you down to nothing. But I know that allowing myself to be sucked down into it, allowing myself to waste time dwelling on it, does nothing but create and feed more frustration. Tomorrow is a new day. I will put this one behind me and move forward into a more productive place. Today, however, what you get to read is me whining and complaining. As Billy Bob says in the movie
Bad Santa,
“Well, they can’t all be winners now, can they?”
    F EBRUARY 26
    I’ve been asked by quite a few people why the prison serves breakfast at 2:30 a.m. The answer to that would be slave labor. The prison is run by what amounts to slave labor—planting crops, digging ditches, construction and maintenance—any job you can think of other than guard is done by the prisoners. They have the choice of doing whatever job the administration gives them to do, or go to the hole. They throw you in there, then drag you out every thirty days to ask if you’re ready to go to work yet. If you say no, they toss you back in. This goes on until the person’s mind or soul has been broken. So breakfast is at 2:30 a.m. because they want to have everyone out in the fields as early as possible so they can get as many hours of work out of them as they can.
    It’s a brutal system. In other states prisoners get paid, even if it’s only five cents an hour. Not here, though. Here you get nothing. They still charge you if you need to see a doctor, even though many people have no money and no way of getting any. The reason other states pay prisoners to work is that in prison you have to buy everything—they don’t give you even the basic necessities, from soap and toothpaste to coffee and candy bars. So they charge you for all of it and take back the money they’ve paid you anyway.
    They can also put you in the hole for giving something to another prisoner who can’t afford it. For example, say the guards decided not to feed a guy one day to teach him a lesson. If you give him a candy bar, they can give you thirty days in the hole. Give someone soap who can’t afford it—thirty days. A cup of coffee? Thirty days. It’s cruelty