Institutionalized: The System & The Time

Just read Kevin Portteus’s article at American Greatness. It’s an excellent read and turns on how prisons don’t always have bars, but are just simply: one’s institutionalized mindset. One will share personally here and hopes it does not offend my newest subscribers.

I spent twenty-seven months incarcerated (#113722) from April 30, 2001 to July 22, 2003. My charge was felonious stalking after violating a protective order issued around November 1, 2000. I won’t recount all of my “decision-making”, if one can call it any of that, but needless to say, the result will still stand.

I spent 10 months in Marion County (IN Booking #566049) jail. During that time, especially the first 15 days, was spent in a holding cell with 90 guys with room for 60 with 2 toilets and 1 broken shower, The Time does you. If one doesn’t know, Marion County is among the worst (as are all urban jails) in the United States. This case was decided just shortly after took my leave of Marion County’s situation. The county’s situation has never improved, if Google is of any authority. (Search: Marion County jail overcrowding federal violations)

I entered Westville Correctional on March 27, 2002, my mom’s 50th birthday. What a way to end my 20s, incarcerated, while my mom was entering Stage 2 renal cancer by time I was released. During those next sixteen months, you make friends and enemies, no matter how you approach doing The Time. One friend I ran into a decade later, as he was a maintenance technician at the Chevy dealership where I bought my Chevy Cruze in 2015.

Jeff, when I met him in the joint, was on the backend of a 10-year bit for drug-related charges. He had about 3 years left and wanted to learn a skill or trade. I had bought a auto mechanics technician manual (my mom did and shipped it) to read and potentially use for a “career” after my prison stay. But instead, I gave him the manual - and he was both reading and doing, as the prison had some courses towards that end - and sure enough, his efforts resulted in a good career, fixing vehicles. Last I saw him, in mid-2020, Jeff was doing well enough given The Times.

Others, however, had been institutionalized. My first cellie, Alvarado, was on the backend of a 30-year bit for manslaughter by knife and cocaine dealings. He was from Oaktown - California. He was of Lakota Indian descent and he was a hustler & smuggler in prison. He worked on the paint crew (people do get jobs for $1.25-$1.50/day) and that gave him access and knowledge of the ins and outs of the facilities. A guard on the take would pass him tobacco and he would come back to the cell and ask me to BUTT the door - stand watch for the other corrupt guards - while he had a stash area in the ventilation in the overhead bulkhead he’d made.

Alvarado expertly used the Lakota Indian narrative to get out to his sweat lodge meetings and ceremonial usage of tobacco. But of course, his character defects were unfixable in so far as while he stashed tobacco, made hooch, and hustled on food and the like, his competitors and customers absolutely despised him. This uniquely became apparent when he got too lippy with a black guard, and suddenly, was permanently removed from Cell Block 2B at The Ville. Within 10 minutes, I had a half dozen “customers” coming to the cell looking to raid his LOCKBOX, which was serendipitously open at the time, and I didn’t guard it for him.

One may say I should have been proactive, but that will get you hurt immediately. I took a chance that Alvarado would be relocated to another section of The Ville (and he was). I saw him one time more - several months later - and he threatened to kill me. Evidently he had few, if any takers, to administer prison justice at the going rate.

Though such justice routinely happened along those 27 months doing The Time. Men get raped, beaten down like dogs, or killed. One instance occurred in Marion County that mirrors Kevin’s piece reflection on The Shawshank Redemption.

A late 20s white guy came in on a rape charge or sexual crime of some sort. He’d been released after 10 years on something similar that took place at the cusp of his 18th birthday, if I remember those details right. He’d been out only a few weeks from his last bit.

I didn’t become aligned to him - but some guys talk more than they should - and so, you get more details than one can ever escape while inside. Jail is a noisy place and always brightly illuminated (the lights are too high, not just for security, but to work on you psychologically) so that you can’t know what time it is until the guards bring in chow. The jails vary certain schedules on food, CC TV enough to nudge people’s emotions. This impacts behavior long-term and weakens one’s will - a nice stew to create plea bargains nicely.

About a week later, he triggered several black inmates and his beating commenced. It’s called a PHD: Pumpkin Head Deluxe. He eventually was put “on the door” a euphemism for being kicked out of a Cell Block. A guy nicknamed M-1 Marvin was the ringleader behind this white guy’s beating and ouster. And “2:30”, the code for a guard, came by and got him as he was in a ball on the floor.

Later, the day I was transferred out to The Ville, this white guy, now with a shaved head and a few scars showing on his melon, was in a holding cell after coming back from court.

He told me, “I got me a fresh bit. 20 years this time.”

I said, what we all tend to say, “Sorry to hear that.”

“Its ok man. I thought they were gonna give me 30. I might even get out by time I’m 40 with good behavior.”

The Mindset

Prison is the only world he knows; it’s the only world that makes sense to him. Red explains that “These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.” Brooks’ fears, and Red’s explanation, prove prescient. Paroled, Brooks is unable to adjust to the world outside prison, and he hangs himself in his apartment.

-From American Greatness on The Shawshank Redemption.

People, at present, and his article discusses the science and medical establishments’ institutionalization on how people respond to stimuli, cannot escape from it, or even value the idea of independence from such systems.

As Kevin tells his own personal reflections on dealing with an science inmate:

She could not fathom a world without government-funded scientific research. It was incomprehensible to her that “science” could happen in the absence of massive government funding and pervasive government supervision. Government funding is how “science” happens. For a scientific researcher, especially an academic one, obtaining a government grant from an entity like the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health is critical, both to one’s research agenda and to one’s prestige and career advancement.

One becomes tethered to that thinking and all their behaviors are in lockstep to garner incentives and prestige. Whereas, criminals, their approach turns on avoidance of further punishment, unknown situations, and having clout based off the number of years and level of crime you are in for. Murderers of men are high ranking; drug entrepreneurs are not far below that in Prison Life. One can obviously assess downward to the what happens to those in for crimes on children and rightly so.

Kevin’s key insight comes through clearly in these lines:

For those who are enmeshed in it, the government-scientific complex is natural, beneficent, and indispensable. It predisposes them to believe that anyone who is outside the complex is not credible, and anyone who challenges it is a crank, a charlatan, or a conspiracy theorist. It fosters the mentality that any other arrangement is inconceivable. Defending that complex is thus a sine qua non of their very being, even when that complex is exposed as incompetent, corrupt, and even unscientific. The system is science. [My emphasis added.]

The System

Upon my release, life did not go back to normal. In fact, my mom picked me up and we went back to her house, about 2 hours from where I caught my case. I was then ordered to reported to probation where I was put on a GPS Monitor ($12/day) and forced to stay in the jurisdiction where my victim still lived. It took an additional 10 months before I could even attempt to come back to a forced NEW NORMAL.

My mother used up her life insurance policy to help me survive in Indy. I worked at Steak & Shake as a server and Bob Evans as a grill cook, while riding an old mountain bike, toting my GPS monitor, and living on North Side of Indy.

In April of 2004, the court released me to my mother’s house. I then somehow managed to get an interview with an up-n-coming company, EnVista, in August 2004. After beating out over 25 other applicants, I was offered a golden opportunity, starting at $50,000/year. Yet, my probation was still restrictive, Marion County even told me they would violate me (even as I offered to do GPS and give my travel for the job), if I ever left Lake County, Indiana again while on probation. (John Stitz (CEO) & Jim Barnes (then CEO) interviewed me, then, 19 years ago.)

This nugget stuck in my head, from the Head of Probation: “We don’t want to cut off your nose to despite your face.” I am not dwelling on this. But I do have an excellent memory - and I don’t forget many details on this trek.

Because what happen was: First, I became demoralized for many months.

But thereafter, I began writing and researching in late 2005 on baseball in the aftermath of the Congressional Steroid Hearings. And, I later proved (to myself) that steroids had little to do with the changes in homers by themselves. Ironically, the ones that benefit the most from The Juice are the pitchers who can maintain velocity, which has benefits and downsides as well. Moreover, the baseball is always the key. (A story to tell for another time.)

I mention this LASTLY because I began INDEPENDENT statistical research. I didn’t have grant funding. I didn’t have a thesis sponsor. I didn’t write with any hopes of making money off of it. One delivered papers for 6 1/2 years overnight during the Great Financial Crisis, while watching the markets implode in 2008.

I even wrote this, from an old blog of mine (with a different political and ideological bent, meaning: I was once a libtard too!) I wasn’t quite accurate.

Get Busy on Freedom & Take America (& This World) Back

The last three years were not as surprising [to me] after I took my red pills gradually in the 2010s. Many saw through the political ruses and knew this was a way to seize power. However, the GRAND AGENDA was not on anyone’s BINGO CARD but Alex Jones, who was indeed, RIGHT!

There is no silver bullet. Sacrifices will be made. Many will suffer into their own doom.

But at some point, WE THE PEOPLE either: Get BUSY LIVING (& FIGHTING) or get busy dying. There is no way out but through. There is no one coming to save us (on this mortal coil.) We all have to do it ourselves and together. We don’t have to cut off our noses or other body parts. We have to take our lumps, TAKE ACTION, and be damn the consequences!

If the lasting consequence of your life is to be remembered at all, it should be as one who died for something aspirational and unconventional, rather than institutional and decadent. For Liberty does not come from accepting the boundaries and incentives of mortal might, but the expanse of one’s own mind and the purviews of seeking them out in honor of the Human Experience.

THE TIME is NOW!