Another
Saturday of racing the sunrise to the upper level of Hell. When I wake up at 5
am on a Saturday morning, I often ask myself why I work so many hours and feel
like I never get ahead. Some days the hour-long drive feels like a shackled
walk to the town square where I will trade my body for a few measly morsels of
currency so that I can pay one more month’s worth of bills. As
I pull up to the dull gray, unassuming, one-story, concrete square with
fish-gill slitted windows surrounded by two, twenty-foot barbed wire fences, I
feel a surge of energy shoot through my body. I may feel enslaved to my bills
or my chosen lifestyle or societal expectations, but I am freer than many –
including the thousand plus men inside that daunting place.
You
may call them criminals. Some call them animals. Most don’t think they deserve
a second chance. I call them my students. When each man walks into my classroom
for the first time, I look into his eyes. I often see a darkness, but there are
two parts behind even the darkest eyes: A brain and a soul.
If
you teach a man to fish…
Do
not judge, lest ye be judged…
There
is a fifty-fifty chance the man whose eyes I meet will be a disrespectful
pervert who will be sent to solitary once I kick him to the curb, or will be
the most perfect example of the complexity of the ying-yang inter-workings of a
human being. Out of almost a hundred students, I’ve only had two defile my
hopeful optimism.
It
is my personal policy to never research the offense of my students. I know the
men in front of me have killed, stolen, pimped, dealt, beaten, molested, raped
and over-consumed. I also know that each man sitting before me will at some
point put to shame any preconceived notions I might have tried to smuggle into
the room. One man drafted plans for a hurricane-resistant bio-dome home that
was completely powered by natural resources. Another man wrote a 500 page epic
novel that could rival Harry Potter. Another man gave a speech that could have
sent chills down the spine of Martin Luther King, Jr. Another had not spent one
second of his twenties in the free. That’s what they call the world you and I
complain about – “in the free.”
And
so Day One of class commences. I may teach these men a thing or two, but I can
assure you I will do most of the learning. That is, after I set the parameters
for the class culture: my classroom rules.
1.
Respect Yourself
2.
Respect Others
3.
No Lewd Conduct
4.
No Unnecessary Negativity
You
may cackle at the simple naiveté of the rules I chose for my prison classroom.
You won’t laugh for too long because you will soon realize that those four
rules are sufficient for even the most untamable.
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