🔵 By Matthew Boivin. Photo by lauragrafie.
“Even in there, closed off from pretty much everything, can you grasp after months and years how much the world, the people, the goals and wishes and dreams of those around you have changed, the moods and behaviors – comparing it to before you were arrested?”
When a friend asked me this question, I was initially struck with a sense of serendipity, or at least synchronicity. Not two weeks before, I had a very similar conversation with my free-world supervisor. We were on horseback riding through a herd of cattle looking for injuries, passing the time with an intelligent conversation. In prison, intelligence is a short commodity, and the ability to hold a decent conversation not filled with the happenings of street life is in even shorter supply. Yet the timing of her question from halfway across the globe could only mean I was meant to answer it.
Of course, an intelligent answer requires a little background first, starting with me. For a point of reference, I turned 21 years old in May, 1996, and in October of the same year I was sitting in jail awaiting trial with a death-qualified jury. The County Prosecutor held no qualms with seeking the death penalty in an election year when his seat was being challenged by one of his Deputy Prosecutors. Understandably, I would not have been in that predicament if I didn’t commit a heinous crime, but after a childhood that put the funk in dysfunctional coupled with hard-core substance abuse, I was ill-prepared to effectively cope with the demands of civilized society, whatever those may be.
Still, I make no excuses for the choices I made on the fact I mainlined cocaine as a poor substitute for therapy and a temporary anti-depressant regimen. Making a different choice would have saved many people much pain, and I certainly wish I could change that decision; but this is the life I have, and all things happen for a reason. Besides, I was well on the way to the bottom of a vortex of self-destruction that very easily could have led to the bottom of a forgotten shallow grave where I would be unable to answer this question or offer my story as an example of overcoming struggle. I could focus my answer on others and how I’ve noticed their changes, but I feel more authentic sharing how my goals, moods and behaviors have changed over the years since I was arrested.
I was a terrified kid when I came to prison. The most trouble I had ever been in was an arrest for unpaid traffic tickets and being paddled once in junior high-school for bringing toothpicks soaked in whiskey. I didn’t consider myself a trouble maker tough I knew I was definitely troubled. I came to prison on a Wednesday and was in the hole for fighting by Saturday. That was just the one that got caught by an officer. My first in-person visit was with my mother sitting at a table some distance away from the rest of the weekend visitation crowd. The security officers escorted me in handcuffs to the table, letting me visit wearing state jewelry I would become all too accustomed to.
A captain came to our table, patted me on the shoulder, telling me: “It’s good to see you manned up.” He turned to my worried mother, telling her I was going to do fine in prison. She looked at me with a question in her eyes, but I just played it off. I didn’t have the heart to tell her his last advice to me had been: “Boy, you need to get you a knife and get your ass back in the barracks.” I did that and learned not to ask the officers for anything. If I wanted to survive in prison, I would have to do it on my own. So I did.
I soon learned that prison life wasn’t that much different from my street life. I could buy or make prison hooch to get drunk on, could buy drugs to get high with and could always find somebody to fight when I needed to feel pain to remind me I was indeed still alive. Even in prison, I could keep my comfortable relationship with drama intact as I actively sought the self-destruction. That was my true addiction. I picked up right where I left off, not learning anything from the ordeal I dragged myself and my family through. But that, too, changed. I clearly remember the day I decided to make a change for myself. It was late 1998, and I was doing time in a private prison operated by the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation. In those days, the Varmen Unit was the Gladiator School housing all of us youngsters who liked to fight each other. When the Arkansas Department of Correction contracted with Wackenhut, the youngsters and the women were transferred to the two units of the Wackenhut Complex. These were the two most expensive groups to house until the tough-on-cocaine surge of the 1990’s Crime Bill aged, turning prisons into nursing homes, but that’s another story.
I was transferred to Wackenhut from the Varmen Unit after stabbing a prisoner for taking my tattoo gun from me. The Administration thought I was too violent for Varmen, I suppose, so I was put on a bus to be someone else’s problem. I was expecting to start working on my Master’s Degree in survival after graduating from the Gladiator School, but fate had different plans. I was assigned to the Honor Pod as a Barracks Porter, mopping floors and cleaning toilets. I spent my days going to GED classes even though I was a high school graduate and my nights drinking coffee to play dominoes until breakfast.
There I was Class-IV in a Class I barracks, a hoodlum among the trusted prisoners of the unit, stagnating in my own lassitude. I woke up one morning and literally asked myself: “Matthew, what are you doing with your life?” I was wasting away, and I knew I was meant for something more; I just had no idea what that something was. I needed a change somewhere, anywhere, and the only place I had any control was the school. I sent for my high school transcripts and asked for an interview when they arrived. I spelled my way into a job at the school, breezing through the interview. The principal let be work as a Resource Tutor, which meant that now, instead of cleaning toilets, I was teaching young men to read and tutoring others struggling with the math portion of their General Education Diploma test.
The woman I worked for was impressed with my intelligence, and I found a new drug – approval.
When the school took a summer break, I went to work in the mental health department of the infirmary where I served as much as a peer mentor as a clerk. My favorite part of the job was sitting in on the group therapy classes talking to others about solving the problems we all faced personally. I spark was lit that would grow to be a life’s passion, but I was still far too self-centered at the time to realize what was happening. One of the more positive things I gained from the mental health stint was my very first IQ test. The psychologist shared conversations with me and was intrigued by how I wound up in prison. He asked if I would mind being tested to gauge my intelligence quotient, and my arrogance readily agreed. After he examined the results, he told me I had a “superior intelligence” at 162 points. I spend my entire high school years doing my best to hide my intelligence and downplay being a “nerd” even graduating ranked 89 out of 209. Here was concrete evidence I couldn’t ignore though. I could no longer tell myself I was smart but no smarter than the next kid. I now knew I had a gift I could no longer waste. Surely there was a purpose for having such a gift if I could only find a way to transform it to a legacy. As soon as I internalized the depth of my intelligence as something given, that old familiar defeatist voice whispered in my ear: “Your dumb ass couldn’t stay out of prison, though, could you?”
I was still too wrapped in self-loathing to fully appreciate the man I was meant to become.
Now, many years later, I managed to accept myself as a capable, intelligent man with many gifts to share and the unique flair to achieve whatever I set my mind to. More than one man has crossed my path years later thanking me for helping get their GED only to tell me they were doing good on parole until something triggered a drug relapse. Others have told me they were encouraged by the motivational talks I gave a the Boot Camp program.
Once I internalized that I had value beyond prison and beyond pain, my world shifted. Even though I still remain in prison, I am no longer shackled by the baggage of a traumatic childhood. I recognize I have problems bonding with other men and a tendency to be a rescuer when it comes to women, but I knew these are common traits of childhood trauma survivors rather than signs that I’m broken or somehow not good enough. I recognize I am driven by a desire for perfection, but I know making mistakes is part of the journey, not the end of the road.
When I stopped carrying the shame of my childhood as my own red badge of honor, an interesting thing happened. My shift caused those around me to shift as well. As my worldview evolved from self-loathing and shame to a healthy relationship with myself coupled with personal autonomy, other healthy men begin to drift toward me. The hangers-on and bottom-feeders tried to pull me down with them, but I fought to break free from their parasitic grasp. They seemed to feed off my pain and devour my joy.
Funny thing about happiness in prison is that there’s always someone lurking in the shadows wanting to steal my happy because they have none of their own. Seeking my own balance then became a struggle fighting the demons in my past, the very real vampires in my present, and the ever-elusive dreams of a future after prison.
When I finally found my balance, others wanted to know how to find it as well. I could tell from their conversation compared to their behavior who the truth seekers really were. A few relevant truths about prison for a moment: somebody’s always watching, a mouth will say anything to get what it wants, and nobody makes it out without a scar, metaphorical or otherwise.
Focusing on my own change, then, my words had to match my actions or others would view me as just another charlatan running game.
Conversely, I spotted the fake men when their actions didn’t match their words. Digging myself out of my own pit was hard enough without having to dog someone else out of theirs as well. Digging beside me is another story, though.
As I grew healthier, I attracted other men looking for a change and repelled those who were just looking for someone to carry them through. When I found my balance, real change was apparent to others who were searching for real change of their own. I realized that my change inspired others around me to change.
To answer the original question, yes, I can clearly grasp how the world, the people, the moods and behaviors of those around me have changed compared to when I was arrested. What I couldn’t clearly see was that the change in myself directly affected the changes in others. As the flap of a butterfly’s wings in China could affect the weather across the globe, so, too, did my tiniest actions affect the perceptions of the world around me. Interestingly enough, the keys to digging out of the hole created by childhood trauma and affecting positive change on others were not as elusive as I once thought. The keys to finding personal freedom amazed me in their simplicity. I had to allow a healthy relationship with myself. I had to develop an active personal autonomy, and I had to fight the inevitable apathy imposed by the drudgery of daily life. Once I internalized these simple concepts, the shift in my attitude shifted the world around me. That’s another story, though.