🔵 By Keith David Houston. Photo by lauragrafie.
By the time many men and women end up in prison they have destroyed most if not all of their relationships on the street. It is extremely painful and heart breaking for any one to go through years sometimes decades without any outside contact because that contact is a true lifeline for everyone where loneliness is a major cause of many suicides inside prisons where they have none who cares about them. Mail call for any men and women is a depressing low point of every day, when there has been no card or letter from anyone who cares, yet communication is essential to maintaining ones sanity as well as a persons inner strength to keep going in spite of the daily struggles of prison life. For a lot of men and women it’s all bad because the complete loss of family and friends results in them being placed in isolation or solitary confinement and punishment due to violence towards other inmates or prison staff. In the State of Texas in the United States of America death row prisoners are automatically placed in solitary confinement and it is being challenged in the courts and is likely to change ending their blanket policy of an automatic solitary confinement in Texas. A lot of men and women who have no one who cares in the world lose all hope of ever getting their lives back, and when you are in solitary confinement it’s difficult to contain the anger. I went through it all for years taking it out on everyone who even looked at me funny until I realized I was my own worst enemy!
Not many men or women could survive 42 years of imprisonment nearly half of it in maximum security and a large part of it in solitary confinement like I have. Unlike many, I exercised my mind and my body to stay mentally stable and the anger inside me turned to a fight to help others by learning the law. I have helped countless people get out, and that eventually gave me the strength to try one more time to get out of prison after discovering new evidence that would prove my innocence through an unexpected source! A State public defender I did not think would help me” So, not everyone goes off the deep end to end up in prison statistic even though many do. My story is a rare one of survival and inner strength, and I won’t give up.