🔵 By Micah Matthews. Photo by lauragrafie.
Imagine living in an environment where it’s pretty and neat on the outside, but ugly filled with polite racism on the inside. Imagine a place where fighting to overturn your case and better yourself, looks invisible and playing spades, basketball and lifting weights is promoted and seen as productive and normal. Imagine a place where you can indulge in everything from fundraisers to obtain candy and food to playing X-Box. Imagine a place where you can indulge in everything except proper education programs that truly prepare men for their return to the free world. Imagine a place where most care more about individuals being house niggas, then getting home and providing a hoes for their kids. Imagine a place where the slogan “Life means Life” is enforced to the up most. Imagine a place where buying the newest gym shoes on canteen is more important than getting the shoe of injustice off your neck.
As unreal as this place may sound, from the outset it must be known, this place is real, very real. This place is Fort Madison prison, in Fort Madison Iowa. Unlike most State and Federal prisons around the county where most inmates make noise and do what they can to let the world know they’ve been unjustly kidnapped and put in the truck better known as prison, by the so called Justice system. Most inmates here at Fort Madison prison, put up little to no fight and are led quietly to the lynching fields so to speak, better known as life without parole. Fort Madison prison is designed for inmates to sit back, enjoy the amenities that are afforded, and you are expected to keep your mouth shut and die slow, especially if you’re a lifer like me. I’ve seen time and time again inmates fall into this routine and/or traps and give up on themselves and/or ever being a productive member of society.
This is what I faced as I stepped onto the landscape of Iowa State Penitentiary for the first time. Expecting an environment somewhat similar to the prisons I had been to in Illinois, or heard of in other states in regards to the number of individuals that wanted and were willing to put in the world to change, to change their life and/or situation. However, what I found was an overwhelming number of individuals living in the past telling stories about who they were before coming to prison, how much money they had before coming to prison and other stories. In other words I found more people content with the amenities that are afforded to them here at Madison prison, who they were or claimed to be in the past, ,than people interested in who they could become or where they could go in life if they put in the work. There are many hype-men here, people that talk a good game but don’t truly put in any work, this is one of the main reasons why you never see or hear about the egregious acts by the Justice System in Iowa or within the prison system ever reported in the “Prison Legal News”, The Marshall Project or any other major prison outlet. This leads people to think that because Iowa has a low prison population that there is no injustice going on here, and life within the prison is good but they’re WRONG, VERY WRONG!
I’m looking to change that, by shedding some light on life in Fort Madison prison, as well as my personal situation of “Wrongful Incarceration” in the state of Iowa. But I need help… If these words resonate with you, please reach out @Second Chance Micah, www. A Second chance for Micah, Change.Org, Color of Change or contact me directly through Corrlinks.