THE LUXURY TAX ON CRIME

Your initial luxury tax for entry into prison is forfeiture of your street symbols. You will be provided with affordable jewels: platinum-plated handcuffs, leg irons, and belly chains. Not ideal bling, bling, huh? Oh, but it's free, like your robbery. No monetary stress 4 U.

Your choice in clothing and jewelry has been selected for you by the state's wardrobe specialist, prison industries. You won't have to worry about street hustling for those T.R.U. Religion or Red Monkey jeans, Air Nike tennis shoes, or Gucci polos. State blue shirts and pants with orange stripes will be provided for you. No need to worry about whether someone else has the same outfit as yours; everyone wears the same attire. You're state property now they got you, playa!

In addition, an all-paid-expenses trip to lands far away from your hood is included in the initial tax. The "hood" or "block" you been rep'in, willing to put your life down for, is of no significance in "the experience."

Your neighborhood becomes a distant memory after the judge sentences you. No one tells you it will be quite a while before you see your hood again, if ever.

Oh, did I mention that the travel menu is cold bologna with soiled bread and cheese, maybe? So sit back, enjoy the chauffeur-driven cruise with leg irons forcing your feet and ankles close, hands clinched in your new jewelry, chained around your waist with a lovely black box attached to assure a tight fit.

You will arrive at "the big house" you've always had street dreams of acquiring. Just not quite how you imagined it!

South, up-north, mid-state are areas of your region you never knew existed. Rural, farm, and swamp lands converted into prisons especially designed for your criminal behavior await your arrival. Your block-oriented thinking never achieved the global or universal scale you had the potential to reach. But now, "the experience" has forced you to see how small your thoughts and goals were. Your new travels are much longer than your block thinking of whether your drug money was proper or whether "the bag" was tied tight. Those things don't matter now that you realize genocide was "you ridin' on your own kind" (gang banging).

Prison trips help you understand you weren't thinking right at all. The scenery on the three-to-five hour drive on the state highway up north will hold your attention until the huge castle-style building shakes your curiosity and fears. As the van whips through the maze of upstate prison security, you look through the van bars and smoked windows and say to the driver, "Excuse me, officer, where are we?"

* * *

Another added cost of your decision to choose prison life is the loss of privacy. You can no longer think in peace and quiet. You lose all rights to use the bathroom alone. It's a community setting in most cases, where anyone who walks by can see you sitting on the toilet, brushing your teeth, wiping your butt, or whatever you can imagine in performing your personal functions.

Even personal conversations during visitations with your loved ones are no longer private. If you don't want your lips to be read by someone watching the surveillance camera, you have to put down "the Gambino"—the mobster's move of placing your hand over your upper lip and mouth when you speak. This does not guarantee privacy, but you engage in it to make yourself feel secure when you have something important to share with your loved ones.

Every part of your life is on display in the prison experience. Just the simple things of being able to touch, hug, and kiss, or to assist someone who needs medical attention is forbidden. If your home boy, home girl, or a prison staff member falls and needs assistance, your natural human compassion is forbidden. You are not allowed to help them. Helping someone in need is viewed as you being responsible for their injury or mishap. The prison experience is so insensitive that you may not realize your heart has turned cold.

Blame is often placed on you because it's convenient. If food for dining hall meals runs short, it's commonly assumed that prisoners stole the food before it was prepared. The logic of the food service staff miscounting the expected number of meals may not be considered.

Yes, not only are you in "the experience," you are also the scapegoat of the experience.

Yet another aspect of the experience is that your sex life will be your hand, lotion, and Vaseline. Your ideal mate may be a picture in a magazine, or maybe memories of your street date or a TV star. Unless you prefer your own gender. If that's the case, you may choose to be the driver or the fender (a.k.a. "the pitcher or the catcher").

In prison, the common laws of nature work against you. Family members pass away and you cannot properly grieve your loss. Communicating news of a relative passing is often done inconsiderately unless you call home to receive the word directly. You may be called into the office of your Counselor, Unit Manager, Caseworker, or Chaplain for consultation or you're simply told to call home.

* * *

There have been several incidents of my immediate family members passing during my decades of incarceration. Fortunately, my remaining family members understood the importance of immediately driving up to the facility to inform me in person.

I will be forever grateful to my daughter Erica Iris, my niece, and my brother Johnnie Earl (R.I.P) for driving over two hours to share important family news with me in October 1998.

A close family member dying was one of my major fears when I entered prison in 1984. I was terrified that they would die before my release.

Being in my early 20s and sentenced to serve natural life in prison was frightening. Sadly enough, I was forced to face another primary fear that October day.

At a mid-Michigan prison in Carson City, I was aware that my mother had been in the hospital for several weeks after she beckoned my sister Beverly in the middle of the night, signaling that she could not breathe. My mother and sister were the only ones living in the home our family had purchased over 50 years ago. My sister immediately called Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and my mother was admitted into Henry Ford Hospital on West Grand Blvd., in Detroit, Michigan.

Ford Hospital is where my father died, in a private room in 1983. I was the last one to visit my dad before the doctor received approval from my mother to shut off the life support system keeping him alive after 81 years on this earth. Reflecting back, it was a time in my life that I felt angry, betrayed, hopeless, and useless all at once. I didn't find out until months later that my mother had ordered the life support system shut off after my visit.

My father was my best friend, although he was 58 years old when his 32-year-old wife gave birth to me. I had never experienced the loss of a parent or other immediate family member. Mixed emotions raced through me, and my ability to cope with my father's death was not supported by groups similar to those available today.

* * *

Being in the prison experience, unable to be at my mother's bedside and learning of her emergency arrival at Ford Hospital at 3:00 a.m., brought memories of my father's death. These thoughts motivated me to frequently call home in hopes of staying abreast of my mom's condition. Early on in my prison time I had permission from my mother to phone home every Sunday at 7:00 p.m. She assigned me a schedule that her limited income could afford so she could have peace of mind that I was not hospitalized or worse. Mothers worry about you when you're in "the experience." So don't ever believe that you're doing time on your own. No matter what your relations may have been with your parents, most times they can't help but feel empathy, guilt, or some sort of responsibility for the choices you make. So keep that in mind about the prison experience should you choose to pursue a lifestyle that will surely lead you to a penal institution.

Fast street cash, drinking, guns, drugs, and irresponsible behavior are all roads that lead to the experience.

* * *

After my mom was released from the hospital for complications of congestive heart failure, she made the two-hour trip up to visit me. It was the strangest visit I have ever received during my incarceration. She was accompanied by my brother Johnnie and my sister Beverly. They were at the vending machines purchasing items for us to snack on when my mother, seated next to me, began explaining her final wishes and expected plans.

I sat in a daze at first, then snapped out of it and shouted, "Don't be talking like that. You aren't going anywhere."

My mother was informing me that the family house was to be left to my sister, who was instructed to send me a certain amount of money every month from the property our family had acquired since my incarceration. She told me what she expected of me in my treatment of others, and shared that all the years she spent helping strangers was in hope that someone would do some good for me if she passed away before I was released. She never wanted to go back to Ford Hospital, where my dad had passed. She spent thirty years paying for our family home and wanted to die in her own bed and not some strange hospital bed.

I realized in that moment that facing one of my primary fears of the prison experience was a possibility. Did I want to believe it or face it? No!

Frustration and confusion dominated my mind after my mother's visit. Leaving the visiting area, I felt I couldn't violate the unwritten prison code of not displaying weakness. Showing vulnerability (tears) may encourage another prisoner to seize the opportunity to take advantage of the moment as word reaches the prison yard. There are no secrets in prison. But within, I struggled with the conflict of my compassionate upbringing and the prison culture.

I reasoned in that moment that sharing a compassionate human emotion (crying) was not a viable option. Let's be clear: to show sympathy is considered taboo in "the experience." So all the things that normally come naturally to you in society are discouraged in the prison culture. Prison has rules that exist only in the experience.

* * *

A week after my mom's visit my brother Johnnie, daughter Erica, and my niece arrived for a visit. Excited and grateful to see all three of my closest relatives, I entered the visiting room in anticipation. Johnnie "Barrel" had just been home off a three-year sentence for receiving and concealing stolen property. I figured he was prepared to really feel my pain and understood the value of family in the prison experience. That's why, I thought at the time, he had taken it upon himself to bring Erica and my niece to visit me since I hadn't seen either of them in over three years. Going through so much stress in everyday prison life, you long for a little happiness or comfort from a family visit.

In the excitement of seeing them, I jokingly asked, "Who died?" as I hugged them in the designated area of the prison visiting room.

You are allowed to embrace your visitors only in front of the officer's desk before and after a contact visit. You can't greet or say goodbye with an embrace or kiss in any area other than directly in front of the officer's view in most correctional facilities that allow contact visits. That is just another aspect of privacy loss in "the experience."

Erica, Johnnie, and my niece just smiled as I hugged each of them. With my arms around Erica and Johnnie's shoulders, we sat in the seats assigned by the visiting room officer.

* * *

I was seated across from Erica, with a small wood grain two-by-four-foot eating table between us. After an hour or so of chatting and them bringing me up to speed on neighborhood events, I jokingly asked again, "No, for real, who died?"

I asked the question in jest. It hadn't seriously occurred to me that they would provide an answer. I was surprised by their arrival and appreciated them coming to visit. But....

In a silent moment, Johnnie and my niece looked over at Erica and her "Adam's apple" moved like a jackhammer up and down her throat.

"Grandma died," she softly spoke.

"Your grandmother died?" in awe I questioned, implying her mother's mother, LaGloria.

"No, Grandma Hudson, your mother," Erica replied.

"No! Not Momma!" I blurted, as my heart began to pound.

* * *

It had been less than a week since I'd seen my mother alive. She silently passed away in her own bed in her home of 30 years, paid for by my father's hard-earned wages. She didn't bother to call out to my sister in the middle of the night as she had done before.

God called her home and I believe now she is teaching the angels how to love. (R.I.P., my dear Mother Rosie. There's no other who can take the place of my dear mother.)

* * *

Me? I was left face to face with my deepest fear. I wondered, what would I do in prison without Momma? It was a thought that I had never seriously pondered. No plan, no escape route, no love, no support. It was just me in this emotional tragedy of the prison experience.

The news of my mother's death made the mystic prison code of no consequence to me. I could not see anyone else in the room of 40 other family members and prisoners. It was a defining moment for me.

A son losing his mother with no ability to do anything to soothe the grieving process made me realize what was real. I always knew the importance of family support. What I didn't know was, what do you do when the foundation of your family is gone?

Just between us, the street game never prepares you for that. No tough-man, gun-toting, male egos when your mother passes away while in prison. At that time you ask The Creator to carry you.

* * *

This aspect of the prison experience has no script available. So let me extend much regret to all my shooter gang stars ("gangstaz"). Karma is a bitch!

You hear about other guys' or girls' mothers passing while they're doing time, but nothing can prepare you when it's yours. The helplessness, frustration, and anger you feel are unbearable.

These and other thoughts scurry through your mind: "What will I do without my mother? She always had my back when no one else did. I could count on her when all else failed me. If I had never gotten into trouble, I would be there for my family. Why couldn't anyone save her this time? I wish I wasn't locked up. God, how could you? Why God, why me?

The unspoken words you wish you had said, the times lost, the moments not shared. The absence, the regrets, the frustration, the remorse, the "what ifs"—are all part of that experience beyond your reach. I ask you, young street thugs, "Do you still need to feel what I'm feeling?"

* * *

Achieving a sense of finality over the death of an immediate family member is nearly impossible while in prison. You can't imagine the pain, mental anguish, and suffering wrong choices offer. The inability to attend the family hour. No funeral or traditional closure. The opportunity to grieve may never come. Healing is a distant process which may never be obtained. It's just you in a cold prison cell.

Once you learn of the loss of a loved one, you're left to suffer in silence in your cell. Some prisons offer Chaplain consultation, but most are not adequate for comforting your emotions.

In spite of it all, the days go on. You are forced to develop a mental defense mode of being your own mother and father, if you're able. If not, the prison healthcare will provide you with mind-altering medications, leaving you in a Zombie-like state of existence.

In the reality of prison culture, weakness is not recommended. You must keep your game face on regardless. It's not natural, but talking your pain out with just anyone is dangerous. In most cases, it's not an option!

Death is always just around the corner. So ask yourself, is this what you want for your life through the pursuits of robbery, murder, carjacking, street riches, or rims?

THE THIRD TAP OF DEATH

Time in prison presents multiple opportunities for you to endure the death of a relative. My two brothers passed away within years of my mother's passing. My brother Johnnie, just 13 months and 13 days older than I, died in 2004 at age 46 from congestive heart failure; never seen that coming. At the time I was housed a half hour away from Detroit. I am grateful for Erica and Neice driving up to prison to break that news to me.

In 2011, while I was awaiting distribution of my first book, Gangsta Rap for the Youth, my oldest brother, Gregory, passed away from congestive heart failure as well, at age 59. I was not prepared for his death, either.

I learned of his passing through my Assistant Resident Unit Manager (ARUM) after my godmother, Lucille, called the facility and asked the ARUM to pass a message on to me. I was two-and-a-half hours away from Detroit, in Coldwater, Michigan.