Peace to Man, Woman and Child,
While waiting in line for chow, some brothers decided to skip the line and advance to the front. I asked my self how come these individuals did not have enough patience to wait their turn. Which borned another thought of: How will these people survive in the free cipher if they have not acquired patience in the injustice cipher? Allow me to help you travel through my reasoning via my train of thought.
Most of us that were arrested were put in cuffs and placed in the back seat of a police car, waiting on the officer(s) to get the story together before transporting us to the precinct. Once at the precinct, we have to sit in a cage (holding cell) until the police fills out their paper work. Now, depending if you are in New York City, or an area that operates differently, you go either to the county (outside of NYC), or to Central Booking (NYC). Going through Central Booking can take days before you see a judge, until then you involunteerly become apart of musical cells --> go from holding cell to holding cell, before reaching the quarters behind the courtroom. In the case of the county transport, you are forced to endure the agony of processing, which may takes hours, depending on the volume of prisoners coming in. Once this is done, you still have more hours of waiting for a bunk assignment. There are those of us that are blessed enough to be able to afford bail, yet and still with being bailed out there is a process of waiting.
Okay, we have been arrested, processed (or bailed out), and given a bunk, so the wait is over now, right? Emphatically not! It is just transferred to another realm, waiting to go before a judge again, and the whole prelimnary process. If either side, defense or prosecutor, puts in for any continuances, the wait is even longer. Let us skip through the entire legal dance of "proving beyond a reasonable doubt", and get straight to the inevitable conviction, the wait is over NOW, right? Not even!
How long will it take to get transported to prison? In Ohio, it takes weeks, if that long. B.u.t in New York, it can take up to months. More waiting. The Department of "Corrections" has us in custody, making us wards of the state, so the next step is to get through the processing stage on a state level. After this we have to wait to go to our institution which can take any where from days to months. Okay, we are finally at the institution we are assigned to do our time ... b.u.t now we have to go through the whole orientation situation and be placed in an ordinary dorm/block. Now the wait is finally over! Except for the greatest wait of all: WAITING TO GO HOME!!!
You have been enlightened to all the waiting that we do as convicts, from arrest to bidding, and one would think we have developed the virtue of patience. However, that is not always the case. In fact, that is often not the case, just look at the recidivism rate in this country. If we had the amount of patience expected of someone going through all the waiting spoken of in this entry, we would not keep coming back to this hell of incarceration. We would not lose focusness when we do not find employment within the first few weeks of release. We wouldn't get sidetracked whenever lyfe throws obstacles before us, like irrational baby mamas, frienemies, pressures of the hood, et cetera.
So in essence, "correctional" facilities do not help us develop patience. It is like anything else with getting what you can out of your bid: it is on the individual to refine themselves and acquire the degree of patience necessary to remain in the free ciphee once there. Any ideas? Peace.
Black King
No comments:
Post a Comment