Prison Camp: The Hearing
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
What follows is another of my early writings in prison, recalling my sentencing hearing and employing again streaming prose to capture the disorientation, the breathless, ineffable experience that marked this new world to which I arrived as if falling down a well.
THE HEARING
My lawyer said there would be only five speakers against me which sounded like a lot to me and then he said after a while that there would be seven speakers but tried to reassure me that seven was okay because we had five speakers but our five included me and my wife and my daughter which meant we only had two speakers and I knew as soon as the first speaker opened his mouth that I was done and I could feel everyone behind me getting as embarassed as me because it was so terrible all the things they were saying about me and I knew it woudn’t matter what any of my firneds or my lawyer or me said because there was no breath in the room and only heavy mist and anger and even when the judge took forty five minutes to deliberate I knew he wasn’t deliberating but only to calculate and when he finally asked me to rise and my legs trembled and the number came out of his mouth kind of garbled so it could have been something not so bad but I knew it was bad before my lawyer wrote it on a pad in front of him because I heard my daughter sobbing as soon as he uttered the first syllable and so I knew I was going away and I would never come back and then I turned around and everyone was stunned not knowing what to do or what had happened even though everyone knew what happened but you just keep telling yourself that it didn’t happen but of course it did and no one wanted to come near me and even my enemies were afraid to look at me because they knew it was somehwere and someplace they never thought they’d be anymore than me and you realize what an ugly place the courtroom is even for the judge and the bailiffs and the lawyers and the prosecuors and the security guys in the lobby and probably the guys who clean up after as it’s just a terrible place where nothing that goes on there makes anyone feel good and only dirty somehow as I could feel the heavy air suffocating everyone including my enemies and all just wanting to get out of that room where all the bad things in life come to their deliverance because all the bad things are part of everyone in that room and at the end of the day as every one was walking out everyone felt sorry for themselves and no one was off the hook not even the Judge.
An expanded version of this was published in a collection of my prose poems published by Moonstone Press. You can purchase the collection here: A Different Kind of Hell.
Up Next on White Collar Journal:
Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform Efforts
Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections
Sunday (Prison Camp): More Streams from prison
If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.
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"there was no breath in the room." I sat through a parole hearing a few years back, and after teh family spoke (against) there was no breath in the room.