Thinking It Over

By every imprisoned father

Tonight I'm sitting in my cell at an FCI trying to think of what I can tell my son, now 16, that will encourage him to finish high school. That's the immediate problem. It's hard to raise a kid from prison who hasn't had a father since he was three. He's a good kid, though, so maybe we'll make it. One thing I can't explain to him is why his dad has to spend over 20 years in prison for a drug possession case. I get the feeling he thinks there must be some bodies somewhere. There aren't.

I also have two daughters, now 22 and 26, who were 10 and 14 when I was arrested. It's been a rough road for them too, to say the least, and old dad just hasn't been much help since that day in 1988 when the federal government removed another drug possessor from society. Let's just hope it didn't create three more in the process.

Someone in the last edition of the Razor Wire hit the nail on the head with regard to the statement that the war on drugs is nothing more than a war on lower and lower-middle income America. How could it be more obvious? George Bush and friends' "youthful indiscretions" are our felonies, not to mention various senators' sons whose drug charges just go away, while their political fathers lobby for the death penalty for whomever they choose to deem a "drug kingpin".

Obviously justice is commensurate with financial and political status.