As I listened to Street's story that night by the water cooler, I read the passion in his unpassionate eyes and the anger in his monosyllabic voice and I saw, for the first time, the tears of a misunderstood man whom I could not identify with, but whom I saw - really saw - and I wondered who could ever tell his story so everyone could see. Sometimes in stories you can move the pieces around. You can reconfigure and retell and reveal hidden aspects and replace the trueness of something with irrefutable fact. You can take out the meaning and bash it over the head and put it back to mean something else or to still be true but only in a certain light. That's not the way it is in this case. You can't change these facts. Jerome was found guilty of a larger crime than he was capable of and he was given twenty-three years. He will do 85% of the time unless he begins the process of lying in court and incriminating someone else on down the line. It won't be hard. There're younger men coming up all the time - an endless supply - just waiting for an outlandish opportunity to be bigshots. For that adolescent misjudgment, they'll get tons of time in which to sit and think and be bitter, and won't America be proud of itself. Won't Americans just sit up and gloat! "See how we do our criminals? See what you get if you grow up slow in America?"

        When I was a young man, I lived through a catastrophic historical error in judgment. The Vietnam War will always be the most ill-defined, poorly thought-out case of criminal self-flagellation in our history, and now, because of some equally stupid policy makers in this era, we are again destroying a whole segment of our population. Our elected officials are not only fucking up whatever tenuous relationship America has with its disenfranchised poor, but they're painting them with the stars and stripes of a select membership. I live in a clubhouse of common hate that is housing hundreds of thousands of young adults.

        In the pod here at the Seminole County Jail, some of the inmates call Street by the unkind moniker, "Magillah." Magillah will take the willfulness of youth, the anger of his race and his unfortunate looks with him to prison for many years. He won't be going to work at the dairy or to movies on quiet Sunday afternoons. He won't be fishing with his friends on summer mornings and he won't be marrying the young girl he met not long ago at his mother's beauty shop. There won't be any babies curling up in his big, hairy arms, and buying a new skateboard or a silly toy for the son or daughter he will never have is also not in the picture. His Christmas eves will be bleak affairs with angry-eyed inmates whose love of life and pride in themselves were also shattered by the razored chains of lifetime sentences. In fifteen or twenty or twenty-five years, he won't be able to watch with pride as his imagined children grow up and graduate and have families of their own. At twenty-two, Jerome is the benumbed soul of America whether he likes it or not. He's the dark puzzle, the monster rumbling in the closet. He is the faulty instrument of our destruction, and if you don't believe it, then you are either not awake or a fool. The momentum of his example is just now beginning to formulate and divide and multiply and coalesce and it will carry us all into the abyss with mind-numbing velocity unless we stop it. Jerome's life will truly be an example. I guarantee it. His jaws will bite and his claws will snatch, and may God have mercy on our souls when that happens.