I was on freaking fire FIRE when the following essay began. It’s a huge issue. Life and – where will I spend the rest of mine. Then logistics came into play. I’m a rewriter. Revising is my jam. And due to technical difficulties, my jam is jammed. The Jpay tablet I’ve used as a word processor for years has given up its ghost and it’s gonna be a while, maybe a long while before I find a work around. And, of course, when it rains…it’s the end of the budgetary year which means inventory which means order gets put on hold which means typewriter ribbons are on hold which means lots of pen and pencil which means my composition pace is roughly half the speed of smell. Meaningful revisions..? yeah write is all, all over again.
For the last decade my process has been generate: some combination of tablet, typed, and handwritten. Then lots of revision, LOTS, using all three mediums, wrapping up in either email of typed my pages.
Why bother (make you, dear reader, suffer through) my laborious explanations?
1) I ain’t got nothing better to do – clearly
2) Terrified I’ll fail to convey how insanely important this, the essay that follows, is to AND for me. That this slow rambling slog – ie unrevised work stream – of – consciousness – will obscure what feels to me, on a personal level, like being buried under ground and breathing through a small diameter rubber hose that could get kinked, plugged, or have somebody simply put their thumb over the end. Game over.
What follows is kind of a rambling mess and makes the reader work to sort out the depth and impact which I regret, but I needed, HAD to get it out of my cell and move on to the next.
MOMENTUM IS ALL!
A. Krosch 206912 MnCF-OPH
MAYDAY REVIEW 2026;
A parole journal entry 5.29.26
The sun is out, the temperature in the mid 80s, we actually got out for year this week. Recent staffing issues make the yard and gym hit or miss. I’ve got a smile on my face and the day is what it is twenty six years into a pair of life sentences, each with a 30 year minimum. Then my smiley face gets a nice little poke in the eye, my caseworker is here for my yearly review. New caseworker. Seems okay. It’s a dude for a change. Kind of nice. Sitting across from an attractive young-ish woman wearing “street clothes” when your love life has been on hold for a quarter century ain’t a lot of fun. I make a point of being respectful, maintaining eye contact while talking, keeping my male pig qualities to myself.
Anyhow, dude caseworker. Much easier to just chop it up with. “How’s the last year been going? Plan on doing anything with your life?” ad so on. I have the same questions this year as I have for the past few. What’s up with this thing called “constructive parole”? sounds positive, right? Constructive at least. Well, constructive is one of those terms they use when they’re telling you like they would a little kid, do something constructive for a change. And if you pass your constructive parole? You get to start your next life sentence. And you’ll be up for normal parole in another thirty. Yay! Now don’t get me wrong. I deserved serious prison time for what I did. What I’m 100% guilty of. How much time, that’s the part that’s debatable.What does constructive parole entail you ask. Well, that’s kind of the problem here, why I started a series of essays, as my way of processing this mess; according to the boots on the ground caseworkers they’re the only ones I’ll interact with on this issue until the actual hearings at 27 or 30 years.
So far, from my takeaway with conversations with multiple caseworkers, constructive parole is whatever you want to make out of it. Hmmmm. What does that mean. It means I could bust my ass and do all the jumping through flaming hoops and bowing and scraping for the DOC royalty that a person serving a single life sentence does. They expect real effort if you’re going to proce worthy to be let out in just a few more years or at least be given real consideration. Does a person with another 30 years left to serve go ahead and do all the same stuff, just so you got it on file, participation trophies so to speak, a couple gold stars in the bank in case they change up laws or simply consider letting you out ‘cause you’re old and decrepit and they want to get you off their medical expense roles and onto the state’s medical plan in some god forsaken state nursing home. If you’re in the last stages of life you’re probably better off in here where you got inmate trusties and guards who’ll look out for you’re a little, if for no other reason than their contempt for the for-profit contractor medical provider.
But, as you may guess, prison can get a little tedious and having something to do isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But how do you know where to begin your parole? Who do you ask? A caseworker is always one possible place to start. Another would-be other inmates that are ahead of you in the parole process. Except there aren’t many here in the state’s highest security prison and the ones that have the ‘inside scoop’ tend to keep it to themselves, the standard convict mentality, “If I have something valuable, I’m gonna keep it to myself.” Which kinda makes sense; how stupid would you feel if you helped out Mr. X with the programs and then he gets out on parole and they, the same board, basically laugh in your face. But doesn’t the prison and larger DOC operation have some kind of structured programming? Yep, mostly in other lower security prisons. Problem is, as you take the steps down the security levels the general suffering and misery and bullshit you have to put up with from other inmates and also the staff gets worse. In the top security prison there’s an understanding that if things go bad, they may go very very bad so people tend to be, I won’t say respectful, but they are for the most part less disrespectful. If you’re gonna spend the rest of your days in prison, this is probably the best you’re gonna get.
Okay, if jumping on the next bus out of here has no appeal, what can a guy do while he’s here? There are several classes available along the lines of anger management, critical thinking: the usual menu. 1-2 hours a week for 10-12 weeks and a certificate for your file upon successful completion.
As I have a couple years until my 27 year review I went and signed up for one of the ten week underwater basket wearing classes. Managed to rub the show runners, a pair of female caseworkers and a female observer from the psych ward of the joint, the wrong way. Part of the class covered what it felt like to have negative interaction with the staff and work it out with roleplaying. What the show runners like to call “presenting”. Which caused no end of giggling on my part. Google what the term means in animal husbandry. I actually successfully stifled my giggles and kept the definition of the word to myself rather than share it with all the other children. Where I dug the first hole was when I used a recent interaction, a still fresh psychic wound as my presentation. I’d had an exchange with one of the caseworkers in the class in another setting where I tried to pin them down on what the hell “constructive” parole meant and what should I be doing to prepare for it. Knowing damn well I was only going to get a non-answer I plugged ahead anyhow. Now, a caseworker is pretty low on the totem pole in the world of parole hearings, subject to the folks at central office. For a caseworker to make a definitive or declarative statement is ill advised at best because once they commit to telling an inmate in situation A that the board expects B and C, so basically, if you want to do the program, you can, but it’ll have no meaningful effect. To condense that, whatever a caseworker says can quickly get used by the inmate as a club. “Caseworker #7 told me X,Y and Z.” And now caseworker #7 is in deep shit with management because they never should have committed to that statement, mostly because it questions the omnipotence of the board.
Nevertheless I decided I’d keep pushing, try to find out if I could get more info on what constructive parole really meant, or if anyone actually knew. The entire parole process in this state is still literally in its R&D phase. Caseworker #7 had nothing they could say to me. Well, they had one thing they could’ve said to me, “Dude, it beats the shit out of me. They don’t tell us any more than they tell you.” Which I already know. My point, I was venting to whoever was closest. That was step one towards getting myself kicked out of that group. Step two was also the last straw. I managed to combine my crap behavior, venting about the non-answer with how badly built up my general frustration was, pretty strongly implying a worse outburst. That wasn’t enough for me though. I thought I’d try and explain to them how they should run their group.as I explained to my current caseworker – back where this whole story started – my intentions were good. The jist being, when I’m on my game I’m actually pretty good with groups. To my mind a concrete fact in that before Covid I’d been in AA for eight years and did a damn good job as what I call a translator or maybe interlocutor between old white alcoholics and the young inner city inmates, gently steering them to meet on the common ground that we’re all too impulsive and get stuck in a feedback loop of the same bad decisions over and over whether it’s drinking or gangbanging.
So I tried to explain this to the show runners, circumventing the caseworkers who I’d rubbed the wrong way for years in the one instance, by sending a memo to the psych ward observer. Could I spell things out in plain language? Of course not. My letter/memo turned into a look-at-how-I-am lecture that came off as pretty standard convict crap Mr. Sociopath being oh so clever using his diabolical Machiavellian wit to manipulate the clueless female staff members. It sure sounds a lot better spelled out in print! (sarcasm emoji here)
Booted out of a group shouldn’t, you’d think, be that big of a deal. Well, that depends on the size of the facility. Big place, lots of staff, you can always find a new milleu. Small joint you can quickly find yourself blackballed, albeit usually in a defacto fashion. Everything is by waiting list and also if the inmate is a “good fit”. Should guys get kicked out and banned from groups? Sure, there has to be an element of order, no doubt. But where’s the line? When something as consequential as parole, potentially the rest of a person’s life at stake, there better be a pretty good reason to blacklist someone. When it’s done in a defacto way by using the endless blind spots and grey areas of a huge cumbersome bureaucratic apparatus, and workarounds like waiting lists and deciding if the inmate is a “good fit for the group”. Both these metrics controlled and enforced at the discretion of the show runners. Once you’re booted in this defacto fashion there’s nothing you can do. You can bitch and whine ‘till the proverbial cows come home but all you’ll get is some version of “settle down. Don’t worry. You’re on the list.”
Do I act like an asshole on a fairly regular basis? Yeah, kinda. Spending the majority of your life with no agency is an enormous factor in one’s behavior, how you feel the need to act, or act out, or go insane(r). which is irrelevant as far as the system is concerned, and apparently, the rest of the world. It’s not like the vast majority of inmates are getting out someday to live next door to you.
If this sounds like a malcontent just complaining, you’re right. But how did we get here, not just me, an individual who is a bit of a mess, what about prison populations in general. As I said in anther essay, “It’s near impossible to convey the absolute power imbalance, the complete lack of agency that is incarceration to anyone who hasn’t experienced it for themselves. Yes, it is true, it is not some totally random process. Some arbitrary force beyond any form of redress. There are laws, rules, institutional policies. Checks and balances if you want to call them that.”
“but to invoke ANY of these checks and balances, YOU the incarcerated must fully convince at least one of THEM, the institutional powers, whether lowly guard or the high commissioner, that they should deign to listen to anything you have to say.
“Because: concrete box. Solid steel door. The only ones who can hear you scream are you fellow inmates.
“So, for now, self-destruction will remain the one constant. The one tool in your inmate survival toolbox that you will always have. Your single lever to take control…affect your right to self-determination, if only for a few moments. The sole piece of agency we will always possess. The ability to (self-sabotage; metaphorically) pull the pin on the grenade that is your life, throw it straight up in the air and see what happens when it blows up.”
A fair amount of this I don’t give a sit attitude so ingrained in me might have something to do with the fact that I spent the first two decades of my incarcerated life with the locked-in mindset that there was no hope. To even let hope in bordered on suicide, at the level of my soul, maybe even in body. This no hope wasn’t simply a personal perception, Two life sentences played a role of course, but the fact that we had a tough on crime phase in the state, no parole board, no one any where close to coming up for parole on the 30 year life, enacted in the late 1980s. Life means life, a direct quote from Joan Fabian, commissioner at the time was taken as gospel and there was nothing that came along that made us, the lifers, dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, serving time in Stillwater prison believer otherwise. We looked at the few who held out some slim hope as delusional.
So, here I am, better chance of being struck by lightning than getting paroled, at least not before my second 30 year minimum is up in 2060, why am I being such a pain in the ass? Thank you for asking.
Maybe a bit of payback for all the years of misery, powerlessness, being treated like a child (even if I sometimes deserved it) and so on. And for the children of course. The other kids in here with me. Guys that have a fair to middling chance at parole, some not all that far away. My though is this: if I go through all the various steps and flaming circus hoops they expect us to jump through my friends and neighbors have someone they can ask about this stuff besides a caseworker who has other, better things to do with their time, like run prison equivalents of underwater basket weaving classes, aka Anger Management and Critical Thinking which amount to “count to ten” and “Think before you act.” One hour a week for tem weeks. Cured!
I can dismiss my parole rigmarole pursuit as futile. Which it is when it comes to my own fate. Or at least my own fate as I choose to perceive it if I want to survive mentally and emotionally and therefore survive physically. So I’ll keep my hopelessness hat on for now. Do my best to be a good circus bear with birthday hat, bugle, and large exercise ball to balance on as I circle the center ring of this three ring circus and maybe actually make it through the process and do something meaningful in an otherwise meaningless life. Help my friends, the closest thing I have to family (a step behind my free world family who I still keep in contact with but abandoned a quarter century ago.) It’s my prison family I can have a direct daily impact on. Knowing how to navigate the hoops and flaming piles of dung that is the parole process is the best thing I could do with all this time. And if I manage to annoy the fuck out the staff in the process, hopefully without getting kicked out and banned, that’s just icing on the cake.
And, ultimately, once again, in the long view us lifers are only secondary. It is the general public this will hit the hardest. Where the real impact will land, if they are safer or less safe around ex-cons.
Think of it like this. Us lifers are the “elders” and “influencers” of prison culture. How you the voting public allow the DOCs of the world to treat us in matters grand and petty declares exactly what you think of prisoners writ large; a clarion message to all the other DOC inmates, makes it crystal clear what the DOC and maybe more so you the general public really think of them as flesh and blood human beings.
In short, if you treat my/our respected, even venerated cultural elders with dismissal and contempt, you do the same to all inmates. Conversely when you, the public, through your agents, the DOC, treat our elders with patience, compassion an respect you win a little maybe a whole lot of respect, or more accurately, lower the level of animosity carried often to the core inside all the guys, the vast majority of inmates who will inevitably get out of prison someday, many of them sooner rather than later.
In other words, if you want us ex-cons to treat your friends and family with courtesy, you should try to show us the same, not as a reward for whatever dumb shit we did in the past, but rather as investment towards a better future for all.
Maybe said too aggressively but keeping it real nonetheless. We may be a bunch of knuckleheads who wouldn’t know good life choices if they landed on our head, but only a tiny percentage of us are truly evil. Like anyone we give the respect we get.
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