Editor’s note: This commentary is by Mac Parker, once a popular performer and storyteller in Vermont, who spent spent four years in Ray Brook FCI in upstate New York. He has recently completed a book about the experiences that led to his incarceration, titled, “How Not to Find God.”
I have a lifetime membership in a club I never expected to join; I am an “ex-con.” To my great regret, I earned that membership.
On Oct. 1, 2013, I entered Ray Brook Federal Correctional Institution near Lake Placid, New York. On that warm fall morning, the metal door beneath the razor-wire slammed closed behind me. I would not be free to leave for four years.
None of us inside those fences was an angel, including me. My new friends and dinner companions had shot police officers, “whacked a guy” in a drunken fight, terrorized bank tellers and customers by spraying gunfire into the ceiling during a robbery, and sold every imaginable drug to fathers, mothers, and children.
But I met scores of men in prison who have taken full responsibility for their lives and crimes, and atoned to depths uncommon in our culture today.
None of them will receive a presidential pardon, at least not from this president.
None of us got to fire the FBI director while we were under investigation.
If any of us had dared to publicly criticize the prosecutors or judge in our cases, we would have had years added to our sentence.
When you serve time in federal prison, you learn beyond a doubt that there is no such thing as “equal justice under the law” in the United States.
While Donald Trump and his cronies bleat about how “unfair” the system is, he is running for a second term as president.
Meanwhile, at Ray Brook FCI and other federal prisons, inmates with clear proof of unfair trials can’t get a court to rehear their case.
Multiple TV screens in prison units carry “news” of President Trump saying he could “shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it,” while men watching couldn’t get away with driving a friend to a drug deal.
Thanks to the infamous 1990s Crime Bill, there is no more federal parole, so even those transforming their lives have no viable path to release.
The last hope for many, the presidential pardon or commutation, is a pipe dream, unless they have a famous advocate like Kim Kardashian, or committed crimes similar to those committed by Trump himself.
Meanwhile, while in custody of the Bureau of Prisons, most inmates can’t even find a case manager compassionate enough to get them a transfer to a facility within driving distance of their family.
I am no fan of a punitive “correctional system,” so I don’t begrudge anyone who receives a pardon. However, where is the “equal protection” for those who will never even be considered?
Trump loves to highlight his pardon of one black inmate, but countless others remain completely and deliberately unseen.
Like my dear friend, Byrd, a 60-year-old black man from Philadelphia, still confined to Ray Brook to this day. Byrd is among the kindest, warmest men I’ve ever met, in prison or out. He mentors younger inmates, brings “a bowl” of some home cooked creation to his friends on birthdays and hard days, carrying a positive attitude in an institution that is relentlessly negative.
He has learned his lesson, but no one cares.
So, with a body breaking down and in pain, a devoted wife waiting at home, Byrd doesn’t even entertain hope of a pardon.
Or Dez, a younger black man who shot someone years ago in what he has long-since recognized as a “foolish turf war.” Now he spends hours in the prison law library, looking for a path to freedom he knows may never appear.
Or Chad, a 40-something white man who grew up tough in a tough neighborhood, then ran into a tough judge who sent him away for 40 years. Another self-taught law library student, Chad helps dozens of fellow inmates file legal challenges, even as he hasn’t been able to crack his own.
None of these inmates is likely to make it into a news story.
Many have written senators or representatives asking for help. I don’t know of a case where help has come.
It isn’t politically advantageous to stick up for “criminals.”
Yet, every single Republican senator stuck up for the defiant lawlessness of Donald Trump.
Even in the midst of a pandemic, our president is firing people with the nerve to investigate him, this time the Friday night sacking of the inspector general of the intelligence agencies.
Any “common criminal” who tried to interfere with an investigation would find the law coming down on them even harder.
But, it appears Trump will get away with it yet again.
It’s time to say this boldly and out loud:
There is nothing impartial, fair, or equal about our “justice system.”
The continued wrongdoing at the highest levels of government is an insult to countless men and women actually paying the price of incarceration for their crimes.
There used to be at least a pretense that “no one is above the law.”
This pretense is gone, as corrupt officials from the president on down ignore the rule of law, and openly conspire to cover up their actions and their crimes.
Perhaps the gravest danger of this blatant corruption is that we now accept it as somehow normal. We watch passively or ineffectually, and therefore allow it to continue.
If we want to see how far we’ve fallen, how corrupt and unequal we have actually become as a nation, try watching the news through the eyes of inmates who will never get out of jail even though they did things less damaging than what our president continues to do. He does so from the White House, a residence he hopes to retain. They watch him from the “Big House,” a residence many of them will never get to leave.
