Monday, July 18, 2010:
This evening I was eating dinner in the chow hall when a child molester sat down directly across from me. There are hundreds of them here at Marianna to participate in a sex offender program. Most inmates are here for SOMP (Sex Offender Management Program) or the drug program.
Since most of the non-sex offenders are short-timers and are going home soon, no one messes with the “chomos” for fear of losing what little good time we get. But if these sex offenders were loaded up on a bus and shipped to Pollock, the high-security penitentiary where I spent five years, there would be a bloodbath not seen since the glory (gory) days of the Roman Colosseum.
Anyway, this skinny, pasty-skinned old man with coke bottle glasses, long, shaggy beard, and unruly, gray hair sits down across from me. The child molesters have their own tables. I don’t know why this guy wants to sit with the “good dudes.”
I’m debating on getting up and moving, because I’ve instantly lost my appetite, when Janus walks behind him and says loudly, What, the freaks are sittin over here now?
O.K. That’s how I do NOT want to act. So I treat it as a spiritual exercise, a spiritual push-up. I am a grain of sand. He is a grain of sand. We’re all grains of sand.
The guy sitting next to me almost chokes on his food, laughing, because he knows where I’m coming from. The “chester” finally gets up and leaves without finishing his food. I try to live by Judge not, lest ye be judged,
but man it’s hard in here.
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