The hole is as low as you can go.  If you break society's laws, a judge sends you to the penitentiary; if you cannot even follow a few simple prison rules, the guards put you in the hole.  This is the last stop, the ultimate sanction, the final disposal for the misfits among misfits.

            In segregation, as the hole is also commonly called, unruly inmates are locked in stark single cells for more than twenty-three hours a day to punish them with boredom.  Social contact with other convicts, free access to showers and telephones, some recreation time on a basketball court, work and the minimal income it provides, and most importantly television - all these are denied to "seg" prisoners.  In the hole, time slows down and starts squeezing you, like a boulder placed on your chest.  This is the lowest circle of hell.

            So why did I spend forty-three days in segregation last fall?  During my nineteen years of incarceration, I had not incurred a single disciplinary charge and was considered a model inmate.  What rule had I broken to earn my trip to the hole?

            That was what I hoped to learn the day after I was locked in seg, when I was taken before the Institutional Classification Authority.  To make the short trip from my cell to the I.C.A. hearing in the unit's dayroom, I had to be placed in full restraints, a correctional officer explained to me through the grate in my door.  All inmates in the hole must be handcuffed and shackled every time they leave their cells, since isolation further destabilizes many of them.

            When the guard unlocked the food tray slot in my door, I had to back up against the door, clasp my hands behind my back, and then half-squat and bend at the waist just far enough to stick my hands and forearms through the tray slot behind me.  The officer now placed handcuffs on my wrist and attached a leash to the chain between the wrist bands - precisely the same sort of leash, incidentally, that Pfc. Lynndie England used in those famous Abu Ghraib photos.  Leashes are standard equipment in all U.S. seg units, not the perverted playthings of a few "bad apples" in military police units near Baghdad.

            Having been cuffed and leashed, I was allowed to pull my hands back into the cell and straighten up.  The officer then opened the door, passed the leash from the food tray slot to the door opening, and ordered me to walk to the bed and kneel on it while facing the wall.  With my lower legs projecting over the edge of the bed behind me, the guard attached leg irons to my ankles and told me to stand again.  Now we were ready to take me to the I.C.A.

            Walking with leg irons or shackles requires a sailor's rolling gate, swinging the legs in semi-circles to the side so the locks on the shackles do not collide as one ankle passes the other during a step.  I could not use my arms to balance myself since my wrists were bound behind me, so the whole experience was a little unnerving at first.  Luckily, the seg officer was a kindly fellow who put a steadying hand on my shoulder; the other hand held the leash, of course.

            When I reached the Institutional Classification Authority in the dayroom, I perched on the front edge of a chair, unable to lean back because my arms were chained behind me.  Five senior staff members looked down on me from across a long, high table:  a prison administrator, a psychologist, a higher-ranking guard and two classification officers (officially still called "counselors," a job title left over from those long-ago days when their position involved helping inmates).  All of these prison employees had known me for years and, in a couple of cases, were on friendly terms with me.  Today, however, the all wore sad and disgusted expressions, as if they were doctors who had just diagnosed me with an especially revolting skin disease.

            I was "under investigation," the I.C.A. chairman told me.  For what, I asked.  He said he did not know.  If this was about the floppy disk found in my cell the day before, I said, they should check with my work supervisor - he had issued the disk to me.  The chairman repeated that he did not know why I was being investigated.  And that was that; it all took about thirty seconds.¹

            Of course both the I.C.A. chairman and I knew exactly what rule I had broken to land me in the hole.  Through the books and articles I had published recently on penitentiary life and prison reform, I had engaged in a bit of indiscreet truth-telling.  It was for this transgression, not for any actual disciplinary infraction, that I was locked in the seg unit with convicts so violent, perverted or mentally ill that they had to be isolated from the general inmate population.

            Of course I cannot produce definitive proof that I was the subject of retaliation by the powers-that-be; plausible deniability is a beautiful thing!  Moreover, I had been foolish enough to give the authorities an excuse to strike back at me, so the Virginia Department of Corrections had no need to deny anything, plausible or implausibly.

            On September 27, 2004, guards had found a floppy disk in my cell, an item normally considered to be contraband.  This is not usually considered a serious offense at the facility in which I am housed; the last inmate who was caught with a floppy disk, Richard Y., did not even receive an official disciplinary offense report but was merely punished unofficially with a temporary job suspension.  If he had obtained permission from his work supervisor to use the floppy disk for personal purposes, he might not have been suspended from his job, either.

            I, on the other hand, did have express permission both from my boss and from the prison's on-site computer systems administrator to use the disk found in my possession, as I immediately told the correctional officer who found it.  Yet I was placed in handcuffs and frog-marched to segregation.  Very peculiar indeed.

            Peculiar also describes the circumstances that led to the discovery of the disk in the first place.  When the guards arrived at my door earlier that day, they announced that they had come for a "random shakedown," a very common procedure in my prison - except that I was housed in my facility's honor dorm, where model inmates like me are trusted to follow rules with minimal supervision.  Random cell searches are virtually unheard of in the honor dorm, and I cannot remember my last one prior to September 27, 2004.

            Certainly I had never experienced a shakedown as thorough as this since my stay at a supermax penitentiary during the 1990s, before my transfer to my current medium-security correctional center.  Every envelope and folder was opened, all jar-lids were unscrewed, each pair of drawers was shaken out, sheets were pulled off the bed and mattress-seams were checked for re-sewing - the works.  Even at the supermax, however, my cell had always been shaken down by two regular correctional officers - not by a sergeant and a correctional officer, as on this occasion.  Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Wonderland said.

            The dreaded disk was found almost immediately, for the simple reason that I had made no attempt to hide it.  I had been given permission to use the disk specifically to store my creative writing projects, so I had seen no reason to conceal it.  Many inmates and staff members had known for years that I was constantly working on books and articles about penitentiary life - and since September 20, 2004, the Department of Corrections headquarters in Richmond, Virginia, had known it, too.

            On that day - precisely one week before that peculiar random shakedown - the state's largest newspaper had printed a prominent article about the publication of my second book, An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse - An Essay on Prison Reform from an Insider's Perspective.  Even worse, the article took a fairly positive view of my work, pointing out that a retired director of the Alaska Department of Corrections had endorsed it and a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, had chosen to use it in one of his courses.  This surely did not please those prison administrators who wanted to maintain the status quo.

            And indeed there are hundreds of thousands of people whose livelihoods depend on preserving America's correctional systems in their current state and size.  More people work in this country's jails and penitentiaries than in any Fortune 500 company except General Motors,² and in many states - including Virginia - prison departments are the largest public sector employers.³ Each year, taxpayers shell out $57 billion to operate the hundreds of local, state and federal correctional facilities spread across the U.S.⁴  That is an empire worth defending, especially against a pesky little know-it-all convict who writes An Essay on Prison Reform from an Insider's Perspective.

            Yet many front-line correctional personnel are fully aware that America's prisons are failing this nation - that they truly are nothing more than An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse.  That is undoubtedly why I have received quiet words of encouragement from staff members of all ranks, up to and including a now retired assistant warden.  During my six-week stint in the hole, only one lieutenant dropped by my seg cell door to sneer, "Guess you ain't writin' no more books down here, huh?"

            What that lieutenant and likeminded prison bureaucrats do not want the public to know is that incarcerating millions of criminals does not actually reduce crime.  The facts are simple:  over the last thirty years, the U.S. correctional population rose from 300,000 to 2.1 million.⁵  But the crime victimization rate for 2003, reported by the Department of Justice in 2004, is precisely the same as the rate for 1973.⁶ So America is getting the same "bang" in terms of crime control, for seven times the "buck."  Not a good deal for taxpayers!

            And an even worse deal for children and students.  Over 1.5 million boys and girls are now growing up with one or both parents behind bars - an effective way to increase those kids' chances of going to jail themselves later.⁷  Meanwhile, the $57 billion that go to correctional departments each year are not available for education departments:  while prison budgets grew 30% between 1987 and 1998, elementary school expenditures dropped by 1.2% and university spending fell by 18.2%.⁸  Low educational levels are, of course, another proven method of preparing children for careers as criminals.

            Correctional employees are acutely aware of the collateral damage caused by the massive expansion of this nation's prison systems because guards frequently come from the same economically disadvantaged background and sometimes even the same neighborhoods as "their" convicts.  If correctional officers do not have a relative of their own who is serving time - an amazingly common occurrence - then their kids' friends always include a few whose fathers are locked up.  Half of all young black men in some urban areas are now either in prison, on probation or on parole.⁹  When you spend your days guarding so many folks from the same part of town you return to after work, you cannot help asking yourself:  is this a sane way to run a country?

            My work supervisor at the correctional center where I am housed was far from the only staff member to answer that question in the negative.  Unlike many other guards, however, he had not completely given up on improving the lives of at least a few of the prisoners in his care:  when opportunities arose, he sat some of them down for a little one-on-one advice.  And if his inmate worker - namely me - wanted to do some creative writing on an old stand-alone computer in his office, my boss let him use a floppy disk to store his files, so long as the facility's computer systems administrator approved and the inmate submitted all writings to the work supervisor for a security check.  Those protections were in place under the arrangement my boss and I had.  But they did not suffice to protect me - or, what is worse, to protect him.

            When I returned from the uninformative Institutional Classification Authority hearing on the day after I was put in the hole, I settled down in my cell for what I expected to be a short wait.  I had done nothing wrong, after all.  But the days of waiting turned into weeks and eventually into months.  In fact, my wait continues to this day.

Months after the events described here, I have still not been told why I was - and presumably still am - "under investigation."  Nor have I ever been questioned at any time, by anyone.  Needless to say, I have also not been charged with, much less convicted of a disciplinary offense. 

            I had expected to be interrogated at some point by the institutional investigator, a staff member at each prison who deals with serious rules infractions by inmates and small-scale corruption by guards.  In normal investigations, this officer softens up prisoners by letting them sit in the hole and worry for about a week.  Then he takes them to a large storage closet in the seg unit called the "ice room," and half an hour later he emerges with the inmates' full, frank and voluntary confession - every time.  Yet I did not see the investigator until eleven weeks later, on December 8, 2004, a month after I had been released from the hole.

            We met accidentally on the sidewalk in front of the prison's administration building.  In response to my question, he said that not he but "Richmond," the Department of Corrections' headquarters, was handling my case.  Then the investigator fled into the admin building behind us at an astonishing velocity for so large a man.

            At least he was truthful; I had already found out two months earlier that, indeed, "Richmond" was behind my stay in segregation.  During the first week or so after my detention on September 27, my work supervisor took no action to help me, showing due deference to the traditional softening-up period that was to prepare me for interrogation.  When no one came to question me or to verify my claim of innocence with him, however, my boss phoned the assistant warden on October 6, 2004.  He had authorized me to have the disk, he told her, and he would appear as a witness on my behalf at a disciplinary hearing if I were charged with a rules infraction.

That phone call should normally have sufficed to free me.  But instead, I received a note from the assistant warden on October 7, informing me that the investigation had been turned over to Internal Affairs in Richmond.¹⁰

While Internal Affairs investigates some inmate deaths, its primary concern is serious cases of corruption or criminal activity by Department of Corrections staff.  Sending my case file to I.A. indicated that the powers-that-be had given up on charging me with possession of contraband and were now pursuing a much more serious line of inquiry against both me and my work supervisor:  "inappropriate staff conduct," correctional bureaucratese for nurses having sex with prisoners or guards smuggling in drugs for inmates.  By defending me so vigorously in that October 6 telephone call to the assistant warden, my boss had apparently crossed the thin blue line and become a traitor to "his" side.  The only possible reason for him to insist that I had done nothing wrong was that I had bribed or blackmailed him, of course.

This is the essence, the pure pith of penitentiary life:  telling the truth is treason.  Thou shalt not proclaim that the emperor has no clothes.  Keep your head down and do your time.

Standard correctional operating procedure in Internal Affairs investigations is to keep the inmate in the hole until he approaches staff and offers to testify against the guard under scrutiny.  In two separate cases within the last year, prisoners at this facility were released from segregation without any disciplinary charges in exchange for testifying against the female correctional officers with whom they had had sex.  Perhaps Internal Affairs hoped I would incriminate my boss; I do not know.  But I do know that neither he nor I was approached by Internal Affairs investigators once I.A. took over the case.

Three weeks later, on October 28, 2004, I was brought before the Institutional Classification Authority for my "thirty day review."  This time the assistant warden herself attended and told me that she, too, could not reveal why I was being investigated.  However, she also no longer saw any reason to keep me in the hole, so she would phone Internal Affairs later that day and ask for permission to release me.

But I was not released from segregation that day, or the next, or the next.  When I wrote the assistant warden to inquire about her progress, she replied that Internal Affairs was not answering her phone calls.¹¹  That, to the best of my knowledge, is a first in Department of Corrections history.

Curiouser and curiouser and curiouser.

Meanwhile, I was "doin' my bit in the hole," serving a period in segregation that was longer than the longest sentence that could have been imposed on me at a disciplinary hearing.  For most offenses, including possession of contraband, the maximum penalty is fifteen days in the hole.¹²  Even stabbing or raping another prisoner, or inciting others to riot, carries no more than thirty days.  I, on the other hand, was well into my second month in seg.

Three times a day the tray slot in my door popped open so I could receive my nutritionally balanced and calorically adequate state meal; during the first month, I lost four pounds, dropping to 153 pounds.  Three times a week the guards put me in handcuffs and led me by my leash to the shower - no leg irons for that trip, thank goodness.  And five times a week, for an hour each time, I was allowed to go to the "dog cages," the segregation exercise yards.

Most correctional centers have specially constructed these one-man "yards" to resemble roofless cells:  the floor area is roughly the same size as a cell, solid concrete walls rise on three sides, and above is a rectangle of blue sky.  The purpose of this arrangement is to continue the prisoners' social isolation even outdoors, though inmates can and do shout to the disembodied voices from adjoining cubicles.  At my prison, however, the segregation rec yards had chickenwire sides that allowed us to see each other while we talked.  So small a thing, yet it became a luxury in the hole.

The inmates I met and spoke with in the dog cages were a fairly representative sample of America's correctional population - not the monsters one might expect, but the usual motley collection of misfits and failures.  In other words, men like me.

Take Cut Me Up, for instance.¹³  One of the 14,500 juveniles who are tried as adults and sent to adult penitentiaries each year,¹⁴ he dealt with stress by gouging chunks of flesh out of his forearms with old razor blades.  He also incurred disciplinary infractions with methodical regularity and as a result was scheduled for transfer to a higher security prison.

When the other convicts in the dog cages described to him what sort of treatment he could expect there, Cut Me Up made suicidal remarks to one of the guards and was moved to a strip cell - a cell without any moveable objects, including bed sheets and clothing, that he might have used to harm himself.  This further destabilized him to the point that he smeared feces on himself and all over the cell, whereupon he was moved to the five-point-restraint cell - strapped down on a bunk and only untied every two hours to use the toilet.  For the rest of the day, the whole seg unit could smell his feces while correctional officers cleaned up the cell he had fouled.

Self-soiling is common enough in the hole that special haz-mat suits and disinfection kits are standard equipment for guards posted there.  In fact, a recent study found that fully 25% of a typical state's segregation inmates were mentally ill, and half of those had attempted suicide while confined in the hole.¹⁵  Cut Me Up was nothing out of the ordinary, unfortunately.

Neither was another visitor to segregation during my time there, a soft-spoken little Hispanic man from our prison's mental health dorm.  While America houses only 80,000 patients in major psychiatric hospitals, this country keeps at least 400,000 mentally ill men and women - 20% of the correctional population - in jails and penitentiaries.¹⁶  The overwhelming majority are not lucky enough to be housed in a special psychiatric unit but are simply mixed in with the general convict population, where they are financially and sexually exploited by stronger convicts.  That was what had happened to this Hispanic fellow:  he had been persuaded to trade his psychotropic medication for cigarettes and been caught.

Because he was so utterly lacking in guile, he admitted his violation of prison rules to the guards - no excuses, he just wanted some tobacco.  Earlier we saw, however, that the truth definitely does not set you free in the penitentiary, so it is hardly surprising that this inmate's simpleminded honesty did not earn him any mercy, either.  Having been convicted of trafficking in prescribed medications, an especially serious disciplinary infraction, he was scheduled for transfer to a higher-security level facility that has no special psychiatric unit.

Blaming the prisoner who bought the mentally ill inmate's pills is certainly justified, but conveniently overlooks the fact that most criminals have serious and untreated substance abuse problems.  While 33% of offenders were under the influence of drugs when they broke the law, only 18% of them subsequently receive drug therapy behind bars; for alcoholics, the figures are 37% and 14% respectively.¹⁷  Only 6% of state correctional spending goes to in-house rehabilitative and educational programs,¹⁸ so addiction cycles continue and even worsen in the high-stress environment of prison.

How easily we roll past that phrase:  "the high-stress environment of prison."  But take a moment and try to imagine being locked in a seven by twelve foot concrete box with a manic depressive thug who listens to Metallica at full volume until the wee hours and showers only occasionally.  Imagine having no reason to get up each morning apart from watching Jerry Springer on T.V. - no work, no family, no mental stimulation at all.  Imagine facing the prospect of living like this for years, decades even the rest of your life. 

On April 27, 2004, my then-cellmate decided that vegetating behind bars for another twelve years, until his mandatory release, was too much to bear.  So he hung himself by a shoelace rope from my bunk while I was at breakfast one morning; I was the one who discovered his body.  Since that incident, I have developed much greater sympathy for those prisoners who try to cope with their misery by continuing to indulge their addictions.  Narcotics seem to me like a much less objectionable choice than shoelace ropes nowadays.

In many cases, the strains and tensions of penitentiary life actually produce new forms of addictive or aberrant behavior.  My compatriots in segregation included several "gunners," for instance - men who had developed the habit of masturbating in sight of one of the many female guards now working in correctional centers.  And of course we had a matching set of victim and perpetrator in a case of inmate-on-inmate sexual assault.

According to a former Republican state Attorney General testifying before the U.S. Congress in July 2002, somewhere between 250,000 and 600,000 prisoners are sexually assaulted or raped by other convicts each year.¹⁹  That may explain why the New York Department of Correctional Services, which tests its inmates more systematically than most, reports an H.I.V. infection rate of 8.5%, compared to 0.3% in the U.S. civilian population.²⁰  Because virtually all instances of prison rape take place out of the view of staff, however, most assaults are never reported or, if they are, are plea-bargained down to lesser charges.

The case involving my two fellow segregation residents was typical:  the attacker was released back into general population with a relatively minor conviction for fighting, while the victim was uprooted and transferred to another facility.  Why?  Perhaps because the tall, older, black attacker was popular with the guards, thanks to years of doing them favors while working in the kitchen.  Perhaps also because the chubby, younger, white victim seemed to be borderline retarded and kept changing his story.  In any case, the attacker has now found himself a permanent "girlfriend" in his dorm, while his victim is the "fresh fish" in a different penitentiary full of well-established sharks.

Not all of the prisoners I met during my stint in seg were seemingly hopeless cases, however:  there are unexpected gems to be found even in the hole, men like Ras Talawa Tafari.  In December 1999, the Virginia Department of Corrections ordered all inmates to cut their hair very short and shave off their beards, allegedly because weapons could be secreted in these hirsute hiding places.  A group of Rastafarians, including my seg acquaintance Ras, refused to follow this regulation because their religion forbids them to cut their head hair or beards.  Since faith-based initiatives apparently only include dominant-culture religions, these men were then locked in the hole while their lawsuit progressed through endless appeals.

I spent only forty-three days in seg, while Ras had been confined there for nearly five years when I met him.  What was so amazing and inspiring about him was that he had actually thrived in the hole, becoming a gentle and spiritual person who spent much of his time in meditation or intensively studying old newspapers brought down to us twice a month.  During our weekday hour in the dog cages, I listened to him try to persuade a younger inmate on the verge of release not to return to a life of drug-selling.  Live with your mother instead of your homeboys, visit a library and read the "help wanted" section of the newspaper, look around your old neighborhood and see if it needs a Laundromat or a video rental store.

Of course the younger inmate paid Ras no heed, even made fun of him.  Like 59% of all prisoners, he was either functionally or totally illiterate and simply could not picture himself in a library; only "nerds" went there.²¹  So this past and future narcotics entrepreneur will leave the penitentiary and shortly thereafter do his part to ensure that this country's recidivism rate stays at 67.5%.²²

Ironically enough, states like California, Texas and Ohio have recently made some moves to ensure that America will see more disasters-in-waiting like this young man come back to neighborhoods near you.²³  Well-intentioned plans to reduce correctional populations are currently focusing on the early release of non-violent drug offenders, the demographic group that has the highest failure rate upon being freed.  By contrast, men like Ras Talawa Tafari - murderers serving life sentences - reoffend at less than one-third the rate of drug dealers, and their new offenses are no more likely to be violent than other ex-prisoners'.²⁴

Those figures come from a recent analysis of date collected in 1994, however, and since then parole for lifers has been virtually eliminated.  Of the 127,677 prisoners incarcerated for life terms in state and federal penitentiaries today, almost all can expect to die behind bars.²⁵  "Capital punishment on the installment plan" is what convicts like Ras and I call this policy.

If Ras Talawa Tafari was thrown in the hole because he would not cut his hair, then my problem, my failure, my mistake was that I cannot keep quiet about Ras, or Cut Me Up, or the little Hispanic mentally ill inmate, or the pudgy young sexual assault victim.  While I seriously doubt that my books and articles can help any individual, I at least want to introduce the American public to some of my fellow convicts' lives and stories.  Taxpayers not only have a right but a moral duty to know what departments of correction are doing in their name, with the funds they provide. 

For much the same reason, I decided to contact the press after the assistant warden wrote me in the fifth week of my stay in the hole that Internal Affairs was not returning her calls about my proposed release from segregation.  So I got in touch with the same reporter who had written the September 20^th article about my second book - the very same article that may have prompted the cell search one week later, during which the floppy disk was found.

This journalist phoned the Virginia Department of Corrections' public affairs office in Richmond on November 8, 2004, and was told to call back the next day.  By that time, of course, I had been freed from the hole and was talking to the reporter directly on the telephone in the honor dorm dayroom.  There was no "story" here anymore, he told me, since I was no longer in segregation.  By letting me go, the powers-that-be had effectively prevented word of the investigation from reaching the public - until the publication of this article, that is.

But it is worth noting that, according to the assistant warden, the investigation continues to this day.  She also told me that I would be suspended from my job without pay indefinitely, and that I was not to speak to my work supervisor except to say "hello" in passing.  "Find another job," the assistant warden advised me in the prison's chow hall a few days later.

When I settled on a position I liked, she phoned my prospective employer not once but twice, to make absolutely sure that he hired me - and at the same relatively high pay rate I had earned in my former place of work (45 cents per hour).  That was certainly a nice thing for the assistant warden to do, and it had the pleasant side effect of making it impossible for me to make any claim of unfair treatment or retaliation.  If anything, I had received preferential treatment, the Department of Corrections spokesman in Richmond would undoubtedly argue to anyone who inquired.

Meanwhile, a tsunami hit my cell.  On November 22, 2004 - precisely two weeks after the reporter's telephone call to Department of Corrections headquarters - I experienced the most thorough "shakedown" of my nineteen-year prison career.  This time a sergeant and two correctional officers spent a full hour and a half examining every single item in my cell.  Nor was this sergeant a run-of-the-mill security staff member, but instead the chief of security's right-hand man - and, perhaps not coincidentally, a computer expert.  Of course he and his officers found nothing.

But at least I am now out of the hole, and that is something to be grateful for, I suppose.  Really, one prison cell is much like another; segregation has some disadvantages, but it also gave me more time to write and pray than my usual environment in the honor dorm.  Since Virginia's parole board will presumably continue to deny my release - nineteen years is not nearly enough, I am told - I have to make the best of whichever hole-in-the-wall the state sticks me in.

You are in that hole right alongside me, though you may not realize it.  No, I do not mean the bottomless financial hole that departments of correction represent, the $57 billion spent on jails and penitentiaries that could be put to much better use.  What I mean here is the moral hole that you as a citizen of the United States are now in, thanks to America's obsession with prisons.

Today 22% of all convicts in the world are housed in U.S. correctional facilities, even though only 4.6% of the earth's population lives in America.²⁶  The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its own citizens than any other nation - more than North Korea, more than Iran, five times as many as Britain or Canada, nine times as many as France or Germany.²⁷  Once "the land of the free," America has become the world's leading jailer.

In a democracy, ultimate responsibility for this lies with you, the taxpayer and voter who put those politicians into office who gave you all the prisons you asked for.  Cut Me Up and Ras Talawa Tafari and I and the 2.1 million other inmates are all guests at the Hopeless Hotels your money built.  Apparently, there are other ways of dealing with us criminals - ways that North Korea and Iran and Canada and Germany have successfully implemented.  But you chose holes and leashes and dog cages.

If all this is a little too painful for you to face, please do not worry:  this nation's departments of correction are ready to help you, by silencing me in the hole.  I have no doubt at all that I will be thrown back into segregation - if not for this article, then for the next one, or perhaps my next book.  When that happens, you will no longer be getting the little stream of information from behind penitentiary walls that I have been providing you through my writings.