The heart will heal, tho it may have turned to stone.

Before prison and the chance circumstance of being regarded as a convict, I had mostly been a victim. Honestly, I don’t know which did more damage to my soul, being a victim or a victimizer. But in prison there was no in-between. You were one or the other. I got schooled quickly and almost too easily became victimizer.
My transformation to convict was most evidenced by a situation involving an inmate named Josie. There were one or two major dope connections on the yard – meaning anywhere in the prison, not necessarily just in the outside yard. Judi, Josie, I, and a few select others were privy to when there was dope on the yard, which was most typically on visiting days. During one such weekend, Josie made the mistake of letting either too many or the wrong people know who was holding the bag, and her punishment came swiftly and severely.
My role was to help pin while two other women tied Josie, using her own long hair, to the hot water faucet of a deep laundry sink outside dorm one. The women then turned on the hot water and left it running. I stood with the others, silent and unmoved, while the hot water scorched Josie’s face and neck, resulting in second degree burns. Her hair had to be cut off to free her from the faucet.
This and many other abhorrent events took me far away from myself, and my heart eventually turned to stone. It was at this point that I began to record my life on paper. I don’t think the reality of my five-year term hit me until about two years into it, but certainly, those tests that secured my convict status made it real. The tests would continue, I knew, but I was growing confident that I could pass them. Doing time was sometimes glorious, other times horrific, always intense. Strangely though, it was also like coming home, in the best sense of the word. My childhood had been mostly chaotic, violent, oppressive, and confusing; and as I adjusted to this bizarre place, it began to fit. To some extent, my time in juvenile prison for a year at age seventeen, as well as being on the streets doing drugs - a period of over ten years by then - had primed me for prison. For years when I spoke about prison, I recounted only the most entertaining vignettes and glamorized my time there. The harrowing details came out much later, as I had buried them deep in some remote corner of my mind, along with all the monsters of my childhood dreams.