THOUGHTS ON CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Below is an essay contributed by Tony Lamb. Mr. Lamb went to prison in 1988
as a 17-year-old for two relatively minor, non-violent offenses. In prison
he remains today.

The sordid picture that Mr. Lamb paints of prison life should be of concern
to everyone living in Missouri. Some will say anyone who lands in prison
deserves everything he gets. This position is wrong for both legal and
moral reasons, of course. But even if you put the law and morals aside,
subjecting offenders to brutal prison conditions is wrong for purely
practical reasons.

One is that just about every person sent to prison will get out one day.
Will people coming out of Missouri's prison return to society prepared to
work, able to support a family and contribute to the community? Or will
they come home physically and emotionally scarred, not fit for community life?

Sadly, that question is partly answered by the fact that two-thirds of
people who are locked up will return to prison.

It is in no one's interest to allow prisoners to be brutally used. Take the
case of Alis Ben Johns. You may remember Mr. Johns as the subject of
Missouri's largest manhunt, a chase that ended in 1997 when he was shot by
a Water Patrol officer in Benton County.

After Mr. Johns' capture, his mother told a television reporter that while
in prison her son had been raped as prison guards watched and laughed.

After serving his sentence, Mr. Johns killed a man during a drunken affray.
While he was on the run, he murdered Leonard Voyles, of Camden County, a
man for whom he had worked, and Wilma Bragg, of Newton County.

This is not to say that had Mr. Johns not been brutalized in prison he
would not have killed three people; he may have anyway. But how much rage
did he carry with him as a result of his prison experience?

If Mr. Lamb's account is even partly correct -- and his story rings true --
one can only conclude that the inmates have far too much control at the
Southeast Missouri Correctional Center, home to 1,500 maximum-security inmates.

It sounds like the classic old-style prison, in which gangs dictate the
tenor of prison life. One can only hope that this is not true.

The Missouri Department of Corrections has a duty to protect the safety of
offenders in its care to the extent practically possible. It is
unconscionable to tolerate a system in which a prisoner's choice is to
submit to rape and other assaults or to join a gang for protection. Prison
officials can and should minimize the role of gangs and confine the most
violent apart from the general population.

To do otherwise is to create more Tony Lambs. That ill serves society.

A glimpse of prison horrors

Editor's note: Tony Lamb took an interest in the cases of the two Sedalia
boys, ages 15 and 14, who faced prison sentences for involuntary
manslaughter. Mr. Lamb was sentenced in Pettis County in 1998 to prison
terms of four years and three years for forgery and possession of
marijuana. He wrote this from the Southewast Correctional Center at Charleston.

On my way to the big house, at the age of 17, I sat chained, silent and
trying to swallow back all those fears trapped inside me, while headed
towards the path of the unknown. I was forced to live a dark experience
that no one wants to hear about.

Stripped naked while all eyes were penetrating my flesh, I was a youngster
in a grown man's prison. The steel bars slamming shut was the sound of
finality, the beginning of the end. The sign above the gate at Missouri
State Prison read "Leave all your hopes and dreams behind."

This I did the minute I woke up, after being knocked out and finding that
my shoes had been stolen off my feet that same day.

I got up and headed for my cell, while my eye was swollen shut and dripping
with blood. My celly informed me about the laws of prison life (fight,
become a turn-out or hit the fence).

With his prison wisdom, I was handed a knife and guided to battle, stabbing
the man who stole my shoes. I was young and only knew the way I was told.
My pair of shoes almost cost a man's life and got six people sent to the
hospital, including me, along with my shoes. The brutal way of life I was
forced to deal with changed me into the hardened criminal I am today.

Through this, I became a member of the Aryan Brotherhood at the age of 17.
Scared, separated from family, just trying to stay alive day-to-day and no
one to turn to except myself created emotional and physical hardships.

Many of the people who came in with me are now turn-outs, men turned to
homosexuality, thrown from one man to another, spreading diseases. They
wear makeup and survive through homosexual activity, while others became
junkies on prison-distributed mental health drugs that are passed out like
candy, or simply committed suicide.

There is no backing up. Take your pick, because everyone in here has to.
Now as a grown man, I write this. I'm a hardened criminal turned hunter
with animal instincts. I rose through the ranks fighting Crips, Bloods,
Gangster Disciples, etc. Plain and simple, "make your bones" is the motto
on the prison yard.

Through assaults by convicts and cops in prison, hearing gang rapes, prison
murders, stabbings and with tattoos all over my body, I'm now filled with
hate. I know no other way after living this life for the last 18 years and,
in the process, getting my bones broken, acquiring a drug addiction and
losing half my lung by a 10.5-inch piece of rugged prison steel. A hit not
accomplished.

Looking back to the day I walked through the front gate, I no longer see a
child with a growing heart, but an animal with a lost heart.

Every day new teenagers are coming to prison. Stepping off the bus, they
are being whistled at, hear catcalls and by the end of the day you hear
their screams of pain, hear them crying for help at the end of the
cellblock. The vicious cycle every inmate has to go through.

Today, I stood with about 15 members of my gang and watched the bus unload
to see who has the look in their eye. Will they become an enemy with a
rival gang? Someone's girl? Or join me? There is no in-between on this
yard. The young ones I can't help, unless they fight and make a stand. They
have to show me something.

For the ones who will not fight, well they are somewhere in the dark,
raped, beaten up and drugged out with hopes to be able to commit suicide.
In the morning, he'll be forced to call and manipulate his family for
money, being told it will not happen again with promises of protection.
Maybe, just maybe, he can pay his way out of this type of slavery.

If so, someone else will be there offering a small gift of heroin, cocaine
or meth. One way or another, the money must flow for any gang to stay on
top. In here, you have to stay on top, even though to society we are at the
bottom. This life is unknown to all, except those who live it. We have our
own rank and file. This is a city within a city. To stay on top, you must
push others down and climb over them.

For the ones who do stand and fight, I'm here to pass on the tradition of
"making your bones." You'll do a year of solitary confinement for this, but
a year in max is what you need to make it in prison. Max, solitary or what
we call the hole, breeds hate, anger and aggression. Twenty-four hours a
day, seven days a week, inmates scream, bang, pound and kick the cell
doors. "Meds, bring me my meds!" Depression sets in from sensory
deprivation, no hugs, no affection from family, no hopes and no dreams. The
front gate shut them behind.

The smell is of urine, feces and Mace from the fire extinguisher size can
called MK-46 and a hand grenade tear gas bomb called a PK-45.

Goon squads, five-man teams dressed in all black face masks and body armor.
They come in our cells throwing hand grenades (PK-45s) then see how fast
they can break something, while mentally ill inmates stand in strip cells
with feces smeared all over them, screaming, crying and trying to commit
suicide.

One year in this hostile environment, you argue, make enemies and form
alliances swearing to kill each other as the correctional officers promote
racial violence.

Then and only then, filled with this type of emotional damage, can a teen
hope to make it in prison, if you call this making it. This is the life.
This is the vicious cycle that awaits teens in prison.