One of the first children—pardon me, one of the first thirteen-year-old adults—that Georgia automatically transferred to the criminal justice system has spent more than half of his seventeen years in the hole.
His knuckles bear the scars of an antipathy to abusive power and injustice, as does his disciplinary record. And while his moral compass is quite in line with what passes for heroism on the outside, on the inside, such defense of principle usually leaves you bantering with desolation’s four walls. There was the correctional officer who took a stack of his neatly written letters asking for legal assistance that the boy was planning to send once he could afford postage. After tossing them on the ground, the officer urinated on the pleas for help in front of the seventeen-year-old. Or, there was the klansman correctional officer at Alto who constantly referred to him as “nigger slave.” As you’ve likely deduced, his response to both resulted in injury to the officers, years in solitary, and retributive cruelty from the friends of those he beat, which kept the cycle spinning. His are the kind of prison offenses that make parole difficult. In a history-written-by-those-who-conquer situation, facts of these incidents are generally not included in the summaries supplied to the parole board.