"I was looking at muscle dudes in tank tops and durags playing the hell out of some chess and killing it."
After I was convicted I was originally sent to a federal prison in West Virginia, all the way to the southwest corner of the state by the Tennessee border, a solid six hours away from my home. There were at least four other prisons much closer, including one in my home state of Maryland, so I had no clue why in the hell they were sending me so far away. When I got there I realized why, the whole facility housed only sixty of us. The Bureau of Prisons was basically sending me where they needed to justify the budget of their existence to fill up the bed space. There was definitely room in the other spots, but you can’t have a practically empty facility somewhere in the region, that would look like there was no need for that prison (which there wasn't). That was one of the first signs that there was something else going on other than me breaking the law of course. I know I screwed up, but 54 months for taking 15 g’s! Shit, Paul Manafort would end up serving less time than me and his last scam was for 20 million! I felt like Dave Chapelle in Half Baked, “four years just for weed!? Dayum!”
All of us were housed in the same open dorm layout, similar to what you sometimes see in military movies where all the bunkbeds are in the same room right next to each other. There was absolutely no privacy, so you can hear anything that is slightly above a whisper. One day I was laying on my bunk and I kept hearing someone yell, “check!” A few seconds would go by and then I would hear a loud ass, “check god damnit!” Curious as to what was going on, I got up and followed the noise and saw a group of dudes, all African American, crowded around a chess board watching these two cats just talk mad smack against each other while playing chess. The back and forth would go something like:
“Is that whachu wanna do…I’m saying, is that what yo black ass wanna do? You gonna give me your knight just like that? Aight, I’ll take that shit, I’m a bad man!”
“Check! Check God Damnit! It’s over, I don’t know why I play with you man, who next? Get this muthafucka out of here, somebody please challenge me! I'm finna to play some chess out this bitch!"
I thought I had a foul mouth when I went to prison, but damn, I was pretty much an altar boy in comparison to some of the shit that you will hear on a daily basis in prison, including the women guards (by the way, I was an altar boy). But that was not the impressive part, what was amazing was how good these brothers were at chess. It takes me probably five minutes to move a piece, and even when I do that I really have no strategy. I know how the pieces move, I just can’t see five moves ahead, which pretty much explains why my dumb ass got in legal trouble. But these guys were fast, I mean the second their opponents put their piece down they were already moving theirs. I was looking at muscle dudes in tank tops and durags playing the hell out of some chess and killing it. I would also see them do the same exact same thing with Scrabble. Do not play Scrabble with an ex-felon who has done some serious time, he will kick your ass! I have a college degree and what I thought was a pretty good vocabulary, but damn these guys were using words that they themselves did not know the meaning of but they sure as hell knew where to place the on the damn board for mad points.
That is when it became very apparent, these guys were not dumb. Ok, let me clarify, there are a lot of dumbasses in prison, myself included, but the majority of people that I saw playing chess had all the capabilities of being more than just drug dealers. It was evident by their moves, their strategies, and by their knowledge of the game that they were sharp. Many of them did not even have a high school degree. Where did this disconnect happen in their lives that they did not use that potential for positive things before getting into trouble? Then little by little I started learning their stories, their backgrounds, and the majority of them had childhoods that you would not wish on your worst enemy. I met people addicted to crack since birth because of a mother on crack, people with abusive parents, abusive relatives, a parent in jail, or bounced from place to place since kids. It was a common theme across the board of terrible childhoods. It did not excuse what they had done to break the law, which for the most part was selling drugs, but it was very clear that most of them never had a shot in life from the very beginning.
I then learned about a study that clearly shows evidence that young kids who go through trauma in their very developmental ages have a higher chance of breaking the law later in life, and black people are the ones who have the more stressful lives because of social conditions. Prison was literally a sociological experiment to which this country already has plenty of data and knows how to help prevent the need for incarceration. It only costs about $10,000 dollars to send a student to community college a year in the DC Metro region, but the United States would rather spend $35,000 to send someone to prison. Why is that? If the often quoted definition of “insanity” is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results," what is it called when you know how to fix a problem, mainly one that is causing so much suffering among people of color, but you choose to do nothing? "Check god damnit!"
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