Wherever there’s a cop rolling a 12 sided die, I’ll be there

Someone famous once said that the best measure of a civilization is to see who it imprisons; unjust civilizations put the righteous and the poor in chains while the criminals hold the keys. Actually, I am not sure if that is a real historical quote or if it is, who said it. It was probably me, I remember scrawling something like that on a homemade placard about 15 years ago outside of the Penn Yan courthouse in protest of JPK’s criminal sentencing as a result of something that is sealed to the public so I can’t get into specifics. At the time, I attributed the quote to Thomas Paine to lend it some moral authority, but that was probably bullshit. I knew none of the slack jawed, lax playing yokels in that Buckwheat town would bother to fact check me unless I attributed it to someone important like Joe Camel, the Marlboro Man or Stevie Ray Vaughn so I might have gambled. Not going to bother looking it up now, just going to keep letting it ride. So let’s just say for the sake of argument that Thomas Paine or maybe Henry David Thoreau said it.

Let’s think about this mathematically. That simple equation says the measure of civilization = (the criminality of the jailors less the righteousness of the jailed) multiplied by the number -1. A score of less than 0 is an unjust civilization, greater than 0 means there is still hope. The U.S. must be fucked because we have a lot of criminal jailers. Just last year, for example, a scandal rocked the Philadelphia juvenile court system when it came to light that two judges sentenced youths to serve time in prison for very minor offenses; they received financial kickbacks from the for profit private company running the prisons who make marginal income on their pinstriped head count.

We are world leaders in incarceration, besting the Chinese, the Cubans, the Iranians, even the Russians, a country whose citizens have spent generations under the thumbscrews of an oligarchic criminal class. That Philly story isn’t even the half of it here in the states, much worse are the judges who aren’t getting kickbacks and no one bats an eye at them for locking away pot and crack-heads. Or the wink, wink, nudge nudge levels of violence and sodomy that we joke about in our prisons and accept as unsanctioned extrajudicial punishments. Hey, no doubt some of these creeps deserve to be in jail, the point is that there are a lot of dastardly, scandalous people running free with blood on their hands. I am looking at Perez Hilton, Marlo Stanfield, Dick Cheney, and Peyton Manning (I’d take Eli as consolation and call it even with the Mannings, for now).

It’s not all doom and gloom, there are some bright spots. The Obama Administration has quietly ended the War on Drugs – drugs are still illegal, but we are no longer rhetorically at war with users. Small consolation to people like the guy the cops shot dead in the back while he lay prostrate on the ground, not struggling, at a Bart station in Oakland the New Years before last, or this kid from Pittsburgh who ran from unidentified, plainclothes police officers that he thought were muggers. They chased him down and beat the ever living shit out of him – of course they were narcos! But we aren’t calling it a war on drugs anymore and that counts for something! We used a similar rhetorical trick to weasel out of counting Vietnam as a loss so we can still proudly claim to be undefeated in war.

More good news – Marijuana is slowly becoming legalized, that is good news and not because I like smoking pot, I don’t, but I can’t think of a single good reason why it should be illegal to do so. Another sign of hope is this decision in Wisconsin as reported by the Associated Press wire service,

“A man serving life in prison for first-degree intentional homicide lost his legal battle today to play Dungeons & Dragons behind bars.

Kevin T. Singer filed a federal lawsuit against officials at Wisconsin’s Waupun prison, arguing that a policy banning all Dungeons & Dragons material violated his free speech and due process rights.

Prison officials instigated the Dungeons & Dragons ban among concerns that playing the game promoted gang-related activity and was a threat to security. Singer challenged the ban but the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday upheld it as a reasonable policy.”

First of all, this article is preposterous on its face and is either intentionally misleading or badly mistaken on the facts. There are two schools of thought on what the real story is here.

Theory 1: The Mad Warden
The prison warden, frustrated by middle age spread, erectile dysfunction, and embittered at his former role-playing friends who are all now too busy manning World of Warcraft avatars full time to come over and roll dice while he plays God these days, took to forcing inmates to play D&D with him. He was the omnipotent dungeon master, of course. Things escalated, and these once relatively harmless games turned into mega-wrong live action role-playing (LARP) sessions. A few ‘orc’ guards rolled natural 20s, boom, crash, bang, and a few hapless prisoners went to the infirmary with bashed skulls. By and by word of this cruel and unusual punishment got out, nobody believed it at first, but the bodies kept piling up and soon they ran out of rug space to sweep under. The courts did what was right in classifying this as a violation of civil rights.

Theory 2: Inmates Running the Asylum
The only other plausible theory is that the guy who runs things inside, you know how there is always the prison gang leader in the movies that other prisoners fear/follow blindly? Well, it could be possible that that guy, the guy in the article, Singer, is coercing other inmates to play dungeons and dragons with him with horrifying offers they can’t refuse. They can pick up the 4 sided dice or they can sit in the hole for 30 days while Latino gangs kidnap their family members and dissolve them in vats of acid.

Now, I don’t have any experience in prison. I’d never make it and know this. I am too weak; emotionally, spiritually and mentally. But I have some experience playing Dungeons & Dragons (first edition rules, I refused to play the compromised 2nd or 3rd edition rules.) There are points of intersection here. An afternoon playing D&D is probably about as boring as an afternoon in prison. The range and depth emotions that you feel having the character that you spent an hour and a half rolling, creating, writing stats for, notating all his equipment, coming up with a backstory and entrusting with your frustrated adolescent hopes and dreams only to lose him 20 minutes into the game because of a stupid roll of the dice to a hobgoblin has to be roughly analogous to having the warden rip apart your cell, find and confiscate your prized cache of nudie magazines sewn into the inside of your mattress. Still, it was not all bad. Just like every prisoner longs for the day when a prison guard gets busted for drug smuggling and faces sentencing, there were small moments of triumph in my playing career that still stand out in a lifetime of achievement as sweeter than most. One example is the time when my abusive, power mad childhood Dungeon Master, and he shall remain nameless, OK, his name was Jerad Flood, created an elaborate labyrinth-dungeon on graph paper with hundreds of rooms, doors, monsters and treasures for me to crawl through. I just went left at every turn and plowed through the dungeon in 30 minutes, avoiding about 90% of the dumb messes he created for my avatar. The look on his face when I came to the exit so quickly, a mixture of shock and disgust, the clear disappointment that he spent so very much more time creating this ridiculous map than it took me to go through, that look was as sweet to me as honey-pie. Later, after getting through that maze, my character fought an Ancient Red Dragon. I played some ridiculous hybrid, it was a half-elven martial artist, I think, and rolled a natural 20, which meant that I/he punched through the dragon’s skull and pulled out his brain. I hated that character, this was all just so preposterous. Floody wouldn’t let me play a ranger, which is what I would have played if I’d had my druthers. He always pulled bullshit like that and if I insisted on the character I wanted he’d just put me in an impossible encounter in the first 10 minutes where death was certain. I can still hear his dickish voice, “Five red dragons fly out of the sky and surround you…” Solidarity, my incarcerated brothers and sisters. Solidarity.