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Truth-Bringer
02-02-2008, 03:43 PM
Tales from an American Gulag, Part 1

by Anthony Hargis

You meet the strangest kind of people in jail. For instance, people who occasionally give in to a useless or self-destructive habit, or people who, wittingly or unwittingly, associate with questionable characters. It’s not that these people are unusual. Probably every one of your neighbors would fit into one of these categories. What makes these people strange is that they sit in jail. I recently had an opportunity to sit in jail myself, for five and a half months, and learn their stories.

Every time I would collect an inmate’s story, I would tell him my “policy”: that I would collect details of his story as told by himself and then have someone on the outside verify details from court filings and police reports. Only one inmate flinched (and ran) when I explained this policy, so I have not included his story. All others had no reaction when I explained it, which indicated to me they had no fear of being contradicted.

Two other factors testify to the truthfulness of these men’s stories: the intensity that accompanied their recitation and their self-criticism. When men tell of events that they feel very strongly to be true, intensity resonates in their voice and fire burns in their eyes. I heard the intensity and I saw the fire.

When men explain events of their lives that could be construed as shameful behavior, it is generally safe to take their testimony as truth. For, when a man relates shameful behavior, he expects to lose a friend, an opportunity, or an advantage. The only thing to gain from such an explanation is truth – and its consequences. On the other hand, when men relate stories to embellish their appearances, their words are to be discounted. That type of information must come from third parties.

These men knew they had not led perfectly clean lives, and they did not hesitate to tell me about their mistakes, their remorse, and the penalties they knew they had to pay to reform--or rather, the penalties they thought they had to pay. Their presence in jail represented penalties they never expected, and as a result, made them very angry men.

Although I told inmates that I would verify their stories from outside sources, I have not done so. The simple explanation is that my situation leaves me with no time and without any resources to do so. Instead, verification will have to be done by others. For those so inclined, a helpful piece of information is that all these men, save Nguyen, were housed in the same module as I (3A of the Santa Ana Jail) during my incarceration from March 15th to August 31st of the year 2003. Nguyen was in the same building, but I don’t remember the exact module.

Although these men unhesitatingly related their stories to me, many of them would later come to me and ask me not to publish their stories because they feared retaliation from the authorities. From these men’s stories, a common purpose of the government became clear. Every time a victim attempted to assert a right, the government would multiply the penalty. For example, my cellmate Saul would ask two times to speak to a lawyer. As a result, his penalty would go from no time and deportation to 30 months and deportation. Several of these men related that, when they asked for a jury trial, the government threatened them with 15 years, while a confession of guilt would bring only three years jail time with three to six years of probation.

These men are short of vision and therefore easily intimidated. They plead guilty and accept the government’s offer. What they fail to see, however, is how easily a probation officer can fabricate a probation violation, and turn the final three months of probation into a new package of one or two years of jail time followed by six more years of probation.

But, I am ahead of myself. Let me tell their stories. Then I’ll briefly explain why I had to be put in jail:

Rest of Part 1 Continued Here (http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/hargis/hargis4.html)

Part 2 is here (http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/hargis/hargis5.html)