It’s Different

Walking out of the R&D building into the courtyard I saw lush green grass, intricately designed garden beds covered with fresh mulch that had color flowers turning brown while clutching to the last bit of autumn sun. I was expecting to walk through another administration building to get onto the actual prison compound.

“This is it,” announced the R&D officer who was escorting me and four other guys that transferred from Canaan. “Over there’s the library,” he continued while pointing, “that’s the gym, the kitchen, and those are the housing units.”

“Wait? This is the compound?” I asked out loud.

“Yeah, big difference from Canaan, right?”

“Difference isn’t the word,” I thought, the shocked expression not hidden on my face.

This is not my attempt to make light of the prison experience, but coming from a penitentiary, this was like moving onto a college campus! There’s 12 trees on the compound. On the compound! Some of these trees are huge!

This clearly indicated that I was no longer living in the concrete jungle.

Walking into my assigned unit, I was quickly greeted by numerous people that I knew from Canaan in the years past.

They all recognized the astonishment I was experiencing in this new environment. “It’s different here,” was the common theme of the conversations.

I was placed with a great celli, who had a run of the compound. Previously he spent a number of years in a penitentiary so he knew what I was going through. He had been at Otisville for over ten years.

Besides the one fact that this facility is older so there’s no air conditioning and only four of the seven showers work, everything is better!

The recreation yard is bigger. The food is served hot straight off the grill. There’s two weight rooms with the type of equipment that you’d expect to find at a Golds gym, and there’s only one medal detector when entering and leaving the gym.

ONE!

In Canaan, I had to go through three on the way to and back from the dinning hall, along with random pat-downs.

Where there were multiple stabbings every week and a few murders every year at Canaan, in my year since transferring, I’ve heard of one stabbing and saw two fights.

In a year!

So yes, it’s different here and it took time to adjust, but adjustments are a part of life.

I’ve learned to embrace them.

Each day I’ve been waking up knowing I’m one day closer, finally viewing the finish line for my freedom after 19 years.

Approaching that type of adjustment gives me a lot to think and write about.