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Welcome to Hell
"Don’t Ask, Don’t Ask"
By D. P. O’Keefe
In prison, everybody asks you what you’re in for. Stupidly, I used to follow suit until I started getting back some of the answers I did.
First off, the answer you get back is rarely the truth. Secondly, a lot of times you don’t want to know why someone is in here because it’s just too heinous a crime to entertain in your head—even if you were a grade-B slasher film producer. The script is gruesome and, unfortunately, real. So I’ve modified the armed services homosexuality policy and I call it, "Don’t ask, Don’t ask."
Some inmates will ignore the fact that I wish to remain pig ignorant and blissful when it comes to their crimes and will provide details sans solicitation anyway. One inmate went so far as to show me his Xeroxed crime scene photographs, complete with Jackson Pollock free-form cerebellum painting of the walls of the crime area. Holding down my prison lunch wasn’t easy.
There are also stories, which are gladly told at mealtime, that are equally appealing. One man, according to prison gossip, apparently killed his whole family and then turned his sights (literally) on poor old Spot and offed him too. Prison lore says he was given an additional life sentence for the dog. But, like I said, that’s just prison gossip—and I’m not about to go up to him during recreation to verify it.
Let me tell you something: It’s pretty scary walking around with my petty 5- to 6-year bid amongst people who are doing quintuple life for the cold-blooded murder of a whole family and a beagle. These men could easily make me number six for playing the wrong domino. All the more reason to keep to myself and to talk to as few of these whack jobs as possible. I know in doing so I’m blowing some fantastic journalistic opportunities—but if I wanted that sort of thing, I might have gone off to report on Desert Storm.
Another reason I "don’t ask, don’t ask" is strictly and personally humanitarian. I don’t want to grow numb to some of the atrocities I’d get from exposure. And if I don’t expose my mind to the idea that killing your family for insurance is normal, I might walk away from this unscarred.
My work in the prison library has me receiving auditory spillover from the legal side of the library. And, again, I "don’t ask, don’t ask." Some of the men who walk in there are there for the sole purpose of appealing, reducing or escaping their sentences. Never mind the crime. That’s a given. The focus now for them is how to get away from the sentence—even after I hear them inadvertently admit their own guilt. And that insults my intelligence.
So, like my desire to remain free from exposure of knowledge of crimes committed, I also want to be free from the individuals who committed them. And that’s an impossible request in prison.
D. P. O’Keefe is a humorist incarcerated in a Connecticut maximum security correctional facility.
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