Word: sy
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With all the changes that have occurred in him since then, Sy does not say that prison made him what he is; only that it helped. After completing the first five-year term, he took a job in Rochester working for a company that makes tanks for chemicals. He fell in love, got married, had three children. Between them, he and his wife were making close to $16,000 a year; quite enough at the time...
...armed robbery, and because he was a two-time felony offender, they gave Sy 15 to 30 years, of which he served eleven...
...spite of the accuracy of the poem's forecast, Sy is still bewildered by his latest crime. He is now doing six to twelve for the attempted murder of his "lady" in Poughkeepsie. After serving time for the robbery conviction, he began to work with delinquent teenagers, but he got into trouble there too, fighting with the authorities over their rough handling of the kids. "They told me: Everybody does it. I told them: / don't do it. I'm part of everybody." He lost that job and "drank and drank." Then he lost his lady...
...here I was in the grinder again. I knew what I had to face. You get into the machine and you're just a little cog. You're nothing major." An eerie falsetto fills the corridor. An inmate walks by outside the door to Sy's cell, shouting...
What are prisons for, Sy? Punishment mainly, he believes, of four distinct types. The first is one's loss of freedom. The second, the loss of a sense of responsibility: "You're expected to think for yourself and at the same time to follow orders without asking questions." The third kind of punishment he calls "sensory deprivation," the forced absence of family, of feeling. The only emotions one knows in prison, he says, are the "negatives" of anger and disappointment. And the fourth type? That, to Sy, is the most severe. "The worst punishment is being compelled...