Word: sy
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...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...
...Sy Jackson from the inside is to agree that, in part, he has been compelled to be someone else. To see him from the outside, from the other end of his cot, is to acknowledge that the man is an explosive, someone to be afraid of. With that view Sy would wholeheartedly sympathize; he is afraid of himself. If the prisons in which he has spent nearly half his life have provided various punishments, they have also given him a context for looking into his own mind. Since what frightens him about his mind was nurtured in prison, the process...