ACID TRIP
A TALE OF GOOD MISFORTUNE

PART 2

Settling In

     The first few days were spent in orientation, both through the auspices of the B.O.P. and by getting information through the other inmates. It was at this point that I began my real education on the inmate culture - basically how to act with and around other inmates. This all came down to being really careful about what you say to anyone at any time. The basic inmate tends to be pretty sensitive about appearing weak or vulnerable. So a word out of place can easily escalate to at least an exchange of harsh words and the adrenaline inducing flight or fight response, if not to actual acts of violence.

     That being said, a lot has changed within the "code of honor" that is the perceived norm of inmate's behavior towards each other. The "snitches are not tolerated rule" of thumb has been changed dramatically by the new laws and by the carrot and stick of no change in a person's sentence unless they give up someone else.

     The 5K1 clause has created a large amount of people within the system who have gone out of their way to give someone up. The urban legend is that if someone is a known snitch with regards to having talked to the cops or to the prosecutors, they are more likely to die than not. But with the government's utilization of the 5K1, the population of known snitches is so great as to form up to one third of the prison population.

     Although someone can get a reduction on their sentence, it is unlikely that anyone can get a no federal jail time as a result of their conviction. So the federal prisons are full of guys who got 5 years rather than 20 due to their cooperation. Since there are so many of them, it would be a full time job for anyone who chose to carry the old belief that snitches must die. So basically they are left alone.

     Now if they actively snitch another inmate out while incarcerated, they do have more likelihood of some sort of retaliation. Although anything that was serious enough to get someone brought up on new charges involved them getting immediately sent to the hole and then shipped off to another institution.

     The rest of the education was to learn the cultural behavior used in every day interactions. I made a choice to be observant of these and to go out of my way not to use them. It wasn't from a viewpoint of superiority, but because I decided that I didn't want to make a habit of doing things that were readily identifiable outside of prison as a prison behavior.

     In essence I didn't, nor to this day do I, agree that selling LSD is a behavior that the society needed to punish someone for at all, even less to incarcerate them. By acquiescing to just about any prison behavior, I would have viewed myself as agreeing to the cause of why I was there.

     The prime example is hitting the rock. Inmates use forming a fist and each serially hitting their fist atop the other one's rather than use handshakes. This is used for all of the things a handshake is used to symbolize on the streets. Such as a simple greeting or to signify that a bet has been made and the terms are agreed to and contracted. I never hit the rock once while incarcerated and haven't since either. I did pantomime hitting the rock though but swerved my hand as it approached the other persons and somehow always missed. It never did rile anyone that much. And I paid up on any bets made so securing the contract was never an issue.

     Initially, I was rather foot loose and fancy free to go and check things out without having the encumbrance of a job to slow me down. I took the opportunity to check out what was happening with the psychology department in this place. Jeeze, what a difference from Fairton!

     There was an actual schedule posted by the psychology department for an array of classes. As well, there were academic classes given in some of the classrooms placed by the library. I had arrived right after a new set of psychology classes had started. There were 22 classes offered. The limit for attendance was two classes without authorization of a person's work supervisor. With authorization the only limit was the conflict of scheduling of the classes that one wished to take. Since this was still the bureaucracy, things were done within a prescribed orderly manner. I was not allowed to jump into any of those classes. The cut off for signing up had been January the third.

How Time is Observed

     What is the purpose of incarceration? What does our society figure that a stint of incarceration will achieve on whomever they imprison? I'd guess that there are quite a lot of viewpoints on that one. But one major belief is that the existence provided be so dismal when compared to the existence possible outside of prison that the thought of going back will be enough to stop someone from engaging in whatever they did to get there in the first place.

     To this end apparently, some pretty annoying restrictions have been instituted. The party line is that any and all of these limitations on personal freedom are inherently for the maintenance of control by the prison authorities. Yet some of them are pretty silly if not nonsensical.

     When I first arrived at the FCI, all movement was controlled. This meant that during the hours of 7 AM and 9 PM, we were allowed to leave our respective housing units and go somewhere else - but only during a ten-minute span between the top of the hour and ten minutes past. Anyone caught alone between specific locations outside of that time window was out of bounds and guilty of a disciplinary infraction, nicknamed a "shot." If we were with our respective crew leading guard though, we were legal.

     I could go to the mess hall at for breakfast at 6:30 AM. During the next hour, movement between the mess hall and the units was pretty unrestricted. By 7:30 PM though, we had to be back at the units. Work call was at 8 PM.

     During the day, till 4 PM, the only places I could go was to work, the education classrooms located adjacent to the library, or the psychology classrooms that were within the chapel. Any time I had to get to class it was only allowed during that ten-minute window of opportunity.

     At 4 PM we all went back to the housing units and were counted. This meant that we were required to be in our cell shortly after 4 PM. The guards locked us in and then counted everyone in the institution. They had to reconcile the count with each unit before they could unlock the doors again. So if the count was somehow off, they had to recount until they got it right or figured out who was missing. This happened pretty often - the guards getting the count wrong, not someone missing.

     When they finally got it right they let us out and passed out the mail. Then the units were called to eat. The mess hall was shut down by 6 PM. Between 4:30 PM and 6 PM, movement was pretty unrestricted from the mess hall to the housing units, but at 6 PM controlled movement was reinstituted. We could only go from the units to the library or gym/rec. yard once again on the hour during that ten-minute slot.

     Access to the commissary occurred in the evening too. The commissary opened at 4:30 PM and remained open until the last inmate got their stuff. Going to the commissary involved standing at a window with a small opening beneath it. The opening was large enough to pass anything sellable through. Inmates took care of the transaction with a guard present to supervise.

     There was a two page, small print, both sides covered list of items available in the commissary. These ranged from food items, clothing and stationary to laundry soap and toiletries. An inmate's money was to have already been placed into an account. There was no cash in the inmate population. Family and friends sent money to the prison. The commissary clerk had the ability to look up the balance of an inmate's account and confirm their ability to pay. Then they would accumulate the items wanted, do the math and pass the stuff out the opening. This was the same as the system at Fairton. The commissary line was immune to the movement restriction. Inmates got in line, and, as they obtained their stuff, they were allowed to return to their units until the commissary closed. This was only for leaving the line. Movement to the line was still restricted to when the movement happened.

     Everyone was required to return to their unit at 9 PM. The TV rooms were open till 11 PM. At that time everyone was required to return to their rooms and be locked in. We couldn't get out till after count was cleared in the morning. Then it was the start of another day. Weekends had the restricted movement between the units and the library and the rec. yard by the hour. All of the other activities were on the same schedule though, except that the TV rooms were open till 2 PM. At 2 PM, it was get locked back into the room time At a point pretty early on in my confinement, the policy of open movement was instituted. Basically during the day of the weekdays, everything stayed the same. But afternoons and weekends, we could go from the units to the rec. yard, library, commissary, or chapel at will.

Prison Food

     Food at Bastrop was if anything better than at Fairton. Meals varied each day, and menus were posted a week in advance. The salad bar for lunch and dinner was better taken care of than at Fairton. It was a quite impressive selection. Breakfasts ranged from eggs made to order to hot and cold cereals. Weekends provided hand made cinnamon rolls on Saturdays and another tempting breakfast roll on Sundays.

     Some lunch and dinner meals had vegetarian options when the entree was meat. On hamburger days, they had veggie burgers. There was always a tray of cheese enchiladas on enchilada night. And although the same basic menus were provided for each type of meal, we usually didn't see a repetition of the same menu for a week and a half. We could only pass through the line once, but the portions were ample.

     There were always deserts, cakes, puddings and the like. Al Nagy, one of the prison psychologists, had a pet theory that he could spot the true incorrigible inmate by the ones who ate their desert first. He said that this showed of a lack of restraint in getting their immediate gratification impulse met. From this, he extrapolated, surmising that on the streets the same immediate gratification tendency led them to go for the easy bucks rather than the nose to the grindstone lifestyle.

     But more than simply getting our hands on something sooner rather than later was the feeling that we created in our bodies that was rather nice to experience. Whether it came out of thoughts of superiority, having an easier life than the 9 to 5's, or from the thrill of breaking the law and getting away with it. It was a tactile feeling that, although we weren't aware enough to consciously identify it and say, "ah, copped that feeling again," we did enjoy it and went back for that internal blast again and again.

     By the time I got busted, I had amassed far more money that I had ever imagined having when I was poor. I remember earlier, living the consummate hippie lifestyle in Bisbee, Arizona, the lifestyle of the basic lower class voluntary peasant. I was working at the local co-op for $67 a week - and living hand to mouth. I had dreams of getting myself together enough to have $5000 over and above expenses at some point in my future. And I also had plans as to what I would do with that excess.

     Well, I had far surpassed that and had, well before the time I got busted, what I considered to be enough to easily retire in Central America. But I didn't stop. I kept right on doing acid deals. And after I stopped and took a look at it once I was imprisoned, I realized that the only reason I had still been taking that risk was to get the thrill I created when I successfully traded some acid for some money. I even had a saying to myself - "I do a felony a day." Each act of selling acid I did was a felony in any jurisdiction, and those days that I didn't do a felony, I went through a bit of a withdrawal. Withdrawal from not having created that thrill that I got when I did do a deal.

Rules

     The B.O.P. bureaucracy that I had to attune myself to included what was taboo and what would happen to me if I were caught doing a taboo behavior. We were given an inmate handbook that laid out our personal lifestyle limits. This ranged from how many books and magazines we could have in our room to obvious things like theft, violence and drugs.

     The basic driving force of the prison institution is to instill a sense of loss of freedom in those incarcerated therein. Any thing we did that was contrary to these rules re-established some small sense of autonomy, personal control of our personal life, and a bit of freedom. So to get over on any level was pretty esteem building. And each time any of us got over, we got that thrill once again. To allow ourselves to be subjugated by the imposed restrictions was esteem lowering. I'm thinking that raising one's sense of esteem is as basic a need as breathing.

     So any little thing we could do that was specifically not allowed improved our heads. Whether it was to have more clothing than was allowed, or to get an extra entrée in the mess hall, or to make up a batch of fermented fruit, sugar alcohol mixture. There was always a potential consequence for doing these behaviors, a trip to solitary, loss of good time, loosing a job position/pay grade level, or getting shipped out to another institution. But having self-esteem appears to take precedence over the attainment of material possessions sometimes. So we gambled every day. At stake was feeling better about ourselves versus losing some of the little amount of freedom we were afforded every day.

     One of the more notorious means inmates have, to express both a sense of freedom and thumb their nose at the authorities and the general culture that they blame for incarcerating them, are tattoos. Having the means to do a tattoo in prison is definitely against the rules. Those inmates who have tattoo guns and inks guard them carefully. It's an art to be able to hide things so well that they withstand a room search. The jailhouse tattoo artists have it down well. It is a source of income for them and therefore well worth protecting.

     I'm not talking about one-color teardrops positioned next to the eye. I'm talking about full blown multicolored images of any design anyone can imagine. The thing that confuses me about the consequence of being tattooed is what tattoos do for the powers that be. Tattoos make it easier for the law enforcement types to identify someone. In my mind if I was all about being an outlaw, the last thing I would want to do is make it easier for those attempting to stop me in the pursuit of my lifestyle to identify me. I guess this goes back to that denial mentality that had virtually all of the inmates encountered totally unprepared for the possibility that they might get caught while engaging in whichever form of lawbreaking they employed.

     At any rate someone who recently got themselves a new tattoo had a lighter countenance to them with their sense of having this new possession. A prohibited possession at that, one that the authorities could not take away from them or punish them for having unless that got caught in the act of receiving it.

Prayer Rug

     One of my personal self-esteem triumphs was getting my Diné rug sent in to me. I own a three by five Diné rug (Navajo to those of you who aren't up to snuff on your politically correct nomenclature of Native American tribes.) I was at a place within the joint use area of the Dine/Hopi reservation in 1984 called Big Mountain. The federal government was engaged in a practice of relocating the livestock herding and very traditional living Diné members from that area, mainly so that the government could give the green light to do coal mining there. I was there for a gathering of people to support the Diné who were resisting the relocation off of their land where they and their ancestors had lived since humans have resided on the North American Continent - far longer than the European/American occupation. One of the other persons attending the gathering was a woman named Goose.

     Goose was a member of the Hog Farm Commune. This is the commune created by members of the Merry Pranksters who traveled with Ken Kesey and who were very responsible for initiating the whole Hippie/Psychedelic movement and culture in America. One of the things that Goose did was to broker rugs for the Diné women who made them. And she had this fresh off the loom creation made by Mae Shay, the wife of Kee Shay, who was the elder of the resistance to relocation movement. I had the funds with me at the time and bought it immediately after I saw it. It is a special possession for me, and I tend to carry it with me everywhere I go. It is the closest thing I have to a prayer rug, although I never have specifically used it for praying upon. I guess just being with it is a prayer in and of itself for me.

     Soon after I got to Bastrop I noticed that some of the Muslims had prayer rugs. They carried them to the chapel to do their hunker down and pray to Mecca thing each day. I decided that if they could have their rugs, then I could get mine sent in to me. But I didn't want to declare that I was Muslim and have to do the daily knees towards Mecca thing every day. The way to get my rug inside the fences was to get permission through one of the chaplains.

     There were two chaplains. One was an older Catholic priest who had spent a long time as a prison chaplain. The other was a young Protestant minister who was a relative newcomer. The Catholic priest was very conservative and didn't smile a lot. The Protestant minister had longer hair, wore nice suits and, smiled a lot.

     I decided to present my case for getting permission to the young minister. Although I was raised Catholic, I had blown off any belief or practice of that religion soon after I got out of high school. And the Muslim card was not one that I intended to play.

     There is a branch of Hinduism named Jainism. The core belief of Jains is an absolute respect for all life. They are militant vegans, which is the most extreme form of vegetarianism. Vegans utilize no animal products. So, not only do they not eat any meat, fish, fowl or any other once living animal, insect or anything like that, they also don't utilize any animal products, like honey, beeswax, leather, wool or anything that an animal created through effort or passively.

     Practically no one in America has ever heard of the Jains. I decided to present to the chaplain that I was a Jain and that Jains use prayer rugs too. As large a crock of bullshit as I have ever endeavored to created. I figured that even if he wanted to corroborate my story, he would have to do some serious research just to find any information of Jainism. I was also betting that he had about as much on his plate already as he needed to keep him quite busy and really wouldn't want to take the time or energy needed to look anything like this up.

     No one was being harmed, and I chose to follow the behavior of inmates everywhere by attempting in any small way to get over on the system created to keep us as down and de-humanized as the powers that be thought was possible without actually applying physical violence.

     Now, whether the chaplain was just kind enough to overlook my line of BS or whether I had actually pulled the wool over his eyes I don't know, but he gave me permission. And after going through the proper route - it had to be sent through a bookstore as if it was a fresh purchase and not just sent in by family - I got my rug sent in. That little thing was as spirit raising an item as I could have imagined having with me while incarcerated.

What About That Whole Prison Homosexual Thing?

     So is there rampant homosexual activity, voluntary and otherwise, especially otherwise, in the Federal prison system? Well there is voluntary. There are gay men in prison. I mean flaming, would be wearing a dress if they could get away with it gays. The tendency is for them to attract partners who did not engage in homosexual activity before they came to prison. And they make a happy couple. The non-gay before prison person also tended to go back to their heterosexual orientation after leaving prison. I have never heard of a forced homosexual act while I was in Federal prison. The whole "don't drop your soap in the shower" thing didn't happen. The showers were individual stalls, which took out the possibility of the communal shower scene mandatory in any prison movie.

Drugs

     Another of those thrills inmates did was to continue taking drugs. Both for the high/escape from their surroundings and for that rush of busting authorities chops once again. I'm not sure of all of the means for getting drugs inside those razor wire topped fences, but the most notorious method was through the visiting room.

     Everyone visiting someone got their belongings searched. So simply carrying in something was pretty much out of the question, as it was a federal charge for anyone got caught in possession. And they knew that they would be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible.

     So those wives and girlfriends who were willing to do it swallowed the drugs. They were in a balloon or something else that would survive the journey in the GI tract. Then after they were admitted into the visiting room they would take a trip to the bathroom. There they would regurgitate the drugs back up. The women's bathroom was notorious for being a mess from having all that vomit not being cleaned up by the vomiters.

     Then they would return to the visiting room with the package of drugs in their mouths and transfer the drugs to their inmate's mouth with a kiss. The inmate would then swallow the package. This was necessary since we were strip-searched upon leaving the visiting room. Once back in their cells the inmate would get the package back up, and soon someone would consume it.

     Since there wasn't any money allowed for inmates, the coin of the realm was commissary items. Or the seller could have another inmate send the money to their family. This ultimately was a source of income for the seller. More so than getting their own stash of drugs to get high with.

     Then the next paradigm sets in, the threat of getting their room searched. Tossing of rooms happened regularly and at any time without warning. Anything not on the allowed list found in a room gets someone a shot. Possession of drugs gets a new charge.

     And then there's the piss test. Since a large majority of those incarcerated are there for drugs, the B.O.P. does random drug testing of the inmates. They just randomly and through retesting past infractions generate a list of identification numbers. The inmates whose numbers are drawn are rounded up and taken to a room with a desk and adjacent open stalled commode.

     Once the inmate is handed their cup, he has an hour to get some pee in it. This can really be a drag if you just got done pissing before they came to test you. A whole bunch of guys spend their waiting time drinking as much water as they can to force some fluids through their system.

     Refusal to piss for them results in the same consequence as if your piss comes out dirty, a shot for using. Not being able to piss within an hour gives you that result too. If someone tests dirty they are taken to the hole and given their shot.

     The most memorable random piss testing experience I had was when the one armed inmate got called up in the same group as I was. After he was handed his cup, he inquired of the officer as to which task the officer would like him to do. Hold his dick or the piss cup, as he obviously wasn't equipped to handle both.

Intimidation

     One of the interesting results of the implementation and accessibility of the psychology programming was that there were very few incidences of violence at Bastrop. The basic prison legend accepted by our culture is that there are ongoing and relatively institutionalized violent events daily. The viewpoint is that there are specific groups - Blacks, Hispanics, and White Racists - who are warring on each other constantly. As well as the basic big guy getting his way with little guy syndrome. Well that was not happening on the level accepted as normal at Bastrop F.C.I.

     Not that incidents didn't happen, but given that the population of men, with attitudes and the ability to war against each other, was present every day, the actual events of fighting were rare. So rare that a violent incident tended to be big news that traveled by the grapevine quickly over the entire population.

     I had an incident of violence occur to me once during my incarceration. It happened to me while I was in the drug treatment program. As part of our exercise program, the class went to the gym one day and decided to play a game of basketball. I was parked next to the lane and about halfway between the foul line and the basket, while playing defense. The other team, which had the ball, set up a play that sent one of their players towards me. I set myself in position, anticipating him colliding with me. As I did, I raised my arms across my chest to guard it against the impact of this guy running into me. He decided that the raising of my arms was a prelude to hitting him and did a pre-emptive strike nailing me upside my face. I resisted any retaliation and simply asked him why he would do that. He gave the explanation of it being a defensive maneuver, but it was clearly seen by everyone on the court as a line of BS on his part.

     One of the interesting outcomes of this event tho was an insight gained by a couple of others on the court at the time. Their basic take within the macho belief system they came from was that if struck you have to strike back. There is no other choice in the situation. That choice is so clear as to be generally accepted by everyone that they knew. A person who did not strike back was to be considered a coward or a pussy to be taken advantage of at every opportunity.

     Now I am 6 foot 41/2 inches and carry a few pounds with that large body. So it wasn't an example of not being able to defend myself. But I saw things a bit differently than they did and have the viewpoint that by not striking back, I was actually stronger within my self and less reactionary than someone who did strike back. I was able to relate this viewpoint to some of my fellow classmates, and they were blown away by the concept. Not only that you didn't have to retaliate but that you were stronger rather than weaker for not retaliating.

     Another interaction didn't gain me the same respectful viewpoint. For the first year of my confinement I maintained a position on one of the construction crews. As I previously related, my work supervisor was a pretty laid back guy. The supervisor of the other construction crew though was the stereotypical Texas white good old boy racist, closed minded, and of the mind that he was more superior than any inmate alive. His name was Scubiata. One of the tools he used was to generally treat inmates with utter contempt and condescension. Basically he was looked upon by all of the inmates working in the general area of the construction services, which included plumbing, electrical, masonry and other disciplines, as the biggest P.O.S. guard out there.

     One of my fellow crewmates was a black inner city cocaine dealer. He carried within him all of the attitude and swagger that is portrayed within that character in any contemporary movie. But all in all he wasn't necessarily prone to act out with the physical violence that his outer façade projected.

     One day our boss wasn't around, so Officer Scubiata was supervising our crew. He had some of our crew, including me and the black dude sweeping off a concrete slab behind the construction building that was being prepared to have an addition constructed on it. And while we were doing this, he decided to push the black dude's buttons. This was one of Scubiata's fortes. And he usually chose as mean a way as possible. I don't remember exactly what he said to this guy, but it was basically generally demeaning.

     This set the guy off, but he couldn't go after Scubiata. If he attacked a guard he would be in a shitload of trouble. That is the kind of behavior that gets one sent to the hole and then transferred, usually to a higher level institution. Not a pleasant thought. So he decided to let off his steam by sending his ire towards me. Basically the kick the dog syndrome, except that I saw what was happening from the get go, that Scubiata was trying to set this guy up for a trip to the hole. And I decided not to play. When the black dude set verbally upon me, I just let it all happen and didn't engage him back either by speaking in a like manner or by hitting him. Eventually he cooled down, and the event passed.

     But the senior inmate of my crew was basically a white racist, and he decided that I acted inappropriately for a white man. He chose to threaten me with violence for not doing my part to present a unified force against the uppity black man. He was not approachable to be given and see my viewpoint that all of this was simply a way for Scubiata to set inmates against each other. For a few days my anxiety was raised, and I had to make sure that I did not find myself in a situation where the senior guy and myself were alone. But this too passed.

     The only other tense moment was after I got to the camp. I was playing chess out at the picnic tables. Some of the ways that inmates pass the time is with games. Spades, hearts and chess games appear spontaneously in the afternoons as soon as count clears and continue until lights out.

     I was playing with one of the older black inmates. While we were playing another young black inmate appeared and announced that this was the time he was supposed to be playing my opponent and I was to immediately stop playing and give my seat to him. I ignored him and he began to threaten me with physical violence if I didn't do as he asked. At some point he removed himself but not until he had actually grabbed my shirt and attempted to drag me from the table. Throughout this whole escapade I just held my peace. After he left I completed my game but I knew that somewhere out there he was probably gunning for me.

     Later that evening though, he approached me and expressed his thanks for not rising to his bait. I imagine that some cooler head spoke with him and related the reality that had I gone ahead and decided to fight him we both would have gotten a free handcuff party and ride to the hole with a possible re-internment to the fences in prison. So my restraint actually did him a favor big time. Somehow he treated me with a bit more respect after that if not with true friendship. Interesting what this non-violence thing can accomplish.

Work

     I got assigned to one of the construction crews and spent my days performing menial construction and building tasks. Thankfully, the guard who ran the crew was much more of a construction supervisor than a B.O.P. prison guard. He was a laid back of temperament individual as anyone I have encountered. He had a folksy subtle wit and was not prone to push the buttons of his crewmembers. So work went easy.

     The work stress came more from the macho attitudes of the inmate crew leaders. These were the guys with the seniority positions. They had been down the longest, on the job the longest, had the most work experience, and had the biggest chips on their shoulders. The rest of the crew were newcomers and still orienting to this life in prison that they had created for themselves.

     About 70% of the inmates were there for crimes involving drugs. And the vast majority of these were non-violent offenders. Some of the inner city black gangsta and white racist cracker types presented themselves as violence prone. But it was all pretty much more about identity and presentment than engaging in actual violent events to punctuate that presentment. More words than actions. Being a medium security facility, there really weren't many violent offenders that were even allowed to be there. The only violence charged ones who were there had achieved a long history of incarceration without any violence in their incarceration record. Violent crimes were punished with incarceration in higher security level facilities.

     Still there is the stereotypical belief that violence is rather endemic within prisons. There just wasn't all that much violence going on in this place. Much less so than either El Reno or Fairton. Just why was this?

Higher Consciousness College

     My first encounter with a psychology program was the last weekend of February. A Life Training was being given. This was a special program, so the envelope of signing up lasted up to the week before the event. This was one I could attend.

     The Life Training was a three-day interactive seminar, where people were taught the tools to look at, and for most a first real look, how their mind currently was working. Actually how they were choosing to work their minds. I lived in a commune when I got busted. Some of the community members where I lived had taken the Life Training prior to my getting busted. They came out of it with stark realizations of their behavior and thought patterns - as well as what to do about really checking their thoughts out about past experiences and present situations that they found themselves in.

     This was something that cost $300 for the three days. It was time consuming and intensive. I had, after hearing the favorable accounts of what the people I lived with learned about themselves, wanted to do a Life Training at some point. But I never quite got around to it. And now here was the opportunity, without the cost and getting to it was as easy as waking up and walking across the compound.

     That something of this personal growth potential was being offered in a federal prison blew me away. I signed up and was in the gym with about 100 other inmates as soon as count was over on Friday night. This was absolutely amazing - 100 convicted criminals voluntarily seated to check out this thing. These guys had plenty of other things that they could be doing.

     It's a misnomer that all there is to do within a prison is sit and wait. Between athletics, a full gym, a weight pile that rivals many World Gyms, state of the art stair-masters, two tennis courts, handball courts, cable TV, a full track, bocci ball courts, gardening, a music section with two studios, recording equipment and instruments, library and any craft endeavor that a person could imagine, there was plenty of diversion available to help the time pass effortlessly.

     This was different though, and there were a bunch of volunteers from the outside with new faces and free faces to relate to also.

     These inmates were grappling with the thought that there might be something amiss with themselves and that they might be able to do something to change that. That is something that is really not taken advantage of in the free world. And the weight of attitude is as prevalent within persons who are incarcerated as within any subset of society. That ten percent of the prison population would even think of forgoing free unstructured time to check themselves out was totally amazing to me.

Just What the Hell Was Going On In This Place Anyway

     I had already been given the basic tenets of the Life Training a few years before at a Rainbow Gathering. There was a counselor there who sat with me and explained the concept of being responsible for my own feelings and reactions. That I perceived that someone did something, and I chose to be offended with it was much more about me than it was about them. And I could not only not get pissed off by others behaviors, but I could let go stuff from the past that I had chosen to be offended by and was still carrying a resentment about. At the time that I was given this information, it was a totally new concept and one of the most healing and freeing hours that I had ever spent. I am still ever thankful to Jam for taking the time to relate this stuff to me.

     The gym was half full with inmates. The Life Training volunteer personnel had arranged some props, a sound system and the chairs in an orderly fashion. There was an area behind the section where the inmates sat, where the volunteers were. Each of them had a specific task to perform to keep the training running smoothly. The trainers were two people who worked with each other. Their names were Roy Whitten and Ann McMasters. They functioned as the tools whereby the trainees were presented with the materials and notices on how individual responses existed and were set into motion by themselves.

     The first session was looser than the subsequent ones. At that first session we were invited to commit to some disciplines. There was a necessary and focused reason for the implementation of these disciplines.

     A primary focus of the life training is to allow people to become aware of the patterns their thoughts normally follow when they encounter an event and choose to respond to that event. The event can be an actual encounter with someone, something outside of themselves, or one solely manifested within their mind. It really didn't matter, pretty much the same progression of thoughts followed any encounter.

     Most of us are on some sort of automatic response determined by the programming that was implanted into our minds at an early age. Some of these are specifically introduced by our parents or other authority figures as we grow up. Some of these were put into place after a traumatic event. Our response to that event stayed on with us as a mental and physical response. The crux of our relating to the events that we encounter in life is to run our program, the one that we are comfortable with, quite used to, that we feel good about, and that we have rationalized through some corroboration means as the right and proper way to respond.

     The disciplines introduced for the three days are meant as a way to be aware of and notice events that we will surely encounter as well as what we run through our heads in response. They are pretty simple things like bring no food into the training. Don't talk to the person next to you. Be in a seat in the gym before the time to start the session. And some harder items - don't drink coffee. Don't smoke. Each person is also asked to take on a personal discipline, to stop doing some behavior that they are used to partake in that is not included on the list presented.

     When the disciplines are agreed to and taken, they are presented as each trainee and trainer having taken an oath, given their word that they will not engage in the behavior chosen. Then each time the group reconvenes, 8 AM on Saturday morning was our next session, the trainers asked us if anyone had not kept their discipline.

And It Was Show Time

     First thing Saturday morning, each person who had not maintained their promised discipline was told to stand in front of the group and tell what discipline they had broken. That was the easy part. The trainers then asked them why. Just what was it that they played within their minds that so easily allowed them to not keep their word - to not hold their integrity.

     It was pretty embarrassing at first, but as it progressed we all got to learn about how our minds were working on that level. And the set of thoughts that any individual used to allow himself to just go ahead and drink that coffee or show up late was a familiar one that all of us used every day in our lives. The interesting ones were the persons who forgot about the agreement that they had made and got a cup of coffee, then remembered it in the midst of drinking the cup. But then they chose to finish it rather than stop when they realized that they had promised not to do so. I use coffee as an example, although there were many behaviors that the same progression of thoughts was adaptable to.

     Some mornings and afternoons were given entirely to inspecting the thought processes of guys who had not kept their word in the ensuing break. Some guys dropped out, and the population dwindled a bit. But the majority of us stuck out this process to stay and learn something about ourselves and about each other.

     And the things that doing the processes brought up for these guys: There were jaw droppingly, amazing stories of absolutely horrendous events they had lived through while growing up. It was no wonder that many of these guys found their way into prison after having experienced the abuse they did as children. And the most amazing thing was that the trainers had the ability to get these guys to open up and relate these stories that would be very embarrassing for anyone to confess to, no less an inmate adhering to this rather hyper macho culture that we had all been thrown into.

     Other processes were introduced one by one throughout the weekend. Different activities that anyone could take the time out to do in order to check out events that they encountered, their responses to the event, the crap that they ran through their heads as a result of the event and the actions that they partook to satisfy what they had come up with as an appropriate response to the event.

     We were introduced to the concept of mind talk - the specific items that we tick off after encountering an event. These are varied but point towards an ultimate goal - to create a response to the event that we feel good about. Sometimes we end up actually feeling bad. But our programming is such that the bad feeling is the one that we are used to feeling when encountering a like event. Therefore, to feel bad, to feel heavy, dense, and separate is to feel correct. And to feel correct is to feel right. To feel right is ultimately our goal about whatever we create to feel - to be right, to identify ourselves and our response as the right one to be and feel. And most of the time our creation of feeling right is so the wrong choice that it borders on the ridiculous.

     A specific activity was presented in order to remember an event. Then we ran the thoughts that we took out and looked at about that event. We wrote these down in series and then put them to a truth test. Was the thought actually true, false or something that we actually didn't know. And "I don't know" is pretty much equal to false. An amazing thing was noticed. Except for the thought that the event had actually occurred, every other thought that we chose to create about a given event was either absolutely false or something that we did not know. This proved to be an amazing tool for letting go resentments that we were carrying around for years - as well as an opportunity to forgive ourselves for carrying that stuff inside of ourselves and beating ourselves up all that time.

     What a revelation! All of this perfectly rational stuff we were accustomed to use in order to be right and judge someone or something was a crock of shit. We had been totally bullshitting ourselves - and continued doing so on an ongoing basis during our waking moments.

     The last two processes were pretty touchy feely but energizing and enervating. They comprised elements of trust, self-esteem and compassion/empathy for others. First we were led into a smaller building and instructed to participate in a Brownian motion type exercise where we continuously moved within a confined area without hitting each other.

     The final one had us speaking to ourselves while looking at ourselves in a mirror and then connecting with someone else through eye contact while stating words of connection. Fun, intoxicating stuff.

     The final outcome of the training was a realization that life just is. The events that we encounter just are. They have no goodness or badness to them. They are just stuff to encounter and then go on to the next thing. Any of the pain that we choose to create as a result of encountering any event is the result of a bunch of crap that we run through our minds.

     A result of the training was the experience by all of the participants of how much alike we all are. With this comes a heightened appreciation for ourselves and the bad stuff we create for ourselves - also a heightened sense of compassion for all of the others who were putting themselves through the same hell.

     By the end of Sunday night all of the participants were much lighter than when they had arrived. This was a measurable lightness of being produced within our bodies. Basically the sixty or so remaining participants, convicted felons all, floated back to their cells. And began treating themselves and their fellows with a higher degree of understanding, compassion and restraint than they did the Friday before.

     Jeeze this was good stuff anywhere. It was amazing stuff within the confines of a prison.

     This was the fourth time that the training had been allowed to happen within the facility. And this was the first facility that had ever allowed this type of event to take place within its walls. The founder of the life training was Brad Brown, an Episcopalian minister. He was a counselor and through his counseling work with couples he came across the basic precepts of the training. Dr. John Rubel, one of the Prison Psychologists, in his quest to facilitate speakers coming into the prison, found in Austin an agent for the authors who were on the tour to promote their books. Brad Brown had recently published a book and was on tour at that time. The agent asked him if he would like to speak at the prison when he came through Austin and he readily agreed to. After his speech he approached Dr. Rubel and offered to facilitate a Life Training within the prison.

     Bureaucratic hurdles were soon bounded over, and the first training was held in the spring of 1989. By the time that I got there it was old hat. But the first four times, only the first three processes of the training were presented.

     The first life training that I attended in January was the second part of a two set presentation. In the free world the entire training is presented during a three-day weekend. It starts on Friday evening at 6 goes until 9 that night. On Saturday, the day runs from 8 in the morning till nine at night again. The final day often goes until midnight. They continue until all of the processes are presented and worked through. But due to the limitations in time set by the prison schedule, it was decided that all of the processes couldn't be presented with any justice in one weekend. So the training was created into two weekends for us.

     I attended the first part of the training in March. As we gathered together and sat in the participatory places, it soon became evident that there was something very different going on. There were inmates sitting with the outside volunteer support team. As the training began one of the inmates walked up to the front of the room and addressed the participants. Reading from a book, he welcomed everyone and introduced the trainers. What was up? Inmates taking part in presenting the event. Whoa! This was something that just didn't occur in prison. And yet here we all were experiencing some of us in roles of responsibility.

     There is an illusion that was presented to us every day. That we were less than human, less than the guards, less than the administrative personnel were. That whole concept was blown out of the window. In the life training, we were a part of this community and were allowed to participate and able to handle the responsibility.

     This was a major shift in perception for both the inmates and the staff members of the facility. The results of the weekend were as significant as the first if not more so. And an opening was created for some of us to go beyond just working on ourselves to a new role. A role that allowed those who took it upon themselves to serve and help others to engage in the process of working on themselves.

Where Did This Come From?

     After that first Life training weekend I had some questions on my mind. Just who was responsible for allowing the environment that resulted in getting this type of event inside the fences? I found out that it was part of the team of psychologists working within the institution. The team consisted of the husband and wife team of Doctors Al and Geraldine Nagy as well as the already mentioned Dr. John Rubel. They were the core psychology department personnel at Bastrop. But actually what allowed this environment to be possible and flourish was the B.O.P. administration in Washington DC.

     Prior to the mid 1980's, the psychology departments of about any F.C.I. only took care of crisis management and suicide counseling. There was nothing except for the occasional AA group and some form of group therapy that was presented to program inmates away from behaviors that were detrimental to themselves and others. With the Reagan Administration, however, came a new director of the B.O.P. Apparently this is a political appointment much the same as ambassadorships. It is handed out as a thank you to some contributor. Generally then it is a purely figurehead position with the real work still being done by the lifetime bureaucrats who have risen through the system to attain positions in the hierarchy of the bureau.

     President Reagan appointed Michael Quinlan at the beginning of his administration. He brought an interesting viewpoint to the idea of rehabilitation. He was very interested in supporting any type of program within institutions that fomented some kind of link between inmates and outside persons before the inmate got out. Especially if the nature of the relationship formed was one of rehabilitative benefit to the inmate. Basically that it was all right to have inmates meet persons from the free world who were themselves engaged in the process of working on themselves. It was thought that if an inmate had a relationship with people who were well integrated within society, this would afford the ex-inmate a new set of community relationships other than the ones that they had before they were incarcerated. The community that they were in contact with before they were incarcerated normally would have been one inhabited by like thinking members who were inclined to behave in the same criminal activities that got the person incarcerated in the first place. This sort of environment is ripe for breeding recidivism.

     The warden present when Al Nagy arrived at Bastrop in 1979 followed the same philosophy that Al himself held at first - inmates were less than human and there was no help for them. There was no change possible. The next warden was named Ortiz. He was quite progressive. One of the keys to allowing the environment of change and psychology department involvement with that process was Warden Ortiz and his openness. He encouraged Dr. Rubel to change from being essentially closed to outside volunteers to beating the bushes for volunteers to come in. This was his adoption of the Quinlan viewpoint.

Dr. John Rubel

     Dr. Rubel had been working as a psychologist for the B.O.P for three years before coming to Bastrop. He began his work at El Reno. Then he moved to Rochester Minnesota, where the B.O.P. has its medical facility. His third stop was at Oakdale, Louisiana.

     Oakdale was primarily a facility that housed Cubans who had come to the United States during the Mariel boatlift in the early 1980's. It seems that Castro decided to empty out his psychiatric institutions and prisons where nonpolitical prisoners were held. Many of these, after lighting on American shores, decided to engage in the same behaviors that got them incarcerated in Cuba.

     When they got caught, the United States was put into a strange position. They were not citizens. Normally the United States has the ability to send a convicted citizen of another country back to that country after they have served out their sentence. But Cuba refused to allow any of these convicts to be returned. So the U.S. instituted a policy of holding incarcerated Cubans past the set term of incarceration they originally received. Basically they just stayed imprisoned without having a sentence imposed upon them.

     When I was in the hole in Fairton, some Cubans were placed there. They didn't care too much about what they did. Since basically it didn't matter what they did, they engaged in such activities as stopping up the toilet in their cell and serially flushing it until the entire wing was flooded. This was because they were in this strange twilight zone situation where they were going to be held indefinitely until the U.S. and Cuba worked out some end to their political confrontation. As of this writing this has not happened yet.

     Oakdale was a facility that was pretty much given over to holding these Cubans. The Cubans rioted and took some of the guards and other personnel hostage as well as destroying as much of the facility as they were able. After the B.O.P. got control of the situation again, they had to shut down what was left of Oakdale.

     Dr. Rubel was left without a facility to work in and as a result was allowed to pick his next place of B.O.P. employment. He decided to go to Austin/Bastrop, as Austin looked like a pretty good place to live.

     It was Dr. Rubel who, when he arrived, instituted involving community volunteers in psychology department classes. Basically he just called professional psychology persons in the Austin area and followed up the leads that the calls generated. As already related, this is how Brad Brown found his way to the prison's doorstep. He also found a place on Austin named The Center for Attitudinal Healing. Personnel from there agreed to come out and hold classes on the types of work that they did at the Center.

     Life training personnel instituted ongoing classes for life training support as well as for individual life training team members to create classes in their personal fields of interest. This all started in the late 1980's and was running on all cylinders when I arrived in January of 1992.

     The warden was so impressed with the results gained for the inmates who participated in the life training that he made available a training workshop for the prison personnel. Its purpose was to allow the staff members to work on themselves. Hopefully, having worked on their stuff, they might be able to view the inmates in a different light also. This occurred before I got there, but the idea of prison guards doing personal work on that level amazed me. And that they know that some of the inmates they are guarding had been through the same experience too. Dayum!!!

The Nagys

     Al had been a Federal prison psychologist for 18 years before I got to Bastrop. He worked for four years at other federal facilities before going to Bastrop in 1979. This was right after it opened. He was the initial head of Psychology. In the beginning, Bastrop had the four 120 bed units. It was not filled up at that time. There was between 300 and four hundred inmates and all of them had their own room. This continued until sometime in the mid to late eighties.

     Al underwent a pretty radical change in attitude between the time that he arrived at Bastrop and the time he left. Basically he was a good old boy when he got there. He had been a serious body builder to the point of using anabolic steroids when they were still virtually unheard of. And he was a drinking buddy of the warden soon after he arrived.

     His basic take on inmates was that they were pretty much scum and all he was interested in, in terms of the psychology department, was taking care of basic crisis management and suicide prevention.

     The only type of group he made available for the inmates was a general group therapy session - one with no set direction or theme. Just one that had the participants sit down with each other and speak about whatever came up.

     Al relates that his basic change in perspective began with the first person to contact the prison to initiate a yoga class. This guy called Al and offered the class. Al wasn't too enthused. His take on it was that there probably wasn't too much interest within the inmate population on this type of thing. But the Yoga instructor persisted, and Al chose to allow an attempt of the class. Al figured that maybe ten persons would show up. Thirty came, which was at that time eight percent of a prison population of four hundred.

     Al continued the class and began a personal relationship with the yoga instructor. He began to take Tai Chi classes with him and to listen to the yoga instructor's take on life. Some of this crept into Al's consciousness. With John Rubel knocking on doors and the B.O.P. administration pushing for an attitude among the personnel to show respect for the inmates and to allow opportunities for change within the inmates, things began to get rolling at Bastrop.

     By 1989 there was an established Holistic Heath Unit at Bastrop with all of the inhabitants actively enrolled in both psychology and physical education classes as a requirement to live in the unit. This unit, when it was conceived, could easily handle the amount of inmates inclined to live there without putting a strain on the other units. As the population grew to where there were 800 inmates rather than 400, and there were two men to a room, the feasibility of reserving 240 beds for holistic health disappeared, as there wasn't 240 inmates of the population who were inclined to participate in the program. By the time I got there in 1992, there was a core group of holistic health participants who were still assigned to the unit.

     Geraldine began to work at Bastrop in 1990. She was also a Ph.D. in psychology and had been working for the State of Texas probation department as a trainer for probation officers. When Geraldine came to work at Bastrop, Al had to relinquish his position as head of the psychology department. It seems that the B.O.P. frowns on married partners being in a position of one being the boss of another within the same department. There was another Psychologist working there at that time, Dr. Varhely. He took over the duties of head of the department until his retirement in 1992.

     My favorite analogy about the Nagy's is that they are a couple whose idea of a vacation was to do a two-week Vipassana Meditation. This is a structured Buddhist meditation practice, where the participants wake up at 4:30 A.M. and begin to meditate. They do some form of meditation for the rest of the day, with short meal breaks, until 9:00 PM. Then they get up and do it again, for two weeks. The food is simple raw fruit and vegetables.

     The Nagy's were committed to doing what it took for themselves to become more aware of their own stuff. They also wanted to present the opportunity, as much as could be allowed within the confines of the B.O.P. bureaucracy, for us inmates to do the same.

     They didn't just talk the talk, they walked the walk right alongside their words. Every program that they brought into the prison they did themselves outside of the institution before bringing it in. So what we were experiencing, in the form of cathartic revelations and sometimes embarrassing moments, we were assured that they themselves had also encountered.

     They had amazing compassion due to the experiencing of these same eye-opening realizations. They displayed that compassion continuously. And they amazed us with the amount and quality of the programs that they brought in.

     There were different classes, taught by volunteers, and scheduled five days a week during the day. The Nagys themselves taught afternoon and evening classes. The classes were set up to run for ten-week semesters. Then after a short break, another set of classes was organized and run for another ten weeks. There were also weekend seminars such as the Life Training, Programs of the Heart, Holotropic Breathing, Holotropic Dancing, The Men's Seminar, and Hate Busters. This schedule continued throughout the two years that I lived within those barbed wire fences.

     The psychology and the education departments had achieved an understanding with the administration that a person's desire to attend class took precedence over any work they were scheduled for.

     All of the persons who came into institution to teach pretty much did it for free or only to cover basic expenses. Usually the compensation did not even cover the expense of putting on the event they did. The Life Training volunteer crew numbered about 20 persons. These people gave up their weekend to be there with us. All of the other volunteer class instructors gave up afternoon hours to partake to us what they had.

School

     I enrolled in a couple of educational classes as well. When I arrived there were four different programs going. Spanish, accounting, horticulture, and computers. I got into the Spanish and Accounting classes in April of 1992. This was fun and certainly better than trundling about with tools fixing broken stuff or building new stuff for the B.O.P.

     The computer and gardening classes were shut down soon after I got there. The F.C.I. had a contract with a community college to provide the teachers and equipment for the classes. In the spring of 1992, the F.C.I. chose to not renew the contract.

     The Accounting and Spanish classes were allowed to continue. So my mornings were taken up, and I was able to keep away from work. I learned some good stuff too. Who would have thunk - go to prison and easily achieve education of self and other stuff.

Onward Through The Fog

     After the winter classes there was a break. The next set of classes didn't begin until August. There were about nineteen different classes scheduled. I was limited to signing up for classes that didn't interfere with my educational classes. So that first semester of availability, I took Overcoming Judgment, Yoga, Creating Your World, and Forgiveness.

     Dr. Rubel and an outside volunteer presented the Overcoming Judgments class. An outside volunteer also presented forgiveness class. I was also enrolled in a life training support group. Sharon Parrish presented this. She was one of the core outside volunteers for the weekend training. By core, I mean that she usually accomplished one of the more responsible roles within the training. She has since that time advanced herself to the role of trainer.

     In her class we continued to utilize the processes that we learned. Through practice and keeping these exercises fresh, we incorporated interacting with the events that we encountered. Then we became more practiced at coming from a place of acting, based on stopping and checking out what was really going on. We were now able to change our response to some of the events we were encountering, as opposed to reacting with the knee jerk response that we had accustomed ourselves to in the past.

     The Yoga instructor, Barbara Germershauses, came in from Austin every Thursday. She taught at a yoga center named The Yoga House in Austin as well. She would bring in a jam box and play some wonderfully soothing music. Then she would lead the class through a set of asanas ending with a short guided meditation. This yoga class ran for each ten-week period of classes, while I was inside the fence.

     The most exciting class for me was the one entitled Creating Your World. This was taught by a woman who lived in Austin named Cata Low. The basis of this class was a course created by a gentleman from upstate New York named Harry Palmer. Mr. Palmer was doing some introspective searching and came upon a set of realizations about the nature of consciousness and our interaction with the universe. From these realizations, Mr.Palmer created a nine-day course he entitled The Avatar Course.

     Cata derived her class from some basic introductory steps that are presented in a one-day class in the free world. Her lessons involved awareness and our paying attention to the placement of our awareness. Since we basically just allowed our minds to go hither and yonder this was a new concept to us - paying strict attention to what we were aware of and consciously placing our awareness on things. It was very interesting and illuminating. She also taught us some meditation type exercises.

     The class progressed through the semester, and we all had fun. Cata was an Avatar Master. Dr. Al Nagy had himself taken both the Avatar course and the advanced course named Masters. A person who has completed the Masters course achieved the ability to deliver the primary course to others - either by themselves or in conjunction with an established master until they get the hang of the possibilities that occur that inhibit persons taking the course from getting what it's about and how to get past those glitches.

     A new set of classes was introduced in October - as well as continuing classes involving Life Training and the Avatar concepts. I also took some meditation classes taught by the Nagy's during the evening.

     So my daily schedule was wake up and get to Spanish class. Go from there to Accounting. Next on to one of the psychology classes. And finish out the morning with another psychology class. Then go to work in the afternoon as well as attending another class one or two evenings a week.

Other Special Programs

     One of the volunteer instructors that the Nagy's encountered was Sharon Heller. Sharon had a near death experience which left her not functioning as well as she had been before the experience. She had to relearn basically how to do just about everything she was able to before the experience - speak, walk, write, and engage with her environment. In the process of relearning, she encountered a set of tools that enabled her to regain her lost abilities better than any other tools presented to her within her therapy regimen. This was Kinesiolgy.

     Kinesiolgy utilizes a set of questions while testing the muscles of an arm. What transpires is that the person being tested raises their arm perpendicular and lateral to the torso. Then the tester asks them a question to which the only response is yes or no. After the person tested answers the question, the tester asks them to resist the tester from pulling their arm down from the raised position. If the tester can pull the arm down, then this is a sign that although the tested person intellectually believes their response is correct their body does not.

     When the arm can easily be brought down by the tester, the tester then can have the tested do a series of exercises which engage both halves of the brain at the same time, basically akin to rubbing your belly with one hand while patting your head with the other. After the exercises are completed, the initial question and muscle test is repeated. The typical responses after the exercises are completed are that the tested now has the ability to resist having their arm brought down.

     Sharon completely regained all of the abilities she had lost through utilizing the Kinesiolgy exercises and became an instructor of the technique. And through her interactions with the Nagy's, she agreed to instruct a class of us inmates in how to administer the process to someone. The title of the class was Brain Gym.

     It was an interesting sight to see these men working with each other with basically pretty silly looking behaviors. At times it could have been taken for rehearsal of a Monty python skit. And for them to not only grasp the theory behind how this all worked but to demonstrate to themselves and each other the ability of the exercises to rectify certain things happening within each of their bodies was another amazing event.

     This was stuff that probably none of the participants would have encountered within their normal lives outside of prison, both theoretically and experientially. It took a bit of stretching of their belief systems to grasp the concept at all. All the more credit to the Nagy's and Sharon for presenting such outside of the general culture experiences to us.

     Sharon ended up giving two full ten week classes which, at the end of each, a certificate was bestowed on the participant declaring that they now had the full ability to give a Kinesiolgy treatment to another person.

     Another wild class that was given over a weekend was Holotropic dancing. Prior to this was a class in Holotropic breathing. I missed the window of opportunity to take the breathing class but have a general idea of what it is all about.

     Stanislav Grof is a Chechlosovakian psychiatrist who utilized and studied LSD for therapy in treating a number of psychological disorders in the 1960's and 1970's. At some point he developed a breathing technique which when done created a psychedelic experience for the individual.

     Arthur Brown is a musician who had a fairly successful and notorious career in the late 1960's. He is one of the first musicians who incorporated the use of visual effects within his performances. About 1968 or 1969, he had a number one hit with a song entitled "Fire." He developed an onstage persona as The God of Hell Fire and used a lot of flash pots and smoke to accentuate the experience and his musical presentation. By the mid-1990's, he had moved to Austin and was producing music.

     The Nagys encountered him at some program they attended, and he agreed to come on in and do this class on Holotropic dancing. It consisted basically of incorporating the Holotropic breathing techniques with music and movement.

     What you'd see upon encountering the class was a bunch of men in a room that had third world African and Caribbean polyrhythmic music happening while they were breathing in a controlled fashion and dancing in a quite free form manner. This was pure unadulterated fun. Damn, prison was so harsh!

     Several of the Life training volunteers had other skills they were involved with, and they also volunteered to teach them to us as well. Alicia Smith was a dynamo, who at that time was taking a hiatus from selling real estate to give seminars involving basically play and fun to instruct corporate members on how to work together as a team. Her seminars were entitled Team Building, and she came in several times, not only to give the seminar to us but on one occasion to try out some new ideas and exercises on us before presenting them to the corporations she taught.

     She also came in and taught the full real estate course to us. There are several ex-inmates who are deriving their living today from those courses.

     One of the highlights tho of my federal internment was the weekend Ram Dass showed up. Austin has a fairly liberal population, especially for Texas. So, several times a year there were weekend seminars incorporating various New Age type speakers and self-help motivational speakers. At one of these Baba Ram Dass was scheduled to speak.

     Ram Dass started out his life as Richard Alpert. He climbed the ladder of education and scholastic endeavors in the field of psychology until in the mid 1960's when he attained a position as a psychology department head at Harvard. While he was the department head, one of his department members was a guy named Timothy Leary. Dr. Leary had been introduced to psychedelics and further introduced them to others within the psychology community, including his boss, Richard Alpert. They and others in the Harvard psychology department began to experiment on themselves with these psychedelic substances as well as administering them to students at the university.

     One of the experiments Timothy Leary developed was to go into the Concord prison in Massachusetts and give psilocybin to the inmates. The purpose of doing this was both to attempt to create within them a spiritual experience and to see if that experience might be a catalyst to reduce recidivism of the individuals who participated. One of my cellmates towards the middle of my confinement had been one of the participants of that study. He was at Bastrop doing a stretch for bank robbery at the time. We were both enrolled in the comprehensive drug program. So much for psychedelics always initiating a changed behavior in resulting in non-recidivism.

     After some time spent ingesting any and all psychedelics he could find, a set of behaviors which resulted eventually in both of Drs Alpert and Leary basically being kicked out of Harvard, Dr. Alpert became somewhat disenchanted with the fact that although he could achieve spectacular experiences under the influence of psychedelics he always came down. He was far more interested in achieving the state of consciousness he was enjoying on psychedelics, but in a manner where he stayed in that state of that consciousness he preferred. While puzzling this out, he took a trip to India. On this journey he encountered an Indian Guru who displayed to him the possibility of achieving the conscious state he desired and maintaining that state without the use of any intoxicating substances.

     After he returned from India, he began to give talks about his experiences and what practices anyone could do to take their quest for a more spiritual life experience further. He also wrote the first of his books on the subject of spiritual practices, Be Here Now.

     During the early 70's, when I first began to take psychedelics, I had one experience which was life changing. I and the group of peers I was associating with, all of whom were smoking pot and taking psychedelics, went on a camping trip to the Pine Barrens in South Jersey.

     We all took some Orange Barrel LSD, and I had the most intense trip of my short psychedelic taking life. The culmination of the trip was my achieving a state of ego loss. Basically there was an awareness in my head that was just there, but the identity of Michael was gone. And my awareness was simply hanging out in what I describe as the clear white light. My awareness achieved a connection with everything, and I was one with the universe. Sounds kind of trite, but I tell you, it was a blast and the single most profound experience of my life even up to this day.

     Up to the time I had this experience I had never heard or read of anyone having a similar one. Nor had any of my peer group. And I got pretty confused as to whether it was something that felt as real as it did or whether I had simply gone too far over the mental edge and had gone psychotic - which was the viewpoint of my peers.

     One rainy night, I was driving back to my parents' home in Somers Point, New Jersey, on the mainland of Atlantic County, from Absecon Island. This is the island on which Atlantic City and three other towns, Ventnor, Margate and Longport are located. As I approached the road leaving Longport, there was a hitchhiker standing at the entrance to the causeway linking the island to the mainland. I stopped to pick him up.

     I was driving my father's Mustang, which was the designated teenagers' car of my family. It was a two-door sedan, with front bucket seats that folded forward to allow entry into the rear seat. One time, my brother and I were driving around with another friend sitting in the shotgun position. Therefore it was his job to roll the joints to be consumed while we drove. He was sitting forward in the seat to create a flatter rolling area and taking care of business while the car was at a stoplight. When the light changed my brother decided to do a jack rabbit start. The unanticipated acceleration resulted in the shotgun sitter being thrown against the back of the bucket seat with enough force to break it right off its hinges.

     That was the condition the seat was in that night, with no back. So the hitchhiker entered the car after I stopped and proceeded directly to the rear seat, as the front one had nothing to lean against. As I took off once again I literally felt the presence of person I had picked up. His energy lit up the rear of the car. I began to ask him what he was about and found out that he was a yoga adept. I felt compelled to relate my LSD experience to him. His response was simply told that I should read Be Here Now.

     I read the book and for the first time I had a solid basis for relating something similar to what I had experienced and validating it. It also gave me the impetus to forgo doing drugs anymore in my quest for a more spiritual life and instead do some other practices.

     Ram Dass had been doing service work and learning new ways to go about furthering his own spiritual path ever since. And in the spring of 1993 he came to Austin. The Nagys found out about his upcoming presentation at a New Age Speakers seminar. They wrote to him well ahead of his arrival to ask him if he would be willing to come on out to the prison on a day that he was not presenting to speak to us. He readily said yes, and on a Sunday afternoon, Alan went into Austin and picked him up and drove him out to see us.

     He gave his talk in the prison chapel, and it was packed with the usual cross section of Hispanic, black and white inmates thirsty for what he had to offer. Between the amazing fact that here I was in a federal prison having this experience and, in my mind, our relative close mental association - after all I was there for acid dealing - this was a pretty high experience for me. Also the reading of his book had further changed the direction of my behavior.

     A Catholic priest headed the chapel. We called him the hack in black. He was a pretty conservative practitioner of both his faith and his politics. After two hours listening to Ram Dass speak and answer our questions, the hack in black opened up the doors that were located in the back wall of the chapel and put large industrial fans in the door openings. Then he had the fans blow air out of the chapel. We all figured that he decided that the presence of Ram Dass and the message he gave to us had somehow contaminated his chapel so that he had to blow all that bad juju out of there.

     Another interesting class that was presented to us was a movement class. It was presented by a couple of women who worked at the federal prison at Pleasanton, California. One of them was a physician and the other a counselor. Of course since they were from California, they were well into all of the woo woo new age stuff going on. The class was based on principals taught in Aikido. But it was strictly forbidden for any type of martial art to be practiced or taught in federal prisons. So although the moves were martial art based, they had to take care to not mention Aikido while presenting the class. As it was, most of the movements had to do with awareness of yours own and others' bodies while moving. What it looked like was bunch of guys gliding past each other and passing as close to each other as they could without actually touching each other. That would have been another rather strange thing for someone not informed of what was going on to see.

     The Toastmasters organization also came in, with free world toastmaster speech enthusiasts as well as inmate speech givers. This happened one night a month and generally was a blast for all who participated. It gave those of us into speaking a nice experience in both writing and delivering our words to an audience. And any chance we had to hang out for a little bit with someone from the outside that we were not related to became another experience of getting the feeling that we were not so much less than our minders wished us to believe. Two of the volunteers who presented daytime classes, Janis Beaty and Alica Smith, also came in for our toastmasters meetings.

     Programs of the Heart was another weekend seminar. It consisted of a group of us who volunteered to take this course getting together with the instructor and doing some meditative type exercises focusing on finding formative events in our lives that invoked a negative response.

     The goal was to re-experience the emotions we created with the original event and take another look at it all with the hope that we could throw off the automatic responses we invoke now when we encountered similar events. It was very touchy feely and the instructor seemed to have an agenda of not having achieved a successful response to her exercises unless every one of us got to a crying place as a result of having relived whatever the event was.

     This was not such a hard thing to accomplish with this group of men. They were the core of the participants in psychology programs and had plenty of experience in examining their past experiences. They also tended to have a bunch of horrendous events that they had experienced in their formative years from being brought up in amazingly dysfunctional families.

     My upbringing was pure Ozzie and Harriet though. My parents rarely resorted to physical violence, and the biggest trauma that I could remember from my early years was being separated from my blanket. So after getting to this meditative place the best thing that I could dredge up was from when I was living in a new development on the edge of the countryside in central Indiana. Ours was the last block of the development, and our house was one removed from the corner. On the other side of the corner was a well-inhabited cow pasture. One day the cows got past the fence and ended up munching away in our back yard. This really caused quite a sensation in my four-year old self.

     As I was sitting there in the class and evoking this memory in that meditative state, my response was to burst out laughing with the thought of cows in the backyard. Being that I was the only one in the class who didn't achieve a full crying jag breakdown and instead only got to full tilt mirth, the instructor decided that I was somehow wrong and flawed in my participation in the exercises. I had a great time though.

     By Motorcycle Michael Sommers

     (Part 3, the final installment of this amazing and informative story, will appear in the spring issue of The Caldron.)