Time and pressure don’t always produce a diamond; sometimes, it produces a writer. I have never told anybody this story before, but the first place that I was ever published as a writer came from the “Letters to The Editor” section of the largest newspaper in South Carolina. The newspaper is called The State and it is the paper that South Carolina legislators begin their day with. And a good portion of them go straight to the editorial page, which I knew when I sent the very first letter. The only thing that I didn’t know was if the letter would get to them because I was dropping it into a prison mailbox.
It is no big secret that I did not deliver my best performance as a human being when I took drugs. Steal, deal, or sell your body, this is Jeffrey Frye’s theory on how addicts get money to support their habit. Of course, this is after they have exhausted their own resources and field-stripped their house of anything potentially valuable that the pawn shop might purchase. Narcotics (first cocaine, then after two heart attacks from this, Heroin) turned me into a thief. But, strangely enough, they didn’t really change the fundamental nature of who I am. I’m non-violent, and this was reflected in tenure as riffraff and in my life as a thief, whether it be in the more than two dozen banks I robbed over the course of 20 years, or in my tenure as a liberator of federally-sponsored infant formula.
As the Honorable Thomas Hughston told me right before he gave me 10 years in the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC), “You stole enough infant formula to feed the starving children of Haiti.” He had a point because I went at stealing baby formula with considerable gusto. And it was work. I dressed up in a generic uniform, the kind that people who drive beer or soda trucks wear, and traversed the state, insinuating myself into about thirty grocery stores in nine different counties. I simply walked into the backroom of these grocery stores and filled up two large boxes with cases of Enfamil or Similac, then I put them on a dolly I had brought and wheeled the boxes out of the front door of the store. I was selling the infant formula to a cartel of Arabs who defrauded the federally-sponsored WIC program. In my twisted narcissistic mind, I justified my theft by telling myself that I wasn’t hurting anybody. It took years for this narcissistic reverie to stop playing in my head and revert back to my “Normal” self. I now know that there is no such thing as a victimless crime. As that smart Chinese guy Confucius once said, The first victim of the lie is the liar. This maxim certainly proved to be true when I was shipped-off to a grossly underfunded prison system that was feeding the prisoners stewed liver a few nights a week and boiled eggs and grits for breakfast every morning. I got tired of not being able to get a roll of toilet paper and having to use notebook paper or rip up a tee shirt whenever I had to cop a squat. So, I wrote the newspaper about the conditions at the prison, and I did it with humor and sarcasm, and with facts about how much the state spent feeding their prisoners.
Before all of this though, I had the pleasure of becoming friends with a guy named Steven Pinker. I read an article in Omni Magazine while sitting in my underfunded cell one day that was written by him. It was on linguistics and human nature. Steven Pinker is an experimental cognitive psychologist and a professor at Harvard. We began a friendship after I wrote him about prison linguistics, which are basically grunts and screams (like gorillas). He not only wrote me back, but he also sent me five of his books. But my letters to the editor spawned a much stranger friendship.
My chief complaint was that even though we were prisoners and therefore pond scum, we were still somebody’s fathers, sons, uncles, and brothers. And more importantly, most of us would be coming back to the community one day, so it seemed prudent at the very least feed us. My research on funding to the SCDC, and what they in turn spent to feed us, produced some sober results.
I learned that out of all 50 states in America, South Carolina spent the least amount to feed its prisoners. They spent $1.37 per prisoner for food a day. This was compared with the Federal Bureau of Prisons that, at that time (2005), spent somewhere around $3.57 per prisoner per day. So, I tuned up my pen and took aim at the Director of SCDC, a man named Jon Ozmint. I hammered him like a 16-penny nail. One of my letters said: “I fully expect Mr. Ozmint to just toss a block of saltlick into my cell and weld the door shut until my Outdate.” I think that was the straw/letter that broke the Director’s back. Because what happened next was downright surreal.
I was sitting in my underfunded cell, sucking on paint chips at the Francis Lieber Correctional Institution, one of the state’s maximum-security prisons, when an officer came to my cell and said, “Frye, report to the Warden’s office.” I laughed when he said it because it was just so preposterous. Inmate Pondscum called to the Holy of Prison Holies, the Warden’s office? Not in this life. It had sure never happened before. But it was real. The Warden wanted to see me. So I took an Italian shower (put aftershave underneath my armpits), put on a crisp white tee shirt and put on an ironed set of khakis, and headed up to the Administration building.
The Warden had a short dowdy secretary named Madge. She was the skid you had to grease to get to the Warden and she played this position to the fullest. But she got up and without a word, she let me into sanctum sanctorum. The Warden’s office was so spacious that I almost had to catch a cab just to get to his desk. Speaking of big, the Warden was a man a man of vast acreage. He wore his clothes too tight and wore a thick black belt that held in his large stomach. I remember thinking, Well, at least someone around here is getting enough to eat. He motioned me to a chair in front of his large desk, then he just stared at me. Finally, he fixed a suspicious gaze on me, and said, “Who are you working for, Frye?” Perplexed about this whole scene, I replied, “Excuse me, sir?” then I quickly recovered, and finished by saying, “I am gainfully unemployed, sir. The Milk Thief vocation is flooded these days.” He wasn’t satisfied though.
He pointed at his phone and said, “I just had a very strange call, and it involved you.” I shrugged. He continued, “The Director, Mr. Jon Ozmint, a man that I can’t even get an appointment with, just called me and told me to have you ready tomorrow because he is coming to this institution to see YOU.” He emphasized this by jabbing a finger in the air towards me. But he wasn’t even close to being done. “Why is the Director of the Department of Corrections coming to see you, Frye?” I was relaxed by now, so I replied, “He owes me money.” The warden let out a laugh/snort that sounded like a Harley cranking up. When the Warden laughs, you laugh, so I laughed. But he stopped laughing and just stared at me, then he asked again, “Who do you work for, Frye…SLED?” This was the acronym for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. Obviously, the Warden was thinking that I was a “Plant” sent there to try and uncover corruption. Most Wardens are like politicians. They may not have come to the job corrupt, but the gig is just so sweet and the temptation so great that they end up being corrupt.
I put my hands up and said, “Nobody is more surprised than me, sir, really.” He wasn’t having it but he had to let me go and couldn’t very well waterboard me with the Director (his boss) coming to see me the next day. So, he simply waved his hand away from him, and said, “Just go back to your block. We’re done here.” I winked at Madge on the way out and this caused her to start cooing like a pigeon and tell me, “Just go, Mr. Frye. Go!” And I went. I was looking forward to the next day.
Good to his word, Jon Ozmint came onto the yard of the institution at lunchtime. I was waiting on the outside of the chowhall and he walked right up to me. He was holding a thick manila envelope in his hand, and he had Warden Bucksnort in tow, and he looked pretty nervous. I shook his hand, and said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Ozmint.” He was smiling and shook his head, and said, “You are funny, did you know that?” I replied, “Funny like a clown?” He burst out laughing and pointed at me, and said, “See? That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” He told me that he came down to talk to me because he had been reading my letters to the editor and he felt like I raised some valid points, but there were things I was not aware of.
Mr. Ozmint went on to explain to me, Inmate Pondscum, that he had tried to get his budget raised several times and had even had legislators that were friendly to his position introduce bills in the state legislature. He went into his envelope and showed me the proof of all he was saying. Then he told me who the real culprit was. It was a man who is now the Governor of the State of South Carolina. He said that he had been the one to basically block all of his efforts in the state legislature to get a larger budget for the SCDC so that they could feed us better. He handed me the manila envelope he had brought and told me the envelope was mine to keep. I found it fascinating that the Director of the SCDC was handing me his budget proposals that he submitted to the legislature to fund the very prison system that was housing me. Apparently, my letters were being talked about in the corridors of power in the state capital. Why else would this man take the time to come down and try and redirect my focus in person?
I thought it was pretty cool, and it taught me what an impact writing can have for both me and others. I have many cool experiences from over the years where both good and bad things happened simply because of my writing something. Some of them are not too good such as the time I wrote a blog about the female Warden in the prison I was housed in having a camel toe. The blog never got published, but she put me in solitary confinement for six months and then transferred me to a volatile prison in southeast Texas. Out of the 12 plus years that I did in federal prison, about five years were spent in solitary confinement, or the Special Housing Unit (SHU) as it’s called. A few years of the five were simply because my captors didn’t like it that I had a blog or an online platform. Time and pressure don’t always make a diamond. Sometimes they produce a blogger and an author. Sometimes in this life, if a person is humble and introspective enough, a negative can produce a positive. Sorrow can be manifested into joy. I am living proof of this.
