SIT BOY, SIT!!!

Good Boy, now come get your “treat” in order for me! All on Texas Death Row receive our daily meals, we must be degraded, dehumanised, humiliated to such an extent that the average man can no longer look himself in the mirror any longer with any type of self-respect.

Here is Polunsky Unit (NOT TDCJ’s) procedure.
1) They come to your doors, say “If your eating turn on your lights SIT on your bank!”
2) Once you comply to this form of dehumanisation they set your tray in the “food slot”. Than they tell you to “come get it”. Some of the more sadistic ones say “Fetch!”

Now Polunsky Unit tries to justify this as a “security precautions,” yet the only time this “security procedure” is used is when they are feeding you. They NEVER tell you to sit before they open the “food slot” to pick up your tray after we’ve eaten!! Nor before they open the “food slot” to give us our mail, medication or before they handcuff us!

No we all have to eat to survive. So what choice to we have? Even a loving and caring dog/man/woman will eventually bite back after so long!

I, myself, after 2 plus years of this degrading, dehumising on mass scale hale decided to “chew” through this leash around my neck and fight back! I will eat, but will also rebel any way I can.

The three years I was at Ellis Unit, before they moved us to Polunsky, I was a “model inmate”!!! I spent 98 % of my time on the work program. I was out of my cell from 6 a.m. till 10:30 p.m., everyday. I worked for TDCJ and as such was rewarded for my good behaviour I was never involved in any assultive type behaviour.

In this last month I’ve been run in  on five times, pushed as far as I can be pushed. I had a choice to push back or let them break me! HA! HA! They will never break me! I guess I’ve finally reached my limit of this mental torture! The physical torture seems easier to handle. Maybe just the human contact I receive as the five man extraction team charges in my cell to beat me, duff me and extract me, helps me to deal with the effects of sensory deprivation.

I’m not a gifted writer but I want to talk, or write, to help not only the “free world” people understand and to help receive some of this pent-up frustration! Thanks for listening.

Hanging on by thread of my humanity

Rich Cartwright