A story by Robert Fogg from 2024
I grew up around older kids and young adults, some of whom were cousins. When you’re around older people every day, it makes you believe you are older, too. So, you try to act older. It is hard to explain but it is a real thing.
When I was in the fifth grade, I got caught with a big Rambo knife, a baggie of “cross road pills” and a .38 Special at school. I was given this stuff from my cousin who stole them. The State Police came. This was the beginning of a long life in The System. I was suspended from school for one month and put on endless probation. That summer the older teenagers talked me into stealing a truck. Of course we were caught, or I was. I took all the blame and was sent to the Maine Youth Center (MYC). I was sentenced to a sixty credit program. I had to earn sixty points to be released.
Credits were earned by going to school, work, and groups. Once I earned 60 points I was released to the same place I came from. Same friends. Same older kids. I was back at MYC in six months with a seventy-five credit sentence. I did the time, got released to the same place I came from. Same friends. Same older kids. Soon I was back at MYC with a one hundred twenty credit sentence. This time I escaped by hopping the fence. I was gone for a week before they caught me and brought me back to MYC where they held me in ICU for five months.
I was in and out of the MYC until I was seventeen years old with other boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Guards would throw our food on the floor and tell us if we were really hungry we’d still eat it. They would line us up for showers and stare at us in our underwear, making comments about our bodies. We were allotted ten squares of toilet paper a day. We were beaten, abused, put in restraints and in and out of solitary confinement.
After so much time incarcerated, I didn’t know how to be around other kids. I felt like an outcast and didn’t know how to function. I would act up, get sent to the office and then back to corrections.
I escaped from Windham Correction Facility in 2001 and was on the run for six months. I went to New York and then down to Virginia, but, I got homesick. I missed my mom. I went back home to see her and that was how they caught me. I was placed in supermax for thirteen months and watched the Maine State Prison being built through the tiny window in my cell. Supermax was twenty-three hour lockdown. We had one hour outside per day in a dog cage, three showers per week, and a ten minute phone call which we were cuffed to the wall for. It was bad. Shit and blood everywhere while the smell of mace hung in the air.
When I finally came out to general population there was a huge riot over sweatpants. They called in the State Police, the local cops, COs from Windham and everyone else they could. We got fucked up bad and were then locked in for months
and months.
I’ve been released roughly eight times and I’ve never been to a sober house. No rehab facility. No halfway house or even a hotel room. I’ve had nothing for help finding a place to go. It’s now October, 2024. I’m getting ready to be released in March of 2025 and I haven’t seen a caseworker yet. Nobody here cares. Nobody helps.
I was in Charleston on prerelease this year where I had an outside job on community status. After a month of twelve hour shifts and a hundred people around, not knowing how to interact, I told my caseworker I was struggling and needed some help. For a month I asked my caseworker for help. I eventually relapsed and failed a drug test. The help they offered me at this point was to put me on observation in a medical unit for five days and then moved me to the maximum security state prison. I went from community status to a maximum security prison. It’s documented that I asked for help. I hoped to go to a sober house but instead was sent back to the state prison. Once again, I will be released at the end of another five year sentence with no support.
A woman I had been friends with has now been my partner for one and a half years. She is in recovery and understands the challenges I face when I am released. I’m scared. She is such a hard worker and has three children whom she is dedicated to. I want to be a good man and I want to be part of her family. Being part of a good family is my biggest dream, but I’m afraid I won’t know how to do that. Because of an error filling out her visitation application, she was denied visitations. Nobody at the prison is willing to talk to her to get this problem fixed so she can’t visit before I’m
released.
They always talk about the importance of family in regards to rehabilitation, well, what about my family? What about my release? How can I successfully develop connection to my future family when they can’t see me? I don’t want to fail anymore.
Because of my experience being incarcerated I know the system doesn’t care about rehabilitation, only punishment.
