Persecution to Prosecution of a Prison Activist

I t had been exactly one week since my promotion, when the phone on my desk rang.In my top floor office, with a view of the bronze capitol dome shining above my IBM-486 computer, the voice told me to return to the cell house and pack my property.I was being shipped to Crossroads Correctional Center in the far northwest comer of the state -the newest nirvana in the ever-expanding Missouri Department of Corrections (DOC).My butt was literally to be on the last bus from Tombstone to Boot Hill, completing the human consignment to the 1 ,SOO-man maximum security, death fence-enclosed prison.To say I was shocked, though not thoroughly surprised, is a mournful understatement.Two weeks earlier, my caseworker advised me that I was not on any transfer list he had seen.FOl• three of the eighteen years of incarceration I had survived the 160-year-old Missouri State Penitentiary -recently, if not magically, rechristened the Jefferson City Correctional Center -I had only a single minor mle violation blotting my record.Though no saint walking the mainline in one of the nation's most notorious prisons, I was self-assured and able to carry myself with maturity, as a convict should.With the sponsorship of family and friends, I had been lucky enough as well to complete half of a baccalaureate program via correspondence from Washington State University.Moreover, I was an active board member of the Charitable Campaign Committee, which responsibly collected the institution's aluminium soda cans for recycling, raising over $10,000 for donation to local charities.I was also the co-director of the prison's first annual Food for Families Campaign, collecting over 2,300 canned goods for Christmas donation to area food banks and a media liaison for the Substance Abuse Advisory Committee.In all endeavors we had successfully publicized our efforts in the media, facets of prison life in the "Show-Me" state that were rarely presented to the outside world.My greatest achievement, however, had been advancing in two years from narrator to nan•ation supervisor to resident director of the Center for Braille and Narration Production (CBNP).The CBNP is the oldest and most prolific prison-based program of its type in the country.Employing over twenty specially screened and highly trained prisoners, the CBNP in 1996 narrated over 65,000 pages of mostly college-level text, transcribed over 70,000 pages of Braille production, and fonnatted nearly 80,000 pages of large print documents for

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