May 2, 2024

I dreamt about being at a hearing disputing the legitimacy and admissibility of evidence. Interrupted by the guard doing his rounds. I have been awake since 2:30 am. I lay there and try to sleep but don't quite get there. After breakfast I sleep a little more and dream about one of my boys on my brothers shoulders while my son gives me a high five. As usual, my son is much younger in the dream than he is now. 

Each unit is a hallway with four branches. Each branch is a hallway with about forty cells referred to as a range. I am on the 100 range, being in cell 110. At recreation this morning for range 4, cells 401-440, an inmate supposedly stabbed up the face of another inmate while they were in the weight room. The inmate worker who does the clean up for this unit is in one of the cells across from me. He says it was a lot of blood. That's the second very violent attack in just a few weeks. The two that got into the fight were in adjacent cells at the end of the range 4 hallway. The previous violent attack was supposedly between neighbors as well. I cannot help but think that had a good night sleep, access to adequate recreation, access to adequate legal resources, access to reliable communication with family, or any of the other pressure cooker stressors not been environmental factors, that the inmates would not have ended up acting out that way. I think most of the inappropriate behavior is antagonized by stress, which is unattributable to punishment for conviction, that inmates fail to maintain healthy coping mechanisms for. Most suicide attempts are only attention seeking behavior. What if, inmates were accommodated when they felt the need to communicate with loved ones, instead of being isolated? That is one of the best examples that demonstrates that institution policy is not actually about safety of inmates.

A 14 year old boy was shot by police in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. The news said "an active shooter was neutralized." I wonder what that child was subjected to that he felt compelled to bring a gun to school. I also think that if he alerted anyone to his expectancy to do so, that it may have been a desperate cry for help and attention. And I also wonder what school administrators, counselors, and teachers are failing to do that a child will be so alienated as to behave that way. There are also questions about pubescent hormonal teenage development that should weigh in as well. The news played up how terrified some of the kids at the school had been while locked in their classrooms but I just feel super skeptical that whatever leads to the killing of a person, especially a 14 year old, is in any way good. To me, an inmate stabbing another in the face, or a child shooting his classmate, seem to be scenarios that share systemic failures which partially contribute to the tragedy. Failing to correct the underlying issues will only result in future tragedy. Two or more wrongs still don't make things right and where is the effort to prevent things from escalating to violent extreme in the first place? My sympathy goes out to the kids and family of everyone that was fearful of the potential shooter at the school, but it also goes out to the family that lost the boy who got shot. Without the ability to discuss the root cause and contributing factors people aren't really able to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Most expectedly, some politician will prey upon the tragedy to sell votes with a message encouraging gun restrictions and wherever the child acquired the gun will be held legally culpable in some trial that challenges the thresholds of parental obligation and a child's independent autonomy. I wonder what sort of man that boy would have become had he been talked off the ledge of suicide by police. I don't know the details of what transpired, but I am left with that impression from what I saw on the news.