NOTE: This is intensely personal, but ends up being an argument for Bernie – so fair warning.

May your dreams never die, because sometimes they do. This is about the death of one of my own. I was reminded of it by the recent passing of one of my personal heroes, Julian Bond. He was a small but large part of this particular dream.

From 1972 to 1978, I served six years, four months and eleven days as a convict in the Alabama prison system. Being a privileged white boy from a middle class family, it was an awful shock to my system. I'd never seen anything like it, and had not really confronted the reality of just how cruel and hateful of a society we are. I got a crash course in reality, courtesy of the Alabama Board of Corrections.

I was shocked to my core upon first entering the Alabama prison system, and that shock never left me. Upon first setting eyes on Draper Prison in Elmore, Alabama, where I did most of my time, I was stunned with disbelief. I'd seen juvenile detention centers in various parts of the country, some pretty shitty ones too, like in Tampa, Florida, but never in my life had I seen the likes of Draper Prison.

Setting foot in Draper felt like stepping back in time a hundred and fifty years. I couldn't believe that anyone would knowingly send anyone there for any reason. It was horrific on a good day. And it was considered one of the better prisons in Alabama.

As I did my time, I did become acclimated. I learned that once you were desensitized to the horror, the boredom and slow passing of time were what wore on you most, but the initial shock never completely wears off. I believe all convicts suffer from a form of PTSD. When people are cruelly mistreated, it affects them deeply – true for any people anywhere, not just convicts. Some toughen up, some crack under the pressure, but none of them are ever the same after taking such wounds to the psyche. That's one thing that makes it so hard, in the case of convicts and ex-cons, to break the revolving-door cycle. Once a convict, always a convict, is the way that goes. And there are good, as in logical, reasons for it. But it's only that way because the system is so hateful and punitive. If you treat people with hate, you get one thing. If you treat them with love, you get another. It's no more complicated than that.

You wouldn't believe the difference in convict time and free world time. Time for convicts runs especially slow, excruciatingly slow. But finally my long-yearned-for release did come. Rather than return to my hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, the place I'd been missing for all those years, I decided to reside in nearby Montgomery, the shockingly backward state capitol, where I could more effectively devote myself to the cause of prison reform and prisoner advocacy. The desire for reform and justice burned in my heart like an ember. Like you wouldn't believe.

For the duration of my incarceration, I cultivated a network of friends and allies, first for survival, second for getting me or other convicts out of jams and thirdly, to get my ass out of prison – which is something much easier said than done, but a task to which I was devoted. Over time I came to know a lot of people, many on the inside but many free world folks too. I wrote many letters, eventually gave many speeches and generally never missed an opportunity to meet someone who might help in some way. I was involved with the prison newspaper, the drug treatment program and the college program. By the end of it, I knew almost all of the power players in the system: the commissioner, his assistants, the Board of Corrections spokesperson, many of the guards, all the wardens, assistant wardens, classification officers, etc. I corresponded with many of these people on a fairly regular basis advocating for someone or something.

I also came to know hundreds of free world people whom I had not known previously: college professors, clergy, activist lawyers, artists and so on. I also met a lot of Air Force people as there were so many in the area because of nearby Montgomery and Maxwell Field, home of the Air War College and the USAF Chaplain School, where I spoke on a regular basis on drug treatment issues over a three or four year time span. I worked at Draper with one of the instructors at that school, an addiction specialist, establishing a therapeutic community drug treatment program at Draper, the first in the Alabama system. I also spoke regularly at the NCO Academy at Gunter Air Station, the other AF Base in Montgomery.

On the inside, I became especially close to a guy who eventually became the Commissioner of the Alabama Board of Corrections, the head cheese.

I first met Larry Bennett when he came to Draper as the new Warden. He was the smartest guy I ever met who worked for the Alabama Board of Corrections. They weren't particularly known for their high standards. But Larry was sharp and atypically reform minded. He saw the system for what it was. I often found myself in the role of spokesperson for some group of inmates or another, or for inmates as a whole based on my reputation for talking shit and being an advocate by nature. All that to say that by the time I went free on parole, I had an awesome network of connections. I'd worked closely with Larry Bennett on the drug treatment program for years and by the time I went free he was the commissioner.

Here’s a random piece of correspondence I found:

In addition to my prison reform and anti-death penalty work, I was writing a script for a documentary titled In the Belly of the Beast: The Prison Experience. During the day, I worked as the Coordinator of the Alabama Prison Project at a donated office in the ACLU building in Montgomery. I got the job through my long association with the ACLU Montgomery office on prison matters. At night I went to college at Auburn University at Montgomery, studying Criminal Justice specializing in Corrections. I also guest lectured and even team-taught some courses in corrections there.

In my spare time I worked on my script on a manual typewriter in the dark days before word-processors and volunteered on Don Siegelman's first statewide campaign for Lt. Governor and for Julian McPhillips (who I came to know by way of the Siegelman campaign) for Attorney General. I was his driver for a while there. I drove him from one end of the state to the other as he campaigned. That's what I did on my vacation.

I had this old childhood friend in Huntsville who was at one time in charge of the speaker's program at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, while he was a student there. So he knew all kinds of interesting people like Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Julian Bond. At some point, Rusty came to take an interest in my script and the next thing you know, we had incorporated as the non-profit Correctional Media Project, and had sent out hundreds of letters to luminaries, including Norman Mailer, who IIRC, agreed to serve on the CMP board of directors. A number of well known people did.

Because of Rusty's connections and initiative, we soon had commitments from lots of folks, including a commitment to do the narration from Julian Bond, a close friend of Rusty's and not only a man I'd long admired but also one possessed of the most incredible voice. He was my first choice. He was absolutely perfect for our project. I was so stoked. I was going to get to not only meet Julian Bond, but also work closely with him on a project deeply meaningful to us both. My dreams were coming true.

NOTE: I lost track of the script long ago. Never completed, it was in its fourth or fifth draft I believe, all on type writers. Life was miserable for writers in those days. I've sorted through what remains of my papers from back in the day. It's a miracle any of them have survived the tumult of my life. I was surprised at some of what I found that I'd forgotten about, examples of which are included in this essay.

I did meet Julian Bond, but only on the one occasion as it turned out. It was at a party to launch the Correctional Media Project and the fund-raising effort to produce In the Belly of The Beast. It was held at the Kaffeklatch in downtown Huntsville, Alabama. Julian Bond came in with Rusty and was pretty much swamped by a horde of admirers upon entry. So I didn't get a lot of personal time with him as he was headed straight out of town afterwards, but I did speak with him. He was a remarkably warm and gentle man, mixed with a fierce intelligence and rapier wit – but palpably a man of great humanity. He reaffirmed his commitment to the project, told me he liked my script outline and the overall concept and goals of the project and said we would speak more later. We both thought that would happen, but it wasn’t to be.

Rusty, a Friends Service Committee activist named Helen Moore, me and a young progressive lawyer named Ed Stevens, who'd become involved and served as our attorney, met with the Commissioner of the Board of Corrections, Larry Bennett and pitched our project. It went really well and we got everything we asked for, including complete and unfettered access to the entire Alabama Prison System, permission to film anything and everything in any prison in the state...in writing. It was unprecedented, and also controversial. Almost anyone else in the system other than Larry Bennett would say that the state had too much to hide to allow wide open access to full camera crews. But we got it in writing, good as gold.

With that sweeping permission granted in writing from the Commissioner, the guy who could back it up, we'd easily raise the hundred and fifty grand or whatever it was. It was all budgeted out. It was going to be a high production value project. The entire point of the film was to show what it's like to not only enter and look around a bit, but what it's like to be stuck there at the mercy of the uncaring state and your all-too-often likewise uncaring fellow prisoners. I thought if enough people understood what that's like, we'd reverse course and begin to treat people with greater humanity. It looked like I was going to be able to make my statement and attempt to show the reality, that if they only understood, would change everything. I was going to get a chance to move people to care enough to change a rotten system. (It may seem naive now but it's still what we need to do.) My dreams, in the mean time, were still coming true...except for, you know, prison reform. And we were working on that.

The CMP met numerous times to review the fund raising, the still in-process script, discuss musical selections, and so on.

We recruited a photographer who Rusty and I had grown up with, a great guy and a fine hippie named Roy Simmons, and we toured Draper and the New Kilby Diagnostic and Receiving Center taking hundreds of photos. We spent about four hours in each institution on the same day.

At Kilby (which was known as Mt, Meigs back when I came into the system), we interviewed a guy, whose name I knew well. His first name was Bo. He had a rep as a stone killer, his name woven permanently into the state-wide prison lore. He was a kid, 24 maybe. A white country boy, not bright, uneducated, but nothing about his presence suggested that he was sinister or psycho. Seemed like a poor dumb kid. At 16 he killed a guy who raped his mom. At one point in the conversation as he described being stabbed by another inmate, he pulled up his shirt and displayed a wicked set of scars. Dude had been run through and through. Roy still has the photo of that guy holding up his shirt displaying his gruesome scars.

There is a lot of over-lap between prison and slavery and racism. A lot. The Alabama prison population was, at the time I served, roughly seventy percent black. And the culture extends directly back to the pre-civil war south. Emancipation gave direct birth to the Alabama prison system, and like systems across the south. If you can convict a man of something, you can put him in chains. It's all about the desire to put people in chains. So you can't say anything real about prison without recognizing those relationships. That white boys like me get caught up in the gears of the system doesn't matter, there is no shortage of poor white folks in prison, but the system is there for black folks...at least in Alabama. I'm here to testify to the truth of that. You can't tell the truth about prison if you don't have some soul in your heart, some honest feeling for the great and generations-long suffering of a people who deserved much better and deserve better still. Prisons in Alabama are a transparent extension of slavery and white supremacy. White supremacy is a black man's dilemma and a white man's disgrace. This is not to blame all white people, that would be wrong, but it was white people who did it, which makes it doubly our responsibility for undoing it. I support that sentiment whole-heartedly. I praise everyone who tries to right these terrible wrongs.

But I digress. At some point a new Governor was elected, a republican named Fob James. He fired Larry Bennett, appointed his own guy commissioner and revoked the CMP's access to the prison system killing our project. We did sort of see this coming, but we hoped it would go another way. Damned republicans. It wasn't the last dream shot down by republicans either...but that's another story.

All these years later, I console myself with the thought that it's not so unusual for dreams to die. To be clear, my sorrow is not for my unfinished project. It's for the dream that inspired it, that we would be capable of seeing how wrong we've been and acting accordingly by cleaning up our mess and correcting past mistakes and wrongdoing. I'd still like to believe that we are capable of that. But I don't know.

Join the broken-hearted masses. Join the shell-shocked millions. There's enough suffering and heartache for everyone.

It's a pity we don't act to make it stop. That's not too much to dream for, is it? That we learn to love one another, can all the hate and start doing the right things for a change? Start treating each other with dignity, respect and caring? Start being responsible stewards of the planet? You know it really couldn't hurt to try. It couldn't be any harder than enduring the status quo for another minute.

How would it be if we could remake our system so that it more perfectly served the American people and the best interests of all humanity? Served them honestly and faithfully, and starting from love not hate.

Why wouldn't we do it that way?

If you treat people with hate, you get one thing. If you treat them with love, you get another. It's no more complicated than that.

That we would wake up to that fact is a dream I still have.

Please rest in peace, dear Julian Bond. Thank you for everything, and for all you meant to the world.

In gathering information for this essay, I contacted Rusty only to find him in ill health. Having suffered two strokes he could barely speak or move. I drove from Atlanta to Huntsville to see him and we had a good visit. I’m glad I did. It would be the last time I’d see him. He died shortly after. Rest in peace, dear Rusty Michael. Life was never dull when you were around. Thanks for all you did for the rest of us.

P.S. As I ponder what I've written it occurs to me that what may seem like failure can sometimes turn out to be something wonderful – like this now cherished memory. I long considered all that work a failure, my brief brush with Julian Bond disappointing in its brevity, the unfinished project, the prison reform not accomplished, to this day seems a personal failure...but for all of that I at least still have the stories those experiences left me with.

However much failure there was to it, as unsatisfying the outcome, it's wonderful to have gone through those struggles and had those experiences. It's wonderful to have them now to write about.

I regret that society has progressed so poorly and lament my own hand in the failure to change things in a fundamental way, making for a more just and humane society, starting with the prisons and working our way up confronting issues of justice and equality and questioning past failures of wisdom and transforming ourselves into the kind of a society we need to be: just, peaceful and cooperative.

I failed many times but I'm left with these tales to tell, and in that way I have riches. Though extreme prices were sometimes paid, what looks like failure is sometimes not that at all, not in the long view. Sometimes we fail our way to our next insight. My failures are legion, from the mundane to the grand and I have stories about each of them. Some of them are aggravatingly still relevant. A writer could ask for nothing more. I'm blessed, and also cursed. Weird, I know.

Now I'm left to wonder, will I see meaningful prison reform in my lifetime? Or even the beginnings of it? The answer, I expect, involves Bernie Sanders.