Letter From A Jan. 6 Political Prisoner

By Armando Simon

Author’s Note: Elsewhere, I published a letter from a J6 prisoner for two reasons: it was a very coherent description of life behind bars for J6 prisoners, and, second, I felt people needed to remember that these are real persons with families, whose individuality should not disappear under the blanket label of “Jan. 6 prisoners.” I publish this subsequent letter for another reason: to highlight the fact that they are subject to intimidation and punitive measures if they exercise their rights. He mentions interfering with mail. This is true. Receiving mail in prisons and jails is a long-established right for any inmate. Yet, in one prison, a J6 prisoner’s mail will be blocked if writing is on both sides of the page, whereas in others it is admitted; in another, newspaper and magazine articles are forbidden, whereas in others is allowed, etc. Much of my correspondence has been blocked for reasons ignored for non-J6 prisoners.

There are few conservative newsletters to have taken up the cause of the J6 political prisoners and they have highlighted instances of beatings by guards, withholding medical treatment, throwing people in isolation (the hole) for speaking/writing to the media,  having court-appointed attorneys who work for the prosecution, and holding an accused person without bond and without trial for over a thousand days (this J6 prisoner appears to have avoided the worst injustices, other than the obvious). Other conservative and liberal websites and writers have turned their backs on these patriots, feeling that the only reaction to blatant electoral fraud should have been disapproval headshaking. They feel the Jan. 6 “insurrectionists” are an embarrassment. I think they are patriots. They feel the Jan. 6 “insurrection” was shameful. I believe it will go down as America’s Bastille Day.

Correspondence to J6 prisoners can be done through here. Financial help would certainly be welcomed.

I am withholding the writer’s name to minimize the possibility of retaliation.

Dear Armando,

A while ago I had read your story, Doña Raquel’s Dilemma, and it is one of my favorites. I was thinking about it and wondered if the Jaguar and Octavio were the same person, if this wasn’t a metaphor for an internal struggle.

We had some good news, I think, in the form of questions asked by the Supreme Court Justices this past Tuesday. It is a day that I had been so looking forward to and is now replaced with an unknown future date when the Supreme Court issues its ruling. This will probably be in early July or maybe, if I am lucky, mid-June.

The case I am talking about is the one of Fischer v. USA. This case, if won by Fischer, will have the potential of taking years off my sentence – in a just world. We will see. People do the right thing all the time and surprise us by resisting the pull of humanity’s long tide. Throughout its history, sometimes people stand against its current, and on those rare occasions, even some Democrats. Maybe our district court judges will do the right thing after a winning Supreme Court ruling and resentence us properly.

We had our housing unit inspected today by the warden. He never made it to my “cell” today. In addition to complaining that inmates had too many books and magazines, he found a crockpot in one cell and a batch of hooch in another. I guess that was enough for him and he left. What I am sure that he would really like to find are cell phones and drugs, but not here in this housing unit. This is the mild one, it houses older, filled mostly with prison factory workers.

I was reading in the newspaper about a San Antonio couple who starved the man’s 4-year-old son to death. It is so sad. The 25-year-old stepmother even recorded and documented the starving and suffering of this boy over several months, with videos of him begging for bread and water right up to the last hours of his little life.

I just can’t understand or imagine the moves or even the ability of someone to do this. Where was the boy’s real mother? Grandmother? Aunts, uncles? Such a breakdown of society, a failure of humanity. After thousands of years of human society and civilization, we keep telling ourselves that this time things will be different, that we have finally once and for all left the barbarism in the past, that we are now enlightened. But the truth is that we have just found new and innovative ways to justify and excuse the same old crimes and villainy of our ancestry.

We have also, starting with the 20th century, learned to apply an economy of scale and efficiency to our enlightened barbarism. How can we ask a society to care about things such as the freedoms of speech, religion, conscience, or the self-determination of people and the protection of minority rights through the rule of law from abuse by a majority, when the same society can’t prevent a child from starving to death in its midst?

Not that I am arguing for government intervention, but where is the family? We are isolated from one another, wrapped in cocoons and shells of selfishness and ambivalence, unable to see past the reflections made by our smartphone screens. It is hard to get us to care about anything beyond ourselves. The road to repairing our culture and society begins with small steps. It’s me closing my book and listening to my lonely cellmate go on about the minutia of his appearance again without sighing and rolling my eyes, and really listening to him. He has no one else, no letters, his family abandoned him after his fraud charges and other inmates like him.

It’s the steps like you have taken to write and support a stranger in prison you have never met, providing encouragement and an ear to the J6 prisoners’ plight.

Thank you.

C

First published in Issues and Insights