Welcome to Super Friends
This is still my son Whit's blog. His contributions to it ceased when he took his own life at USP Terre Haute. At 21 he had been sentenced to a 6 1/2 year sentence for unarmed bank robbery, then inappropriately remanded to the maximum security federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Halfway through his sentence, six days before his 25th birthday, he left us, after having spent the previous 15 months in solitary confinement, from where he wrote this blog by mailing me the handwritten entries for posting.
If you are visiting here for the first time, I hope you will take the time to read it, and be witness to what he experienced. He'll make you laugh, and he'll make you cry. The entries begin in the folder named "2008" (see "Archive" at right). Click on the arrow to show "November" and "December," and then on the month to open all entries for that month. Scroll down to the bottom and read up to follow them in chronological order. Repeat for 2009. BUT, if you get through a few of the first blogs and know you want to read to the end but don't want to get bogged down in all the scrolling needed to read in chronological order, just send me an email at jeff1347@protonmail.com and I'll send you a PDF file of the blog that's already in correct order. You can keep it for reading over again or passing along.
A YouTube video I created in which I read a Father's Day letter Whit wrote, with still photos and video, can be found here. Also a Scottish tune I commissioned in his memory with the well-known fiddle player and composer Fiona Driver here.
In 2014 I commissioned the script for a play, Blogging Behind Bars, which got produced for the 2014 Cincinnati Fringe Festival, where it won the Audience Pick of the Fringe award. One of the performances was video recorded and can be seen here. The dialog is heavily based on word-for-word excerpts from his blog and interviews with people from his life; some scenes actually happened, others are imagined but true to the people involved and the circumstances. Run time is almost exactly one hour.
And finally, consider ordering the book "Super Friends" from Amazon. I published it, but it's really Whit's and my book. It contains his full blog along with letters he and I wrote to each other during the five months he was blogging, interleaved with the blog entries. Also some background chapters and a lot of additional material. I donate all proceeds from sales of the book to Prison Writers, an organization that publishes (online) writing by inmates around the country in both the federal and state systems. They have also been gracious enough to publish a number of Whit's blog pieces.
Jeff Smith
