Welcome to Super Friends
At age 21, my son Whit was sentenced to 6-1/2 years in federal prison for unarmed bank robbery. Contrary to the sentencing judge's recommendation that he go to a medium security prison, the bureaucrats at the Federal Bureau of Prisons remanded him to the maximum security facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. Where all federal death penalty inmate reside, along with lifers, gang-bangers and others with nothing to lose.
Halfway through his sentence, six days before his 25th birthday, he took his own life, after having spent the previous 15 months in solitary confinement (though much of the time with a cellmate), from where he wrote this blog by mailing me his handwritten entries for posting. Before he was sent to solitary I was allowed to spend one Saturday a month with him in the visitors room, but once in the hole they violated their own policies and took away all his visiting, phone and commissary privileges. Except for two CCTV visits at the prison, with me in a little closet near reception and he in one somewhere else in the range, we never saw each other again. He blogged for just the 5 final months, every few days from November to March, but it is an impressive and important body of work; the quality of his writing is astonishing, especially for one who was never able to finish high school.
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. 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 to jeff1347@protonmail.com and I'll send you a PDF file of the blog that's already in correct chronological order. You can keep it for reading over again or passing along. And by whatever means you read it, please let me know what you think.
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 tune I commissioned in his memory with Scottish award winning fiddler, composer, teacher and writer Fiona Driver is here.
In 2014 I commissioned the script for a play, Blogging Behind Bars, which was 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 posthumously, something they never otherwise do.
Jeff Smith
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