GROWING OLD

There is a frightening and unsettling aspect to prison life which has nothing to do with having to live among potentially violent men, or getting beat up, raped, slashed with a razor, or stabbed in the eye with a spike. It is growing old.

While the aging process affects everyone, growing old in prison is an exceptional hardship. Men seldom talk about it. But for those like myself who are doing long sentences, and who've already been incarcerated for many years, there's the

dread of the world going on without you.

For many of us, we're stuck having to live in the past. In a way the world seems to have stopped for me.

I am computer illiterate, and I have no oportunities to learn how to use one.

I've never operated a CD player or used a cell phone. When I was on the outside there wasn't even cable TV stations or VCRs. Let alone DVDs. It's almost as if I am living in a time warp.

The world has become much more technologically advanced than when I knew it. In a sense, I feel as if I am still living in the 1970's.

As time goes on the people who were once in a prisoner's life often drift away. Some do stay, however. But many do not. Family members die off. Others realize they could get along fine without you. Visits become less frequent. A crushing lonliness can settle in when you begin to realize that you're at the mercy of your keepers.

In such a stark situation some men search for God. Others stew in anger or they drown themselves in a sea of regret. Imprisonment plays heavily on a man's mind.

In the more than twenty-seven years I have been behind prison walls, I know of men who haven't received a visit in five, ten, fifteen, twenty or more years. Some don't even get letters. And if not for the fact that their names and identification numbers appear on the Department of Correction's

public access web site, they would exist in almost total obscurity.

This is scary. It's like being among the living as well as the dead. You're alive within the little world of the prison system, but dead in the minds of the masses. Your space is a small cell, or a bunk and footlocker. Your future, if you have to spend the remainder of your life behind bars, is an eventual trip to the local potter's field.

And even the prison's cemetary is hidden on a desolate hill on State owned land where no one from the general public can go.

Day after day it goes through your mind that the world has already forgotten you. You wonder if someone will claim your body when you die. You wonder if anyone even cares.

David Berkowitz

January 26, 2005