The Guys Who Really Should Be Locked Up

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Since I’ve been out of prison, I’ve been going to these hellish rehab groups deep in Brooklyn to satisfy the courts. Ninety-five percent of my fellow clients live in halfway houses or three-quarter houses, and I don’t know what the difference between a halfway and three-quarter is. You’d think that three-quarter is better than halfway, but I don’t know how you get any worse than these people living in the three-quarter houses, and their stories sound 100 percent unbonerable to me. I’m grateful every day, ‘cause they were trying to stick me in some shit like that, or a long-term residential drug program. Fuckin’ nuts. I guess if you’re homeless, you gotta roll with the punches—another thing is, if you say you have a drug problem, you’ll have a much easier time eventually finding housing, ‘cause you’re trying to overcome your disability.

So, I’m sitting in this rehab outpatient group way more often than I’d like to admit, getting a glimpse into the lives of crazy people. They’re usually the ones who talk the most—a lot of the time, about nothing. It’s confusing how retarded the discourse is day in and day out, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it. This particular group is different than ones I’ve had in the past ‘cause lots of these guys have just gotten home from long prison stints and have nowhere to live, so they ended up in the halfway house and are forced to go to these groups as part of the living arrangement. Basically, it’s a hustle on everyone’s part—the clients, the folks running these groups—to make sure bills are being charged and people are getting paid. Since Medicaid foots the bill for everything, unfortunately that means that the taxpayer is stuck with the check.

I’m constantly stunned by shit I hear—like when one of the clients explains that he just did 31 years straight and now he’s home, living at the halfway house, attempting to get his shit together. Damn… Hearing that takes the wind out of me, first off ‘cause they always say it like it’s nothing, ‘cause to them it is nothing. They live it; it’s been made normal. Second, ‘cause I’m pretty damn sure he did some heinously reprehensible shit to get that 25-to-life bid and then get knocked at his board a few times before parole let him go. I’ve become somewhat accustomed to palling around with murderers and rapists, but I guess I wonder how the average reader out there feels about this? We can’t hide these dudes away forever, I guess, no matter what they did. I try to believe that everyone deserves a second chance, but at the same time, if you kill a 16-year-old girl and then fornicate with her corpse, I don’t want you to ever be let out. Just imagine if that was your daughter. Could you ever be comfortable with her killer being free?

Recently, I was reading the highly esteemed New York Post online and came across this alarmist article from a couple months ago about flocks of freed fiends flooding the Big Apple. Basically, the geniuses at the Post think that all the crack smoking going on in the 80s and early 90s led to all sortsa decrepit crimes and now these convicts are coming out after serving their time. Last year, 230 murderers and sex offenders were let free in the five boroughs, the most ever, and supposedly this year we will see even more vermin sliming their way back to the streets. The chances of them recommitting their heinous crimes are very slim, but clearly their parole boards weren’t ready to return them to their communities after the first few hearings. Somehow, it’s the last two to four years of a 30-year sentence that do most of the rehabilitating.

You might think that someone who’s been locked up a lot like me might have more sympathy for inmates, regardless of what their crime is, but I doubt that I do. When I hear a guy sitting next to me in group say he just did 31 years, I really don’t want to be around him anymore. Sure, maybe he’s better now, but he definitely did some real sick shit to get time like that. At the end of the Post article, we are filled in about the criminal acts of some newly released New Yorkers—like Sherain Bryant, who beat her daughter to death ‘cause she was ugly. Somehow she got a 25-to-life in 1994 and already got released.

The really tough one to stomach is 52-year-old Paul Kennedy (no relation to JFK, I think) getting sprung free after serving 32 years of a 25-to-life. In what is now basically my backyard, Greenwood Cemetery, he decided to get some pussy off a 16-year-old, but she didn’t want him, so he strangled her and then went to town on her lifeless body. I’m sorry, but that’s gotta be one of those crimes that you never get paroled for. That’s just too much. I hope he gets hit by a bus… hard, but also slowly, so it drags him a few blocks, painfully dismembering him.

Another pervert named “Crazy Chris” Aniades also raped and killed women. I guess he fucked them while they were still alive, which is probably actually worse now that I think about it, and he maybe might’ve cut their eyes out? I guess that 16-year-old was better off being dead before her rape occurred. I just didn’t know it was necessary to let murderers out of prison so soon. These guys are in their 50s. I feel like they could’ve spent another decade in prison, but maybe the state is smarter than me and even really disgusting people deserve a second chance.

But maybe it’s just a set up… Let all these sick fucks out, secretly hoping that one of them does a number on some poor little girl, causes a huge sensation and then they’ll pass “Little Dead and Raped Rebeckah’s Law” that says that no sick fuck rape-o shall ever be paroled again—or maybe they’ll say they need to be castrated before being released back into the wild—you know what? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with neutering a man who admits to strangling a girl to death and then boning her. Chop ‘em off… Get that stuff outta there… Homey got some bad ball-juice…

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.

Previously: There’s No Sex in Prison Showers