Scared Straight

Every once in a while, something happens that changes your entire perspective. One isolated incident, by itself nearly overlooked, which causes you rethink an entire philosophy to which you were once zealously committed.

So it was for me with the saga of Kyree Slocum.

You may have read about Slocum a few weeks ago. According to the Philadelphia Police version of the story, Slocum, 35, of North Philadelphia, was wanted by authorities in connection with the murders of Barry Johnson, 33, and Rubin Rasheen Eason, 28, inside a rowhouse on Marshall Street last October.

A month later, Slocum used a fake passport and ID at New York’s JFK airport to board a flight bound for Cairo.

Not speaking a word of Arabic, and not knowing the slightest thing about Egyptian customs and lifestyles – our boy from North Philly may have found it difficult to blend in as well as he thought he would. Egyptian authorities soon had Slocum under surveillance, and arrested him May 29. His false identity unraveled, the FBI was called, and arrangements were made for the FBI and Philly police to fly over and get him.

Here’s the part that made me go “Hmmmmmmm…”

When they finally picked up Kyree Slocum on June 19, he was practically begging to come back to an American prison. He profusely thanked his local escorts for freeing him from the Egyptian hellhole he’d been in for three weeks, and couldn’t wait to get on the plane.

Apparently, sleeping on a damp concrete floor with ten men to a cell, rancid, insect-filled food and a bucket in the corner for a bathroom were not accommodations to Mr. Slocum’s liking. You have to imagine there is a prison hierarchy over there just like here, and a prisoner who doesn’t speak a word of the language is probably not treated well.

It was a filthy, harsh, frightening environment – conditions so severe that even a hardened career criminal could be broken - brought to his knees crying and babbling with gratitude in a less than a month.

That got me to thinking.

All the neighborhood hard guys who take pride in their long prison stretches, whose chests swell when they speak of their exploits behind bars, who gleefully teach the next generation of young black men to speak, think, and act as if they’re already incarcerated – would change their minds about how cool prison is if they’d done time like Kyree Slocum.

For Slocum, after his Egyptian experience, American prison must seem like Club Med.
Those of us on the outside - particularly those of us who, from a safe distance, like to think of ourselves on the side of prison reform – like to talk about the effect of those two million American prisoners on society as a whole.

That effect is magnified tenfold in minority communities. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, based on current rates of incarceration, an estimated 32 percent of all Black males will enter prison during their lifetime, compared with 17 percent of Hispanic males and 5.9 percent of white males. In most states, convicted felons are not allowed to vote from prison; and in twelve states, felons are banned from voting for life.

Once released, many prisoners are still poorly educated, lack basic job skills and face employer suspicion, provided they can find a job at all. The result? More than two-thirds of released prisoners are re-arrested within three years, and the cycle begins anew.

So we do-gooders lobby for increased funding and for more programs encouraging education, proper physical and mental exercise, music and the arts behind bars as a means toward rehabilitation.

I still think those are causes worth fighting for, but I have to wonder if perhaps a case could be made for giving prisoners a taste, just a taste, of what life is like in a place untouched by us liberal do-gooders and prison reformers. I can’t help but wonder if this whole concept of prison reform would do better with a more little reform of the prisoners themselves.

I don’t know what the recidivism rate is in Egypt, but I’m willing to bet it isn’t even close to two-thirds.

There probably aren’t many tough guys holding court on street corners in Cairo, wearing their pants down below their butt, boasting to the local young bloods about how they aren’t afraid of prison because they run the cellblock.

Prison in Egypt is a scary place, and no one who’s been there is anxious to go back.

Just ask Kyree Slocum.