Untitled-329 by Jay Goodman

I have over seventeen years in prison and I can never begin to explain all of the madness I have seen throughout the
years. I was trying to remember one night how many people I’ve seen die, but honestly, it’s been too many for me to
count and I wouldn’t even try to count how many I have seen get stabbed or beat with pipes or other objects. I did my
first five or six years in maximum security, when I left and finally made it to a lesser secured prison, it was like
leaving a war zone. The first night at the new prison, I bowed my head and thanked God I survived.

Throughout these years I have really worked on myself and I have tried to better myself in every possible way. It
hasn’t always been an easy task under these conditions, but I pushed on and never allowed anything to stop me. As I
look around me these days, I have wondered how things have changed so much since I was young. Even though I am sitting
in prison myself, I cannot help but see there is a difference in the men today, then from the past. I have wondered
how our country has changed so much, I’ve given it a lot of thought and looked back in time at everything that’s
happened and I can see a little bit what’s changed our men today from men in the past. In order to understand what’s
happened, I will have to take you back in time and slowly bring you up to date. I am sure most people that are over
fifty, can see a big difference in how people act today than in the past. While it is true times have changed
throughout history, but usually the changes were for the better. I cannot say that is always the truth in modern day
times. I have thought about why it’s so different and I have come across some books that I’ve read from history,
poets, artists, philosophers and the bible. I’ve pieced together a little something I believe was the start of change.

I am almost sixty years old and I look at the men in prison around me and wonder how could they think and act the way
they do? Some of these men are even my age, but to watch them, listen to how they think, talk and see their actions,
it’s like looking at a man who has never matured past his adolescence. In fact, I have always joked with my cellie
about the way a lot of people act I our cell block. While joking I’ve always showed him how when people in here lose
control, they will literally act like a child and start screaming. The funny thing is, about two days ago he was in
another cell with a guy in his fifties and saw first-hand what I am talking about when this man started screaming and
kicking his locker over nothing. As crazy as this may seem to many people, this sight is something I have witnessed
many times over the years of my incarceration. Which got me thinking about why. Looking back over my life, I have
never seen my grandfather or my dad act like the men who seem to have no control over their emotions. I was reading
something once about why men are so different today than the men in past generations. The book was talking about how
young boys and young men now had lost a very vital lesson about life from their dads, which is coping skills. Looking
back on this article now in my life, I can see what this man was trying to say. I imagine it all started to change
when the Industrial Revolution began. I looked back at life before this time and young boys had grown up working by
their fathers all day, this gave young boys a vital knowledge, awareness, a special type of male nourishment, but once
fathers went to a workplace outside the home, the average American father was spending only a short period of time
each evening with their boys. When fathers and sons interact only at the end of the day, the son is exposed to only
his father’s temperament having been shaped by stress at work, humiliation form his boss, competition with other men,
and not his teachings.

The Industrial Revolution had removed fathers from homes and the fields where sons had once learned by their sides and
sent them to factories and offices during the day to return home exhausted, irritable and disconnected from their
families at night. Modern men were grieving that loss but didn’t know the language or understanding for talking about
it. I am sure at first the effects were not noticeable, but I imagine after a few decades, they started seeing a
change in how young boys acted. Something I have done over the years is look back at the difference between my
grandfather, dad, and myself, they came from an era of tough men, I am not talking about tough as in fighting, they
experienced life when men had to be men as they both told me. My grandfather showed up in this country with a bag, he
said, in my day there was no welfare, a man either got a job or he and his family would be put out in the streets.
Family meant everything in his day, all they had was each other. My dad’s time was no different, he was raised to love
his family, he was sent to Germany and forced to face World Wars four thousand miles away, but he did it without
hesitation. He loved America and everything it stands for, my dad used to tell me, something has to die for a man to
be born, what has to die is the boy. At the time it didn’t make a lot of sense, but looking back now, I get what he
was trying to teach me, because when I look at the men around me in prison, that doesn’t happen anymore in our
contemporary culture. Contemporary men today are being left in a state of eternal childhood, like modern day Peter
Pans. I see men around me that have no idea that they think and act the same as they did when they were teenagers.
It’s like watching a grown man who is forever stuck in their adolescence. The same man my cellie saw kicking the
locker and screaming, I have tried on several occasions to talk some sense in to him when he was acting like a fool,
but with someone like him, he cannot understand and think like a grown man his age is because he hasn’t let the boy
die yet, so he cannot become a man.

As I have watched him over the last year, he walks around every day with a look of pure hate on his face and in his
heart. To listen to him it’s everyone else’s fault why he feels this way, but in all actuality, I believe he realizes
that something is missing. By not transforming from his teens to adult hood, he will forever be stuck in a time he
should have left over thirty years ago.