My Midnight Years by Ronald Kitchen & Ronald Kitchen & Thai Jones Logan M. McBride

Author:Ronald Kitchen & Ronald Kitchen & Thai Jones, Logan M. McBride
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2018-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

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Anyone who was on death row or who served hard time and says that they never thought about suicide is a goddamned liar. Every person who has been through something like this has thought about it. Guys I played basketball with, strong as shit, went back to their cells and had heart attacks or killed themselves. The most tragic case was an inmate in his late forties, Frankie Redd. He started showing signs of depression and psychosis but the prison administration ignored the warnings. After one suicide attempt, instead of providing psychological care, the guards put Redd in a cage for three days, butt naked for everyone to see, and then sent him back to his cell without any follow-up treatment. Not surprisingly, he spiraled out of control. I could hear him screaming, “They’re coming to get me!” We desperately tried to secure assistance for him, but the lieutenant who finally stopped by blithely said nothing was wrong. A few hours later, Frankie Redd managed to twist his pants and shirt into a noose, tie one end to an air vent, and hanged himself. “There was no suicide note, no warning signs,” the prison authorities reported in a heartlessly false statement. I penned an obituary for him in a prison activism newsletter. “Frankie Redd was me,” I wrote, “a man here on Death Row. He was a man who needed help, but none came to his aid. I’m so sorry, dear brother Frankie. To them, he was nothing. To me, he was a man and a friend.”

No aid came to Frank Bounds, either. He was an incredible guy, a real peacekeeper among the guys. On October 10, 1998, he died alone in a prison hospital room from untreated lung cancer. The Illinois Supreme Court had just thrown out his death sentence, but the neglectful treatment he received inside made that reprieve meaningless. It was hard to see him go from being healthy, energetic, and playful to being so sick, to being nothing. It felt like it happened overnight. One day, he stopped going out. He lost all his teeth. He couldn’t hold any food down. Suddenly, his clothes didn’t fit him any more. He was like a skeleton with skin.

Every day on death row was like having a gun held to your head. You were not really living, just breathing. And then, one day, you weren’t. As men dropped around me, I never knew whether or not I was going to survive. Execution hung over me every second of every day. I suffered panic attacks. I couldn’t sleep. My hands shook out of control. I poured with sweat. I couldn’t promise myself that I wasn’t eventually going to go crazy, or snap, or act on my suicidal thoughts. My thing was: I was going to fight. I wasn’t going to give it up easy.

When the time came for one of the guys on death row to finally take that journey, it was a big event. With a brutal

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