| Glenn Seaborg |
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Herman Atkins
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affluent
well educated friends have told me that if they ever somehow found themselves facing an inevitable, protracted prison sentence they’d simply commit suicide rather than try to summon the courage to somehow live thru it i don’t think i’d have the nerve myself but neither do i think i’d survive fourteen years of imprisonment for a rape i didn’t commit what i do think is that if by some miracle i did survive i’d be bitter on the day i was released and bitter till the day i died i could never forgive a state that in the last decade has built two new university campuses and twenty new prisons i could never forgive the state that ranks second only to the gaza strip for the world’s highest per capita incarceration i could never forgive the state that took me from high school graduation and stole fourteen years from the prime of my life i could never forgive the state that planned to compensate me for fourteen years of stolen life with the amount of money |
that michael eisner makes in ten minutes ten thousand dollars how extraordinary then that as you talk to herman atkins as he smiles and tells you about the correctional system as he tells you about facts and paradigms tells you about problems that must be addressed tells you that he believes there still is no better place to live than america the man who i thought having lost so much precious time to prison might be only semiliterate sounds like nothing so much as a congressman i should not have been surprised after fourteen years it seems safe to say that herman atkins has earned a ph.d. in corrections every time they moved him to a new facility the library he had accumulated was so large they made him send it home on his release he said “only god and i knew my innocence today god, i, the riverside district attorney and the people of california and the united states know that i am an innocent man” |
| Innocent Man |
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18 March 00
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