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Time. Wow.. sometimes when I hear that word, it makes me tremble. TIME! For someone who has ever done "TIME" the word is frightening, especially when you must confront it with its boxing gloves on. For most, time is an anonymous fear that has no shape or form. It just is, but when you go to prison, TIME because a living, breathing monster that you have to either tame or die. Prison transform TIME into the proverbial monkey on your back. It is always there like a bad habit you can't shake. In prison. TIME awards you nothing but the challenge to defeat it.When I was a rookie at going to jail, the old heads used to always say that the time is already made. All you gotta do is to outlive it." That is easier said than done when you have a thousand other lost souls competing for 'something to do' in the same shared space. During my first serious bid at 15, I felt like I had cheated TIME because the Youth Center was like a summer camp for troubled teenagers. I learned how to box (was a pretty decent welterweight fighter), tightened up my basketball game, and discovered where some of my classmates had gone who had suddenly disappeared. I went to prison on the day that MLK had gotten killed and within hours of my arrival in prison, a riot broke out due to MLK and 8 convicts were murdered. You know something that I hadn't really thought about, but that incident may have sparked my militancy because shortly thereafter, I morphed into a revolutionary. I was not playing with those devils. I started a riot of my own a few years later. I burned down the corn fields at the prison farm to protest them forcing us to work in below freezing weather which was against the rules. I took over Sunday church services to rail against white oppression. I was placed in solitary confinement for my last year in prison because it ws decided that I was a 'bad influence on the other convicts. My second bid netted me 30 years and I knew I had to do ten before parole so what was I to do for 3650 days Looking at TIME like that is really frightening. Oh yeah,let me tell you about how TIME steals your perspective. I did 4 years on that first bid. I thought everything stood still because in prison, it does. You don't realize thar shit still going on in the streets. Anyway, when I came home, my family had moved and I didn't quite know the hood, so 3 of my sisters came to greet me. I waited for them in a park. I had been 19 and I was four years older than the oldest of those sisters. In my mind, Istill thought they were little girls. Hell, the baby girl was barely walking when I left so when I saw 3 girls walk by, I had no idea who they were! I was hiding behind tree s I could jump out to surprise them but I idn't recognize my own sisters. Doing TIME had tricked me into not knowing that shit didn't stop bbecause I was locked up. I watched TIME make bitches ot of strong men because the day you run out of shit to do to fill up those long days and empty nights, is the day you go crazy. And that hurts most. Dig this. I had friends that I was close to who got shipped out to another jail and then when we hit the same prison yard again, he was a 'girl'. As hard as that was, I dealt with that better than seeing a friend lose his mind. Nothing is sadder than to watch a soldier turn into a zombie. What is worse is seeing it out here. A few months ago, a chain-gang friend came home. Good, good brotha. Came home after 23 years and he was gone. All he talks about is flying mission while he was in 'Nam. He was never in the Army. Shit sad. Yeah, TIME is a different monster when she got out her whip and chains. I was close to fucking up myself nut a white counselor saved me. I was placed in maximum security for a year for 'instigating a rebellion against staff'. Anyway, even though I was a vet at doing time on lockup, I was not emotionally rready to be locked up for 23 hours a day with no physical contact with another human being so I put in a request to see the psychologist. This was normal as most guys would go to the Wizard as the psyche doctor was called because he would happily prescribe psychotropic drugs that would make you sleep. The first week or so on lockup are the hardest until you adjust so the pills works wonders. In any even, when I went to see the wiz, he refused to give me a 'script. What happened is that he had ben a counselor at another joint where I had been and he told me that he saw me out of his window every day running. You couldn't miss me. I had extremely long dreads. He explained what the drugs would do to me. He told me to tuff it out. And that's what I did. Man, I almost let TIME get to me. TIME ain't no joke. My brother did 36 years straight in prison. He's out now. We were waiting on our oldest brother to come home, but he died two years ago after doing 40 years inside. I don't know if it has made news everywhere but a friend who did 44 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit was released two months ago. He is trending online, has been on the news, and has the ear of locals. I will ask him to push the National Day of Amnesty mentioned in another thread. TIME messed up another friend who did 20 years inside for a crime he didn't do. His case was finally overturned, he got millions of dollars for wrongful imprisonment, and then committed suicide. When I did ten years for a robbery I did not do, TIME really messed with me. I was innocent. I wrote Oprah, 60 minutes, Geraldo. Only Ed Bradley from 60 minutes responded. The office of Barry Scheck from The Innocence Project ( a lawyer on the OJ case) told me it would take two years to get to my case, I almost wanted to give up. two years! That was too long. You cannot imagine how TIME roughed me up. It was like I was on some different kind of mission. I didn't want to get into trouble or beef with the guards or the convicts. I wanted to go home. It took me ten years

Brother, you are on point. Dig this, I just read an article where a guy said that the problem is that we let opinions and ideas go unchecked for fear of offending others. It's wrong not to question things because if we simply allow false notions to persist, it can be damaging. The reason a lot of lies exist is because we never challenged them though we knew them to be wrong. Considering the position we are in as a people or as a nation, we cannot reman silent in the face of lies. Keep on providing your light. In the joint, what is true as you mentioned is how your mind should be free. Used properly, your mind is your best ally in the struggle to survive. When younger, I was told by the old heads to get your mind off the streets. Forget about family, friends, girlfriends because thinking of them would disrupt your ability to live in the moment. In prison, you must always live in the moment because if you are not aware of what's going u can get into trouble. That works, but as I got older i started to free my mind. I enjoyed that way much better.

I consider myself a Modern Primitive. I use technology, but magic, belief and will are more important for me. The mind is what makes your reality. It is possible to train or deprogram your mind. I feel the first step is to either question everything or say you know nothing. I have not been to prison, but I would imagine there are guys in prison, that even though their body is imprisoned their mind is not. It sounds lie prison in an odd way freed your mind. If I am mistaken . I apologise. @Gibran I feel the only people free in society are sociopaths, creative artist and inventors.

i am, like you ,a believer in conscious living but sadly, we all, for the most part, live in alternate realities. What you consciously experience may not be a reality for me. What happens is frustration because I can fit my conscious perspective into the perspective you have invented for yourself. It like eyewitness accounts. For example, we can witness the same fight and walk away with differing accounts and opinions of who won. Or what about a wreck. We both see the accident but I saw car A as wrong whereas you swear Car B was wrong. No matter what I perceive as real due to what I consciously interpret from my environment may not be what you get. While consciousness is real. it is is interpreted subjectively and therefore open to differing opinions nd judgments. That is primarily the reason why people will usually accept science over spirituality. Science can be qualified ad verified whereas consciousness, like spirituality, is open to individual questioning. How is it, I wonder that something as powerful as time which affects us all can be seen so differently by the very ones it affects most. Maybe, my brother maybe the ones coming after us will figure it out. Peace @Pioneer1 Brer, I almost forgot to mention this. When I was locked up, any and every time I would hear that song by Stephanie Mills called HOME, I would almost break down and cry like a baby when she gets to the part where she sings "TIME BE MY FRIEND". Man, that used to bring me to my knees. Th way she sings that hurt my soul in a way. It cuts me in half emotionally. When you are inside, your only job if you are to survive is to find a way to make time your friend. Think I'm gonna listen to that song now and see whats up

Yeah, we the only ones who don't treat time as an investment to getting better while inside. There was an old saying. DON'T SERVE TIME. MAKE TIME SERVE YOU. but jail is the one place where we exercise POWER. We run shit inside and maybe that is why we flock to our power base. Dig this, throughout my convict life, I have constantly ran ito brothers that I have practically grown up with from juvenile to the big house. See them over and over again. On the state. In the feds but guess what? I hardly even see Asians but once. They don't keep coming back.

THIS IS REAL! BLACK MALES ARE AT RISK. WHO IS NEXT!? Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr photo Mark Ciavarella Jr AFRICANGLOBE – Disgraced Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella Jr has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for conspiring with private prisons to sentence juvenile offenders to maximum sentences for bribes and kickbacks which totaled millions of dollars. He was also ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution. In the private prison industry the more time an inmate spends in a facility, the more of a profit is reaped from the state. Ciavearella was a figurehead in a conspiracy in the state of Pennsylvania which saw thousands of young Black men and women unjustly punished and penalized in the name of corporate profit. According to allgov.com Ciavearella’s cases from 2003 – 2008 were reviewed by a special investigative panel and later by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and it was found that upwards of 5,000 young men and women were denied their constitutional rights, and therefore all of their convictions were dismissed and were summarily released. During his sentencing Ciavarella was defiant, claiming he had broken no laws and claimed the money he received was a legitimate ‘finder’s fee.’ Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod said comments such as these were typical of Ciavarella, according to the local reporting of citizensvoice.com:

First, some good news. If there is such a thing as a natural remedy for success, it would certainly be time, but just what is this phenomenon that most of us tolerate with only a mild curiosity? Can it be harnessed? Can it be regulated or reduced? How do we establish a long-term relationship with it? Are there any hard-and-true “rules of the road” when it comes to confronting time in an effort to mastering it? From the very moment of our conception, we are born ready to run away from time, the one thing we can’t escape. No matter what we do or don’t do during the course of our lives, it will all be accomplished within a framework where time has generated either a blessing or a curse dependent upon our behavior in regards to it. Time is indeed a privilege, a social pact between you and God; and when we come to understand how much of a travesty it is to us, individually, to fail to validate our lives, we will learn how to interact with time on a more compatible basis. What can be any more personally cruel to us as the amazing humans we are than to die without having solved the mystery of how to make time your friend. To merely exist is so low-tech. The emphasis should be on living, and by that I mean living well, but let it be understood right now that to truly live is both appealing and challenging. The inherent appeal lies within your ability to envision that “there is more where this came from” while the challenge is praying that you have room for it all. What is so apparent is that some of us, perhaps most of us, approach the adventure of life with the view that time is an enemy, our own private bogeyman that ushers in horizons where unforeseeable unknowns can threaten our personal sanity. Then we legitimize these fears by becoming a poster-child for their fruition. Unsurprisingly, those of us who have made a living of being victimized by time simply don’t know what to do with ourselves. What this so aptly illustrates is how deeply we have tied our emotions and our intellectual independence on the fear of something whose primary goal is to confer value on our existence rather than to rob us of it. In a nutshell, time, rather than being the spirit of doom should be more rightly viewed as an introductory offer to tomorrow. *I wrote this 15 years ago*

Gibran My Mama got angry with me and told me that no white man could beat up that many ‘colored’ men. LOL...you know she was right. And another show that we loved as Black boys growing up was DUKES OF HAZZARD. We used to play it as children chasing eachother arouns playing Roscoe and Boss Hog. And ofcourse everyone wanted to drive the "General Lee" car with the Confederate Flag on it and older Black people couldn't figure out why. But many of our people were being programed into White Supremacy through these television shows at a young age. As it turned out, this was when they were getting ready to commence daylights saving time. I was visibly impressed, albeit a wee bit silly. You can laugh if you so choose, but I somehow thought that the white man was going to get into one of his rocket-ships, fly into space, and then to manually rotate the earth on its axis to alter time by one hour. This reminds me of Daniel 7: 25 "And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time." This could refer to the Caucasian trying to change and alter time to CONFUSE the masses of our people and ATTEMPT extend his time of rulership on the planet by switching around the dates and times. B.C.....A.D....add 30...take away 33...lo. Listen to the first 10 or 15 minutes of this old clip of the Late and Great Dr. Khalid Muhammad breaking down how they switched up the dates and times to confuse you: Dr. Khalid Muhammad....Caucasians Changing The Time Any Damn Time They Get Ready

Hey, sis....I got nothing but love for you also. And you can through brother Gibran into the mix.