MANSFIELD: A Fake Terrorist

Demetrius Pitts, the deranged loser who was arrested on July 1 by the Feds and charged with planning a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, really didn’t want to blow anything up, he simply wanted to go home, to that safe and comfortable place that previously had provided him with the only security he has ever really known in his troubled life: Prison.

There’s a saying in the joint about dudes like him: “He wasn’t arrested, he was rescued.”

But Pitts had been to prison enough times to know that, similar to life on the street, there’s a pecking order. Some prisoners are accorded more respect than others, and this time he wanted to be respected in prison.

The bottom rung on the convict ladder is occupied by the sick fucks that commit crimes against children. They’re considered the lowest of the low. They’re treated as pariahs, and rightly so. Usually, the first thing they do upon arriving in prison is to rush to the chapel to get a Bible and a cross to wear around their neck, hoping that it will serve as a talisman to ward off other prisoners that might want to stomp a mud hole in their asses — something many feel they so roundly deserve.

The second step up from the bottom are those individuals who rightly should be in a mental institution instead of prison since their sicknesses are so pronounced other prisoners simply pity them, while avoiding them like the plague, perhaps mistakenly thinking that mental illness is contagious. Indeed, the mentally challenged and heavily medicated prisoners tend to even avoid each other, and some of them eventually end up in padded cells talking to imaginary friends and playing handball with their own shit. It’s downright shameful how the mentally ill are often treated in this country.

The next rung up is occupied by the suckers who let their peckers lead them to prison. The weak guys that get so tangled up in a romantic affair they can’t see or think straight and end up doing harm to someone, be it their significant other or the person they suspect of engaging in an affair with the one they think they own and should have exclusive rights to. These clowns are simply too weak and stupid to just walk away when the relationship goes south and therefore are viewed as clowns.

At the apex of the prison food chain are the prisoners who were busted for trying to enrich themselves, be it through robbing a bank or defrauding investors with a stock swindle, and to a lesser degree, dealing drugs (a profession that is thought of as neither particularly courageous or clever by real convicts). Credit card counterfeiters — like yours truly once was — are also classified in this category.

However, there’s a relatively new, higher category of prisoner now vying to occupy that top ladder rung in federal prisons: The terrorist. In the upside-down world of prisons, where so many are incarcerated for far too long for relatively minor crimes, the hatred level for America has greatly increased, and therefore the terrorist who wants to do damage to America is loved and respected in prison.

At his first court appearance, Pitts, who sometimes went by the Islamic names Abdur Raheem Rafeeq and Salah ad-Deem Osama Waleed, blurted out to the magistrate judge: “I just want to get this over with.” Indeed, he wants to, as quickly as possible, go back to that safe place where he doesn’t have to worry about anything. His “three hots and a cot,” with “a punk under every bunk” is provided for him by the federal government.

This dude is completely institutionalized; he’d love nothing better than for the judge to give him a life sentence. But this time when he enters prison he’ll be at the top of the prison pecking order — a bona fide badass terrorist, not viewed as the complete joke that he really happens to be.

From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.

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