Riffs From The Row

By William Van Poyck - July 5, 2006

For the past several weeks the local TV news stations have been highlighting the current budget stalemate which has befuddled the Virginia legislature (called the General Assembly here). The sticking points in this fifty-billion dollar budget are schools and roads; essentially the governor wants to spend money improving the schools and rebuilding the transportation infrastructure (roads, bridges and tunnels) and the General Assembly does not want to fund these things. The General Assembly adamant about one thing, though, they want to build two more huge prisons, perpetuating to national trend of building more prisons and incarcerating more of its citizens even in the face of declining crime rates. According to a just released report by the U.S. Justice Department nearly 2.2 million people – 1 in every 136 U.S. residents – were behind bars in 2005. This is despite the fact that crime rates have been going down for a decade now. In this country the answer to all problems is “lock them up forever,” an attitude that caters to our nation’s desire for easy answers and simplistic solutions. It’s easier to just lock people up than bother to figure out real solutions. And if criminals don’t cooperate by committing more crimes, we’ll just criminalize more behaviors. “Crime rates have been going down for a decade now, so it’s somewhat disturbing that the prison population continues to rise,” observes Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington D.C. – based group that promotes alternatives to prison. “Increasingly we’re filling our prisons with people who have committed non-violent drug and property crimes,” Mauer noted. This country possesses an odd, Puritanical lust for inflicting punishment, an impulse that seems to grow with each passing year. On a per capita basis America incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation on earth, and there appears to be no end in sight. The sad thing is that an apathetic public does not even see this as a problem.

We have two executions scheduled for this month, one on July 20^th and another on the 27^th. Mike Lenz, the guy set to die on the 27^th is a very good friend of mine, and I’ve been in the unenviable position of have to count down his final days with him. Mike killed a fellow prisoner in one of those common prison encounters where you must kill or be killed. Mike was in prison for burglary; the guy he killed was a convicted murderer and known bully, a fact Mike’s jury was prevented from learning. Baring a legal miracle his execution is certain, and Mike recognizes this. Abstractly we all recognize that from the moment of birth we begin the process of dying, but when you are really facing imminent death, when it is sure and confirmed, it attains a different flavor. The remaining husk of your life is now measured in discrete, finite units of time, as fixed as your heart beats, each one steadily diminishing, like the ticking second hand of a clock. There is an inexorable, incremental ratcheting of tension that threatens your very sanity as you ponder the imponderable: How do you prepare yourself for not existing? I grieve for my friend, Mike, and I know that after July 27^th a small part of me will die with him. In truth, though few will recognize, a small part of all of us will die will die with him.

William Van Poyck was sentenced to death in Florida but was transferred to Virginia’s death row by the governor of Florida after Florida State Prison guards murdered Van Poyck’s codefendant, Frank Vales, in his death row cell in 1999.

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