< zines >
PRISON MUSIC
($1.00 from Megan / PO Box 184 / Yoncalla, OR / 97499 USA. Produced by John Adams 768543 / Rt. 1, Box 150 / Tennessee Colony, TX / 75884 USA)
Review by Randy Osborne
A pair of Texas prison inmates, John Adams (#768543) and Hector Martinez (#1006536), smuggled this jail zine into the “free” world with help from non-inmate Megan, who makes the 14-pager available to readers interested in finding out – among other things – just how bad confinement can be. It can be very bad.
“You may think it wrong to steal or break the law when you’re forced through these gates the first time, but you will feel a criminal upon your release,” writes John, in the course of detailing of rotten lockup conditions. Not the sort of remark parole boards look fondly upon, but John seems more about honesty than about saving his “two-time loser” (his phrase) ass from the squalor in which he finds himself.
Which brings up something else. I’m a big fan of prison zines, but one maddening quality most share is that the writer stays coy about what he’s in for. Would I quit reading if he said murder? No. But omitting from a prison zine – which tends to be about life behind bars – the set of circumstances that put the writer there in the first place seems a glaring hole in the story. This especially so since one point of the zine often is the way luck is largely what separates ordinary people from those in the clink.
Prison Music warns that “until you’ve been crushed by society, don’t be too quick to think you’d test better or more ethically.”
But that’s a general point. Even with its misspellings, its jailhouse ruminations on the merit of Christianity (to which many convicts have converted, about which others are skeptical, in slammers across the land forever), its quote about “America the Hypocrite,” and its inmate sarcasm (“contrary to what society believes, I am human”),
Prison Music is a quick, sorrowful, worthwhile read. You can’t run your eyes over the Adams passage that begins, “The agony comes in the aftermath of dreams …” without feeling a pang. Be glad you are on this side.
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