Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

Jim Earley’s poem about the incident that landed him his original life
sentence speaks for itself:
Sometimes happy, sometimes sad,
This repeated living makes me mad;
Freedom taken, no life at all,
Taken from society, behind this wall.
Meet all sorts of people, oh, big deal:
Muggers, rapists, people that squeal;
Dogs, informers, that should be shot,
Remanded in custody, so fucken what?
The charge of murder should be dropped,
I shot a man who couldn’t be stopped.
His gun, her house is where it went down.
And now I await the judge who’s gonna go to town
On me, a man who ain’t had much of a life;
Ain’t got no children, ain’t got no wife;
The girl in question is always on my mind,
I wish I never met her, her or her kind.
This little tale it must be said,
Never trust a woman, except in bed.
Find ‘em and love ‘em, be friends in general,
Or the next bloke she finds
might make it your funeral.
Jim’s lament is justified where there is no hope of release, where the
original sentence has been served and an additional sentence of five years is
imposed by a politician’s whim, then basic legal principles are
compromised: the separation of powers and the concept of rehabilitation as
demanded by the ideals of justice and mercy. What is happening here is
that justice is replaced by revenge – and that does not help anyone because
it also kills the soul of those who administer to the prisons.
Two weeks after my release a newspaper report revealed that there are
smuggling problems in prisons. Since I have been in five prisons in three
countries I can say with certainty that this phenomenon is not unusual. All
over the world it is a fact of prison life that an alternate economic system
begins to operate as soon as you have a community of individuals who are
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