Cell Memory became an organic manifestation after I was introduced to the masterful artwork of Tibool. His imagination spoke to me in vivid imagery that perfectly captured my idiosyncratic perception of prison. His portraits compliment the "shock absorbers" I sprouted to survive a decade-long nightmare through dark comic relief. Somewhat true stories live within these pages through the depiction of horror with satire, a comedy with a tragedy that you will find informative, entertaining and disturbingly thought-provoking.
Cell Memory is my magnum opus to the paradox of prison. Incarceration, to those who have never had the experience, is an enigma. There was a time I could not fathom living in a prison either. Now, as a veteran, I can subliminally embroil the conundrum further as you wonder "does that really happen?"
Cell Memory glimpses incarceration through my psyche's window of sarcasm as a state of mind in varying hues of orange turbulence.
In the early days of millennia 2000, millions of bankers, brokers and government agents swindled billions of dollars by inflating a financial bubble with fraudulent mortgages. In 2008, when the bubble burst and the mortgage rackets exploded into the economic cataclysm called The Great Recession, only a handful of people went to prison. I was one of them. My criminal conviction chronicled in my first book, Fractals of Deception, will not live again in this tome. This book is about the five years I spent in prison as a result.
A "nickel" is a long prison sentence for a non-violent, first offender without a victim. But, I was one of the sacrificial lambs that the government needed at the time to take the fall for the "big boys" who had looted the global money supply. In the macrocosm, five years is a blink of an eye; in my personal cosmos, it was a hefty slice of my adult life that abruptly redefined me from a successful businesswoman to a convicted criminal.
Prison rightfully confines and punishes the dangerous among us. It is also a refuge for certain of the disenfranchised, a retreat for substance abusers, an asylum for the mentally ill, a shelter for the homeless and campaign rhetoric for a "tough on crime" wannabe prosecutor. Most of the women whom I had met burnt their bridges by petty drug-related crimes and appeared reflective, contrite and repentant. I was not one of those types of prisoners. I fought my conviction the entire time and remained pissed off, full of rage and angst from day one of my incarceration. My legal work allowed me to keep my head in the sand and be "of" the environment, not "in" it. For this reason, my prison time was a degrading, colossal inconvenience, a nuisance, and distraction; not a sanctuary for rehearsing a mea culpa.
The only upside of my prison experience was the freedom from the chains of self- idolatry. The humiliation of seeing my name in the headlines as a convicted, imprisoned criminal was a sobering yet welcoming liberation from caring what others think of me. Life is different after a sojourn through the abyss leaving no one to impress and nothing to hide. My plight for criminal justice continues, but the optics of my cell memories live here in illustrative perpetuity.
