Life is Hard to Get Used To, Prisoners Remind Me

The concept of “getting used to” anything in life is an interesting one. Where I’ve encountered it, the implication is that, over time, one becomes more accustomed. The idea that anything can be gotten used to, in my opinion, is a kind of gut-reaction understanding of life that is not borne out by the experience of most people, no matter how long they live.

If you have a job you don’t like, then surely you know the feeling. And surely, you know it better the longer you’ve had the job. But, more ominously, maybe you even have a job you do like, and still, after a while, the days start to go by slower and slower, and somehow, despite the commonly held belief that people can “get used to things,” you’re enjoying your job a lot less — and the days are going by a lot slower — in your fifth year on the job than your first. How can this be explained, if time helps us get used to things?

Perhaps because of my relative privilege (despite which I’m broke for a significant portion of every month), I also notice a gut-reaction in myself, which assumes people in the worst conditions for the longest must have an even better knack for “getting used to” things than the rest of us. It’s an understandable assumption: How else could people survive in the worst of circumstances for so long, especially when even circumstances that are not the worst in life become hard to get used to, or grow boring? When even a good life is pretty hard and slow going? How else do people in prisons or war zones or homelessness survive, if there’s no getting used to it?

Indeed, we hear it all the time, especially in our empire, as we ravage the planet and build up our nuclear arsenals: Any of us who has expressed fear about such things to people in our lives has had someone meet us with the response that, “Human beings have a unique ability to adapt.”

I’m still skeptical. I think sometimes life is harder and harder to get used to every day.

You know the feeling, the one you get on those extra long days at work?

Even though we all have cell phones now, for some reason, there are still clocks in many of our offices. I’m sure you know the days I’m talking about, where you have to monitor how often you’re looking at the clock even though you have a phone, and you have to try to avoid looking at the time on your phone if someone texts you, because you don’t want to know how early it still is.

Sometimes you look at the clock on the wall at work, get a sense of the time, then do a bunch of tasks to try to burn more time, then you look back at the clock, and a lot less time has passed than you thought might’ve, and you get that sinking feeling.

There have been times where I looked at the clock, did 10 to 15 tasks just to keep myself going, returned to my desk, and I swear, when I looked back up at the clock, it was actually earlier than it was the last time I looked at it.

And I’m someone who likes my job. I’m not a huge fan of needing a job, and having to do it full-time, and getting paid an insultingly low amount. But, as jobs go, I really like my day job.

I’m just saying: Life is hard to get used to, and the days often go by slow and crushingly, even if you like your life. Maybe it’s just that getting used to things is not linear, or something like that.

And there are always the curveballs of sudden tragedy, health issues, family needs, whatever else you’re dealing with. We all deal with those experiences, and there’s no getting used to them. We learn to deal with those experiences by doing it, because we have to.

Some of our lives are filled with the pain of other people constantly, along with our own pain, and that’s hard to get used to as well.

And on top of everything else, we’re all going to die some day, and everyone we know and love is also going to die some day, and we have to live with the knowledge we will die some day. It’s dishearteningly the only thing we don’t have to figure out for ourselves. Something is going to get you, and you don’t know when or how. And no matter how long that’s been the case, it’s not any easier to get used to now than it’s been for anyone living before us.

So, on some level, while we hold this concept of “getting used to things,” I think most of us live every day learning the hard way that you can’t get used to any life, the best of lives or the worst. You’ll be lucky if you get used to anything in this life, in this world, for any sustained period of time.

I first met Milton Jones by chance. I was interviewing another prisoner in Ventress Prison, who happened to know Milton and that Milton had no money on his phone account, no postage stamps, and no regular contact with family members or anyone else on the outside at the time. His mother had died. He never knew his father well. He was an only child.

So, that prisoner let Milton use his phone account to call me, because he had a heart and thought Milton’s story was important, and that’s how I met Milton Jones.

Milton Jones was imprisoned for rape at 15. He claims he was innocent. He claims the judge held him until he was 16 so that he could more easily be tried as an adult. He was illiterate at the time. He claims his mother was a child prostitute, who had him when she was 15. He had no meaningful defense and no legal guardian in the state at the time. His trial was transferred to another county due to the alleged bias of press coverage in the county in which the crime occurred, but I can find no such press coverage in any archival systems. There is no DNA evidence against Milton. The Case Action Summary of the trial names “two Negroid pubic hairs” as evidence (language I’d not seen before in a legal document from recent history, even in Alabama), but there is no DNA match to Milton Jones from those pubic hairs. Milton claims he knows who actually did commit the crime. I tracked that person down. That person, who is much older than Milton, is now in prison for a murder in an unrelated case.

Milton taught himself how to read in prison but is now going blind due to poorly treated diabetes.

While I do believe Milton is innocent, I’m also forced to ponder the possibility that he was guilty (though we shouldn’t be forced to ponder that since, if the standard is “beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt,” he is not guilty). Even if he is guilty, I’ve got to be honest, this is a head scratcher.

I’ve been interviewing prisoners, mostly Alabama prisoners, for almost 15 years. Alabama has harsh sentencing laws and high rates of parole denial. So, the bar is high for finding a case that shocks me of all people.

I’ve interviewed multiple prisoners, convicted as adults, who committed multiple crimes as bad and worse than the one Milton is accused of committing as a child, and many of those prisoners didn’t get nearly as much time as Milton did for this single charge, of which he claims to be innocent, and has a strong case for innocence and wrongful conviction.

Perhaps the saddest part of Milton’s story is that all this happened in 1983. And Milton Jones is still in prison.

I met Milton in late 2019 or early 2020. I don’t remember for sure.

Over the years, any time I was working on a story about him, or information he gave me about a prison, or trying to reach out to people to get him help, he’d say, “Take your time with it,” “God will make it happen,” “Be patient,” “God will take care of it.”

I’ve always admired his steadfast faith in God, in other people, in himself, his patience within a life incomprehensibly painful. His case is as heartbreaking to me as any I’ve come across, saying a lot given how many people I’ve interviewed in this twisted system.

He’d go weeks or months without calling back sometimes, then reach out again. We always pick up where we left off like it was yesterday every time. He put me in touch with his only remaining family, with whom I remain close.

I’ve tried for seven years to get a lawyer to take an interest in his case, sent letters to various organizations, and tried to get journalists to cover it, with no success. Until recently.

The only times I got responses from experts, for years, they told me they couldn’t look into it without the trial transcript. So, for years, I reached out to the courthouse to get his trial transcript and never got a response. I tapped some colleagues, journalists and lawyers I’ve been in touch with who live in Alabama, to try to get his trial transcript from the courthouse, and had no success for all these years.

Then, one lawyer who I was consulting on another case, to whom I happened to mention all this, pressed the courthouse for a few days in a row and was able to finally get them to turn over his whole court file.

Guess what is curiously missing from the court file: The trial transcript.

To be clear, that means they either lost the transcript of the trial that resulted in this 40-plus-year conviction, or they never made one.

As a result, the lawyer I was in touch with, out of shock, took an interest in this case and has taken preliminary steps to getting more information and filing for post-conviction review.

Through all these years, Milton’s spirit has remained unwavering, his patience steady. Until recently.

A couple weeks ago, he called me, and after discussing some logistical matters and updates on his case, he asked me to call his younger cousin. She is in her early 40s now. They’ve never met in person, but she has been in touch with him much of her adult life. A big heart, appalled by his case, she made a point of staying connected with him after she grew up, based on the very little she was told. I merge the calls as he asked.

Moments in, Milton begins to tell us how grateful he is to us, for our love and friendship for him, for the connection to the outside world, and for the hope. Through sudden, heavy tears, he tells us how badly he wants to get out, needs to get out, how he’s trying to hang in there and hold it together but it’s getting harder every day, how desperately he wants to walk out of that prison.

It’s clear in his voice and in his tears that he feels in his bones an immediate need to walk out of the prison today, like he can’t imagine another day, that even after 40-something years, right now, even one more day sometimes just feels like a whole extra lifetime.

In seven years of interviewing him on and off about his absolutely tragic life story and the inhumane conditions in which he’s been imprisoned, and becoming close friends with him and his family, I had never heard him cry until this. These were some of the most painful tears I’ve ever heard in my life.

I’ve experienced versions of this with other sources too. We are in touch for years. Our conversations are cordial, and similar each time. They’ve been in 10 or 20 or 30 years or more. They seem comfortable speaking to me from the environment they’re in, no matter how much they don’t like it.

Then one day they call and they’re angry. Not at me, but they’re angry at the state. They’re angry at other prisoners around them. Sometimes they’re angry at their family, or friends in the free world who have abandoned them. They feel they need to get out as soon as possible, that, for whatever reason, today is the day they just can’t fucking take it anymore. It’s often unclear to me what is so different about those days compared to all the other horrendous ones.

Some days, no matter how long you’ve been in it or how “used to it” you’ve gotten, you wake up and it feels like your first day, and you have to try to get used to it all over again. You might spend years getting used to it and wake up to realize one day that suddenly, for whatever reason, you’re just not used to it at all anymore, all over again.

Again, please keep in mind: I am trying to describe something that is hard enough for everyone, no matter what your life is like, not just prisoners.

But now just imagine how much even harder it is if you’re in prison in Alabama, especially if you’ve been wrongly sentenced, and it’s been over 40 years.

Life is hard enough to get used to as it is, even if you don’t have it so bad. Our prisons are turning that feature of the human experience, how hard life is to get used to, into an outright torture mechanism that can hardly be controlled.

And I’m sorry to be melodramatic here. I really am. I typically try to just document the crises relentlessly and let the audience decide what they think about it. I try to share my feelings less the longer I write. And I’ll admit that this work gets lonely. So, I don’t know how meaningful this is to anyone. Sometimes I feel that I can’t fully relate to anyone in the free world anymore, because they’re not in prison, and that I also can’t fully relate to anyone in prison, because I’m in the free world.

And perhaps more importantly, we live in a world with nuclear weapons and climate change. And as someone who insists on the importance of covering prisons and people stripped of their freedom, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is a genocide going on right now, armed, funded, and diplomatically backed by our government, and that genocide is being committed against people who live in an open air prison. Poor children forced into a diabolical combination of confinement and displacement have been shot in the head and chest by advanced military snipers, kids who are as young and younger than Milton Jones was when he was sent to prison.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is: I know the tremendous amount of suffering going on in a tiny part of the world that not many people are paying attention to, which I’ve happened to stumble across, is not the most important thing going on in the world right now. I recognize that. In some ways, this is a uniquely scary time in history, and there’s plenty to be focused on.

I don’t mean to suggest that what I focus on is any sadder or more important than a lot of what’s going on right now.

But I do worry the people I interview, the stories I cover, because of how much tragedy is engulfing the world, are more and more easily forgotten at best, ignored at worst.

Who has time to think about random prisoners in Alabama with everything going on right now, whatever your political leanings?

I’m just begging you not to forget about these prisoners, to remember these people whose names you’ve never heard, these lives we steal and crush one day at a time for decades on end. I’ve mentioned this in previous posts, but I believe we are becoming too accustomed to the destruction of our neighbors’ lives.

Milton Jones is in Bibb Correctional Facility in Alabama. Post #freemiltonjones on your social media. Find him in the Alabama Department of Corrections Inmate Search. Write him letters of support if you can. Write the Board of Pardons and Paroles and tell them to give him a chance next time he comes up for a hearing. Write the DA’s office in Marengo County, and tell them you wonder if an enormously tragic mistake has been made. Contact me on Substack if you’d like more information about his case or would like to read his court file.

I hope he gets to walk out of that prison someday. But, no matter what, don’t forget about this child. Don’t forget what has been done to him. Remember that he is suffering unjustly as you read this. Wonder to yourself what he is doing right this second. Tell your friends and family.

What has been done to this child is disgusting. If it’s not criminal, it should be. And no one should ever have to get used to it.

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