About 5 PM on Monday, 25 May 1998, while most prisoners were eating their evening sausage and stale bread, Thomas Warner huddled alone in his cell and cut his throat. A friend found him sprawled on a blood-drenched cot. Friends are the rarest of treasurers, and rarer still in prison. It is reported that although bloody and weak, Warner was still alive and conscious when his friend found him and that Warner ordered his friend to let him die.
The friend rushed for help, but even though the authorities found him alive, Warner was allowed to bleed to death. For once we shouldn't fault the guards who were first on the scene. One of them used his palm to try to stem the bleeding. Another, a notorious man with the nickname, "Mark Furhman," made a genuine effort to help.
This appears to be another death which must be laid at the altar of the bloated, unprofessional and ineffectual prison medical staff. It is largely a gang of overpaid, self-important outcasts from the real medical professions. In the prison medical department, 32 dregs, drop-outs from the free-world's medical professions do the work of three people.
It is reported that the frighteningly unstable guard lieutenant who was called to the scene was as hysterical as a terrorized woman. Raving and screaming, he made a fool of himself, tossing his radio and shrieking. Prisoners thought he was having a breakdown. It took a captain to bring order to the situation.
Each year about 130 men die in Pennsylvania's prisons. About 40 are like this death, pointless suicides. Most prison deaths are, like this tragedy, caused by the evils of the "system," the system that we citizens condone.
Like 15,000 other Pennsylvania prisoners, Thomas Warner was a black man from Philadelphia. He "fell" when he was just 19 and he grew up in prison. He had green eyes and was given the nickname "Eyes." Warner was well liked by his peers and he went out of his way to obey rules and to keep on the good-side of the prison authorities. He was, as they say, a "model prisoner" and he was put into the prison "honor-block" for not causing "the man" (meaning the prison authorities) any bother.
Later, Wagner was moved outside the prison into a kind of "pre-release" status. By any measure, he should have been paroled. But, instead, the system which we citizens condone, punished him instead. The irrational Ridge Reich, in its mania against "crime," exploited the "Mudman" case in New Jersey. The political hacks subverted the Pennsylvania Parole Board into a sadistic pack of vindictive extremists who are almost as foul as Ride himself.
Obeying their Fuhrer's desires, the Board refused to parole thousands of deserving men including Warner. Like a good lap-dog for the dictator, Prison Commissioner Horn, who had helped to slither Ridge into power, revoked Warner's status to be outside the prison where he was being rehabilitated. The Ridge Reich is not about improving men or improving society. It is about causing pain. In "Eyes" Warner's case the Reich succeeded.
The model prisoner continued to kowtow to "the man," but he became more and more hopeless. He suffered more and more pain; the Ridge Reich loved it! Ridge's prison system is designed to crush not to cure.
Although he'd done everything that "the man" asked of him, Warner was turned down for parole time after time. His mother died. His grandmother died. Warner ached.
There was no help in the prison and certainly there was no hope. Warner got some drugs to try to ease his pain. It was his only comfort. One of his prisoner "friends" snitched on him just for the fun of it. The "system" does that to men. It turn's them into garbage.
"Eyes" failed a drug test and receive a prison misconduct. It's against the rules and the mania for a man to try to escape his pain. The misconduct guaranteed that Warner, already five years over his minimum would again be refused parole. Even in the insanity of prison, a human life should be worth more than a marijuana cigarette.
On Monday, 25 May 1998, while the other prisoners were trying to stomach their sausage, Thomas Warner, age 37, sliced his throat. His pain stopped.
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