nassauco.htm

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
   <TITLE>From Nassau County Jail</TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="NAMBLA's goal is to end the oppression of men and boyswho have mutually consensual relationships.  Our membership is open to everyone sympathetic to man/boy love in particular and sexual freedom in general.">
   <META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="NAMBLA, NORTH AMERICAN MAN/BOY LOVE ASSOCIATION, MAN/BOY LOVE, NAMBLA BULLETIN, MARTIN SWITHINBANK, PRISON, PRISONER">

   <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Mozilla/3.03Gold (Win16; U) [Netscape]">
</HEAD>
<BODY TEXT="#000000" BGCOLOR="#FFFFE8" LINK="#0000EE" VLINK="#551A8B" ALINK="#FF0000">

<H2 ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#0000FF">FROM NASSAU COUNTY JAIL</FONT></H2>

<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Dear Renato,</FONT></B></P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">You ask what kind of place this is. Well, maximum
security, to start with. &nbsp;Nobody has ever escaped! &nbsp;Between me
and freedom, are at least twelve locked barred gates, many of them manned
remotely by officers in bullet-proof glass rooms. No daylight. None! No
fresh air! None! No darkness, ever ~ lights on 24 hours a day. Almost never
quiet, the yelling, loud music and the clang of doors contrast with the
sharp tapping of keys.</FONT></B></P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Living in a tiny box 23 hours a day, with no
exercise, no weather, no reality, fluorescent light glaring down, it's
like something out of 1984 or 2001!</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Modern, yes, not Dickensian one bit. But heartless,
cold and functional, cold cold stone and hard hard steel bars, no wood
anywhere, cold hard tile walls, no privacy, on view like monkeys at the
zoo 24 hours a day.</FONT></B></P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Frightening. The violence is always there,
lurking just below the surface. Sometimes it erupts, and then blood is
everywhere, staining floors and walls with its startling redness contrasted
to the cold unemotional concrete and steel, and someone goes to the hospital
to be patched up.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Remotely temperature-controlled, always the
same. Whether a foot of snow outside, or a blazing hot August day, you
never know it inside, we live like laboratory animals, not knowing, and
unreal, physically and emotionally, like a vision of the future, but a
dark and horrible vision of what the future holds.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Para-military. Obey orders instantly, and without
complaining. Do what they tell you, even if it's wrong. Don't step out
of line, or risk the dreaded &quot;lock-in&quot;. Do this. Do that. Dress.
Undress. Go here. Go there. Move it!</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Humiliation. Degradation. Deliberate putting-down.
Cruel and deliberate meanness of some (fortunately not many) officers.
Arbitrary orders. Heartless commands that trample feelings underfoot. Sudden
inspection shake-downs by SWAT teams, looking for weapons and drugs, but
in the process overturning treasured personal possessions, often in a calculatedly
unpitying manner.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Oppressive. Depressive. Terrorifying at times.
Distressing. Wearisome. Frustrating. No individuality. No liquor. No sex.
No Love. No care for fellow-man. Pervading sense of unreality (because
no weather, no trees, no flowers, no air). Deflated persona, reduced to
a cipher with attendant loss of self-esteem by everything, but especially
by wearing only shapeless blue cotton uniforms so you blend into the faceless
mass.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Virtually no personal possessions. Strictly
limited number of books and magazines. No razors, scissors, even table
knives, eat like a baby with one spoon for everything. Bad institutional
food, and never enough of it. Always a gnawing sense of hunger. You cannot
fill up with food from the inmate Commissary, because it's only once a
week with spending limited, and either you don't have enough money to spend,
or else it's a choice between communication (paper, pens, carbon, stamped
envelopes, file folders and suchlike), or coffee and cake, and communication
always wins out in that battle, because the mail must go through.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Mail is a desperate, vital life-line to the
outside, to sanity, to the real world out there, to people that matter,
people that care about you, and ~ sometimes ~ even love you. Mail-call
every morning is the greatest high-spot of the day, raising your spirits
if letters from friends are there, casting one into the fearsome depths
if nobody bothered to write that day.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">With the food so unappetizing, so tepid or
even downright cold (because served nearly an hour after it's cooked),
all jumbled together on a tiny stainless-steel plate, cake, cabbage, and
kielbasa interfolded on one another, with bread soaked in dirty cabbage-water,
you lose weight constantly, down 30 to 40 pounds in just a few months,
uniform waist-size ever-dropping.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Impersonal unconcerned medical service ~ when
the doctor is &quot;in&quot; ~ you could easily die if you were struck
with appendicitis or a heart attack. Even worse dental work, no repairs
or construction, only tooth pulling so you lose a tooth forever, and a
seven day wait at times even for that.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Visits are wonderful, but unbearably short.
And when the warm visitor leaves, the repression returns ~ instantly! Strip
search! Completely nude, check mouth, ears, hair, underarms, soles of feet
and rear end, and every piece of clothing and shoes. Ultimately humiliating
and degrading, treated like a thing, not a person.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">So what is jail like, you ask?</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Inhuman, unreal, impersonal, frightening, diminishing,
cruel, heartless ~ like every prison movie you ever saw, except not dark,
dingy and dirty, but ~ on the contrary ~ intimately sterile, bare, super-clean,
over-bright, glacial, frigid in every sense. 1984 is here already!</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">And for what reason is all this punishment?
(For, mark my words, being here is punishment, even though I am guilty
of no crime, just as in all totalitarian countries.)</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Just because I looked after, loved and cared
for several boys over a number of years, boys who were my good friends
as I was theirs; and allegedly allowed that love to develop naturally into
physical affection (for, remember, here in Amerika hugging is against the
law).</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">They're supposedly being &quot;protected&quot;.
&nbsp;From what? And from whom?</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">They neither want to be, nor did they ask to
be &quot;protected&quot; from their grown-up friends. They only want to
be protected from the efflorescent evil of over-ambitious detectives and
DA's who seek promotion, publicity, and political advancement with utter
disregard for the kids' feelings or the ruination of their lives.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">For boys and men alike, police intervention
into their friendships is a total disaster, even if, later, charges are
dismissed. The damage to both is irreparable. Nevertheless, of course,
I hope this harm is minimized by the authorities dropping this senseless
prosecution of my friends and myself and avoiding the many many months
of media-sensationalized show- trials that will otherwise be the inevitable,
ghastly and traumatic result.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Let us pray that this, at least, can be achieved.</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Affectionally,</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Martin</FONT></B><BR>
</P>

<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

<P><FONT COLOR="#804040">from <I><A HREF="bulletin.htm">The NAMBLA Bulletin</A></I>,
Vol. 3, No. 4 (May, 1982), Pg. 4. </FONT></P>

<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

<P><FONT COLOR="#804040">Click here for information about <A HREF="prisoner.htm">what
you can do to help a prisoner</A>. Click here for A. Shneur Horowitz' <A HREF="crimjust.htm">The
Prison Experience</A>. </FONT></P>

<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

<P><A HREF="select.htm"><IMG SRC="m0p7nau7.gif" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=58 WIDTH=58></A><FONT COLOR="#804040">Copyright
&copy; NAMBLA, 1997. All rights reserved. </FONT></P>

</BODY>
</HTML>
	<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
	<HTML>
	<HEAD>
	<TITLE>From Nassau County Jail</TITLE>
	<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="NAMBLA's goal is to end the oppression of men and boyswho have mutually consensual relationships. Our membership is open to everyone sympathetic to man/boy love in particular and sexual freedom in general.">
	<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="NAMBLA, NORTH AMERICAN MAN/BOY LOVE ASSOCIATION, MAN/BOY LOVE, NAMBLA BULLETIN, MARTIN SWITHINBANK, PRISON, PRISONER">

	<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Mozilla/3.03Gold (Win16; U) [Netscape]">
	</HEAD>
	<BODY TEXT="#000000" BGCOLOR="#FFFFE8" LINK="#0000EE" VLINK="#551A8B" ALINK="#FF0000">

	<H2 ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#0000FF">FROM NASSAU COUNTY JAIL</FONT></H2>

	<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Dear Renato,</FONT></B></P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">You ask what kind of place this is. Well, maximum
	security, to start with.  Nobody has ever escaped!  Between me
	and freedom, are at least twelve locked barred gates, many of them manned
	remotely by officers in bullet-proof glass rooms. No daylight. None! No
	fresh air! None! No darkness, ever ~ lights on 24 hours a day. Almost never
	quiet, the yelling, loud music and the clang of doors contrast with the
	sharp tapping of keys.</FONT></B></P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Living in a tiny box 23 hours a day, with no
	exercise, no weather, no reality, fluorescent light glaring down, it's
	like something out of 1984 or 2001!</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Modern, yes, not Dickensian one bit. But heartless,
	cold and functional, cold cold stone and hard hard steel bars, no wood
	anywhere, cold hard tile walls, no privacy, on view like monkeys at the
	zoo 24 hours a day.</FONT></B></P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Frightening. The violence is always there,
	lurking just below the surface. Sometimes it erupts, and then blood is
	everywhere, staining floors and walls with its startling redness contrasted
	to the cold unemotional concrete and steel, and someone goes to the hospital
	to be patched up.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Remotely temperature-controlled, always the
	same. Whether a foot of snow outside, or a blazing hot August day, you
	never know it inside, we live like laboratory animals, not knowing, and
	unreal, physically and emotionally, like a vision of the future, but a
	dark and horrible vision of what the future holds.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Para-military. Obey orders instantly, and without
	complaining. Do what they tell you, even if it's wrong. Don't step out
	of line, or risk the dreaded "lock-in". Do this. Do that. Dress.
	Undress. Go here. Go there. Move it!</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Humiliation. Degradation. Deliberate putting-down.
	Cruel and deliberate meanness of some (fortunately not many) officers.
	Arbitrary orders. Heartless commands that trample feelings underfoot. Sudden
	inspection shake-downs by SWAT teams, looking for weapons and drugs, but
	in the process overturning treasured personal possessions, often in a calculatedly
	unpitying manner.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Oppressive. Depressive. Terrorifying at times.
	Distressing. Wearisome. Frustrating. No individuality. No liquor. No sex.
	No Love. No care for fellow-man. Pervading sense of unreality (because
	no weather, no trees, no flowers, no air). Deflated persona, reduced to
	a cipher with attendant loss of self-esteem by everything, but especially
	by wearing only shapeless blue cotton uniforms so you blend into the faceless
	mass.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Virtually no personal possessions. Strictly
	limited number of books and magazines. No razors, scissors, even table
	knives, eat like a baby with one spoon for everything. Bad institutional
	food, and never enough of it. Always a gnawing sense of hunger. You cannot
	fill up with food from the inmate Commissary, because it's only once a
	week with spending limited, and either you don't have enough money to spend,
	or else it's a choice between communication (paper, pens, carbon, stamped
	envelopes, file folders and suchlike), or coffee and cake, and communication
	always wins out in that battle, because the mail must go through.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Mail is a desperate, vital life-line to the
	outside, to sanity, to the real world out there, to people that matter,
	people that care about you, and ~ sometimes ~ even love you. Mail-call
	every morning is the greatest high-spot of the day, raising your spirits
	if letters from friends are there, casting one into the fearsome depths
	if nobody bothered to write that day.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">With the food so unappetizing, so tepid or
	even downright cold (because served nearly an hour after it's cooked),
	all jumbled together on a tiny stainless-steel plate, cake, cabbage, and
	kielbasa interfolded on one another, with bread soaked in dirty cabbage-water,
	you lose weight constantly, down 30 to 40 pounds in just a few months,
	uniform waist-size ever-dropping.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Impersonal unconcerned medical service ~ when
	the doctor is "in" ~ you could easily die if you were struck
	with appendicitis or a heart attack. Even worse dental work, no repairs
	or construction, only tooth pulling so you lose a tooth forever, and a
	seven day wait at times even for that.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Visits are wonderful, but unbearably short.
	And when the warm visitor leaves, the repression returns ~ instantly! Strip
	search! Completely nude, check mouth, ears, hair, underarms, soles of feet
	and rear end, and every piece of clothing and shoes. Ultimately humiliating
	and degrading, treated like a thing, not a person.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">So what is jail like, you ask?</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Inhuman, unreal, impersonal, frightening, diminishing,
	cruel, heartless ~ like every prison movie you ever saw, except not dark,
	dingy and dirty, but ~ on the contrary ~ intimately sterile, bare, super-clean,
	over-bright, glacial, frigid in every sense. 1984 is here already!</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">And for what reason is all this punishment?
	(For, mark my words, being here is punishment, even though I am guilty
	of no crime, just as in all totalitarian countries.)</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Just because I looked after, loved and cared
	for several boys over a number of years, boys who were my good friends
	as I was theirs; and allegedly allowed that love to develop naturally into
	physical affection (for, remember, here in Amerika hugging is against the
	law).</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">They're supposedly being "protected".
	From what? And from whom?</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">They neither want to be, nor did they ask to
	be "protected" from their grown-up friends. They only want to
	be protected from the efflorescent evil of over-ambitious detectives and
	DA's who seek promotion, publicity, and political advancement with utter
	disregard for the kids' feelings or the ruination of their lives.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">For boys and men alike, police intervention
	into their friendships is a total disaster, even if, later, charges are
	dismissed. The damage to both is irreparable. Nevertheless, of course,
	I hope this harm is minimized by the authorities dropping this senseless
	prosecution of my friends and myself and avoiding the many many months
	of media-sensationalized show- trials that will otherwise be the inevitable,
	ghastly and traumatic result.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Let us pray that this, at least, can be achieved.</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Affectionally,</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<P><B><FONT COLOR="#804040">Martin</FONT></B><BR>
	</P>

	<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

	<P><FONT COLOR="#804040">from <I><A HREF="bulletin.htm">The NAMBLA Bulletin</A></I>,
	Vol. 3, No. 4 (May, 1982), Pg. 4. </FONT></P>

	<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

	<P><FONT COLOR="#804040">Click here for information about <A HREF="prisoner.htm">what
	you can do to help a prisoner</A>. Click here for A. Shneur Horowitz' <A HREF="crimjust.htm">The
	Prison Experience</A>. </FONT></P>

	<CENTER><P><IMG SRC="colorbar.gif" HEIGHT=3 WIDTH=600></P></CENTER>

	<P><A HREF="select.htm"><IMG SRC="m0p7nau7.gif" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=58 WIDTH=58></A><FONT COLOR="#804040">Copyright
	© NAMBLA, 1997. All rights reserved. </FONT></P>

	</BODY>
	</HTML>