Jun 21, 2021

The Poignancy of Serving the Needs of a Student Who Enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative While Doing Time in a Texas Penitentiary

On a 97-degree day in August 1982, a hot and lonely and drugged Cicero Falkland ignored his bedridden grandmother’s exhortations to stay home.

 

He needed money. 

 

His little brother was hungry.

 

His father has been in prison for 16 years, his mother for seven.

 

His job pushing a broom for Safeway got Cicero nowhere near the money that he needed to feed and clothe the family. 

 

So Cicero Falkland departed the dilapidated family residence at 4:45 PM, giving himself plenty of time to survey an ample dinner crowd at a chicken shack a few blocks across I-75/Central Expressway in Dallas, Texas.  One dude, approximately 46 years old, looked vulnerable.  He was above average height, skinny, hands full of sacks of chicken and accompaniments.  Cicero was heavier, hands less burdened, carrying no sacks but wielding the great equalizer.

 

“Drop those sacks and give me your wallet,” directed Cicero.

 

The man dropped the sacks but panicked and stretched his hand out, found the barrel of Charles’s pistol, and then felt the explosion In his chest.  Whether some tugging action on the part of the victim or Charles’s independently moving fingers had caused the triggers to be pulled remains in dispute.

 

But having failed to abide by the provisions of probation for a burglary charge, and with a host of juvenile offenses on his record, Cicero was sent up in December 1982 for third degree murder, probation for the burglary charge was revoked, and he was incarcerated at a maximum security facility in West Texas, given by the standards of draconian Texas penal standards the relatively light sentence of Life with possibility of parole.

 

…………………………………………………………………………………

 

Cicero was among the first African American students to attend Thomas Jefferson Junior High School in North Dallas, bused in from his all-Black neighborhood near downtown Dallas.  He dropped out after his grade 7 year. 

 

In prison, Cicero found GED courses ill-taught and intimidating.  He mostly eschewed the minimal formal education classes that were offered but became an avid reader---  novels, political tracts, works of sociology.  He had a few rough incidents within his first six years  of incarceration .

Since then he has been a behaviorally model prisoner.  Nevertheless, he has been denied parole eight times, including recently, in May 2021.  Parole board members, of eight possible reasons typically cited, give “nature of offense” as the official reason for denial.  But victim’s rights weigh heavily in Texas, and for each of Cicero’s parole hearings, two and sometimes three members of the victim’s family have argued emotionally and emphatically against Cicero’s release.  Such objections are given heavy consideration and are very frequently decisive.

 

………………………………………………………………………………………

 

I first met Cicero in 1998 when I was doing research on a school run by a friend of mine from the Southern Methodist University (SMU) days in Dallas.  She had been a tutor of Cicero during our years at SMU, lost touch as she was starting her school, then reengaged when she found out that he had been sentenced to prison.  Cicero has had little family support and now has none;  my friend has been Cicero’s main human contact on the outside all of these years.  I also have kept in contact during the new century and have recently adopted an attorney’s role in the case, endeavoring to find the best possible strategy for overcoming the objections of the victim’s family and for presenting the most vigorous case for Cicero’s successful prospects upon release.

 

Cicero is well-read in certain fields but his vocabulary is still a work in progress.  His writing is error-laden and grammatically challenged.  His mathematic skills do not go beyond addition and subtraction, and even those are still to be developed fully.  I have now for Cicero’s use worked up a special adaptation of the mathematics chapter in my book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, which covers fifteen academic subjects to give citizens the education that they never attained in public school institutions.

 

I also have sent Cicero my English usage chapter and have assigned him essays of utmost topical interest to him, including making his best case for release from prison.

 

 I find myself in the familiar position of providing the knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education that Cicero never got---  as most of my students are not getting---  in the public schools.

 

For Cicero, who will either gain some time to live freely or continue to endure an adulthood and then death entirely within prison walls, the acquisition of knowledge and skill to work and function successfully is a life or death matter.

 

But then that is true for everyone, especially those most academically abused by the wretched Minneapolis Public Schools and other systems for which MPS is a salient example.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No comments:

Post a Comment