The Poignancy of Having a Student 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December 1982 for third degree murder, probation for the burglary charge was
revoked, and he was incarcerated at a maximum security facility in West Texas,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.
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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 but since then 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.
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