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 need 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 bigger, hands less burden,
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 the victim’s tugging action 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, to 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, he 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 weighs heavily in Texas, and for each of Cicero’s parole hearings, two
nd sometimes three members of the victim’s family have argued emotionally and
vociferously against Cicero’s release. Such
objections are given heavy consideration and are very frequently decisive.
………………………………………………………………………………………
I
first met Cicero in 1998when 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 Charles during our
years at SMU, lost to uch as she was starting her school then reengaged when he
was 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, he best possible strategy for exploring indicating Cicero’s options 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 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 ow 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.
As
for so many of my students, I find myself in the position of providing the
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education that he never got--- as most of my students are not getting--- in the publ;ic schools.
For
Cicero, who will gain some time to live freely again or continue to endure an
adulthood and then death entirely within prison walls, this 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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