My name is Eddie Alan Nunnelley, Jr., but people who know me call me Alan. I’m a 48-year-old heterosexual male, 6 ft. 2 in. tall, 200 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes. I was born under a hot summer sun in Childress, Texas, less than two years prior to the J.F.K. assassination.
ANCIENT HISTORY
My high school years were spent in Garland, Texas, where I was sort of an anti-student at Lakeview High School. Academia wasn’t my strong suit so I quit school, earned a G.E.D., joined the U.S. Air Force, and married one of my high school sweethearts—the wrong one. Well, were wrong for each other, anyway.
We went our separate ways none too soon, but I continued, zombie-like, in a cycle of toxic relationships for the next two decades. My dysfunctional way of life is also evident in my diverse work history. There aren’t many jobs I haven’t tried—including a few of the illegal ones. I’m not proud of any of that, but I did at least become more stable with age. Prior to my latest trouble with the law, I spent some years in the hardwood flooring trade, and that opened the door to a year-long job managing a furniture refinishing project for a hotel. The job I most loved, though, was as Captain of a small cruise boat for a resort on Lake Texoma. I would have done that for half the money.
Nearing forty, I had the life I thought I wanted; I had plenty of money, sex, drugs, and no looking back. I was a “functioning addict,” and by the standards of myself and my circle of associates, I was something of a success.
Then 9/11 came. Business dried up, jobs and money disappeared, and I sank into a quagmire of drugs, crime, and craziness that I couldn’t extricate myself from. Financial and relationship stresses made my mental illness worse, and I wasn’t getting the treatment I needed. Finally, I ended up in prison on charges of Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon and other things. I didn’t know what had hit me.
It took awhile until I was able to pick myself up and begin to piece myself back together. When I did, I started to question who I was and how I had reached the state I was in. I would have described myself as a fairly articulate “regular guy” who was basically as harmless as a box of kittens. Surely, I was neither a brute nor a mania, yet here I was, in prison for violent crimes. How had it happened?
There aren’t as many rehabilitative programs within the prison system as one might hope, but there is some useful material if one is willing to seek it out and make use of it. After a couple of years, I got my present prison job as a teacher’s aide in the CHANGES class, (that’s “Changing Habits and Achieving Goals to Enable Success”) and found some good insights there.
What prison does offer a lot of is time to think, so I spent a lot of my time thinking. It took time, and honesty, and it wasn’t pretty, but I looked back over my prior life and the many mistakes I had made. I had hurt a lot of people over the years starting with the four children I had helped create but hadn’t been a father to. Then there is the rest of my family, my friens, and even if only indirectly, co-workers and taxpayers at large. I regret every bit of it, but can I do better than that? Yes, with what I know now, I can.
The First Book: ALI3NIZM
As part of the process of finding answers to my questions and of re-casting myself I a more positive mold, I began to write. What eventually emerged was an odd sort of memoir. The first part was largely a chronicle of my life up to and including prison, and of the gradual metamorphosis of my thinking about myself and the world. But this is not your average “Gee, I screwed up—don’t let this happen to you” sort of convict testimonial. This is a no-holds-barred personal expose, sort of a psycho-spiritual autopsy. I also describe my encounter in 2002 with a source of information so compelling that it has radically changed my view of and approach to life. The latter part of this memoir then consists of my attempt to express this transformative knowledge in an accessible form. I completed the manuscript in 2006.
While dealing with the impossible logistics of submitting a manuscript from prison and waiting for replies from publishers, I kept continually discovering books and articles that supported or amplified on those themes I’d written about in my manuscript. Dozens of unlooked-for sources just sort of fell into my lap. It seemed too much to be coincidence. This new material quickly piled up, so in 2008, I decided to incorporate much of it into an expanded and annotated version of my original manuscript under a new title.
What I describe in the second part of the book is a complete paradigm of life, so inspiring, that I feel obliged to share it with an many people as I can, but the most novel and hopeful portions are the practical strategies that stem from the basic principles. Especially now, with the situation around the world and in every area of human life rapidly worsening and approaching crisis, we desperately need new ways of doing things. We need to upgrade to a sustainable values system, and I believe that the principles and approaches described in the book could help to turn things around for us. I’m eager to put these ideas into practice and see how well they do, and I have a practical plan to do that which I’ll implement as soon as I’m no longer freedom challenged.
The Cost of Complacency
My own history, my downfall, my experiences in prison, and my present work with the CHANGES program, afford me an unusual insight into the mind and motivations of the ordinary convict, why they offend, and why they so often re-offend and return to prison. Some of these people, it must be said, just aren’t right and are never going to be right. Many have one ire-mediable defect or another, whether it’s labeled habituation, sociopathy, or some other kind of mental illness. But most are fairly ordinary people, some brighter than others, who have learned negative beliefs and antisocial habits of thinking, coping, and behaving. Most of them lack maturity, real self-security and perseverance, are habitually self-focused, and come to prison with a distinct entitlement mentality. They’ve formed the habit of seeing “the system” (society) as a the adversary.
Provided that they can be led to see their errors and that they want to change, they are, mostly, capable of reform. Here, motivation is a crucial consideration. Reform, however, is both a personal and a social process. New views and ethics have to be practiced successfully in order to become ingrained. Cultivating empathy, generosity, and charity requires opportunities to help others without any expectation of direct return. The satisfaction derived provides its own reinforcement, and the new behavior soon becomes a new habit. Personal responsibility in inculcated though the pressures of accountability imposed through real relationships with real people.
Today there are, by some estimates, over 1.6 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons. The great majority of those will eventually be released into the population at large with only a few dollars, limited supervision, inadequate preparation for employment, and too few of the basic interpersonal and life-skills that might make it possible for them to maintain themselves and build positive lives for themselves in today’s society. These factors, along with other negative external influences, often combine to impel ex-cons to re-offend. And take it from me—once you’ve been in prison and survived, the threat of incarceration alone is no longer a deterrent to future anti-social behavior.
The fact is that the current practice of releasing ex-cons unprepared to manage themselves or meet their own needs, only serves to promote recidivism—it’s an open invitation to return to Criminal College. The policy only benefits employees and stakeholders of the prison-industrial complex. Its effects are unhealthy for society overall.
Society has an obvious interest n finding real ways to reduce the incidence of ex-cons returning to the Big House. Lip service is cheap, but the national average of $24,000 per convict per year to warehouse people isn’t so cheap. Yet a number of programs have shown that it takes much less money to simply change the offenders’ behavior instead of keeping them in prison.
My first step, as soon as I’m released, is to establish a non-profit organization that would help ex-offenders to build positive, productive lives for themselves and avoid falling back into criminal behavior, and which would also benefit society more directly by employing the huge human resource potential represented by so many releasees to help with community service projects and other volunteer activities.
The core of this enterprise will be a re-entry program established in a sort of halfway-house in a rural setting. There, former inmates will be able to provide for their own basic needs through small-scale organic market gardening, animal husbandry, and some sorts of “green” manufacturing. Initially, this will probably focus on the manufacturing, installation and maintenance of renewable energy systems. Along with these basic responsibilities, program participants will also contribute their service to various charitable efforts such as Habitat for Humanity projects. We’re hoping to partner with a number if philanthropic and socially-beneficial organizations life heifer.org, networkforgood.org, organicvalley.coop, and pointsoflightinstitute.org, if they’ll have us.
At the same time, residents will undertake other programs to develop life-, social-, and job-skills, and will gradually ease back into full outside employment, cultivating critical community relationships in the process.
I think that if the “outcasts of society,” ex-convicts, can independently support themselves, even in a depressed economy, can improve and reform themselves, and prove themselves to be a valuable, constructive members of society, they might well inspire and motivate countless others. All we need is the opportunity.
This idea will take time, work, and resources to realize, the most critical of which will be a plot of rural property to start out with. The long-range plans calls for about 160 acres in order to have a completely sustainable, self-supporting mini-farm, but we could probably get started with as few as forty acres. Land donated by some generous individual or organization would be ideal, though a zero-interest, long-term, lease-to-own arrangement with a trust might be an option. Also, there’s only so much research and planning that I can do alone and behind bars. I’ll have to be paroled to actually implement any of this. Any help on that score would be very welcome.
If I fail to make parole when I first become eligible, I intend to use the extra “time” to file several novel court claims which should challenge the constitutionality of some statutes and procedures the currently fetter criminal defendants. One example is the following:
All across the nation of prisons, inmates are paid for their labor in dollars. (I realize there are several pro and con arguments on this issue but those are off point right now.) One reason for this is that judges nowadays sentence offenders to only a term of incarceration rather than a term of labor as in the old days. Without a sentence of labor, the practice of coercing a prisoner to work against his will and without some sort of compensation violates the U.S. Constitution’s anti-slavery clause. Yet Texas is doing exactly that.
The constitution also forbids making any law or rule that may “impair the obligation of contracts,” and it’s from this angle that I’m attacking the policy. The claim will demonstrate how the state is using coercion, along with substituting worthless “work-time-credits” for money, to compel all Texas inmates’ participation in an unconscionable contract, which is illegal. Consequently, the respective convictions are void, and these issues are addressable in a non-statutory Habeas Corpus.
Another example is a Constitutional error that can be found in the arraignment process of every person in America who is accused of a crime. The court will read the formal charge and ask the defendant, “Do you understand the charge?” Being under duress and not wanting to alienate the just, defendants will usually answer in the affirmative.
There are several problems with this procedure, but the primary concern is that the statutorially prescribed admonishment from the court is taken by virtually everyone as a satisfaction of the State’s 6th Amendment duty to inform the defendant of the nature of the accusation. We contend, however, that is does not do so, that the legal system has never adequately define the “nature” (or essence) of the charge, and that it should properly include a good deal more information than the minimal amount required by the statute, beginning with the Article III judicial power under which the court hears a statutory case. Again this claim would be presented in a Habeas Corpus.
There are numerous other issues that can and should be addressed, but my larger intent here is to write a book about the Criminal Justice system, from commission of a crim to sentence expiration, using the results of the court claims in support of the narrative. Ten or twenty years ago, such a book wouldn’t have been viable, but with the current economic downturn and the possibility of an associated increase in the crime rate, this information may now be important to people. You may know people, even friends or loved ones, who might wind up in the unfortunate position that I have found myself in. In that case, wouldn’t you want them to know what to expect?
There’s a stereotypical image of prison inmates, endlessly recycled by the popular media, that no only presents convicts in a wholly and exaggeratedly negative light, but lumps all convicts together into a faceless, homogenous mass. The fact of the matter is much more complex. The prison population is a reflection of the country’s overall population. While I haven’t met any princes or saints in here, I can tell you that not all of these people are slope-browed imbeciles, amoral deviants, treacherous con-men, or vicious thugs. There’s big money and political power in the fear-mongering, hate-pimping propaganda, but no truth to the propagandists’ nation of a global “criminal type.” While there are some monsters here, our prisoners are by and large just people who have made mistakes and broken the law in the process, just as you do every time you back your car out of the driveway and into the street. (Yep, it’s reckless driving. Check it out.) At any rate, they’re individuals and should be considered as individuals. Most of them, even if flawed, are salvageable human beings.
Acknowledgements
Personally, I’d like to believe that I’m reforming and re-creating myself, and influencing others in a positive way in my attempt to right a few wrongs—some of which I egret to say that I myself have perpetrated. In that spirit, I’d like to publicly extend my thanks, apologies, or forgiveness to the following people for the various things that I think of as significant. They may be large or small things, the details of which are between that person and myself. I want these people to know that they have my respect, that I appreciate the role each has played in bringing me to where I am in my life today, and that they deserve some share in the credit for my future successes.
Abelin, Jim Nunnelley, Patrick
Allen, Matt Nunnelley, Sean
Bond, Jeff Nunnelley, Whitney
Bucko, Courtney Nunnelley, The Family
Carson, Jane Pollan, Tanya
Carson, Randy Rankin, Lynn
Cheek, Teresa Ray, Benton
Corley, Kelly Ray, The Family
Doucette, Tim Rochelle, Christine
Gibbs, Clifford Smalley, Dixie Gladys
Hale, Kathy Smalley, Glenn
Jewel, Stephanie Stubbs, Kerry
Jourden, Cole Talley, Penny
Jourden, Diane Wayne, Kim
Moorman, Amanda Wrinkle, The Family
Moorman, Jill
If I have forgotten anyone or if you have comments or questions about this post, I invite you to contact me via U.S. snail mail at the address below:
Eddie A. Nunnelley, Jr.ANCIENT HISTORY
My high school years were spent in Garland, Texas, where I was sort of an anti-student at Lakeview High School. Academia wasn’t my strong suit so I quit school, earned a G.E.D., joined the U.S. Air Force, and married one of my high school sweethearts—the wrong one. Well, were wrong for each other, anyway.
We went our separate ways none too soon, but I continued, zombie-like, in a cycle of toxic relationships for the next two decades. My dysfunctional way of life is also evident in my diverse work history. There aren’t many jobs I haven’t tried—including a few of the illegal ones. I’m not proud of any of that, but I did at least become more stable with age. Prior to my latest trouble with the law, I spent some years in the hardwood flooring trade, and that opened the door to a year-long job managing a furniture refinishing project for a hotel. The job I most loved, though, was as Captain of a small cruise boat for a resort on Lake Texoma. I would have done that for half the money.
Nearing forty, I had the life I thought I wanted; I had plenty of money, sex, drugs, and no looking back. I was a “functioning addict,” and by the standards of myself and my circle of associates, I was something of a success.
Then 9/11 came. Business dried up, jobs and money disappeared, and I sank into a quagmire of drugs, crime, and craziness that I couldn’t extricate myself from. Financial and relationship stresses made my mental illness worse, and I wasn’t getting the treatment I needed. Finally, I ended up in prison on charges of Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon and other things. I didn’t know what had hit me.
It took awhile until I was able to pick myself up and begin to piece myself back together. When I did, I started to question who I was and how I had reached the state I was in. I would have described myself as a fairly articulate “regular guy” who was basically as harmless as a box of kittens. Surely, I was neither a brute nor a mania, yet here I was, in prison for violent crimes. How had it happened?
There aren’t as many rehabilitative programs within the prison system as one might hope, but there is some useful material if one is willing to seek it out and make use of it. After a couple of years, I got my present prison job as a teacher’s aide in the CHANGES class, (that’s “Changing Habits and Achieving Goals to Enable Success”) and found some good insights there.
What prison does offer a lot of is time to think, so I spent a lot of my time thinking. It took time, and honesty, and it wasn’t pretty, but I looked back over my prior life and the many mistakes I had made. I had hurt a lot of people over the years starting with the four children I had helped create but hadn’t been a father to. Then there is the rest of my family, my friens, and even if only indirectly, co-workers and taxpayers at large. I regret every bit of it, but can I do better than that? Yes, with what I know now, I can.
The First Book: ALI3NIZM
As part of the process of finding answers to my questions and of re-casting myself I a more positive mold, I began to write. What eventually emerged was an odd sort of memoir. The first part was largely a chronicle of my life up to and including prison, and of the gradual metamorphosis of my thinking about myself and the world. But this is not your average “Gee, I screwed up—don’t let this happen to you” sort of convict testimonial. This is a no-holds-barred personal expose, sort of a psycho-spiritual autopsy. I also describe my encounter in 2002 with a source of information so compelling that it has radically changed my view of and approach to life. The latter part of this memoir then consists of my attempt to express this transformative knowledge in an accessible form. I completed the manuscript in 2006.
While dealing with the impossible logistics of submitting a manuscript from prison and waiting for replies from publishers, I kept continually discovering books and articles that supported or amplified on those themes I’d written about in my manuscript. Dozens of unlooked-for sources just sort of fell into my lap. It seemed too much to be coincidence. This new material quickly piled up, so in 2008, I decided to incorporate much of it into an expanded and annotated version of my original manuscript under a new title.
What I describe in the second part of the book is a complete paradigm of life, so inspiring, that I feel obliged to share it with an many people as I can, but the most novel and hopeful portions are the practical strategies that stem from the basic principles. Especially now, with the situation around the world and in every area of human life rapidly worsening and approaching crisis, we desperately need new ways of doing things. We need to upgrade to a sustainable values system, and I believe that the principles and approaches described in the book could help to turn things around for us. I’m eager to put these ideas into practice and see how well they do, and I have a practical plan to do that which I’ll implement as soon as I’m no longer freedom challenged.
The Cost of Complacency
My own history, my downfall, my experiences in prison, and my present work with the CHANGES program, afford me an unusual insight into the mind and motivations of the ordinary convict, why they offend, and why they so often re-offend and return to prison. Some of these people, it must be said, just aren’t right and are never going to be right. Many have one ire-mediable defect or another, whether it’s labeled habituation, sociopathy, or some other kind of mental illness. But most are fairly ordinary people, some brighter than others, who have learned negative beliefs and antisocial habits of thinking, coping, and behaving. Most of them lack maturity, real self-security and perseverance, are habitually self-focused, and come to prison with a distinct entitlement mentality. They’ve formed the habit of seeing “the system” (society) as a the adversary.
Provided that they can be led to see their errors and that they want to change, they are, mostly, capable of reform. Here, motivation is a crucial consideration. Reform, however, is both a personal and a social process. New views and ethics have to be practiced successfully in order to become ingrained. Cultivating empathy, generosity, and charity requires opportunities to help others without any expectation of direct return. The satisfaction derived provides its own reinforcement, and the new behavior soon becomes a new habit. Personal responsibility in inculcated though the pressures of accountability imposed through real relationships with real people.
Today there are, by some estimates, over 1.6 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons. The great majority of those will eventually be released into the population at large with only a few dollars, limited supervision, inadequate preparation for employment, and too few of the basic interpersonal and life-skills that might make it possible for them to maintain themselves and build positive lives for themselves in today’s society. These factors, along with other negative external influences, often combine to impel ex-cons to re-offend. And take it from me—once you’ve been in prison and survived, the threat of incarceration alone is no longer a deterrent to future anti-social behavior.
The fact is that the current practice of releasing ex-cons unprepared to manage themselves or meet their own needs, only serves to promote recidivism—it’s an open invitation to return to Criminal College. The policy only benefits employees and stakeholders of the prison-industrial complex. Its effects are unhealthy for society overall.
Society has an obvious interest n finding real ways to reduce the incidence of ex-cons returning to the Big House. Lip service is cheap, but the national average of $24,000 per convict per year to warehouse people isn’t so cheap. Yet a number of programs have shown that it takes much less money to simply change the offenders’ behavior instead of keeping them in prison.
My first step, as soon as I’m released, is to establish a non-profit organization that would help ex-offenders to build positive, productive lives for themselves and avoid falling back into criminal behavior, and which would also benefit society more directly by employing the huge human resource potential represented by so many releasees to help with community service projects and other volunteer activities.
The core of this enterprise will be a re-entry program established in a sort of halfway-house in a rural setting. There, former inmates will be able to provide for their own basic needs through small-scale organic market gardening, animal husbandry, and some sorts of “green” manufacturing. Initially, this will probably focus on the manufacturing, installation and maintenance of renewable energy systems. Along with these basic responsibilities, program participants will also contribute their service to various charitable efforts such as Habitat for Humanity projects. We’re hoping to partner with a number if philanthropic and socially-beneficial organizations life heifer.org, networkforgood.org, organicvalley.coop, and pointsoflightinstitute.org, if they’ll have us.
At the same time, residents will undertake other programs to develop life-, social-, and job-skills, and will gradually ease back into full outside employment, cultivating critical community relationships in the process.
I think that if the “outcasts of society,” ex-convicts, can independently support themselves, even in a depressed economy, can improve and reform themselves, and prove themselves to be a valuable, constructive members of society, they might well inspire and motivate countless others. All we need is the opportunity.
This idea will take time, work, and resources to realize, the most critical of which will be a plot of rural property to start out with. The long-range plans calls for about 160 acres in order to have a completely sustainable, self-supporting mini-farm, but we could probably get started with as few as forty acres. Land donated by some generous individual or organization would be ideal, though a zero-interest, long-term, lease-to-own arrangement with a trust might be an option. Also, there’s only so much research and planning that I can do alone and behind bars. I’ll have to be paroled to actually implement any of this. Any help on that score would be very welcome.
If I fail to make parole when I first become eligible, I intend to use the extra “time” to file several novel court claims which should challenge the constitutionality of some statutes and procedures the currently fetter criminal defendants. One example is the following:
All across the nation of prisons, inmates are paid for their labor in dollars. (I realize there are several pro and con arguments on this issue but those are off point right now.) One reason for this is that judges nowadays sentence offenders to only a term of incarceration rather than a term of labor as in the old days. Without a sentence of labor, the practice of coercing a prisoner to work against his will and without some sort of compensation violates the U.S. Constitution’s anti-slavery clause. Yet Texas is doing exactly that.
The constitution also forbids making any law or rule that may “impair the obligation of contracts,” and it’s from this angle that I’m attacking the policy. The claim will demonstrate how the state is using coercion, along with substituting worthless “work-time-credits” for money, to compel all Texas inmates’ participation in an unconscionable contract, which is illegal. Consequently, the respective convictions are void, and these issues are addressable in a non-statutory Habeas Corpus.
Another example is a Constitutional error that can be found in the arraignment process of every person in America who is accused of a crime. The court will read the formal charge and ask the defendant, “Do you understand the charge?” Being under duress and not wanting to alienate the just, defendants will usually answer in the affirmative.
There are several problems with this procedure, but the primary concern is that the statutorially prescribed admonishment from the court is taken by virtually everyone as a satisfaction of the State’s 6th Amendment duty to inform the defendant of the nature of the accusation. We contend, however, that is does not do so, that the legal system has never adequately define the “nature” (or essence) of the charge, and that it should properly include a good deal more information than the minimal amount required by the statute, beginning with the Article III judicial power under which the court hears a statutory case. Again this claim would be presented in a Habeas Corpus.
There are numerous other issues that can and should be addressed, but my larger intent here is to write a book about the Criminal Justice system, from commission of a crim to sentence expiration, using the results of the court claims in support of the narrative. Ten or twenty years ago, such a book wouldn’t have been viable, but with the current economic downturn and the possibility of an associated increase in the crime rate, this information may now be important to people. You may know people, even friends or loved ones, who might wind up in the unfortunate position that I have found myself in. In that case, wouldn’t you want them to know what to expect?
There’s a stereotypical image of prison inmates, endlessly recycled by the popular media, that no only presents convicts in a wholly and exaggeratedly negative light, but lumps all convicts together into a faceless, homogenous mass. The fact of the matter is much more complex. The prison population is a reflection of the country’s overall population. While I haven’t met any princes or saints in here, I can tell you that not all of these people are slope-browed imbeciles, amoral deviants, treacherous con-men, or vicious thugs. There’s big money and political power in the fear-mongering, hate-pimping propaganda, but no truth to the propagandists’ nation of a global “criminal type.” While there are some monsters here, our prisoners are by and large just people who have made mistakes and broken the law in the process, just as you do every time you back your car out of the driveway and into the street. (Yep, it’s reckless driving. Check it out.) At any rate, they’re individuals and should be considered as individuals. Most of them, even if flawed, are salvageable human beings.
Acknowledgements
Personally, I’d like to believe that I’m reforming and re-creating myself, and influencing others in a positive way in my attempt to right a few wrongs—some of which I egret to say that I myself have perpetrated. In that spirit, I’d like to publicly extend my thanks, apologies, or forgiveness to the following people for the various things that I think of as significant. They may be large or small things, the details of which are between that person and myself. I want these people to know that they have my respect, that I appreciate the role each has played in bringing me to where I am in my life today, and that they deserve some share in the credit for my future successes.
Abelin, Jim Nunnelley, Patrick
Allen, Matt Nunnelley, Sean
Bond, Jeff Nunnelley, Whitney
Bucko, Courtney Nunnelley, The Family
Carson, Jane Pollan, Tanya
Carson, Randy Rankin, Lynn
Cheek, Teresa Ray, Benton
Corley, Kelly Ray, The Family
Doucette, Tim Rochelle, Christine
Gibbs, Clifford Smalley, Dixie Gladys
Hale, Kathy Smalley, Glenn
Jewel, Stephanie Stubbs, Kerry
Jourden, Cole Talley, Penny
Jourden, Diane Wayne, Kim
Moorman, Amanda Wrinkle, The Family
Moorman, Jill
If I have forgotten anyone or if you have comments or questions about this post, I invite you to contact me via U.S. snail mail at the address below:
ID # 1186691
Neal Unit
9055 Spur 591
Amarillo, TX 79107
