Daisy: You’re so young.
Benjamin Button: Only on the outside.
Time is slipping away for Aaron Glascock. It daily slithers through his fingers, snakes unseen through the iron bars that keep Aaron confined, clandestinely floats by the security doors at the Federal prison’s entrance, and happily rises to freedom, leaving Aaron behind, stuck in a past he can’t reclaim, aging ever so quickly, growing older from the inside out.
Aaron’s youthful, twentyish-looking face, fit, athletic build, and boyish grin betray an inner age far beyond his 33 years. Now eleven years into a thirty year sentence for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, Aaron, native of Lebanon, Ky., and member of the church I pastor, remains hopeful that somehow, someway, his sentence will be commuted. Federal law requires that he serve at least 85% of his sentence. He will be 48 years old when he is released. Aaron’s last great hope is that President Barack Obama will commute the sentence to time served.
His case is curious in many ways and points to inconsistencies in the federal judicial system.
How is it that a young man in his early twenties, a law-abiding, church-going, well-rounded young man with a steady girlfriend, a young man who was a model pre-med student, a biology major at an academically respected Catholic school, Bellarmine University, how is it that he, in his last semester before graduating, gets charged with conspiracy to traffic in drugs? Perhaps the answer lies in a young man’s desire for a father’s relationship.
In the spring of 1998 Aaron’s father, who had not been a part of his son’s life for years, suddenly took an interest in him. He began taking Aaron, by then a college student at Bellarmine, to Florida when Aaron was on spring or summer break. His father was supposedly buying homes, making needed repairs, and selling them at a profit. Aaron would help with electrical wiring. He liked staying in a beach-front hotel and hanging out at the beach. He didn’t bother to ask where the money was coming from. Three such trips had been made when his father asked Aaron to do something curious: make a trip not to Hollywood, Florida, their usual destination, but to Gainesville, Florida, and travel not with his dad but with his father’s friend. They were to start working on repairing homes until the elder Glascock could arrive.
The first night in Gainesville, early on the morning of March 11, 1999, officers with the Drug Enforcement Agency (D.E.A.) knocked on their hotel room door, burst in, read Aaron his rights, and charged him with trafficking in cocaine.
His life would never be the same. Time would pass, but Aaron would remain frozen in 1999, aching from within, holding on to his childhood dream of becoming a physician, slowly aging on the inside as his dream slowly faded until, like the early morning fog, it finally disappeared at high noon with the rejection of Aaron’s third appeal.
Aaron could have admitted guilt and received 12 years, or he could have cooperated and been sentenced to 3 years. That was the “deal” the government offered him. He turned down both options, refusing the first, since he maintained he knew nothing and was therefore innocent; he would not cooperate, believing that justice would surely prove his innocence, allowing him to pursue his life-long dream: a medical career.
Now Aaron waits. And works. And reads, mainly the Bible and newspapers. He keeps one eye on the world above; and the other on the world outside. And both feet in prison.
Some people think Aaron knew what was going down on those trips when he accompanied his father, and maybe that’s the way it happened; others think he not only knew but cashed in, and maybe that’s the way it happened; and others think he was a totally innocent pawn in someone else’s game, and maybe that’s the way it happened.
One thing is for sure: the punishment exceeds the crime, especially when you consider the sentence given Glascock is longer than that given to Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian dictator and drug smuggler, longer than the ten year sentence for conspiracy to murder given to John Walker Lindh (alias Sulayman al-Faris), who was captured by American soldiers as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan, and it’s longer than the average amount of time actually served by first time sex offenders.
Curious? Indeed.
In prison, Aaron rests in Psalm 23, finds solace in Jesus’ words that we are not to worry about tomorrow, and prays for mercy.
As I leave, walking through the prison gates, wondering if there are other Aaron Glascocks behind other prison walls, the wind hits my face, awakening me to the freedom on the outside; the setting sun’s orange glow reminds me that another day is passing into infinity; and my heart cries for an explanation to a curiosity: how a man’s soul—worn by the routine of prison life, wizened to the skill of prison survival, scorched by disappointment in the court system—can be aging so quickly and yet still be so alive, even as that burdened soul is hidden beneath a hopeful outlook, a warm handshake, and words that promise a new tomorrow.
Life Matters by David B. Whitlock, Ph.D., is published weekly. Visit David’s website, www.davidwhitlock.org. His email address is drdavid@davidwhitlock.org