Angry, and alone.
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is angry. His recently released police mug shot reveals as much.
Chauvin is angry that he went from a police uniform to a jail jumpsuit.
He is angry that his former fellow police officers are angry at him because he killed George Floyd with a knee on the slain man’s neck. Chauvin knows his fellow officers are not angry because he killed Floyd but that he did it with the whole world watching as Floyd begged for his life. He knows that many of his fellow officers have done the same thing but “were not caught.”
Chauvin is angry that family and friends have turned against him. His wife told him that she is divorcing him. There is no rational way to explain his actions. You either accept those actions or you reject them. Most of the former officer’s family and friends rejected the actions. It has brought them untold shame and grief.
Chauvin is angry that fellow officers placed him in handcuffs, escorted him through the jail booking process, and placed him in a jail cell.
Derek Chauvin is alone now in a cell with only dark thoughts, and the crippling fear they produce, as companions through a mind-altering sense of powerlessness. The fall from privileged grace into what Jack Abbott once called “the belly of the beast” is a journey of nightmares.
And, indeed, jail and the prison cell that will most likely follow is a beast, especially for a white cop convicted of killing a black man pleading for his life. The “white boys”—not even the Aryan Brotherhood—will touch him and the “brothers” will do everything they can to get their hands on him. Even a deep protection lockdown cell will pose risks and dangers for him. A rogue prison guard could always leave his cell unlocked (as was probably the case with Jeffery Epstein) where he would later be found hung by his own jumpsuit.
Bad things happen in prison.
If Chauvin is placed in a barred cell rather than a solid door cell, he will constantly have feces and urine thrown on him by inmates out on the tier during shower time.
Chauvin will be alone, every minute of every day. Perpetual fear will overwhelm the anger. No one will help him. No one will hear his pleas, “I can’t breathe” as the knee of prison applies its pressure.
It was once reported—and I do not remember where—that Jack Ruby’s screams of “they’re killing me in here” could be heard at night by passersby on street below the Dallas County Jail.
No one will hear Derek Chauvin’s screams of “I can’t breathe” in here.
Some former cops can make it in prison, but not one as infamous as Derek Chauvin. He is on his own, and dark times await him in a world where his knees will only tremble.
And whatever bad things that may be visited upon this former cop, no one will really care—and if he should somehow manage to survive prison, the only life for him in the “free world” will be with some lunatic Nazi-saluting right wing militia group in the mountains of Utah.