Oh, brother where art thou?

You with your cafeteria trays. You with the orange jumpsuit, the delousing powder, the crazy, cross-eyed roommate in the bed above.

Oh, loquacious prisoner, where have thou gone?

I miss them, you know. When I stopped writing this column last year, letters from prisoners dried up like funds to an enemy nation. The Christmas surprise of mail call turned up zeroes for me. It was as though Santa himself had been paroled.

No more wild tales of Kangaroo Courts in the laundry room. No more complaints of cruel guards, road kill food, Shawshank-style corruption. No more puffed up bravado, screams of innocence, dire warnings of things to come.

There is no mail like prisoner mail. For two years, I had a half dozen pen pals in Windham. They wrote to tell me of horrible things happening inside the tall walls or in their old neighborhoods, where treachery and criminal enterprise went on in their absence.

One inmate, serving a dime or more for sex offenses, was good for at least one letter a week. He knew the secrets of the Lewiston streets and shared a bit of that knowledge. He churned out a half dozen pages of thrills and chills at a time and his penmanship was just fantastic.

The inmates wrote with hope or despair, defiance or remorse. They called me a reckless hack or confided in me as a friend. And then for the most part, they stopped.

Well, there is this one guy. He wrote me a week or two ago and asked that I not use his name. He was serving seven years for a pair of robberies committed with a martial arts weapon. But five-and-a-half of those years were suspended, and he was really serving 18 months to be followed by three years of probation. Although there was an option of serving more time to reduce the probation period. If you multiply the initial sentence by pi and then divide it by the area of a parallelogram, you will easily see how this works out.

Do they allow inmates to keep calculators in their cells? The lunacy of prisoner math is bewildering. But here. Have a listen:

“I am currently incarcerated at Androscoggin County Jail debating if I want to take the rest of my five-and-a-half years. … The D.A., the judge and my probation officer want to have me do two-and-a-half out of the five-and-a-half that I have left. Or give me 54 months to complete it all when I get out.”

The only question I have about this legal auctioning is: what?

I see myself as a prison inmate. I’m playing cribbage at a metal table anchored to the floor. There is a cigarette dangling from a corner of my mouth (I don’t care if they prohibited smoking in the lockup. It’s my fantasy and I will smoke all I want) and I’m pondering the jack and three fives in my hand.

A burly prisoner covered with tattoos approaches and looks at me with menace.

Prisoner: “How long you in for, boy?”

Me: “I have no idea.”

I hate math and would thus make a terrible prisoner. I would scrawl lines of chalk on my stone cell walls but I would get it wrong.

“You forgot to carry the two,” Sal the Spork Murderer would mutter from his bunk.

Fortunately for the letter writer, his early days behind bars were spent hating me and distracting himself from the flurry of numbers that ruled his life. I’m happy I could be there for him.

“I didn’t really appreciate the way you wrote the whole robbery/nun-chucks article,” he wrote.

But of course, I am unrepentant. You just don’t see a dude sticking somebody up with a pair of sticks on a metal chain. Not since Bruce Lee went bad, anyway. It was an unusual heist and as is almost always the case, unusual means news.

But that and the calculus of prison time aside, it’s good to be getting inmate mail again. Even if it means the discovery that at least one convict has been smearing my reputation.

“I have come to greatly appreciate you and your articles. I’d like to say sorry for talking smack about you behind your back,” the Kung Fu robbery suspect wrote. “Please forgive and forget.”

Consider it done, inmate 1201B. And good luck to you when you gain your freedom in 18 months. Or 54 months. Or five-and-a-half years followed by a hypotenuse of probation, whatever it is.

Don’t forget to carry the two or Sal will shank you.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal crime beat reporter. He can be reached at [email protected]