This man wants to spend the rest of his life in prison

Maurice Cemond, 38, listened to his attorney tell how long the prison sentence might be for the latest bunch of forgery raps.  Cemond thought a moment, then spoke.

“I want you to get me as much time as possible.” he said.

“You what?” the attorney asked.

That has been Cemond’s problem lately. Nobody seems to understand his ambition, his goal.

Cemond, you see, has decided he wants to spend the rest of his life in prison.  He wants solitary confinement too, if it’s no bother.

“I’ve thought it through,” he says “My mind is made up.”

Maurice Cemond didn’t start out hoping for a life sentence at some slammer. He was a bright and cocky ghetto Kid, in fact, with the sense that he could be “somebody great.”

Then one day he shoplifted, unsuccessfully, at a Chicago clothing store.  “I just wanted to look presentable,” he said.

That began a life of crime—and a life of custody.  Cemond’s felonies were nonviolent, mostly thefts and bad checks, but they were enough to put him in nearly a dozen jails and prisons during the next 23 years.  Statesville, Leavenworth, Terre Haute. He’d no sooner get out than be invited back in.

And during all the moving back and forth, he began to notice something. He couldn’t cope on the outside.  Cope? He had never really learned how the outside worked.

“I just couldn’t never seem to catch up,” he said. “Oh, I’d go to the halfway houses, but they’d just get my $50 (release money) and that’d be all from them. I tried to get work.

“But I’d always fall right back in that big hole. You see, they got a big hole just outside every prison. And the only way to  get past that big hole is if somebody’s waiting on the other side with his hands out. There ain’t nobody, so I fall back in.

Cemond never married. He wasn’t ever outside long enough to woo anybody.  His grandmother and two sisters are still in Chicago. But Cemond said he hates to be a burden. And nobody seems ready to hire him for the one profession he says he could really excel at. “BANKING.” He said. “The banks could save millions if they’d hire me. I could teach them a lot about security.”

Besides, Cemond said, he has learned to live adequately, if not quite grandly, in prison. It is where the world leaves him alone. And maybe that’s enough.

Leavenworth prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.

“Prison ain’t Cloud Nine” he said. “but the system seems to work better for me. I’d just get off alone-what I’d do is volunteer for solitary-and read.  I’d read the dictionary, I’d read the Bible, I’d find peace. I really would.”

Cemond sat in the County Jail as he reminisced. He had been released from Statesville in 1978. Now he teetered at the big hole’s brink once more, awaiting three separate trials on multiple counts of forgery and attempted theft.

Cemond said there was no reason to feel sorry for him. If he was going down again, he said, just let’s make if for keeps, that’s all.

“He is an unusual client,” observed his attorney, Herbert Abrams, who is respecting Cemond’s wishers.  “I know I won’t forget his first words in court.”

“Give me liberty or give me life.” Cemond told Circuit Court Judge Daniel Ryan at a July 25 pretrial hearing.

Cemond’s attorney stood there quietly. The entire court, as he recalls it, was now suddenly quiet.

The Judge and prosecutor listened transfixed as Cemond explained that he simply wanted to get in one lump[ what he had been getting piecemeal the life of a lifer. He was prepared to pleads guilty, in fact, if he could be promised forever in the slammer.

The judge, still transfixed, did some scribbling. The best Cemond could hope for was 30 years. Tops.

“That’s not good enough.” Cemond said.

It will take several more months to sort out the tangle of forgery charges.  The first trial is set for Sept 18.  Cemond, meanwhile, is biding his time. If he’s found guilty, he will plead for no mercy. If he’s found innocent, what the hell, he might just appeal.