Invisible physics, my story

Richter, Robert

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Invisible Physics, My Story In October 2010, I unexpectedly solved all of the big problems in physics. The one problem I couldn’t solve was how to get my work published. Although the internet has made it easy for “anyone” to publish anything they want to, that “anyone” does not include prisoners. By the time I made my breakthrough, I had been in prison for more than 17 years. My friends and family had long since moved on with their lives and left me behind. In New York State, there is no system in place to help prisoners participate in the outside world. My own efforts to find a publisher were futile. The prison librarian was spectacularly unhelpful, taking two whole years to find the address for the British journal “Nature”. I shouldn’t have bothered. My papers were returned unread. This was the rule, not the exception. The prison return address on the envelope guaranteed that I would be ignored. Furthermore, not one DOCCS employee has even a basic grasp of science. Every attempt to get some kind of help or support was met with complete disbelief and sarcastic comments, “Where’s your laboratory?” being typical. Real physics does not require a lab. One can ponder the results of other people’s experiments anywhere, in a cave, on a hilltop, in a prison cell, or on a bus. My access to data was (and is) severely restricted by my incarceration, by I can still THINK, and I did. More importantly, I was inspired to think about something simple, something so simple that nobody ever thinks about it. That answers a question I have heard a thousand times, “How could you, in prison, find the answer, when nobody else could?” Here’s the craziest part: I was inspired by a Ke$ha song, of all things! So, how did the prison administration react? A Corrections Officer warned me one day that he had heard that I was writing lots of letters to magazines. If I didn’t stop, I was going to wind up in the box. Did I stop? No and I soon wound up in the box for having a “stolen” radio, a blatant setup. The cop even said, at my hearing, that he told me it was his radio! How convenient, that he searches my room when I’m not there, “finds” a radio, then claims that I stole it from another prisoner, who was never identified (because he didn’t exist). Fifteen days in the box, kicked out of Honor Block, but I didn’t quit. For four more years, I wrote to every address I could get. I made no progress whatsoever, until I was again retaliated against. This time, I wrote to a government official and threatened to sue her if she didn’t stop wasting taxpayer money. She didn’t do what I expected. She called the State Police, they called the prison, and I wound up in an OMH strip cell. For five days, I was kept in that cell without a single meal. Then I was sent to SHU, the box, for two months. At my “due process” hearing, two months into the illegal process, I was found guilty of threatening to sue a government official. I was unable to appeal the charge because to do so I would have to sue the Commissioner, and I didn’t want to wind up back in a strip cell, starving. Out in the Real World, Americans still have some shadow of civil rights. If you threaten to sue someone, they contact a lawyer, and you can go to court. Not so in prison! DOCCS and OMH have formed a Devil’s Bargain, working hand in hand to keep prisoners from exercising their civil rights. For example, on 12/5/14, my second day in the strip cell, the guards brought in a guy named Rufus Woods, brutally assaulted him, threw him in the cell next to me, then assaulted him again. Why was Rufus in an OMH strip cell? He had been beaten down in another prison after offering some advice to another prisoner. To cover up their crime, the guards claimed that he had beaten himself up! With OMH’s cooperation, Rufus was then held in a strip cell without food or medical attention, pen or paper, or any way to report the abuse. I don’t know if he survived. I have never feared for my safety the way I did in there. Anything can happen, in total secrecy. Strangely, this latest retaliation plan backfired. When I was sent to the box, I wound up in a cell where the address I needed was waiting for me. The Prisons Foundation, in DC, would publish any book. Finally, finally, I was able to get my breakthrough published online. I had been at my wits’ end, worrying that someone I wrote to would claim my work as his own and publish it, leaving me in the dust. Now, no matter what else happened, I could point to the “comic books” I had published as proof that I was first. The harassment did not stop. I was kept on “idle” status from January to September, earning at most $1.80 per week, which drastically limited my ability to buy stamps. OMH refused to leave me alone, and I was threatened with a return to a strip cell if I didn’t abandon my scientific work (and my religion) and start taking psychiatric medication. “Cooperate with your treatment.”, I was told, but there was no diagnosis, and no specific treatment was described. It was Soviet-style psychiatry: Medicate away any new ideas, call people crazy to hide the truth they speak. I was sexually harassed by one of the officers who work the OMH unit, one of the officers who starved me. When I tried to refuse to see the psychiatrist who had put me in the strip cell, the officer threatened to have me put back in, and made a homosexual threat. How my complaints were handled is an excellent example of the way NYS DOCCS pretends to obey the law while rampantly violating it. First, my grievance was “investigated” by a sergeant. These “investigations” are done solely to give the administration the opportunity to cover up. The sergeant told me that my complaint was “bullshit”, and that the officer couldn’t put me in a strip cell. In his report, he claimed that I “could not identify” the officer. This is a classic method, do no investigation, then claim that the threat was illegal, thus impossible. A complaint to the Office of Special Investigations (formerly IG) in Albany was similarly “pre-investigated” by a sergeant. I never got a reply. Every day, I have to worry about being killed, not by other prisoners, buy by State employees. Here in Greene Correctional Facility, an inmate was recently beaten to death. One of the witnesses told me how he was pressured, during the pre-investigation, into saying that he had been asleep and saw nothing. There is no oversight, no protection of witnesses, no end to the corruption. Again and again, I have watched as physicists win one Nobel after another for “work” that isn’t even wrong. I can easily prove that everything in “advanced” physics is based on a pair of silly errors, and even published the proofs online, but nobody is paying attention. Physicists don’t look for answers on a prison publishing website. It is as if I don’t even exist. Science is supposed to be about the message, not the messenger. So, I sit in prison, watching in disgust as the world spend countless hours and dollars studying pure nonsense. Anyone can understand what I am saying, but nobody is listening. How could a mere prisoner ever discover anything? Even worse, what if I did!? People might actually listen to me when I reveal officials’ crimes! Better to throw me back in the box, say I’m crazy, or even kill me.

Author: Richter, Robert

Author Location: New York

Date: October 19, 2016

Genre: Essay

Extent: 5 pages

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