It’s April 10, and Donte Smith, the suspended Georgetown sophomore, is reflecting on the past five months of his life. Tomorrow, he will embark on a four-hour drive to Fort Worth and the Federal Correctional Institution where he will reside until July. The past few days have been about making arrangements and saying goodbye. He returned his library books. He spent some time with his grandmother, went to lunch with old friends. He had his nipple piercing removed. Tonight, the last night in many that he’ll sleep in a real bed, he’ll do his best to just go with the flow. “For a long time it felt like there was this giant rock hanging over my head, swinging back and forth, and at some point I knew it was going to drop but I didn’t know when,” he says. “Nowadays I’m not so bleak. I feel a little anxious, but generally ready.” Smith has done his homework on the next three months of his life – he’s checked out a half-dozen books by authors who spent time in federal prisons, made friends with other protesters who went to jail, conversed with celebrity activists. Back when he was a student at Hightower High School, a public school just outside of Houston that he describes as closed-minded and culturally blind, most of Smith’s attempts at activism were quashed by school authorities, so he put his focus elsewhere, like at a protest of the war in Afghanistan in 2001. When he came to college, he joined the Georgetown Solidarity Committee, discovering a cause he both cared about and knew that he could influence. Last year, between Nov. 18-20, members of the GSC went down to Fort Benning, Ga., for the annual vigil of School of the Americas Watch, an advocacy organization founded to protest the training of Latin American military officers at the U.S. Army facility formerly known as the School of the Americas. Graduates of the facility, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, have been repeatedly accused of committing human rights violations. The annual November protests began in 1990, after eight people – including six Jesuit priests – were killed in El Salvador by a force of SOA-trained soldiers. About 19,000 people, many of them religious officials, attended the 2005 vigil. On the third day, the protesters held the annual “funeral procession,” in which some protesters climb over a Fort Benning fence, enter federal property and are often arrested. “It was something that I hadn’t totally made a decision to do until about a week before,” Smith says. When Smith broke through a torn-down section of fencing, several officers ran toward him. As he was placed under arrest and dragged away, he shouted, “No mas!” Now, months later, Smith is thinking about what he’s going to do when he gets out of prison. If he’s even allowed back to Georgetown in spring 2007, he worries about how he’ll pay for it. As for the fall, he’s thinking about taking courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. Right now, only a few plans are certain. “First thing is I’ve been saving a bottle of wine, a bottle of Merlot, that I’m going to open when I get out, and I’m going to take a swig of that, and then I’m going to hug everyone in my family, and then I’m going to take a long nap,” he says. Adapting to Prison Donte Smith sat in a federal penitentiary, cut off from the world, from April 11 to July 7. Due to some sort of administrative error, he spent his first day in prison in “the hole,” a 16 ft. by 7 ft. cell typically assigned to prisoners whose behavior warrants administrative detention. When Smith was finally moved to a regular cell, the preliminary transition was slow. But after overcoming the prejudice he felt toward perpetrators of violent crime or child pornography, he says he learned to adapt. There are private restrooms and showers at low-security FCI Fort Worth, as well as recreational facilities, a threadbare health clinic, a chapel and a library containing donated titles like “How to Quit Alcoholism” and “How to Be a Good Father.” For most, there are no cells – just big spaces the size of a large ICC classroom, each with beds for 60 prisoners. Eventually, an inmate might be “promoted” to a two-man cell, smaller than the hole but far more desirable. “Generally the rule is, treat people the way you want to be treated,” Smith says. “For me, someone who was new there, you let guys talk to you because they will. They’re friendly enough. They’ll converse with you: `What are you reading over there?'” The intelligence of some of Smith’s fellow inmates surprised him. There was Kevin, an accountant and family man convicted of tampering with financial statements, and there was Loco, a parole violator who had been in and out of prison since he was a teenager, and now traded books by John Grisham for Dostoevsky and Alice Walker. On May 9, Smith spent his 20th birthday in the company of two of his new friends, who bought him a pair of avocados from the commissary and made guacamole to celebrate. True to popular prison folklore, there were prisoners to avoid, but Smith was never afraid of those predators. He was too worried about Officer Ralph, who would threaten him with a trip back to hole if he showed up late to work at the chow hall, or wore his hat backwards while distributing milk. No Regrets It’s Sept. 9 and Donte Smith has been out of prison for approximately two months. When he was released, the first thing he did was share some beer and doughnuts with his cousin. Then, true to his word, he fell asleep for a long time. “I spent the first two days looking out my window,” Smith says. “My mom walks into my room and says, `You’ve been looking out that window all day.’ `I’m just appreciating that I can do whatever I want,’ I said. Now, with this abundance of new freedom, Donte Smith has the heavy task of explaining himself. It starts at home. “It was hard for [my parents]. It was a failure to them – that I’m going to prison, that I’ve been suspended from Georgetown – and it looks like a failure to a lot of people,” he says. Smith says that his friends, especially those on the Solidarity Committee, were supportive from the beginning. But there are some things even they can’t understand. “When I got out from prison, all my friends were like, `How was it?’ – and they all have that hesitant moment when I’m supposed to say, `I was raped a thousand times,'” Smith says. “And that’s what people expect to hear, and I can’t tell them that it was a really great experience and I had some really great times and some depressing times. There are some things I can never put into those words for other people.” Smith has no regrets about his activism and where it brought him. He now works full-time in Houston as a community organizer for the non-profit group ACORN, which provides housing assistance to the poor. He still wants to go back to Georgetown in the spring, when his one-year suspension expires. Smith also plans to attend SOA Watch’s 2006 vigil in November. He does not, however, plan on being arrested, preferring to work on the other side of the barbed wire. After all, the words he now lives by are those of his old friend Loco: “You know what it feels like to not be able to change things [in prison], to be at the hands of these idiots. Now that you know what it feels like to be powerless, tell people on the outside.”