Dear Bentrock,

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I have just been informed that your Inmate will be transferring to his permanent unit tomorrow morning. He was sentenced yesterday and is spending the night at a transfer unit. You should visit him there to get things started on the right path. 

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Since your assignment is now confirmed, there is no point in continuing to hide the truth from you: this will not be an easy mission. The prison system is the one place where the Enemy continues to make progress and where our own success rate is barely rising (we tend to do better once our assignees are released back into the “free world” as they describe it). Your classmates from training who have been assigned to the suburbs, universities, and working-class neighborhoods will all find their tasks much easier.

It will not surprise you to learn that there is a great deal of frustration among the senior staff Below about the Enemy’s prison successes. Our colleagues complain that it ought to be easy to accomplish the “simple task” of maintaining our inmates’ current direction. Nearly everyone they send to us, they note, is already on the fast track to our Domain. While their free world prey frequently come from good homes, have been indoctrinated in the Enemy’s book, and are often professing Christians, our inmate prey tend to come from dangerous and disadvantaged circumstances with unmatched track records of what the Enemy calls “sinfulness.”

All of this is true, and your Inmate is no exception. He has been reliably traveling in our direction for many years. He comes from a broken home, has received little training in the Enemy’s ways, and he has adopted a personal law-of-the-jungle philosophy built around the ideas that strength is its own justification and doing “what is necessary” to thrive is the only morality that matters (at least “where he lives”). Maintaining a Hell-bound direction for someone like that ought to be easy, but it will not be.

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What our colleagues fail to acknowledge, and what you must never forget, is that your Inmate is even now confronted by an undeniable truth: his approach to life has failed. It has failed to such an extent that he now finds himself cut off from his friends, from his romantic interests, from his remaining family, and from the personal comforts he had accumulated. He simply cannot deny the reality that his life choices have now led to him living in a small cage where even the most insignificant details of his day – from when he eats, to when and how he bathes, to if and when he may speak to his mother – are now controlled by disinterested and often hostile bureaucrats.

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 As you will immediately recognize, our colleagues’ prey among university students, executives, factory workers, teachers, retirees, and whatnot may all be easily convinced that their lives are going “just fine” and that they are, on balance, “good people” with little need to change. This has always been, and continues to be, the most reliable way to keep someone on the wide and easy road to Our Domain. 

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Indeed, our convict population provides an invaluable service to our free world colleagues. If one of their free world prey begin to wonder a bit too much about whether they are really “good” and “deserving,” we just whisper a quiet reminder that there are plenty of thugs and thieves who are the real “bad people.” Our colleagues point to the prisons and tell their prey that it is the inmates, not they, who need serious spiritual help. “While you may have made some mistakes in life,” we reassure them, “at least you have never committed any of the really big sins like the ones that landed those convicts behind bars.” So, we provide an important service to our free world colleagues just by being here! 

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Sadly, your Inmate also knows this is what most people think. He knows (and it is only now really beginning to sink in) that as of yesterday he is officially, according to the judge and the laws of Texas, just a convict. He will carry that designation for the remainder of his life, and it will affect every facet of his future. So, like most inmates, he will enter the prison system deeply troubled, on the verge of despair, and believing that he needs to “change his life” one way or another. 

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In other words, we are at a moment of crisis right now, tonight, even before your Inmate arrives at our unit. So, you need to do something that will be completely unnatural for our kind: you must comfort him. This is urgent and we do not have time to debate tactics. You must go to him now and plant the seeds for the Seven Essential Messages that we embed in every inmate the day they arrive. These messages will help us year after year to keep him out of the Enemy’s hands. Memorize these and whisper them to him tonight! I will check in with you tomorrow...

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Chief Warden Deumus

Texas Department of Corruptions, Incarceration Services Division