Five years.
He's being sent up for five years to the state penitentiary. His first offense, but it was a blatant one, so the public defender couldn't do anything about the mandatory sentence. The shame of it is nearly overwhelming. He was in the county jail for a month (a month!) before he could bring himself to call Dad. I clenched my teeth hard enough to make my jaw ache as I listened to Dad's voice tremble and break while explaining what had happened. The rest of the family doesn't know. Just me, my sister, my husband, my dad, and his wife: the five of us, the core, the ones who will post bail, and sell his property for him, and arrange for his stuff to go into storage.
It's heartbreaking to contemplate what this will do to him. He could never cope with structure. Even school was too much for him. He's weak, afraid of everything that he doesn't understand, and he doesn't believe in a lot of what we think of as normal. He used to be religious but he lost his faith. He's probably paranoid schizophrenic, but he's functional and I don't know that there's any hope he'll get treatment for it. He's going to be in a situation that will be close to intolerable for him, I'm afraid, but that's the price he'll pay for choosing a get-rich-quick scheme over ordinary hard work. I'm furious, and worried, and I don't know which is worse, imagining my brother in prison, or hearing what this is doing to my father during a time of great stress. Probably the first. My father will cope. I don't honestly know if my brother has it in him. Which means I'll be dreading late night phone calls again.
It's going to be a very long five years.
