He walked across the control floor, the big, bare windowless space that sat at the center of the prison. The air was stale and damp. It smelled of concrete, iron, and sweat, like a basement locker room. There was a guard on his right, a guard on his left. It was maybe thirty feet across the worn linoleum to the first check point and the first barred iron gate. The guard sitting in a little room behind the bulletproof glass studied the screen in front of him, pressed a button, and the gate inched across steel tracks to open a doorway to a long corridor. This was an old prison, the oldest in the state. The gates were old. They creaked and clanged. The cell blocks—there were four of them—were old. They were Sing Sing-style “cages within cages” that looked like the setting of every grim prison movie ever made: parallel rows of barred cells, forty cells long, five tiers high, narrow metal walkways, nothing but concrete and steel. He had lived in this place for nineteen years. He was thirty-seven. Today he was getting out.
When the gate finally opened, he walked down the long, narrow corridor, careful to keep close to the right-side wall so the cameras could see him. At the end of the corridor was another gate. He stood there waiting for another guard who was sitting, invisible, in another little room behind bulletproof glass. The guard looked at his screen and pressed a button. The second iron gate inched open. Now he stood in a small room waiting for the same guard to open the third and final gate.
He had taken care of himself during his long years inside, not just this almost two-decade stretch in a maximum security penitentiary but the two and a half years before that when he was confined to a youth detention facility. He was strong and athletic looking but without that aggressive, pectoral-amped, I-pumped-iron-on-the-yard-for-years physique so common to inmates. His head was shaved, but the tough look was softened by his rectangular glasses, which made him look both studious and smart, which he was. He had strong cheekbones, a square jaw, and when he let it happen, a wide smile. His skin, halfway between copper and olive, was the smooth, unblemished skin of a man who had not spent much time outdoors. Today, a midsummer day, he was dressed in a spotless white T-shirt and baggy black gym shorts. It was the first time in nineteen years that he did not have to wear prison blues. He stood, shoulders back, head up, facing that last gate that separated him from the life he would try to live as a free man. His name was Arnoldo.
He was poised, that summer morning, to reenter a community he barely knew. He was poised to reenter the circle of a family that had grown and changed without him. They were waiting for him on the other side of that third gate. It inched open. He walked up a short ramp through one doorway and then another, this last one bracketed with metal detectors. And then he was out, in the visitors’ waiting room, leaning over to hug his mother. The top of her head rested under his chin. She couldn’t stop crying. He hugged his brother. Then he got down on one knee to embrace first one, then the other of his two young nieces. He might have felt the tears coming, but he kept his emotions in check. That’s what you learned to do in prison. Still, he wanted to be swept up by the moment. He wanted it to last. But he had something to do, a promise to keep, before he could say goodbye to his incarcerated life. He forced himself to break off the reunion. He would have time for his family later. He headed out the front entrance of the prison, down the worn concrete steps, past the sentry tower, and out to the street.
On State Street, a few yards from the driveway that curved into the prison’s ten-acre compound, sat a municipal fire hydrant. The city of Salem, Oregon’s sleepy capital and home to four of its fourteen prisons, a youth correction facility, and a county jail, had years ago mounted a community volunteer project to paint all its hydrants a bright canary yellow. Several years ago, when they were first becoming friends, Sterling had pointed out the hydrant to Arnoldo. Sterling was a lifer who had been inside since he was sixteen. Long before, he couldn’t remember just how long, he had noticed the hydrant when he was standing at one of the barred windows on the fourth floor of the prison, the floor that housed the chapel, its library, and its meeting rooms. From there you could see over the twenty-five-foot perimeter wall across a swath of weedy grass, across a small creek and another patch of grass to the main road. That’s where the hydrant was. During the long, gray rainy season that was western Oregon for five or six months a year, the hydrant was a spot of color. It was a long way off, but once you saw it, your eyes were drawn to it every time you looked out the window. At least Sterling’s were. And later, Arnoldo’s.
Few inside the prison noticed the hydrant. You had to be on the fourth floor to be able to see over the walls, and some of the prison’s more than two thousand men had never been on the fourth floor. And even if you attended services or meetings or events in that corner of the floor, even if you made your way to the chapel’s library, you had to want to look out. Some men who’d been inside for many decades had stopped looking out the window years ago. They had to. Prison was their life and always would be. Looking over the walls led to imagining a life beyond the walls. That was unbearable, so they turned their backs.
Sterling spent most of his days on the fourth floor where, since 2014, he had worked as the chapel clerk, managing the calendar of chapel-sponsored events, supporting volunteers with room reservations and setup, spreading the word about programs, helping to communicate with security about inmate attendance. Everyone who was able to work had a prison job. Arnoldo—when he wasn’t serving time in the hole for infractions big and small, for fighting, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, for his gang connections—worked in the prison’s laundry. It was the state’s second-largest commercial laundry, a moneymaker, a huge, deafening facility that handled soiled linens trucked in from dozens of hospitals and other institutions. It was considered a good job inside because of the possibility of overtime (wages in the so-called prison industries in the state were reported to be, at most, forty-seven cents an hour) and because even when the prison was on lockdown, the laundry still had to operate. That meant you could get out of your cell for work when no one else could leave, not for chow hall, not for showers, not for pill line, not for any reason other than keeping the laundry operating.
Sterling and Arnoldo had met out on the yard back in 2012, when they had both volunteered to work on a crew to prep the softball fields for summer games. It was hard work and it was unpaid, but it was outdoor work, which meant more yard time. Inmates were allotted only so much time outside. If you had a history of what was called “pro-social behavior” and made it to the top level of the prison’s nonmonetary incentive system you had the privilege of spending up to three hours a day seven days a week out in the yard. Those on the bottom tier were allowed an hour and a half five days a week. Those were precious hours, especially in the spring.
Working side by side, weeding, pushing wheelbarrows, grooming the baseball diamonds, the two men made an unlikely pair. Sterling, who sometimes referred to himself as a “marvelous mulatto,” was half African American, half Italian, a tall, lanky, loose-limbed man with a dusting of freckles and impressive dreadlocks that reached down his back. Arnoldo, shorter, stockier, bald, was Mexican American. Inside, Black and Latino prisoners rarely mixed, eating at different tables in chow hall and congregating in different sections of the yard. Each group had its own club—Uhuru Sasa for African American inmates, the Latino Club for Hispanic inmates—and each had its own gang, affiliations that followed the inmates in from the outside. Gang hostility from the outside sometimes erupted into fights on the inside. The fights sometimes escalated into yard brawls. A brawl could, and sometimes did, turn into a riot. There would be multiday lockdowns and months of punishment in segregation cells for those on both sides. Arnoldo belonged to a gang. He was, in fact, a gang leader.
As unusual as it was for men of different races to establish relationships, it was almost as unusual for lifers and nonlifers to be friends. Lifers were in for what inmates called “a grip,” a sentence that might be for the entirety of their life—life without parole (LWOP)—or a life with parole (LWP) sentence that meant twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, or more years as they pled their case, often many times, before rehabilitation panels and parole boards. LWP often meant the possibility of parole, with no guarantees. Lifers had their own club inside—it was the biggest and oldest club in the prison—with events and fundraisers, even an annual banquet. They had their own newsletter. Their unending or close-to-unending sentences created a special bond between them. The longer they spent behind bars, the looser their ties were to the outside world. Parents died. Siblings and friends moved on to live their own lives. What remained, after thirty years, was the guy on your cell block who had been around just as long as you had. Lifers were hesitant to invest the time in getting to know and trust and care about a man who might be gone in a “dime” (ten years). Losing that hard-earned friendship would be just one more loss in a life full of losses. So lifers stuck with lifers. Sterling was a lifer. Arnoldo was not. He had a “flat” sentence, a firm release date. Once inside he’d gotten two extra years tacked on to that sentence for assault, but he knew that on July 18, 2017, he’d be walking out the door.
Sterling’s case was a lot more complicated. It was, in fact, one of the most complicated cases in the state’s history. It would have been different had he originally been sentenced to life without parole for the murder he’d committed as a sixteen-year-old. Ironically, if that draconian sentence had been imposed back in 1994, he might not be behind bars right now. Or he would be anticipating a release date in the near future. That’s because in 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that a mandatory life without parole sentence for juvenile offenders was unconstitutional. It was, the justices agreed in Miller v. Alabama, cruel and unusual punishment that violated the Eighth Amendment. Juvenile offenders who’d received LWOP would have those sentences reversed. Depending on how long they had already been imprisoned, some would be freed immediately; others would await timely parole dates. But what Sterling had was a de facto LWOP sentence. He had two LWP sentences to be served consecutively, which added up to a lifetime. But because his official sentence was not LWOP, Miller did not apply to him. When Arnoldo walked out of prison that day, Sterling was about to begin his twenty-fourth year behind bars, entangled in what appeared to be an endless legal battle for the right to have his case reviewed.
Although close in age—Sterling was just three years older than Arnoldo—the two were temperamental opposites. Sterling was spark; Arnoldo was banked fire. Sterling was bold, verbal, witty. There was a spontaneity about him. He was a gifted spoken word poet, a natural performer. Arnoldo was understated, reflective, deeply cautious. He was a serious man who held himself tightly. But as they worked side by side they talked, and the longer they talked, the more they found they had in common. They had both come into the system as juveniles after childhoods scarred by abuse. Sterling’s mother had given birth to him while shackled to a hospital bed. She was serving eighteen months in prison for forging checks. A loving grandmother raised him until she died. Then he was shuffled to the home of a wife-beating grandfather and his alcoholic second wife and later, at age thirteen, to the house of a drug-dealing uncle barely out of his teens himself. Sterling slept on the couch or in the cab of a truck in the driveway. When he realized no one knew or cared where he was or what he did, he took to the streets. He stole cars, vandalized, took drugs, bullied, scammed, learned that the riskier your exploits, the greater your street cred. He learned how to be a “player.”
Arnoldo’s early home life was dominated by an alcoholic father. He was a man who, when sober, could be (as Arnoldo later told himself) “just the kind of father you wanted to have.” He was also a violent, abusive drunk who tried to drown his young son, a man who would later be sentenced to fifty years in prison for murder. Arnoldo’s mother, protecting herself and her children, ran away from the marriage, leaving the culturally comfortable Texas border town of Arnoldo’s childhood to make a hardscrabble life more than two thousand miles north as an agricultural worker in the alfalfa and potato fields of eastern Oregon. This is where Arnoldo felt the sting of prejudice for the first time in life, where he remembered a teacher telling him he would never amount to anything and would probably spend his life in jail, where he joined a gang of equally displaced Mexican American kids whose parents worked in the fields, where he started using drugs, where he started carrying a gun. And using it.
The two men had grown up and come of age in prison—Arnoldo remanded to juvie at fifteen, Sterling sentenced to an adult penitentiary at sixteen. And by the time they met and had become friends out on the yard, both had spent all of their twenties and most of their thirties behind bars. They had also both served hard time, spending a succession of months-long stretches that accumulated into years, and then more years in solitary confinement in what was known officially in this prison as the Intensive Management Unit (IMU) but what the inmates called “the hole.” That kind of time could break you. But neither of them broke. They hadn’t let the system harden them either or make them paralyzingly or self-destructively angry, as it did for so many others. Neither had they let themselves be tamed. They had, in defiance of the system, managed to keep a part of themselves whole. “Choosing hope / fuels spiritual fires / in cold chaos,” Sterling wrote once. He admired what he recognized as Arnoldo’s warrior spirit. He had the same spirit, the same tenacity. They were stubborn, independent men with a sense of their own power that kept them both sane and in trouble. They clicked.
When Sterling started working up in the chapel, he began inviting Arnoldo to events. One event was a talk by an American criminologist named Howard Zehr, a pioneer in the field of restorative justice (RJ). This was not a new subject to Sterling. He had taken a restorative justice course offered inside the prison by Nathaline Frener, then a University of Oregon law professor. Through that class, he had learned that RJ, a progressive movement launched back in the mid-1970s, focused on bringing together victims and perpetrators. Rather than defining “justice” as solely the administration of punishment, RJ proposed notions of accountability, empathy, and making amends. Mediation and reconciliation were the key concepts. RJ was a way for those who did harm to take moral responsibility for that harm and to face the consequences their actions had on their victims, their families, and their communities—not just by going to prison but by opening themselves up to the emotional and psychological chaos they had caused others. As it evolved, RJ worked to provide a de-escalated space outside the heat of a courtroom or the glare of media attention for the victims to tell those who harmed them how they had been harmed. Some believed the process opened the door to forgiveness, or at least a kind of closure that a prison sentence often did not give to those whose lives were forever altered by crime. RJ was focused on victims and offenders, but it might also be applied to prison culture, to warring gangs, to men who reacted aggressively, often violently, without considering harm or consequence.
Zehr had also talked about trauma. Trauma was the leitmotif of so many prisoners’ lives, both pre-incarceration and later, for years, often decades, sometimes a lifetime. The products of toxic home and street environments, they were now confined to the toxic environment of prison, where showing emotion was showing weakness, where empathy was an invitation to exploitation, where “healing” was not something real men needed to do. Wounds scarred over. They toughened you, and that was a good thing. But Zehr said, “Trauma untransformed is trauma transferred,” and that resonated with Sterling and Arnoldo. They knew this. They were living it.
Karuna Thompson, one of the prison’s three chaplains, saw the two of them talking together after Zehr’s presentation—they were deep in conversation, intent and intense—and she knew, in that moment, something was happening. That something could happen. Both men were thinkers. They were both leaders. They had struggled with and lived through the issues the men in that institution faced every day, issues that often led to conflict. Suppose instead of—or in addition to—bringing in experts like Zehr or offering a university class or having community volunteers facilitate programs, these two men became the planners and facilitators themselves? Together they might be able to do something outsiders could not do. They could identify men at the edge of shifting their behavior. They could reach out to them. The combination of Sterling and Arnoldo together could be a powerhouse. Arnoldo’s stature in a gang and Sterling’s cred as a lifer would resonate inside. The hard time they had both served in the hole was a badge of honor. They would be seen not as men co-opted by the system, not as cons trying to con anyone, but as legitimate players. Karuna thought they could work together to create a trauma transformation program, a chapel-sponsored series of events and talks organized by the prisoners themselves. It could be a way to make a difference not just in their two lives and not just in the individual lives of the men they could persuade to participate but in the culture of the prison itself.
They could also take the lead, or at least be involved in important ways, with how the prison might incorporate RJ within its walls. Out in the yard or in chow hall or on the tiers, they—and the men they would reach in workshops—might help resolve conflict before it erupted. These two were wise to the culture. They could smell a conflict coming. But more than that, Karuna thought that their extended time in isolation had helped them understand who they truly were. They knew their own minds. They had achieved a kind of equanimity born of self-reflection and a resolve born of the psychological and emotional rigors of years in the hole, of not just withstanding but growing from that experience. She believed they could be capable of stepping into confusing, potentially explosive situations without getting shaken. And that they would be respected for doing so. The chaplain believed in change. Change was always possible. Change came from the hard, gritty work of soul-searching and the quieter work of self-awareness. The path forward was through the practice and development of morality, through the slow gaining of wisdom. She was a Buddhist. She was also a plain talker, a nurturer who could be both tough and stubborn. And she was funny in that dark way people who work in dark places can be funny. Sterling and Arnoldo liked and respected her. And she liked and respected them.
Encouraged and supported by Karuna, fueled by their growing friendship, Sterling and Arnoldo began to work together on programs and events. The bonds between them, both personal and professional, grew stronger. They were comrades and brothers. But they knew their time together would not last. Arnoldo’s release date was fast approaching. He would soon walk out a free man. Sterling’s legal case was stalled. He would be left behind—perhaps forever.
One day, up in the chapel library in the southeast corner of the prison, Sterling pointed out the yellow hydrant to Arnoldo. Sterling had written a little essay about the hydrant. He was a talented writer, a poet who harnessed the power of both words and performance, a creative force. Had he not been in prison since his teens, he might have had a thriving literary career. He stood in front of that barred window often, maybe every day. He looked over the massive wall and saw birds landing near the creek. He saw joggers trotting down the sidewalk, cars pulling in and out of the prison driveway. He imagined himself feeding the birds. He imagined himself walking down that sidewalk. Sometimes he allowed himself to imagine sleeping in a comfortable bed in a quiet room. Sometimes he allowed himself to dream of the life he could craft outside the walls, a life defined by more than his worst failures. He stared at the spot of yellow in the distance. The hydrant became a symbol of a life of freedom, of the life Sterling might never have a chance to live, and the lives his released friends would struggle to recapture.
“When you get out, go touch that hydrant. Touch it for me,” he said to his friend. They were standing together looking out the smudged window. He said this not with longing, not with envy, not even with sadness for the loss of the friendship. It came from a place of hope. He wanted Arnoldo to succeed. He wanted him to remember to cherish every moment of liberty.
That July morning of his release after nineteen years, Arnoldo hugged his mother, his brother, his nieces, and then walked out the front entrance of the prison, down the driveway, and over to the hydrant. He had left his family in the visiting room, but he wasn’t alone. Sterling’s wife, Cheryl, walked with him. Sterling had introduced the two of them at some event in the past, but Cheryl didn’t know Arnoldo very well. Sterling, like so many people behind bars, compartmentalized his life. He very purposefully kept his two worlds separate. There was a saying in prison, “Don’t let your family do your time,” which translated as keep your incarcerated life to yourself. Or what happens in here stays in here. But although Cheryl didn’t really know Arnoldo, she did know about the hydrant. She knew what it meant to Sterling. And Sterling had asked her to come to the prison this morning to take a picture of Arnoldo touching the hydrant. She could print it out and show it to him at the next visit.
Out on the grassy strip that bordered State Street, Arnoldo crouched next to the yellow hydrant, balancing himself with a forearm on the weather cap, smiling, squinting into the sun, striking a pose for Cheryl as she tapped her smartphone to take pictures. Then the two of them stood side by side and looked back up at the prison. In the distance, over the wall, they could see a row of four heavily barred windows on the top floor. The second one from the left was the window Sterling had gazed through when he first noticed the hydrant, the window the two friends stood in front of when they talked about the future. Arnoldo’s future was beginning today, right now. Could he make a successful life for himself after two decades of incarceration? What would that path look like? Sterling’s future was persistently, agonizingly uncertain. Would his byzantine legal case—bolstered by U.S. Supreme Court decisions and various state rulings—move forward? Would he have the same chance Arnoldo now had?
From their vantage point on the street, Arnoldo and Cheryl looked up. The windows were dark; whatever was on the other side was obscured. They were about to turn and walk away when they saw something, a square of white near the bottom of the second window. Sterling was holding up a sheet of paper, signaling that he was there.