…I have been classified, collated and rated fingerprinted photoed and filed I am an examined, inspected cut of meat dressed in khaki and set in concrete.
The ritual dehumanization of entry is a powerful theme for prison writers. In the excerpt from “Fair Hill Prison”* above, 1987 prizewinner Nolan Gelman resisted the process by naming it. Fundamental disorientation may strip one of words as well as of civilized garb. M. A, Jones’s “Prison Letter” here captures the problem of wordlessness — another name for fear — at the most private level.
To become a prisoner is to enter an alien universe. One’s most trusted resources fail to help interpret the new setting, and the simplest social interaction may be fraught with peril. Sometimes seasoned inmates help newcomers begin to do time. In William Aberg’s “Siempre,” set in an unusual Arizona jail that housed both men and women, a veteran talks a novice through fear of the penitentiary {the pinta, in Mexican argot} to which she is being sent.
More often it is a “cellie” who helps a “fish” to learn the ropes. In Clay Downing’s 1974 story “The Jailin’ Man,”* the title figure teaches the narrator how to heat water for coffee in the glass part of a lightbulb and in the process to feel less sorry for himself. Ingenious ways to prepare food are also shared with newcomers. Jarvis Masters describes learning how to make powerful wine in “Recipe for Prison Pruno” (Death Row). Advice on how to avoid danger abounds: “Drink plenty of water and walk real slow” is a typical admonition.
“Symbiosis” between inmates is possible, according to the avuncular mentor in David Wood’s story by that name (1996),* if you learn how to carry yourself like a true convict: “Look every man square in the eye and let him know you’ll fight back. You don’t have to win a fight, just hurt the other guy bad enough so he won’t want to scrap with you again.” This swift cultivation of attitude, a particularly male response, is not restricted to men. Thus in Denise Hicks’s 1996 entry “Where’s My Mother?”* the neophyte reports: “I was learning the none-of-your-business stare; the no-you-don’t-know-me stance; and the why-I’m-here-could-not-possibly-be-of-any-concern-to-you pivot.”
Old hands school new prisoners in the cons’ rules, as crucial to survival as institutional regulations. Each prison has its underground economy and its informal government, with leadership ranging from fluid to stable. Prison mentors elucidate the “code” of the “stand-up” convict, a signal feature of prison subculture for generations, particularly among men. Akin to “honor among thieves,” it has tenets like “Be loyal to cons,” “Don’t let anyone disrespect you,” and “Never snitch.” This ideal is still nurtured by old-timers who nostalgically lament the bygone days when convicts, they say, ran penitentiaries. In “Ring on a Wire” (1996),* a story by George Hughes, the narrator’s “cellie” celebrates a mythicized golden age when they could “take your freedom, take your property and everything else away from you, but not your word.” For such as he, only a “convict” was a “real man.”
But beginning in the 1980s, new throngs of rash and fearless teenagers doing time made a much more menacing experience. The “code” began to degenerate into little more than vengeance against snitches or, as Victor Hassine puts it, “Darwin’s code: survival of the fittest.” In his poem “Convict Code” (1988),” Alex Friedman describes “walking on by” scenes of weapon-making and gang rape, and then being stabbed twenty-eight times by a stranger—”and everybody walked on by.”
In “How I Became a Convict” (extracted from his book Life Without Parole), Victor Hassine describes his adaptation to Pennsylvania’s prison for the most violent criminals. His first impulse was to retreat and build himself a cocoon. His ultimate decision to engage the life around him typifies that of most effective prison writers.
For many, survival begins with mastery of prison lingo. (See “I See Your Work” in Players, Games). Some novices feel compelled to create lexicons of their new argot. Often harsh and minimal, this patois is sometimes rich in nuance. For the transferred prisoners facing reorientation on a new turf in William Orlando’s “Dog Star Desperado” (the first chapter of a novel-in-progress), battles of rhetoric are all they can afford. Like the “dozens” played on ghetto streets and the rough banter of the armed services, this patois allows its performers to position themselves against one another while strutting their stuff. It also offers them a kind of collective armor as they size up their new surroundings and their new keepers, who are also pulled into the force field of prison language.
On another level, Orlando’s story enacts the galvanizing of the spirit to meet the shock of dehumanization. In their own way, women, too, cultivate such resources. In “Arrival” here, for example, Judee Norton calls up the inviolable inner liberty of the Stoics and converts her shackles into jewelry. Her summoning of her innermost self marks her starting point as she begins to do time.
You ask what it’s like here
but there are no words for it.
I answer difficult, painful, that men
die hearing their own voices. That answer
isn’t right though and I tell you now
that prison is a room
where a man waits with his nerves
drawn tight as barbed wire, an afternoon
that continues for months, that rises
around his legs like water
until the man is insane
and thinks the afternoon is a lake:
blue water, whitecaps, an island
where he lies under pale sunlight, one
red gardenia growing from his hand —
But that’s not right either. There are no
flowers in these cells, no water
and I hold nothing in my hands
but fear, what lives
in the absence of light, emptying
from my body to fill the large darkness
rising like water up my legs:
It rises and there are no words for it
though I look for them, and turn
on light and watch it
fall like an open yellow shirt
over black water, the light holding
against the dark for just
an instant: against what trembles
in my throat, a particular fear
a word I have no words for.
1982, Arizona State Prison-perryville
Buckeyc, Arizona
She tells me through the vent
from the cell below
that they’re taking her
on the morning train to che pittta,
that the guards have already packed
everything but her sheets, blue jumpsuit, and towel.
Through the floor,
with my heart as with an eye,
I can see her as she sits
on the bunk, face
cupped in her hands,
elbows propped on her thighs,
cheeks smudged by fingermarks
and tears, her dark
hair eclipsing her knees.
I try to reassure her
with wisdom I do not have,
and hope I try to fake,
that the hammer
and anvil of coming days
will forge us into
something stronger.
By the time they unlock
my cell at breakfast,
she has already gone. But later
as I walk back in my boxers
from the shower, an older guard,
the kind one, slips a note
into my hand, whispers,
She sent her love. Back in my cell
I unfold a note that says,
Te amo, siempre in crude letters
formed by a finger and menstrual blood.
1994, Pima County Jail
Tucson, Arizona
It had been a journey.
We were bussed from USP Leavenworth during one of those polar Novembers in Kansas. It was a day cold and white and hushed, a solitary morning of the snows.
Our prison transport showed its age. It looked as knackered as some of the convicts it had aboard — men in bad flesh who’d let themselves go, turning gray with the years and bitter for it. The bus smelled funny. The odor of cigarette butts and rusted apple cores, the odor of stale, brooding sweat. A prisoner smell. We sat in our chains and stared holes through the bus windows. We had little rap for one another, anyway. Most of us were just faces — a surly face that grunted at you over a morning bowl of grits. We were content to look hard and forbidding. Desperadoes all.
Those that did talk, talked shop. Who was hot and snitchin’. Who got stabbed and good for the motherfucker. Who bugged out. Who busted loose one fine morning in Kool-Aid lipstick, cue-chalk blue eye shadow, and bikini briefs over buns of steel. Gossip and lore. Amazing, I thought, that so little could be so absorbing. Still, absent any stone tablets, this was how they passed on the tribal Decalogue — defining value and boundary. This was how they staked out their claims as regulars, as men, as convicts. Real ones. Very few of us left, they would have you know. Rats and queers taking over.
“Yo, baby!” a six-plus-footer dubbed Wonder Woman called out to me from the back of the bus. “Yeah — you, cutie. You can break me down like a shotgun, and ride! Just two hundred cash.”
All heads turned. I grinned, embarrassed.
“Two hundred?” I replied at last. “You bump your head, bitch? For that much you can fuck me.” The bus rocked. Laughing just to laugh. Prisoner laughter, and afterward gravity.
It grew, the distance between us and the prison and the distance between each other. Who could acknowledge the thoughts, let alone share them? We rode quietly out of Kansas and through Oklahoma, passing here a frosted wood and there a stubbled field, a ragged scarecrow under leaden skies; rode across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, across miles and memory and heartbreak in a country song; rode, finally, the last leg westward to California and the sea, so by the time the bus reached Lompoc’s gate we could’ve lifted our heads and howled — Lompoc looking, to transfixed eyes, as welcome as hoof-prints in the snow to winter wolves.
It had been a journey.
The guard riding shotgun stood up and unlimbered his weapon from its overhead mount. Then he stepped heavily off the bus, plucking free the imbedded seat of his pants. This correctional officer wore the dark blue blazer, dress shirt with tie, and gray slacks — new image, new name.
The driver, likewise uniformed, followed after his lumbering partner, but returned in minutes to key open the bus security grill — a steel mesh partition between their inviolate space and ours.
“Let’s move it out, happy campers.”
“But, officer!” fretted someone, “There’s criminals in there!”
The driver shifted a wad of chaw in his mouth. “Hot grub, too.”
Our response was Pavlovian. Hands cuffed, feet shackled, and chained at the waist in twelve-man coffles, we rattled off and away from the bus — shuffling like coolies. The bright Lompoc afternoon was typical for this part of the central California coast. The sun batted our eyes into a squint, and the aggressive breeze nipped at our prison khakis.
“The more the merrier,” needled one of the escort guards. “I like seeing all these inmates!”
“Job security,” quipped another behind his M-16.
These guards all matched: boots, mirrored sunglasses, guns. They were many, and they deployed themselves around us. Such overkill made you feel at once hopeless and proud at being considered so fierce a beast. For the nonce you weren’t some tame and humble inmate. Hell, no. You were a barbarian being whipped to the imperial gates, straining at your bonds and snarling defiance at your captors.
By now we’d passed through the main entrance sally port. Ahead loomed the administration building; straight to the door, the long strip of pavement ran a flowered gauntlet between annuals gay and nimble in the breeze. A ribbon on a pig.
“Hey, you! Take a right.” I turned left — busily straining at my bonds, absently leading the coffle. I’d been daydreaming since my youth and was getting better at it.
“Your other right, Twinkle Toes.”
I stopped in my tracks to make up for my blunder, and caused a bigger one. The chain reaction was literal. The coffle bunched into folds, like a caterpillar at the end of a leaf.
“What kind of a Polish fire drill. . . C’mon, shake the fuckin’ lead!” came the same loud and abrasive voice.
“Aww — shake these hairy nuts, cop!” This voice belonged to the Georgia boy right behind me. They called him June Bug. Nicknames came in two ways: The con dug deep and flattered himself with one, or the world slapped a handle on him. June Bug. It stuck. It rubbed salt. He had griped the loudest about the joys of being in transit with no property — “nary a toothbrush or a stamp.” He had stayed in the Man’s face, selling death from behind the safety of the security screen. The transport guards just rolled their eyes. Who took seriously a balding, short little fat guy? He got too mouthy you raised your hand at him and that was enough.
“Chill out, June Bug,” advised the third man on the chain, a black convict. “Dude’s a fool. I knows that Hoosier from Terre Haute.”
“Indiana?”
“Yessir. Him and the gooners rushed my cell— I was in the hole— and jtvc tossed me up.”
“Is that right? Well, he don’t move me none.” June Bug bunched his pudgy fists. “Just let me get my hands on him. Two minutes!”
“Easy, killer,” 1 pitched in, thinking he was out of place in the cacchall of prison.
The black threw back his smooth-shaven head and laughed. “Hey y’all seen his wife? Big of tits. She’s got some kind of secretary job —- warden’s office or some shit, and they say she’s fuckin’.”
“Now I likes me a gal with round heels,” said June Bug.
“Ain’t no question!” agreed the shiny-pared one. “I’d like to dick her down and him watching— the dirty Klansman.”
“I wouldn’t: fuck a pig’s wife,” I said, playing to the gallery. “Might squeal.”
June Bug added his chortle to Cranium’s and then said, “Right about now I’d fuck a snake? Just hold the head.”
“I hear ya,” said Cranium. “Ain’t no shame in your game.”
“None in the fed’s, either,” I told them boih. “We need a law like the one passed in California.”
“What law?” asked June Bug.
“He means SP42. tt’s one of them … uh … radioactive laws. They lettin’ all kinds of motherfuckers go.”
June Bug hissed through chipped teeth. “We ain’t going nowhere for a while. Fuck with Uncle and get retired.”
“Yeah. And stuck with fools like that one over there,” complained Cranium. “He’s some shit.”
The correctional officer in question sported a lieutenant’s gold badge. He posted himself just ahead of us, on the wide expanse of lawn edging the walkway.
“How you be, Lieutenant Griggs?” I heard an escort C.O. ask him in passing. “Where’s your jacket?”
“Don’t need one in California.” The C.O. did a double take. Lieutenant Griggs was not kidding. The El-Tee stood with arms akimbo above the trestle of his legs, raking humorless eyes over the length of the prisoner chain. A big, unlit cigar jutted from his mouth.
“Why, Rufus!” came the loud voice as we shuffled before him. “Last time I seen you we was dancing.” The black con surrendered a tepid smile.
“Ain’t gonna have no trouble out of you here —- are we?”
“Nossir. Got my mind right, boss.” Rufus had introduced himself on the bus. “Money is my game, Well-to-Do is my name.”
“Well-to-Do?” challenged his homeboy from Miami. “My nigga . . . every since I done knowed you, you been doin’ dirtball bad. Well-to-do!” he snorted. “Nigga, y’name needs to be Food Stamp.” Merciless, the guffaws.
“My name ain’t Rufus, it’s Well-to-Do,” he huffed as we descended the basement ramp into Receiving and Discharge.
Once inside, we were unchained, strip-searched yet again, handed towel rolls, and, the first twelve of us, sent naked to the next holding cage to dress. There we opened our rolls, and got a surprise.
“What the fuck?”
“Kiss my black ass!”
“!Que la chingada!”
The problem was comic; the problem was grave. Each of us stared at the drawers we’d been issued. These were not the loose-fitting boxers of custom. These were jockey shorts. Dainty shorts — shrunken and the brown all faded. They were, in effect, pink panties.
“Ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun,” mused one convict aloud.
We wrapped towels around our waists and started wailing for the Man.
“C.O.”
“C.O.!”
“Hey, you deaf? C.O.!”
Footsteps approached, and a gravelly voice grew louder. “Hold on, hold on. Damn! I ain’t got but two hands and two feet … and half a dick.” The officer, reaching the screen-fronted cage, grinned. “But I got a split tongue!”
“Dig this,” started Rufus, “These here—”
“Do I know you?” The C.O. had scanned our faces, pointing to the ugliest one. June Bug, “Hey, you think I’m good-looking?” His own round and homely face creased into another grin. “It ain’t easy being fat and greasy — huh?”
It had sounded suspicious to me when my mother first said: “You can be ugly and your personality can make you charming.” She sat in her slip before the dresser mirror, painting her face. “Just be nice to her.”
“But I don’t want to be nice. She smells, too.”
“You love me?
“Yes.”
“Then do it for your mama, Handsome.”
She always used that on me. It was just me and her, and so I went up to the front house where the landlady lived. We were behind on the rent.
Moms was right, of course. Take this grizzled C.O. He exuded a crude charm — just the thing for inmates. You could tell he knew people, liked people. His job was a paycheck, not a calling. This was obvious in the shit he talked. But for timing, we would have laughed at his next remark.
“All right, little darlings, you got me down here. Who tore their panties now?”
We howled. Our clamor brought another officer on the run, keys jangling. “What’s wrong?” the second asked the first.
“This hee-uh is what’s wrong!” June Bug held up the offending briefs between thumb and index finger.
The blond and burr-headed second officer shrugged. “So?”
“So look at these — how can I — I can’t — just get me some more, Mister Police.”
“That’s a negative. Laundry only gave us a set amount.”
“Well, you gots to do somethin’.” June Bug gestured at his rotundity. “How you figure me getting these on?”
“Try one leg at a time.”
“Try these nuts, you —”
“Calm down,” cut in rhe wearied veteran, waving a placatory hand. ‘“Main thing’s don’t fuckin’ panic. Conic laundry tomorrow, yon pruna donnas will get squared away.”
A big white con — all muscles and inky tattoos — got up from one of the backless benches bolted to the wall. The dragons, the demons, the damsels of heroic fantasy muraled his upper body. “Fuck that,” lie said. “Call the laundry now.’“
“Laundry’s closed,” informed Blond Burr.
“Well, send somebody…”
“That’s right,” broke in Rufus. “Earn some of them taxpayer dollars.”
“… somebody over there and get us some decent drawers. Some bonaroos. Come on, pops. Do the right thing!”
“Anything else?” came the veteran’s arch reply. “How ‘bout a reach-around, too? Now I’ve got 10 get you guys processed and—”
“Fuck you then, you old fart.”
“Fuck me and you’ll never go hack to a woman.” I pondered the exchange. C.O.’s sounded like convicts — even unto sex talking each other, and they had women. Environment rubbed off.
Rubbing a sleek head — one kepr shaven in fear and concealment of balding age — Rutus stalked over to the cage door. “Man, we got our righis. Constitutionally aniendated. I’ll call my lawyer, and take y’all 10 court ou one of them there, uh …a writ of hocus pocus! You can’t be doggin’ us like this. I ain’t going for it.”
“Me neither,” chimed in June Bug. “I’m tired of suckuT hind tit. Don’t make me come out and whip somebody now!”
The younger C.O. ran a hand over his fair, burr-cut head. lie could bite it back no longer. “Fib, gentlemen — this is not the I loliday Inn. You don’t like ihe treatment, you shouldn’t have come to prison. Your fault (or breaking 1 lie law.”
He spoke from on high. His prissy manner riled the natives all over agam.
June Bug grabbed his crotch and sallied forth with his all-purpose response: “Break — these — nuts!”
Blond Burr smiled thinly. “You write your own material?”
June Bug was stumped, but not the others. They counted coup.
“Bring us a fuckin’ lieutenant!”
“Guard, guard! My dick is hard!”
“Get the nurse; it’s gettiu’ worse!”
“Get the president!”
“Hell yeah!”
“We buckin’!”
Leave it to a group. Who was impressing who?
“Fellas,” warned the old-timer, “don’t make it harder on yourselves. You know where you are. Use your heads for a change.”
June Bug was consistent in his trademark reply.
Shaking their heads, the two guards trudged away from the impasse. A cocky June Bug took a parting shot at their backs. “For heaven sakes, look at those cakes! Hey, blondie! Let’s do a sixty-nine, and I’ll owe you one.”
The two C.O.’s let us stew a while. Then they came back to order us over to the next processing station. We refused. “You can’t win,” they said matter-of-factly.
Fuck winning, fuck prison, fuck you. Men eat bear. We got our chance. A lieutenant showed up soon afterward. He did not come alone. Clomping in formation behind him was the goon squad — the special operations response team. Goofy menace.
They were eight strong, and not a corn-fed one of them was under six feet or two hundred pounds. They were military — real paratroopers in jumpsuits and jump boots. They were riot-garbed and ax-handle armed. They were dressed to dance.
1998, United States Penitentiary Marion
Marion, Illinois
I have heard Graterford called the Farm, the Camp, the Fort, and Dodge City, but I have never heard it called safe. When I was in the county jail awaiting trial, I saw grown men cry because their counselors told them they were being transferred to Graterford.
Graterford State Prison, Pennsylvania’s largest, was built in the early 1930s to hold the state’s most violent prisoners. On June 14, 1981, while it could not contain all eight thousand of the state’s most wanted, it certainly had enough room to hold me. Its steel-reinforced concrete wall measures four feet thick by thirty-two feet tall and encloses over sixty-five acres of land. The five cellblocks are huge, each containing four hundred cells. Each cellblock is a three-story rectangular structure, measuring about forty-five feet by eight hundred twenty feet, over twice the length of a football field.
I knew none of this as I sat handcuffed and shackled in the backseat of the sheriff’s car, waking to be taken inside to begin serving my life-without-parole sentence. All I could see was a blur of dirty, grainy whiteness from the giant wall that dominated the landscape before me. It made me feel small and insignificant, and very frightened.
A giant steel gate rose up to allow the sheriff’s car to drive into Graterford’s cavernous sally port area. Once the gate fell shut, I was immediately hustled out of the car by some very large, serious-looking corrections officers. I knew I would have to submit to a cavity search, but it wasn’t the strip-search that would dominate my memory of this event. It was the noise.
Since concrete and steel do not absorb sound, the clamor and voices from within just bounced around, crashing into each other to create a hollow, booming echo that never ended. It sounded as if someone had put a microphone inside a crowded locker room with the volume pumped up to broadcast the noise. It was this deafening background noise that would lull me to sleep at night and greet me in the morning for the next five years. Though I have been out of Graterford for many years now, its constant din still echoes in my ears.
The prison guards finished their search and escorted me up Graterford’s main corridor, a dim, gloomy, fifteen-hundred-foot-long stretch. The lack of natural light and the damp, dungeonlike air was oppressive. As I took one tentative step after another, I became so disoriented that I lost track of how far I had been walking. I promised myself never to take bright and sunny places for granted again.
Things changed with sudden permanence once I reached the central corridor gate that separated the administrative section from the prison proper. I saw, for the first time, the faces, shapes, and shadows of the men who would become my friends, enemies, and neighbors. They stared at me and I stared back, as scared as I had ever been in my life.
Once inside, I was walked through a gauntlet of desperate men. Their hot smell in the muggy corridor was as foul as their appearance. Most were wearing their “Graterford tan,” an ashen gray pallor. The discoloration of these distorted human forms reflected the prison landscape. At Graterford you work, eat, sleep, and idle indoors. You never have to go out unless you want to risk the sometimes deadly yard. Many inmates served their time like cave dwellers, never leaving Graterford’s concrete-and-steel shelter.
My first impression was that most of these men brandished their scars and deformities like badges of honor. None seemed to have a full set of front teeth. Many displayed tattoos of skulls or demons. They all seemed either too tall or too small, but none seemed right. Eyes were buggy, beady, squinted, or staring. Heads were too big, too small, pointed, swollen, or oblong, some with jutting foreheads, twisted noses, massive jaws. None seemed human.
One could argue whether it was the look of these men that led them to prison or whether it was the prison that gave them their look. What tales of suffering their bodies told seemed to be of no concern to them. They were content to wear their scars openly like a warning, the way farmers use scarecrows to keep menacing birds away. Today I feel pity and compassion for those who have had to suffer so much pain and tragedy. But on that hot June day, all I wanted was to get away from these ugly creatures as quickly as possible.
Now when I watch a new arrival walking “the gauntlet of desperate men,” I can always sense his hopelessness. I know my stare is as horrifying to him as the stares were for me on my first day, and I know what I must look like to him.
Getting Classified
Toward the end of the main corridor I was shepherded into yet another corridor that led to the Clothing Room, a cold, damp place equipped with a tile-walled shower, and endless rows of mothballed clothes hung on racks like mismatched goods in a thrift shop.
I was still wearing my nice suit and tie from the courthouse. My escort guard ordered me to “get naked” and surrender my personal effects to an inmate dressed in brown prison garb. As I stripped down, I handed the silent inmate the last vestiges of my social identity. He tossed them impatiently into an old cardboard box. The guard conducted another “bend-over-and-stretch-’em” search; I was given delousing shampoo and ordered to shower. Afterward, as I stood naked and shivering, 1 was assigned two pairs of navy-blue pants, two blue shirts, three T-shirts, three pairs of boxer shorts, three pairs of socks, a blue winter coat, a blue summer jacket, two towels, and a pair of brown shoes. Everything but the shoes and socks had am4737 boldly stamped in black. This number was my new, permanent identity.
Once I had dressed, I was fingerprinted and photographed, then escorted to E Block, officially known as the Eastern Diagnostic and Classification Center (EDCC). E Block was treated as a separate facility, which inmates and staff called “Quarantine.” Because all new receptions to Quarantine were issued blue prison uniforms, they were labeled “Blues.” General population inmates, who wore brown uniforms, were referred to as “Browns.”
Soon I found myself before the E Block sergeant, who walked me to a room full of bedding. There another inmate in brown dropped a rolled-up mattress on my shoulder. Inside it were stuffed a blanket, pillow, metal cup, plastic knife, fork, and spoon, a pack of rolling tobacco, soap, toothbrush, and a disposable razor.
Awkwardly balancing the mattress roll on my shoulder with one arm and carrying my prison-issued clothes with the other, I followed the sergeant down a flight of stairs to my cell. The moment I twisted my body and cargo sideways into the dark, narrow cell, the sergeant slid the door shut and disappeared from sight.
I spent the next two days in the prison’s infirmary for shots and a complete medical examination. While it was a doctor who examined me, it was an inmate who drew my blood and wrote down my medical history. A guard followed me and the other Blues everywhere we went. I wondered about this constant surveillance. Why were we so heavily guarded? One reason, I later learned, was that although the infirmary was also used by Browns, contact between Blues and Browns was strictly forbidden. Nonetheless, because they had more liberties than the new arrivals, Browns often tried to barter privileges with Blues. For example, a pack of cigarettes could buy extra phone time or a library pass; for a pack a day, you could rent a TV or a radio. Also, some Browns were homosexuals and would exploit weaker Blues. Many were point men for prison gangs, who reported back on the new prospects for possible gang membership or future victimization.
Two weeks of idleness followed the medical examination process. Finally I was taken to an examination room for a series of psychological and literacy tests. From the inmate point of view, the testing was an utter sham. For one thing, the written tests were given to everyone without even determining who could read or write. I was tested in an unsupervised room with about thirty other men, most of whom just picked answers at random or copied them from someone else.
Because the tests were given so irrelevantly, inmates tended to see their results only as a tool of manipulation. Under this assumption, many men had developed theories on how to answer the test questions. Some felt it was best to copy from the brightest men in order to improve their chances at getting a clerk’s job over kitchen or laundry duty. Others felt they should give lunatic answers so they could be medically released from work altogether. Still others gave no answers at all and faked illiteracy, reasoning that they could enroll in school and appear to do extremely well, thereby fooling the parole board into believing they had worked hard to make a positive change in their lives. All these connivances were based on the inmates’ understanding that they were being conned as much as they were doing the conning. They believed that the tests were used by the administrators just to maintain the semblance of educational purpose at best and at worst to harvest information from them that would some day be used against them (for example in job placement or for parole eligibility).
Two more months of idleness followed as I waited to be interviewed by my counselor. To occupy time, people played cards and worked out. During these early idle days, long-standing friendships and alliances were made. I also noticed that every rime the four hundred members of E block were let out into the yard, a fight would break out. It is my experience that when convicts are let loose after being locked up for long periods of time, aggressive behavior is an immediate and natural consequence.
This was also a time when inmates distinguished the weak from the strong, predators from victims. The first impressions I made on others during classification have followed me through prison ever since. Since I was not a career criminal, I was initially viewed as a “square John”: a middle-class outsider with no experience of the social world of inmates. To both my advantage and disadvantage, I was seeing everything through the eyes of a foreigner, making many foolish mistakes yet gaining just as many unique insights.
When I was finally called in for my interview, the counselor examined my test results and asked me a few questions about my conviction and sentence. The interview took only ten or fifteen minutes.
Two weeks later, I was summoned to appear before the Classification Committee. Sitting before a counselor, the block sergeant, and a major of the guards, I was informed that I had been classified to Graterford. Just before I left, the major added in a pleasant voice, “You’ll be working for me.” At the time I didn’t consider the significance of my job assignment — a fortuitous clerical job. I was too relieved to know that the tortuous classification ordeal was finally over.
The introduction of the classification process was originally a major prison reform but for me and most of the others, as I later discovered, classification was a total waste of time. While different prisons in Pennsylvania purportedly provided different types of rehabilitation programs meant to serve the needs of various kinds of offenders, in reality it seemed that only three considerations were used to determine a convict’s ultimate destination: (1) race, (2) hometown, and (3) availability of cell space. At the time, most of the minority inmates in the state were classified to Graterford or Western Penitentiary. The other seven prisons consisted of mostly white inmates under an all-white civilian staff.
Getting Dug In
Once I was classified to Graterford, I traded in my blues for browns and moved off Quarantine to B Block. This was a working block, reserved for those inmates who had been assigned a job. Though it mirrored the design of E Block, B Block was considerably less crowded and noisy. Most of the men on B Block were much older than those on the classification block. These were the “Old Heads” of the prison, inmates who had done a long stretch.
“When I arrived at my new home, I quickly signed in at the block sergeant’s desk and requested cleaning supplies. Then I spent the morning scrubbing down every inch of my cell. By noon count I was able to lie down on my bed, smoke a cigarette, and consider my surroundings. My cell measured about six feet by twelve with a ten-foot-high ceiling, from which dangled a single light bulb with a pull chain. For furniture, I had a flat, hard steel bed and a steel desk and chair which had been assembled as one unit. The mandatory toilet afforded a sink directly above it with a steel medicine cabinet above that. High over the toilet was a rusty radiator, my only source of heat in the winter. Finally, I had a flimsy wooden footlocker with a hasp that could be locked with a commissary-bought combination lock. My entrance was a solid steel sliding door with a fixed glass window on the top quarter. On the opposite wall was a window that could be manually opened and closed, just a little. The concrete walls were painted a dingy off-white and adorned with graffiti and cigarette stains.
This was my home. I was due to report to work the next morning and I could feel myself getting dug in. In prison it doesn’t take much to make a man happy: food, some quiet, a good book, a job, and enough heat in the winter. That day I was happy just to be able to lie on that hard bed with a seventy-watt light bulb glaring in my face. I felt the worst was over. I could now begin to serve my time.
Escape from Reality
Like most first-time arrivals to Graterford, I was preoccupied with survival and how to avoid becoming the victim of violence. When there was general movement in the prison, for example, the main corridor would fill with hundreds of inmates in transit. This made the corridor an extremely dangerous place to be. I was more likely to see a stabbing than a guard on duty.
The cellblocks were just as insecure. A guard at one end of a cell-block could not identify anyone at the other end; the distance of seven hundred feet was just too great. Because of their fear of being assaulted where no one could see them, many block guards never patrolled the inner perimeter and spent most of their time avoiding conflicts at all cost, even turning the other way. In fact, inmates serving long sentences preferred to lock at Graterford because, even though it was violent, it afforded them the most personal liberty. The more violent a prison is, the more reluctant guards are to enforce petty rules for fear of being assaulted.
If I made eye contact with a stranger, I would feel threatened. An unexpected smile could mean trouble. A man in uniform was not a friend. Being kind was a weakness. Viciousness and recklessness were to be respected and admired. I could feel my habits, my personality, and even my values change. I came to view the world as a place of unrelenting fear. Oddly enough, these changes were in some way comforting. In the struggle to survive, it was easier to distrust everyone than to believe in their inherent goodness.
By the time I had settled in, however, I found myself feeling safe enough to think beyond the moment, something I had not been able to do since my arrest. Unfortunately, this new sense of security brought with it the “sleeping phase.” I began to sleep twelve to fourteen hours a day. My whole life consisted of eating, working, and sleeping. I never dreamed. I only tried to stay unconscious for as long as I possibly could. Though I had no way of knowing it at the time, I had entered a very common prison-adjustment phase, one so common, in fact, that walking in on a newcomer while he sleeps is the most practiced technique of cell thieves and rapists. In Graterford, a man who spends too much time in bed sends the same signal as that of a bleeding fish in shark-infested waters.
“You can’t be sleeping all the time,” cautioned my chess partner one day, waking me to play a game. “You can’t sleep away your sentence. You have to stay awake to stay alive in here.”
I resolved to keep myself busy. I took up reading and painting. I was allowed to buy almost as many books, magazines, and newspapers as I wanted, as well as canvases, brushes, and paints. Self-help was encouraged so long as you could pay for it.
Soon I was reading everything I could get my hands on and painting well into the wee hours of the morning. My cell became crowded with books, magazines, canvases, newspapers, even an easel. I went so far as to rig up extra lighting, hang pictures, and buy throw rugs for the cement floor. I had successfully transformed my cell into a cluttered boardinghouse room.
“You have to spend more time out of that cell, Victor,” insisted my chess mate and only friend at that time. “It’s not healthy to do a ‘bit’ [time] like that. Look at your cell, you have junk everywhere. You even have lights that look like they belong in a room somewhere else.”
“I’m just getting dug in,” I replied in defense, annoyed that my efforts at avoiding reality had been detected.
“This isn’t getting dug in, this is foolishness. You’re in a penitentiary — a tough one. You should never try to forget that. Never try to make yourself believe you’re somewhere else. Do you know what a lit match could do to this cell?”
His words struck an unnerving chord. Only a few months earlier, I had watched a man whose cell across the way had been deliberately set on fire. He had screamed and banged helplessly on his locked door, flames dancing around him, biting at his flesh. Through his cell window, I could see billowing black smoke envelope his pleading, twisted, horrified face until he disappeared. It had taken some time before guards responded to his screams.
The very next day I gave away my books, magazines, newspapers, art supplies. I knew I had to fight as hard for my safety as I did for my sanity.
1995, State Correctional Institution Rockview
Bellefonte, Pennsylvania
bright shiny bracelets
jangling on my arm
wide leather belt
snug about my waist
chains dangling seductively
between my legs.
I am captured
but not subdued
THEY
think they have me
but
my mind
wheels and soars and spins and shouts
no prisoner
I am free
to look to see all that I ever have been all that I ever may be
I hold the small and sacred part of me close
like a royal flush
my poker face
must not betray
THEY
cannot touch it
not even in their dreams
I
am light and air and fire
I
slip through their clutching fingers
like the night
even as they grasp my puny wrist
of simple bone
and blood
and flesh
body here
spirit there
I
am still
free.
1990, Arizona State Prison Complex-Perryville
Goodyear, Arizona