Genesius was a Roman comic actor who was famous for his plays making fun of Christianity. One day, the story goes, he was midscene when he had a religious revelation and converted to the faith. He was martyred when he refused Emperor Diocletian’s order to renounce Jesus, and so became Saint Genesius, patron of comedians, torture victims, lawyers, converts, and clowns.
San Genesius State Penitentiary is located just outside of Vacaville, about three-quarters of the way between San Francisco and Sacramento, set far enough back from I-80 that they didn’t have to post the usual signs about not picking up hitchhikers.
It’s a brooding place, the way prisons tend to be, H-shaped, with an original 1930s cinder-block building as the crossbar, and two sixties-vintage wings on either end. Designed to house seven hundred inmates, home to three times that number. It smells, and the floors have lost their finish from prisoners’ endless mopping, exposing rough aggregate surfaces that have absorbed an endless shower of fluids and misery.
The first time I visited San Genesius was in late 2012, four months after Scott surrendered himself to the California Highway Patrol detail in Redway, California. He was accompanied by his lawyer, a very expensive fellow from a Silicon Valley firm who specialized in getting diversion or other wrist-slaps for rich techies who got caught with Schedule II narcotics. He usually succeeded.
But not in Scott’s case.
It wasn’t even Scott’s cocaine. I know, that sounds like the kind of bullshit anyone who got busted would say, but I believe him. I enjoy a little coke now and again, but Scott doesn’t. I’d seen him pass on so many bumps and lines. For Scott, it was magic mushrooms as a daily driver, LSD for special occasions, and mescaline, peyote, salvia, DMT, and even ayahuasca when he wanted a true blowout. Scott just wasn’t a coke kind of guy.
Scott wouldn’t say whose cocaine it was. He wasn’t a snitching kind of guy, either.
It was that refusal to throw someone to the lions that cost Scott his freedom. The cop who busted Scott—doing 95 m.p.h. on a winding stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway that was posted at 35, which was an idiotic thing that was (unlike cocaine) perfectly in character for Scott—found the coke when his dog “alerted” on Scott’s car. It was down the side of the passenger seat, in a little baggie containing precisely 9.01 grams of powder cocaine of middling quantity. That 0.01 was important, because 9 grams is the threshold for an “intent to sell” rap, which is a Class B felony.
Scott’s fancy lawyer could have gotten him diversion if Scott had coughed up the name of whatever friend had been riding in his passenger seat. Instead, he kept mum, and the prosecutor—furious with him and intending to “send a message”—made sure the judge knew that this was Scott’s third felony rap: the felony assault on an officer and felony possession charges from Catalina filling out his rap sheet.
Three strikes. In 2011, a third felony conviction meant an automatic twenty-five-to-life sentence, under a vengeful 1994 law passed by state ballot initiative following the grisly murders of a teenager and a little girl. By 2012, that was softened, thanks to another ballot initiative motivated by a combination of horror at the state’s bursting prisons and the cost of supporting so many young men who’d grown so old in those same teeming lockups.
Scott was arrested in late 2011, just after Thanksgiving. Bad timing.
Scott was serving twenty-five years to life in the minimum-security wing of San Genesius State Pen, and I didn’t know about it until I sent him an email and got an autoresponse warning me that he was “away from my desk for the next quarter century.”
I’d left San Francisco early, but I was still nearly late. I was twenty minutes en route when I remembered that I wasn’t allowed to wear any “blue denim” and had to race home and change out of my jeans.
The rules for visiting Scott were so complex that I’d actually printed a checklist (e.g., “Spare key ring with only two keys”), but I’d forgotten about the jeans.
The checklist was just the latest hurdle in a series of bureaucratic steps, starting with mailing Scott a letter requesting that he send me a CDCR 106 visitor questionnaire, which I then had to send back to the prison administration, who took a month to approve it. I got five ten-dollar rolls of quarters at the bank and loaded them in a clear plastic bag, along with my driver’s license. Everything else stayed in the trunk.
I handed in my CDCR 106 and submitted to a search and metal-detector scan, then sat tight in a visitors’ lobby with the other visitors, waiting to be called into the visitation room. Mine was the only white face in the lobby, apart from the guard’s. The largest group of visitors were young, sad women, often with kids; the second-largest group was older people with the wrung-out look of demoralized parents of adult children in crisis. Wives, kids, and parents amounted to three-quarters of the visitors. The rest were young men, friends or maybe siblings, staring hard at the floor or whispering to one another.
I was nearly the last one to be called. I followed a guard—an older white guy with volcanic acne and a pronounced limp—into the visitation room. It was crowded, and the ancient body-odor stink was overlaid with the odors of fresh-scrubbed kids and the desperately cheerful perfumes of the wives and girlfriends.
Scott and I were assigned a table right in the middle, between a young Black man and his sorrowing parents; a middle-aged Latina woman visiting a middle-aged man who looked enough like her that they were probably siblings; a Black woman and her teenaged son visiting their father, behind me; and behind Scott, a Middle Eastern boy, barely eighteen, visiting with a girl no older than he, tears coursing down his cheeks while her shoulders shook from soft, hiccuping sobs.
Scott was already at the table when I entered: shorn of his ponytail, with a few days’ facial stubble, looking doughy and hollow-eyed, not so much scared as just disappeared. He registered me when I slid into my seat, a flick-flick of the eyes.
“Hi, Scott,” I said.
“Marty,” he said, in a numb voice, barely audible over the sounds around us.
“Jesus,” I said. “Can you appeal?”
He shrugged and hitched a half grin in one corner of his mouth. “The lawyers will take whatever I give them and spend it. But the law’s the law. Three strikes, you’re out.” His eyes flashed a little. “They didn’t like that I wouldn’t name names. They knew it wasn’t my stuff, but they wanted to punish someone, and if I wouldn’t give them a name, they’d make an example out of me. At least I was able to set things up so my lawyer would pay into my commissary.” He patted his bulging stomach. “Keeps me out of the mess hall.”
I was briefly at a loss for words. “Are you really going to spend twenty-five years here?”
Again with that half smile. Like everything else about that Scott, it was recognizable as a distant cousin to the happy-go-lucky guy I’d spent all those weekends with on Catalina, but only just. This Scott looked like a lossy JPEG of himself.
“They tell me I can get a third off my sentence for good behavior.”
We talked inconsequentialities for a while, mostly just me quizzing him about how I could help him—what I could send, who he wanted to hear from, what I could relay to people on the outside.
Finally, I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “But Scott, how the fuck are you going to do this? Brother, you look half dead and it’s only been four months. Twenty-five years is a long time, but it’s not forever. I don’t want you to die in here. There’s got to be a way for you to get through this. Can I sign you up for college classes? Anything?”
Again, the flash in his eyes. “It’s not my job to figure out how you can help me, Marty. I’m the one in prison.”
That rocked me back. It was right, of course. “I’m sorry,” I said. “What if—” I stopped. What if what? “What if I go talk to some lawyers, some advocacy organizations? What if I get you some magazine subscriptions?”
He nodded. “I would appreciate that,” he said. I think he meant it. Or at least that’s what I told myself.
The drive home seemed twice as long as the drive up. I had to stop twice because I found myself crying. I was certain, absolutely certain, that Scott would not survive. I had just spent an hour with a man who was fixing to die. What’s more, I didn’t blame him. Not one bit. And that made me cry all the harder.
*
Six months later, he was a different man.
“Marty fucking Hench!” he said, grinning broadly and drumming the table with his palms. He threw his arms open—though he didn’t rise for a hug—and gestured to my visitor’s chair. Other prisoners and their families turned to stare at us briefly, then returned to their business.
“Scott Warms,” I said, sitting down. “You look amazing.” He did, too. Still pale, but fitter than last time, his prison-issue jumpsuit no longer bulging at the gut, clean-shaved, hair buzzed to an all-over half inch. “What’s your secret?”
“Magic,” he said. He grinned—the whole Scott Warms grin this time—and waited for me to bite.
I bit. “Do go on,” I said, grinning back.
“We’ve got a really good Dungeons & Dragons group here,” he said. “They’ve been playing for about ten years now. There’s a guy who makes miniatures and dice out of toilet paper mâché, and when they sweep the cells and confiscate the dice, we draw dice-rolls out of decks of cards. The GM has been inside since the 1980s, but he actually knew Gary Gygax, and he’s had people on the outside who’ve been sending him books and modules in his quarterly packages for decades. He’s published two character classes in Dragon and four modules with Judges Guild while he was inside, though all the money they earned went to restitution for the liquor-store owner he shot.”
“That is a lot,” I said. “Give me a second.” His smile widened. “Okay, maybe start with the liquor-store owner.”
Scott shrugged. “It was a long time ago. Evan was strung out at the time. The guy lived. Evan’s done twenty years and he hasn’t touched heroin for decades. I’m not going to judge this guy by the things he did on the worst day of his life.” He shrugged again, then the grin came back. “Man, that guy is a hell of a DM.”
And then . . . he told me about his D&D games.
No, really. Scott was a pretty good storyteller, but D&D games are like dreams, more fun to have than to hear about. There were some pretty funny moments where Scott’s cleric rolled up some consecutive critical fails and healed the boss troll his party was fighting, but for the most part, it was an eye-glazing half hour.
Not that I begrudged it. It was Scott’s time, and he needed the freedom to spend it the way he wanted way more than I needed to direct the subject of conversation.
When the story wound down, I got up to leave, and so did Scott. “We’re allowed to hug,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. He always was a hugger. It went on for a while, and then I felt his fingers work at the waistband at the side of my pants, tucking something in there. I immediately felt like every person in that room was staring at us: guard, prisoner, and visitor. But no one seemed to notice. They were all wrapped up in their own drama.
I drove back to I-80, then pulled off at a truck stop, parking far from any of the other cars, before I fished in my waistband.
It was written on both sides of a quarter sheet of thin paper, folded twice. The writing was cramped, so tiny I had to squint.
Marty: My DM has an old friend on the outside who gets him sheets of blotter acid disguised as graph paper for games, a first-generation hippie chemist who learned his brew from Owsley. The D&D club plays, but we also have a monthly trip. I was skeptical at first, because I couldn’t imagine having a bad trip while locked in a cage, but I was wrong.
It literally saved my life. We start our trip together in the day room, play awhile, get very silly, then we just start telling each other stories. We get pretty weird, but everyone who hears us just assumes it’s part of the game. The DM has been making up his own variant rules for a quarter century, and honestly the stuff we say when we’re tripping is not much weirder than the stuff we say when we’re not. So long as we move our miniatures and roll our dice, everyone assumes it’s all fine.
Then we go back to our cells and they lock us in, and we finish out the trip in our bunks or with our cellies. We don’t tell them, though they probably suspect something.
But here’s the deal: the DM is getting out, and he’s not going to risk his parole by sending contraband inside. The risk of getting caught is low, but he’s a felon mailing graph paper back inside, so for him, it’s a little higher.
Marty, I have a favor to ask.
He had a pretty clever method worked out: he’d start a book club, one where they’d take turns reading aloud to one another. Great works of literature, the kind of thing you could buy in a used bookstore.
I’d deposit a single drop of LSD onto the spine-side bottom corner of prime-numbered pages, so that any guard who riffled the book wouldn’t handle the doctored areas. Plus, the tiny excisions at the spine would not be obvious to anyone who checked out the book after the acid had been extracted.
I understand that this is a terrible idea and you’d be an idiot to take me up on it.
But I still hope you’ll do it.
Talking with my DM, I’ve learned a lot about the golden age of psychedelics research, back before the panic led to the pharma companies halting the supply of drugs and sent the FDA to ban it. There were hundreds of studies, Marty, and the results were really promising, especially for people with drug habits and people with trauma problems. As in, 99% of the people I’m locked in with here.
I’ve seen LSD make a difference. I know that sounds weird after decades of scare talk about drugs, when the only time you’d go tripping is when you’re partying or at a festival. But the guys in here need this. They are benefiting from it. It’s not just keeping them sane in a fucked-up situation, it’s actually helping them get better. There’s been a little underground club of psychonauts in here for decades and if it ends now, it will be a brutal turn for people who are living in the most brutal conditions.
So I understand if you won’t do this, but fuck I really hope you will.
And then he promised to give me information for his DM’s chemist, an encrypted email address at a Swiss privacy-focused provider, along with a “foolproof” dead-drop method: go to Redfin, find an empty house for sale, and have FedEx deliver an innocuous parcel containing a small vial of liquid LSD there, timing the arrival so that it shows up at a time when the Realtor wouldn’t be there (but I would). That was a variant on an old trick that I knew for a fact worked, and it was clever.
I refolded the paper and put it in the armrest compartment, then I pulled out of the truck stop. It took a couple of hours to get home and the whole time I kept seeing phantom police cars in my mirrors, and every time I thought I caught a glimpse of one, my heart thundered so hard that I could hear it as loud as dubstep.
There was no way I could do this. No way. There were too many ways to get caught, and if I was, well, I’d be right next to Scott. Maybe I wouldn’t get twenty-five years (I’d managed to make it that far without even one felony, let alone two), but it wouldn’t be a short sentence, either. The Great State of California gets very touchy about people who help its prisoners smuggle contraband into its prisons.
*
Three months later, they turned me away.
“Your visitee is in the Special Housing Unit and is not eligible to receive visitors at this time.” The guard at the reception looked at me like I was an idiot, and I realized I was just standing there with my mouth open, not saying anything, and there was a line behind me.
“He’s in solitary,” the woman behind me called out. “You can’t see him ’cause he’s in solitary. Now move, please?” She had a toddler on her hip and she looked tired. I apologized and retreated to my car.
I sat there for a long time, hand on the key, not starting the ignition, until a guard wandered over and made me roll down my window so he could explain the policy against “loitering” outside the facility.
I drove home.
A month later, they turned me away.
He wasn’t there. He was in the state medical facility, following a suicide attempt.
I didn’t loiter in the parking lot.
A month later, he was eligible for his quarterly package.
I mailed him five books.
I had toyed with the idea of picking up some Carlos Castaneda, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, and Philip K. Dick, but I quickly abandoned that plan (and later that night, got a momentary case of the shivers when I was struck by what an idiotic, self-sabotaging temptation of the fates that would have been).
I also contemplated sending the Bible, or hymnals, or something by Bill W., but I decided that was trying so hard it might wrap all the way around and seem suspicious on its own.
In the end, I went for high fantasy: all three Lord of the Rings books, The Hobbit, and A Wizard of Earthsea. It took me two full nights to prepare the books, working with a printed list of prime numbers and an eyedropper, wearing disposable gloves. When I was done, I packaged the books in a big bubble mailer and took it to a pack-and-ship across the Bay, with a handwritten slip giving Scott’s prisoner number and address. As I expected, the bored clerk rekeyed the address, squinting at my nearly unreadable handwriting, and printed out a thermal adhesive-backed label.
I wore my uncle Ed’s hat, pulled low. I paid cash. I parked around the block. I used store windows as mirrors on the way back to my car, hoping to catch a tail. I drove home to my place in Noe Valley and took the pork tenderloins, covered in salt and pepper and resting on a wire rack over a baking tray, out of the fridge and set them on the counter. While that came up to room temperature, I lit a chimney full of hardwood charcoal on top of the grill on my balcony. Once the coals were hot and covered in white ash, I slipped on a silicone cooking mitt and tipped the chimney onto one half of the grill, making a neat two-zone fire.
I burned up the bottle the liquid LSD had come in, the envelope it had been packaged in, the bubble wrap, and the gloves. The plastic stank and made black smoke. I let the coals burn for twenty minutes more until the plastic was nothing but residue. I threw on a couple more lumps of coal and a fist-sized chunk of cherrywood, then rested my oiled, cleaned grill on top of them. I carefully laid out the pork tenderloins in the cool zone, fat ends closest to the fire, and put the lid on tight, closing the vents up to slits. I washed and trimmed some asparagus while the timer on my phone counted down three minutes, then I flipped the tenderloins, putting sprigs of rosemary between them and the grill.
I flipped them twice more, then checked them with an instant-read thermometer, decided 135 degrees was done enough, and moved the tenderloins to the hot side of the fire for sixty seconds on a side, to develop a sear and crust. I moved them onto a plate and put a dish towel over it, then tossed the asparagus onto the hot zone and kept it moving around until it had a nice char, then moved it to the cool zone while I carved the tenderloins into thin medallions.
I transferred the asparagus to a fresh plate, sprayed it with aerosol olive oil, squeezed a lemon wedge over it, and sprinkled on a half pinch of flake salt. Then I added a medium-sized portion of tenderloin medallions and splashed them with some fiery mango salsa and got the plate nicely centered on my balcony’s little bistro table, along with a wooden-handled Opinel steak knife and a nice fork, and four fingers of dark sipping rum—Bacardi Añejo.
I ate my dinner and stared at my neighbor’s backyard garden while the sun went down, and I tried to appreciate every bite, just in case it was my last dinner as a free man.
*
Scott looked great.
Seeing him with clear eyes and a little smile, there in the prison visitation room, was a profound relief. It caused me to expel a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding in, drawing a suspicious stare from the guard who escorted me into the room. I smiled apologetically at him and pretended I didn’t see him scowl in return.
The last time I’d seen Scott, he’d been half asleep, doped to the gills on Haldol, one corner of his mouth and one hand ticcing in counterpoint with spasms. Slumped, fat, and listing, eyelids at half-mast, he’d seemed gone.
Six months and one more quarterly shipment of books later, Scott was back to his old self, with a wicked gleam and an easy laugh. He’d lost weight, or maybe his muscle tone was just better, and he radiated a kind of bemused air that I took for detachment at first, like he’d escaped us all, but which I decided was engagement, like he was right there with us, soaking up all the unintentional, undeniable comedy of it all.
“Hey, Marty!” he said, and launched to his feet and pulled me into a backslapping, crushing hug.
“Scott,” I said, tensing up while I waited for him to slip another note into my waistband, but he didn’t. We took our seats.
“Things are good, huh?” I said, then regretted it, because of course things weren’t good, how could they be good when Scott had twenty-three years and change left on his sentence, maybe sixteen with good behavior?
But he nodded enthusiastically. “You wouldn’t believe how good,” he said. “The D&D game, the book club, they’re going so well. The guys I’m hanging out with have become like brothers. It’s completely changed how I relate to this place—how I relate to my life.” Which left me feeling incredibly exposed, like anyone could easily figure out this code: Thank you for smuggling a Schedule I controlled substance to me, my fellow felon. But of course, no one gave a shit about us or our discussion, and even if they had, that was quite a leap to make.
Scott saw my thinking on my face. “Easy,” he said. “I’m good. This situation”—he waved his hand around at the people, the walls, the vending machines, the buzzing lights—“is not ideal, but these guys aren’t running a sci-fi gulag. No one’s running speech recognition on our conversation looking for oblique references. They’re just trying to warehouse a bunch of losers as cheaply as possible. Once you realize that, everything else becomes very straightforward.” He snorted. “Very straightforward indeed.”
He didn’t feel the need to recount any of his D&D adventures that time, but we did have a long talk about the group’s feelings on The Hobbit. Apparently they’d really identified with the all-male cast, and observed that Frodo and his dwarf pals got into exactly the kind of stupid, self-sabotaging trouble that lands guys in prison, chalking it up to the absence of female contributions to their deliberations.
“I never really thought about The Hobbit being such a sausagefest,” I said.
“Spend enough time away from women, that kind of thing stands out. For guys in here, even reading about women is a treasure. Not just the straight ones, either. One of the guys in the book club is a Gold Star Gay, never so much as kissed a girl growing up, but he misses having women in his life as much as the rest of us.”
“I wonder if women in lockup miss men the same way?”
“Not if they’re smart,” he said. “If I ever get out of here, I could happily spend ten years without ever seeing another man. No offense.”
“None taken.”
We stared at each other across the table. I had to remind myself that this serenity-radiating Buddha in khakis was the shattered zombie I’d seen just a few months before. I guess he didn’t like thinking about that either. He got sad, his eyes drooping, and he said, “You need to know, Marty, that you’re making a difference. I couldn’t do this without your help.”
Help, felony, what’s the difference? I didn’t say it.
But I mailed him another five books the next time he was eligible for a quarterly package.
*
The first time I got behind the wheel of a car, I was terrified. Objectively, I was right to be scared. Driving is just about the most dangerous thing you can do as an everyday American, and you’d have to be a lunatic to treat it like it was just a quick spin around the block. But that’s exactly how we treat it, despite the fact that we are surrounded by people who are, by definition, lunatics, because they are all treating the experience like a spin around the block.
But if you do something dangerous and terrible long enough, eventually it becomes normal.
Over the next four years, I mailed twelve more packages. Mostly Zane Grey novels. Scott loved those. They reminded him of the good times on Catalina, helped him purge the bad associations he had with the place.
The chemist kept coming through and never charged me a dime. That might sound weird to you if all your drug experiences started in the post-Reagan, Just Say No era, but it made perfect sense to me. This was Silicon Valley, after all, where computers and psychedelics produced some of the strangest hybrids imaginable: hypercapitalist mystics who decried the material realm as an illusion even as they amassed billions of dollars.
Steve Jobs was a lifelong LSD evangelist (though Woz wouldn’t touch the stuff). He called it “one of the most important things in my life.” The Valley is full of billionaires who trip, and the proximity of the Stanford chemistry labs—and all the equipment they’ve discarded over the years, hoarded in the homes of chem grads who work in tech and only use their degrees to make dirt-cheap, lab-grade psychedelics—means there’s never a shortage of extremely pure LSD kicking around. Also DMT, MDMA, 2C-P, and a whole alphabet soup of very small, very specific molecules.
Throw in one of the world’s largest fleets of private jets, able to nip down to the jungles of Costa Rica or the Mexican desert and reenter the country with only the most cursory customs inspections, and you get a similar supply of ayahuasca, peyote, and mescaline.
Once you plug into the network, there’s an effectively bottomless supply of this stuff for the taking, much of it in the hands of people for whom it is too cheap to bother selling. I had a friend around then who connected with an MDMA seller over the Silk Road and bought a kilo of pure MDMA for $3,000.
This was pure powder MDMA, and the recreational dose is something like 100–150 mg, which means that he had between thirteen thousand and twenty thousand doses in a double thickness of gallon-sized ziplock freezer bags in his sock drawer. He made his three grand back selling a generous scoop to a friend who had a friend who was heading to Coachella and then he just started giving the stuff away.
That’s the thing. While the wholesale drug distribution networks were controlled by dangerous, organized criminals, the actual production side was often just some semiretired hobbyist engineer with a lab in their garage, who produced in so much quantity, so cheaply, that selling to anyone except those wholesalers made no sense. The cartels paid cash. Pals got freebies, in quantities that exceeded any sane personal usage.
So it never surprised me that I was getting drugs for free. I even helped myself to a dose or two. The first time, I got sloppy and managed to dose myself while I was infusing a collection of Steven Brust novels about a wisecracking assassin and his pet dragon. It was scary at first (the trip, not the novels—they’re delightful), and then I figured out what was going on and carefully put away my workbench, changed into comfortable clothes, and headed down to Glen Canyon Park, where I spent the rest of the day hiking the rugged urban trails and looking really closely at leaves, bugs, and the occasional critter, which may or may not have actually been there.
The second time, I took a tin of Altoids that I’d dripped with three measured drops of liquid LSD with me when I went to stay with friends at a lakeside cabin in Napa. We took them at sunset, just as we were finishing up a couple of thick tri-tips over the charcoal grill. We ate as the doses came on, then stared into the firelight and wandered the woody trails while we peaked, finishing up with a 3 a.m. skinny dip in the cool, clear, sweet lake as we came down. We lay out nude on beach towels and watched the stars in the moonless, cloudless sky, murmuring conversations and giggling, sometimes reaching out to touch fingertips across the whirling void.
We slept late the next day, had pancakes and coffee at noon, went for another swim, and drove home. I was a little sleepy, so I went hunting up and down the radio dial for something to keep me alert on the empty, winding roads. I found a Sunday-afternoon news-roundup show where they had a panel about Brown v. Plata, and I stopped hunting.
I’d followed Plata ever since Scott went to prison: it was a lawsuit brought by California prisoners to argue that merely serving time in the overcrowded California prison system was a violation of their Eighth Amendment rights—the right to be free from “cruel and unusual punishment.”
California’s got a crunchy-granola reputation, but never forget, we’re the state that gave America Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Darth Vader. The three-strikes rule was pure cruelty, a recipe for putting hundreds of thousands of Californians behind bars for decades, but those Californians who voted for the measure? They weren’t going to vote for anyone who’d raise their taxes to build prisons to house all these prisoners.
By 1990, the prisons were already groaning and straining under their new life-servers. A class-action suit argued that these underfunded prisons were a danger to prisoners, so the prisons appealed. They lost. They appealed again. They lost again. That only took five years—an eyeblink to someone serving twenty-five years for possession of a single rock of crack cocaine.
The state’s position was simple: We don’t have money, and our judges have to hand out life sentences, so that’s that. Unfortunately for several successive state attorneys general, none of that actually mattered as far as the Eighth Amendment is concerned. Unfortunately for prisoners, the California Department of Corrections was happy to ignore court orders and no one seemed to be in a position to make them stop.
By 2001, the original 1990 case had morphed into a new case, Plata, which got rolled up with Coleman, another prisoners’ class action. By 2006 (sixteen years after all this started), Governor Schwarzenegger (remember him?) declared a state of emergency.
In 2009 (now nineteen years into the case), the courts ordered California to figure out how to release 40,000 of its 150,000 prisoners and reduce the state’s prisons to a mere 137.5 percent of their capacity. That court order reads as extremely pissed off in a way that I don’t often associate with judges writing about government agencies.
The anger was justified, because the state had no plan to get down to 137.5 percent of capacity—or rather, they had a lot of plans, each stupider than the last, like paying prisons in other states to house California inmates. The obvious solutions—releasing prisoners or building bigger prisons—never came up.
So it went. I’d followed Plata a little even before I had a pal inside the California state system, and once Scott landed behind bars, I’d paid more attention, setting a couple of news alerts. I knew that the case had gone to the Supreme Court, but that was months before. Now, they’d rendered a judgment.
The Supremes were pissed. The State of California had ignored seventy court orders to get its shit together. The time for court orders had passed. It was time for the Supremes to hand down . . . well, another court order. But while the previous orders had been about improving conditions—by increasing the number of doctors or decreasing the number of prisoners per cell—the Supremes were just gonna make the State of California release prisoners. Fuck that three-strikes rule. The California prison system was so badly run that merely being incarcerated constituted cruel and unusual punishment and so violated the Eighth Amendment.
As the Sunday-show panel debated the meaning of this order, I pulled off to the side of the road and just stared out the windshield at the whizzing cars.
Scott didn’t talk about getting out of prison, and I didn’t bring it up. We had both decided that we would spend the next quarter century of both our lives with me mailing contraband to him in San Genesius, both of us silently aware that even a relatively safe smuggling method wasn’t perfect and that just one piece of very bad luck would be the end of it for both of us.
Now, unexpectedly, Scott had a path to freedom, and so did I. This was true, despite Antonin Scalia’s vicious dissent about the risks of releasing “fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym”—which shocked even the Sunday commenters—and Clarence Thomas’s sadistic remarks about not “rewarding” healthy prisoners by releasing them early.
Scott and I might go free. So might thousands of other prisoners, and the families who were unfree the way I was, and in worse ways. The California prisons were so bad, they were literally indefensible. If the state had figured out how to make even a thin pretense of fixing the system, it might have escaped judgment. But no—it was so bad that it would now get good.