I was sent to Death Row at the age of twenty-one, the second youngest of the twenty-seven men sentenced to die in Pennsylvania in 1982. Imagine what it is like to know that you are not just going to prison, but that you are going to be put to death at some time in the future – although you don’t know when.
America currently has nearly 3,500 men and women waiting to die in prisons across the country. While they vary in their individual settings, nearly all face a similar situation to the one I faced back in 1982. A programme of severe isolation and deprivations is the rule for most people on Death Row. They are locked up in solitary confinement, usually for twenty-three hours a day, and left to rot for years while the state tries to win the right to execute them through the appeal courts.
Once you have been sentenced to die in Pennsylvania, you are taken from the county jail and placed in solitary confinement inside a maximum-security prison run by the state. These places are designed to house the most violent and depraved convicts. In the first weeks of being sent to one of these, many men collapse under the stress of being left in such a black void. The isolation, coupled with the initiation rituals used by the guards to break them down mentally, proves just too much.
The administrations of these prisons actually endorse such efforts to ‘break you’ as, to them, a broken man goes along to get along. Therefore, you are left to fend for yourself from the outset.
For me, like everyone else, Death Row was a horror show from the very first day. My first placement in the state prison system was in State Correctional Institution (SCI) Graterford, located just outside of Philadelphia, where I was to be evaluated, or ‘classified’ as they put it, before being moved to a permanent prison to await execution.
In 1982, there was room for only twenty-four men to remain permanently at Graterford, because it had rather a small Restricted Housing Unit (or RHU), and I was told early on that I was not going to be one of those men. They did not want a high-profile case like mine in their prison and they did not like me. I was aggressive, had violent mood swings and was prone to outbursts. I even made a replica mini-electric chair out of cardboard and taped it to my bars in defiance.
It was while I was at Graterford waiting to learn where I would be housed permanently that I first heard the horror stories about SCI Huntingdon. Every man on Death Row in Graterford feared they might go to another prison in the future because they knew that more and more men were being sentenced to die across the state. If the staff did not like you or you caused trouble you were more likely to get shipped out to Huntingdon, in the central mountains of Pennsylvania, or the state penitentiary at Pittsburgh, on the other side of the state. Neither option was good. However, every time the subject came up in discussion between the men waiting to be evaluated for transfer, as I was, the same fear crept into their voices at the mere prospect of being selected to go to the worst place in the system: Huntingdon. No one wanted to find out just how bad it was. We knew that the men who had rioted at Graterford the previous year had been sent there, and rumours about what the guards had done to some militant Muslim prisoners, who had caused an uprising, were scary.
All I knew was that this was where I was definitely going, and I would be put on B-Block, where a Death Row had been created a few months before. To me it felt that the further away from Philadelphia I was sent, the more the reality of what was being done to me would sink in.
It was at 3.30 a.m. on 14 February 1983 that I was shouted awake by two guards standing in front of my cell with clubs and handcuffs. They told me that I was leaving for Huntingdon right now. I was taken out through the prison reception area and placed next to a large blue and yellow bus with metal screens over its windows parked beside the forty-foot rear wall. These prison buses were known to inmates as the ‘Blue Birds’, named after the bus manufacturer whose insignia was written on their sides. Now I saw four guards with huge piles of chains linking together a procession of men already in handcuffs. These were the other transfer prisoners, all waiting to be ‘hooked up’ to a partner for the ride. As a Death Row prisoner I was left separate, but an extra security device was used to attach my handcuffs to my belly chain.
I was shivering as I stood there in my handcuffs and leg irons, dressed only in a prison-issue yellow jumpsuit, lined up in the cold night air like a farm animal ready to be transported to the slaughter house. The other Huntingdon-destined prisoners and I were about to begin a nine-hour ride on a bus that no one wanted to go on, to a prison that no one wanted to be in. Any of the inmates on the bus who were headed for one of the state’s other prisons just looked relieved not to be among us.
I kept to myself, trying to stay warm and get through all this without becoming motion sick – I had skipped breakfast, but even so I cannot ride on a bus without getting sick. I had been in one prison cell or another for over a year now and I was not ready for the movement of the bus as we rode along. However, I let the chatter from the others distract me from further thoughts of where I was heading.
The last stop for many of the gangsters who went from prison to prison acting tough, Huntingdon was legendary for the horrors done by its staff to its inmates. Even so, it was eerie how every man on that bus hushed as we made our way up the steep mountain back roads, closer and closer to our destination.
As soon as we pulled up inside the prison walls that afternoon, the guards emptied the bus of all the other men before four more guards climbed in and dragged me roughly from my seat. It all happened so fast that I had no time to brace myself for any of this. Next I was shoved up against a brick wall. All the guards were dressed in special, military-style outfits used to extract particularly violent prisoners or save hostages. Black gear and black uniforms. Three of them prodded their clubs into different points on my body while the other held my hands still by the cuffs. In the cold February sunshine outside of the building where Huntingdon’s Death Row was located, just a few yards from where the bus was parked, I finally met its captain of the guards.
As he approached from between the men holding me with this quick military-style stride, he pulled up inches from my face and looked me hard in the eyes for a few lingering moments. As the man in charge of Death Row, one of the captains made it his personal business to literally get in the face of each new inmate. He loved being part of this place which revelled in its reputation as the hardest place in the prison system, and he loved the power he held over the lives of the 145 men housed on his block, or ‘unit’. His voice was God-like to the men over whom he ruled.
His face still inches from mine, he began to address me in this very calm, detached voice: ‘You’re dead. Everyone you knew or loved is dead. Your family and everyone else who knew you are dead. And since you are dead, dead men do not speak in my unit, do you understand me?’
When he had finished I raised my head and said a soft ‘Yes, sir’ in reply.
He backhanded me with his right hand across my face so hard and so quickly that it rocked me. Suddenly I saw bright points of light in my left eye where he had smacked me with his clenched knuckles. From my jaw to my eye, my face filled with heat where I’d been hit, and my left ear was ringing from the blow. I pulled myself upright and managed to hang on to my balance as I tried to brace myself for what might happen next. I stood absolutely still and waited without looking at anything.
But I never got to do or say anything else because now he turned from me and said over his shoulder to the four guards holding me: ‘Thirty seconds.’
I had no clue what this meant, but it was clearly the words these men had been waiting for. Instantly they were on me, their clubs flying, as, over the next half-minute, I was beaten so mercilessly that I was grateful to be knocked unconscious after the first few blows. They beat me all along the backs of my legs, from my butt to my feet. They tore into my calves and thighs and really worked on my lower back and buttocks. These men were professionals; they knew exactly what they had to do – a beating which would leave the prisoner in as much pain as possible but without breaking any bones.
I learned later that this captain ‘fed’ his officers a new inmate once a week for them to take out their lives’ frustrations on. It was also his way of controlling random violence by these same guards, who might otherwise have acted alone and targeted anyone they felt like. In the past at Huntingdon it had all been too chaotic to let the guards just randomly go wild and so, the administration reasoned, it was better that the guards were given ‘sacrifices’ on which to perform ‘controlled’ beatings than for them to become predatory and out of control. I was told all this soon after I arrived by the inmate in the exercise cage next to mine when we were allowed out for our thirty minutes of exercise a day – the one occasion on which we were allowed to talk without being harmed for it. However, I could not have cared less what the intention behind it was when I became that week’s ‘sacrifice’.
I had prepared myself as best I could for how, as a convicted rapist-murderer, I was likely to be dealt with, yet what truly shocked me, right after the beating I got, were the actions of the medical staff who worked in this insane place. Having been dragged unconscious into my first cell on Death Row and given a little extra beating because I came to temporarily and was struggling against them in my semi-conscious state, I was ‘examined’ by the nurse on duty. She stood outside my cell with a guard beside her no more than a few minutes after I had come to, and called me to the window by saying my new prison number and my last name in a loud, official voice. Without even looking at me or caring if I answered her, she read from the clipboard in front of her. On it was a single sheet of paper, the routine document the prison provided for her to read aloud to every new inmate.
Among other things, she explained how I was to follow set procedures for seeing a doctor should I ‘think’ I needed one. The guard standing next to her felt this was the point at which to laugh, given the obvious pain I was in.
But, no matter how much it hurt me to do so, I stood up on my wobbly legs by my cell window and willed this nurse to look at me. I was praying that I could stand upright long enough for her to see my swollen eye and the trickle of blood from my nose. On the side of my face there was a large mark the shape of a left boot, grooved into my skin, where one of the guards had stood on my face while the others had removed my handcuffs and leg irons, ripping my arms up behind me as high as they would go. Now I deliberately refused to say anything just so that the nurse would have to look at me as she rattled through the questions on her clipboard. When she got no replies, the guard next to her added in an annoyed voice, ‘Inmate makes no response.’
Then, without ever looking up from her clipboard, the nurse just walked off. It was as if that was all she wanted to see. I felt as if I was no more of a human being to her than a cardboard cut-out placed in that cell. Now I truly knew what it was like to be regarded as non-human by people I didn’t even know.
I felt sick and light-headed, and my side was aching from where I had been kicked in the ribs, so I just let my grasp slip from the bars of my cell window and slid down the wall as painlessly as I could. I could not believe that I had been openly assaulted for no reason by the guards and that the healthcare professional who was meant to look after me had just totally ignored it all. I doubted I could live in this place for long. What kind of human being could? Some of the men I met when I first got there had been in the RHU for ten years or more. How was I ever going to keep from going insane in this madhouse?
I hardly slept that first week on Death Row as I kept waiting for the guards to come into my cell and attack me again. I could hear men whimper or cry out in the night. And the sound I came to know so well was the one of someone else being dragged into the housing unit and left in another empty cell for the nurse to come by with her clipboard interview. This was nothing like I had imagined the prison to be, and nothing in the world of which I had previously been a part had prepared me for such a brutal existence.
When that captain of the guards said that dead men were not allowed to speak in his unit, he meant exactly that. If the guards caught you talking to another inmate in a nearby cell, you got a written misconduct report and they confiscated whatever possessions you had. The next time they caught you talking out loud, they had four officers rush into your cell wearing protective armour, beat you down with clubs and hold you steady while the nurse on duty came in and stabbed you in the butt with a needle full of psychotropic drugs – usually 100 mg of a drug called Thorazine. It’s really creepy how a normally functioning man can converse with you in a lucid way in the exercise cage next to you one day and the next time you see him he has become a zombie who doesn’t even recognise you.
For those men who persisted with their bad behaviours after drug treatment there was the ultimate torment, the dreaded ‘Glass Bubble’. The Glass Bubble was, in reality, just a regular cell that had had the solid red bricks of its front wall replaced by glass bricks. This allowed the guards to see the prisoner at all times but also, more importantly, those bricks acted as a sound block, so the cell was completely hushed. Then the lights were left on twenty-four hours a day, and positioned on a chair outside was a guard whose job it was to make sure that the inmate was woken every twenty minutes or so for a ‘head count’.
Day after day the inmate was forced to partake in this same ‘standing count’ process. Usually after four to five days of this sort of sleep deprivation he would lose all awareness of time and place. The guards called the process ‘waiting for the white-out’, because inmates who lived through it sometimes described how their eyes would see only this sort of ultra-bright light and nothing else. It is much like becoming snow blind, I would imagine.
And so, while the rules are being forced on him in these most brutal of ways, a prisoner somehow has to find the courage and will to fight his appeals and seek to survive. I was so angry those first few years I was in Huntingdon that I would sometimes beat my head against the wall just to feel physical pain. I wanted to use my anger to keep me alive, because I saw what happens when men stop fighting. It hurts to think of them even now.
I was sitting on the bed in my ground-floor cell reading a newspaper only a few months into my time at Huntingdon when I witnessed my first suicide. A prisoner housed on the top tier, two floors above me and about three cells along, simply dived head-first off the balcony. As soon as they opened his cell door to take him for his shower, he jumped, handcuffs still on, over the railing. I had no idea what had happened. I just heard the sound of what I thought was a mattress being thrown out of a cell on to the floor thirty feet below. (The plastic mattresses on the bed sometimes had to be removed if a diseased inmate had died in his cell.) But when I stood up and walked over to my cell door to see what it was, I saw him lying there.
He was a black man, in his thirties I guessed, but even though he was lying on his chest his face was angled unnaturally upwards. Urine and blood pooled about his lower body as he twitched uncontrollably and then stopped. I could not have been more than twelve feet away from him, yet he looked so unreal that I really did not process the fact that I was looking at a dead human being until the guards came and covered his face with a towel.
The man who had jumped to his death had served fifteen years there, the last four in that cell almost directly above me. How in the world did anyone handle four years of this type of craziness? I had only been there for a few months and already I could not see myself living like this, with no end in sight. This thought was soon becoming the worst thought in my head. I came back into my cell from the exercise cages one day soon after that inmate jumped and looked at all that I was allowed to possess. A few paper sacks full of legal materials, some novels I had managed to barter for, some cheap toiletries and a small radio – that was all I owned. I thought about how that man had been driven to take his own life and he was not even on Death Row – he was just a prisoner who had broken the rules four years earlier. I was not going to last even that long unless I became stronger than I could ever have dreamed myself capable of.
Over the next twenty years, I watched as eleven men hanged themselves, swallowed razor blades, cut their own throats or just jumped to their deaths as that first man had done. Although I honestly do not know how I survived decades during which death was a welcomed relief from the endless madness, I do believe that one motivating factor that helped me not fall into the life-sucking horror of the place was given to me by my father.
My parents only got to see me twice a year, as they lived hundreds of miles away and could not afford to come more often than that, so each year they came once for my birthday in May and again at Christmas. It was during one of these visits that my father, a proud man, simply turned to me and said: ‘I cannot do anything for you.’
In that moment I looked into the eyes of someone who had no hope for me whatsoever. There was such complete bleakness in his face that I swallowed every bit of pride I had and swore before God that I was going to do whatever it took, not only to survive but also to try and become the redeeming face of love for him and for my family. I told him, ‘I am going to try to do whatever it takes to come home, Pop.’
I went back into my cell that day determined to grow strong enough to keep my word to my father.