Doing Time (7 page)

“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.