Riven (18 page)

“Not physically, no. And they might be more likely to behave because I’m with you. But there’s an incredible rumor mill inside any penal institution. Everybody knows Russ is gone and the new guy is coming in. It won’t surprise anyone who you are.”

“I was thinking of carrying my Bible, you know, just to make plain who I am and what I’m about.”

“Yeah, no,” Frank LeRoy said. “Word to the wise: I think they’d see that as a little pious, a little holier-than-thou.”

“I see. If someone greets me . . . ?”

“In a civil way? It’s okay to respond, but keep it noncommittal. Tell them you look forward to getting to know them eventually, something like that. As you know, they have to ask for you to visit, so it’s on them. And then you’ve got to watch all the religious games they’ll play, trying to get next to you, get favors, get you to get them a free phone call—usually for some made-up crisis. And then when you don’t, they’ll try to lay a big guilt trip on you, questioning whether you care, challenging your faith, your interest, your love, everything. Russ used to get guys whining about how he never came around, when they knew as well as he did that they had to officially request a visit. Now, you ready for a look?”

Forest View High School

Brady knew exactly what he should do, yet he also knew he would not do it. He should swallow his pride and enlist all the help he could in order to succeed on the midterms, believing that even if he failed, his teachers and Dean Hose would recognize that he was giving it his all. They would be able to make concessions for him, keep him in the play, keep him in school, and transition him into the work-release program.

But that crazy part of his brain, that lazy, hope-things-will-work-out part of him, heard the timing issue—that his midterms could all be Fs and still not affect his first three performances—as a license to coast. He knew there was no way he could pass even one test with that attitude. He would be flunking himself out of of the play, even out of the work-release program.

But what if a talent scout saw him that first weekend? Then Brady wouldn’t need school. He wouldn’t need anything but his dream and his passion and his talent. And maybe, just maybe, he would be so impressive that the school would let him try the work-release program on probation.

Hose had been crystal clear on that score, though. It wasn’t going to happen. The second weekend of the musical was in no way guaranteed—unless Brady failed, and then it was guaranteed he would be on the outside looking in.

Yet still Brady mentally shut the door on his midterms. He wouldn’t be cracking another book, taking another note, talking to any teacher, employing any tutor. He would do his best on the tests, excel on the boards, and hope for a miracle.

Stupid, stupid, stupid,
he knew. But he had never played the game before, and he wasn’t about to start now.

Adamsville State Penitentiary

“Eight percent of the state budget goes to incarcerating criminals,” Warden Frank “Yanno” LeRoy said as he led Thomas Carey out of the office wing and down a long, sterile corridor. When they turned right, Thomas’s senses were assaulted. The tang of industrial cleaners hit his nostrils, and as they approached the first envelope, as Chaplain Russ had called it, he heard all the clanging and yelling.

“These men cost us over three hundred dollars a week each,” Yanno said. “It’s no surprise some wonder why we don’t just execute ’em all and save money.”

Thomas couldn’t imagine anything worse. Sure, some no doubt deserved to die. But to kill them all just for economic reasons? How, then, could any of them be reached for Christ?

He was quickly processed through the double entry into the main unit, surely because the warden was with him. The corrections officers greeted the warden, and they were friendly, though businesslike, with Thomas.

As they moved into the corner of the massive first floor, Yanno stopped to point out things and explain. And from all over the unit came shouts and cries.

“Padre!”

“Father!”

“Reverend!”

“God squad in the house!”

Thomas tried to take in everything at once. In some ways, this reminded him of a zoo. Cement floors, concrete block walls, tiny slits of windows, and cages everywhere. He was surprised to notice that each cell had a solid steel door with an opening for a food tray, the rest of the front wall made up of two-inch square openings, almost as if metal strips had been woven. There were no bars, per se, except between corridors and envelopes. Each man’s “house” was identical.

“Each cell is seven feet by ten feet with a built-in bunk, a concrete stool, a metal table, and a sink-toilet unit.”

“I’ll never complain about the size of my office,” Thomas said.

“I hear that. But this is the price for bein’ a bad citizen. They carp and complain and write letters and cry to the public, but we’re not trying to be mean. They’re not in here for chewing gum in class, know what I mean?”

Closer to the cells, the industrial cleaner smell was overwhelmed by a stench that seemed to be a combination of sewage, garbage, and body odor. “Each man is responsible for cleaning his own house, and we give ’em what they need for that once a week. They tend to misuse good cleaning products, so they get watered-down stuff that can’t be turned into anything dangerous. And some of them just don’t care to clean their places. Again, that’s on them. If they want to live in filth, that’s their problem. Once a week someone is let out, by himself—shackled and cuffed, of course—to mop the area around the pods. The banks of cells are the pods.”

The cells were arranged five side by side, with another five directly above them, a single shower stall at one end, and the exercise area at the other. The ten-cell units were arranged in a circle of six, clustered around a two-story watchtower. From the tower, which Yanno called the observation unit, corrections officers could see into all sixty cells.

“The locks are controlled from within the tower, but each man’s house also has a manual locking device, so we’re talking triple security. When an officer is extracting a prisoner for a shower, a meeting, the work assignment, or his daily one-hour visit to the exercise kennel, he signals the tower first. The electronic lock is disengaged for that one cell; then the officer must remove the manual lock before using his key for the main lock.”

“Did you call the exercise area a kennel?”

Yanno nodded. “I probably shouldn’t, because the bleeding hearts would just love to quote me that way. But it’s a ten-by-twenty-foot, two-story, fenced-in area with fresh-air grates in the ceiling. Certain times of the day a man can catch a glimpse of the sun through there, but usually, no way. As you can see, it looks like a big kennel.”

As they strolled, Thomas was struck that so many of the inmates—all wearing white T-shirts, khaki pants, and soft slippers—were living in the dark. Many had clothing draped over their lights, and paper hung even over some of the four-inch-wide windows cut vertically near the top of each cell.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “You’d think with the lack of a view of the outside, they’d want all the light they can have.”

“Isn’t there something in the Bible about that, Reverend? Something about men living in darkness because their deeds are evil? Russ tells me you’ve got the whole Bible memorized, or something like that.”

“Well, not the whole thing. But, yes, I know that verse. And the ones around it. ‘There is no judgment against anyone who believes in Him. But anyone who does not believe in Him has already been judged for not believing in God’s one and only Son. And the judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed. But those who do what is right come to the light so others can see that they are doing what God wants.’”

“Wow,” Yanno said. “That’s impressive.”

“If you’ll indulge me, Warden, there’s another passage that speaks to this.”

“Fire away.”

“Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, said, ‘And you, my little son, will be called the prophet of the Most High, because you will prepare the way for the Lord. You will tell his people how to find salvation through forgiveness of their sins. Because of God’s tender mercy, the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide us to the path of peace.’”

Yanno cleared his throat. “Was your voice breaking there?”

Thomas nodded but could not respond. He had been warned about being soft, yet now he found himself on the edge of tears, praying his lips wouldn’t quiver and give him away. All these men—these sad, lonely, desperate men—caged, hapless, hopeless, lost. His heart broke over them, and he hadn’t met a single one.

“I’m gonna tell you one more time, Carey. You can’t let ’em see your soft side. Now I know that goes against all they teach you in seminary and stuff, but just by the nature of your job, these guys already assume you’re an easy mark. Don’t prove ’em right, whatever you do, or we’ll be looking for another chaplain before the end of the month.”

21

Adamsville State Penitentiary

To Thomas Carey, the difference between the ASP supermax and, say, Cook County Jail in Chicago was like the difference between
War and Peace
and
Love Story.

Cook County was a chaotic, depressing place, and the evil there was exacerbated by the relative freedom of the inmates to congregate. It was overcrowded, dangerous, and appeared nearly unmanageable because gang members still associated with one another, guards were compromised, and sometimes even escape attempts were successful.

ASP, though, was an entirely different kettle of felons. Warden LeRoy admitted that many on the outside considered his zero-tolerance policies overkill. “But they simply don’t understand my constituency. These guys have proven over and over that they understand only one language, and that is maximum force, complete deprivation of freedom, and punishment rather than reform. They have lost the opportunity to redeem themselves, because every time they’ve been offered that chance, they’ve violated the state’s trust. Their previous hitches were in
correctional
facilities. This is a
penitentiary.
We allow them to be as penitent as they want, but clearly they don’t want to be reformed, or they wouldn’t have wound up here.”

Thomas considered himself a man of justice. Actions had consequences. People needed to be punished. He even allowed that some were worthy of capital punishment, though that notion had fallen into disrepute among many within his own profession. It was hard to argue for something so final and brutal in light of the Bible’s teaching on love and respect and forgiveness. And yet the Scriptures were also clear that one who sheds another’s blood should have his own blood shed. Thomas acknowledged that a death sentence was no trifle and that all the checks and balances and safeguards—fair trials, appeals, and all the rest—were a crucial part of the process. But still, he believed, justice mandated the ultimate punishment in extreme cases.

Yet now, as he tried to absorb all that his senses were trying to communicate, Thomas found himself overwhelmed with pity for this massive population of men. Did they deserve this? Apparently they did. Why could they not have learned at some earlier, more copacetic level of incarceration that changing their ways would spare them this inhumanity? Had they not heard the stories from inside this place?

Yanno told him that even here the cons tried every scheme to manipulate the system, “but at the end of the day, they lose. Every time. They are in their cells twenty-three hours of every twenty-four. They are allowed out only when no other inmate is, and they are strip-searched, manacled, cuffed, and led about by corrections officers. When they return to their cells, they go through the same procedure in reverse. They dare not ask an inch of leeway. They don’t deserve it, and they won’t get it.”

Yanno led Thomas to the far end of the unit, within a hundred yards of the main gate. Already Thomas had learned not to turn at the shouts and jeers of the inmates. He was intrigued, however, by a man about his age who stood quietly next to his solid door, peeking out through the squares in the front wall. The man was balding and paunchy.

“You the new chaplain?” he said.

Thomas looked at the warden, who nodded. “Just stay back about two feet,” he whispered.

Thomas approached. “Yes, sir, I am. Thomas Carey is my name. And yours?”

The man reached his fingers through the opening. “Call me Zach.”

Thomas looked to the warden for permission to touch the man’s fingers. Yanno shook his head.

“Nice to meet you, Zach. I look forward to getting to know you.”

“Yeah, me too. I’d like you to stop by as soon as you can.”

“I think that can be arranged.”

“Yeah, no!” LeRoy said. “Zach, you know the protocol. You know how to go about requesting a visit.”

Zach pressed his lips together and shook his head, then cursed both men. Thomas wanted to assure him he would be happy to come back if the proper request was submitted, but Yanno pulled him away. “You’re tempted to make nice, but he’s just pulling your chain. You’d be falling right into his trap.”

“But I’m here to minister to him if he wants.”

“Exactly. If he wants. We’ll both know how much he wants that if we see the paperwork, won’t we? What else has he got to do? He asks for the form, fills it out, turns it in. We call that a kite, because he’s sending it into the wind, hoping it’ll fly. If it’s all in order, you schedule it. But let me tell you something: you won’t be hearing from Zach.”

“You’re sure?”

“People will do what people have done, Reverend. Zach never once in ten years requested a visit from Russ.”

Thomas shook his head. The guy had sounded so sincere. “Tell me, why is he so out of shape? Does he not take advantage of the exercise room?”