Uncaged (7 page)

The state added it up for me. There were a lot of crimes, and a lot of victims, and the cops knew who they all were. It even turned out there had been another investigation under way at the Payless Drugs. Detectives had been looking into a series of things over there. They had reviewed the store videotapes. Something like $3,000 had been stolen. They figured it was all me, and they had the video to prove it.

The judge brought me in for my hearing. The public defender and I had decided to plead guilty to certain charges—the ones where they had me cold—and hope for some sympathy. I told the judge about my wife and son being taken from me, and trying to graduate from high school while working two jobs, and having this drug and alcohol problem. I told the judge, “I just want to go to school and AA or NA to get help.” The court records state that I was “polite.”

But the victims of my crime spree called for justice. They all came to court. According to the court records, they told the judge things like “If he gets loose, he'll just go and do it again” and “He has no remorse. He should be taught a real lesson” and “Something needs to be done about him—he's an out-and-out thief.” The only guy who sounded sympathetic was the security officer at the Payless. He said I seemed remorseful.

I got off the hook on some of the charges because I pled guilty to the others. But that didn't mean I was out of trouble or that I was going to get the old slap on the wrist. The judge fined me $1,500 and sentenced me to six years in the California Youth Authority.

So I went to jail.

I was used to getting into trouble and then manipulating the situation to my advantage. I wasn't afraid to be sent in front of a judge. I wasn't afraid to go to jail. I'd been in courts and jails almost my whole life. I knew what CYA was. It's like graduate school if you're an adolescent criminal. It's like prison for little kids.

I thought I'd fit right in. I figured I was basically still a kid, and most of the crimes they'd busted me for had been committed before I turned eighteen. I figured I could handle whatever they threw at me.

It didn't start off too bad. I was locked up in the Lassen County Jail in Susanville for three or four months. That was real jail. It was pretty hard-core—all men locked up because they were criminals. After I had been processed, when they keep you apart from the rest of the population, I was put into a two-man cell with a guy who was accused of beating his wife to death with a telephone.

He had been a very successful local businessman whose marriage had fallen apart. He was very high-strung, and the breakup was upsetting to him. He started taking Prozac, which instantly
fixed him, except when he'd go into these rages. His wife had moved out and found another place about ten houses away. One night they were arguing on the phone. He said, “Can you hold on a minute?” He walked out his front door, walked down the street to her house, took the phone out of her hand, and beat her to death with it.

“It was the Prozac,” he said. “I'm innocent.” He was the nicest guy, but he was a murderer. And he was going to sleep two feet away from me, every night.

I was working on my plea bargain. I was trying to figure out which things I could admit to, and how far they'd reduce my sentence. My cellie was also waiting to go to trial. The whole process moved very slowly and took a couple of months, so we got a chance to know each other.

His trial date came up before mine; he had been there for almost a year. He was sentenced to twenty-six years to life. It would have been twenty-five years to life, but he was carrying a concealed weapon at the time his crime was committed, and so that added a mandatory year. He was in the habit of carrying around large sums of money and had gotten a gun and a concealed-weapon permit, but the law didn't care about those details.

When he came back from the sentencing he looked sort of crushed but also sort of outraged. He kept saying, “It's not fair! I had a permit for that gun!” He didn't seem that upset about the twenty-five to life for first-degree murder, but the extra year really pissed him off. I kept thinking, “Dude! You killed your wife.” Besides, what was the difference between twenty-five to life and twenty-six to life? Either way, he was out of there. Being a convicted and sentenced murderer meant he had to go to a different part of Lassen County Jail. So I lost my roommate.

Once I had my plea bargain session, it was time for me to move on, too. I wasn't that worried about being sent to the California Youth Authority. How bad could it be? Like juvie, but bigger? Like
juvie, but for longer? It didn't seem that scary. A bunch of screw-up kids, like me, who'd gotten busted and put away for a while.

Besides, my wife had started visiting me again in jail. She brought me my son. We rekindled our relationship. She was going to keep visiting me. We were going to be together. The future looked kind of bright.

The next stop for me was the CYA induction center in Sacramento. I didn't expect to be there long; I'd been told I was going to be one of the first one hundred prisoners to be sent to the new “Chad” high-security facility near Stockton. (This became one of the state's most notoriously violent institutions. At the time it was described as a facility for California's “worst of the worst” juvenile offenders. Its real name was N. A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility.)

I knew right away that I was in trouble. I'd had this romantic idea about CYA, that it was just like the adult prisons I'd seen in the movies. I imagined tiers of cells, with everyone quietly doing his time. I imagined something orderly and quiet.

This was hell. This was
Lord of the Flies.
This was thousands of kids who were disconnected from life, who had no connection to anything. They were seriously screwed up—tattooed, like lifelong gangsters, at twelve. I felt completely unsafe.

I was a good-sized guy by then. I had a fair amount of experience in the criminal world, stealing stuff, selling stuff, doing drugs, and making trouble. I could pass for a fairly experienced criminal. And I was near the top of the age range. Though some kids were going to stay at CYA until they were twenty-five, most of them were my age or younger.

But this was a seriously bad environment. I came from fucked-up shit; this was a whole new level. There was heavy gangbanging here. There were serious politics. I was out of my element. I thought I was a man, with a wife and a child. I felt like a grown-u
p. But now I had thirteen-year-old kids, really
hard
kids, coming up on me and saying, “Where you from, holmes? Who you roll with?”

“Uh, nobody. I'm from Anderson.”

I understood right away that I had to get out. I knew that if I stayed I was going to be in CYA for a long, long time. I'd just get sucked in. I felt like I was past that kind of behavior, in terms of who I was and where I was in my life. In jail, I had begun a new relationship with my wife, and things had changed.

When Christy was first pregnant and then when our son was born, I did everything I could to avoid being involved. I didn't want to feel responsible and I couldn't stop doing drugs. I was high all the time. I was in jail half the time. But now I had this new experience where I was sober for the first time in a long, long time. Everything felt so clear once the drug haze wore off. I felt a new responsibility to my son and to my wife. Christy was writing me letters. I was committed to becoming a real husband and father. When I got out, we could be a real family.

But I knew as long as I was in CYA, I couldn't help her and my son. There were no jobs, which meant you couldn't make money, which meant you couldn't send money. There was no visitation. I couldn't be a dad to my son locked up in that place.

So I went to the counselor and asked him what my options were. He said that because I was over eighteen I could ask to be classified as an adult and sentenced to an adult facility. He tried to scare me off that. The counselor said, “You think you're all hard, and you want to go where the real criminals are. But you're a good-looking kid, and you're young …”

He was probably right. He was trying to protect me. It was outside the norm for a youth offender to ask to be reclassified as an adult. He warned me that there would be no coming back. I wouldn't be able to change my mind. But I knew I wasn't going to make it at CYA. My only goal was to get out, be a father and
husband, and move on with my life. In the CYA system you can be held until you are twenty-five years old, even if your sentence is less. Unlike in the adult system, where you get a day off your sentence for every good day you produce, in CYA you are subject to periodic reviews by your counselors. They can add what they think you “need” to behave. I was a youth offender. I had a long rap sheet. They might feel like they needed to keep me a while to help me get over that. That might mean staying the full six years. Plus I knew from what I could see around me that I was going to have to fight. If I had to fight, I was going to get more time added to my sentence.

I had already had one incident. It was just after I arrived at Lassen County Jail in Susanville. It was dinnertime, and it was chili night. I had already heard about chili night; the old-timers had warned me about it. The old-timers said it hurt their stomach. But I was hungry, and I had a strong stomach. The chili was served in bowls at the tables. I sat down and started to reach for my bowl of chili.

A big, bearded biker dude, way bigger than me, sat across from me. He looked like he had just came down from the mountains. When I reached over to pick up a bowl of chili, the biker dude grabbed the bowl and said, “That's mine.” I apologized and reached for a different bowl. But he said, “That's mine, too.”

I knew from the streets what this moment was, and I could feel twenty sets of eyes sizing me up and down and waiting to see what I was made of. So I said, “Oh, here you go” and threw the chili right in his face. Then I jumped up and started beating him on the head with the metal tray. That was a good start, but then it got ugly. He hit me hard in the stomach, and I hit him back in the face with the tray, and then it was on. He grabbed me and threw me across the room. Then he got on top of me and pounded me on the head and back. I started uppercutting him in the balls. The guard got on us and we all fell over. He was still banging me on the head, but I still had hold of his balls. We were both screaming. By the time the
guards separated us, we were messed up. It was a successful fight because that guy never bothered me again, and everyone else was very nice to me, too. In fact, after that, the old-timers would bring their bowls right to my seat and spark up some conversation.

At CYA, I was always prepared to fight, always on guard. I knew I was going to get jumped, and I was going to get hurt, and I was maybe going to have to hurt someone else. I didn't want to do that. I had been roughed up a little. I could take a fair amount of punishment. But I didn't like hurting other people. So I signed the papers and filed the writ, and the transfer came through. I was taken out of CYA and sent to an induction center at Tracy, California.

This was another step up. Or down. CYA had been weird. This was really, really scary. It was a real prison, a
big
prison. It was eight stories tall. It was all cells. The cells were filled with men—serious adult criminal men. Everyone was wearing prison orange and moving slowly. The mood was very tense, and very sad.

I remember the first night. I was on one of the lower tiers with easy access, cell block number two or number three, because I was a new guy. I was a fish. That meant they kept me on a rotating suicide watch, in case I killed myself or something. I was alone. Up on the seventh floor there was a gay black guy, and when it got dark he started singing. He had the most amazing voice. He sang “Under the Boardwalk.” It was unbelievably beautiful. It made guys cry. You could hear him singing. You could hear guys crying. You could hear guys getting beat up. You could hear other stuff that you weren't sure
what
it was. It didn't sound good.

I remember lying there thinking, “What's a guy with a voice like that doing here? And what am
I
doing here?”

The whole life was new to me. For example, there was the kite. I never knew about this stuff. A kite is a way of sending things from one cell to another. One guy would tie something to a piece of string—a cigarette, a message, a tattoo needle—and send it to the
next guy. He'd send it to the next guy. It might start on the eighth floor and wind up on the third floor, just passing along from one cell to the next, on this little piece of string. Some nights there would be kites going all over the place. Everyone sends the kite along. Even if one guy's a white guy and other guy is a black guy and they hate each other, they have to move it along. Everyone's got to move the kite along.

There was also a “telephone” system. There was a way you could take your pillow and stick it in the top of the toilet and suction the water out of the pee trap. It turned the toilet into a telephone. You could lean into the toilet and talk to the cell above you or below you—depending on whether they took the water out of their toilet, too. You could have a whole conversation that way, or pass along a complicated message.

Because Tracy was an induction center, everyone was in his own cell. There was no work. You just sat around waiting for your one hour on the yard, or to go to the chow hall, or for someone to bring you a bag lunch. There was no visitation, either. Maybe that's why there was so much kiting and telephoning. It was the only way for anyone to communicate, and we all had too much time on our hands.

It was a big facility, and the yard was huge. Everyone was in orange, and everyone was broken into groups. This was my first introduction into the racial self-segregation of prison life. In the youth system, I was aware of people being from different places. I was aware that I looked Mexican. It was no big deal. At Tracy, it was much more serious. There were three groups—white, black, and Latino. In that facility, the whites had most of the control. They were the most trusted, and they had the most access. But the blacks had all the power. Everyone was most afraid of them. If you weren't black, you couldn't walk through the black guys' area. But if you weren't Latino, you couldn't walk through the Latino area, either. And if you were North Mexican, you couldn't walk through
the South Mexican area. When I first arrived, some old-timer took me aside and laid it out for me. He asked me what I was and who I ran with on the streets. I wasn't sure what I was. He told me I was “other”—not black, not white, not Latino, but other.