Exile Nation: Chapter Two, "Hotel Hell" (Pt. 2)

Chapter Two continues. Go here if you missed Chapter One - "Dead Time", or the beginning of Chapter Two: "Hotel Hell". Download print quality PDF of Chapter Two.

Exile Nation - Chapter Two: "Hotel Hell" - Pt.2.

One at a time we are called up to begin processing. As we step out of the holding cages into the facility we are ordered to strip naked and to deposit our Cook County scrubs into one laundry bin and our shoes into another. We aren’t allowed to keep our own shoes, but they give us the option of sending them home by mail, at our own expense. This is particularly galling for two reasons: I just bought the pair I am wearing explicitly for prison, and they replace our shoes with cheap canvas slip-ons that won’t last a month. Then later, once we reach the prisons, IDOC gives whoever can afford them the right to buy overpriced name-brand athletic shoes through the prison commissary.  And inmates clamor to get them too. Shoes are one of the few outward signs of “affluence” that are permitted. If you can get good shoes, it means you got ends.  

Adjacent to the turn-in counter is a shower room. Each of us is handed a powder blue jumpsuit, white t-shirt and pair of underwear, socks, the aforementioned canvas slip-ons, a towel and a bar of soap, and told to go wash our asses. As we’re all standing there naked, stack of clothes in hand, women guards walk through and laugh at us, making sure to remind us just where we are.

An inmate close to me peeps one of the female officers and begins to turn towards her. “That one there kinda thick,” he says.

“Naw man don’t go doin’ that!” another tells him, quickly motioning for him to turn around. “They catch you lookin’ at them like that, they gonna crack yo black head!”

For an instant you can see the wounded pride, the ego battle being waged within this young male as he tries to wrap his head around the notion of a woman whuppin’ his ass, much less telling him what to do. You can just see his misogynistic street persona egging him on to say something, to make some comment to show he “aint no punk,” that somehow, even though hundreds of nasty-ass thugs go through this shower every week, that somehow, he is different and will make these heavily armed female correctional officers swoon. He rises up to talk some kind of shit but before he can seal his own fate one of the women C.O.s shouts across the shower room…

"This aint no muthafuckin’ gay dating service, bitch! Shut yo mouth and wash yo stankin’ ass or I’ll come in there and show you what a muthafuckin’ man is!"

Dude advisably turns around and heads into the shower.

We spend the next few hours going from station to station in the intake process. It’s almost a point-for-point match of the process at County except for a few crucial differences. First, the room is big and clean and terribly quiet. Second, no one is screaming at you. Third, you are clean, and wearing clean clothes. The people at each station are pleasant to you, or if not pleasant, at least do not degrade you or treat you with hostility. There are actual dentists, doctors and nurses present as well. The C.O.s are unobtrusive, slowly milling through the room. The tone and mood doesn’t seem to require a huge security presence, as if the place is running itself, as if there is a kind of unspoken treaty between all parties to just get it over with, behave, and keep it quiet, so everyone can get the fuck up to their cells and sleep. Methodical, clinical, rational, mechanical.

All the while I’m standing there, looking around, finally getting it.

I’m in prison. Jesus, I’m in fucking prison. Can you believe this shit?

One by one we get our photos taken, get our prison IDs, see a doctor for vitals, have blood drawn, teeth x-rayed, psych profile, and our criminal history and gang status, which, again, will determine our security classification and which facility we are sent to.

IDOC has eight levels of security classification.

Level 1 - Maximum Security
Level 2 - Secure Medium Security
Level 3 - High Medium Security
Level 4 - Medium Security
Level 5 - High Minimum Security
Level 6 - Minimum Security
Level 7 - Low Minimum Security
Level 8 - Transitional Security

Although I didn’t know it at the time, or what it meant in context, I was eventually designated Level 6 – Minimum Security.

I figure out fairly quickly that IDOC has a master list, and the order we find ourselves in line never changes, so we’re always sandwiched between the same few guys throughout the intake process. I find myself next to a tall, bald, middle-aged black dude with a thin silver mustache named Willie Frazier. All the way back at five o’clock in the morning, in the shipping pen at County, he sat on a bench across from me next to a Puerto Rican guy named Luis smoking Newports. He gave me a “short” off of his cigarette. He and Luis were fuckin’ around a lot and seemed unfazed by the fact that we were about to be shipped to the joint. We ended up shackled one in front of the other in the line for the transport bus, but my chain buddy and I were the last two on our bus, and Willie and Luis were sent on to the next. As he shuffled away, Willie shrugged his shoulders at me and said, “you snooze, you lose.”

Willie kept telling me that Luis knew one of the counselors at NRC, and that we should ask to be sent to “East Moline.” I didn’t know what that meant.

“Don’t ask for treatment,” he told me, “they only got one place, at Sheridan, and there aint never no room. They say you gotta wait six weeks for Sheridan, minimum. Six weeks here. Uh uh, aint happenin.’ Luis said ask for East Moline, says that’s the best place to go in the whole damn system.”

When the time came to speak to the counselor, she asked me whether I wanted to go to the drug treatment program at Sheridan, which had only been open for a year, but which the State was already touting as the “largest fully dedicated state drug prison and community crime reduction program in the nation.” You can see just how proud of themselves they are by looking at the sobering (pun intended) press release from the opening of the center in 2004:

In addition to aggressively working to address crime and recidivism throughout all state communities, the reopening of Sheridan Correctional Center will restore more than 400 jobs in the surrounding region of LaSalle County.

"For too long, our state has led the nation in drug crime. Today, we begin our efforts to lead the nation for drug crime prevention," said Gov. Blagojevich. "The Sheridan project is about public safety. Illinois faces the highest recidivism rate in state history. Statistics show that more than half of the nearly 34,000 parolees on the street today will be reincarcerated within only three years after their release from prison. We know that drug use is a significant contributing factor in recidivism, and we owe it to our communities to take on this challenge."

According to the Department of Corrections, statistics show that approximately 60 percent of all male arrestees statewide and approximately 82 percent of all male arrestees in Chicago test positive for at least one illegal drug. In addition, nearly 25 percent of all state prison inmates are currently serving time for drug offenses, with an untold number of others who are in prison for property offenses, violent offenses or other crimes committed as a result of drug involvement.

Let’s put all this backslapping into perspective before Blago breaks his arm. The State freely admits that a significant (and most likely understated) percentage of the roughly 46,000 IDOC inmates are incarcerated for drug related offenses, and yet out of a $1.3 billion dollar budget, 28 prisons, 6 work farms (labor camps), and 2 boot camps, it has taken them 34 years since the launch of the War on Drugs to build one—one, as in uno—dedicated treatment facility that can treat a maximum of 900 out of (conservatively) 11,250 drug related inmates. This means that only 9% of those with acknowledged drug problems can receive treatment, a paltry 2% of the total prison population. Ideally, every facility should have these resources available to anyone who wants them. Anyone who shows a desire to improve themselves should be given that opportunity. It would appear that this might be the best and most direct way to put a dent into the problem. But I digress.

Its also important to note that although substance abuse may indeed be an important contributing factor to ongoing problems with the law, it’s not nearly as significant as the lack of social and economic opportunities available to those with an arrest or conviction record. In this context, the Sheridan drug treatment facility is mostly a public relations tool, and another means for IDOC to expand their budget. So I just said no to drug treatment. I didn’t need it. I had already taken that road enough in the past, and now was not my time. There were so many active drug addicts around me at that very moment, and they really needed the program and should have a shot at a bed.  

At the end of the process I still had no idea where I was going to be sent. I was told nothing except to get back in line. I asked Willie if he requested East Moline and he said, “Now why would I tell you to go on and ask for somethin’ and not ask for the same shit myself?” Then he smiled and shrugged his shoulders again and mumbled something about Luis “hooking it up” for him. Somehow, I had a hard time going with him on that one.

After Intake we sat in a caged bullpen for at least another hour or two until they made an announcement that we were about to be taken to the cellblocks. They instructed that as they call out our names we reply with our IDOC number, which was emblazoned on our ID cards twice the size of our names. You’d hear “Jackson, Jerome J.!” and in reply you’d hear “R four five zero three eight!” One by one the men rose and formed a line along the wall that led to the inner areas of the prison, a bundled sheet and blanket held out before them.

Then it was my turn.  “Shaw, Charles B!”

I rose and shouted, “R four five zero six seven!” and made my way to the line.

“Frazier, Willie!”

Willie rose and shouted “R four five zero six eight!” and fell into line behind me.  We made eye contact as he was walking up, and we were both relieved. It wasn’t a given that we were going to be housed together, even though we were in line together, because they appeared to be mixing it up while assigning cells, so it was a bit of a pleasant surprise. It was weird, I didn’t know him from a hole in the wall (although, we were certainly about to be stuffed into one) and yet, we already had this perplexing connection. Perhaps it was predicated on the fact that he was not someone I considered particularly threatening to spend a number of weeks locked down with. You wouldn’t have been able to tell he was in prison just by observing him. Half the time in line I thought he was going to draw us heat from the C.O.s because he was fucking around so much, mumbling Richard Pryor cocaine jokes under his breath like When you on fire and you runnin’ down the street, people will get out of your way. I was honestly fighting back laughter. It was definitely going to be an interesting experience.

“All right, all right,” Willie whispered behind me. “Datz right, Charlie. We got this muthafucka. Time to go get up on some riz-est.”

He meant “rest.” Willie liked to use the Snoop Dogg “z” a little bit too much (like, he was always asking for a “mizz-atch”), though, unlike many of the young brothers, Willie used it ironically. It’s what set him apart from most. He had a complex sense of humor, and was fiercely intelligent, as I would later learn.

They marched us along a fathomless corridor of shiny polished concrete with cellblock entrances along the left side stretching to what seemed like the horizon. Fatigue, stress, fear, and the unknown all conspired to spin out my perceptions as we shuffled along single file, stopping at a cellblock, depositing a few inmates, and moving on. The line grew smaller and smaller.

Then, it was our turn as about six or eight of us were ushered into one of the anonymous cellblocks. Willie and I were bundled into a cell on level 2. The entire cell was molded concrete except for some stainless steel on the bunks, (single) stool, sink and toilet. The cell was sealed behind a magnetic steel door, no bars, and a shatterproof glass window. It was lit by one fluorescent light which we could not control. There was a feed slot below the window. We turned around, and the door slammed shut behind us, and Willie and I looked at each other.

“Man, this aint the honeymoon suite,” he said, clowning. “I’m sorry, dear, they must have messed up the reservations.”

I laughed, kind of.

“Well, all right then, if it’s gonna be like that we might as well just go to sleep.”

I let go a long protracted sigh.

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Sleep.”

I crawled up onto the top bunk, laid my head down on my rolled up blanket, and was asleep before I could finish exhaling.

I don’t know what time it was when I woke up, but the lights were on in our cell and it was daylight outside. I could see faint shards of sunlight spilling in diffusely from a single window along the outside wall of the cellblock. Above my head was a vent that was pumping in cold air, and it was freezing inside the cell. I jumped down from the top bunk and shuffled to the toilet. Willie was still asleep with his blanket wrapped around his head.

After I had finished I moved over to the cell door and looked out the window. It was eerily quiet and still. I sat down on the concrete desk jutting from the cell wall and put my forehead against the glass window.

Now what?

I had nowhere to go. I had nothing to do. I was in a cold and barren environment, and it felt as if gravity was pulling me into the floor. I was still so exhausted. And I was sick. I had picked up the jailhouse hack in County and now, because of the cold, it was coming on full force. I coughed so hard my head was pounding and my teeth were chattering in my mouth. I crawled back up into bed, wrapped myself inside my blanket, and went back to sleep.

Correctional Zoology

I remember when I was a child and would go on school field trips to the zoos in Chicago. I remember feeling a palpable sense of confusion and despair as I would watch the animals in what were at the time fairly inhumane conditions. The zoos were old and decrepit in the mid-1970s, and the “natural habitat” model hadn’t yet been put into practice. Most cages were cells, pure and simple, cold and hard concrete and steel cages with bars. How anyone didn’t feel the animal’s misery is beyond me. They would either pace restlessly, or they would sleep.

Not to beat you over the head with this metaphor or anything, but humans are animals, and all animals, regardless of how intelligent or unintelligent they are suspected to be, when removed from their natural habitat and placed in captivity, will respond in the same manner. They will either respond with agitation, or they will respond with depression. There is room for very little else when you’re in a cage.

In the beginning you do nothing but sleep. Your body senses it is in a hopeless situation, and it begins to shut down. You fall into a deep depression. Throughout that first week I must have slept 18 hours a day if not more; I had only a general sense of time that was measured by the on and off periods of the light in our cell, which we did not control, and the daylight that could be seen coming in from the pen window, if we strained to look.

At first you are disoriented. You wake up and its dark and you forget where you are, and when you do suddenly snap back to reality, you remember you’re in prison and its like being hit on the head. So you only wake up when your body has a more pressing need, like liquid in, or liquid out.  

The hunger compounds the fatigue and the depression. Sure, we were fed three times a day, but breakfast was usually a milk carton and a donut, lunch a sandwich, and dinner, so many torturous hours later, was a tiny affair resembling a “Lunchables” box or something from some trendy crash diet. The food was better quality than we had at County, but there was barely any of it. And I’m not exactly a small guy, I’m six foot one and two hundred pounds. I knew I had to eat whatever they gave me if I wanted to stay healthy, so I really had no choice but to “suspend” my vegetarianism until after I was released. Despite this decision, I calculated that I was eating only about 25-30% of what I normally took in out in the world.

Anecdotally, I heard it said that IDOC calculated how much less physical activity, and thus calories burned, the body engages in when on lockdown, and scaled back the food portions accordingly to meet that lowered level of activity. I also heard that it was to intentionally keep us weak, and thus, more pliable. The most cynical interpretation simply said that everywhere IDOC could cut costs to line their own pockets, they did.

The hunger is what brings you out of depression into agitation.  If it wasn’t my bladder that did it, I would normally be awoken by the rumbling of my stomach. It would begin another absurd pantomime where I would crawl down dizzily from my bunk and sit on the desk with my head against the glass and look out to see if the food carts had been delivered. Most often they had not, and I would begin stressing. As time wore on and I grew hungrier and more awake, I would pace. And pace and pace. Imagine turning round and round in a 6 x 10 foot space. By the time I saw the food cart, I would be full-on salivating. When they finally flipped open that feed slot and chucked our two food trays at us, we’d be done eating before they even reached the end of the row, attacking our food like a dog goes at its bowl.

Like I said…put any animal in a cage and it will respond in the same manner. We were being broken down, conditioned, institutionalized, domesticated. We were treated like animals, and so we began, in varying degrees, to act like them.

There’s really no way to describe the maddening boredom you experience when subjected to a sensory deprived environment for a prolonged period. You feel like you want to crawl out of your skin. You start talking to yourself and developing tics. Your mind is exploding in a dozen different directions, your emotions become all bundled together in this inextricable mass, your natural rhythms are thrown completely out of whack, and if you don’t get a grip and deal with it soon, you start to go stir crazy rather quickly.

This is where humans begin to differ from animals. Humans have an additional capacity…for spiritual transcendence. It’s a painful process, and it doesn’t happen immediately, and there are many phases and stages you will go through over time. But once you surrender to it, the process can begin, and you are on your way to no longer feeling like a caged animal, even if in a cage is precisely where you are.

I hovered on the perimeter of this shift for the first week I was on ice. I spent too much time unconscious to allow my conscious mind to begin to shift, hiding in a dark, dreamless, motionless sleep, a place where my being merely floated in stasis. Nothing changed from moment to moment. I could sleep for 18 hours and wake up in the same position, to the exact same view, from the exact same perspective. I began to verge on the place where time begins to lose all meaning, because one day is indistinguishable from the next. There was virtually no stimulus coming into the cell, and whatever stimulus I had sequestered inside my mind was still too terrifying for me to release. I was not yet ready to go inward, but I was getting close, wearing myself down moment by moment.

During my waking hours the last thing I would want to do would be to stay in bed, so I would usually sit on the desk and stare out the window. But for the air vent, which would kick on at regular intervals, it was painfully still and silent. Unlike County, which was deafening most of the day, Stateville was very quiet and gave you the feel of being underwater; everything was muffled and in lower frequencies and you felt it through the walls more than you heard it in your ears. Every few hours the C.O. on duty would walk through and count each cell, never interacting, never bothering to make eye contact. Other inmates would call out to them for something or another and they would just ignore them.  A phrase began to repeat itself over and over in my head: Persona non grata. Persona non grata.

A number of years earlier in the mid-Nineties, while I was fresh out of another stint in rehab and living in a halfway house in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago, I got a job working for the Anti-Cruelty Society as a kennel technician. In the beginning I worked the closing shift where I would feed all the dogs and cats and clean their kennels. To be honest, it broke my heart to work there, except for the rare times when I could work the adoption center and find some of them homes. So many of the animals never made it out of the shelter, a secret they guarded very closely. Anti-Cruelty, despite their name, was a euthanizing shelter.  What was worse was that most of the “no-kill” shelters in the city would send animals to Anti-Cruelty when their spaces filled up, thus, not actually doing the killing themselves, but leaving it for us to do.

Every day after tending to the dogs and cats I would then have to help round up the animals that had to be euthanized that night. At first, I couldn’t even bring myself to go anywhere near the death room. Then, over time, I forced myself at first to watch a procedure, then assist in a few with the managers who were on duty, whose tragic job it was everyday to do kill dozens of beautiful, sweet, loving creatures, who, for whatever reasons, were simply unwanted and now were too old, or not cute enough, or not the right breed, to be adopted out to a new family.  One of the managers I often worked with—a mother of four who had a house full of rescued animals—told me she rationalized the euthanasia by saying that the animals were now “with God.” I didn’t see it that way, and so I felt I owed it to the animals to be there with them in their last moments, to give them some final seconds of love. It was compassionate, right? It was the least I could do, right?

Wrong. As noble and selfless as this gesture may sound, it was a profoundly stupid decision for an addict new in recovery. I was not in any way emotionally or spiritually prepared for the consequences of what I was doing, and before long something in me snapped. I went out on a binge for a few days, and when the smoke cleared, as it were, I had lost my job and had been kicked out of the halfway house, a mere month after being released from four months in an inpatient treatment facility.

To this day thinking about that job still rattles me, particularly in light of the knowledge that millions of unwanted dogs and cats are euthanized every year in the US. I don’t blame Anti-Cruelty, though. They do more than their part and provide an invaluable, and costly, service; even I would go on to adopt my dog from them about five years after I had worked there. The larger point is that they were forced into acts of “lesser evil” in response to a preexisting problem, namely, overpopulation of domestic animals, and thus were forced to make impossible choices. “Sophie’s choices.” Only years later would I begin to understand just how my manager transcended, with Shiva-like grace, the pain of the death she dealt, and was able to come back every day to face more and still live with love and compassion, and perhaps even more surprising, hope in her heart.

It was only when I was locked in that cell at Stateville that I began to unlock the deeply repressed emotions I had about what I had gone through at the shelter, which was traumatic on a level I simply couldn’t face for years for much deeper reasons than the fate of the animals themselves. The shelter experience only served to compound the malignant traumas I had buried deep within me.

It is true that I so love animals that I can’t even begin to tell you what their suffering does to me. At the time I was locked up, I mostly preferred them to people and the only real healthy relationship I had in my life was with my dog, Milhouse. I was born in 1970, the Year of the Dog, and there is something in that, as I have always had an uncanny connection with dogs. In fact, I give Milhouse credit for a great deal of my healing, which I discuss later in the book. I was very attached to him, he was one of the few things that gave me joy those days, and so I was devastated to have to leave him for a year. Very quickly this came to haunt me in the form of these memories.

So notwithstanding the real horror of the animal holocaust going on every day, the grief and despair I felt at the time I worked at the shelter was distorted, because I had yet to grieve out some of the worst things that had ever happened to me. This not only meant that I was kept from any form of transcendent grace (a very important topic I cover later as well) but it also meant that as I continued to swallow pain after pain, and the suffering of a dying dog became for me the metaphorical touchstone connecting me to the collective despair of humanity and the wounding of my young soul. This was what set me off into that terrible relapse. When I looked at the dogs, on some level, what I was seeing was myself.

Now once again, there I was contemplating the simple suffering eyes of a dog floating in my preconscious mind, these eyes that were a Trojan horse stealthily unlocking larger, deeper creatures clawing to get out of my inner recesses. I sat there in that cell endlessly bored and mind racing, tip toeing around the psycho-spiritual avalanche that was waiting for the slightest thing to set it off.

I didn’t really know it at the time, but in hindsight, I can recognize and appreciate, with a sense of awe, the clever path my mind/soul was taking in order to achieve this very end of purging the grief it held prisoner behind my steadily darting eyes. My mind and my heart were doing everything in their power to get me to wake up and face the music.  It was time to feel! As I got control of myself, I suddenly realized that I was not going to be able to sleep much more. I was pretty much slept out, and the natives were restless.

As the breakfast cart came around I envisioned my fellow inmates instinctively jumping to their windows in anticipation, noses leaving smudges, yelping through cell doors. Images of dogs in their cages, some jumping up with excitement, some growling, some cowering in the corner, and others just laying there listless and depressed, all of them wanting out. The sad eyes of a thousand scared and desperate dogs, a thousand scared and desperate convicts, besiege, besiege, and I am overwhelmed.

A quick pained sob leapt out of me and my heart wrenched down into this terrible knot and I thought I was going to collapse and have a heart attack. It was all connecting at once into this perfect storm, a thousand memories piling in, crashing the breakwaters and flooding my soul.  This was the first real emotion I had felt since I had walked off the courtroom floor into custody. I went through County in an adrenal haze, and now that I was finally in one place, exhausted and ensconced and awake, my mind and heart were going to make sure I kept them company from here on out.

But the crime here is that I was not able to truly release this massive cue ball of pain and grief I was now forcing back down my gullet. It was like holding in the worst puke of your life, but I did not have the luxury to let it out. I know now, years later, that this was a critical point in my story. Yes, I managed to “get a grip,” per se. But the sickness I swallowed back down went to work inside and would return later in the worst form yet, after I got out of prison, when I least expected it.  

Thankfully, Willie didn’t wake up when I was having my mini-meltdown. I really didn’t have it in me to deal with that on top of everything else. Willie slept a lot more than I did that first week, and he was a deep sleeper who snored something fierce. And farted. That goddamn prison food did a number on you. Sometimes the stink in the cell would be overpowering. Like, hide-under-your-blanket foul. It was funny for oh, about a minute. Then it just got to be annoying.  But that day I was grateful for his snores and farts, if only because, ironically enough, they were serving as a thin retaining wall propping up my dignity, and allowing me to suffer in peace.



Who Let The Dogs Out?

After one week they let us out of our cells, one level at a time, to go outside into the pens attached to each cellblock, for one hour. We were marched down the walkway to the outside door, and when they opened it, were simultaneously blasted by intense sunlight and stifling heat. It must have been a hundred degrees outside.

At first the twenty or so of us just milled around on the hot concrete, squinting at each other as we shuffled about in a light-induced daze, sizing each other up again, a mess of men in powder blue jumpsuits and white slipper shoes with disheveled hair, thick stubble and rancid breath. It was terribly quiet outside, no wind, no sound, just silent heat.  Just outside our pens, rising up and stretching as far as the eye can see in both directions is the big wall surrounding Stateville Max. After a few moments someone finally spoke and broke the tension. Well, shouted, is more like it, kicking off a mini explosion of suppressed sentiment.

“God damn I am happy to get outta that muthafuckin’ box!”

“Bet, yo. Dem mufuckas is crazy. I’m goin’ outta my god-dam mind in there, aint shit to do!”

“Man you aint lyin, Joe.”

“Welcome to Hotel Hell, ya’ll.”

“Anyone got a square?” Willie hollered. “Man I need a muthafuckin’ squizzle!”

Tobacco was prohibited at Stateville, so inmates who were smokers were in the first week of withdrawal. They were edgy and irritable, despite the joy they were feeling at that moment about what amounted to little more than moving from a smaller cage to a bigger cage with sunlight and fresh air. So they walked around with smiles, but could often be seen gnawing at their fingers.

Eric, the blonde boyish kid who got eleven years for vehicular manslaughter, was housed on my level and came outside with my group. We gave each other a pound and sat down together with our backs against the razor wire fence, the tops of our jumpsuits unzipped with the sleeves tied around our waists.

“How you doin’?” I asked him.

“Man…I’m so fucking bored.”

“I know the feeling.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Sleeping, mostly,” I said.

“Me too. I don’t think I’ve been up for more than two hours all week. And I’m soooo hungry!”

“I know, me too.”

“But I’m all right. It is what it is, I guess. I just miss my girl.”

Eleven years, I thought. My god. How is he going to make it? I knew instantly his nineteen-year-old girlfriend would be looooooong gone by then. He showed no sign of it penetrating yet, though, which made sense. He had a long road ahead of him. It hurt me to think about it, and at the same time, filled me with immeasurable gratitude that it wasn’t me. The gratitude made me feel guilty as hell, mostly because I knew that if by some act of providence I was given the opportunity to switch places with Eric and give him his freedom, I wouldn’t. I don't know whether that was selfish or simply self-preservation but the net result was the same. Despite wanting to extend Eric as much compassion as possible, it was almost as if on some level I thought his sentence was contagious, and I fought this flight response to get away from him. I can’t really explain it any better than that.

I didn’t act on the impulse, though. I stayed and talked to him for a while, but the entire time I was conscious of the fact that this kid, for whatever reason, had some baaaaaaaad karma, and I had enough problems of my own with karma at the moment, thank you very much.

Willie and a couple other young brothers came and sat down with us. For a second, no one said anything, we all just looked at each other. It became a powerful bonding moment. We were searching each other’s faces for support, for recognition of our own internal pain and discomfort, fear and apprehension. The fears we felt differed somewhat. Those who had never been to the joint feared the great unknown; those who had been down before feared the all-too-well-known.

“Man, Joe,” one of the young kids said, “I just can’t wait ’till they come around wit dem bags.”

“Bags?” I asked.

“Uh huh. When you about to get up outta here they come through and slip a brown paper bag under yo cell door. That bag got the name a the joint you headed to, and it means you outta here, baby. Man, that’s probably the best feelin’ on earth, yo.”

“So we have no idea where we are going until then?” I asked.

“Naw, Joe. They don’t tell us shit, you know this.”

“True,” I said.

There was a pause, and then Willie said, “Hey you see that thick sistah who was workin’ the deck yesterday?” He was referring to one of the female C.O.s working our cellblock. “I’m a get me some a dat” (nods).

“You out cho goddam mind,” someone replied. “She dont want nothin’ to do wit yo convict ass.”

“Naw, I saw her lookin at me,” Willie went on. “Ole girl thought I was sleepin’, but I could see she was peepin’.’”

“She was countin’ yo black ass, nigga, she wasn’t makin’ dates!” The guys started laughing at Willie, and you could tell he was loving it.

“Ya’ll youngbloods don’t know nuttin’ ‘bout dis,” he said, then started to pimp strut across the concrete. They all just shook their heads and waved him off.

“Yeah, ah-aight. Go on ahead and step to her like that and see what she do,” the young black kid said, as he sat down next to me.

“She might crack me,” Willie said. “But eventually, she gonna love me.”

After a moment, I said, “I wonder where the hell I’m going to end up.”

“After you get out?” Eric said.

“Naw…I mean, what joint.”

“Shit. Me too, man.”

“I don’t even know what level security I got coming.”

“Man, I hope I get East Moline,” the kid to my right said.

“This motherfucker said that too,” I said, gesturing at Willie.

“I sho did. And they gonna do it.” Willie said.

“I just don’t know how you think you know this,” I said.

“He don’t know shit,” the kid said. “He’s just frontin.’”

“Just you wait and see,” Willie responded. “They probably send White Boy there too,” he said, referring to me.

“If you aint got no violence on your record,” the kid to my right said, “and you a short timer on possession or some shit, you probably gonna go to a Min [minimum security]. East Moline is a Min, and they got movement.”

“Movement,” I asked?

“Yeah…you know…you get to move around, you don’t have to stay locked in your cell or your day room. Aybody wants to go to East Moline, but its small, so only like a few mufuckas ever get to go.”

“It would be good to go there,” I said.

“Whatchou in fo’?”

“Possession. One year.”

“First time down?”

“Yup.”

“Aw shit, man, you gonna get a turnaround.”

“A turnaround?”

“Yeah…you aint got but sixty-one days to serve, nigga.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Cause that’s the way it is. Look, you got one year, right? But the law say that aybody does only half their time, so that’s six months off right there. And they give aybody six months ‘good time.’”

“’Good time?’”

“Man…are you sure you belong here?” dude said, laughing.

“That mufucka definitely belongs here,” Willie said, pointing at me. “He’s got crazy ideas, wants to save the world. Don’t wanna let him round the young chirren.”

"Yeah, ah-aight. Whatever,” the kid said, and turned back to me. “So, ‘good time’ is time you get for…you know…bein’ good. But they give it to you ahead of time, and if you don’t fuck up, you keep it. You fuck up, you do those six months and more.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Half time, and six months off that, equals a year and leaves me with nothing. Why didn’t I just get ‘time served’ and go home,” I asked?

“Cause aybody gotta get paid. Yo ass is worth, shit, thirty, forty stacks. And the state don’t cut a check until you serve a minimum of sixty-one days. So think about it…its like an assembly line in a plant. They got all these 61-day-wonder muthafuckas steady goin’ in and out, all year long, thousands of them, cause they dont got the space to hold everyone. And for every one a them, IDOC gets a check worth what it costs to keep a mufucka in prison for a whole year! Like I said, aybody gotta get dey money.”

“Are you sure about this?” I asked.

“About what, the 61 days? Man…the one thing a convict knows is how much time he got.”

I could be out in 61 days?

The C.O. popped out from the door to the cellblock and shouted for us to line up so that we could go back to our cells. Willie came up and patted me on the head.

“Come on, Fido. Back to your cage.” 

~~~~

NEXT WEEK: Chapter Two continues with Part 3 as the author and his cellmate get to know each other's history.

Missed the Introduction and Chapter One - "Dead Time?" Read them now or visit the Exile Nation home page.

~~~~ 

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Exile Nation copyright © 2010 Charles Shaw. All rights reserved.

Charles Shaw's work has appeared in Alternet, Alternative Press Review, Conscious Choice, Common Ground, Grist,Guerrilla News Network, Huffington Post, In These Times, Newtopia, TheNew York Times, openDemocracy, Planetizen, Punk Planet, RealitySandwich, San Diego Uptown News, Scoop, Shift, Truthout, The Witness,YES!, and Znet. He was a Contributing Author to the 2008 Shift Report from the Institute for Noetic Sciences, and in Planetizen's Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning (2007, Island Press). In 2009 he was recognized by the San Diego Press Club for excellence in journalism.

Charles is the Editor of the Exile Nation "Unheard Voices" Project (coming Spring 2010), and Editor of the Dictionary of Ethical Politics, a collaborative project of Resurgence,openDemocracy, and the Tedworth Trust. He is the former Editorial Director of Conscious Enlightenment Publishing (Conscious Choice, Common Ground, Whole Life Times, and Seattle's Conscious Choice), the founder and publisher of Newtopia, former head writer for the nationally syndicated radio show Reality Checks, former Senior Staff Writer forThe Next American City, and a Contributing Editor for Worldchanging.