Doing Time Read online

  “The more the merrier,” needled one of the escort guards. “I like seeing all these inmates!”

  “Job security,” quipped another behind his M-16.

  These guards all matched: boots, mirrored sunglasses, guns. They were many, and they deployed themselves around us. Such overkill made you feel at once hopeless and proud at being considered so fierce a beast. For the nonce you weren’t some tame and humble inmate. Hell, no. You were a barbarian being whipped to the imperial gates, straining at your bonds and snarling defiance at your captors.

  By now we’d passed through the main entrance sally port. Ahead loomed the administration building; straight to the door, the long strip of pavement ran a flowered gauntlet between annuals gay and nimble in the breeze. A ribbon on a pig.

  “Hey, you! Take a right.” I turned left — busily straining at my bonds, absently leading the coffle. I’d been daydreaming since my youth and was getting better at it.

  “Your other right, Twinkle Toes.”

  I stopped in my tracks to make up for my blunder, and caused a bigger one. The chain reaction was literal. The coffle bunched into folds, like a caterpillar at the end of a leaf.

  “What kind of a Polish fire drill. . . C’mon, shake the fuckin’ lead!” came the same loud and abrasive voice.

  “Aww — shake these hairy nuts, cop!” This voice belonged to the Georgia boy right behind me. They called him June Bug. Nicknames came in two ways: The con dug deep and flattered himself with one, or the world slapped a handle on him. June Bug. It stuck. It rubbed salt. He had griped the loudest about the joys of being in transit with no property — “nary a toothbrush or a stamp.” He had stayed in the Man’s face, selling death from behind the safety of the security screen. The transport guards just rolled their eyes. Who took seriously a balding, short little fat guy? He got too mouthy you raised your hand at him and that was enough.

  “Chill out, June Bug,” advised the third man on the chain, a black convict. “Dude’s a fool. I knows that Hoosier from Terre Haute.”

  “Indiana?”

  “Yessir. Him and the gooners rushed my cell— I was in the hole— and jtvc tossed me up.”

  “Is that right? Well, he don’t move me none.” June Bug bunched his pudgy fists. “Just let me get my hands on him. Two minutes!”

  “Easy, killer,” 1 pitched in, thinking he was out of place in the cacchall of prison.

  The black threw back his smooth-shaven head and laughed. “Hey y’all seen his wife? Big of tits. She’s got some kind of secretary job —- warden’s office or some shit, and they say she’s fuckin’.”

  “Now I likes me a gal with round heels,” said June Bug.

  “Ain’t no question!” agreed the shiny-pared one. “I’d like to dick her down and him watching— the dirty Klansman.”

  “I wouldn’t: fuck a pig’s wife,” I said, playing to the gallery. “Might squeal.”

  June Bug added his chortle to Cranium’s and then said, “Right about now I’d fuck a snake? Just hold the head.”

  “I hear ya,” said Cranium. “Ain’t no shame in your game.”

  “None in the fed’s, either,” I told them boih. “We need a law like the one passed in California.”

  “What law?” asked June Bug.

  “He means SP42. tt’s one of them … uh … radioactive laws. They lettin’ all kinds of motherfuckers go.”

  June Bug hissed through chipped teeth. “We ain’t going nowhere for a while. Fuck with Uncle and get retired.”

  “Yeah. And stuck with fools like that one over there,” complained Cranium. “He’s some shit.”

  The correctional officer in question sported a lieutenant’s gold badge. He posted himself just ahead of us, on the wide expanse of lawn edging the walkway.

  “How you be, Lieutenant Griggs?” I heard an escort C.O. ask him in passing. “Where’s your jacket?”

  “Don’t need one in California.” The C.O. did a double take. Lieutenant Griggs was not kidding. The El-Tee stood with arms akimbo above the trestle of his legs, raking humorless eyes over the length of the prisoner chain. A big, unlit cigar jutted from his mouth.

  “Why, Rufus!” came the loud voice as we shuffled before him. “Last time I seen you we was dancing.” The black con surrendered a tepid smile.

  “Ain’t gonna have no trouble out of you here —- are we?”

  “Nossir. Got my mind right, boss.” Rufus had introduced himself on the bus. “Money is my game, Well-to-Do is my name.”

  “Well-to-Do?” challenged his homeboy from Miami. “My nigga . . . every since I done knowed you, you been doin’ dirtball bad. Well-to-do!” he snorted. “Nigga, y’name needs to be Food Stamp.” Merciless, the guffaws.

  “My name ain’t Rufus, it’s Well-to-Do,” he huffed as we descended the basement ramp into Receiving and Discharge.

  Once inside, we were unchained, strip-searched yet again, handed towel rolls, and, the first twelve of us, sent naked to the next holding cage to dress. There we opened our rolls, and got a surprise.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Kiss my black ass!”

  “!Que la chingada!”

  The problem was comic; the problem was grave. Each of us stared at the drawers we’d been issued. These were not the loose-fitting boxers of custom. These were jockey shorts. Dainty shorts — shrunken and the brown all faded. They were, in effect, pink panties.

  “Ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun,” mused one convict aloud.

  We wrapped towels around our waists and started wailing for the Man.

  “C.O.”

  “C.O.!”

  “Hey, you deaf? C.O.!”

  Footsteps approached, and a gravelly voice grew louder. “Hold on, hold on. Damn! I ain’t got but two hands and two feet … and half a dick.” The officer, reaching the screen-fronted cage, grinned. “But I got a split tongue!”

  “Dig this,” started Rufus, “These here—”

  “Do I know you?” The C.O. had scanned our faces, pointing to the ugliest one. June Bug, “Hey, you think I’m good-looking?” His own round and homely face creased into another grin. “It ain’t easy being fat and greasy — huh?”

  It had sounded suspicious to me when my mother first said: “You can be ugly and your personality can make you charming.” She sat in her slip before the dresser mirror, painting her face. “Just be nice to her.”

  “But I don’t want to be nice. She smells, too.”

  “You love me?

  “Yes.”

  “Then do it for your mama, Handsome.”

  She always used that on me. It was just me and her, and so I went up to the front house where the landlady lived. We were behind on the rent.

  Moms was right, of course. Take this grizzled C.O. He exuded a crude charm — just the thing for inmates. You could tell he knew people, liked people. His job was a paycheck, not a calling. This was obvious in the shit he talked. But for timing, we would have laughed at his next remark.

  “All right, little darlings, you got me down here. Who tore their panties now?”

  We howled. Our clamor brought another officer on the run, keys jangling. “What’s wrong?” the second asked the first.

  “This hee-uh is what’s wrong!” June Bug held up the offending briefs between thumb and index finger.

  The blond and burr-headed second officer shrugged. “So?”

  “So look at these — how can I — I can’t — just get me some more, Mister Police.”

  “That’s a negative. Laundry only gave us a set amount.”

  “Well, you gots to do somethin’.” June Bug gestured at his rotundity. “How you figure me getting these on?”

  “Try one leg at a time.”

  “Try these nuts, you —”

  “Calm down,” cut in rhe wearied veteran, waving a placatory hand. ‘“Main thing’s don’t fuckin’ panic. Conic laundry tomorrow, yon pruna donnas will get squared away.”

  A big white con — all muscles and inky
tattoos — got up from one of the backless benches bolted to the wall. The dragons, the demons, the damsels of heroic fantasy muraled his upper body. “Fuck that,” lie said. “Call the laundry now.’“

  “Laundry’s closed,” informed Blond Burr.

  “Well, send somebody…”

  “That’s right,” broke in Rufus. “Earn some of them taxpayer dollars.”

  “… somebody over there and get us some decent drawers. Some bonaroos. Come on, pops. Do the right thing!”

  “Anything else?” came the veteran’s arch reply. “How ‘bout a reach-around, too? Now I’ve got 10 get you guys processed and—”

  “Fuck you then, you old fart.”

  “Fuck me and you’ll never go hack to a woman.” I pondered the exchange. C.O.’s sounded like convicts — even unto sex talking each other, and they had women. Environment rubbed off.

  Rubbing a sleek head — one kepr shaven in fear and concealment of balding age — Rutus stalked over to the cage door. “Man, we got our righis. Constitutionally aniendated. I’ll call my lawyer, and take y’all 10 court ou one of them there, uh …a writ of hocus pocus! You can’t be doggin’ us like this. I ain’t going for it.”

  “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

  How I Became a Convict

  Victor Hassine

  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.