One of the people sitting at the table is the high-energy kid who greeted me last night. His name is Eric, but everyone calls him Easy. Easy gives me the rundown on our block, which has 150 inmates. The white car sits together at two tables. There are also Crip tables, Blood tables, Muslim tables, Tango Blast tables, and Sureño tables, and there are separate TVs for each group.
* * *
—
When I step out onto the yard at Cumberland for the first time, it’s like something out of a gnarly prison movie. It’s summer, and everyone’s shirt is off. People are tattooed head-to-toe. Guys are hanging by the fence, doing furtive business.
Trucks circle the yard, but although there’s always some tension on it, there’s surprisingly little police presence. The yard is partitioned so that guards can isolate a riot if one starts. There are lots of people working out but no weights: the purchase of new weightlifting equipment by federal prisons was banned in 1996, out of a concern that prisons were creating jacked super-convicts, and weights have been removed from medium- and higher-security prisons.
Every prison is controlled by one or two gangs who, through some combination of numerical dominance and a violent reputation, “hold the keys to the yard.” At Cumberland, it’s two Mexican gangs: the Sureños, from Southern California; and Tango Blast, from Texas. That means they control a lot of the illicit activity on the compound and have the strongest relationships with the dirty cops, and it means that members of any gangs they’re enemies with can’t be placed here.
On the yard, different gangs and racial groups have their preferred areas to congregate, but in the chow hall, segregation by car is strict. Each group has its own table or tables: Crip. Blood. Baltimore. Tango Blast. Sureño. Gangster Disciple. Folk. White. Puerto Rican. Ñeta. Muslim. Christian. If you’re white, and all the white tables are full but there are three empty Sureño tables, you wait until there’s an opening at a white table or someone at another table invites you to sit down. Whites are a minority in higher-security prisons, which is one of the reasons they’ve developed such a violent reputation: if they aren’t feared, they’ll be prey.
For years, I’ve been hearing how deadly these higher-security places are, and given Dimitri’s warning, I’m uncertain what’s in store for me. Right away, I start running around the track, but I still have a limp, which is unnerving, given that I’m surrounded by predators with hypersensitive antennae for wounded animals. But my diligent exercising will pay off, and eventually I’ll regain full use of my injured leg.
* * *
—
Higher-security federal prisons get more money than lower-security ones and are more manicured. Cumberland, being the highest-security facility near D.C., makes a good showpiece when federal brass want to tour a prison, so they keep it looking nice. Loretto was a dump and falling apart; this place has newer paint, and it’s the rare higher-security prison with a grove of trees. You’re not allowed, as an inmate, to leave the path that wends through the grove, but it makes such a difference to me, to see something other than concrete.
The kitchens at higher-securities have bigger budgets, and the guys who work there, especially the lifers in key positions, are serious about it and take pride in their cooking. The food here is decent, and they give you a good-size tray. There are more activities, and there’s more equipment. There are TVs literally anywhere there’s an open space. Anything to keep us as pacified as possible. There are more cops here too. Some are hyperaggressive, but in general they’re more respectful, because they have to be: there are inmates here—killers, gang members—who are never going home. Before doing population moves, the guards even tend to check with the shot-callers first.
Inmates here are caught all the time doing things like tattooing, gambling, or smoking—any of which could land you serious hole time at my previous prisons—and only have their commissary privileges suspended. Even shots for drug possession or a dirty urine—for which I had five years added to my sentence—might only get you ten days in the SHU, or even zero days, if the cops need the limited number of SHU cells for violent prisoners. A cop might just say he’s “putting it on the shelf,” essentially giving you a suspended sentence, and if you stay clean, it’s never activated.
At the same time, higher-securities are more regulated. I can’t move freely around the compound. I can’t just walk to someone else’s block. Cell phones are much scarcer here. Where maybe one in fifteen inmates at lower-security places has one, here it’s more like one in five hundred. The cops here take them much more seriously, because the security of the institution is at stake. At Cumberland, a no-frills flip phone goes for $3,500.
* * *
—
Moving too quickly, when you hit a compound, is called “speeding” and almost invariably ends with a crash. I know this. But it’s also my nature to speed, and I’m eager to find allies. Easy and I become friends, hanging and working out together. He’s from Rochester, New York, in on drug charges. When he first arrived, he hung out with the other Rochesterians, who happened all to be black, but by the time I met him he’d become increasingly aligned with the white car.
Soon after my arrival, some heroin hits the compound. I’m anxious about adjusting to the most dangerous place I’ve been in yet, and it sounds good to me. Easy makes alcohol and has connections, and together we buy a decent amount of brown-powder junk, which we hide in plain sight. Easy has a prescription for fluoxetine, generic Prozac, and I empty the capsules and refill them with dope.
We start taking orders for the heroin, shaking it out into papers, each a folded wad of glossy magazine paper containing a Bic pen cap’s worth of powder. We sell the papers for three books of stamps each. When heroin’s around, people like to do it, and I cut some guys a really good price. I’m trying to settle in, and it ingratiates me to the yard, or at least to some of the white guys.
Easy is wild. He jokes around a lot but also commands respect. We get high together. My involvement with heroin, at this point, is opportunistic: I’m not worried about relapsing—every time I snort it, I’m vigilant about not doing it again for a while, lest I slip back into a habit—but it’s helpful for taking the edge off, and it’s the drug most readily available here.
Sometimes, when I can get pot, I smoke it instead, though it’s a production. I put a towel under my door. I roll a playing card into a tube held together with a piece of tape, and make an incision in one end with a disposable razor blade. I take the metal sleeve from a pencil eraser and put it in the incision, pack a little weed in the makeshift bowl, and run a toilet-paper wick out of that. Then, when the corridor is guard-free, I take a double-A battery, remove the plastic wrapper to expose the naked metal, and bend a thin strip of Hershey-bar foil from the side of the battery to the negative terminal. It sparks, lighting the toilet paper and then the weed. I draw as much smoke into my lungs as they’ll hold, then exhale into the ceiling vent.
* * *
—
Uncertain who’s an enemy and who isn’t, I’m just waiting for something to happen. As usual, everyone knows who I am, while I don’t know who anyone else is, but now the stakes are much higher. I’d be a great person for a guy doing life, or a young kid looking to make a name for himself, to put some steel in. The Italians here, led by Vittorio Amuso, the Lucchese crime-family boss, don’t like me. The white supremacists don’t like me. I never know if the guy approaching me is going to shank me. “In prison, a man rations his smiles, because predatory men see smiling as a weakness, weak men see it as an invitation, and prison guards see it as a provocation to some new torment.” From day one, I carry a lock and a belt with me whenever I leave my cell, and after a few weeks I get a knife from Easy. It’s a piece of sharpened metal with some rubber from the kitchen on the end for a handle. I dangle it inside my sweatpants, tying it to one of the drawstrings. When I’m going out to the yard, which requires passing through a metal detector, I leave the knife in my cell, in a hidden compartment in my locker, and
just bring the belt and lock with me. A good number of the guards seem to recognize the jeopardy I’m in, know I need all the help I can get, and let me enter the yard with those.
* * *
—
Facial hair is one of the few mediums available to express yourself in this place. A lot of it is white supremacists aping Vikings. They get Celtic-knot tattoos, and they grow huge handlebar mustaches and crazy beards. Notably, given the racial inspiration of much of the facial hair, I never see an inmate with a Hitler mustache; even the neo-Nazis must think it looks ridiculous. The white shot-caller on my unit is a guy named Peter Hafer, who has a monster beard that he wears alternately as a giant ZZ Top bush and as a single tail held together by evenly spaced rubber bands.
Me with Farmer, Casper, Hafer, and Easy at Cumberland.
Hafer is nice to people he likes, but is generally aloof and can get really grouchy. He has minor folk-hero status because of a courtroom video on YouTube, with more than two million views, of him coldcocking his court-appointed lawyer, the ultimate disgruntled-felon fantasy. When he’s walking around the compound, he keeps up his pace so he won’t get stopped by anyone to talk. He’s one of the white shot-callers mainly because people fear him. He also makes hooch.
My paperwork arrives in a brown envelope. It’s an inch-thick sheaf of court minutes—everything said at my various hearings, including my resentencing—plus my pre-sentencing report by the probation department. Most importantly, it documents that at a certain point I refused to cooperate, which contributed to my harsh sentence of an extra five years. My paperwork now accurately reflects the whole truth: when I entered the system, I didn’t know what was what, but once I started realizing the score, I had a change of heart. So although my initial cooperation was a strike against me, my ultimate about-face, resulting in the doubling of my sentence, balanced it out.
Hafer has Farmer scrutinize the paperwork. I tell Farmer, “You’re going to have to go over everything carefully to get a real idea of what happened. It’s not perfect, by any means, but it is what it is.” I’m hoping that the details that fucked me with the prosecutors will be what save me with my fellow criminals.
Farmer takes the envelope and spends hours poring over its contents—all the documents, briefs, and minutes. Then a kid named Donny, a sweet country boy with a ponytail and glasses who did something like blow up a police station and runs errands for Farmer and Hafer, comes down to my cell.
“Go to Farmer’s cell when you have a chance.”
My fate rests on the outcome of this process, and given my luck, I’m not optimistic. If Farmer’s an asshole, and decides my paperwork is problematic, he’ll tell me to check in with the cops and ask to be transferred into protective custody, or else I’ll be hurt. Before going to see Farmer, I make a promise to myself: I’m not going to check in. I walk upstairs to his cell.
“Dude,” he says, “I’ve gone over everything. You’re good. I’m going to let everyone on the compound know that you’re good.” I’m so relieved, and I feel vindicated. Someone has taken the time to see the details of my case and decided that I’m honorable. Farmer is in good status with the whites on the yard, which in turn means that he’s in good status with the shot-callers from other races. His approval basically means that I’m good to go.
Ten minutes later, Hafer, who’s been keeping his distance, comes up to me and is friendly for the first time. I also show the paperwork to Bob, an older bank robber from Boston I’ve become friendly with; he spends hours in the library peering at it through his glasses, and reaches the same conclusion Farmer did. After that, it’s pretty much smooth sailing for me, and I almost start to enjoy myself for the first time since I’ve been in prison, ripping and running with Easy and Farmer and Hafer.
With Bob the bank robber and my beloved Chucks at Cumberland.
31
2013: As a Man Thinketh
Six weeks after my arrival at Cumberland, I come back to my cell and find a bunch of my stuff missing, including a couple of pairs of nice eyeglass frames and a radio. This is how new inmates get tested. Someone wants to see if I can be chumped. If I am, it will mean one kind of future here. Before the day’s over, it gets back to me who the culprits are. It’s two guys from Baltimore, a black kid and a white kid. This is a loophole in the Byzantine racial codes at Cumberland: it’s acceptable for whites from Baltimore to hang out with blacks and run with the predominantly black Baltimore car.
I’ve been drinking with Easy, and I go into the interracial duo’s cell, which is on my unit. They don’t try to deny they took my shit. “Fuck you,” the black kid says, and I start hitting him. The violence comes easy to me by now. It feels natural, an innate survival skill. It is not just a part of prison life, it is a part of me. But this battle does not go well. The white kid starts hitting me. They get the better of me. Meanwhile, a cop searches my cell and finds a jug of alcohol Easy and I bought from Hafer and hid in our trash can, and sends me to the lieutenant’s office. I’m still bleeding, and he Breathalyzes me. I take the rap for the alcohol, so I get one shot for that and another for fighting. I’m going back to the hole, and I think the DHO is going to knock my block off, but when I have my hearing he only gives me two months. I thank him.
* * *
—
Cell 136, my new home in the SHU, is only five paces long and extremely narrow. With my arms spanned, there’s maybe a foot and a half of clearance on each side. And I have a cellmate, a member of the Pagans motorcycle gang. The BOP wants to move him to gen pop, but despite having another two years in his sentence, he’s dead set on staying in the box. He forces them to keep him there by saying that if they move him he’ll kill someone.
My first weeks back in the hole, I don’t go outside. The rec hour is 5 to 6 a.m., and I’m not willing to sacrifice sleep for fresh air. My mental state is precarious. Just when I’d begun to form alliances, I’m in the SHU again. There’s no guarantee that when I get out, someone won’t have mounted a slander campaign against me in my absence. Having tasted relative freedom after so long in solitary, I feel like I’ve taken a major step backward.
One night, I dream that I’m at dinner with my family and closest friends, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ll never amount to anything and that they feel the same way. Then I’m having sex with a woman who turns into a demon. Then I’m marrying a woman I’ve loved since I was a child, and although I know that she has consented to be my wife only out of pity, I’m still willing to go through with the wedding. When I wake up, I’m shaken, but as I lie there I slowly fill with determination. I’ll use the images of doom and failure to inspire me to chart a different course for my future. I’ve had thoughts like this so many times before. Will it stick, this time?
Another night, against all odds I glimpse, through a visual cacophony of steel plates and fencing and razor wire, a full moon. I’ve always felt a connection to the moon. I’ve spent hours looking at it and daydreaming. With my return to solitary, I’m thirsting for a sign—something, anything, to remind me of life beyond my monotonous daily feelings of despair and lostness—and this stolen glimpse of nature feels like a moment of grace.
* * *
—
A few weeks later, Easy is sent to the hole. This concerns me, for his sake as well as my own. I know he’s here because of the heroin, and I figure he might suspect that I ratted him out to try to get out of the box. I want to talk to him to clear the air.
Early the next morning, during rec hour, I go outside and see him in a cage a little ways down.
“What’s up?” I shout.
“What’s up?” he shouts back, without his usual friendly tone.
I start going out every morning so we can talk, or shout, cage to cage. Eventually I ask the cops to put us in the same cell. Their willingness to cell us together goes a long way toward convincing Easy that I didn’t snitch on him, because if I had, the cops would never put us together.
He says the cops went straight for h
is Prozac bottle; they clearly knew that’s where the drugs were. “Then someone else clearly knew,” I say. “ ’Cause I didn’t tell them.”
After I was sent to the hole, Easy says, he moved in with Charlie, a tattoo artist on our block who was going to do some work on him. Easy is now convinced that Charlie gave him up to mollify the cops about his illicit ink operation. Easy is nearly homicidal. He knows that for this shot he’ll be transferred to a higher-security prison. “When you go back to gen pop,” he says, “you need to hurt Charlie for me.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It doesn’t seem like something Charlie would do just so he can tattoo. I’m not going to put my hands on that guy without more proof.”
“Well, then, you’ve got to let people know that this is what I think, and this is what I’m saying.”
Easy’s racial attitudes are starting to offend me. Increasingly, every second word starts with n. It’s a word that he, like a lot of prisoners, applies to anyone he doesn’t like, including white people. But Easy is becoming over-the-top about it. In the hole, we tear off strips of bedsheet to create bandannas for working out, and Easy puts a swastika on his. When, after a few weeks, he’s sent to Big Sandy, a penitentiary in Kentucky, I know he’ll fit right in. He’s exactly the specimen that the neo-Nazis are looking for: a strong, good-looking soldier with a shaved head who’s volatile and energized by his newfound sense of tribal aggrievement.
Long Way Home Page 31