Three weeks to the day, a guard rousts me from my cell and brings me to my disciplinary hearing in front of the reporting officer and the hearing officer. This hearing will determine the answer to two simple questions: Did I violate the laws of the prison, and if so, how should I be disciplined? The hearing officer hits me with the official charge of group resistance and petition.
“We have confidential informants,” he says, an executioner’s smile spreading across his face. “They heard you in conversation with other inmates planning to take over the institution.”
“I’ve never had any such conversation,” I say.
The two guards glare at me.
This is serious.
The fiction has become true crime. I’m helpless, shackled to a table in this sham of a hearing, this kangaroo court. These two guards want my head. They want to send me to jail.
Then I remember an article I read about Boscobel, the brand-new supermax, made up of only isolation cells. A few years ago, an inmate at another institution ambushed and murdered a fellow prisoner, the notorious “Milwaukee Cannibal,” Jeffrey Dahmer. As a reaction—or overreaction—the state built “Wisconsin’s most secure facility,” Boscobel, designed to house 509 of the “worst of the worst” prisoners. The state is in the middle of a prison boom. Maximum-security prisons like Waupun have become overcrowded, while Boscobel, the supermax, sits half-empty, providing unoccupied bed space. When I finished the article about Boscobel, I imagined some state higher-up saying, “We built it. Now we have to fill it.”
The hearing officer shouts my name, jarring me.
“Guilty,” he says.
They charge me with inciting to riot, with group resistance and petition.
I almost shout, “Bull! This isn’t about an infraction. This is about bed space!” but I hold my tongue.
They send me to Boscobel.
They sentence me to 360 days in segregation.
10.
Segregation
Those who decide not to die choose to live.
I remember reading that somewhere. During the next year of my life, that becomes my mantra, my meditation, my fuel.
In the heat of an endless day, I sit chained to a bench in a bus without windows. The bus groans and rolls over rough roads for a torturous two and a half hours, trudging from Waupun, where I saw my status grow, to Boscobel, the supermax, where I will once again tumble into anonymity, a nobody identified by a six-figure identification number. On this drive, I make that determination, that choice. I refuse to allow the system—this twisted, tainted, elitist criminal justice system—to swallow me, to submerge me, to beat me. I will beat the system. I will use words, language, persistence, guile, faith, and the law. I will use these means because they are all I have.
* * *
—
Segregation.
I used to only associate that word with racism. With my forebearers. With the Mississippi cotton fields where my relatives toiled, broken and beaten, emotionally, mentally, and physically. Today, again—
Segregation.
Where I will live for the next year.
In isolation. Apart from the population.
In the hole.
A hole in hell.
* * *
—
I live in a cell the size of a parking space.
The room feels too tight to roll over.
I have a cardboard-thin mattress on a concrete block, a toilet, a sink, a shower, and a TV that gets five channels, all news. I have a rectangle in the wall the size of a hardcover book they call a window. I live in here twenty-four hours a day. I never leave, except for one hour each week when I can walk around the yard accompanied by a guard. They may call this segregation, but I think of this as quarantine. I feel as if I have contracted some horrifying virus. I wonder if that’s how my relatives felt back in Mississippi—quarantined, as if being Black were a deadly disease.
* * *
—
I can’t stay still. I pace in my cell. Sometimes I walk in circles. I need to move. I need to walk. I walk for—I don’t know how long. Hours, maybe. In segregation, time becomes my cellmate. Time has breath, time has a pulse, time has a soul. I don’t lose track of time. I can’t. That would be like losing a piece of myself.
* * *
—
I write letters in my head. I scribble notes on a pad. I drop to the floor, rip off twenty push-ups, build up to thirty, fifty, a hundred, flip over, power through a hundred sit-ups, two hundred, five hundred. Then I pace, walk across my cell, drop to the floor, and rip off another set of twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred push-ups. Before long, I’m up to a thousand push-ups a day.
One morning, from the floor, I glance at the TV and see a plane fly into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. A few minutes later, a second plane flies into the second tower. I watch, paralyzed, as the towers explode, then emulsify, dissolving like pillars of sand. Nothing seems real. Nothing seems right. I change the channel. The towers explode on every one of my five channels. Who did this? Where am I? Caged. Quarantined.
* * *
—
The country is frozen in fear. We go to war in a far-off desert against enemies we don’t know, an evil we can’t see or imagine. Meanwhile, I pace and do push-ups. I turn twenty-one, alone. I celebrate by jotting notes down on my pad, priming arguments, promising myself and my family that I will stay alive. Twenty-one. I am of age. I can vote, I can drink—out there, that is. Not in here. I imagine my friends in bars, drinking, toasting, partying. I pace. Thanksgiving comes, goes, Christmas comes, goes. Happy New Year, 2002. I count down my sentence as I pace. Tick, tock. Approximately twenty years to go. Tick, tock.
I live in a row of ten cells. I see no one, hear a constant chorus of doors slamming. I do learn that we have a celebrity on the row—Christopher Scarver, Jeffrey Dahmer’s killer. One day, I look through my tiny book-sized window and lock eyes with the inmate in the cell across from me. He stares back, his face expressionless, his eyes dead. After a moment, he disappears. I wonder if he’s in here because of a false conviction as I am or if he’s one of the worst of the worst. I wonder if that’s Christopher Scarver. I never see him again.
I need to exercise my mind. I am pacing one day when I hear a voice. I stop, freeze. I knock on the wall. I bend down, talk through the vent on the floor by the shower. “Hey, yo, next door. What’s up, bro? Where you coming from?”
“I came from Green Bay Correctional.”
“Hard time, I hear.”
“Hard time. Wild West, man. Where you coming from?”
“Waupun Correctional.”
“Okay.”
“Hey, yo, man, you play chess?”
“Yeah, man. I do.”
“Cool. Let’s get up a game.”
I draw out a chessboard on my pad. Sixty-four squares. I number each square, one to sixty-four. On the back row, I write “rook,” “horse,” “bishop,” “king,” “queen,” “bishop,” “horse,” “rook” on squares one through eight; then I write P for pawn on the row in front, squares nine through sixteen. I get on the floor, put my face close to the vent. We decide to alternate who will be white and go first and attack and who will be black and defend. I get white first, study my homemade paper chessboard, and announce my opening move by calling out which piece I’m moving to which square. We play two games of chess that day, then try to keep going every day at about the same time. I play chess to survive. And I read.
Once a week, a guard arrives outside my cell pushing a book cart. I notice that the guard always starts at the far end of the cellblock, at the cell farthest from me. He comes to me last, after all the popular books have been taken. A slight, but the guard doesn’t know I’ll read anything, and I do, books about gardening, cooking, parenting, politics, poetry, even books by Freud.
I request two or three books at a time, and the guard shoves them through the trap at the bottom of my cell door. I read voraciously. I’m like a starving man who’s stumbled on a buffet. Some days, my chess partner and I discuss books. We communicate this way, through chess and books and ideas, the two of us. Two disembodied voices connecting through a vent below a prison cell shower.
* * *
—
They keep the lights on twenty-four hours a day. Often, I can’t tell the time until the guards deliver food, always some disgusting variation of potatoes, like hash browns for breakfast and au gratin for dinner. Hours and days tick away. Weeks whip by. Months pass. I play countless games of chess. I take mental vacations through my books. I read a book about Gansu Province in China and imagine myself traveling there. I visit the Silk Road, the Gobi Desert, the Jade Gate, the temples, the grottoes, the rugged mountains. And as I escape in my books, losing days, weeks, and months to my imagination, I plot my literal escape. I write letters, frantically. As the guards dump books into my trap, they pick up letters I write to my mother, asking her to keep the faith, telling her that I miss her, that I think of her, and that I am surviving. And the guards pick up letters I write to lawyers, law firms, and organizations like the ACLU and the Wisconsin Innocence Project asking them to hear my case. When I receive a return letter turning me down, or I don’t hear back for a period of time, I write to them again, trying a different approach, coming at them from a new angle.
There’s an image I keep at the forefront of my mind. I see a huge, monstrous tree. I know this tree bears fruit, and I want to taste it. I need to have that fruit. It’s my tree, my fruit. I start by kicking the base of the tree, but all I get are leaves falling down on me. I know I can’t keep kicking the base of the tree the same way because all I’ll get are those useless, fluttering leaves. I have to take a different approach. I go to the back of the tree, try to find a weaker point of impact. But this time, I don’t kick the tree. I start rocking it. I see if I can get the fruit to fall by making the branches sway back and forth. I know this tree has fruit. I can see it. If this approach doesn’t work, I’ll try something else. Maybe I’ll climb the tree. I won’t give up. I’ll keep trying until I cradle that fruit in my arms.
I use this approach with my letters. I know I have to keep them to one page. No lawyer will read past that for free. I write and rewrite, focusing on creating a more compelling opening as I argue for my innocence, explain my wrongful conviction. Having read dozens of books, I’m aware that my vocabulary has widened and become more precise. I take hours crafting these follow-up letters. I’m in a rush, but I won’t hurry. I’m in segregation. I’ve got nothing but time.
* * *
—
Everything happens through the mail.
Slowly.
Through the warden’s office, I file an official complaint to the security director of the prison. I explain my grievance, insisting that I have been placed in segregation without proper cause and with insufficient evidence. I refute the decision that put me into segregation on what has been a blatant failure of due process. According to the law, the state must respect my legal rights. Instead, the state has harmed me, put me into segregation without following the law. The state has violated my legal rights.
Weeks pass.
One day, I receive a reply from the security director. He upholds my original disciplinary ticket, keeping me in segregation.
I don’t give up. I file a writ of certiorari to the outside court that oversees the prison, the Dane County Court. I cite an exhaustion of remedies, meaning that I have run out of choices within the prison system and I need to ask the appropriate outside court to consider my case. I argue that the evidence as presented didn’t support—nor did I have the opportunity for—due process. The Waupun Correctional Institution officers based my misconduct ticket on a vague, questionable statement attributed to a confidential informant. I never saw anything explaining or confirming what this alleged informant claimed except for a redacted statement that left only two lines that were not blacked out. This gave me no chance to refute the informant’s statement because I couldn’t see the statement at all.
* * *
—
Several more weeks pass.
I receive a reply. The attorney general argues that I should be kept in segregation.
I respond to the attorney general. I again cite exhaustion of remedies, insisting my rights have been violated and that I have been put into segregation without evidence.
A week passes, then another, and another. A month passes, then two. I calculate that I have been in segregation for close to a year.
One day, an officer grunts outside my cell, slides open my trapdoor, and shoves through a stack of mail. The letters land with a thud on my floor. I roll off my mattress and open the letters systematically. I rapidly read each one. Form letter from an attorney, rejecting my case. Form letter from a law firm, rejecting my case. Form letter from a legal nonprofit, rejecting my case.
Then I come to two envelopes with state seals. I tear open the first with trembling hands. The court in Wisconsin, after three years, has denied my appeal for a new trial. They report this in a form letter. No explanation. No reason given. No nothing. They didn’t answer any of my questions. They didn’t consider my request to question Shawn Demain, the eyewitness, the guy whose testimony got Rovaughn’s charges dismissed.
I want to rip the letter into a thousand pieces and flush them down the toilet. I want to howl. Rovaughn’s charges get dismissed and I can’t even get a new trial? I stand in the middle of my cell and I shudder, my body quivering, as if I’ve come down with fever.
I plop down on my bed and slowly pry open the last envelope, expecting another form letter delivering more bad news. I see that it’s not a letter at all. It’s a court order. I start reading it. I sit up.
Dane County Court has reversed my conduct report.
The state will be removing me from segregation within seven days, during which time they will determine my next placement.
They’ve given me a “Get Out of Segregation Free” card. But it has been anything but free. It cost a year in isolation.
I grab my pen and pad and furiously write a letter back to the department of corrections.
“My conduct report was reversed by the Dane County Court,” I write. “I’m writing to say that I am willing to go anywhere in the state except for Green Bay Correctional. I ask you to please not send me to Green Bay because I have a hardship issue. My mother is a senior with health issues. She lives in Chicago. It would be too far for her to come all the way to Green Bay. She wouldn’t be able to visit me and that would be a hardship for both of us. Thank you for considering my request. Sincerely.”
I get a letter back two days later.
They’ve considered my request.
They’re sending me to Green Bay.
11.
Born at the Scene of the Crime
Everything about Green Bay Correctional Institution seems unreal, starting with its location: a stone’s throw from Lambeau Field, the iconic home of the Green Bay Packers. The front entrance looks like a medieval stone structure. Built in 1898, the prison feels, smells, is decrepit. The walls sweat in summer and freeze to ice in winter. Seven hundred men live in this complex, almost all of them young, angry, and violent, the rest of them mentally disturbed. At least that’s what I hear through the prison grapevine.
I arrive at Green Bay in the fall of 2002, not yet twenty-two years old. I get celled up with a guy younger than I am, a frenetic, furious, loudmouthed gangbanger who doesn’t talk; he screams incoherently and never seems to shut up. I don’t know whether he’s strung out or simply in a constant state of rage.
* * *
—
By this time, 2002, prisons in general have become overcrowded. Drugs, especially crack, have ripped families apart just
as our government has gotten tough on crime. Fear—the same kind of fear that got me convicted, the fear of us, of me, of the other—has put nearly 1 million young Black men behind bars. In a couple of years, that number will swell to 2.4 million. And for reasons that I can’t understand, in the state of Wisconsin, the courts send the most violent young men, ages eighteen to twenty, here, to Green Bay. I see almost immediately why my chess-playing neighbor at Boscobel called Green Bay Correctional the Wild West and why others call it Gladiator School.
My second week at Green Bay, my cell door breaks open for lunch. I slide out of my cell and find a place in the chow line. I instantly feel a ripple of movement, pushing, shoving; then somebody shouts, “Bitch!” and right behind me I hear the sickening sound of hard metal smashing into a human skull. Then screaming. I stand to the side, crouching, coiled, ready to defend myself, praying I don’t have to defend myself. Punches thrown. Fists striking bone, hands slapping flesh. Bodies hitting the floor. The alarm sounds.
Guards run in while inmates continue pounding each other. The guards dive into a pile of humanity, untangling arms, legs, slamming inmates with their fists, nightsticks, pulling them off each other. Then they herd us back into our cells. My cell door slams. My cellmate circles me, stalks me, snarls into my face, spits, “What are you doing up here?”
“I wish I knew,” I want to say. But I lock my eyes into his, staring, unblinking, until he backs away, still taking the measure of me, probably thinking a fight with me might not be to his benefit.
After that melee, it seems as if every time the guards open our doors, a fight breaks out. Guys from rival gangs go at it over long-held grudges. Latino guys and Black guys fight in here over territory in neighborhoods they just left. Black guys and the Aryan Nation tear each other up just because. I see revenge hits. Contract hits. Skinhead gangs. Biker gangs. MS-13 gangs. I can’t keep track of all the designations. One day on the rec yard, a minute before I head out to find a chess game, two rival gangs go to war. A free-for-all. Heads get cracked open. Blood flows. Guards descend like an army, hurling tear gas, shooting beanbags.
Redeeming Justice Page 14