And shortly after Premium Sentencing was ratified on Capitol Hill, the media or perhaps it was the public through the deft shorthand of the internet, gave it an easier handle, a more immediate, dramatic name which stuck on the lips of those talking about this complicated, controversial issue. Soon, almost everyone was calling it Bio-Justice.
Ray Van Houten rounded up his team in the eleventh floor conference room at Harris, Boyce and Selden in midtown Manhattan: his art director Rick Cortez, senior copywriters Tammy Lee and Karen Bosworth and account manager Chris Scarpetta. Van Houten—freckled, a young looking forty-seven with old style aviators—was Creative Director at the advertising agency, handling only the company’s most prestigious accounts. He let the buzz in the room continue, allowing the energy to swirl in the air for a few more moments of delicious suspense.
“Boys and girls,” Van Houten announced, “at nine-thirty this morning Harris, Boyce and Selden was awarded the American Correctional account—all national and local advertising plus all media buys, print and industrial. Billing will start modestly at thirty-five million, but is expected to increase dramatically in the next fiscal year, projected at eighty million annually.”
The team broke out into ebullient cheers, with Cortez and Bosworth leading the charge, howling like exuberant frat boys.
“And—the client is tasking the agency with a national roll-out industrial for the introduction of Premium Sentencing,” Van Houten said as seductively and mysteriously as he could. “The media and the public have already latched onto this thing, calling it ‘Bio-Justice’. We got handed a product with double branding which actually makes our jobs easier. That’s the good news. The sobering part of that good news is they expect a demo in two weeks and a finished thirty minute industrial in five.”
There were furrowed brows amidst the gleeful bits of laughter and then the obvious question. It was Tammy Lee who asked it. “I keep hearing people referring to Bio-Justice, but what is it, exactly?”
Van Houten grinned. “I can tell you this, I wish to God I had thought of it first.”
“Good Lord, Danny,” Aaron Mossbacher said over the visitors phone, peering through the plexiglass window at his client. “What on earth happened to you?”
Danny’s face was devastated. The swelling had persisted and his right eye was still closed. He shook his head at Mossbacher, signaling for him to continue.
“I’ll see what I can do to get you transferred to another block. I thought you were in solitary.”
Danny laughed, even though it hurt like a son of a bitch. “I am in solitary. The guards did this to me.”
Mossbacher feigned at representing the power of his authority. “Why, it’s an outrage! Shall I file a complaint against the guards who did this to you?”
Danny shook his head. Inside, Mossbacher was relieved.
“So—you didn’t come down here to look at my pretty face.”
Mossbacher smiled as if he were proud of himself. “I’ve got good news. I mean it’s not great news but it’s something.”
“What?”
“I got the court to grant you a parole hearing after you’ve put in some time.”
There was a flicker in Danny’s good eye. “How long?”
“Well—you have to serve a minimum of thirty years.”
Danny laughed until his face seized up with pain. He rose from his chair still talking to Mossbacher on the phone receiver. “Well, I’ll start marking the days off my calendar starting today.”
“I know it doesn’t sound like much.”
“It doesn’t sound like much because it’s nothing. Well, Aaron, I’ll see you when I’m fifty-five.”
“Danny, I’ll keep trying. I’ll file another appeal.”
“Don’t you understand? I’m not going to make it.” Danny turned his battered face from Mossbacher and hung up the phone. Then he walked away with a pronounced limp and left the visitors hall.
Everything seemed worse to Danny after talking to Mossbacher. He sat in his cell for days afterwards barely moving. Time got slower, excruciatingly slower. But eventually, Danny realized that without distraction, without something to occupy his time, he would be done for. He requested a television but was turned down. A radio: no. A music player: no. Only paperback books were allowed to be parceled out to him, and then only coverless high school snoozers like The Grapes of Wrath and David Copperfield, nothing current or non-fiction—certainly no magazines or newspapers. What he would have given for a Sports Illustrated or even a Mad Magazine. Later, he was told—he would receive privileges later, after he had earned it, by displaying cooperation and positive behavior.
Danny didn’t honestly know if he could do it. More than once, he thought about how he could get ahold of something sharp enough to make it all stop.
Sonya de Leon stood in the kitchen and held the envelope in her hands. It would have been easier if she had discovered it hidden behind the gas bill or the Gristedes flyer but there it was sitting by itself in her mailbox. Danny had labored over the handwriting of her name and address, she could tell. She thought of him wanting to make the best impression—no careless scribbling, no smudges.
She had received his other six letters over the past five months. They were not as neat as this one was. She had read all of them and with each successive one, she became more frightened because they were all the same. The message, the wording, the perspective. All about Danny. How he had suffered. How lonely he was. How he would be happy when they were together again.
Now a seventh letter had arrived in response to her single piece of correspondence, her announcement to Danny that his baby had been born and that she was saying goodbye. She had no reason to think this one would be different from the previous six. Maybe more emotional. Angry. Confused.
The baby was asleep in the next room and would be awake soon. He would be irritable, expecting to be fed.
Sonya turned on the stovetop and allowed the blue flame to consume the unopened letter. The letter finished burning in the kitchen sink until it was ash, and Sonya turned the faucet on to wash the blackened remnants down the drain.
It had taken six weeks but Danny Fierro’s face finally healed from his beating. Only some traces of purple bruising stubbornly hugged his mouth and the corner of his right eye. There were men all around him and no one seemed to notice, or care. This was the first time Danny had been allowed with other inmates since he had arrived. But as lonely as he had been, Danny was surprised at how comfortable it felt being guarded and mistrustful. He looked at the nine other inmates in the room, who seemed to be waiting for the big sell job, whatever it was they were selling. Some of the guys in the group seemed to know what this gathering was about. But then, most of them had been allowed to congregate with one another, engage in dialogues, watch TV, read newspapers, while he was cut off, isolated, sealed away from the details and information which allowed one to hypothesize—no matter how outlandishly—a subjective view of the world. In fact, Danny had not even heard of Premium Sentencing until today when Warden Rice stepped up to the podium and introduced it as if it bore a great significance to them all. Apparently, Danny was going to be affected by it—and soon—so he waited, undeniably, with interest.
The group was a dizzying assortment of disturbing characters. In fact, all of them had been convicted of violent crimes but with varying sentences, ranging anywhere from fifteen to forty years. This, as it turned out, was the primary demographic for inclusion in the Premium Sentencing program. Excluded from consideration were Death Row killers from states that still enforced capital punishment. Also excluded were those prisoners who faced life without the possibility of parole. Premium Sentencing would be tantamount to a death sentence for these prisoners, so they were considered ineligible by the State, although their attorneys were furiously filling the courts with appeals, looking for loopholes and technicalities to finagle their clients into qualifying for the program. Those with potential life sentences but mitigated by parole consideration wer
e capped at their first parole eligibility dates. Ironically, Mossbacher’s gambit for a parole hearing after thirty years had actually secured Danny a spot on the qualified list.
One of the malignant standouts in Danny’s group was a loudmouth named Wilson Caine, a textbook psychopath who should have headed the exclusion list but instead slipped through the cracks of the overworked, beleaguered justice system. In another age, they would have strung up Caine, set his corpse on fire, with his ashes poured into the furthest reaches of the darkened sea. Caine had killed a family single-handedly, keeping the father and mother in line by promising to spare the children, only to break his promise with a laugh to show the hopeful parents how foolish they were for trusting in the mercy of the dark human soul. Caine’s attorney had gotten his client a mistrial on a technicality—one of the jurors’ daughters had once babysat the youngest victim—and while on appeal, after a plea deal, Caine found himself qualified on the list of viable candidates for Premium Sentencing.
Across the room, Danny also noticed Kyle Thompson who famously killed a liquor store owner after hog-tying him in the store’s parking lot and backing up over him repeatedly with his pickup truck. Ultimately, a reduced sentence was handed down when a psychiatric specialist testified that Kyle had a damaged brain due to the amount of crystal meth introduced into his system for decades and was therefore not responsible for his behavior.
The others Danny didn’t recognize—all of them, he figured, were half-crazed nut-jobs who did unspeakable shit starting when they were kids, like torturing puppy dogs with firecrackers in the back yard. He didn’t belong with these diseased animals, he thought to himself. Hadn’t he tried to stop Milo? Didn’t he drop his gun immediately? He thought: if he could just get up from his seat and walk out. He would marry Sonya and raise his baby. He would live a good life—law-abiding and straight. Hell, he could do that. You couldn’t say the same about these other sick fucks.
Warden Rice was talking now. Danny figured he’d better listen.
“All right, settle down. Listen up. You ten have been chosen to be among the first to participate in a revolutionary new process that represents the future in humane sentencing for men and women serving hard time for violent crimes such as murder, rape, armed robbery, assault, sexual child abuse and kidnapping.”
Ray Van Houten stood off to the side, watching the men in their chains as if they were a specialized focus group. He watched their confused eyes turn clearer; there was nothing like watching the messaged script hit home to its targeted audience. The film they would watch, on a large screen lowered from the ceiling, would be the first step of the process. He was pleased his agency would play an integral part in the new order of consequential discipline that would create a safer society for all and even, he believed, for the convicted men themselves.
“So, watch the film,” Warden Rice continued, “and there will be a brief period afterwards where you can ask a few questions.”
The room darkened. One of the men, Danny noticed, bent over in his seat to take a nap. Another yawned so loud it sounded like a scream. Caine put his foot up on the chair in front of him. Sometimes the last thing a man wants to lose is his swagger.
As the film played, Danny assumed he was supposed to identify with the gross-looking perv on the screen, some cheesy actor who they put in some badly-lit set that was supposed to represent a maximum security lockdown cell. This same loser, after he goes through this Premium Sentencing—boink—he comes out some silver haired gent with a nice suit ready to face life anew. He wouldn’t be interested in crime anymore because his entire perspective would be altered. The stupid shit young guys did to act out and rebel would have been matured out of him. They also hinted his ass would be too old to run from the cops. It would be like some Rip Van Winkle thing, except the world wouldn’t have gotten older as you slept—only you were affected by passing time; the rest of the world would remain exactly as you had left it. Same fashions, same bad TV shows, same haircuts.
The film said Danny could be out in a few weeks, a month or so at most. A month versus what—thirty years? Even if Mossbacher had gotten his sentence reduced on appeal, Danny would still be pulling down at least fifteen, twenty years—and that, he admitted to himself, was a fantasy he had harbored only to keep himself from going totally off the cliff. Anyway, it didn’t sound as if he were being given a choice.
Partially hidden by the glossy Madison Avenue narrative, the whole twisted science was up there on the screen for Danny to take in, but for some reason the obvious guinea pig reality of it didn’t register. Maybe Danny had needed an answer to his anguish and loneliness when up to now, none had been offered. Time had been his enemy, his tormentor, and now it was being presented as his savior. Still, there was something unsettling about it all. It felt curious and deceptive, like someone trying to dress up something rotten by covering up the gray spots.
But no matter how many ways Danny tried to question the downside of the proposal, he could not deny the one thing Premium Sentencing would deliver: he would be a free man by the end of summer.
CHAPTER 4
The ten selected subjects in Danny’s group were to be transported separately to a processing facility in North Brunswick, New Jersey. Once there, inmates were to be kept segregated from one another as much as possible as they underwent Premium Sentencing. There was a concern that all it took was one inmate to contaminate the goodwill of the project with cynical or incorrect information.
Danny was escorted one cold gray morning in March to an unmarked blue and white van, his wrists and ankles bound in chains. He wore a newly issued prison uniform, the usual colorless canvas coverall, and they had instructed him to shave that morning. After being prompted by a prison guard, Danny ducked his head and climbed into the back seat of the van.
The sky had been cloudy, threatening rain. Danny felt anxious and relieved at the same time. He was leaving behind his seven-by-ten life, his existence in a concrete box that could have led to a quiet madness if he were lucky or a full-blown, wild-eyed insanity if he were not.
Danny watched as the vehicle cleared the heavily armed gates and sped its way quickly toward the main highway. Behind the wheel, the bulky driver looked slightly cartoonish with his overdeveloped biceps. The armed guard beside him was thinner, his facial features sharper and less intimidating, the gun in his hand balancing things out between the two of them.
The highway was clear and the traffic flowed easily. Mostly rumbling eighteen-wheelers and half-asleep commuters in their SUVs. A car to his left was filled with laughing children who seemed oblivious to everything except their own immediate delight. As the van shuttled past the car, an approaching New York City came into view.
Danny took a sweeping look at the Manhattan skyline, a sight he had beheld countless times without really appreciating its grandeur. Danny made a silent compact with himself that when he was on the other side of this process, he would revisit all of the places and sights he had taken for granted. He would show his son all of it and in doing so really experience these things for the first time.
In New Jersey, the view became serene with verdant clusters of leafy trees surrounding small nondescript townships and industrial lots. Shortly before the van left the highway, the driver flipped a switch on the dashboard causing the glass partition separating the rear from the front seats, and the side windows to tint dark and opaque so Danny could not witness the journey any further.
A few miles later, Danny felt the vehicle accelerate, then slow down, turn a couple of times, then rise over one or two speed bumps before coming to a stop.
He could hear the driver and the guard leaving the van and closing their doors. The guard opened the door for Danny to get out and once he did, he saw the van enclosed in a concrete chamber with just an elevator breaking up the solid, soundproof walls.
“OK,” the guard said to Danny as the driver waited beside the opening elevator doors, “let’s get going.”
Danny rode the elevator w
ith his escorts to Level 3 and was led through a maze of empty white corridors. Stopping at a door marked simply “F”, the armed guard slid a card from his pocket across a panel six inches above the knob. After the door lock clicked open, Danny was led into a small one room compartment, with a mattress, table, chair, shower, sink and toilet contained within the twelve by fifteen foot space. The driver removed the shackles from Danny’s wrists and ankles while the guard had his pistol pointed at his chest. When he was through, the driver exited the cell.
Without lowering his gun, the guard pointed up at gas jets fixed in the four corners of the cell’s ten foot high ceiling. “Don’t get cute in here. They can see everything you do. If you do anything out of line, they will release a gas that will stop you, but not before you retch your guts out and wish someone would put you out of your misery.”
“So, I have company,” Danny remarked, looking up and around.
“They don’t care what you do as long as you behave yourself. So jerk off all you want. They could care less.”
“No thanks, I’m a little shy,” Danny said.
“Enjoy your stay,” the guard smirked as he closed and locked the door behind him.
Danny, conscious of the surveillance, made a cursory study of the new larger box he found himself in. The accommodations were definitely a grade above his previous cell. It was clean for one thing and the mattress on the bed looked a lot softer. He decided to test it out and laid down, closing his eyes. His mind started to drift toward a pleasant dream. Nothing specific, just a good feeling.
An hour later, the cell door opened and Danny looked up from his mattress.
“Come on,” a new guard said, his gun holstered but ready. Another backed him up with an M4 carbine. “Time to donate to the Red Cross.”
Danny smiled. All these guys, he thought—fucking comedians.
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