Getting Life

by Michael Morton

  Hilariously, on occasion the interviewers would use the wrong script for an inmate. One guy getting ready to do time for armed robbery had to be physically restrained when he was asked if he felt sexually attracted to his young daughter.

  Oops.

  We all had to find our humor and humanity anywhere we could. Most days it was hard. In my psychiatric interview, the woman assigned to question me asked whether I “heard voices.” In a bid to ease the tension, I laughed and told her I certainly did—I heard hers right now. She stared blankly at me, then turned again to her notes and dutifully wrote something down.

  To this day, I wonder what it was.

  My weeks at the Diagnostic Unit in Huntsville were just the beginning, a bitter welcome to prison life—to its lack of individuality, its regimentation, the institution’s complete indifference to me as a person.

  I lived on a cellblock made up completely of new inmates—prison innocents, or at least as innocent as most inmates get. We were getting acclimated to prison life together.

  We knew it was time to go to sleep when the cell lights went off and only the security lamps were left glowing.

  We knew it was time to eat when the “boss”—penitentiary parlance for a guard—let out a deafening bellow of “CHOW TIME, CHOW TIME, CHOW TIME.”

  When he did, we all began moving toward the door leading off of the cellblock. The guard stopped us in our tracks. A bunch of hungry men couldn’t just charge out en masse—that would be chaotic, tantamount to a riot or an organized escape attempt. What a bunch of boneheaded newcomers we were. We had to learn to proceed in an unthreatening, under-control fashion.

  The boss roared at an earsplitting level, “DEUCE IT UP. DEUCE IT UP.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, and I looked at him as if he were speaking a foreign language—which he was.

  “Deuce it up?”

  He’d clearly seen this kind of new inmate perplexity before, so he leaned in and delivered in a stage whisper, “That means get in line, two by two.”

  We did, and when we reached the chow hall, we learned that most of the guys eating there were new, too. But many were veterans of a few days or even a week. My group and I were eating our first prison meal.

  Prison chow halls have their own peculiar aromas, depending on the slop du jour. Eventually you get accustomed to the fact that the weird smell enveloping you is probably dinner. The chow hall is also always hotter and more humid than other parts of the prison—except the laundry. And the chow hall tends to be the place where trouble starts if there is going to be any.

  Every single inmate has to go to the chow hall. So if someone is going to pass something to someone else, or if there is someone you want to attack or if someone wants to attack you—the chow hall is the obvious spot to do it. The guards know this and try to keep a tight rein on the place.

  My first meal in prison was a lot like every other meal I would eat inside—mystery meat casserole, with God-knows-what sauce and a side of carbs. We all sat at long metal tables with pitchers of water and iced tea in the middle. We ate off metal trays until TDC eventually switched to plastic. The metal ones were sturdy but too often used as weapons. For all I knew, I ate my first dinner off a tray that had been used to bash someone’s head in.

  The guards swarmed the chow hall as we ate. Loud talking was discouraged. Table-to-table socializing could earn you a glare. We were there to eat. When the guard rapped his knuckles on the table, that meant everyone was finished—ready or not.

  We were told to toss our trays in the “bean hole,” Texas prison-speak for an opening in the wall where someone on the other side would take your tray, wash it, and put it back on the stack for the next meal.

  A boss stood next to the bean hole and stopped anyone with food on his tray—no food was to be wasted. So the man who hadn’t finished had to stand there and clean his plate quickly. The rule was “take all you want, but eat all you take.”

  During the decades ahead, I would learn that each meal could be quite different in its awfulness. The indifference and malice, the malevolence of the men preparing and serving the food, really represented the conscious disregard for prisoners demonstrated at every level of the system. The food was bad because they wanted it to be.

  Eventually, I learned I would be assigned to the Wynne Unit, a maximum-security prison not far away. The facility housed more than 2,500 inmates—all of them men who had earned the longest sentences for committing the most serious crimes.

  Would I find a way to simply stay alive?

  Or would I die trying?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was dark. The sun hadn’t even begun to brush the horizon.

  The old Texas Department of Corrections bus bumped along the rural roads outside of Huntsville, the sky so black it seemed as though we were traveling through space—pushing forward in a starless sky with no beginning, no end, no exit.

  I sat there glumly, handcuffed to another inmate, surrounded by dozens of men—all of us headed to our new home at the Wynne Unit, the state’s second-oldest prison.

  What struck me most about my fellow passengers was their uniformity. We all wore white, making the moment seem ghostly, ominous, and otherworldly. Some of the men had shaved their heads, because with summer on the way, anything that could be done to cool off counted. And there was another benefit: in a fight, an opponent would have no hair to grab.

  There were no mustaches, no colorful clothes or outlandish hairstyles. The end result of all this paring away of the outside world, the forced removal of our vanities and free-world identities, was that each inmate had been reduced to his fundamental self.

  Actually, one guy did stick out. He had shaved off his eyebrows, which made him appear crazed.

  He looked like I felt.

  We were headed for Wynne because we’d all been judged to be badly in need of a very secure setting. We made up a motley group of murderers, bullies, and bad guys—along with the occasional wrongly convicted, completely innocent man. Some of the inmates on the bus were assigned to Wynne because they had messed up at a lower-security prison—by attacking staff, attempting escape, or behaving in a way that made prison administrators want to make their lives more miserable.

  Through the front window of the bus, I could see security lights and a gate—a glaring, bright island of concrete, chain link, and steel in a sea of darkness. Within that light stood the portal to my new life.

  My name and a few others were called. We shuffled off the bus, were checked off on a list, and directed into a cage. It had no roof, only threatening rounds of razor wire glinting above our heads. There were no walls—just tall stretches of chain-link fence. Looming over us was a guard tower.

  The end of a rifle poked out.

  We were all totally unprotected from the elements. If it rained, we got wet. If it grew cold, we shivered. Our feelings, our comfort didn’t matter. I felt like meat—like a slave, like a piece of state property—because that’s what I was.

  Dawn spilled streaks of pink, orange, and blue into the night sky. Clear shapes materialized as the sun rose, revealing my new world. I saw mountainous old red-brick buildings, tractors, a pasture, and the prison recreation yard. Guards moved around, sometimes barking orders. I heard buzzers and screechy PA announcements. Inmates who’d earned status as trustees went in and out of the property through a side gate.

  Some of them looked at me.

  I would soon learn that, in prison, nothing fascinates like novelty. I was a new face. Many of us in the cage that day were new to the system. Some of the current inmates and trustees stared at us searching for the face of an old friend—others scanned the crowd of “new boots” for old enemies.

  We sat there for hours. Finally, a guard called out a list of names and escorted us in a small group into the main building. Another guard frisked each man, a process I became so ac
customed to through the years that eventually I wouldn’t even notice it happening. Getting frisked in prison was like shaking hands in the free world—it was simply a regular interaction, part of what the social order commanded, like having to curtsy for the queen. It was just another piece of prison protocol.

  In the free world, you might be greeted with “How do you do?” Inside, it was different. “Turn around, put your hands in the air, and spread your legs.”

  Often, a guard wouldn’t even have to say a word, just motion with his index finger, making a circle in the air—we all knew what it meant.

  Finally inside the building, the guard had us sit down on long benches for more waiting. Again hours passed. It was an annoying introduction to a couple of things that were reinforced every day in the quarter century to come.

  First, nothing about me mattered—my existence was irrelevant. I could live or die and the penitentiary would just do what it always did, what it would always do. I could have toppled off the bench with a massive heart attack, splitting my head open on the concrete floor. There was not going to be a stampede to help me. I was on my own.

  Second, prison is, more than anything else, a bureaucracy—a state-run operation where everything takes longer than it should, requires several tries before getting it right, and keeps the people who rely on it frustrated and angry. Imagine living every day at a state driver’s license office, with long lines, misfiled forms, and—too often—incompetence. Now, imagine that same scene with all the state workers carrying cans of Mace, radios, handcuffs, and—for those employees ringing the perimeter—shotguns and rifles.

  I was escorted into a room where I was interviewed, assigned a job, and given a cell number. One of the men who interviewed me said he wanted to put me in the kitchen. Another leaned in, pointed out something in my file, and told me I would be working in Rec­ords Conversion, whatever that was.

  My living assignment was C1-3-13T. I was on C1 block, 3 Row, Cell 13, top bunk.

  Home sweet home.

  I was led to the cellblock and ordered to drag my mattress three floors up to my cell. No one was home when I got there, but both beds appeared to have owners. So I dragged my mattress back down and told the block boss. He double-checked and said that was where I belonged. Back upstairs the mattress and I went, now under orders to bring down the other mattress and then make my bed with my mattress. This kind of thing was tedious, tiring, unnecessary—and constant.

  When my cell partner finally showed, he said he had been keeping the bed made, hoping folks would look in, think someone already lived there, and not move anybody else in.

  I settled in, fully believing that, unlike everyone else’s, my days here would be relatively few—that this whole thing would get straightened out very quickly. I just had to learn the ropes and the rules and stay alive until the truth emerged and, in a flood of shame and remorse, the judge who sent me here would set me free.

  In the meantime, I had to learn the rhythm of the place.

  Prison is all about routine. Prison is routine—followed by routine—reinforced by more routine.

  Lather, rinse, repeat—for life.

  The unchanging schedule behind the walls of the Wynne Unit often gave its guests a schedule for the first time in their lives. If you came in without a routine, the institution’s routine would be imposed upon you. If you didn’t get up for breakfast, you either didn’t eat or had to scrounge something up yourself. If you didn’t go to the showers at the appointed time, you stayed dirty.

  My routine had me rolling out of bed every morning at 3:00 to eat breakfast. I left for my job between 4:30 and 5:00 A.M. Lunch in the chow hall began about 10:30; dinner was mounded into gloppy piles on my tray sometime between 3:30 and 5:30. The gym and the rec yard opened after that. The dayroom closed and the lights were dimmed every weekday—without fail—at 10:30 P.M.

  Sometimes, at night, I could hear men crying. On those battered cellblocks built of concrete and steel, men every bit as hard as that concrete and steel wept in the dark. Captivity does brutal things to a man, no matter what he’s done to lose his freedom.

  I never sobbed loudly or cried out in anguish the way some men did. But when it was quiet and I thought of my old life—my lost wife and my little boy—I lay on my top bunk, looking at the ceiling, crying silently, tears for me, for my family, for whatever lay ahead. I now had the time to recognize that I hadn’t had a chance to fully grieve for Chris—or, now, to grieve for the loss of Eric.

  I was fighting to survive, fully focused on the dilemmas I faced daily, surrounded by violence and anger, ignorance and cruelty. How do I stay alive? How can I get out of here?

  During the day, I worked, kept my head down, and waited to hear from my attorneys, who were preparing my appeal. Not long into my stint at Wynne, I had gotten word that they had come across something unexpected—and, for once, it was good news for me.

  Immediately after my conviction, my attorneys had joined Mike Davis, the assistant prosecutor who argued the case with Ken Anderson, for a joint interview with the jurors. This is quite common, as attorneys on both sides are eager to improve their performances by learning what worked, what didn’t, and why.

  During this casual Q and A, Davis told the jury that if my attorneys had seen the full investigative file and notes—Davis then held up his thumb and index finger to indicate a report that was about an inch and a half thick—they would have been able to raise much more doubt about my guilt.

  Bill Allison was floored when he heard this. He knew he had never seen the full report, even though he and Bill White had worked hard to get it. In fact, the lengthy pretrial battle between the two sides about turning over evidence that indicated I was innocent—exculpatory evidence—had led Sergeant Wood’s notes and reports to be sealed and included as part of the record for the appeals court to review. The notes my team had seen before trial amounted to no more than a few pages. In his off-the-cuff chat with the jurors, Davis had just let them know that there was much more to the report—and that it had intentionally been kept hidden. The prosecutor’s decision not to turn over the offense report to the defense may well have led to my conviction—that’s what Mike Davis was saying.

  The two Bills had immediately filed a motion to overturn my conviction based on the Davis revelation, but the court turned them down.

  Now, Davis’s comment to the jury became part of my formal appeal.

  To this day, no one knows why Davis burst out with this bit of truth that was so damaging to the prosecution’s case—and even more damaging to the prosecutor’s reputation. Hiding an offense report containing evidence favorable to the defendant is more than unprofessional—it is illegal.

  Had Davis said that to sympathetically tip off my attorneys? Was he just mindlessly bragging about how clever he and Ken Anderson had been in winning my conviction? Why did he bring this up at all? I still don’t know.

  When the appeal White and Allison had prepared showed up in my mail, I took it back to my cell, ripped open the package, and devoured it the way a starving man would eat a steak. Frankly, I couldn’t understand much of it, except that they were on my side. I had no way of gauging the strength of their arguments or the wisdom of their approach.

  I only knew I had never read words on paper that held such power. My very life hung in the balance—my freedom, my chance at a future. I decided to go to the prison’s law library and see what I could learn. I knew there was an underground cottage industry of “jailhouse lawyers” inside the walls. For money, one of them would probably have read the appeal and given me his opinion on its worth. But even though I hadn’t been there long, I knew most of these guys were no good. Frankly, the majority of them used their legal “expertise” simply as a way to scam the uneducated or unknowing out of the little money or extra food they had.

  I decided to try to learn something myself. I soon joined the “legal eagles” in the l
ibrary, reading and trying to understand opinions and arguments, case law and the odds for my appeal. I felt like a first-time astronaut, perched precariously atop a rocket while hurriedly reading an introductory astronomy textbook before I was blasted into space.

  Through the years, I would file well-intentioned, carefully written, but mostly naïve motions that never really had a chance. Still, the law library gave me a quiet place to be, a setting in which to read and learn, a chance to think more deeply about what I might be able to do with my life while I waited to be free. I decided to start looking at the options I had for finishing my college education inside, a step that would ultimately help change my life.

  In the meantime, my education in the peculiar mores of prison life continued apace. Privacy, I learned, was monumentally valued in prison. Since real privacy is not possible, prisoners developed small courtesies that afforded us at least the illusion of privacy. We knew when to look away, when to put on a headset, when to give each other some room. One such courtesy was the unspoken rule dictating that inmates were never to look inside another man’s cell as they walked by. It was considered disrespectful. And it could be dangerous.

  There was one man on the cellblock who either didn’t know or didn’t care about this rule. Maybe he just couldn’t help himself. Whenever he passed a row of cells, he would turn and gawk inside. A few guys said something to him—warning him to knock it off—but it did no good. He just kept gawking.

  One day, as he waltzed toward the dayroom to join the others watching TV, he walked slowly along the block, staring into each cell he passed. Then the gawker looked into the wrong cell. The man who lived there was waiting for him. As soon as the gawker peeped into the cell, he got a full cup of urine thrown in his face. After that, he learned his lesson.

  In prison, privacy—or even the illusion of it—is important.