The other illusion all inmates work to maintain is strength, at least in some form. Strength in numbers, strength in brute force, the strength that comes from being particularly fast in a fight, the strength that comes from having strong friends inside—anything that gives you an edge, or the illusion of an edge.
This is why gangs thrive inside, because their members believe gangs give them protection, a way to convince others that taking on one of them means taking on all of them.
An inmate’s personal demeanor matters, too. If you are direct, candid, and confident, opponents know where they stand. This prevents misunderstandings—so does minding your own business. An inmate’s physical condition is also important, but nothing helps as much as having witnesses when you clock the first guy who gives you any grief. Because sooner or later, almost everyone fights—or they become someone’s punk. And that’s not good.
Prison demanded a reeducation for me. I had been taught—and wanted to teach my son—that differences can be resolved without hitting. I had never worked in a place where bloody fistfights could break out without warning. And I certainly knew that, even in the midst of the most emotional marital spat, a physical response was totally taboo.
In the penitentiary, I had to unlearn some of that. Inside, there was no prohibition on violence; in fact, there was more of a reliance on it—or there was at least an understanding that physical force occupied a prominent spot in every inmate’s toolbox of responses.
On the inside, you had to deal with men who were not particularly smart. They often lacked what psychologists call “impulse control.” They may have grown up in harsh environments—suffering everything from broken homes to failing schools, gang-riddled neighborhoods to dysfunctional families, low expectations to long histories of drug and alcohol abuse. Or they could be just stone-cold crazy.
No matter what their issue, though, each and every one of them—including me—understood brute force. They had all learned, as I had, that when a man has a knife at your throat or is pummeling you to death, it doesn’t matter what sort of traumatic childhood he endured, whether he got the counseling or support he needed in overcoming addiction, or why he had a lower than average IQ. The only thing that mattered at that moment, was whether you could muster the physical force to stop him.
Cultural niceties, political correctness, social justice, empathy, and fear of the law—all the values we talk about in the free world—inside prison become irrelevant, inconsequential conceits. All that matters in that moment is brute force.
Like most people, I had not been around much violence. Most of what I knew—or thought I knew—about it came from movies and TV, which I soon learned bore little resemblance to reality. Fake fights had been a breeze to follow—clean face-offs with clear winners and losers, obvious motives, easy to understand morality. Not so inside.
The first few fights I saw happened so quickly that they were over before a crowd could gather. The fights began and ended with such rapidity, such ferocity that many of their finer points were lost on me—at first. Only after seeing them close up, again and again, did I begin to understand what was happening.
The good guy–bad guy dynamic was mostly a theatrical dream, particularly in a place populated with very few truly “good guys.” There were almost no one-punch knockouts. Speed and agility often trumped size and strength. And experience and skill meant everything.
I learned there were unwritten rules for prison fighting—a ritual to it. These were usually just fights, not attempted murder. If a guy went down, the fight stopped. If someone stepped in to break it up, it usually stopped. Usually.
If someone in the fight picked up a weapon—a tray, a chair, a book, a bench—everything changed. When a weapon entered the equation, so did the guards.
Probably the first difference I noticed between real fights and TV fights was the sound—in Hollywood, fights are always punctuated with a sort of high-pitched smacking sound, like a fist hitting the inside of a palm, which is how I suspect that sound effect is made. In a real fight, what you hear is the unforgettable pounding of meat on meat. When you hear a fist hit someone’s face, you will remember it forever. Nothing else sounds like that. The thud of flesh colliding with flesh, the brutal snap of a bone being broken—this awful, unforgettable audio will stay with me for the rest of my life.
And fights are not tidy affairs—there is always blood. When hit, faces tend to rupture and bleed. Blood gets on clothes, on fists, on the floor, on the walls. It gets on the people watching the fight.
Another revelation for me was the aftermath of fights. In the movies, a combatant seems to come away with a shiner or a cut on the cheekbone, which quickly clears up, leaving the hero’s face as pretty as it was before he took a pounding. In prison, I learned the human face is an incredibly fragile commodity. A fight would leave it damaged for days, if not weeks. Sometimes, a fighter’s face would never look the same again. Split lips and cracked teeth don’t heal easily. Even the winner comes away wounded—your hand can hurt for days from the beating you delivered to someone else.
In some ways, I was lucky. When I came to prison, I was thirty-two years old—I was more mature, more grown into myself than many men who land behind the walls. Most of the younger guys were sent to what we called “gladiator farms,” prisons for those in their twenties, where the fights and face-offs were constant. They would fight to establish dominance, to avenge insults (real or imagined), to defend themselves, and sometimes, simply for entertainment.
The Wynne Unit housed men closer to my age—from their late twenties into their mid-forties. A lot of them just didn’t have the stomach for fighting the way they had years before. In other words, my prison held a lot of “professionals,” men who had been in prison before. This wasn’t their first rodeo.
After only a few months, I understood in my bones what every inmate does—that prison is not just a place, not just stacks of cells with bars for walls, not just a collection of old buildings where everyone inside is angry. Prison is a different planet, a world turned inside out. It has its own kind of oxygen and gravity, its own powerful rulers and hopeless slaves, its own distinct wars and martyrs, rough morality and sin. It is a warehouse filled with broken souls we don’t want to look at or live with—people whose addictions, abuses, ignorance, or rage we need to be protected from.
Prison is where society puts its problems, its rejects, its mistakes. In my case, the mistake was that I was there at all.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I had waited an entire year to see Eric. Now that the day was at hand, I didn’t know what to expect, or even what to hope for. I simply wanted him to recognize me.
The night before, I lay on my bunk and began pulling myself out of the day-to-day grind of penitentiary life. For the first time in ages, I allowed myself the luxury of thinking about my son. I fully conjured the sensation of holding him—I could almost feel him in my arms. The way he would drape himself around my neck, lay his sleepy head on my shoulder, or how he’d dig his little legs into my side to hold on tight—thoughts like that brought my old life rushing back. I hadn’t forgotten that his soft hair always seemed to smell of baby shampoo and sunshine, or the way he would light up when he saw me walk in after I had been gone for the day. That’s what I was hoping would happen when I saw him in the visiting room.
Once again, reality was more complicated.
Custody of Eric had been awarded to Chris’s younger sister, Mary Lee. She was single, lived in a small one-bedroom Houston apartment, and had no children. In the past, she’d had bouts of unemployment and periods when she seemed adrift. She had lived with us for a while, but after Chris’s murder, I had felt Mary Lee pulling away from me. Now, we were completely estranged.
Twelve months after my conviction, I wasn’t sure whether Mary Lee had a job or who took care of Eric if and when she worked. I didn’t know if she was dating or whether her dates spent tim
e with Eric. I didn’t know the day-to-day details of his life. There was no legal order requiring Mary Lee to share that kind of information with me.
The custody agreement simply ordered that she bring Eric to see me—in prison—once every six months until he turned eighteen. Since I had very much preferred Eric to go to my parents or sister, I wondered if this visiting schedule was some kind of compromise by the court after giving custody to Mary Lee. Or was it simply Williamson County’s way of rubbing my powerlessness in my face? I would never know.
Still, my parents and siblings saw Eric regularly, and despite our estrangement, I knew that Chris’s family would never try to hurt me by mistreating him. They loved him, too. I knew he was safe, at least physically. But I also knew Chris’s family detested me. They believed with all their hearts that I had beaten my wife—their daughter, sister, niece, cousin—to death. I saw the loathing in their eyes in court. I feared I would someday see that same anger and disgust on Eric’s face. His spending a lifetime with people who hated me did not bode well for our long-term father-son relationship. The only way I had to fight back was to make these twice-yearly visits as meaningful as I could. I was determined to try.
I walked to the central desk in the visiting area, where all the inmates expecting someone would check in. The person behind the desk would then send them to either the contact or the noncontact visiting area. Contact means exactly what you think—the inmate is able to touch his visitor—they can kiss, hug, hold hands; a child can sit on his father’s lap, a husband can cradle his wife’s face. Contact visits are close to sacred for inmates—so many of us would go months, even years inside without anyone touching us in kindness or with compassion. For inmates, the opportunity to hold or be held by another human being was like a heavy rain in the desert. Sometimes, it meant the difference between survival and being pulled down by the pressures of penitentiary life.
The noncontact visiting room was split down the middle by a thick sheet of glass and a kind of room-length table. Inmates sat on one side and visitors on the other. Guards strolled both sides of the room—always eavesdropping and looking for trouble—sometimes even starting trouble themselves.
The area on each side was open, so there was absolutely no privacy. Every inmate could hear what the inmate next to him was saying. The visitors could all hear what the families or friends next to them were saying. In that room, voices were loud, often crude, occasionally angry and ugly with rage.
The noncontact visiting area was where violent inmates got bad news from their attorneys or heartbreaking brush-offs from girlfriends grown sick of waiting. It was where an inmate could learn his wife was pregnant, count backward, and realize he was behind bars at the conception.
I was expecting a contact visit with Eric—that was what the judge had ordered. But the guard at the desk had listed me as meeting visitors in the noncontact area, a hard place to comfort a four-year-old boy who has lost both his parents in the past eighteen months.
I protested to the guard that my court order had specified contact visits. He didn’t care. So I ran the distance back to my cell to get my copy of the order. Panting when I returned to the visiting area, I handed the paper across the desk and looked around. I wondered if Eric or Mary Lee could see me, or if I could catch a glimpse of them. I knew they had been waiting. I imagined Mary Lee sitting impatiently with Eric, a look of disdain on her face. It was bad enough that she had to come to this awful place to see me—now I was making her wait.
The guard handed my court order up to a captain, and he came out and shot the paper back at me across the desk. He said the Texas Department of Corrections did not care what “some judge” thought; the TDC would handle the visit the way the TDC wanted. He told me it was going to be “this way or not at all.”
I went into the room, still protesting the captain’s decision.
Mary Lee did not stick up for me. And I know I looked upset and angry, because I was.
She sat quietly beside Eric across from me, letting us talk as best we could. The glass between us was filthy from generations of dirty, sad hands pressing against it on both sides. It looked like it was superficially cleaned once every few months. I didn’t want Eric to touch it or even be near it—that glass probably had diseases on it biologists have yet to discover.
At the base of the glass was a three-inch opening with thick wire mesh across it, a crude sort of conduit for sound. Still, it was very hard to hear. Even laying my face down on the table and talking directly into the mesh didn’t help much. When I looked through the glass, I saw a scared four-year-old boy who seemed to only vaguely recognize me. Eric was simply too young, too battered, too confused, too unmoored to know what was going on. He lost interest in my indistinct image behind the dirty glass. He kept his head down and played with his tiny cars.
They left early.
I was crushed. I felt like smashing the face of the first person I came across.
I didn’t.
I brooded over the loss of my son and the powerlessness of my lousy new life. I couldn’t blame Eric; he was sort of in the same boat I was—a victim of circumstance, bad luck, and overwhelming loss. The only solace I could find was in the friends that I’d made inside, many of whom shared my frustrations and anger the same way we shared everything else—from showers to bad food, dull-witted guards to unfairly meted out discipline.
My first real friend inside was Gary Stinnett. We’d met in the Diagnostic Unit. Gary was a former police officer whose wife had been beaten to death. He would be released in 1997 after revelations that prosecutors had hidden exculpatory evidence in his case.
Sounds familiar.
We were two of the only three inmates at the Diagnostic Unit that day without tattoos. The other guy was a firefighter turned arsonist—bit of an odd duck, needless to say.
Gary and I hit it off.
He was assigned to the Wynne Unit as well, although I got the better cell. I was up on the third row, far above the clatter and chaos of the dayroom. Gary’s cell was right across the hall from the dayroom. Every day and every night, he had to endure noise blasting from two TVs always set on different channels and at full volume. Plus there was the relentless shouting and bellowing bombast from ill-informed sports fanatics. There were verbal confrontations and the occasional—and inevitable—outbreaks of violence. It was like living at the world’s loudest and most violent sports bar during a big game that went on for years and years.
Compared to Gary, I had a penthouse suite.
Gary always believed he had been given his cell assignment because of his “bad attitude” toward the guards. He loved making fun of them and constantly corrected their speech and grammar. Maybe they were getting back at him.
Both of us had studied just enough psychology to be dangerous, and we used to sit around the dayroom analyzing our fellow inmates and trying to identify the issues we thought bedeviled them. We fancied ourselves the intellectual giants of the prison dayroom—something akin to being the state’s prettiest armadillo.
Gary and I were given virtually identical jobs in what we called the “Typing Pool,” the Records Conversion Facility, where we entered state paperwork digitally, photographed and developed microfilm, and generally pushed paper.
There were about two hundred of us who were lucky enough and experienced enough in clerical work that we got the enviable assignment. It beat the heck out of churning out new Texas license plates eight hours a day—or sewing together an unending number of shapeless uniforms and boxers for the other unlucky souls who lived in the embrace of the state. The finishing work on our clothing was hopelessly crude. But then what would you expect from a group of indentured tailors forced to stitch together the most visible evidence of their imprisonment? Our uniforms were handmade for angry people by angry people—and they looked it.
Gary and I worked together in the prison darkroom, developing microfilm for sta
te agencies ranging from the police to public universities. I was lucky. Gary was one of the relatively few inmates I felt comfortable being with for hours, alone in the dark.
Like me, Gary had family who visited and a little money in his prison commissary account. The majority of men inside had nothing and no one to care about them. Some inmates, for other reasons, were particularly vulnerable to attack or exploitation.
Every prison has a “protection” wing for men who would not fare well in the general population. There, you would find the child molesters, the convicted police snitches, the “out” gay men who, if they didn’t have protection, would be savaged by other inmates. They lived separately, ate separately, and died separately. The protection wing at Wynne had more suicides than the other wings. Even if a person is isolated for his own safety, being denied the same small freedoms and camaraderie other inmates had must be crushing.
There was homosexual behavior in the general population, usually by men who would describe themselves as “straight.” While they might introduce another man as their “girlfriend” or their “lady,” they would protest loudly if you mistook them for being gay. They would say they always “pitched” and never “caught,” which in their minds made a difference.
Okay, then.
And there were rapes in prison, but just like sexual assaults in the free world, rape behind the walls is an act of power rather than sexual desire. Most inmates are able to fend off attacks by maintaining their ground the first time they are confronted, something that gains respect from other dominating prisoners.
But woe to the poor soul who doesn’t strike back or curls into a ball and cries rather than standing up for himself and fighting. He will be taken apart like a character from Lord of the Flies.
We all saw it happening and we heard it happening. And there was nothing anyone could do—and very little the guards could, or would do. Violence, whatever form it took, was just part of the natural habitat. You couldn’t stop it, you could only decide how you were going to react to it.
Getting Life Page 12