by Mateo Hoke
The majority of the people at Long Lane were Black. There was only one white kid there that I can remember. There was one Asian guy, that was my boy. The rest were Black and Puerto Rican. All the staff was Black, with only a few white people, like the chaplain, the director. And the administrative staff—case workers, case managers—they were mostly white. The teachers were all white women. The substitute teachers were Black—like they wasn’t good enough to be regular teachers, right? We never seen the warden. The security force was mostly white guys.
I remember once I got into a scuffle with this officer. I was coming from the bathroom and I think I opened somebody’s door to look in, and the officer jumped on me from behind. I’m like, What are you doing? He banged my head on the ground. And they sent me to the unit for that. I don’t know what his problem was.
After the scuffle, I had a big knot on my head from where he banged me against the ground. I’d had a staff member once tell me, “Listen, whenever they do something wrong, write them up.” So, after my scuffle with the officer, I wrote a grievance that he’d banged my head against the ground. It was a big investigation and they even called my mother in. I think they called her in to tell me to withdraw the grievance. That’s what she said—“Stop writing these people up. Stop being mad.” It worked, though. I got out of the unit early because they found the officer hadn’t acted the right way. That experience kinda prepared me for some of the bigger fights down the line. I had learned the process of filing grievances.
I DIDN’T LIKE MY CELLIE ANYWAY
Aaron was released from Long Lane in June 1999, and returned to live at home. Six months later, on December 13, 1999, sixteen-year-old Aaron was arrested in connection with a shooting that occurred several days earlier outside the apartment complex where his family lived. One man died in the shooting. Authorities placed him into Walker Correctional Institution, a maximum-security adult prison, to await trial.13 Aaron was ultimately convicted of manslaughter in the first degree and a weapons charge, and sentenced to thirty-five years. He continues to maintain his innocence.
Walker was a new experience for me, and I remember spending some time in segregation there. The first ticket I caught was because I didn’t get out of the shower in time. I was showering and the guards said, “Recall.” I didn’t know what that meant. I guess I was supposed to get out, but I didn’t. I get out eventually and the guards said, “You’re getting a ticket.” I didn’t even know what that meant. I said, “So?” I didn’t know what none of that meant. Then my cellie told me, “Ticket means they are going to write you up.”14 And I am still like, “So? What’s that going to do?” It meant I was going to be confined to my cell.
There was another time, after getting in a fight with a white gang. In New Haven, where I was growing up, there wasn’t no gangs. If there was, I didn’t know, because I wasn’t with the gangs growing up. It was just us, me and my friends, doing what we do. And I didn’t know nothing about Aryan Brotherhood, white supremacy. The only thing we heard about was the Ku Klux Klan, because we learned about them in school and in my projects. We had these community leaders, they’d come and show us films of how it was in the sixties, and the KKK and all that. That’s it. So Walker was a brand-new experience.
One day me and one of my friends from New Haven were playing basketball in the yard. The ball happened to roll over to these two white dudes and they snatched the ball up. So my boy said, “Let’s get this ball.” The white guy said, “No.” My boy said, “Man, give us the ball,” and the white dude threw the ball and hit him in his face with it, and then they rushed him. They started jumping him. I’m like, “What?” So, I jumped in it. We all ended up in segregation units, and the two white boys were shouting from their cells, “You fucking niggers. You dirty nigger,” and I am like, This is crazy. In my mind, I’m not thinking that they are racist. I am just thinking, These dudes is crazy. But I was actually glad to be in segregation; I thought, That’s fine, I didn’t like my cellie anyway.
From December 14, 1999, to February 2, 2000, I was at Walker. Then I was sent to Manson Youth Institution, MYI. At one point early on at MYI, me and this other guy my age were arguing, and the other youths was instigating us. It got to the point where we both wanted to fight. We were in different cells, though. The older guys in the cells next to us told us if we wanted to fight, to tell the guards that we were “gonna hang up,” which means threaten self-harm. If we did that, we’d get sent to the Hartford MHU block, the mental health facility. They said the COs—correction officers—would transfer us.
So me and this other guy got ourselves sent to the psych ward on purpose. I talked to a nurse and told her I was hallucinating, seeing frogs jump out of the toilet and that kind of thing. I was just making it up. But when I got down there, I couldn’t take it. Hence, me and the other guy never was put in the same holding cell. Therefore, we never fought.
It was a stupid idea looking back; I don’t even know why we were so mad at one another. I was in a room by myself with nothing but a paper gown, and there were people down there that really had mental health issues, medicated all day, banging and screaming. They had a light on all day, and a camera in the cell. A hard metal bed, no sheets, no nothin’. It was cold. I couldn’t take it. I tried to get back out by acting wild, but that just made it seem like I was more crazy. I caught three tickets just trying to get out of there. So then I chilled out for seven days. Finally, they sent me back to MYI. But isolation at Walker and MYI wasn’t anything like where I went next.
“ARE YOU BROKEN YET?”
In June 2000, the state sent me to Northern Correctional Institution, the supermax, while awaiting trial. This is maximum security, with the most violent and dangerous inmates. I didn’t feel like I was a dangerous inmate. I committed no assault on nobody. I got sent to Northern because I caught too many minor disciplinary tickets.
I could feel the overly aggressive nature of the Northern environment instantly when I got there. I’m seventeen at this time, but that has no effect on the staff. Coming into Northern, everyone’s treated the same: big, small, young, old, it doesn’t matter. It was like a culture shock. When I first come into Northern, they stripped me of all my clothes—my drawers, socks, T-shirt—and put me in a jumpsuit. They chained me up with leg irons, handcuffs behind my back, and then a tether chain and padlock connecting the handcuffs to the leg irons. They marched me down the hall, like ten COs and a lieutenant. They want you to know who is running the show. They letting you know like, go ahead, try something. When you chained up like that, and you’re naked, it actually paralyzes you. You feel vulnerable in the presence of force. You feel defeated.
What got me about Northern was how everything was glass and metal, and it’s all reflective. You feel like you’re in a spaceship. The second thing that got me was how they do the recreation. You rec in kennels, like dog kennels, like a big cage. That’s it. That really made me feel depressed: This is it, life in a cage. It felt like everywhere you go, you were still in a little cage. You go from your cell to the shower, and the shower is enclosed—another cell. You’re not in no type of open area. You’re always in some type of closet, or you’re in some type of locked confinement. Even when you’re out your cell for that one hour, you still feel like you’re locked down. It’s really no movement. All that takes a toll, especially if you constantly pay attention to it.
They put me in a cell with a Puerto Rican dude named Angel. The cells at Northern, everything is gray. The walls are all dark gray with holes in it—it’s all made out of Quikrete. When I got to Northern all the cells were double-bunked. The bunks are steel and a bluish-green. The toilet’s steel. Everything’s steel. Everything is gray. The cell is about six by eight; if I stood and spread my arms I could touch wall to wall. If I stand on my tippy-toes, I could touch the ceiling. It’s narrow. The cells were designed for one person, but they’re double-bunked. So it’s two people in that little room.
Ang
el and I were getting manipulated by some of the older prisoners. They kept telling us there were women and potato chips and all this other good stuff down in the mental health wing. I didn’t really believe them, but I guess they were persuasive. They convinced us. So we told the COs we were going to kill ourselves, and they took us down there. It was on Friday. There’s no windows in the reformatory at Northern. You have a mirror, sink, toilet, shower inside the cell. The door is all glass. And they only give us a paper gown and paper slippers. They don’t give us no type of bed linen, no sheets. You could take a shower, but there was nothing to dry off with. We were down there all weekend. On Monday the doctor comes, and we tell him we don’t want to kill ourselves, we tell him anything to get out of that situation.
After I come back, one lieutenant asked me, “Are you broken yet? Are you broken?” So that’s why I know this is a bigger game plan in place. So from that point on, I seen everything as them trying to break me. The feeling of being in Northern? You feel isolated. You feel hurt. You feel mad. You feel bitter. You got all these different emotions running through you at the same time.
I STARTED WILDING
One day I went to court, I came back, and my whole cell is flooded. The toilet is overflowing. There’s toothpaste spilled all over the place, and bologna and potatoes everywhere, and my cellie Angel is missing. The guards just put me in there anyway. I’m hearing yelling and thudding from below my floor, and I found a note from Angel saying he’d eaten all my commissary food. I’m hearing yelling, crying, and it’s Angel. I can hear him through the vent.
Once the guards left I could talk to him through the vent. He said he couldn’t take it anymore, that he had to get out. He said they had him strapped down to the bed on “four-point.” It’s the first time I’d heard of that. I didn’t see Angel again for a while, they moved him to another block. I found out “four-point” is where they chain you down to the bed, with your legs and arms handcuffed to the four corners of the bed.
My next cellie was someone I’d met at Long Lane, who’d been in with me for a while. One day the guards were in a cell downstairs from mine, chaining up another inmate. I was at the door trying to figure out what was going on, and a guy on the other side of me named J Scar was kicking the door, screaming about whatever was going on. I guess he was objecting to someone being restrained. But the guards thought it was me doing the banging.
A lieutenant came to my cell and told me to turn around and “cuff up.” I told him I didn’t do it, and the guy in the cell next to me even said the same thing, that it was him. But they didn’t care. They put me on in-cell restraints. In-cell restraints are different from four-point. With in-cell restraints, they put you in handcuffs, leg irons, and a tether chain between the handcuffs and the leg irons in the front, and then wrap the tether chain around the handcuffs three times, so you’re bent forward at the waist. You can lie down, but you can’t really stretch your legs out, because you’re in a cramped position. You’re just constantly twisting and turning to try to get comfortable. You just cramp up. They left me like that for twenty-four hours.
After that incident, I started wilding. I wasn’t adjusting. I wasn’t complying with the rules and regulations. I was always at it—covering the windows, basically acting up, acting out. It helped me not pay attention to the psychological effects of the environment. That it was affecting me. That it was affecting everyone. But some people were wilding because they were mentally ill; others because they were upset. I was wilding because I was following the crowd and it was something to do.
From that point it just got worse and worse for me. First, it was about twenty-four hours in-cell restraint, then it got to be two days, then three days, then it was five days one time. Then they got the black box. The black box is this thing they put over the handcuffs and then they got the waist chain, the tether chain, the leg irons so you don’t have any range of motion, nothing. You chained up like Houdini in a magic show. They left me like that for three days in the black box. Then they took the black box off and the waist chain and left me in the in-cell restraint setup for two more days and took me off. After five days straight of being chained up.
From that day on, I’ve been determined to change this barbaric, abusive, humiliating, insane, and every-other-word-that-connotes-torture practice.
THEY’re trying to get you TO ACT OUT
You know they’re trying to break you, you know they’re trying to get you to act out and you really don’t want to give them what they want, because it’s a battle, it’s a fight, it’s a war. If I give them what they want, they’re gonna win, but if I don’t give them what they want, they’re still gonna win, so how can I level this playing field? I’m gonna give them what they want until they tell me they don’t want it no more. And that was what my first two years was like adapting to that new plantation called NCI Supermax. You try everything in your power to basically make them feel how you feel—defeated. And that’s why I stayed in Northern from 2001 to May 2002.
I went on trial in 2002 from May 31 to July 3. I was in New Haven county jail then. May, June, July, I wasn’t at Northern. And getting away for those three months, I realized that things are different there. When you in an environment, you’re wilding, and everybody’s wilding, and you think it’s normal. But when you leave an environment and you look back at it, you start to see yourself differently. Especially seeing other people in other environments. When you’re around other people, you see that they are looking at you like you’re not normal. You see that your behavior ain’t normal. After the trial I went back to Northern, and I started seeing that everyone is not normal. I saw the elements that cause psychosis—the colors, the restrictive environment, the lack of environmental stimulation, the slamming doors, the restraints. I was able to see all the things that cut you off mentally from society, and influence the development of your brain.
FOCUSED ON RETALIATION
Then after my sentence, on September 11, 2003, I was back at Northern all the way to 2013. I lost count of all the times I was chained up. I’d say about twenty would be a good estimate.
That whole time, I felt angry, destructive, violent, bitter, sad, mad, depressed. I felt anxious and defeated. I felt painful and mistreated, and experienced institutionalized racism, but of course at that time I couldn’t identify exactly what I was going through. I heard cries for help. And that’s the best way I could describe what being back at Northern was like. You’re cut off from the outside world.
At Northern you remain bitter and frustrated, mad and angry. You’re focused on retaliation. You’re always trying to get back and you’re always trying to, basically, reciprocate the feeling of being defeated.
ONCE I LEARNED THE LAW
I didn’t start to calm down, so to speak, until I met Andre Twitty in 2005. Andre is the one who made me realize my whole incarceration from beginning to end was a violation of my rights. He helped me start learning how to do something about it. He introduced me to criminal law and helped me find websites that a lady friend of mine who was going to school at University of Massachusetts could go to and download a case and send it to me.
I met Andre at Northern when we were on the three-cell tier. He more or less taught me certain things about the law through discipline. I had no knowledge of the law whatsoever at this time, completely legally bankrupt. Now I think I know something. With Andre, my question would be answered with another question, which frustrated me. But it also challenged me to find the answer myself. So it was a process of getting me to think.
I’m a fast learner. From reading so much, I started understanding general concepts—due process of law, failure to protect. Where’s the court’s holding at, what the facts are. I started to know how to read criminal cases. I never had access to a law library or the internet. I used to write the New Haven Law Library and ask them to send me cases and pay for them myself. They’d tell me how much a page. I’d send them the money. I
learned through reading cases. Everything started from reading case law. Then I got the annotated version of the statutes. From that, I got the cases that supported the annotations. Reading the criminal law introduced me to the civil law.
Once I learned the law, the authorities didn’t know how to deal with me. They’re trained for dealing with violent inmates, not litigious inmates. When I was aggressive and frustrated, and acting out of those emotions, they were right there, front and center, with their shields, masks, mace, dogs, batons, whatever. They could deal with that. They train twice a year for that. But now that I ain’t dealing with that no more, now that I’m seeking to change things through the court system, they don’t know how to deal with me. They call their attorney at the state attorney general’s office to deal with me.
The more I felt confident with the legal system, the calmer I got, and the closer I got to getting out of Northern’s “administrative segregation” program, which was set up around three levels or phases. If you catch a ticket, you’d go to phase one for 120 days. You have just one fifteen-minute phone call and one half-hour visit every week, limited commissary and full restraints wherever you go. Then you go to phase two where you get more commissary, and just handcuffs when you’re taken out of your cell for the first thirty days. After ninety days there without a ticket, phase three.
I almost didn’t make it out of phase three in March of 2003. I ended up catching a ticket right at the door when I was about to be transferred. I was given a Georgetown Law Journal from another inmate, and for that I got a Class C ticket. They ordered me back to phase one for that, but I challenged the ticket and got it overturned on appeal.