Nor was my faith shaken. I had realized from the beginning that it was a severe challenge, but the facts that my mental and physical health and my marriage and family had borne it showed I was not God-forsaken. As Pope John Paul II told Emmett Cardinal Carter about the cardinal’s stroke, to bear such a burden was a divine gift, a demonstration of God’s confidence in the afflicted, and a subject of rejoicing. Like the cardinal, I found the flourish about rejoicing a rather stiff challenge. I had long believed the Jesuit formulation that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God (though I frequently disagreed with the definitions of tyranny targeted by members of the Society of Jesus). In any analysis, there was no practical alternative to fighting it out, and there was never a thought of any other course.
John Hillier delivered us to the long-imagined destination after a three-hour drive, right on time. There had apparently been a media attempt to follow us and attempts to televise us, as in the flight of O.J. Simpson, as if there were any suspense about our destination, but it wasn’t very successful, and we weren’t aware of it.
My first views of my new address were not reassuring: relatively modern buildings, watchtowers in the adjoining higher security facilities, a generous use of barbed wire. Quite a large press delegation was at the gate but was kept back and got no view of us as we entered the complex. I learned later that the recreation area had been closed, to prevent the press from photographing inmates at leisure, and that an atmosphere of some anticipation had been generated.
The Coleman Federal Correctional Complex has two penitentiaries (often referred to as the “thunder domes” or “gun clubs”): a medium-security facility, a women’s camp, and the low-security facility to which I was assigned. With a total of about eight thousand inmates, it is the largest correctional complex in the vast U.S. federal prison system. Though the architecture is red-brick, low-rise, and relatively unforbidding, it possesses the monolithic, dehumanizing arrogance of banal official buildings of all times and governments.
The indifferent visage of the buildings is studiously replicated by many of the personnel. Barbara and I entered the reception centre; I waited for someone to speak. We were ignored. Barbara, thinking I had been struck dumb, said, “My husband, Conrad Black, is here to self-surrender.” We sat for a few minutes in the waiting room, and then a beefy correctional officer, unarmed but heavy-laden with gadgetry, surged into the room and pointed at me with well-rehearsed purposefulness. I answered a few questions and handed over $2,500 in cash for my commissary account and a little paper carrier bag from a pharmacy with sleeping pills, cholesterol-reducers, and lip balm, which was confiscated. They gave Barbara the lip balm and told us to say goodbye. A kiss, a searching look, a very few words, and I walked forward, not turning back to wave lest I be reproved in front of her and add to the distress of us both. She departed.
The process of accustoming arrivals to their absence of rights was, as I had assumed, begun at once. I was handcuffed, in accord with the inexplicable American official compulsion, for no reason, to manacle as many people as possible as often and publicly as possible, in this case for the challenging one-hundred-foot walk to the induction centre (after I had voluntarily come two hundred miles), and delivered over to another uniformed official, a large, black, bald man who evidently considered himself endlessly intimidating and riotously witty. I removed all my clothes and satisfied my captor that nothing was concealed in my mouth, underarms, behind my scrotum, or in the approaches to my rectum. (I would receive a great many medical and security anal inspections over the next couple of weeks, and was slightly mystified at the extent of official curiosity about that generally unremitting aperture.) A brief medical consultation and a few words of elemental guidance followed, and, dressed in painter pants, a T-shirt, and blue canvas shoes, with some bedding in my hand, I debouched into the compound and was pointed toward my unit (B-1). The blithe wit who had conducted the body search with such exuberance told me that if I departed the correct paths, I would be “shot.” Withal, the official greeting was quite civilized, and my first glimpse of the regime was of a tolerably good-natured group. (The man who had inducted and handcuffed me soon proved quite convivial.)
That evening I began a prison diary, which for security reasons I wrote in French, with many abbreviations, words spelled backward, and argot. It would not have taken a skilled cryptographer five minutes to decode it, and there was nothing of much interest in it anyway, but it assisted me in a slight Chateau d’If fantasy, easing those first days. I wrote: “I proceeded a bit reticently toward my unit, and was accosted by some very affable residents, who seemed like typecasters’ simulations of the charming rogue: easy, toothy smiles, relaxed and jovial conversation, an oddly warm welcome to a total, though apparently much-publicized, stranger.” I was well received by everyone, residents and personnel, and some of my neighbours in my unit generously provided me with necessities. It soon emerged that I was in a completely black-market environment. Initially, most of the people that I met were relatively presentable, white-collar offenders (or at least people convicted of white-collar offences). On my first night, I was summoned to the lieutenants’ office and greeted with the words: “Black, I don’t consider you to be different to anyone else, and you won’t be treated differently.” I responded that I was not different to anyone else, and what earthly reason possessed him to imagine that I wanted to be treated differently, “which I do not”? We quickly crossed that drawbridge together and I was urged, in an almost avuncular manner, to “antiquate” to the community. I resisted the temptation to lure the lieutenant further into the tenebrous thickets of polysyllabalism, divined that he was urging me to “acclimate,” and promised to do my best, but added that I “don’t expect to grow old here.” A round of knowing nods ensued and I departed the citadel of local authority. I would shortly learn what an intensely and credulously gossipy place I had arrived in: my arrival had been endlessly discussed. I was greeted as something of a celebrity, as well as one of the few who had fought the government with what was perceived to be relative success, as everyone seemed to realize that I had won 85 per cent of my case and was pursuing a serious appeal.
It was not a great challenge to be a refreshing surprise to those who had been expecting me to be an aloof hoity-toit. I always find almost anyone somewhat interesting, and many of my new co-residents actually were rather interesting, albeit often in a Damon Runyon way of hoods and scoundrels. The top of the pecking order appeared to be the few authentic Mafiosi. They were elegant, extremely courteous, even courtly, and had a sardonic sense of humour. On my first night, one of them approached and said that mutual friends had said to look out for me, that I was not to be “bothered” and wouldn’t be. If I caught “a cold, we will find out from whom” and “that we have a lot in common.” I surmised that he meant the comradeship of persecution by the U.S. government. He replied, “Yes, but more than that, we are industrialists.”
The interior of the residential units had laundry and microwave rooms, a games room (chess, cards, board games), three television rooms, and a residential area of about sixty feet by one hundred and fifty feet, divided into four rows of fifteen to twenty two- or three-man cubicles, divided by painted, concrete block walls about five feet, six inches high. It was to one of these that my snug defence perimeter, which a few years before had linked continents, had shrunk, as I plotted the next phase of my struggle to save or recover my interests and reputation. I was now in the belly of the beast. After most of the lights went out, at 10:30 p.m. (it was possible to read by night-light for as long as desired), only red overhead lights provided any illumination. In this eerie light someone of my height could see the constant movement of quasi-sleeping men in the upper bunks, an unearthly Dante purgatorial scene. Many of the Hispanic inmates, finding the air conditioning cool, wore long underwear as outerwear in the evenings and wandered unselfconsciously about like giant bunny rabbits and slept with the covers over their heads like pre-natal caterpillars. It would be in this
bizarre ambiance that I would listen to Barack Obama’s election victory speech in November. I had to stand up to get clear reception on my handheld radio and earphones. On this one night, almost all the African Americans were also awake and listening on their earphones, in their upper berths, in the roseate gloom. I thought of Henry Ward Beecher’s famous eulogy of Abraham Lincoln. America had come full circle from the despair of the recent slaves following the murder of the Great Emancipator: after 143 years, the stifled sobs of the liberated black man, in the dark, had given way to the quiet and deserved celebration, also in the dark, of his imprisoned descendants.
My accommodation reminded me of boarding schools. (Not an unpleasant memory, as I had somewhat enjoyed them: people relied on their personalities. Nothing on the outside, such as family prominence, much mattered.)
–
THERE WAS A LUMPY, NARROW BED with a thin pillow, one metal locker, and two other occupants in bunk beds in a ten-foot by eight-foot cubicle. There were demeaningly precise rules governing almost everything. Yet there was almost unlimited access to emails, five hours of telephoning per month, full access to newspapers, periodicals, television, and radio, and visitors up to five days a week for up to six hours a day, but not more than nine days a month. I would soon learn that the six hours were sharply reduced on many occasions by the often lengthy waits visitors had to endure and by the habit of ending visiting hours early. The personnel at what was called, with unintentionally pious overtones, the visitation centre oversearched and harassed visitors and were themselves searched by other correctional officers in a futile effort to reduce smuggling. In my cubicle with me were two extremely pleasant and unobtrusive Hispanics, including one who had paddled from Cuba to Key West on the detached roof of an ice-cream cart. He assured me that he preferred an unjust sentence in an American prison to “freedom” in the Castroite paradise. Their English was limited, but we got on quite amicably. I did not sleep badly on this first night, after the strain and apprehension of the last few days. This was the grim fate that had been hanging over me for almost five years. On first sight, it was not as grim as I had expected.
Relief almost became serenity on discovering that the worst the enemy could do would be quite survivable. There had been much speculation in the Canadian media that I would be sexually assaulted, beaten up, blackmailed, and made to clean latrines (preferably, no doubt, with my tongue and bare hands). I quickly found that these fates were rare in this place and that I was not in the categories of people to whom any of them occurred. There was no violence, except in occasional scuffles that were easy to avoid, and sometimes toward child molesters. Homosexual activity was not apparently widespread and was by consent only. The rudest jobs were correctly the best paid and were sought by those who needed the money. I resumed my column in the National Post and often the New York Sun, and when the Sun closed, in the online Daily Beast of Tina Brown, and then the National Review. This was made possible by email access and agreement with the unit manager. After a lapse of only two weeks (to a heartening volume of comment), I felt I was in touch with the outside world again and made it clear to visitors that this life, though no country club, was not onerous. The media sought information from sundry inmates by letter and email, and soon discovered and published that I was tutoring high-school-leaving students in English, giving lectures on U.S. history that were well attended, and getting on with inmates and guards in a perfectly normal way. My experience in more complex, if perhaps less unsavoury, milieus taught me to be polite to everyone, reveal nothing to anybody, outwardly respect the authorities, and give no hint of self-importance nor self-consciousness at the temporary loss of status. I regarded my confinement, though not voluntarily assumed, as like St. Thomas More’s hair shirt, an abrasive but bearable reminder of my imperfections. It was also reassuring to confirm that I could equably forego all luxury and revert to a less sumptuous life than I had had since my expulsion from my last boarding school forty-eight years before, almost to the day (for insubordination).
I was fortunate that the inmate to whom I was handed over in my unit was a street-wise, corn-fed Southern boy of integrity and intelligence, whom I could always rely on for solidarity, guidance, and companionship. We agreed that, when we could, I would accompany him to a NASCAR race and that he would come with me to an opera. He was of the other Florida I did not much know: beer, air-boating, and hunting everything from bullfrogs to alligators, panthers, and bears. These authentic Floridians are a far distance from the condominium towers of Miami and the movie-set estates of Palm Beach, only ninety minutes or so away from them, and no less estimable a part of what FDR used to call “the great voice of America.”
After the genuine Mafiosi, the leading figures in the compound seemed to be real executives, prominent drug dealers, artful swindlers, lawyers who had strayed from the rules of the profession, such as they are in the United States, before descending into overzealous telemarketers, common or garden fraudsters, routine drug dealers, petty larcenists, and, finally, child molesters. There were many original characters, some by virtue of the elaborate impostures they made for themselves, aggregating grand theft auto up to Professor Moriarty–like criminal fiendishness in the telling. In the valley of the designated wrongdoers, next to those who have the money and the muscle, the most flamboyant are the kings. I sat down at lunch one day, in the noisy dining hall, opposite someone I had seen before but did not really know and asked him why he was here. “I steal airplanes.” When one of the men in my cubicle had to go to court to testify and was away a few weeks, a pleasant Puerto Rican moved in. I asked him his occupation: “I rob banks,” he replied with a touch of self-importance. I met other bank robbers, including one proud scion of a family of bank robbers, whose matriarch, his aunt, had robbed scores of rural banks, from the Carolinas to Florida, and had always arrived and fled on horseback. Another neighbour in the unit was proud of having sold, on cold calls, an astounding number of DVD-dispensing machines at “prime locations” that were in fact at rural road crossings or in the most remote or undesirable places. Outrageous though it is, in its apostasy from the world of affected, bourgeois respectability, it was almost refreshing.
I was automatically enrolled in a crash course in the parlance, mores, and folkways of the carceral state. One of the first people I encountered was a former armaments dealer who had, he claimed, roamed the world of mercenaries and irregular warfare. In these circumstances, it mattered little whether the talents of raconteurs were devoted to truthful accounts or fables, as feats of the imagination are also worthy achievements, and some of my fellow residents were Jules Vernes of autobiographical embellishment. The armaments dealer claimed that he wore an SS officer’s spruce black uniform at home, that he had been arrested by a flying squad of thirty FBI agents at his home, and that of all his experiences in selling, testing, buying, and evaluating weapons from side arms to battle tanks and ground-to-air missiles (all for freelance operations all over the world), his greatest satisfaction was in firing rocket-propelled grenades at cows in Cambodia. His descriptions of the cows blowing up reminded me of Mussolini’s son’s description of the joys of bombing defenceless Abyssinians in the Duce’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
Because of the fussing about my arrival, some of my new neighbours surmised that with their brains and my presumed money, much could be done. I had been fielding this sort of pitch for more than forty years and generally replied with suggestions that instead we try my ideas and my interlocutors’ money. One of the early candidates in this crowded field started out explaining to me his relationship with a U.S. senator but was exposed as an FBI plant and shortly shipped out after being threatened with grievous bodily harm. He was also under suspicion of impregnating one of the (female) correctional officers.
Another early acquaintance, who had apparently damaged his mind with his drug habit, answered almost any conversational gambit either by describing his subterranean marijuana-growing facility or by holding forth on the anthropological
insights of the animated cartoon television series The Simpsons. This inmate had a wisp of a goatee, like Ho Chi Minh, and had such large-bore ear piercings, he occasionally suspended padlocks from each ear, creating a very bizarre effect.
The child molesters (chomos, they are called) were a peculiar group. Some hobbled about with canes or walkers from the beatings they had received from some other prisoners because of their perceived moral degeneracy, or to provide themselves with weapons of defence against such attacks. One, with the massive spectacles provided by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), but otherwise slight and with a shaved head, had been sentenced for performing circumcisions on underage girls. He always took a cup with him to the bathroom because he had modified his own urinary tract by self-administered surgery and required the cup to avoid unsanitary spillages at the urinals.
There was an informal group of chomo-bashers (literally). One of the most colourful was a central Floridian, always friendly to me, at whose home police had allegedly discovered a severed human hand. He told me that the hand was planted by the police, in their unfailing incompetence, ten feet beyond his property line, and that he had self-righteously demanded that his neighbour be interrogated and chastened for besmirching the reputation of the neighbourhood. He was a physically formidable man with a delightful sense of humour but was accustomed to beating or shooting those he disliked. He was banished to the isolation accommodation (Special Housing Unit, or SHU, pronounced “shoe”) for threatening an alleged chomo who was blocking the door to my room, but he returned to the unit after three months in the SHU and shouted, on re-entering our unit, “Fuck the chomos.” For my part, I found the alleged chomos that I met quite pleasant and sometimes rather intelligent. It was impossible to know whether they were really guilty of anything. Some had answered email enticements from middle-aged policemen claiming to be young girls. Some had huge collections of lewd photographs. I am not convinced that these are facts that justify imprisonment. If they were guilty of physical abuse of defenseless people, their offences were disgusting and the fate of their victims was pitiful; but I also sympathized for the maladjustment that would have driven them to such acts. If they were not guilty, they were fellow victims of the corrupt prosecutocracy. In either case, it was not ultimately my place to judge them.
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