Dark Spell

by Mara Leveritt

  After three weeks at the Diagnostic Unit, Jason got his first prison visit with his mom and brothers. “My mom wanted to know how the prison was and if everyone was treating me okay. I told her that I was doing well and that it was just like a country club. I told her the unit chaplain, Chaplain McKraken, a real neat old white guy, likes to come and talk to me about God and we play basketball together. I tell her, ‘He may be old, but he can play! He beats me every time! Plus, there is another old white guy who likes to come to see me too. He brings Bible study booklets, and I have been reading those while I am locked up in my cell.”

  The main question his mother and brothers had for Jason concerned the prison food. “I told them it was absolutely terrible! I said it is unfit for even a dog and that, if we were to put a plate of the stuff in front of Bear or Charlie (our pet dog and cat), they would just turn their noses up at it! At that, my mom took out some change and asked one of the officers who was supervising our visit if she could buy me a soda, a candy bar, and some chips out of one of the snack machines out there, and thankfully he let her. Of course, she couldn’t buy me something without buying my brothers something too, so we all snacked and sipped sodas while we talked. It was so good to see them again.” Unlike the visits in the county detention center, Jason got to have physical contact with his family here. The visits were also longer than what he’d been allowed at the county jail. Still, he said, “They always ended way too fast, and it was always hard to let go. The guards told us ‘one hug and one kiss for the beginning and ending of the visit,’ but this rule was impossible to keep because my mom and brothers couldn’t leave me there with just one hug to part with.”

  “not being able to govern events, I govern myself.”

  ~ Michel de Montaigne

  Part of Jason’s medical classification hearing had included a meeting with a department psychologist. “She tried to put me on some medication which I refused,” he recalled. “My reasoning was that there wasn’t anything wrong with me. The only thing I was experiencing emotionally was because of what I’d been through. There was nothing to be medicated. She wanted to put me on Zoloft, which was experimental at the time. She said, ‘I want you to take it and tell me how you feel.” She said, ‘Your family has a history of mental illness and suicide.’ But I’m like, ‘No. I’m not suicidal in any way, shape, or form.’”

  Jason reasoned that, if he complied with the order to take antidepressants, administrators could claim he was being treated for depression and place him in the Suicide Prevention Unit, or SPU, where he would be under closer supervision. He decided that was not going to happen. Before his arrest, Jason had seen the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest with Jack Nicholson. And already, in his short time at the Diagnostic Unit, he’d observed “the guys from the SPU walking down the halls, doing the Thorazine shuffle.” He didn’t want to take Zoloft because, as he put it, “If they put me in SPU, I had no idea what could have come next.”

  Sure enough, members of the classification board asked Jason if he would like to stay long-term at the Diagnostic Unit, on the SPU ward. “They told me that Jessie was already there and that I would have my own cell and everything. They tried to make it sound really nice. I didn’t trust them. They told me that if I didn’t go to the SPU, their only alternative would be to send me to the Varner Unit. Then, they proceeded to tell me how horrible that unit was and that, if I were to go there, I would not survive. They told me Varner was Gladiator School. It did not sound like a happy place, but I would go if I had to. I’d already heard enough about SPU to know that I did not want to go there. They were already trying to dope me up so I wouldn’t be able to think clearly. I could only imagine what they would do if I were in a psyche ward. ‘No,’ I said, ‘you can send me to Varner if that is what it has come to. I refuse to be so doped up that I cannot even think about fighting for my freedom.’”

  Whatever might happen or be done to him, Jason at least wanted to be in control of himself. He refused the medication. “I might have been a little paranoid,” he admitted later. “I was just glad they didn’t jump on me and hold me down and shoot me with a needle.”

  The officials’ next proposal was to place Jason in protective custody, or PC, at the Cummins Unit. There, as in an SPU, he would have been closely watched. But again, he refused. “PC is where they put inmates who are too feeble to defend themselves, or who might be targeted by other inmates for injury or even murder,” he said. “They might call it ‘protective custody,’ but usually it turns out not to be protective. I knew that just from seeing the behavior of people. Being in PC means you can’t stand up on your own two feet. It means you’re singling yourself out for even more abuse.” Coincidentally, a film had factored into this decision too. By sixteen Jason had seen Brubaker, the 1980 film starring Robert Redford that was based on true events from a few decades earlier at Arkansas’s Cummins Unit.65 He’d heard that going into PC at Cummins was “the worst thing you can do because that’s where the worst predators are.” No. Jason would not agree to PC.

  A new side of Jason was showing itself. He’d always been compliant—at home, in school, in jail, with his attorneys, and, until now, here at prison. Never before had he refused an adult’s order. But here, all bets were off. This was his life. He had little control over anything in it. Where he could control it, he would.

  Of course, some decisions carried consequences. That’s especially true in prison, where no refusal of an order—however insensible— is tolerated. What administrators saw was a super-high-risk kid who was refusing to take medication, accept protective custody or go into an SPU. Exasperated, the warden ordered Jason sent to punitive isolation, or what was called “the hole.” For the staff, it meant that he could be protected there. For Jason, all it meant was more isolation.

  Even by now, Jason was an old hand at the deprivation called isolation. He’d endured months of it before his trial. He knew that, in prison, conditions in the hole were worse than those on death row, where televisions, radios and books were allowed—except that prisoners in the hole weren’t put there to await execution. Stays there were limited to thirty days unless a hearing were held where an inmate’s time was extended.

  Yet he understood. “They didn’t have too many choices about where to put me. I didn’t sense any ill will in it. It was just like they were seeing me being put into a messed-up situation and they were trying to do the best they could within the parameters they were allowed. And they weren’t allowed to do much. I felt they always wished they could do a lot more.” Nevertheless, “I was alone, just like I’d been at the jail. You work out, but mostly you’re just sitting in there. It sucks. The only advantage is that nobody’s trying to kill you.”

  There was, in fact, one other advantage. While Jason was in the barracks, in a single-man cell, he’d have to wait while guards marched the other men past his cell, naked, to the showers. Then, after everyone else was finished, he’d be taken out and marched, naked and alone, past all of them for his shower. “I had to walk past all them in their cells and listen to all their negative mutterings,” he said, “and I couldn’t even see them. It was like being surrounded by monsters all the time.” But at least, in the hole, when he got to shower, no other inmates were watching.

  Still, everyone—including Jason—knew that he could not remain there indefinitely. Unless an inmate faces new charges, he can only be kept in “punitive” for thirty days. A place had to be found for him somewhere in Arkansas’s vast penitentiary system—a system filled with adults. Jason, skinny and seventeen, stood convicted of killing three children—about the worst crime there is. On top of that, his case was charged with rumors of Satanism and sexual mutilation. Everyone in charge had reason to worry about him. “They really feared somebody was going to try to do something to me,” he recalled, “and then, on the other hand, the mental health lady was afraid I’d do something to myself.”

  The warden assigned a sergeant to keep an eye on Jason and to do things for him t
hat other inmates were allowed to do for themselves, like go to the prison’s library or commissary. The sergeant would also take Jason—alone—to the basketball court. “He was always professional,” Jason said. “He’d say, ‘Hey, I’m going to treat you with respect, you treat me with respect, we’ll get along just fine.’ He’d tell me, ‘If somebody comes running at you, tries to do something to you, get behind me.’”

  For all their concern, however, no one on the prison staff realized yet that Jason could barely see. Nor did he tell them. Since his arrest he’d adopted a policy of not speaking unless spoken to. He kept to himself. He didn’t mention it to anyone when he learned, at the end of a month at the Diagnostic Unit, that Burnett had just dismissed a motion that Ford had filed seeking a new trial. He did not let himself feel fear. “I’d already experienced so much in my short little life—so much bad—that I’d ceased to be afraid,” he said. “And I’d ceased to be shocked. King Kong could have come knocking the walls out and stuff, and I’d be like, ‘Well, I didn’t see it coming, but now that it has, well, okay.’”

  That proved to be a reasonable outlook. After Jason had spent a month in the hole, administrators decided where to place him. Near the end of May, almost two months exactly after his arrival at the Diagnostic Unit, the sergeant showed up at his cell door. He held out a two-piece uniform for Jason: white pants and a white shirt that had his name and a laundry number on it. The unstated message seemed to be, “If you’re not going to cooperate, we’re going to treat you like everyone else.” The sergeant said, “You’re going to Varner.”

  Chapter FOUR

  VARNER

  May 20, 1994 - January 31, 1998

  In 1994, Varner was the toughest unit in Arkansas. Just seven years old, it was built for high security, to house thousands of the state’s young male offenders—a combustible population. Inmates and staff alike knew that there were times when the place verged on boiling out of control. The word reaching Jason was that it was run by gangs of African-Americans who were “tearing the place apart,” and that they were especially hard on white guys. “I knew it was going to be rough at first,” Jason said, “just like being the new kid at a new school on the playground. I remembered being in the county jail with guys who were in there for robbing, breaking into houses, and so on. But, like anybody, once you got to know them, they were cool. My overwhelming feeling was only that I was resolved to get through it.”

  Jason enjoyed the thirty-five mile ride from Diagnostic to Varner, deep in east Arkansas’s farm lands. He would end up staying there for four years, from May 1994 to February 1998, years that saw O.J. Simpson’s arrest, the slaughter of half a million Rwandans, a jetliner crash near Long Island, release of the movie Titanic, and reports of a woman named Monica Lewinsky having some kind of an affair with the president. Of course, Jason’s survival at Varner did not make news, but as improbable stories go, perhaps it should have.

  “I went with several other guys,” he said. “They all wanted to know about me; they had seen me on the news. It seems like everyone knows my name but I don’t know theirs. They all ask the same thing, why did you kill those boys? I tell them that I am innocent and that just shocks them. Rarely does anyone ever believe me. It hurts because people find it so much easier to believe that I am a crazed killer rather than a normal teenager.”

  The van drove around the barbed wire fence of the institution, to the “sally port” or prison gate at the back.66 There, guards took the handcuffs and shackles off Jason. They pointed to a concrete sidewalk about two hundred fifty yards long and ordered, “You just follow that walkway to those doors.” Jason stood amazed. For more than a year, he had been used to going where he was told—but always accompanied by guards. “You mean, I should walk all that way alone?” he wondered. Walking unescorted, as he’d been instructed, Jason felt strangely elated. “It was just a small taste of liberty.”

  The first person Jason met at Varner after arriving at the sally port was a stern, older man whom Jason knew only as Mr. Patton. As the prison’s classification officer, he determined where inmates lived and worked, and what privileges they were entitled to, based on their classification or “class.” In prison, class is rigid and determined by several factors, including the inmate’s crime, length of his sentence, and disciplinary record. Class, which determines everything in a prisoner’s life, is designated by a numeral and a letter. An inmate’s letter class can rise and fall between a low of C or a high of A. But, while Jason could aspire to a numerical classification of one, he understood that his letter classification could never rise above C because he was to suffer a life without the possibility of parole. He saw the C for what it was: C stood for Condemned.

  The classification officer told Jason he would start out, like most new inmates, as a Class 2-C. He gave Jason roughly the same welcoming speech Jason heard at Diagnostic, except that Mr. Patton added this: “Stand up for yourself.” The officer then turned to his inmate clerk, George Rhoades, who was also serving life without parole. Mr. Patton said, “Mojo, show him your scars.” When Mojo lifted his shirt, Jason drew back. He later recalled, “He had a scar that ran from his naval to his rib cage. A guy had stabbed him for no reason and practically gutted him. And it had happened just a short time before. He’d healed and was on his feet again. I was, like, ‘Oh, this is going to be fun.’” Jason and Mojo would become—and remain—close friends.

  New inmates were called “short hairs” by the prison system’s veterans, inmates and staff.

  The classification officer assigned Jason to work on the prison’s hoe squad, where almost all new inmates start out. But before work would begin that Monday, Jason had to be assigned to a barracks. Up to this point, he had been confined to single-man cells located in larger cell blocks. Varner was different. It was built with what are called open barracks. At the time, the only single-man cells at Varner consisted of several old railroad box cars that had been converted into cells for punitive isolation, the hole. Jason was assigned to Seven Barracks, the first barracks assignment for everyone who entered Varner’s doors. Barracks One through Fourteen held inmates who were assigned to hoe squad detail, a surviving remnant of the South’s slave trade.

  When Jason left Patton’s office, he was told to head left. His new home, Seven Barracks, would be just past the control center. Jason walked out the door, but as he passed the control center, he heard a crazy riot of banging and gonging, as if thousands of drums were being beaten at once. Looking up, he saw a three-story wall of bulletproof glass crisscrossed with chicken wire. Behind that were metal bars, and hanging onto those bars were people. Men of all description were literally climbing the walls. The awful drumming came from them, beating on the bulletproof glass. Their faces were contorted with rage, hate, and glee. All their mouths formed vulgarities. Spittle flew over the windows. Jason walked slowly to the center of the hallway, trying to stay as far away from the spectacle as possible, his jaw dropped. It was the hate wall from the courthouse again. It had found him here. The men were pointing at him. He was the object of all that hate and rage.

  “Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”

  ~ William Shakespeare

  A voice barked above it all from his side of the glass, “Get behind the yellow line, Inmate!” The speaker was a large guard in a blue Arkansas Department of Correction uniform bearing the insignia of a sergeant. Jason quickly moved out of the center of the hallway, towards the thundering wall of hate. Careful now not to stray beyond the yellow line drawn just three feet from the wall, he walked slowly down the length of the barracks, just a foot away from the glass, making his way the hundred feet or so to the Seven Barracks door.

  The men behind the wall of glass sustained their violent frenzy. They had been watching Jason on the news for a year, talking about the murders and how sick and horrible he was. They’d been expecting Jason. And now he’d bee
n delivered. Their excitement to get a piece of him was madness. He thought to himself—not for the first time—that surely, here, was what the Bible spoke of when it told the tale of Legion. The men on the wall looked possessed.

  When Jason finally made it to the metal door that marked the entry to Seven Barracks, the large guard who had yelled at him looked down and asked, “Are you ready?” Jason gulped, looked up and nodded. The guard looked down and asked Jason again, “No, I asked, ‘Are you ready?’” He put a lot of meaning into the question this time. Jason felt it. He raised his head and straightened his shoulders a bit, summoning his courage and standing taller. Readjusting his grip on the paper sack containing his worldly possessions, he managed to say, “I’m ready.”

  Before the sergeant opened the door, he said something else to Jason. “Stand up for yourself in there. If you do, I’ve got you. If not, they do.” Jason looked up into his eyes and nodded once.

  Then the sergeant opened the door and Jason stepped into hell. He fought as hard as he could and likes to think that he gave as good as he got, but he knows that just isn’t true. Jason had just entered a fifty-man barracks, and every man in it wanted a piece of him. There was nothing fair or pretty about it. All the rage and anger that had been building up for over a year over the senseless murders of three children finally had an outlet.