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When I was sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City, in February 1960, there were 2, 500 men inside "the walls. " The white convicts slept three to a cell (except for several hundred in the one-man cells). The blacks slept as many as eight to a cell. Stabbings and killings, robberies and rapes were common. Dope was easier to get in prison than it was on the streets.
There were men in prison who were said to make more money each year from dope and gambling than the warden was paid. There were captains on the guard force who owed their souls to certain convicts. You never knew whom you might have trouble with. The reasons for murder and mayhem made little sense to anyone except the convicts. So hundreds of men either carried a knife or had one they could get to in an emergency. You wonder if you have an enemy in the "population. " If you have, he has the advantage: He got there first, he made friends, he knows the prison.
He has a knife; you don't. A lot of men, thinking of the enemies they made outside, begin to imagine that they see them in a choline or in a line of men going to work. And many of them "check in" for protection. A lot of men would rather die than check in. A lot of men have died, though all they had to do was walk up to a guard and say "protect me. " There are other ways of getting into trouble in prison. No matter how much you " ve been around, you feel uneasy when you go to prison.
If you are young and good looking, you can count on being confronted again and again. If you have money, there will be people who want it. If you are helpless, there are people who will try to make a reputation at your expense. Or you may simply say the wrong thing to the wrong person.
In 1961 a prisoner I knew went up to a 22 -year-old man and told him that he wanted to have sex with him. The young convict, within two months of going home on a two-year sentence, replied, "I don't want any trouble-but I'm not going to be a punk. " (A punk plays the female role in a homosexual relationship. ) The young man worked on the food service dock. The next day the older inmate walked up, drove a 22 -inch ice pick through the young man and raped him as he lay dying. In 1963, a 16 -year-old black inmate resisted the sexual advances of a group of older convicts.
They caught him in the A-hall shower and stabbed him to death while he screamed for help. After they killed him they rolled his body up in a tarpaulin, dried themselves off and returned to their cells. All because he didn't want to be a punk. Some older inmates decided they were going to make a punk out of another young black convict at Jeff City. The boy's uncle, also serving time in the prison, tried to intercede in his behalf. The uncle was stabbed to death for "meddling. " You never know for sure what is going to happen from day to day in prison.
If you mind your own business you probably will not have any trouble, but there is never any guarantee. In 1966 an inmate working in the school was daydreaming and looking in the direction of another convict. At recess the daydreamer was stabbed twice in the liver. I watched him die. The killer remarked later that the victim had been staring at him. Not long before that an inmate in the kitchen walked up to a man and chopped off the back of his head with a meat cleaver.
He explained later that Moses had come to him in a vision the night before and told him to do it. In prison, paranoia and fear are natural states of mind. You develop a vigilance and alertness that makes you sensitive to who is around you, their moods, their actions. You become chronically suspicious.
Violence is only one aspect of prison. Sometimes when you get to know the men you feared, you find beneath their icy visages warm, lonely, desperate beings who would like to reach out to you but who are afraid to. There was a time when I cared for Ronald Western the way I would a brother. He was serving 25 years for shooting a state trooper. To his friends he was warm and giving-anything he had was yours.
He tried to escape several times, always in the company of friends; one such attempt ended with two of his friends being shot down in the yard. When Ronnie first came to the prison he was stabbed in the back over a relatively minor matter. He always carried a knife after that. He had a quick temper and assaulted several other inmates. He became increasingly paranoid. Some inmates spoke resentfully of Ronnie behind his back.
A lot of men tried to belittle him by starting rumors. These things got back to Ronnie. He felt that the convicts who hated him might think he'd lost his nerve; and if they thought that, they might work up the courage to attack him. He had a kitten-he pampered it, spoiled it. A kitten was something he could love without his love being mistaken for weakness. One day he came in from work and found the kitten dead, crushed by the electrically operated cell door.
He felt that it had been done by someone who hated him. He draped the dead kitten over the lever that operates the doors and vowed to kill the person responsible. Several months later he killed a man. He told me later that he'd had an argument earlier that day with the person. When he came out of the cellblock to go to the yard, he said, "the guy was looking at me and laughing. So I killed him. " That prison killing, plus his earlier escape attempts, pushed Ronnie's original 25 -year sentence up to 52 years.
In December 1970, while in solitary, Ronnie hanged himself. There are many Ronnie West bergs, and while they live in fear they also create fear in others. I'm talking about a gnawing kind of anxiety that puts a sharp edge on all your senses. It permeates your subconscious. It catapults survival to the top of your list of priorities. Wanting to survive in prison can make an actor out of you.
There are certain roles you can play that enhance your chances of being accepted by other convicts, of being left alone, respected; and respect, ultimately, is the key to "making it" in prison. The Missouri State Penitentiary is, and always has been, a custodial institution, one whose guiding philosophy is to minimize killings, riots and work strikes. The officials want a tranquil atmosphere. There are programs at Jeff City-primarily education programs-but all of the programs combined involve barely one-third of the inmates. Some of the best programs were started by the inmates-in spite of official apathy, and often over official opposition. The art class began with one man, once a death-row prisoner, named Samuel Norbert Reese.
Sam was sentenced to die at age 19 for a murder committed during a holdup. Father Charles Disease Clark took an interest in him, and with Clark's help Sam's sentence was commuted to life (actually, two lifes plus 75 years). Sam got his hands on a painting course and developed an uncommon ability as an artist. (In 1961, because of his prison cartoons, he was featured in Time magazine). Sam worked first as a porter in the Catholic Chapel and set up an easel in the corner. One day the warden, the late E.
V. Nash, asked Sam if he would teach another, younger inmate how to paint. Sam agreed. His group grew, until he was given a corner in the library and, ultimately, a classroom in the school. One of the men he instructed was Albert Bradford, now known as Malik Hakim. The prison art group won many awards, had many exhibitions, and Reese and Bradford were recognized as possible "comers" in the art field.
Then the art class was closed by the warden, because, as he told Jan Dickerson, then art critic for The Kansas City Star, the inmates were drinking the oil paint and holding sex orgies in the art class. Prisoners, however, said the reason was a dispute between the warden and the education director over who would get credit for what the artists accomplished. Bradford was one of the first people I met in the prison. He had been sentenced at age 19 to life for forcible rape. By 1960, with eight years served on his sentence, he was an accomplished artist and an equally accomplished con man. He was one of eight or nine leaders among the black inmates -- a Black Muslim at a time when only a few knew what a Black Muslim was.
He loved books, especially poetry, mysticism and oriental philosophy. He introduced me to Sam, and it was through talking with these two that I realized how little I knew about books. They got me into reading, and they shared their small hoard of tempera with me. By drawing in the dirt in the yard, they showed me how to do line drills and taught me the principles of composition and perspective.
When we ran out of tempera we used instant coffee for yellow, beet juice for red, kitchen cleanser for white, crushed pencils, anything. In spite of our pleas the warden did not let us reestablish the class until 1964. In 1961 I tried to escape. For that attempt I was given 10 days in the hole and six months in solitary. Solitary, at that time, was on the third floor of E-hall, a century-old building, now torn down. Each of the three floors had two tiers of cells, for a total of 336 cells.
The bottom floor was occupied by regular inmates; and since the E-hall cells were considered among the choicest in the prison, because of laxity of supervision, it was considered something of a politician's row. The second floor was for protective-custody cases-people who had "checked in" for protection from other inmates. The third floor was solitary confinement. The days of true solitary confinement are largely past, although some prisons, including the U.
S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, still have cells with closed fronts. Solitary now usually consists of being put in a cell with a barred front; while you can hear your neighbor, you can't see him. You stay in that cell, except for a weekly shower and an occasional visit. Some prisons, including Jeff City, under pressure from the federal courts, have begun allowing token recreation, infrequently, but enough to keep them from losing a case in the courts.
Solitary confinement is a community of people unlike any other. It is enforced association for protracted periods of time. It is a world of mental tripping and daydreams, a world of frustrations and angers, magnified emotions and distorted responses. The windowpanes on E- 3 were painted green, so that during the day the area between the cells and outside windows was permeated with an anemic gray haze. In places where the paint had peeled from the window, shafts of sunlight cut like a knife into the cells. You could see a thin cloud of dust drifting through the sunbeams.
And there were starlings. They nested in the rafters overhead, screeching constantly and fouling everything below. Shower day was a festive time in solitary. It was then that we could actually see the people we had talked to all week. And the messages we wanted to relay to friends could then be given in person.
When we got tired of lying to each other about our fabulous lives "outside" -- i. e. , our fantastically successful criminal careers, our plentiful and varied amorous exploits, our feats of courage-we would play chess or " 20 questions. " In order to play chess in solitary we fashioned the pieces out of soap and numbered the squares on hand-drawn boards from one to 64. Then, from 8 a. m. until lights out at 10 p. m. , voices were heard all over the cell block: "Eight to 18 -- 12 to five -- six to seven -- nine to 40, " punctuated occasionally by a distant voice shouting, "Why don't you punks shut up and go to sleep!" In the regular population, you have some options-go to the yard, or stay in and read; go to school, church, join the Jaycees; go to the library, lift weights, play handball; draw a $ 25 coupon book and buy ice cream and cigarettes.
In solitary you go nowhere. In the early years you were not allowed to have books. On the occasions when an injudicious convict volunteered an opinion of a guard to his face, the guard would finish what he was doing-passing out mail, food, etc. -then return with a tear gas canister and empty it on the convict. The guard would then begin to unreel the firehouse, but by the time the hose was unreeled the tear gas would have drifted into adjoining cells, and those men would join in to berate the guards. They would all be fire hosed. I spent my 21 st birthday anniversary in the hole, in solitary, and it was that night that one of my friends from Algoa reformatory hanged himself in a nearby cell.
He was within three months of going home, and he had received word that his wife was divorcing him. On the last burglary he had pulled he scrawled his name on a restaurant mirror with lipstick, and under his name the plea, "Catch me! I can't help myself!" One way to get out of solitary for a few days was by self-mutilation. In the hospital you could score dope easily, get drunk, see people and just walk around. Seeking such a vacation, I cut my wrist after a month in solitary. Instead of hospitalization I was given 10 days in the hole and first aid for my wound.
Being caught with a knife, dope, civilian money, a hack-saw blade, or other things considered serious contraband. Murder. Attempted murder. Rape, sodomy, homosexual activity in general. Escape or attempted escape. Engaging in a work or food strike.
Inciting a riot (the administration decides what constitutes "inciting to riot"). And investigation. This last is often the worst, because you may spend many months in solitary and no one will tell you why you are being investigated. At one time Black Muslim activity was sufficient to get you anywhere from six months to a year in solitary.
When the courts recognized the Black Muslim faith as a genuine religion, the prison administrators resisted temporarily, predicting dire consequences, then finally admitted that the Black Muslims were generally a healthy and stabilizing influence among the black inmates. In the 16 years and eight months I spent at Boonville, Algoa, Jefferson City, Moberly and Church Farm, I spent 2 1 / 2 years in solitary and 1 1 / 2 years more in the hole. I went to the hole more than 30 times at Algoa and Jefferson City, and I consider those the most wasted periods of my life. The theory behind the hole goes back to the origin of prisons-deprive a man of everything he has to live for, and he will somehow repent of his sins. I...
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