Prison used to be rougher, whew, a place you dreaded to go, a place that inspired fear and anxiety, a place possessed with dark brutality, a place that made you doubt yourself and doubt whether life was worth the effort anymore. A prison sentence handed down – “…years, executed in the department of correction…’’ – was doom, like hearing your banishment to death’s waiting room, where the death promises to be slow and painful and public and infamous; a sinking pronouncement you earned like a chain of cinder blocks from the courtroom to the jail, where you wore it and tried to get the feel of it, but you kept asking yourself questions you couldn’t answer – and then the early-morning call came, to roll it up, your ride awaits, your next stop is to be coldly deposited, like trash, at the massive prison gate.
Inside the prison, immured deep behind the sound-dampening stone walls – long ago – outlaws made the laws. Outlaws enforced them, too. That was an age when “real convicts” ruled, when the “convict code” anchored the prison social system, when being called an “inmate” or “offender” was cause to fight. The code was simple: mind your own business, don’t snitch, stand up for yourself, and show respect. Everyone got put to the test, and the weak were exposed and made to suffer, regretting whatever they did to come to prison. Primitive justice – not always neat, not always pretty – was the law of the land.
But that age has passed. Old-school convicts, and even young jitterbugs with only five or ten calendars in, talk about how prison’s not as rough as it used to be. Every day, in some cellblock in America, a convict will recall that age, going off on a rueful diatribe, something like this:
“You shoulda seen this place when I first got here! It was off the hook, every day. A real prison. We ran the joint, did what we wanted to do. These soft-ass kids wouldn’t have made it here back then. Back in the day, a new fish had three choices: fuck, fight, or run. And there wasn’t nowhere to run! Kids nowadays, they carry a gun to be tough, then they get in here and they all turn soft. Now it’s all note-dropping, running up debt, checking in, and getting protection from The Man. Fuckin’ crybabies. And, all of a sudden, we got chomos everywhere. This used to be a place where you could build time – now it’s a fuckin’ daycare center.”
Soft. Prison’s gotten soft.
I remember very clearly how prison was, back in the day…
Joliet, West Cell House, 1981. I’m 19, doing 30 months on a five-year sentence. Burglary. Stole change and a few cassette tapes from five unlocked parked cars in Pekin, Illinois. It shoulda been a misdemeanor, criminal trespass to a motor vehicle, but the appellate court won’t get me out until I’m down to seven months. College career aborted, all for this.
I’m placed in the last cell on 2-range, top bunk, cellmate Eddie Skala. Mid-20s, has a few years in. When I arrive, he’s mopping up blood, with a lackluster effort that’ll leave the floor pink for a month. Seeing me, he directs me to grab a spray bottle and start wiping down the walls.
“What happened here?”
“Aw, my bitch-ass cellie cut his wrists when I went to rec, then I come back and find him hanging from the vent.”
“He dead?”
“Naaaaah, he’s just a dramatic motherfucker, looking for some sympathy. He’ll be alright.”
We lock in, and judging by the sounds, I’m not sure if I’ve entered a prison or an insane asylum. Screeching. Word salad. Conversations that make no sense. “Hey, 238! Hey, 238! You got a simple time, or is there a wheat bread on it?” I question whether I still understand the English language. Someone asks if I want to sell my stones.
“Stones?”
“Shoes, motherfucker, your shoes!” Curses and threats ricochet off the concrete walls.
Rough characters stroll up to the bars to gaze wordlessly at the pink floor and the severed sheet tied to the vent, looking at me as if I’m the one who made the mess, or as if I’m the weak motherfucker about to make the next mess. Physical ugliness assaults the eyes – facial scars, teeth randomly assigned, overly black amateur tattoos with the ubiquitous doodle pad motif crawling above the neckline and down to the knuckles. Calloused knuckles. Facial tats that would sabotage any job interview, saying, “I’ve given up on normal society – prison is all that matters.” Shirtless torsos decorated with wide surgical scars where Cook County doctors dug out slugs. Seems like the more damaged a prisoner is, the more he displays it, as if stab wounds are a badge of honor. The visual message shouts: “I’ve been through the shit and I’m still here, motherfucker, so now what?”
Like anyone new to maximum-security prison, all I see is chaos. The only discernible pattern is the door rolling open three times a day for chow. The range explodes with bodies, milling around, yelling, arguing, unpredictable. They all seem unstable, and I wonder if they came here this way, or if there was a downward spiral. Murderers and sociopaths lurk about, with eyes fixed in predatory stares. The prey, by contrast, swivel their heads with an abnormal frequency, expanding their peripheral vision. I find it hard to imagine a more dangerous place.
“You’ll get used to it,” Eddie assures me. “It ain’t that bad.”
I don’t leave my cell until the fourth day, when hunger overrides the hermit strategy. I try to blend into the chow line, untucking my shirt, feigning a thousand-yard stare. I eat, make it back unscathed. He’s right, it’s not that bad.
At night the officers have disappeared, surrendering control, and dozens of prisoners roam the cellblock. The doors are defective, easily jimmied open with flat metal prodded atop the release mechanism. No cell is secure. Around the sixth night, Eddie has a visitor.
The rickety bed frame banging the wall rattles me out of a light sleep, and I realize we have two people occupying the bottom bunk. Tasha, an aggressively friendly wannabe transsexual, is taking it in the ass, hard. I can’t even pretend to sleep. Bang, bang, bang, bang… I try to ignore it, focusing on the ceiling, noticing blood spatters we missed and wondering how the blood flew so high. The frame keeps crashing against the wall until Eddie’s spent, then Tasha asks, “Your cellie wanna go?” Uh, no thanks, I’m good. Tasha leaves, happy, knocking on the bars of the next cell to offer her services, waking up the nut concerned about wheat bread. Eddie washes up, first in our sink, then straddling the toilet while dousing his groin with rubbing alcohol.
“You’re a cool cellie,” Eddie offers, out of nowhere. “My last cellie complained about everything!”
Days later, Eddie shows me a poem sent to him from his buddies in Chicago.
It’s titled, “The Original Fuck You Eddie Skala Poem.” I recall a couple verses:
Fuck you Eddie Skala,
Does your cellie think you’re cute?
Fuck you Eddie Skala,
Does he want your poop chute?
Fuck you Eddie Skala,
Did you make your mama cry?
Fuck you Eddie Skala,
We hope you fucking die.
I get a kitchen job, washing pots and pans and celling with Gerald Borden on 3-range. He’s transferred in from St. Charles, the juvenile prison. Auto theft. Took a Volvo on a joy ride. Five-foot-six, 124 pounds, same as me. Looks like Woody Allen. We got each other’s backs.
Good times in the kitchen, working for Sergeant Boner. Eatin’ good. I liberate a 50-pound case of pineapple and walk it back to the cellhouse. Boner lets me learn to work the grill, but only on liver and onions day. Everyone gets chewed out the day they open up a pan of chop suey on the serving line and find a turd floating on top. I wonder if there were other such pans, but where the turds didn’t float.
One day, I’m pouring dirty water down a drain, and some spills onto the freshly mopped floor, an act the floor-mopper interprets as “disrespect.” What the fuck ever. Words pass, as in his words pass right by me, and my words pass right by him. He unleashes a three-foot steel stirring spoon. Deadly intent. Borden snatches a freshly washed stirring spoon from the dry rack, says, “I pour shit down that drain the same way every day. You hit him, you gotta hit me too.”
The mopper’s own gang, the Black Gangster Disciple Nation, put him in check on what does or does not constitute “disrespect.” The various gangs – Disciples, Vice Lords, Latin Kings, Outlaws, Aryans – were beneficial in that way, providing structure in the vacuum left by the state.
I sign up for school and get celled with Robert Conklin, cell 819. We play a lot of chess. We’re in two classes, accounting and management. The young associate professors seem more interested in our pathetic lives than in teaching, and I can sense that they’ll relate to their cohorts for years that they know what prisons and prisoners are like because they’ve “been there.”
Conklin has an armed robbery charge, a punctuation mark on a progressively violent rap sheet. Stuck up a florist, or some such nonsense. He’s acquired a collection of non-mainstream magazine pictures, death row post-mortems of electrocuted prisoners, graphic images designed to deter. Rob is only fascinated. He exudes a counter-authoritarian attitude and a sociopathic callousness I can only ascribe to being a product of the prison environment. The free world is incapable of producing humans like Robert Dale Conklin. They only evolve here, on this island.
We see stabbings, yoke-outs, five-on-one beatdowns, guards sharing liquor flasks through the bars. Gary D, in 821, is the only rape victim I ever witnessed, choked unconscious by his certifiably insane cellmate, Frank, who is later sent to the bug house in Menard. Gary sports massive facial petechiae for a few weeks afterward.
The day three prisoners are acquitted of killing three guards during the Pontiac prison riot, a celebratory riot jumps off in our cellhouse. Smoke fills the ranges, the goon squad rushes in, forcing the crowd to the back – then, as fast as they rush in they ran back out, crowd on their heels. Good sport. Wrap a wet towel around your head and keep spitting out the taste of pepper spray. Just another day.
We lose any laundry we turn in, learn to wash our clothes in a bucket. Conklin makes a stinger that boils water in 30 seconds. Shower on Sundays, big room, lotsa bodies, try to ignore the punks gettin’ busy, with Playboy centerfolds plastered to their backs, at the far end. One Trac-II razor, passed cell-to-cell daily, with an old toothbrush to get the last man’s hairs out. Guys group up to bring back commissary, which doesn’t always work. No phones. Black and white TV, if you can afford one. I can’t. Books are my refuge.
One afternoon I have a textbook opened, and an older convict has some advice for me:
“Lemme keep it real with ya,” he confides. “I got me a degree in ’65, and I got me a felony conviction in ’66. Lemme tell ya, one cancels the other. You can get all the degrees you want, and they’re not gonna hire you. All they see is the felony conviction. Professions, careers, dreams – forget about it.” He has a long list of examples of how society has rejected his lawful efforts. “If ya wanna learn something you can use, learn how to ‘get over.’ College is all around you.” He hands me a copy of Catch Me If You Can, by Frank Abagnale. “You need to work on your game, and forget about trying to fit back in when you hit the streets.” The book is practically a primer on criminal enterprises.
There’s a block-letter inscription in concrete over the West Gate at Joliet, the gate where prisoners arrive: MAKE TIME SERVE YOU. There’s a mocking quality to the message, much like the ARBEIT MACHT FREI (“work makes you free”) message above the concentration camp gate at Auschwitz. Nobody in prison can make the time they serve serve them very well, just as nobody in the Nazi death camps could liberate themselves through labor. You learn what you can, learn what will serve you best, and move on.
Joliet’s chaotic appearance dissolved as my time there passed. Eddie was right: you get used to it. What was initially the most frightening, chaotic scene imaginable gradually became structured, navigable, and tolerable. The people getting hurt were the ones who didn’t know how to act. Simple rules, couldn’t follow ‘em. And just like that, this great monstrosity the state built to deter crime became utterly incapable of deterring anyone who had survived it. You don’t fear what you’ve learned not to fear.
Years later I learned Eddie Skala had gotten out, burglarized a house, and killed the homeowner. A pawned radio led the cops to him. He hung himself in a downstate county jail. The poets got their wish.
I’ve never tracked down Gerald Borden. He wanted to stay out of prison, this I know for sure. But he had no family support, no education, no training. I can only hope his persistence, work ethic, and character somehow prevailed.
Rob Conklin’s dead. He killed a man in Atlanta in 1984, and there was some question as to self-defense, since the lethal weapon was a 12-inch screwdriver, not exactly the weapon of choice for premeditated murder. Within 46 days of his arrest, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Color pics of the victim’s body parts strewn in various locations didn’t help much. He retained hope for a reprieve, but every appeal was a narrow loss, 2-1, 5-2, 2-1, 7-2, insufferable split decisions that ignored the recantation of the medical expert’s crucial testimony. Conklin was executed by lethal injection in Jackson, Georgia, in 2005.
Don’t miss: “Gators, Snakes, and Rats: My Time in a Florida Prison,” also by Ty Evans
Decades after Joliet, I look down 5-range in C-cellhouse in Michigan City, Indiana, as the doors roll open. Kid in 533, he’s not coming out. Chomo, I hear. Last week, some convicts intruded. He negotiated. They took everything except his clothes and his mattress. He’s too afraid to come out, even for meals, but I know hunger will eventually motivate him. The prison probably seems chaotic to him, but he’ll get used to it. Or maybe he won’t.
I still wash clothes in a bucket. Cleaner that way, and they never get lost. I can shower daily, just gotta be sure the punks have cleared out before I pull back the curtain. No problems bringing back commissary. Some have problems – new fish, mostly, ones too scared to slide a shank in someone’s ribs.
I still see stabbings, yoke-outs, five-on-one beatdowns, and guards sharing dope packets through the bars. Cellhouse chatter, if you listen to it, sounds like 237 is still looking for his wheat bread. The hazmat team stays busy, cleaning up blood, and worse. Judging by the national suicide rate for state prisoners, we should have a suicide here once every three years. We’ve had twenty-two. About the same number have died from violence, including drug-addled Bennie Lee, who was killed from an officer’s knee to his neck. No retribution befell the state for that murder – Benjamin Lee Jr was one Black Life that Didn’t Matter.
It’s a sad, stagnant world, yet nothing going on here seems to rattle me, or even strike me as unusual. I recognize the patterns in others’ behavior, and I know how to step through the minefields. I casually associate with the “worst of the worst” – shotgun murderers, stick-up men, gang bang rapists, carjackers, baby shakers, pedophiles, even a couple brain-eating cannibals – with a few young burglars sprinkled in, of course, the future of America, no school for you, you’re in for the long ride and don’t know it yet – all decorated with marks and scars, beautiful memoirs, all pretty good guys, no joke, if you ignore what they did to get here, good stand-up guys, minding their business, solid, respectful, standing on the code, the eternal code. And, unfortunately, around us are the riff-raff, the weak, the toonheads, the scavengers stationed by the tray dump, the sneak thieves fishing through the bars, the head-swiveling weight-pile-avoiding soft-ass three-biscuit-eating kids nervous as mice at a rattlesnake farm, fucking things up for everybody. All in all, pretty much like the cast we had roaming the set at Joliet, forty years ago.
So when I’m asked, hey, Old School, how it was, back in the day? I tell them the truth: we had suicides, note-dropping, check-ins, gangs, extortion, robbery, laundry theft, dopers, and jackasses who couldn’t mind their own business – just like it is today. Phones, color TV, and cable, that’s about all that’s different.
Prison hasn’t changed a bit. What’s changed, what’s constantly changing, is a prisoner’s ability to adjust to it, and deal with it.
Most prisoners never perceive the changes that have taken place within themselves. Senses sharpened, incident by daily incident. Survival skills that never leave you, personal characteristics acquired that any other former prisoner can immediately recognize, on the streets, years later. A casual indifference to violence, borne out of necessity. A savage acceptance of pain. Gradual changes, unseen, that fool a prisoner into believing it’s prison that’s changed, not him.
Anyone who’s been here a while and thinks prison’s gotten soft hasn’t learned much about prison, or about himself. I’m sure someone outside the gate, about to enter for the first time, still feels the dread and wonders how life will unfold. Will I make it? What will I learn from this experience? Will I respect myself in the end? What he fails to ask is how it will change him.
If we are lucky, life behind the wall teaches us two things. One is that we can persevere and survive in a truly horrible environment. And the other is that our former selves are gone, lost forever.
