Transitionish, Episode 4

To read Episode 3 click here

Orlop was wedged between the toilet and the wall again. It took me a moment to identify what I was seeing in the gray light of the 5 o’clock hour — mostly because you wouldn’t have thought that a human body could actually have managed to pour itself into such a tiny fissure, outside of a Dali painting. I sighed inwardly. This was only the sixth day of lockdown, and already this was the third time I’d found him slumped over in a state of massive, narcotics-induced catatonia. Some people make choices that allow them to wake up lying next to someone they love. Others make choices that cause them to wake up next to drug-addled morons. And some of you apparently seem to think I still need poorly scribed diatribes on the subject of consequences.

Orlop’s drug use hadn’t been much of a problem up to this point. True, I worried about it in a low-grade way almost constantly, but he had respected my position on not wanting to be around that poison sufficient to keep his word about only smoking when I wasn’t also in the cell. It wasn’t quite the case that he managed to clean up all of the evidence of his pastime, however. On my third day, I had returned to the cell to find his homemade lighter left on the floor next to the bed — essentially the only common area in the cell. I may have misread the situation a little bit. Orlop had stepped out as I came in and was still on the tier outside of the cell talking with a neighbor. I called him back.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the contraption.

“It’s cool,” he responded, looking from me to the floor and back again. He could tell I was angry, so his response had more to do with pacifying me than with any kind of actual reasoning on the coolness of him leaving his contraband in plain sight. He clearly didn’t have the slightest idea of why I was peeved, though, which in a way made me even angrier — though this was aimed more at myself than at him, that a younger version of myself had forced my current iteration to live around such situations, such people. On some level I knew that drugs were so common in prison that nearly every cellie Orlop had ever lived with had probably partaken with him, so it was completely normal for the tools of the trade to be tossed about in so cavalier a manner. My problem in the moment was that I didn’t know Orlop well enough to know whether this was a tactic he was deploying in order to potentially avoid a case, the sort of thing where he could say, “Shit, bossman, you say you found that lighter on the floor? Well, I live on top bunk, so you may want to talk to my cellie.” In retrospect, I don’t think he’d have done that, but I wasn’t willing to bet my classification status on it. I could have just moved the lighter to his cabinet, but I had been thinking about cellies and boundaries for so long that it felt like this was one of those scenarios where one had to be established before things got a lot worse. I picked up his device and handed it to him.

“This is your shit. You don’t leave it next to mine.”

I thought, for the briefest of moments, that we were going to end up punching on each other. I could tell he was weighing the options. I’m not entirely certain why he backed down. Logic would tell you that he must have considered his state — his weight, his level of physical fitness, his blurred sense of the material world around him — but logic doesn’t apply very well to drug addicts. Maybe it was as simple as this: he knew his buddies had dope in the dayroom, and he preferred to get high rather than exert himself. Whatever the reason, he slouched over and grabbed the lighter out of my outstretched palm and tossed it onto his mattress. It was still visible from the door, so I suppose this was him making some kind of passive-aggressive, truculent point, but at least the bloody thing wasn’t lying next to where I rested my head every night. It would have to do, I thought. He just made it out of the door before it started its erratic, grating process of slamming shut. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I hadn’t noticed the flecks of ash left on the edges of the sink and liberally deposited on the floor and felt another stab of irritation as I used toilet paper, soap, and a washrag to wipe up his mess. This was an act I ended up repeating several times a day for the months I lived with Orlop, some kind of karmic vengeance for every problem I myself had left behind for others to straighten out. This is pretty much a standard model for the entire concept of cellies: to have a cellie is basically to be forced at gunpoint into a relationship where you are forever cleaning up another person’s chaos. There may be some good relationships and some fun moments (maybe — I haven’t experienced them yet), but overall, the entire subject makes one think that Sartre was right about hell being other people.

The balance Orlop and I had found during my first six weeks went right out the window on 13 May, when I woke up to find that Ellis Unit was beginning one of its semiannual lockdowns. From that point forward, the only time I would be able to leave my cell was to walk down the hallway three times a week for a communal shower. This obviously presented problems for our truce: how could he smoke only when I was in the dayroom if I wasn’t ever in the dayroom? Orlop wasn’t an early riser, so I had hours to stew over this on day one of the lockdown. I turned the problem over and over inside my head as I drank a cup of coffee and eventually arrived at a pretty grim place where I was all but resigned to the two of us finally having it out.

I tried to imagine how this would play out, both during the fight and then afterwards when the guards noticed that we were bleeding and one of us was packed up. Orlop did have a reputation amongst the guards for being a dope fiend, and I thought it possible that I might get some benefit of the doubt from this when they rolled up to find him cognitively flying through the stratosphere (then again, the more realistic portions of my gray matter responded, when has that ever happened? Like, ever? I couldn’t argue the point.) I wasn’t terribly concerned about the response from his gang if we fell out. I had spoken with his family’s shot caller about the situation, and he had washed his hands of Orlop, saying that what he needed was a good beating or ten. This made me wonder why they weren’t disciplining him themselves, but I considered the conversation to have been a minor victory of sorts and didn’t want to press my luck.

I thought about how I was going to explain this to my friends and family. I was going to look like such a complete failure to them. Less than two months in population, and already I was in trouble? A few of them would understand on some level, but nowhere near enough. You really have to live in one of these places to fully comprehend how prison serves up nothing but impossible scenarios and then turns around and castigates us for being morally deficient. Never mind that you could put any random group of people — preachers, teachers, whatever — into this exact situation and they’d end up making the same choices we all are forced to. If I was able to insert you, oh reader, into a cell with a maniac, you’d finally understand what I’ve been writing for years: much of the recidivism we experience as a society is due to the lessons taught to us by the prison, not the inherent qualities of the people released.

I kept trying to find the words that would explain everything without looking like a complete idiot and failing. The only other option was to simply take the situation on the chin and accept all of his nonsense. That’s probably what my dad would have advised, because it was the most peaceful option. It really boiled down to a question of what kind of case I wanted to catch: one for forcefully evicting my horrible cellmate or one where I am accused of smoking dope because some officer found some piece of random paraphernalia or smelled the smoke as he was doing count and didn’t feel like differentiating the two of us. One of those cases is considered righteous, and one isn’t, so . . . that calculation definitely militated a certain decision. I know now that I almost certainly would not have been harshly castigated for giving Orlop the boot. The current admin hates smokers almost as much as those of us that are forced to live around them, and it is all but guaranteed that the disciplinary captain would have patted me on the shoulder and let me off with a minor punishment, once he found out who the “victim” was. Still, I’ve never had a case for violence in the TDCJ, and I’d have hated to have lost the ability to say that over a fool like Orlop.

In the moment, though, I was unfortunately focusing on all of the stealthily creeping set of risks associated with giving a bully/dope fiend/chronic masturbator/(insert your personal bugaboo here) the proverbial inch. Also, the idea of letting Orlop run over me with his careless driving made me feel like a coward, in a place where cowardice is pretty much the one truly unforgivable sin. I wasn’t blind to all of this. I generally notice when the warped norms and values of this place are insisting upon themselves in contradiction to what the better angels of my nature are recommending. I tried to separate the emotional junk from the pure logic of the decision, but, man, is it sometimes hard to do so in the middle of the action. I kept coming back to this annoying little idea that the acceptance of uncomfortable situations could become a form of paying penance. What did I really dislike more, me having to bend more than I should have, or having to explain to my father or friends — or you, unknowable reader — why I couldn’t even manage to make it a single quarter in population without screwing up? Framed like this, my choices looked different. I had thought all kinds of negative things about myself over the years. Maybe adding “pushover” to the list wouldn’t be so bad.

Orlop eventually stirred and managed to pry himself out of the gap between the toilet and wall. His skin was red and splotchy, and his eyes had the glassy look of someone who was confronting reality directly for the first time in a while and wasn’t terribly happy about it. Once he realized he was on the floor he apologized and offered me his breakfast Johnny Sack as compensation. Accepting food from him would have literally meant taking the food off the plate of the starving, so I refrained. There was a bit of an irony here that irked me. Prison is a place of massive inequalities. Some men have a great deal of financial support, but most have little to none. Orlop had income from his family, but he blew it all on dope. If he had been sober but broke, I’d have split my commissary with him. It would have meant buying cheaper items so I could double up on the quantities, but I’m not proud — Ramen noodles are fine — if it meant I was eating with a friend. What kind of human being eats a spread right in front of someone with nothing? That’s a bad look. Orlop’s spending behavior put me in a situation where I felt absolutely justified in ignoring his growling tummy — consequences, once again. I just couldn’t do it, though, which meant I’d been occasionally feeding him since I moved in. Him offering me his breakfast bag was the first time he had actually offered me anything, and I couldn’t even take him up on it. This is a pretty trivial thing, I know. It annoyed me more than it should have because of everything else going on in the moment.

Orlop must have sensed the storm clouds in my head because we didn’t speak much that day, which added to the overall unpleasantness of the feeling pervading 309. Some people handle silence well. Orlop didn’t. I knew we’d have to talk eventually, but I didn’t necessarily trust my ability to govern my tongue at that point. There were things he could have done that would have required immediate action — I mean, it wouldn’t have completely surprised me if he’d decided to light up a joint in the middle of the day. That would have removed all of my options, because it would essentially have meant that Orlop had decided none of my desires mattered, that they were below his consideration. That is a lesson population manages to teach you regularly: being disrespected is quite often a highly intentional, deliberate act, an opening move in a game that leads to awful places. No matter how unpleasant it may be, you have to put your foot down and end things promptly, come what may. (Again, for the hundredth time: why do you permit environments like this to flourish? What does society gain from it, in the long run? You aren’t just punishing offenders; you are punishing yourselves when these newly trained monsters return to you.)

In a sense, having a cellie like Orlop was exactly what I needed. I had known that cellmates were complicated. I had heard plenty of horror stories over the years. But I had been so looking forward to getting out of seg that I think I may have glossed over the worst possibilities of this aspect of life in my mental forecasts. I needed to see just how bad the K2 problem was, how seemingly intractable, how deep the consequences ran even for those of us who attempted to maintain all of the distance in the cosmos from that junk. Orlop also gave me the opportunity to practice distancing myself from the emotions of the moment. It is one thing to say to yourself: every rotten thing that happens to us is just information, so if you can step away from what is going on and find some space for equanimity, you can make better decisions. It is quite another thing to do so in the heat of battle. It is like a mental muscle, one that you have to work out daily. Orlop made me want to punch him almost daily for the first few weeks we lived together — but I never did, I always managed to find a better way of dealing with things, without completely sacrificing my safety or moving my boundaries more than was reasonable.

What kept the two of us from fisticuffs was really a combination of factors. First off, I really had been decent to him, and he knew it. On numerous occasions, I had picked him off the floor of the dayroom and set him on a bench; twice I had even carried him up the stairs with another guy, just to get him out of the way when the warden was walking around. I’d fed him and helped him with his homework and made sure he had basic hygiene supplies. I’d definitely kept the house in order — I doubt he’d lived in as clean a cell his entire time behind bars. Being good to the streets doesn’t always mean the streets will be good to you, as they say, but on average it helps. Second, Orlop knew he was a bit out of control. His homeboys were irritated with him, to the point that several weren’t even recognizing him anymore. I knew that stung, because quite a lot of his identity was wrapped up in that group — he had their logo tattooed on his cheek, remember? I don’t know if he felt ashamed, exactly, but he couldn’t have been feeling good about the status of his relationships. Three, he was nearing the end of the program and was aware that the only reason he had made it this far was due to various officers and teachers making dozens of decisions to overlook his obvious habits. At some point, he knew his luck was going to run dry. This mattered because he was seeing parole at the end of May and he knew he needed to tighten ship a bit for the interim. And lastly — and I’m under no illusions about just how determinative this was when compared to the other reasons — he ran out of dope. Many of the dopeboys wouldn’t sell to him because he was too obviously out of control. His supplier had dumped his wares on a couple of big spenders at the start of lockdown. Orlop sent him a few kites, only one of which was answered. I assume he was aware that he was little more than an irritation to his dealer, but this didn’t seem to bother him much, dignity and concepts of self-worth being early casualties of his disease.

I have seen numerous people go through withdrawal before. In the county jail, drunks would come in, get very, very sick, and sometimes they’d be taken off to the hospital. Other times, we had to look after them ourselves. I had never really been forced to coexist in a tiny cage with someone withdrawing from K2, however. I suppose I was fortunate in that Orlop mostly slept for three days straight (glory, glory hallelujah!). He woke up to vomit several times on day two, which wasn’t a lot of fun. What worried me most was that the muscles in his legs twitched almost constantly when he slept, sometimes pretty violently. This never woke him. He was an exceptionally heavy sleeper; anything short of me slapping the underside of his bunk repeatedly wasn’t going to cause him to stir. (I admit I felt immensely envious of him for this ability, in this life where having a conscience seems to imply regular insomnia.) After day three he seemed to be okay. He still slept fifteen hours a day, but we were a little more conversive, and he admitted to being pretty unhappy with the state of his life.

This lockdown initiated the best four weeks of time I had with Orlop. Being forced to get clean gave him the added motivation to quit smoking entirely. Since he was no longer selling his meals, he began to put on a bit of weight. He socialized a bit more with a different set of people once lockdown ended and actually went to rec a couple of times. We even had a few grown-up chats, which supplied most of the biographical data I’ve used in this series. We spoke a lot about his choices and goals, and I started to allow myself to think that maybe I was doing some good in the world by supporting him in his sobriety. That was a pretty dumb thing to do, I know now. What can I say? I’m always looking for projects that make me feel like my life isn’t a complete wasteland of purpose, and he was right there in front of me, clearly needing to be saved. I thought in my arrogance I could help him slay a demon or two.

Lockdowns are pretty different in population. In seg, the day begins with a whole scrum of officers invading the pod. You are taken out of the cell in handcuffs and placed either in the dayrooms or in security cages in the hallway. Your property never leaves the cell. Usually, the screws order you to place everything you own on top of your bunk. After a few hours, everyone is brought back to the cell and begins the process of taking stock of the losses and cleaning up the mess. When I first got locked up, the word “mess” may not have been sufficient to truly describe the state of one’s cell. On a number of occasions, my cell looked like a bomb had gone off. Officers used to regularly open each and every Ramen soup, sometimes dumping the crumbs out in a large pile on top of the desk or bed. I’ve had neighbors tell me their bags of coffee were split open and left scattered across the floor, which, on a humid day, meant these men returned to find a sticky mess covering most of what they owned. All manner of items would be missing; it didn’t take too many lockdowns for me to learn the lesson that you really own nothing in prison. Property slips or commissary receipts matter very little against the intentions of an officer. Sometimes I’d find pages of books ripped out, and once one of the officers had apparently taken a dislike to one of my Bart Ehrman books and had written something theological and scatological in big block letters across the title page.

Still, for all of that, lockdowns are pretty easy in seg. You don’t really do anything — it’s mostly a passive experience, something that is done to you. The affair is more participatory in population. Even getting to the point where officers begin to paw through your stuff takes some effort. As described in a previous entry, Ellis Unit is essentially a single long hallway, with the various wings and offices branching off at right angles. At one end of this expanse sits the main gym, at the other the chapel. To one side of the chapel is a smaller gym, which also contains a number of classrooms used by CITP (Cognitive Intervention Transition Program) and GRAD (Gang Renouncement and Disassociation) enrollees; this was known as the close custody gym, because it was designated for the use of prisoners whose custody level was G4 or higher.

It was to this gym that we were directed to carry our belongings, once we had been stripped down to our boxer shorts. This entailed bagging everything up, lugging everything down three flights of stairs, and then traipsing down the hallway to the gym. We were each given two trips. For people with too much property to be carried in a normal manner, a couple of creative solutions presented themselves. I saw a number of people fashion themselves harnesses that crisscrossed their chests, on to which their cellies tied bag after bag. They then proceeded to teeter their way down the steps, knees shaking from the strain. More often than this, the abundantly possessed simply paid their less fortunate friends to act as pack mules. Most of these arrangements took place on the first couple of days of lockdown, soups and shots of coffee being passed from cell to cell to seal the contract. I was concerned that Orlop would rent out his back for dope, but he slept for most of the first few days of lockdown, and by the time he must have started thinking about this, everyone’s needs had already been taken care of. That’s an assumption on my part — I don’t actually know what the content of the kites he sent down the run consisted of. I only know that on the day of lockdown he had only one small bag of his own property to carry, so I asked him to lug my typewriter, which meant I could make it to the gym in a single trip.

One side of the gym contained a line of maybe a dozen 8×3-foot tables, all lined up in a row. On one side of this sat officers in chairs, two per table. Others told us to line up in rows that ran orthogonal to the tables, with a few feet of space between us. I should have noticed that some of my more intelligent and experienced peers had all managed to find some reason to stop before settling into one of these lines. One guy suddenly needed to set his bags down to rub his shoulder; another spilled a few items on the floor and then seemed to develop a rather alarming degree of clumsiness as he corralled these back into his bags. It was only later when I had time to deconstruct the day’s activities that I saw these actions for what they were: stalling tactics that allowed them to decide which pair of officers they wanted to select. It wouldn’t have mattered much to me even if I had figured out the game being played in the moment, as I hadn’t been there long enough to know which officers were the preferable options. I simply picked a row which had a relatively short line and began to pile my belongings into one of the red 1.8 cubic feet crates that were stacked in piles near the center of the gym.

It took each pair of lawmen between twenty and thirty minutes to inspect the pile of goods each inmate loaded up onto the tables. While we waited, we were called in pairs to the corner of the gym where we were strip searched. Security Threat Group officers randomly selected some of us for narcotics screening; a few were dragged to the side to have some of their tattoos photographed. One of our lot never returned from his session, as he had a fresh tattoo proclaiming his admission into one of the Aryan gangs. Instead of moving on to population, he was returned to seg.

The two Nigerian officers that inspected my belongings seemed bored more than anything else. They sent my typewriter to be scanned, but beyond that the process was mostly painless. Prison has conditioned me to develop a penchant for organization which might look like low-grade OCD from a distance, so I didn’t love losing all of the plastic bags I used to keep things tidy, but in the grand scheme of things that wasn’t a big deal. I’ve lost far more than my sense of order over the dozens of shakedowns I’ve experienced during the past two decades.

CITP class number 37 graduated a week after lockdown ended in early June. Orlop was one of the eighteen students that managed to survive to the end. That he did so is a testament to the generosity and highly intentional blindness of at least two dozen staff members. He seemed pleased. This was the first certificate he’d managed to acquire in twelve years behind bars, and having a diploma in hand had him convinced that he was going to be granted parole when he met with the unit investigator mid-month. I was less optimistic, but I kept my mouth closed. I didn’t feel he’d done anything particularly special to deserve his freedom, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted him living next door to anyone I cared about — or anyone at all, really. I recall penning a letter to a friend about this time where I wrote something along the lines of: I know more people worthy of freedom on death row than I’ve met in the CITP. This would be a recurring thought for me over the months to come. If pain and suffering are integral to redemption, it seemed clear to me that most of my peers at Ellis hadn’t suffered nearly enough.

Class 39, of which I was a part, began on Monday, 17 June. The week prior one of the instructors came onto the wing and passed out an introductory questionnaire. What struck me about this paperwork were the underlying assumptions lurking behind nearly every question. Placement in seg is not supposed to be “punitive.” Texas claims that it did away with punitive isolation years ago. Instead, the reasons are always administrative: we are dumped into these holes because we represent a future “threat to the institution” not, supposedly, for any specific past action. I’ve never been able to find even the tiniest sliver of daylight between “punitive” and “administrative” in this context. “You beat up an officer and so we are punishing you” and “you beat up an officer and therefore might do so again and so we are punishing you” are pretty much the same damned thing, as far as I can see. My years locked away from the community of men certainly felt highly punitive to me, at any rate, especially as I couldn’t point a finger at a specific reason for my placement there in the first place.

The writers of the questionnaire did not understand the difference, either. Nearly every question was steeped in the assumption that we had committed specific disciplinary violations, nearly all having to do with violence or dope or some combination of the two. (Question #7: What is your drug of choice? Not: do you have a substance abuse problem, and if so . . . I wrote “nihilism” as my answer, but the teacher never said anything about this, so I don’t even know if they read the bloody thing.) The class lessons mirrored these assumptions. We were absolutely assumed to have committed violence against other humans “beyond first aid” or were the proud bearers of a thick disciplinary file loaded with narcotics cases. One of the instructors later admitted to me that, a few gang members excepted, she’d never met anyone in the nearly twenty cohorts she’d taught that had been in solitary for genuinely administrative reasons — and those guys had been in the GRAD program, not the CITP. I was certainly the only student in class 39 that hadn’t been downgraded for something exciting.

Our weeks were to be structured in the following manner. A little before 6am, an officer would open the cell doors for the first “in and out” following breakfast, and the twenty-four of us assigned to the morning class would trudge downstairs to the dayroom. There we would wait for a sergeant to come and escort us to the close custody gym, where I had experienced my first population shakedown. Attached to this were four classrooms on the first floor, and several more on the second. Most of these would be used for the GRAD classes, but the one on the far left was reserved for the CITP. The cognitive intervention class began at 6:30am. This portion of the curriculum was taught by a teacher from the Windham School District, the education system set up by the state for the prisons. This class lasted until 11am. The following hour was taught by an instructor from the Rehabilitation Programs Division. This separation of authority between Windham and RPD was a bit awkward and produced more than a fair bit of friction over the months to come. Each side tended to blame the other for all manner of problems, and to be fair, my peers certainly provided plenty of these for everyone to deal with.

The classroom itself was a bit of an experience for me. There were actual tables and chairs — chairs with real backrests. That might not seem like much to write about, I know. All of the seats in the TDCJ look about like what you’d get if you’d asked Torquemada to build a torture device for the backside that also happened to look like an artificial mushroom: essentially flat, round pieces of stainless steel attached to a vertical post cemented to the floor. They serve the typical function of a chair — preventing gravity from putting your derriere on the floor — but no one ever accused them of being too comfortable. It took me at least a few days to remember how to sit on an actual chair, which is really weird when you think about it. The walls had dry erase boards on them, most of which were liberally splashed with all sorts of what I guess passes for motivational or didactic scholarship in prison land. These pearls of wisdom remained for the duration of the program, mostly due to the fact that someone had bought the wrong kind of permanent markers, meaning the dry erase boards had just become plain old boards. The teacher had the exact same kind of desk that I recall from elementary school which, I suppose, could signify that they were both made by the same inmates. I guess I had never considered where the state acquired its public school furniture before, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn they used the prisons as suppliers. There was also a large steel filing cabinet that looked like it dated back to the Eisenhower era, with a steel hasp and padlock welded to the front. I stared at this often, thinking it was a pretty good metaphor for the CITP.

The best part of the entire set up was the small, wall-mounted air conditioning system hanging in the back of the room. For a little under six hours a day, we were able to evade the worst of the Texas heat, which, as the summer progressed, regularly put the heat index values inside the unit well into the 110s. By the time August rolled around, I’d have endured just about any kind of bullshit indoctrination just to get closer to the aircon unit. The way we fawned over it and winced when it emitted occasional gasping, gargling sounds resembled something pretty close to worship.

My cohort consisted of twenty-four guys — well, it did so for the first fifteen minutes of the first day. The guy sitting two rows behind me was convinced that because he had once been enrolled in some form of cognitive course before, he shouldn’t have to take the present one. Ms. G–, the teacher from Windham, explained to him multiple times that none of his programmatic history mattered, that in order to get out of seg he had to complete that specific program. He was a funny looking Black kid, gangly to the point of suggesting insectile metaphors, with enormously thick eyeglass lenses. He had managed to grind the circumference of these down so that they fit into the commissary eyeglass frames, which are generally considered to be more stylish than the ones the state provides. They were so thick, however, that they looked like he had jewelers’ loupes tied to his face. His hearing was apparently as bad as his vision, because he was absolutely not listening to anything Ms. G– was trying to tell him. After a long argument he stormed out of the class. He was moved off the section a few days later, and I heard he got shipped back to seg after a week or two on F-Line. He was the first casualty of class 39. He would not be the last.

After this little spat, Ms. G- presented to us the orientation handbook, which consisted of a number of pages describing the program’s goals and the rules of conduct expected of participants. I’m including some of these below, so you can get a measure of what the program looked like — at least on paper.

Like most everything else in life, what you get out of an experience is dependent upon both the effort you put into it and the frame through which you choose to view everything. There really were some good moments I experienced in our classes. Some of the information was genuinely useful. I had never heard of Hyrum Smith or his Franklin Reality Model, but it seemed a very simple, introductory concept for behavioral modification. I admit to despairing a bit when I realized that a few of my peers were too lazy to cognitively work their way through even a simple six step process, but enough of the guys gave it a go that I was able to keep such things at bay. I’ll include a few of these pages as well, in case any of you are interested.

That said, this is still prison and there was a lot of ridiculousness to be found no matter what lens through which one wanted to view my classmates. We had one twenty-year old that slept for much of the class each day. When he wasn’t studying the backsides of his eyelids, he was engaged in a systematic attempt to derail the teachers and send them down whatever tangential pathways presented themselves. He was particularly skilled at this. Thanks to him, I knew far, far too much about our Ms. W–‘s personal life (including details about the black mold growing in her house, the value of her car note, how much time her father spent in prison, and the messiness of her divorce, among many other topics). Ms. G– seemed to enjoy these detours, as they gave her an opportunity to talk about religion and politics. I have been trying to reduce the circumstances in which I will talk (read: argue, which in this context seems to be a synonymous term) about either, and I had vowed that once I made it to population, I would keep mine trapeth shuteth anytime someone brought these subjects up. When it comes to knowledge about either, the mean is low and the variance — not to mention the passion — is high. Years ago, mostly to prove a point to a neighbor who was essentially a strutting, toothy exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger Effect that he knew far less than he thought he did, I started to pass around a number of political literacy exams (Pew’s “News IQ” quizzes or some of the ANES surveys, for example). It became really obvious to all of us that most prisoners (and most citizens, I’m willing to bet) know almost nothing true about the real world, and those with the highest degree of ignorance tend to be the loudest in proclaiming their expertise. (Doubt this? Go take one of those surveys. Or, better yet, explain in detail how, say, a toilet actually works. You probably think you know, but I’m willing to bet nearly all of you left out the existence of the trap way and the siphoning effect this produces. We are all, alas, victims of what psychologists call the illusion of explanatory depth.) I journaled a lot during this time about motivated reasoning (internally siding with beliefs that maximize good feelings and minimize bad ones), but most of that reads a bit grumpy to me now, so I’ll just say that the CITP gave me ample opportunity to practice the art of silence. For that I am grateful.

If I have doubts about the overall value of the program, this has less to do with a criticism of the TDCJ and more with the honest statement that most of the students were unrepentant assholes. There was a small group of us — five guys, maybe six — that were paying attention and trying to get something positive out of the courses. No one else had done anywhere close to the time I had in seg, but this subset had learned many of the same lessons and had taken onboard a healthy respect for the power of the state to heap misery upon us for acts of disobedience. Most of the rest seemed to feel that their release from the Hole was owed to them, like the system was obligated to conform to their desires. Their behavior matched this sense of entitlement. I don’t know how they managed to maintain this view, as people failed out of the program every week, including some from Class 39. Of the 24 that started the program in June, only nine would graduate in October.

Mostly this was due to drugs. Over the years, I have noted the increasing potency of what people refer to as K2 (or “tune”, or “toon”), and it has gotten to the point where people are smoking a substance that incapacitates them for long periods of time. One member of my class, Pelon, was so obliterated that when he slumped against the wall of his cell, he didn’t notice that he’d dropped his joint near the door. Unfortunately for him, it didn’t stay lit, so when an officer walked by, he was able to grab it. It was sent for testing, and when Pelon received his disciplinary case, it listed a mixture of PCP, fentanyl, 5F-MDMB-Pinaca, and 5F-MDMB-Butinaca (and a couple of other indole carboxamides with complicated names). The immediate response from the smokers was to clamor for his dealer to “come off of some of that shit.”

Try teaching anything to a student body where at least half of the students are stoned or actively trying to get that way. I couldn’t help but sympathize with the teachers. They were underpaid and under-supported and had to contend with all manner of forces normal teachers do not. I tried to help them when I could. Still, I did question some of the decisions they made. The pace of the lessons was too slow, such that even the most interested became bored. Whoever wrote most of them had very little experience with the types of lives that tend to have been lived by people in prison, so many of my peers had difficulties in finding traction on how to apply the information to their own realities. I think Ms. G- was too jaded and cynical, and Ms. W- had just about given up by the time Class 39 began. She wouldn’t make it to the end: she quit six weeks before we graduated and put on an officer’s uniform. They collectively phoned it in on Thursdays, when we engaged in “group formation activities,” which sounds great on paper, but which actually consisted of Sudoku books and jigsaw puzzles being passed around. Naturally, this meant that Thursdays were nap days, which meant that Wednesday nights were a great time to get fucked up on hooch. Not that anyone needed a special reason for doing so.

I think what I liked most about the class (other than the air conditioner) was the structure it gave to time. After years awash in loose time, I had an actual schedule imposed on me, a place to be five days a week — and in the Fall, a graduation and a new phase of life. I was still constantly waiting for things to happen — that’s prison, after all — but there was actual movement in my life, progress of a sort. Those of you who are reading these words from within a solitary confinement cell will understand me when I say it gave me a kind of pleasure to experience that the word Monday actually meant something distinct from, say, Thursday. After nearly two decades of every day being exactly like every other, this felt pretty amazing.

Read Episode 5 here