Baseness as Usual

Though this may be play to you, ‘t is death to us.

Roger L’Estrange

It was the wheels that brought me to the door. There are precisely seven sets of buggies that one comes into contact with in an administrative-segregation (ad-seg) wing of a Texas prison. Each possesses its own distinctive resonance, cadence, or note that tells an experienced convict exactly who is on the pod. The necessities carts make a low, constant rumble. Think: plastic wheels coated in a thick layer of rubber rolling on clean bearings, sounding like continuous, distant thunder heard from underwater. These can often be confused with the chow carts, because they use the same model of wheels. To tell the difference, you listen for the jangling noise made by the metal hasp that keeps the trays from getting dumped all over the floor whenever someone makes a turn. You know the story of Pavlov and his dogs? Yeah, that rattle is the penal equivalent.  

The mailroom cart’s wheels clank and occasionally squeak when one of their number vibrates out of line. It’s also poorly welded, so the whole thing clinks and clatters continuously: imagine a poorly greased windmill spinning furiously, layered on top of the sound your silverware drawer makes if you close it angrily. The library cart is so old I’m pretty sure it once delivered papyrus scrolls or maybe even stone tablets to australopithecine-esque urprisoners, its bearings barely holding onto the vaguest notions of sphericality; consequently, it screams as it is pushed. Considering the poor literary tastes of most of my peers, I have always thought this to be perfectly fitting. I mean, James Patterson always makes me want to howl, mostly questions like: how the fuck does this drivel keep getting published?

The commissary cart sounds like an angelic chorus singing Hallelujah, a child laughing, a slot machine dinging that you’ve just won the jackpot – you get the point. It makes the same racket as any other hunk of metal on cheap wheels, but that clamor – nay, that symphony – signifies that for some people life is about to suck just a little bit less for a while. The painter’s cart, which I have seen precisely once in this land of rust and dust and amalgamated low bids, made the sound of a cocktail party populated by eager geese. 

The wheels of the Regional Shakedown Team’s casket-black special-ops Gigantic Trunks of Incessant Nosiness make no sound at all. I mean: none. No, these people grease them regularly, so they stay in stealth mode. That wasn’t a joke. They really do grease them. One of their number bragged about this fact to me once, clearly not understanding the idea of tailoring one’s message to fit the audience. If you can’t understand that level of dedication, well, you probably aren’t the kind of person who willingly peruses military surplus warehouses for black tactical neoprene arm coverings or gets animated when discussing the pixel count on the newest model of HD camera snakes the department splurged for. Clearly, few of you are that… uh… cool? Yeah, we’ll go with that: cool.

This cart wasn’t any of those. In its quest to punish me for being a lousy human being by turning me into an even worse one, Mother Prison has taught me many useful and grotesque lessons over the years. One of this former category that seems to have finally burrowed down to the level of my bones is sometimes referred to as the Sucker’s Folly: the tendency of concentrated short-term benefits to obscure risk and long-term cost, and also to drive acceptance of this error even when the net analysis is negative. In other words, rewards often obscure costs. (Duh, you say. Fair enough, though you might want to reread the complete definition and think about it for a few minutes before you conclude it’s really that simple.) In other other words, young convict, when you hear a strange sound on the run, put your book down and get your lazy carcass to the door. Quite often, whatever is coming is going to be to your detriment. 

This was not one of those times.

I hadn’t seen a television in more than four years. On the day I was shipped from Diagnostics to the Michael Unit to begin my current and unasked for all-expenses-paid tour of the ad-seg world, I was placed in a holding cage to await my bus. There had been a television on the wall, playing Faux News. I ignored it, having previously earned an advanced degree in Taurascatics Detection and Rejection. Still naïve about the chicanery the system was about to spring on me, I figured I would soon have the opportunity to watch plenty of the boob tube if I so chose. More fool me. The flat screen currently being wheeled into the dayroom by Smokie, one of 12-Building’s resident trustees (on remarkably quiet wheels), looked expensive, which is surely a testament to how long I’ve been locked up. A rig like that would have set one back a few thousand bucks back in my day. Since the TDCJ is currently hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars per annum from its budget so that Greg Abbott can militarize the border and bus crowds of amnesty seekers to Bluer Shores, I’m certain it would not be considered fancy by anyone currently reading these words.

“You seeing this shit?” my neighbor Chitown asked.

“Probably a PREA video,” Chainsaw remarked, which made a few people chuckle. As well they might: from this vantage, it certainly seems like Texas’ main attempt to meet the standards set by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (read: secure funding from the Federal Government) is to show videos about how raping people is A Very, Very, Very Bad Thing. Because that is surely the only brick missing from the cognitive architecture of a would-be rapist, right? Right. I’m sure we’re all relieved they made the attempt. 

“Ain’t no PREA shit, it’s Fast and Furious 9,” the trustee responded, his voice a bit muffled as he unspooled the power cord.

“Que pinche mentira, güey!” replied Flaco-G.

“I ain’t seen a movie in seven years, Smokie. You wrong for playin’,” added Flaco Taco, a man whose name was the recent, unfortunate byproduct of his having moved next door to Flaco-G. Prior to his arrival, they had both simply been Flacos, a result of the general lack of imagination inherent in the prison nickname nomenclature system. After a period of mean-mugging and the comparison of almost identically stupid facial tattoos, peace was obtained via the mechanism of a mutual rechristening. Flaco-Model-A became Flaco-G, Flaco-Model-B became Flaco Taco. The situation is made an order of magnitude more annoying by the fact that their voices are eerily alike, so it is almost impossible to tell which is speaking. 

Smokie couldn’t tell either. He gazed in the general direction of the Interchangeable Flacos for a moment before replying: “Ain’t playin’, nigga. It’s what I said.”

“If that’s a movie, I’ll eat that television.” 

“Bitch, I hopes you got all yo’ chompahs, cuz Captain T- says it’s movie night!”

Even after Smokie removed the DVD from a folder tucked into a shelf underneath the screen, even after he inserted this scintillating disc into a slot on the side of the machine – indeed, even after the menu screen popped up showing the stern visages of Vin Diesel and John Cena – even then, I didn’t believe we were actually going to watch a movie. It didn’t overly bother me that I was having to watch said movie through serial layers of chicken wire and the dayroom cage. It didn’t perturb me that the little speakers on the television were no match for the irregularly-shaped concrete auditorium in which it played, meaning that most of the dialogue was completely lost to the strange echoes that plague regular conversations here in Gehenna. It didn’t even occur to me for almost seven whole minutes that the movie was actually quite stupid; that it was, in effect, an incoherent mash-up of fancy cars regularly violating the laws of physics, fetching women attempting to out eye-candy each other (and may the gods bless them for it nevertheless), and exotic locales. Oh, and lots of explosions; mustn’t forget those. At some point, it dawned on me that it wasn’t actually necessary to understand what the characters were saying, that, in fact, the movie probably made about as much sense with words as without. Maybe this epiphany found final confirmation about the time the crew bolted a car onto the side of a rocket and launched it into space in order to… uh… kill a satellite, or something. Maybe it was when the bad guy’s obscenely and unnecessarily massive, 4,000-wheeled mobile lair gets flipped onto its roof via magnets (never mind, en avant et plus vite que ça), and then somehow manages to pick up the inertia of a neutron star and goes sliding along, mile after mile, crushing cars, and at one point a building under construction, before Vin Diesel is able to flip it around right-side up, drive it towards a cliff (a cliff located in an arid and mountainous desert – wait, weren’t we just in central London?), and only then stop it in a maneuver that manages to destroy the archvillain’s missile-wielding drone fighter jet. Okay, so not Fellini. Whatever. It was a movie. And we were watching it. Not listening to it, but still, one can’t have everything. It was easily the nicest thing the TDCJ has done for me in almost seventeen years. 

It did occur to me that over the past six months we’ve had multiple auditing teams here at Chez McConnell investigating why so many of my peers have decided to obtain early parole at the end of a rope or via illicit chemicals, and that, just maybe, this might have something to do with this surprising kindness. Again: whatever. It was a rare moment of communal enjoyment. For nearly three hours, nobody cussed out anybody else, demolishing a statewide record in place since the late Pleistocene. 

The bonhomie continued long after the television was wheeled out and into the next section. Indeed, one could say that it went on far too long. The conversation that developed over the next hour or so was, as so many things seem to me these days, both a lens and a mirror. If you’d have shown that film to a group of gearheads, the talk that followed would have been about the virtues or deficits of the various automobiles featured. If you’d shown it to fashionistas, they’d have focused on the sartorial choices of the various characters (like, maybe, how Vin Diesel manages to get shot at, blown up, punched, kicked, and burnt whilst keeping his ice-white t-shirt completely free from stains). What do you think you get if you show the same movie to criminals? Yep: crime. Not directly, I mean. First came the excited commentary regarding the “hoes” and the “whips” – the women and the cars, respectively, to you squarefolk. I think we can skip the details of said chatter – it was about what you’d expect. The following step involved the first, enthusiastic-yet-nebulous promises about how each was going to obtain similar hoes and whips upon their release, a sort of visceral screaming rejection of the steel door pressed neatly into their faces. This slowly converted into the realization that: A) hey, hoes and whips are kind of expensive, yo; which led inexorably to: B) dang, I don’t have any money; following which creeped the horrid awareness that: C) I have no professional skills commensurate with the acquisition of said moolah; which then resulted in figuratively audible explosions and the clanging of gummed up clockworks as cognitive dissonance descended en masse; which caused nearly everyone to flee in terror into the fantasy land of: D) hey, I can sell some dope! I can steal some stuff!

Problem solved!

This devolution in the conversational quality took place very quickly, as bad decisions are wont to do. I listened for a few minutes and then went and sat down on my bunk. I didn’t put my hands over my face or anything as melodramatic as all that, I promise – though, I did at least consider it when Muskrat unveiled his master plan. Having just drooled and panted his way through a copy of the latest Robb Report, he considered himself sufficiently au fait with the world of supra-half-a-million-dollar European wristwatches to decide that if he was somehow able to steal just one such horological wonder, and then also somehow manage to sell this to someone for a quarter million cash (in a darkened alley, no less; seriously, I wish I was joking, but my imagination is sufficiently advanced that I could have come up with a sexier location if I were inventing all of this), he could then buy some keys of dope, which, as we all know, is a risk-free means of becoming a millionaire. There were some muted sounds of admiration and agreement, so I’m fairly certain that I was not the only one thinking that if Muskrat went anywhere with such a timepiece and an anticipation of a suitcase stuffed full of cash, the only thing he could expect to find was a bullet. No, I kept my mouth shut, because that’s pretty much my standard MO these days, and because with Muskrat, at least, this was just talk; the moans of the poor, unwashed rummaging outside the gates of the wealthy. I figured I could get him outside and disabuse him of this fantasy, and remind him that he was making a decent paycheck helping construct residences before his arrest. I don’t know how much good this would do, because Muskrat is kind of crazy. He thinks this one guard from New Orleans is secretly harvesting kidneys and livers from inmates that sleep during the daytime, and that he is the real owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, a point which would probably come as a bit of a surprise to Jeanie Buss.  

Everyone else, though? They were serious. 

The above anecdote fits neatly into the narrative framework of my entry from this past May, Halfway to Nowhere Good. The gist of that essay was that for a significant subset of the prison population, the only major lessons we learn in these halls are ones which are antithetical to living morally decent lives once released, that this place creates and engenders the will to commit crime as a response to the levels of cruelty and indifference we experience here on a daily basis. I was hoping to show how prison encourages us to see violence as the answer to all questions, and why assigning responsibility for the behavior of ex-cons is not as simple as some would think. I wanted to illustrate how this process worked in practice, how it is constructed of a thousand small choices that individually feel moral or necessary, and yet somehow add up to its exact opposite. The essay produced some good responses from the readership, both in posted comments, rejected ones, and a pair of personal correspondences. I would like to respond to a few of these here. I have been feeling quite disconnected from this site for some time. I write and write, but it mostly feels like I am shouting into a vacuum. I hope that by directly interacting I can rekindle some of my motivational fires, so to speak. This once felt more like a community, and I’d like to have that back, if possible.

To “A Citizen”: your comment made me feel the effort spent writing the essay was worthwhile. Thank you. There is definitely a sense in which I feel a little cruel for having clobbered you in the forehead with my words. Although you readers may not know it, I seldom convey the entire reality of this place in these pages. I am not trying to hurt any of you. In Release, when I had my character Winston reference the quote by Freud about how you can judge a writer by how he treats his readers, I was channeling myself a bit more than I normally do in fiction. Sometimes I do wonder, however, if I am failing in my duty of reportage if I pull my punches. I do not know the balance here. It is one thing to report that a guy down the run slashed his wrists open a few months back (he survived). It’s another to talk about just how many times they gassed him before the nurses arrived, or how much blood dripped onto the run when they pulled him from his cell and tossed him on a stretcher, how these puddles turned black and were feasted upon by roaches for days until a trustee finally took the time to scrape the mess off the concrete. And yet it was there, this thing happened. I still think about it, I still flinch a little at the memory of the guy downstairs who shouted at the sergeant to “just go ahead and let the fucker bleed out” as the medics wheeled him off the building. What am I to do with such a memory? I can do nothing. I have no power to change anything. I can only pass along the baton and hope that you can finish the race. I feel like if we can live this set of experiences that you, society, has deemed to be acceptable, then the least you could do is hear about it. That you felt numbed by the tale makes me feel a little dirty. But it also means you still have a soul. For whatever that is worth.

TJ wrote me directly and asked when writing about events in prison is considered snitching, and if I am ever worried about using names of real convicts in these posts. The question of how to expose the goings-on here in Prison Land is one every incarcerated writer has to wrestle with, usually pretty consistently. There is a fairly objective way of answering the question – though this proves to be a starting point and not a final answer. Basically, could your article be used to get someone indicted? Written up for a disciplinary case? Harmed by other inmates if they learned of the exposed information? If you think the answer has even the tiniest chance of being answered in the affirmative, you don’t write about it, period. There are sometimes ways to generalize the main point where it can be talked about, but even then you have to be careful. You can’t talk about a specific guard that is bringing dope into the prison, for instance. You can’t write that your unit has a dope problem. Those would be snitching, and it is an example of the difference between a real journalist and whatever I am. One might be able to make the point that in an overall, structural way, most of the illegal narcotics in the system were brought in by guards, because everyone knows this, even the prison bigwigs – though they don’t like to admit it, instead blaming the problem on visitors or drones or 11-dimensional wormholes. (Okay, I made that last one up, but if things get any worse, they may end up resorting to excuses that are no more absurd than that one). It can be a very gray line, TJ. My stance is that I err on the side of caution, but that I also know I will make mistakes and there will be consequences for this. And why not? I live in a hurricane of consequences: for bad decisions made, and for good ones, because that is the way things work in times and places where morality is largely transactional or situational and the law is whatever the big man says it is. I know there is no surviving this storm as a human being, because they have mandated in Austin that survival is not an option. What are a few more consequences added to the mix? At least with these I know I was trying to do the right thing. I can look at myself in the mirror and not wince over what I do with my pencil. That’s something.

In terms of specific people I mention in these essays, I should say that at the very least I always change the names of those involved. The “Flacos” in this piece were not really called Flaco, for instance. They would almost certainly recognize themselves from my portrayal, though, since I mimicked how the second man’s name rhymed with the first and because it also consisted of a type of food. The thing about their eerily similar facial tats would have given me away if nothing else did, too, because I have made fun of both of them for this within the array of casual insults that pass for affectionate small talk here. I feel comfortable with this sort of thing because I know them both well enough to guess that if they ever came across the article, they would find the whole thing funny. Sometimes characters are actually composites of various men I have known, a sort of chimeric apotheosis of all the myriad weird behaviors found in these halls; I doubt the individual contributors to these mutant beasts would recognize themselves, but if they did, the other aspects of the character would probably convince them they were imagining things. Some are fairly faithful to character, setting, and plot, but the events reported took place years ago, and I doubt anyone but me would remember them. Then there are the rare instances where I just don’t care. The situation in “Halfway” with the necessities worker stealing our toilet paper happened exactly as I wrote it, and while I didn’t use his real nickname, he would have definitely recognized himself, no question. But since he is a spineless, bottom-dwelling lickspittle, it doesn’t really matter. If I ever get out of ad-seg and meet the guy in population, I’m confident he wouldn’t even look me in the eyes. If you are a prisoner stealing from other prisoners only because there is a steel door protecting you, you deserve whatever form of justice I can grind in your face. There have to be some standards, after all.

Actually, TJ, that’s pretty much what this all boils down to: standards. I live a certain way here. I have a code. Others see this. I don’t claim to be special or great and certainly not perfect, but how I live here, how I treat people, it gives me a smidgen of credibility. I have a bit of a cushion if I make a mistake, because people perceive me as fighting for them. They see that the administration doesn’t like what I do, and in the weird, assbackwards morality of prison, that means I’m a Good Guy. We have a saying here: Be good to the game, and the game will be good to you. I’m good to the game. It helps.

Blake wrote the following: 

“I’ve kept up with this site since the late 2010’s. I ran across it once I became curious of the day-to-days of life on death row. This was after a Nat Geo documentary. Being from Texas, our death row in particular, intrigued me. My research into the Texas death row has left me with an agnostic opinion of for or against. I believe Thomas, as well as those that have contributed to the site, have done a great deal for advocating against capital punishment. However, this site appears to have become more of a prison blog than an advocacy site. I’ve kept up with various condemned inmates that have made it off the row. Bobby Moore and Raymond Riles, in particular. Both of them being either the longest serving or one of the longest serving inmates on death row. There’s no mention of them making it off the row anywhere on this site. No mention of Clinton Youngs progress either. All that to say that I don’t follow this site to read Thomas’ ventures into literature. I don’t follow it to know about everyday prisoners lives. It should be no surprise to Thomas that his stock has dropped. He no longer means anything to the death row groupies. Ironically, the same group that gave him his notoriety has now abandoned him. Just my humble opinion; Thomas could do more good if he spotlighted the progress of those getting off the row, as well as keeping us informed of life on death row, instead if complaining about the redneck officers who are likely low income/information democratic voters.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. I think I’m just going to pass over the obviously ludicrous comment about rural Texas prison guards being “low information democratic voters,” because fruit hanging that low just has to be bait. Instead, I’ll start with the simple statement that I never realized this site was ever considered to be an “advocacy site” rather than a prison weblog. I always thought it was the latter, never pretended it was anything other than a place for people in prison to write about what they have witnessed here. Maybe I’m guilty of trying to make MB6 seem a bit more highbrow than it really is by calling it a “literary journal for incarcerated artists” and sometimes referring to something found “in these pages” or written by “your correspondent”. I do this because I’m staring across a cheap Chinese typewriter that was built to break down; beyond that, I have a concrete wall covered in paint that is flaking off, followed by a door coated in rust, followed by fourteen human beings who are being broken down into their component parts and reassembled into a type of monster that would have made Dr Moreau blush. Of course I yearn for a bit of sophistication, culture. Also, it amuses me a little that this site has managed to survive for fifteen years, when even someone as illustrious as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe couldn’t keep his journals Die Horen and Propyläen in circulation for even a tiny percentage of that time. Anyways, is there a political or ideological message interwoven through many of these articles? Naturally. Jane Austen wrote all of her books in the midst of Napoleon’s various wars and never said a single solitary word about any of them. I’m not Austen, clearly. This place consumes me, more and more of me, every day. Like nearly everyone who has ever posted on the site, I hope that the information contained in my contributions will cause you to modify your present positions on prison reform, crime and punishment, mercy, freewill and determinism, etc. I hope this because I have seen great evil here, evil done in the guise of justice, evil that whispers in your ear that it’s actually not evil simply because of who it targets – and I feel this is self-defeating. But ultimately that is up to you. I’m mystified about how you could have perceived this site as anything other than what it so obviously is. 

You wrote that you think I could do more good if I “spotlighted the progress of those getting off the row, as well as keeping us informed of life on death row”. I actually appreciated the advice here, because I am still clearly searching for my function in this place, the work that I am capable of performing that is beneficial to myself and others. Unfortunately, your suggestions just aren’t possible for me at the moment, and even if they were, I can’t see the utility in part of your request. To clarify: I am still in solitary confinement. My world consists of a very small box. I have no ability to write about anything other than that which is purely imaginary or whatever happens to take place literally right in front of me. When I was on death row, I could write about it with some authority, because I was up to my neck in the psychological, sociological, legal, and material issues that confronted us there. I’m glad you found some value in that, but my current view of the world is distinct. They do not even allow me to correspond with the guys at Polunsky. How could I, several hundred miles away, give you any kind of accurate reporting on those issues?

I admit to some confusion about exactly why you found some value in my work, however. It doesn’t seem to have impacted you morally, since you remain agnostic about the death penalty. If you don’t seem concerned about the big issue here, I don’t really understand why you care about the smaller ones regarding conditions on death row or what anyone is doing who is no longer confined there. The number of human beings impacted by capital punishment is very small. Obviously, to the condemned and their families, it is a huge issue. But to the average citizen, we hardly matter: our dreams, our loves, our regrets, our traumas – the collected human feelings of a couple of thousand prisoners nationally doesn’t really touch upon the lives of many of you out there. What you are asking for regarding the handful of guys who have escaped the needle is even less relevant. This amounts to what exactly, Blake? It kind of looks like mere voyeurism from here. Why, precisely, do you feel you’re entitled to know what, say, Bobby Moore happens to be doing at the moment? How is that your business? The man paid his debt. The courts decided this. He’s a private citizen now, to the best of my knowledge. That’s what you get to know. Who are you to be so privileged that you deserve more? On the other hand, the circumstances I reported on in “Halfway” ought to be of vastly more importance to you, because the training/grooming I was writing about has a far higher chance of actually touching upon your life directly. The statistics vary a little each year, but something like 95% of the people currently in prison are going to be released one day; the same can be said about almost no one on death row. How these prisoners are treated, the habits they develop, the philosophies and politics they learn in these halls, all are going to directly determine how they respond to the rest of you once they are out. This is common sense. Prisoners are no different in this regard than any other humans: past is prologue, right? Who you are is the sum total of the experiences of where you come from. How is this not relevant or of interest to you?

Unfortunately, in the time between my penning of “Halfway” and this current article, reality has provided me with a gruesome object lesson. On 12 May, a Texas prison inmate named Gonzalo Lopez escaped from a prison transport bus, remained on the lam for three weeks, before killing an elderly man and his four grandchildren, apparently for their vehicle. Sometime later and hundreds of miles away, Lopez got into a firefight with police and was killed. You may have heard about the story. Here is a relatively decent description of the events from NBC News.

So: bad guy, right? No question. The purpose of “Halfway” was to encourage you to think deeper, to understand that how someone like Lopez was treated in prison is a part of his story – a vital part, I think, a deterministic part. Perhaps some of you noted this peculiar comment in the NBC article’s fourth paragraph: 

“Lopez, who was being driven to a medical appointment, had been placed in a separate caged area because of security concerns, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has said.”

That thing about Lopez being placed in a separate caged area? The reporters handed this data didn’t know what this meant. You probably don’t either. We do, though: this means Lopez was in ad-seg. When you get into one of the white prison Bluebird buses, there are two internal cages: one in the back for general population inmates, and a second smaller one in the front for those from ad-seg. Nowhere else in the article is it even hinted at that Lopez might not have been a regular prisoner. This was never reported on in any of the articles I read or heard about on the radio. It’s just not something reporters understand needs to be asked of public officials. The TDCJ is certainly not going to offer this sort of thing up voluntarily. Why? Because such information begins to explain Lopez’s radical actions. They know this. They don’t want his actions explained. It serves their interests for you to be baffled by how anyone could be so rotten – so that they can get away with doing anything they want under the guise of protecting the public. Whatever they say, they know that sometimes this is what happens when you lock a social primate in a cage for years on end and effectively forget about him. Again, this is common sense: when someone intentionally withholds information from you, what does this mean? It means some form of deception is at play. See this. Do not let them get away with it. And that goes for actual reporters out there. Getting background on a recidivist is absolutely essential if you are genuinely attempting to explain how violence happens. If you read an article talking about an ex-convict being arrested for a new crime but see no reference to how they were previously housed, I want little red lights to start going off in your heads, because you are missing information necessary to understand this person’s actions. 

I don’t know how long Lopez was in ad-seg. I’ve come across six men who claim to have known him. I questioned these prisoners separately for this essay. I believe that five of the six absolutely knew him; I can’t really tell with the last, if what he knows is simply rumor or if he had actual contact with Lopez. Various details did synch up in all of these testimonials, including the use of a pair of nicknames that were never disclosed in the media. There were some descriptions of a fairly idiosyncratic behavioral trait that three remembered, and it seems to me the chances of three of these men independently fabricating this have to approach zero. At least four years seems to be as far as I’m willing to go in terms of certainty, because four of the six men I spoke with seemed to hover around this number in their own recollections. A fifth said he thought they’d been together in 2016, the last 2012. I can’t verify any of this, but it is at least possible that due to Lopez’s gang affiliation, he’d been in ad-seg since his conviction in 2006. I claim this as a possibility – maybe even a likelihood – because membership in certain prison families automatically places one in ad-seg, and Lopez seems to have been a member of one of these so-called Security Threat Groups. Had Gang Intelligence known of his affiliation, placement in ad-seg would have been automatic. Since the media reported on this connection, they had to have gotten this data from the TDCJ, ergo, his membership was indeed known to the system. Meaning Lopez may very well have spent as much time in ad-seg as I have.

It is of course impossible to say with total certainty that Lopez’s stay in solitary confinement caused his behavior during the escape, just as it is difficult to say with total certainty that climate change caused a specific hurricane to become stronger. What you can say at the very least is that in both cases, the contextual factors surrounding the event – years deprived of human contact or warm surface ocean temperatures – likely played a significant factor. I have now completed sixteen years in ad-seg: six months in the county jail and fifteen and a half years in the TDCJ; that is roughly 38% of my life. This unfortunate wealth of experience suggests to me very strongly that had Lopez been treated differently, six people would not have died in early-June. I have zero doubts about the fact that if you could but spend a single month back here with me, you too would completely understand this point. Try this: I want you to pause for a moment and think about your day. Who did you interact with? How many conversations did you have? How many steps did you take? What distance did you travel from your bed this morning? Did you feel the wind on your face? See a tree? Wave to a neighbor as you walked to your car? How many times did you interact with the broader world via your smartphone? Did you receive love? Did you laugh? Now eliminate all of that. Instead, you interacted with hardly anyone save for a few mentally deranged lunatics or swaggering guards barely out of high school. You never moved more than three steps from your bed. You have not felt or seen a tree or spoke with distant people in years. You cannot remember what love felt like, nor thought about laughing in ages. All you feel is pain and misery and a rising hatred. In Lopez’s case, there would have been no end to this, since he was serving a life sentence. When you take all hope, meaning, kindness, love, dignity, purpose, and connection away from a social creature like man, what do you get? You get a man willing to do just about anything to escape, anything to remain free, including killing a grandfather and four kids – and ultimately himself. You get exactly what happened. 

You also get a crowd of ex-felons returning home, hearts festering with the same species of desperate rage that powered Lopez. One emailer contacted the site in the wake of “Halfway” to mock me for “bitching”. Bro, that article wasn’t about me – it was about you, it was for you. I know you think you are tough, what with the cloak of anonymity and open carry laws seeming to swaddle you. These people I’m talking about? They won’t be impressed. This place teaches you to sniff out weakness, both in yourself and others. You think you are a tiger; many men do. Then you go strutting into the jungle and find out the truth: you are dinner. I was trying to warn you. The State will allow me to have no other function, so I’m volunteering as the canary in the coal mine. Don’t be obtuse. The least you could do is notice when we keel over. Look. Listen.

The question I asked at the end of “Halfway” was for people like you: do you get what you deserve when one of these men returns back to you? I don’t think so. I’m not that far gone. I don’t wish vengeance on anyone but my younger self. But I do understand the argument. It’s all about consequences, after all. Society makes choices, it sows its seeds. And then it reaps them. Remember my earlier description of the Sucker’s Folly? You rightly desire justice. You see some punk on the news accused of burglary or rape or tax evasion, and you think: away with him, then. You turn a blind eye to the circumstances of just what “away” means – the fact that this person is now out of sight is your short-term benefit. You are not regularly presented with recidivism statistics, you are seldom if ever given details on how a newly recidivist detainee was treated during their previous stay in prison, and you are never told if they served time in solitary confinement. Your view of your risks and long-term costs are completely obscured. It’s just too simple to read about Gonzalo Lopez and say: he was a bad apple. Ask instead how he got built, what rotted him. The next time you hear a story about an ex-con doing something horrible, I want that question to pop into your heads, and then I want you to keep asking it until the point finally clicks into place that maybe, just maybe, you ought to be thinking seriously about how none of this recidivism is inevitable or accidental, about how choices made from laziness, politics, and a desire for cruelty impact upon your long-term safety. Don’t just say good riddance. That’s a far too convenient epitaph to be etched on our headstones. In any case, as Lopez showed, sometimes we don’t get buried alone. Our graves are sometimes your own. 

Under normal conditions, I would have ended this essay on that somber note, but I want to circle back to Blake’s comment that I ‘no longer mean anything to the death row groupies’. I don’t think that is fair to the handful of people who still write me. They are not groupies. Neither were the people who ultimately faded out of my life since my commutation. Some of this paring was clearly my fault. Maybe all of it. This place and my extended stay in solitary have weighed on me; I cannot imagine that I have been much fun of late. Also, I don’t think I handled one aspect of my commutation very well. Once my execution date was set in early November 2017, I was dismayed to find that some people I thought of as friends never wrote me to commiserate. This was in stark contrast to others who wrote me immediately, the ones who rolled up their sleeves and put their hands to work. I waited a few months in some cases for some sign of solidarity, or even just mere presence, before I finally wrote them. In some sense, all I was looking for was for them to ask a simple question: what can be done about this? My answer would have been: nothing, we already have a plan in place, but thank you for asking. The fact that many never asked soured things for me. The analogy I kept coming back to in my head went something like this: if I were dying of cancer in a hospital somewhere, what would I have thought of my so-called friends who never visited to say goodbye? I’d have thought that they were not really friends. Showing up at least once seemed like the bare minimum of what one would do if one cared about the person dying in that bed. I think I let my principles get the better of my empathy, because I pretty much cut these people off. I did this once I started to figure out that I had a whole new fight ahead of me regarding my classification that I had not anticipated. I told myself that I was too tired to carry the weight of those people, that I needed to associate with those tough enough to keep up and carry their own baggage. I write these words and some part of me still mutters, “Amen, bro; amen.” And yet I do regret my lack of sensitivity. Being friends (or whatever we were) with someone in the process of being murdered is not easy. I should have been kinder. And they should have been tougher and more demonstrative. And so it goes. Inside/outside friendships have never been easy.

Blake was definitely right in saying that my “stock” has dropped; it certainly feels that way, at least. It isn’t always easy to count the reasons why any prisoner would want to consider penning articles about this place. They seem to all but evaporate once mailed out, hard work turned ephemeral in the time it takes to close the envelope. This is about the time of year when I ask you, the readership, to pitch in a little cash to help us meet our operating costs, which is really code for: please do something, anything, to validate all of this work. It is befuddling to me that even after years of telling you about Amazon’s ‘Smile Program’, hardly anyone has taken up this offer on our behalf. To reiterate, this program shaves a percentage off of your regular purchases on that site and gives this money to whatever registered non-profit you choose. It costs you nothing, nada, zilch. The percentage comes from Amazon’s revenues. The process takes hardly any time at all. (Again, the website is https://smile.amazon.com/, and our non-profit number is 82-3422504.) Please consider helping with this. We’ve brought you our site on a shoestring budget, so just imagine what we could do with a few thousand dollars a year. That sounds like a lot, I know. But we could get there pretty easily if just twenty percent of you regular readers signed up.

I want to go a bit beyond that this year, however. I occasionally think about some of the great writers we’ve had on our site who were driven into retirement simply because they never received any incentive to keep pressing pencil to paper; I think about my own temptations in this regard. I’m hoping that some of you will step forward and get a bit more involved in the lives of some of these writers. If you click on an artist’s or author’s name linked below their photograph at the bottom of a post of theirs, or look them up on our Contributors page, this will take you to their biography. Many of our contributors post links to their personal websites, or other projects that they are involved with. Locate your internal comfort level, then help, get involved. Otherwise, why are you here? Why keep coming back to this site? If criminal justice reform matters to you, stop waiting on the State or someone else to do something, move beyond mere witnessing and become a participant. It’s taken me a long time to realize that witnessing solves nothing. This is a conceit that literature sold me for years, but it is nothing but a pleasant fiction. Progress, like faith, is dead without works.