To exist in prison is to live forever in a state of imbalance. Every detail of your daily life is controlled by others, so almost everything shifts and morphs according to the agendas, whims, or traumas of the particular set of correctional officers currently on shift. Sure, there is policy, but as is so often the case when Leviathan is snoozing, the rules really boil down to interpretation. Many of my peers feel that this regime of unease is an entirely intentional act of hostility, something meticulously crafted to create misery and keep those of us in white perpetually on the back foot. I disagree. Like all large organizations, the TDCJ doesn’t do meticulous very well, and the administration is neither that evil nor intelligent. Rather, much like Einstein’s eternally descending turtles, indifference locked in a passionate embrace with laziness is the root of the problem here, all the way to the bottom. Somewhere along the line, some screw took a short cut. Nobody protested, so the next shift copied the action; again nobody complained (or complained forcefully enough), and eventually a habit developed and a min-max point was reached: the most efficient point on the graph where the X-axis is the minimum amount of work on the part of the guards needed to maintain the basic functions of the prison and the Y-axis is the level of compliance of a majority of the inmates.
Take showers. On a redbrick unit like Ellis, there are no showers on the wings. Instead, the facility has two large rooms filled with rows of nozzles and all the varieties of mold a budding botanist could hope for. Decades ago, it became practice to start showering the wings at 2am. Why? Maybe there once was a round of showers before the earliest field squad was marched out to pick cotton, back when that was a thing, and maybe some random night shift captain decided to expand the list of when the other wings had access. Or maybe the day shift got tired of doing most of the work and lobbied for something to be shifted to a spot on the schedule before they showed up. Whatever the reason, it is now taken as normal that the maximum number of hours slept without an interruption is roughly four, from 10:30pm to 2am. This, of course, is if you are fortunate enough to have a relatively quiet section. Since the front of the cells on one of the older units consists only of bars, you tend to hear pretty much everything — and I do mean everything. The nights do not belong to the better angels of our natures, here in god’s blind spot.
Your wake-up call always consists of an officer screaming from the hallway. Like many prisons in Texas, Ellis has a large complement of African guest workers, mostly, but not exclusively, from Nigeria. I’m not sure why this is exactly, but the percentage of non-citizens is always much higher at night, to the point where you are far more likely to hear guards speaking in Yoruba than English once the sun goes down. (For the record, if you wanted to make a very telling point about the state of the modern prison, you could do worse than contemplating on the fact that these environments are so awful for employees that in order to maintain staff levels sufficient to continue operations, the system must fly in planes full of people from 10,500 km away. Imagine hearing that the IRS or NHS was so operated. You’d demand changes, wouldn’t you?) This has led to an amusing circumstance that, I admit, perplexed me greatly on my first morning. Since “shower” and “chow” sound very much alike when shouted by someone with a strong West African accent, the guards have had to come up with alternative phrasing in order to prevent confusion. “Soap and water” (sooohp an waatah!” was very common, as was “geet reed of you stinkee aahs!”
Somehow, nobody had bothered to inform me of this schedule the previous afternoon, a point which I did not greet with equanimity on that first, torn-from-a-hard-won-sleep morning. I stumbled, bleary-eyed and keyed-up, from the cell when the door slammed open. As I explained in [Part 2 link to https://minutesbeforesix.com/wp/transitionish-part-2/], getting out of the cell is only the first leg in one’s itinerary. Once all three rows had been released, the thirty or forty of us with predilections for cleanliness would be required to wait for the duty captain to release our wing for movement. If we were lucky, we might only be delayed for ten or fifteen minutes. Alas, we were not a terribly fortunate set of prisoners, which is one reason why so many of my fellow program participants chose instead to bathe in the cell with cups and hand towels.
The stroll to the showers took only a few minutes. At the entrance, an inmate will hand you a piece of emerald-green state soap. These bars are roughly the dimensions of a domino, though perhaps a millimeter or three less in depth. The room itself was rectangular. To the left one finds a large, metal mesh partition, which runs from the ceiling to the life-stained tile floors. Behind this works the shower staff, which consists mostly of other prisoners. Years of having to look at naked humans all day long has engendered a creative solution. Except for a narrow, horizontal gap that runs parallel to the counter line, cardboard boxes have been cut into sections and attached to the mesh with string, blocking all view. This means that if you wanted to exchange boxers, socks, or jumpsuits, one had to bend at the waist and yell under the partition. Clean towels would be handed out three times a week as we filed out.
The middle of the space contained a set of wooden shelves that were used by the bathers to store towels and clothing. This was also a handy spot for the smokers to raid for unattended loot, so you had to keep an eye on what one left behind. I saw at least a dozen fights over this type of theft. Something would go missing, and then a few days later the victim would notice someone wearing a T-shirt (or whatever) that looked oddly familiar being worn by someone else. Cue the threats, and then fingers would be pointed at the smoker who sold them the pilfered goods. Nobody ever got away with this sort of thing, but such is the power of K2 that people are willing to receive a delayed beating just so they can get a joint.
Behind the shelves were the showers themselves. Picture an open space. Bisecting this were six stainless steel beams, each perhaps seven feet off the floor and supported by metal pillars. Along both sides of these beams were the shower heads: five facing one way, five the other. Simple enough, right? This layout unfortunately requires the rapid development of a curious behavior. You obviously need to use your eyeballs to bathe. On top of that, this is prison — you need to be constantly vigilant in watching what is going on around you. Although I only witnessed two fights in the shower during my almost seven months in the program, that is hindsight data. From the perspective of daily living, where at any moment some delinquent could decide to take out their ire on you for any kind of stupid reason, one has to exist in the space where the possibility of violence is always lurking just around the corner. Because of the placement of another showerhead exactly opposite — not to mention the other lines laid out behind this — you are going to be looking directly at another naked man. Which (this) one doesn’t particularly want to do. So, aware, but also blind, which is obviously an impossibility, one that nevertheless must be attempted. This isn’t exactly new. Prisoners are often required to contend with impossible contradictions before breakfast on a regular basis.
One of the two fights I mentioned was due to a particular inmate spending a bit too much time dragging his eyes across another’s anatomy. It didn’t help that this person was a self-professed homosexual, or, frankly, a sex offender. (It also didn’t help that he was also a Thomas. On more than one occasion I had to correct people when they mentioned him, insisting they refer to him by his nickname. That insistence probably saved me more than a bit of trouble, given the messiness of the rumor mill in this circus.) Texas prisons are not known for the liberality of their penal practices, nor the ideologies of those who live and work here, and anti-LGBTQ attitudes are unfortunately quite prevalent. I don’t truly know whether this guy was getting in a little surreptitious ogling; I only know that one of my peers believed this and splattered his victim’s blood all over the walls and floor before security arrived. I wasn’t even going to include this anecdote in this series, but for something I noticed in my journal. I apparently left out the most interesting point of the whole unfortunate business, something I thought about occasionally afterwards. As the events were unfolding, there were people that didn’t even bother to stop their ablutions. They were monitoring developments, of course. One older cat even muttered, “shit, go get you some, youngster”. But unlike the rest of us that paired off with a homeboy or hit a wall, perhaps a quarter of the men just continued on, as if another human being wasn’t in the process of having his skull cracked. I wondered how much violence a person would have to witness before such things became so commonplace that they no longer warranted even pausing to set the soap down. I’ve commented before on many occasions that the prison environment selects for antisocial traits, that people become sociopaths as an adaptation that maximizes safety and survival. Can anyone explain to me why this is desired? Do you not understand that the vast, vast majority of all incarcerated peoples in this nation are going to be returning to you, one day? Would you want to share a bus with someone that felt so little horror over a brutal beating that they couldn’t be bothered to pause the process of washing their feet? Unless something changes, that is what you are getting. Don’t claim you weren’t warned.
It certainly bothered me. It bothered me that it happened, that none of us stopped it — that I didn’t stop it, because I have been trained to “mind my own business”, that this has become equivalent to a virtue in my personal moral calculus. It bothered me that people seemed to think that the “faggot” got what he deserved. It bothered me that this event was regularly joked about, even after the victim was returned to us two days later, fresh from a sojourn to the local hospital. And it bothers me that I can’t figure out how to write about this sort of thing in a way that doesn’t make me feel like a coward or like the asymptomatic carrier of a disease. Depiction may not be endorsement, but it sure does feel like propitiation. There was a time when I believed that if something could be described sufficiently, it could be made harmless. I still toy with the idea of writing as a kind of vaccination against unpleasantness. I think I may be too old to believe in such fairy tales — but what great emptiness would rush in to fill their shape if they disappeared?
If there was anything I enjoyed about the showers it was the pipes. I struggle a little to find the most pleasing way to describe the amazingly chaotic jumble of hydrological tubery that ran exposed from one end of the room’s ceiling to the other. It was an absolute spiderweb of copper, steel, iron (yep, we’re using iron pipes in the TDCJ, for some imbecilic reason), PVC, and other assorted metallic or metal-adjacent gadgetry, a creaking, moaning, dripping testament to the power of accumulated amateur tinkering. Many of these extensions didn’t even connect to anything. I’m assuming they were the detritus of antiquated, replaced systems. The really interesting aspect of the plumbing was the many twists, turns, and loop-de-loops that some of the pipery took to reach the far wall. Most of them meandered along a unique path along all three dimensions, jutting this way and that, as if the maintenance guys had been drunk or philosophically opposed to the idea that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. It was as if the state had adhered nothing but joints in lieu of anything that ran straight for more than a foot or two, and the lads had been forced to make do. There had once been what I presume was a steam system for a now-departed piece of machinery, and some natural gas pipelines that were wrapped in ohmigod-that-looks-like-fifty-year-old-asbestos insulation. Since looking upwards was one of the few safe places to plant my eyeballs while I bathed, I spent a lot of time tracing various pipes along each one’s idiosyncratic pathway. I’d have drawn you a picture, but it probably wouldn’t have been a good look for others to see me posted up in the showers with a drawing pad and a pencil. One demolished Thomas was already too many, to my way of thinking.
It wasn’t all blood and chaos in the CITP. Two weeks after my arrival I got to go outside to the rec yard. This was the first time I had been outside without a screen or bars separating me from the sky in nineteen years. The line filing out the door was painfully slow. I’m not the conspiratorial, paranoid sort, but it almost felt like the sergeant tasked with shaking us down was taking his sweet time just to spite me. I eventually made it outside and stood there, blinking like the pale subterranean creature I had become.
The yard itself was a long rectangle, the dimensions roughly 20 meters by maybe 80. There was enough space for a half-sized basketball court, some benches, and, because this is prison and certain cliches simply must be adhere to, a handball court. None of that was what had me doing cartwheels inside my head, however. No, that was the grass. I had not touched anything green and growing in a very, very long time. I regularly dream of trees, of creeks, of mountains. I do not know how many times I have found myself a bit lost in the magic cast by an advertisement in a magazine, because behind the product or service being hawked there sat a lovely fern or oak. I used to feel embarrassed by this yearning, like it was evidence of some species of softness or strangeness. I remember being profoundly impacted when the warden removed the azalea bushes that used to line the walkway leading from 12-Building to Michael Unit’s visitation room. I couldn’t touch them, the grassy embankment being separated from the walkway by chain link fencing, but still: they were a splash of color in a dungeon so dominated by grayscale that it sometimes felt like someone had sucked all of the cones out of my eyeballs. (When I asked the guards escorting me to my visit why they had been cut down, one told me that the warden claimed there was “too much life” in the previous layout. I knew what he meant, that there were too many spots for the inside yard trustees to hide things. But of course, I also saw an additional message, given all of the death that has so dominated my prison experience.)
I guess I must have gotten over this shame. It’s not weird to be affected by a complete lack of access to nature. We didn’t evolve to live in barren concrete tombs. I now know I am not the only prisoner to have felt this way. I recall reading the following lines from Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” and thinking, I’ll be damned, that’s exactly it:
But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison air[semicolon]
The shard, the pebble, and the flint,
Are what they give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man’s despair.
I’m not sure what I looked like as I walked the perimeter of the yard, blinking at that huge burny thingie that hung in the sky. I was trying harder than normal not to look like a goofball, but what I really wanted to do was take my shirt off and roll around in all of that green. Given that I have enough oddities to worry about, I settled for finding a spot near the corner and merely removed my shoes and socks. I sat, enjoying the sun and the light breeze. We have only a very brief period of comfortable spring weather in Texas before summer shoulders its way into the room and proceeds to pummel us into periods of aestivation. It was, as far as prison moments go, nearly perfect. I tried to share it with far too many people that no longer had the ability to experience anything.
The icing on the cake was a brief visit by a bee. This is the second time this has happened to me in prison; the first was many years ago, when I was still on death row. Just like in that previous memory, the little thing landed on my knee as I sat there and spent a few minutes picking its way through the hair on my calf. It kept doing this thing where it appeared to touch its head to my skin, like it was tasting the salt left behind by my sweat. I don’t know if that is a thing — what do I know about bees? Do they even have tongues? Whatever it was doing, it felt like I was given a connection to something vast, something untroubled by decades of guilt, of violence and incompetence and need, something that was here long before our species took such solipsistic notice of itself and will be here long after we finally make our much-deserved exit from the stage. It felt like being human again, if only for a few moments.
My little communion with Spinoza’s god had not gone unnoticed. I received a few knowing glances from men walking the perimeter of the yard. Prisoners gossip like TMZ hosts, so it had made the rounds that I had spent considerably longer in the hole than most. I hope their smiles were a form of solidarity. They could have meant something else. I keep telling people that you pretty much find whatever you are looking for in life, so I’ll go with a touch of optimism if only because it makes me feel better.
I often have need of such things. Mother Prison is a cruel parent. For every gift of a visit by a friendly pollinator, she hits you with a riot. Population has provided me with many firsts of late, some of them quite nice. This wasn’t. It happened on my second trip outside. The circumstances that started the altercation were actually pretty banal. The Hispanic guy was drunk and was apparently dissatisfied with a transaction that he had conducted with an African-American neighbor. In his inebriated state, Pablo forgot what turned out to be a rather salient point, which was that his intended victim was a Blood. Within seconds, he had five guys practicing their boxing game on him, which caused a number of other Hispanics to drop the handball and join the fray. The whole thing didn’t last that long. Security showed up within maybe two minutes, but by that point Pablo was examining the limitless expanses of unconsciousness, and the shot-callers for the various races had separated most of the pugilists. Nine men were ultimately cuffed up and escorted away. That would have been the end of the ugly business, save that a shank was found in the grass near where nurses were crouching over the instigator. Apparently Pablito had attempted to remove it from his shorts once he realized he was getting cliqued on, but had been so deep in his cups one of his attackers had taken it right out of his hand and tossed it away. You could see the attitude of the twenty or so officers on the yard shift, a sort of limbic resonance wave rippling outward from the point of the yard where a captain was kneeling over and putting something long and thin into an evidence bag. One by one, we were stripped naked and searched, right there in the middle of the yard, before being led back to the wing by a pair of officers.
The classes for the CITP were the center of the hub of our wing’s schedule, and everything else revolved around them. Every Monday through Thursday, one group of roughly twenty men would march out of the section at 6:30am; we would not see them again until around noon. In the afternoon, a second pack of men would do the same. There was only one pair of classes on Friday, so that was the hole in the schedule where outside rec was slotted in. Commissary competed with this, unfortunately, so the sergeants would alternate the weeks: one Friday we’d go to store, the next we’d go outside. Sun every fourteen days — that was a luxury I hadn’t experienced since I was free, so I wasn’t complaining, though I guess it would have been nice if we’d had the staff necessary to run rec on the weekends.
Actually, physically walking to commissary was a new experience for me. In seg, the process involves filling out a list of desired items, known as an SO-0007 form, the evening before. Officers would pick up these forms sometimes during the night, and the goodies would be delivered in carts the following afternoon. In most units where I’ve done time, an “out of stock list” would be handed around, which is supposed to detail the items currently unavailable. These are often out of date, so while I think we appreciated the concept, these lists had less utility than they sound. What the set up in seg means in practice is that one never really knows what one is going to get until the carts roll though the door. Yet another good reason not to get into debt with people, to my way of thinking.
At Ellis, our program was released one floor at a time, usually starting around 6am. I admit I was a little surprised to hear what the sergeant was screaming when he announced store for my first trip. You may have read in these pages that someone was referred to as a “catch out”. This is a term that describes a prisoner that requests to be moved from one area of the prison to another, based off a perceived threat to their safety. A massive percentage of these people are trying to skate on a debt, usually one accrued through the consumption of narcotics. This tactic was lamentably common in the CITP. Literally every single trip down the hall, at least one or two of my peers failed to return to the wing. They’d make the journey with the rest of us, as if nothing was amiss. You could usually tell who they owed money to, as this person would be hovering about, tracking their clients. (What kind of drug dealer fronts dope, you might ask? Apparently, all of them. This system is so saturated with this poison that in order to maintain market share, the dealers are handing this stuff out weeks before they can receive payment. Call it an attempt at customer satisfaction.) Somewhere along the hallway, they’d peel away from the group, find an officer, and claim a need for protection. The cuffs would be whipped out and deployed, and the catch out would be taken to lock up. This entire process required actual work on the part of the staff, which naturally annoys the typical CO. Thus, the content of Sergeant B’s proclamation: “Commissary! Commissary starting on 3-row! Get yo bags and IDs! If you owe that, pay that! I ain’t doin no motherfucking paperwork today! Ain’t nobody catchin out! I’ll whip you my own self if I have to take anyone to F-line today!” That was clearly wishful thinking on his part, perhaps because of how futile he knew his desires to be: as I said, we’d lose one each store day, and that day was no different. Those of us attempting to make light of a grim problem started taking bets on which of the dope fiends would vanish next. My horse won regularly. I was markedly better at this than I was at any other kind of betting, alas.
The men actually going to commissary and not attempting to pull a Houdini would carry bags or one of their sheets down past the chow hall, continue through the central control area where the administration’s offices were located, and past the door for visitation. There, one would find a small window. Through this one would hand over their SO forms, and a free world employee would list off the items to their inmate staff. These men would then scurry about, grabbing items off shelves and handing them to their boss to be scanned. The goods would then be tossed out the window. You had to set your bag up in just such a way as to catch the loot, lest everything end up skidding past you onto the floor. The big benefit to standing in line and interacting with the actual workers is that if commissary didn’t have an item in stock, you could in many cases find a substitution. This really helps when you have plans with multiple people to put together a spread, as it mostly eliminates instances where meals had to be postponed until the next store day because somebody in the group wasn’t capable of fulfilling their obligations.
The process of waiting in line could take hours. That I know the basic order in which hallways went, and where, at specific hours, or which workers left this wing or that at certain times, is largely due to the mornings I spent with my back to the wall, mental camcorder running the tape. This time also gave me ample opportunity to study what was clearly one of the most absurd murals I have ever seen in prison. Now, I’ve seen some doozies over the years, given the combination of a surplus of large expanses of empty wall space and a complete lack of artistic sensibility in the correctional mindset. Near the top of the list for absolute ridiculousness is the image covering fifteen feet of space near 12-control at the McConnell Unit. You know that famous photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal from World War II of the Marines on Iwo Jima, lifting the American flag? The McConnell image is an attempt at replication, except in place of the soldiers, you had TDCJ guards in full Extraction Team armor, and the Stars and Stripes had been replaced with the Texas flag. One of the female officers has her helmet off, and she can be seen gazing adoringly upwards towards the Lone Star.
Only slightly worse than this is the mural painted on the hallway wall near the juncture for C- and D-Pods. This consisted of a massive goon squad helmet, ten feet by eight. I can’t recall the exact wording, but the accompanying quote went something like: “The devil told me I would not be able to resist the storm. I screamed at him that I am the storm.” With a mentality like that, is it any wonder there is so much violence in seg?
So, obviously, the bar for (un)intentional (?) godawfulness is set pretty high (low? Living this close to absurdity’s asymptote scrambles the meaning of normal words). The unit artist at Ellis had nevertheless made a valiant attempt, and his submission to the journal of the Annals of Awful Art is painted on a piece of sheet metal that runs along the top of the crash gate that bisects the main hallway right in front of the commissary window. The left side of the image is dominated by a stern-faced officer pulling back the curtain of an American flag. The entire image is rendered in black, white, and gray, with the exception being that one of the thirteen normally red and white stripes has been replaced with a blue one — a single, dominant blue line. Get it? Of course you do. The guard himself was central casting Nazi warrior: cleft chin, Teutonic brow, blond hair, piercing oh-so-dead eyes. He stares disdainfully at we delinquents as if to say: “I know what you lot are about — and there will be consequences”. To the right of Herr Sturmtruppen is a large guntower, with razor-wire fencing extending to the right and left. Behind this in the middle-distance sprout three other guard towers like mushrooms after a steady rain: tower after tower, forever and ever, Amen.
My immediate response to things like this is to assume that the artist — who was a prisoner, after all — was having a bit of fun turning the iconography of the administration back upon his oppressors. I mean, surely, not even the guardiest guard in the history of prison guards ever imagined a paradise of eternal fencing and towers, right? (Uh…right? I think?) I snorted when I pulled up to commissary and took it in for the first time. The guy standing in line behind me asked what was so funny, and the conversation that developed with him and a few of the other guys led me to believe that perhaps there was no intentional irony at all, that maybe my detector for such things needs to be recalibrated. In fact, I’m not sure these images seem to spur much in the way of critical thought at all. I hesitate to put thoughts — or subtract them, as it were — in or from the heads of an entire class of people, but I didn’t find anyone in my wing that gave these murals any kind of attention. Maybe they were so beaten down by the sheer numbing number of them that their individual power was diluted to the point of impotency, or perhaps my peers are made of sterner stuff than I when it comes to automatically resisting the power of propaganda. Or maybe I just have an instinctual disliking for such art, in the same way that visible and ostentatious clothing labels used to turn me off. There may be something to this last. I have a good friend that was forced to relocate from Hong Kong a few years ago due to the security laws being forced on the city from the mainland, and she sent me a small library of books on recent Chinese history. I had the same visceral response to the murals at Ellis as I did to seeing photographs of the many, many awful slogans hung from every conceivable surface during the Cultural Revolution (“Crush all kinds of constraints and subversive plots of revisionism!” “Revolutionary committees are good!” “Such-and-such-poor-bastard is a mere fifty meters away from the capitalists!” Wretch. These aren’t that much worse than some of the tripe used in our last election, but that’s a whole other essay, I think….)
As I wrote in Episode 2 of this series, life in population is really about finding an additional set of options beyond what is available in the cell or amidst the comprehensive calamity that constitutes life in the dayroom. Unfortunately, the wardens at Ellis didn’t seem to be in a hurry to speed us through the program or provide much in the way of alternatives. Although CITP participants spent, on average, less than two weeks at the Ramsey Unit waiting for placement in the official classes, I would not begin them until 17 June — a full two and a half months after my arrival. I knew many men whose wait was closer to four.
This state of affairs befuddled me. I can’t claim to have felt frustration, exactly, not at first. After so many years of anticipating a release from the hole, I don’t think frustration or anger or any of their confederates could have found me with a map and a compass. But it did seem to me to be seriously counterproductive to structure a program in such a way that the dropout rate regularly exceeded fifty percent. That is not an exaggeration. We lost people every week, including seven people that didn’t even manage to make it twenty-four hours — two didn’t make it a single hour before they were getting beaten up. I lost track of the participants that failed to make it to their one-month mark. At first this was merely a data point, an unfortunate set of statistics that became increasingly difficult to ignore morally. As I got to know the men and heard their stories, my level of engagement naturally rose, and seeing them getting walked off in cuffs or on a stretcher bothered me more and more. Every last one of us had waited for years for this opportunity. It saddened and vexed me in equal measure that some couldn’t resist the temptation to get high, knowing the potential consequences included a return to solitary. Even more troublesome were the men that simply couldn’t handle the psychological pressure of living once more in a population-style environment. You could usually identify these people pretty easily. They kept to their cells, and had a hunted, furtive nature when they ran out of commissary and had to join the rest of us for trips to the chow hall. These men received no support whatsoever from the prison, beyond whatever medications they were prescribed.
I won’t pretend to have a complete set of remedies or solutions to all of the problems I found in the CITP. I’m probably more sympathetic to the state’s position on all of this than the above would imply. I recognize that the administration has been provided by the legislature with no other solution other than segregation for men who were broken long before they came to prison, or for men who were massively deformed by their winding journeys through the long midnight of solitary confinement. It is probably true that some of my peers would have failed out of the program even if they had been given access to counselors who had been willing to attend to their unique needs, addiction and mental illness being what they are. Still, for all that, the wardens at Ellis weren’t even attempting to help these most vulnerable of prisoners. Adapt, we were told, to our new social circumstances. Fine, great advice. I just wish it meant something other than, “hey, pal, you’re on your own”.
Because the administration chose to view us as psuedo-G4 inmates instead of G2/G3s in process, all other potential activities were off-limits. Although B3 was located less than fifty meters from the chapel, we were not allowed to attend services. Neither were we allowed to work, even though most of us were willing — indeed, most of us would have leapt at the chance to get off the wing and do anything other than stew in the tensions of the dayroom. Ditto for any of the regular educational or vocational programs available to normal prisoners. This was particularly troublesome, as it became obvious to me that there were a number of guys that had vowed to themselves that they would obtain their GEDs once they had been released from segregation. They had such classes at Ellis, we just weren’t allowed to attend them. Given that most would spend anywhere between eight and twelve months in the program (and most of that spent twiddling their thumbs in the dayroom), these men could have knocked a major item off of their to-do lists, and been prepared for higher level training opportunities once they were released to population — with all of the recidivism reduction benefits attached to such advancements. Instead, they rotted.
This, at least, seemed to be an issue that I could do something about. I’ve written before about my theory that the antidote to existential crisis and the nihilism that I seem to be philosophically hardwired for is taking radical responsibility for problems that are absolutely not mine. Doing so gives me a sense of agency, and the ability to face down and maybe even give the middle finger to a cosmos whose indifference to human suffering appears to be infinite. After polling the widening circle of men I was familiar with, I figured there were at least four or five guys that were genuinely interested in forming a study group. While they needed to work on all four areas of the GED exam, it was clear that everyone felt like mathematics was their weakest subject. After asking a friend to do a little research on the options, I went out and purchased a Kaplan GED prep workbook, and in the last week of May started teaching a class after the 7pm in and out.
Initially, I had four students, though the number would fluctuate over time. I eventually, inevitably lost a few guys to the disciplinary wing, but they were soon replaced. Not everyone showed up every night, which wreaked all sorts of havoc on my lesson plans, but most were pretty consistent.
One aspect that troubled me was the racial character of my little group. Three of my first four students were Caucasians, and the last was Hispanic. In all of the months I taught the class, I never had an African American participant. I started to wonder if there was a vibe I was putting out that discouraged my Black peers from asking to join. I asked some of my Black friends if this was the case, and they denied it, but I never really got a satisfactory answer for this disparity. I tried to imagine how the class must have looked from the outside. We didn’t have any obvious racists attending, no visible swastikas or Confederate flag tattoos. One of the occasional Hispanics, Sindi, was a little prone to solving his problems with his knuckles and wasn’t terribly liked by most, but I couldn’t see people avoiding the group because of him. (Amusing aside: his nickname was short for “sin dientes”, or “without teeth”, his chompers having been casualties of an adjacent organ.) I never resolved this, and it irks me still. Something was going on, but I never figured out what it was.
One of my challenges was figuring out exactly where each students’ calculations broke down. I’m a little embarrassed at how long this took me in some cases. Take fractions, for instance. I made all of these color-coded flow charts for how to add or multiply fractions, and I couldn’t understand why they weren’t simple to follow. It didn’t occur to me that the problem was more conceptual in nature, that a few of my guys couldn’t really envision what exactly a fraction was. The problem was easily solved after Steve-O started talking about “eight balls” of cocaine, which are so called because at 3.5 grams, there are eight of them in an ounce. That clicked, so then we started talking about pizza slices, which led to a series of examples where I had them working for an Amazon-like delivery company, where every box they sent out had a certain number of items. They just needed a way to visualize the pieces of the problem first. A better instructor would have figured this out far sooner, I think.
I was proud of my guys. Instead of screwing around with the dominoes or watching yet another interminable Marvel movie on TNT, they chose to spend an hour or two most weeknights knee deep in linear equations, polynomials, and calculating the slope of a line. The furthest we managed to make it was evaluating functions on a graph. It got to the point that after a few days the various cliques that usually congregated in the rear of the dayroom decided to make room for us to take over one of the tables.
“That was nice of them,” I remarked after settling into our new spot.
“They had no choice,” DVille claimed. “We be doin’ hella gang shit in the math mob.” Naturally, that stuck. It was still as noisy as you would expect a tiny room to be when packed with 100 ill-behaved primates, but having our own table made it a little easier for them to stay on task. Also, I quickly learned the value of little breaks, so some could take a few laps around the dayroom and try to dispel the little ADD demons flitting about inside of their brains.
I feel pretty confident that most of them will do decently when they eventually take the GED, at least on the mathematics section. For all of that, I probably got more out of the class than they did, even if I did sometimes contemplate whacking a few of them in the back of the head with a sturdy ruler (or a 2×4). There are very few opportunities in seg for working on projects that give one a sense that you are making the world better in some way; very little exists to allow you to feel that you are actually paying penance. This class felt like…well, not redemption, exactly, because I’m not sure I believe in that idea any more no matter how much I want to, but maybe a highly specific Thomasy activity that I owed to the world was finally, finally (finally!) getting checked off a list somewhere. I’m not saying others couldn’t have done this or done a better job at it. I’m saying no one else did, and something genuinely, inarguably positive was brought into the world because of my will — and that felt really, really good. (Try it, oh unknowable readers of mine. I promise you will feel great afterwards. There is no shortage of problems for you — yes, you — to address these days. Just take a glance at the world around you.) Most days I feel like my life is maybe a few sizes too big for me, but for those hours, the universe fit.
These classes also released a bit of pressure I was feeling regarding my own educational ventures. Long-term readers will perhaps recall that I earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees while on the Row. I wanted to earn another during my long sojourn in seg, but the economics just weren’t in my favor. Then covid stimulus checks came along, and at least I had a start. There aren’t many universities that offer full degree, offline correspondence courses anymore — and of those that do, not many are willing to work with the incarcerated. After much searching and many, many letters, I found a Master of Science in psychology degree offered by California Coast University that I thought would work for me. It took some time, but I was able to come up with an exam proctor that was acceptable to the dean of admissions, always a troublesome task for prison-scholars.
I was impatient to begin this degree for a couple of reasons. First off, I feel like my brain atrophies a little each and every day in this place. Hardly anyone talks about anything of real consequence. I will sometimes catch myself starting to zone out in the middle of a conversation someone is trying to have with me about some ridiculous or phatic topic, and I picture a hole in the bottom of my skull, evidence-based hard data leaking out in puddles on the floor and being replaced with piffle. At least when I was in school, I felt like that leak was plugged up a bit, and, on occasion, maybe stopped up entirely and the basin upstairs slowly refilling. Secondly, it becomes more apparent to me by the day that I will never be considered to be a normal prisoner in the eyes of the administration. My flight to Mexico, the sensationalized media coverage of my trial, my death sentence and the governor’s last-minute commutation of that sentence, the subsequent high-profile tag: I will never move past any of this in the eyes of the directors and wardens. If I am ever going to be allowed to work a meaningful job in prison, something that gives me a sense of meaning and value, I am going to have to be so exceptionally well-trained that the option of not utilizing me looks pretty dumb. There are a (regrettably) small number of inmate counseling positions in the TDCJ, and I thought that this degree would give me a great deal of information that I could use to be of benefit to my peers. The past twenty years have supplied me with an abundance of personal experience, much of which will be useful in trying to reach some of these youngsters. The level of empathy I feel for the men around me has been on a (somewhat jagged, I admit) upward trajectory due to many of these experiences, so I know my intentions are good. It is also true, however, that well-meaning people regularly do a great deal of damage to others simply because they project what they think they know about mental health onto them. Some formal training, I felt, would surely add some items to my toolbox, and maybe prevent me from harming those I’m trying to help.
Given that I had no idea how long I was going to be assigned to the Ellis Unit, I couldn’t start the degree during the summer of 2024. Attempting any kind of formal, accredited degree from prison requires setting up all kinds of processes, everything from ordering books to begging friends in the free world to do research requests. I’m stepping a little out of time here for a moment, but I was accepted into the program in late 2024 and started taking the four undergraduate prerequisite courses in January 2025, (a few of the additional prereqs were already covered by courses I took in past degrees).
Here you can see one of the letters I received upon my acceptance:
and here is my proposed academic plan:
I’m breaking up the normal chronological sequence of these essays because now that I have started the work, I’m fretting about my ability to pay for it. I’m currently on a payment plan where I am shelling out $175 a month. I have a bit of a cushion due to the stimulus checks as well as a grant I received from Solitary Watch last year, but I know it won’t be long before this evaporates, so I need to ask if there are a few more of you willing to help contribute to this goal of mine. I first asked this of you back in December, and I wanted to thank TB, KM, and LD for the donations. As always, any funds sent to my Paypal account will be supervised and controlled by my father. As with the past degrees, I will post regular updates on my grades, so you can see how your money is being spent. No doubt some of the information I learn will start to sneak its way into these essays. Many thanks in advance.
What is the point of the math class, the degree, the striving? What else are we here for? Like many people, I reread Albert Camus’ The Plague in 2020, during the height of the pandemic. Although I wasn’t necessarily looking for parallels between that fictional world and my real one, it didn’t take long to find a few. When I heard reports of people packing bars after the initial wave died down or flexing on Instagram, I recalled how Camus commented on this very phenomenon, a sort of insistence on the decadent. When I saw in the newspaper photos of idiots burning masks, I again remembered the folk who intentionally violated the quarantine rules in a misguided attempt at proclaiming their agency. Father Paneloux’s sermon about the disease being sent from an angry deity as a moral corrective could have easily come from the mouths of any number of ministers I heard on the radio during that stressful time. I should have written about this at the time when the book was still fresh on my mind, but I do clearly remember thinking that the author had nailed the heart of the issue: people are too often bored with life, so they cultivate habits to distract themselves from existential angst — and pandemics threaten this balance, churning up all sorts of fears that we go to great lengths to ignore.
That said, I felt uneasy about one of his other conclusions, which was that in times of pestilence, we learn that there are more things to admire in men than despise. I want to believe this, but I had to admit to myself that it doesn’t always feel this way. There is a quote I wrote down, however, that has stuck with me, because it so perfectly encapsulated who I wanted to be. I returned to it in my notebooks recently, and I realized it summed up why I am engaged in so very many quixotic endeavors these days. It came from the character of Dr Rieux: “I have no idea what awaits me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people, and they need curing.” A person could do worse, I think, at finding a motto to live by; I’m not sure if anyone could do better.
To be continued…
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