After Boatwright got killed and the GBI decended on the camp, it didn't take long for the official decision to be made. They were closing Alto down. Busloads started leaving every transfer night. Every other prison got a little bit wilder, a little more violent, as they tried to absorb a wave of Alto babies.
Transfers are on tuesdays and thursdays, early in the A.M. I transfered from Alto to calhoun on my 21st birthday. After 8 months on level 5 pending max, I left an isolation cell and rode 2 buses, stepping out into the sunlight and relative freedom of Calhoun State Prison. This is where I would spend my wildest chaingang days.
Calhoun was wide open, full of drugs, and full of corrupt COs. That's a very good thing. Maybe now I should give a little scientific breakdown of correctional officers; please remember that I'm painting with a broad brush here, so the level of 'science' is up for debate. This is a generalization based on years of experience.
In GA, there's a strong contingent of good ol' boys working in the prison system. They have cans of Skoal in their pockets, drink Jim Beam, follow high school football, hunt during hunting season, and bitch about their jobs. They're inclined to identify with convicts who rode with biker gangs. Often they are morbidly obese. Republicans.
In my opinion, the republicans aren't so bad. They're ignorant and out of shape, but rarely are they the overzealous, crusading GI Hoe type, the ex-serviceman who feels like he is waging a personal war on crime every day he is at work. Republican COs are just doing their jobs, getting through the day, so they can get their hands on a cold Budweiser, and a fist-full of deer jerky(when they get home to their single-wide).
The GI Hoes are dangerous, and not because of whatever hand to hand combat training they received in boot camp. These clowns take their job way too serious. They go out of their way to enforce rules that even the administration don't care about. Disdained by their fellow co-workers, you can spot these losers by their ramrod posture, better physical conditioning, and maybe a barbed wire or tribal band tattoo across their bicept. I suspect many of these one man army types visit dominatrix dungeons in their spare time. Although they're universally despised and a constant nuisance, they make the kind of embarassing, please accept me guys kind of comments that say they're just one of the fellas. Yeah right.
There is alot of cross-pollinating going on between these two camps, and nothing is worse than a militant republican fusion. The place I'm going (whitworth) is like an underworld nightmare of drill sargeant wife beaters. It's ugly.
Calhoun had exactly zero good ol' boys working there, mostly due to the fact that, of all three shifts, there were only 2 white correctional officers there. That's out of hundreds of possibilities. The catagory of CO at Calhoun during my time there was a mix of ex-military, corrupt nacotics cop, and gold toothed wanksters. These guys were barely dodging felony charges of their own. For the most part, this worked in our favor. They couldn't come down too hard on us since most of them were criminals too. It was a state of functional choas during my time there. It was crunk.
The caliber of prisoner there was pretty high in my opinion. There was so much gang activity, so many drugs, and so little chance of getting rescued by the guards, that the camp pretty much ran itself. Convict owned and operated. The weak got trampled. Everybody got high. The administration kept it as quiet as possible.
On day one, I held a cameraphone in my hand for the first time in my life. I was impressed, like someone used to playing duck hunt suddenly coming across a playstation 3. This was 2004, the infancy stage of the prison cellphone explosion, so they were still pretty rare. Now, you'd think you were at a verizon wireless store. We've came a long way, cell phones are the best thing to ever happen to prisoners and their families.
I saw three stabbings my first week. I also saw a small mountain of cocaine and weed. Lots of the violence that went down was tied to drug debts going unpaid. One morning, the warden himself, told everyone that he didn't mind us doing the drugs, but if we didn't pay our debts and the violence continued, he'd shake down the compound and make life harder for all of us. He was a coll warden, a practical one. Here's 1200 prisoners, lots of them doing life sentences, lots of them violent, and as long as they're getting high, they're calmer, easier. The ignorant, war-on-crime CO doesn't want to understand that.
At this time, I was in F2, which was being used as an intake dorm. Their was a paricular officer named Morningay who worked our dorm, an obese puerto rican with a feminine manner who always wore his windbreaker, even inside the dorm. We discovered the reason for this was that he had been a "cutter" and he had a patchwork of scars across his inner arms from slicing himself with a razor. I have absolutely no prejudice against anyone with a mental health disorder, but it seemed strange to me that someone who had problems with self-mutilation was able to get a job as a prison guard. It still seems strange.
One Saturday, at noon headcount, Morningay took it upon himself to try and grab the towel my cellmate and I were using to block the light from pouring into the window in our room. I snatched the towel back and told him to get the fuck on. That earned my cellmate and I a trip to the hole for assault on an officer. At any othe institution, this would mean 2 or 3 weeks of administrative segregation, waiting to go to DR court, and then2-4 weeks of isolation time if found guilty.
Not at Calhoun. My cellmate was out in 3 days, I was out in 5. Never went to DR court, never heard about it again. Whereas Alto had many, many cells for locking behavior problems in, Calhoun's hole was limited to one side of J building, J1. Only 48 cells. Whenever they had a full house and needed to lock someone else down, they'd "parole" someone out to make room. This meant that you could literally stab the fuck out of an enemy, get caught and go to J-building, then get out within a week or two in most cases.
They put me back in F2, at that time the cocaine capital of the compound. Money talks, for the right change, you can usually get the right range out of an officer. There were a few females who worked the F-building booth, they alternated bringing in drugs for a white guy we will just call "Gay Mike". That's not his real name of course. I just call him that because, athough he wasn't gay in the technical sense, I thought of him as a punk ass dude, with a gay psychological profile. He did have alot of money though, and to be fair, was very generous with his drugs. Every weekend, me and about 10 other whiteboys got cocained the fuck up, compliments of this sucker. I know that sounds raw, believe me, I'm the last one to hang out with someone because of what they got, very rarely do I indulge someone I dislike just because the drugs or drinks are on them. A little background on this guy, just to let y'all know why I sound so cold.
Gay Mike and I transfered to Calhoun from Alto on the same day. He was the kind of guy who made things happen with drugs in prison, since he had all that money. He was working on getting a pound of pot dropped off at Alto, someone found out about it and thought he had already got it in, and they ran up in his cell trying to rob him. They laid him down, got his watch and chain, and he ended up on protective custody. He did recover his jewelry, because he told the police who robbed him. A bitch move.
When you transfer from prison to prison, whatever money you have on your books takes about a week to catch up to your new location(no longer true. They now have a centralized banking system). Then you recieve a money receipt, which gets passed out by an officer during mail call. When Gay Mike's receipt caught up, the female officer took notice. He had like $6000 on his books. Money talks, and that weekend she brought in a quarter pound of mids, a cell phone, and an ounce of cocaine.
I didn't fully explain my distaste for Gay Mike, for the sake of maintaining chronological order, some of this will come as the story progresses. One thing about this guy, he set off my bullshit alarm. Prison is full of liars, some say the acronym for jail is "just another inmate lying". Even among this hallowed company, Gay Mike stood out in my mind as a liar among liars.
He was a chameleon. On his arm he had "311" tattoo'd, which usually stands for "Crip Killer"(the 3 is for the third letter of the alphabet,C, and the 11 is for K), or it can stand for the eleventh letter multiplied times 3,KKK. For Mike, it stood for both, whichever matched his company. Around the skinheads, Mike was a Klansman. Around a crowd of (accepting, whiteboy freindly) Bloods, he claimed to be affiliated with Bloods. My honest opinion is he got it to signify KKK, got in some hot water because of it, and jumped on the gangbanger bandwagon, paying his way into some unholy alliance with some Bloods somewhere. He was a countryboy from some backwater field in Georgia, I have a hard time picturing him with a red bandana hanging out of his back pocket.
The female muling in drugs for him was a real sweetheart. She was obese but pretty, and had a certain air about herself(I guess now you'd call it "swag"). One day after doing a generous shot of cocaine, I popped my cell door and stepped out, ears still ringing, hardly fit for public consumption, to find her 10 feet away, staring straight at me. She knew I was high, but I pulled it together and winked, she seemed to like that. Later on she asked what nationality I was and said "you've got something in your blood". I definitely did that night.
My cellmate was a GD(Gangster Disciple.-ed) from Macon called BG. We became good friends and this marked my loose association with GDs in prison. In some ways, running with them was a blessing. It definitely wasn't calculated' I just fell in with the clique. It also got me in trouble over and over again, but I can't blame that on anyone but myself. This was a time when I was simply destined for trouble.
In most level 5 prisons, inmates get patted down whenever they pass through the gates going from the living units to the central area of the camp, where GED school, church, medical,counseling, and the administration's offices are located. We also get patted down coming back to the dormitory from the store or chow hall. This is to keep us from walking around with weapons.
These little searches didn't happen at Calhoun. We were always "tooled up" and went everywhere with our knives. It was something that you kinda took for granted.
One of the older muslims in our dorm started writing letters to the commisioner of Atlanta, the media, and senators, ranting about how out of control Calhoun was, how unsafe it was to be an inmate at this institution. Soon after beginning this campaign, the TACT squad came and searched the entire prison. The TACT squad is compiled of elite, gung-ho, department of corrections super-warriors. They came into the prison in the morning, maybe too strong, marching like the Gestapo, with drug sniffing dogs, metal detectors, and paintball guns with little rubber bullets inside. We were locked in our cells when they showed up and instructed to strip down to our boxers. When our doors are opened we are instructed to walk backwards out of the room with our hands behind our heads. TACT squad members guide us out and place us on either side of the cell, and the dogs are led inside. The animals level of excitement determines how thorough the seach is going to be.
I heard the dog's nails scratching at the heater on the backside of the room, and his handler soon discovered " a small bag of a green leafy substance, believed to be marijuana". They also found a shank hidden in my mat. I claimed the marijuana, since I had it hidden in a central location and didn't want BG to get jammed up with me.
As fate would have it, Gay Mike also got locked up that day, for a cell phone charger. We ended up being cellmates in J1, and he went to visitation that weekend and brought back a quarter ounce of coke.
This guy was someone who gives IV drug use a bad name. A plus sized gentleman, with reclusive ceins, he'd sit there for 30 minutes trying to get a register. Every time I hear The Pixies song "Gouge Away" I think of Gay Mike, digging in his arm with a needle. UGLY.
Good cocaine is a hell of a drug and this was good cocaine. He gave me a gram and I threw half of it in a spork, the orange kind they use in prison. It broke down as clear as Aquafina, no residue. It took my breath away, I was gasping and couldn't hear anything except the train running through my head. Mike got worried for a minute, thinking I was gonna flop out on the floor but I grabbed my nuts and pulled myself back together.
We shot cocaine and smoked weed all night. At some point, the conversation turned to his plans for revenge on a whiteboy named Jason Jones, who was on the eastside of the compound. Someone would drop a pistol, a compass, and a change of clothes outside the wall of the prison. Then mike would tell the warden he heard Jason talking about escaping and the location of the drop. For this information, Mike would be given favorable treatment from the administration and jason would be put on max. This is the kind of moves I came to expect from this slimy motherfucker.
Shit like that happens all the time. There's lots of behind the scenes "power moves" going on every day in prison, snitch wars, people getting framed, some real Machiavelli-style backstabbing. There's always a plot. In this case, Mike never got to put his plan into effect. One of the orderlies, who knew we had drugs, told on us, and around 9am, an officer knock on the door.
They took us out and put us in the showers. We were woefully unprepaired for a shakedown of anykind, and they found a slew of drugs, contraband, and paraphanellia. They also found a cell phone in Mikes pocket. He was within a year of being eligible for a halfway house and was concerned about how these charges might affect his chances. I knew I was a long way away from being considered for parole, and I offered to claim the cell phone for an 8-ball. I figured he was good for it. We struck an agreement.
They seperated us and for the next week I kept filling out statements and forms claiming responsibility for the phone. One day, the warden came around and I handed him a statement, launching into a plea about how I didn't want anyone to get stuck with the punishment for something that was mine. He cut me short. According to him, Gay Mike had been in his office earlier in the week, confessed to everything, and told on a couple of officers who had been bringing him in stuff. Mike was about to be transferred. The warden said that I was off to a bad star and that I'd be sitting in the hole for awhile to consider the errors of my ways.
This was our new warden, not the cool one of the pro-drug speech. This guy was a politician with a used car salesman persona. A republican with some ambitions, I think he was from up north.
I spent about 70 days back there, an eternity for Calhoun. Gay Mike did in fact transfer and a guard got fired behind him running his mouth.
I have yet to hear anyone loudly proclaim themselves to be a snitch or a punk. Everyone takes pains to present themselves in the most favorable light. In prison, everyone is a killer, pimp, and major drug dealer. I never heard anyone say that they told on their co-defendant for a lighter sentence. Very few admitted to being intimidated or afraid when they got to prison. Noone says they're locked up for child molestation. There's just alot of pretenders in prison and it's certainly no different on the streets. Being surrounded by people like Gay Mike, I think I developed a keen eye for bullshit. Dealing with drugs, in and out of jail and prison, you're always around game, lies, posturing, bogus motherfuckers marketing themselves as tough guys or good people, real freinds, whatever role they need to play. It's tiresome to deal with, wondering if your new buddy is trying to fuck your girlfriend or not. Some people get off being chameleons and fake kicking it. I try to avoid these people like the plague. I don't hold myself as the gold standard of realness, but what you see is what you get, if I'm your friend you've never got to doubt that. I wear my heart on my sleeve.
My ineptitude at playing both sides of the fence has caused me problems. If I dislike someone I don't put myself around them if I can help it. I try to keep a nuetral position most of the time, try to stay disengaged from pointless ideological conflicts in the penitintiary. It's a very political enviroment, very racially charged, and almost every position is based on hate and ignorance. In my view, the only reasonable policy is neutrality,of course, that's only possible to a certain extent. You wind up forming alliances based on who you kick it with, and a problem for a friend is a problem for you, if you're that kind of person.
My openness about my drug use here is something I feel the need to explain. I'm really just passing time, jotting down my experience of jail and prison. I don't have wild ambitions of going viral or a great many people. This is just a forum for me tell a little about my life, things I've seen and been a part of, and although the specific details are probably news even to my closest friends, the fact I've been doing drugs for years is a secret to noone who knows me. Putting my personal business out on front street in this way may not be the wisest decision, and of course I won't implicate myself or any others that could lead to prosecution.
I hope my disclosures won't stain my pristine reputation. The truth is that my choices with illegal drugs have wrecked my life in the extreme. I want whoever reads this to know that, not to provide a cautionary tale, simply because it's real. Thanks to God, the rotation of the stars and planets, and the wisdom that comes from growing older, a lot of this is behind me. Eventually, even a true die-ha,rd gets tired of this much self inflicted injury.
In particular, I'm talking about IV drug use. It's taboo to discuss this, except with other IV users. Maybe I'm comfortable talking about it because, knock on wood, that part of my life is over. I also hold onto a useless and haughty opinion that, atleast hygenically, I wasn't as bad as other people I knew. I never contracted any social diseases, niether from sharing needles or unprotected sex. I haven't lost my teeth, not from a lack of trying. I've been blessed and lucky.
My feelings on this issue have changed considerably over the years, for a long time I questioned why anyone would ingest a drug in any other way. Aside from occasions where the social setting required politely sharing a pipe, I thought it was wasteful. Regardless of how a drug is used, it always ends up in the bloodstream. That's how the substance gets to the brain and causes the desired effect. The quickest route between two points is a straight line. By ntroducing the chemical directly into the bloodstream, nothing is lost in translation. You go from 0 to 60,like, instantly. The totality of the experience is unbelievable. It's the final frontier of drug use
For me, it took seeing other peoples suffering, at the hands of this ingestion method, to recognize the dangers involved. It's too much. I have a hard time describing exactly why my opinion has changed, lets just say that I've been made aware. Injecting drugs is another level of commitment. I never want to contribute to someone taking that step again. Life is too short.
Another fatefull event occured while I was in the hole for that couple months. During this time I had a variety of cellmates. They came and went, I stayed. One of them had a portrait of Osama Bin Laden on his back and was called, predictably, Bin Laden. He only stayed for a couple of days. He was a tall, light skinned dude from Augusta, and despite his bizarre political inclinations, we got along. After he left, I realized all of my CDs had left with him. This was January and for Christmas my family had sent 6 CDs to me. I had them for a month before this thieving bastard caught out and sold them on the westside of the prison. I got to sit and NOT listen to my familys gift for 8 months before I got a chance to straighten my business on that bullshit. I hate thieves, especially when they're stealing from me.
Sometimes I have to wonder why I got tried like I did. I've concluded that people are idiots and have a hard time projecting their thoughts into the future, to consider what the possible consequences fpr their actions might be. I hate that its got to be like that, I truly dislike being violent and wish that noone ever forced my hand. I guess they think this shit is a joke and that's ok, just don't cross that line. The same thing that will make you laugh will make you cry.
My hearts desire, in prison and out in the real world, is to be given enough respect so that I can live my life in dignity, without getting tried. I want a peacefull life. I carry myself in a humble enough manner, I'm not the kind of person who's naturally out to be disrespectful or ruffle anyones feathers. There's no chip on my shoulder, I don't worry about the size of my dick in relation to other men, and don't try to prove myself to anyone. Yet somehow, I'm doing something wrong because I still attract controversy. The marketing of myself as a tough guy has not convinced everyone to give me my space, maybe I need more tattoos.HA.
On the subject of tattoos- I love them. I'm covered in them. Everyone of them I got in prison. I remember being in jail when I first got locked up, seeing these neanderthal looking whiteboys with blue and black ink all over their bodies, sleeved up, with Harley Davidson logos and swastikas. I remember promising myself I would never walk out of prison looking like one of them.
I don't have any racial tattoos, no gang affiliated artwork, but I'm tattooed the fuck up. I guess I ended up looking a lot like those guys did, at some point I lost my mind and started getting wet up. I was lucky enough to become good friends with some tattoo artist who put me in the game, my upper body is 90% covered and I probably have around $15 invested. The only thing that costs less in prison than outside are tattoos and your motherfucking life. Damn! Admit it, that was pretty raw right there.
When I was released, I had a complex that people would take one look at me and think "chaingang" but that was mostly in my head. My work is good enough to be freeworld, the only people that associate me with prison, based on my appearance, are other ex cons.
I think I've got around 10 different artists work on me, but the lions share was done by 2 men in particular, both very gifted, both very close friends of mine. They hooked me up. There's no way I could of afforded this out on the street. I want to take time to talk about them both but for now I'll stick to the story.
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