With the exception of a few camps whose architects had artistic freedom, most GA prisons follow the same basic blueprint. There's two "sides", an east and a west, or a north and a south. These are the living units, with 3 buildings with 2 dorms each. Each dorm holds 48 two man cells, so in a perfect world, each dorm houses 96 prisoners. This is rarely the case anymore, as the balloning prison population has caused the DOC to seek new creative ways to cram the maximum ammount of inmates into a static amount of space. This creativity has mostly found expression in the form of the 3 man cell. Some institutions have an entire bottom range of triple bunked rooms, bringing the total amount of inmates to 120 per dorm. They reserve that trick for medium security camps. That many seperate male personalities in a close ecurity prison, housing that unique caliber of prisoner, is apparently still a bad idea, even to an organization of bad ideas.
At these 2 sided prison, there is a good side and a bad side. The word "good" is definitely relative here, it would be more on point to say the "bad" and the "worse" side. In March of 2005, I got out of the hole and emerged onto the "worse" side of Calhoun, The East Side.
Getting released back into general population after a stint in admin. seg. is a unique feeling. I'd been locked down a couple of months, and had not been to the eastside yet. Had no clue who I'd find there, what drama awaited me,what kind of reception I could expect. I was very alert.
The reception I recieved was positive, thanks to a white GD friend of mine named Paul. When I learned what dorm I was going to,he sent word to his partners in H building, that I was a friend. That's all it took.
I had the utmost respect and trust for Paul. We were workout partners in F2 and had implemented a split schedule for our training. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday were days of rest, when we did cocaine courtesy of Gay Mike, and the rest of the week we worked out hard, waiting for the reup. I guess he took a liking to me and thought of me as a younger brother. We were pretty tight for awhile.
My cellmate in H2 was a huge black guy named Angelo who was fucking this nurse who looked like Olive Oil and kept thick red lipstick on her face. He was a cool individual, humble and deeply into the Bible after a comment on the basketball court got him stabbed almost to death.
I fell into a group of whiteboys who were around the same age as me, with similar interests in music and drugs. Two of them had life sentences, Buckwild and Burnout. Q was tenyears into a mandatory 12 year sentence. Scrappy was the only one who wasn't a GD.
Q was definitely the unofficial leader of the pack. He'd been incarcerated longer than any of us and involved in gangbanging since he was 13.
I have to clarify my feelings and beliefs about gangs at this point. I'm not from LA or Chicago, and have never seen much gang activity outside of incarceration. It's not really going down like that in Atlanta. Other GA cities seem to have more active gangs, but where I live, it's mostly confined to the hispanics in the Gwinett area. I've never been concerned about what color clothes I wear or which way I tilt my hat. Atlanta is neutral to major gangs.
Prison is different though. It's in us humans to form groups and classify others into catagories. I think we crave that order, that logic; perhaps it's a survival skill. One of the ways we catagorize in prison is by gang affiliation. Even more apparent is the breakdown by race and city of origin, or what part of town in the city you're from. Religeon too. We seek out associates with common interests and similar characteristics to ourselves.
Since GA is neutral, there is a perception that gang activity inside our prison system is off-brand or watered down. I don't have a basis of comparison since I have never been in prison in any othe state. I have seen some serious things happen to people over gang shit inside this system, many beatings, many stabbings, kings dethroned, and imposters exposed. From the neutral perspective, it seems legit to me. It gets pretty real sometimes.
One big point of contention is the inclusion of whiteboys into these majority black gangs. It's one thing to be out in a white country town, terrorizing other little white kids, throwing up signs, fronting to people who don't know shit. That doesn't fly in prison, if a whiteboy claims affiliation, they will be stepped to by members of that gang and better be in tight. If they don't know what they're supposed to know or don't have enough heart, terrible things happen. Public shaming, beatings, rapes. If you're not from the hood, don't go to the hood. If you're not a real gangster, don't say you;re a gangster.
The whiteboys I was around in there that claimed G were official and recognized by all the Gs on the compound, they were real enough to have that respect.
Without a doubt, they got mixed reviews from unaffiliated white people. Some felt like a white man hanging around with a black gang was disrespecting their own, going against their skin. It was a delicate balance. My feeling is, that you have to consider each person on a case by case basis. To be sure, some of those whiteboys were in it for protection, catering to a majority, trying to "get in where they fit in". Some just identified more with that style. Like choosing a brand of clothing. They chose Jordans over steel toed workboots or wingtips. To the few I considered solid, choosing their gang over their race, family, and friends was never an issue. Like JFK balancing Catholicism and the presidency.
I was very observant at this time. I looked for contradictions, seeking out any flawed or wack behavior. There's a margin of error that can be written off as human weakness, but in prison, it's wise to choose friends carefully. You definitely don't want a weak motherfucker in your circle. At the same time I was being observed too, because of Pauls endorsement. I was accepted without question at first. Later on, it had more to do with my own merits. Time reveals a persons real character and this prison was full of suprises and revelations.
Q was a charismatic individual. It took me a long time to trust him, he was way too nimble, too versed in manipulation and deception. Ordinarily, the kind of person I keep at an arms distance, he ended up being like a brother. You had to watch him though, Q was slick.
Burnout and Buckwild were like night and day. Besides being big white guys with life sentences, these two represented polar ends of the spectrum. As his name implied, Burnout was a frequent flier when it came to drugs. After an LSD and coke fueled spree left a corpse with its head nearly severed, Burnout entered the prison system with a Zen like acceptance of his fate. I had to respect that he wasn't holding on to any ridiculous hopes of a miraculous courtroom triumph suddenly springing him. It takes a man to admit defeat and homie knew it was over. Nothing is more irritating than listening to a hopless soul present the strengths of their defense to anyone who will lend a sympathetic ear. Let it go.
Another thing I liked about Burnout , he had interesting taste in music, maybe the only Gangster Disciple on the planet that listened to jam bands(which I cannot stand,but I appreciated the incongruity of a tattoed murderer stomping around the yard with Widespread Panic in their CD player). Encountering anyone in prison who was familiar with drum and bass music was a rare thing and he was up on all that.
If Burnout was the intelligent philosofer of the group, Buckwild was the concrete worker. He looked like a cro-magnum, with a flat forehead and prominent eye sockets. Bigger than any of us by a good 20 pounds, he had a permanent dazed look. A fan of Mudvayne, Slipknot, and other bands cranking out good soundtracks to hack enemies into little pieces. Buckwild scared people. He was a juggarnaut.
I'll never know what Scrappy did to get his alias, usually you think of a "scrappy" as being a small, fearless warrior. But the Scrappy of H2 was just small and goofy. Supposedly his dad was Wrestler #2, who had a respectable career as a professional wrestler on tv. Scrappy ran tattoos and had a good basketball game.
For the next couple of months, these were my daily associates. We got high everyday, went toevry meal together, and posted up in Q and Scrappys cell, smoking Buglers and getting tattoos. I got to know these kids very well. We'd get stoned and tell war stories, always a good way to get to know people.
Jason Jones, the object of Mikes contempt, was in the dorm for a little while too. He had a very good poker game, but provoked a lot of ill will with his abrasive personality and uncompromising stance. Jason and I always got along well though. He was wild, could be counted on to do almost anything, un predictable at all times.
At this time I became more of an exploiter and a predator. I'm not sure why. Probably due to the cast of unsavory characters who revolved in my daily orbit and also because of the temporary lapse of incoming mail and other indicators that people still remembered me on the street. We began a campaign of extortion, pimping out two sissies for store goods and 3 way phone calls. I always ended up giving people nicknames, and I christened the sissy #1 and sissy #2. 1 looked like he came from some money, and when there were drugs on the yard, we'd send him out there to get as much as possible on credit. Then we'd roll him a joint to share with 2 and keep the rest for ourselves.
The era of #1 and #2 only lasted a couple of weeks, our heavy handed approach to running a prostitution ring resulted in both of them "catching out", signing themselves into protective custody.
It used to possible to get meth into prison easily through the U.S. mail. This is an outdated method now, because someone snitched it out, but all it took was constuction paper.
A wacked out tweaker in his 40s,"Chrome" had a girlfriend who would take an 8 ball of speed, make a bunch of shots, and spray them onto construction paper. After it dried, she'd draw a childish depiction of a house, mommy, daddy, and baby, with "we love you daddy" written across the top. Nothing to it.
The use of crystal meth among inmates who are already violent and paranoid always seemed to make things interesting. Good times, lots of near disasters. That little bit of speed, shared among 6-8 men, raised the combat readiness of the whole dorm. Back then, I could still handle my money under the influence of this stimulant(Now, even a small amount is sure to induce temporary schizophrenia). It's availability in GAs prisons is strangely limited compared to cocaine, pills, and weed. This is a suprise when you consider how many people in this state are locked up because of meth. It's dangerous shit.
Around this time BG moved into the dorm, definitely a there goes the neighborhood moment. There was a child molester named big john who slept in a room downstairs and we started plotting on him. One night as the dorm left for chow call, BG and I stayed back. We went into Johns cell, picked his lock, and emptied his box of all storegoods, as well as his radio. It was an easy lick and a smash getaway, the least we could do for a pedophile scumbag like him. In the days that followed we orchastrated the plundering of another child rapists assets, this time a guy named Champ. I hate thieves, but not as much as I hate pedophiles. Sometimes you gotta do a little bad to do a little good.
As usual, no good deed goes unpunished, and as usual, somebody told on us. There are always kite writers in every dorm(A "kite" is chaingang slang for a note) who author snitch notes to the staff to get people locked down. Often this is purely a manipulation tactic, with all sorts of falsehoods being reported, sometimes to deceive the staff into wasting time chasing a bogus lead. Or to get an undesirable moved out to a different dorm, an anonymous kite might say that that persons life is in danger. and then protocall requires that inmate be locked down for their own safety.
In this case, there was a kite that said something about theft, and it had my room number on it. By then I had moved into the cell with Burnout. We both got locked down pending investigation and spent 10 days in the hole.
The esiest way for me to remember the chronological order of events from my time in prison is to think of the many times I went to the hole. Especially in these days, I always had to be into something. My restless nature led me to take risks, to my bitter misfortune.
The next big event for me was getting locked down yet again, 4 days after they let me back out. This time, my actions resulted in 30 days in J building, and an Internal Affairs investigation...but thats a story for another time.
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