Dateline: October 9, 2009
DAY TRIPPING AND FURTHER NOTES FROM THE PRISON DIARY
Friday, October 9, 2009—still waiting for transfer to Sumter C.I.
Here is a word of advice—don’t get sick in prison. If you do, make certain your illness is minor. For God’s sake, don’t come down with anything serious. Especially be wary of indigestion.
Some years back a fellow prisoner went to medical at a central Florida prison complaining of chest pains. He told the nurse he thought he was having a heart attack. She told him it was indigestion, gave him some “Alamay” tablets, chalky pink, horrible-tasting antacids, and sent him back to his dorm. He collapsed and died on the sidewalk. Indigestion can kill you! Happens all the time.
This past Monday morning the guards awakened me at 3:30 AM, told me to get dressed, I was going on a medical trip. After years of being roasted in the relentless Florida sun (cutting down all the trees and shade in prison didn’t help), for the past several years I’ve been dealing with skin cancer, specifically squamous cell carcinoma, on my arms, scalp, and face. It is not fun.
An outside specialist, a dermatologist, has weekly clinics at the prison hospital at Lake Butler, in North Florida, a two- or three- hour drive from my prison home at Tomoka, Daytona Beach, depending on who’s driving. I haven’t driven in over thirty-one years. I could use the practice, but they won’t let me drive, for some reason. With the manacles, waist-chains, and leg irons, it would be difficult to shift and steer, anyway. The D.O.C. transports sick prisoners from across the state to see a variety of specialists—cancer, heart, and eye problems, particularly, referred by the local medical staff.
I’ve had several laser surgery treatments on my arms, scalp, and cheeks, and it is not pleasant. Last year I came out of the doctor’s office with the burning hair and flesh scents, and a prisoner waiting his turn for the procedure asked me if it hurt.
“Imagine someone holding a Bic lighter to your head,” I told him. No sense sugar-coating it.
This time I went to Lake Butler for a consultation concerning “actinic keratosis,” a precursor to the skin cancer. No lasers this time, thank God!
I was escorted (in handcuffs) out of my building before 4 AM to medical, to await my ride. I haven’t been outside at that hour in a long time, and craned my neck to see the full moon overhead and all the stars. Securely chained in the back of a van, doors padlocked, metal grills over the windows, a tight cage, I tried not to think of what would happen if a crazy driver smashed into the van, rolled it, and it caught on fire. There’d be no getting out. The Bic lighter held to my scalp didn’t seem too bad after all.
Staring through the steel mesh, taking it all in, my primary impression was how dark it was “outside,” in the night, away from prison. There is little darkness or shade in prison. Jack Murphy told me once that when flying across the country at night, he could identify isolated prisons from a long way off, square beacons of orange light beaming into the night sky. They burn cell lights all day long, and at night between 11 PM and 5:30 AM, cut the main fluorescents, but leave on dimmer “night lights.” It is never dark. One of the rules of the Geneva Convention regarding treatment of prisoners forbids “sleep deprivation” and the use of constant illumination as torture. It works. Those rules apparently don’t apply to us. With the lights, the racket, the slamming and clanging of steel doors, day and night, a twenty-minute nap is a luxury.
But “outside,” on the street, the absence of light, the darkness, struck me with its immensity. Mere blocks from the prison, twisting down a narrow, two-laned street without streetlights, tall trees on either side blocked off the sky and the dim light of the moon. I thought of the weekend visitors, the women,—wives, mothers, lovers—who parked on a sidestreet in the pitch-dark early every Saturday and Sunday morning, waiting for 7:30 AM, when they were allowed to enter the prison parking lot and wait for 9:00 AM visits. For the first time I realized the depths of their love, commitment, and sacrifice, to sit, alone, in that forbidding darkness, out of love. It gave me pause. Why can’t they be able to park in a safe parking lot?
The hospital at Lake Butler was as it always has been, filled with sick and dying prisoners. It’s not difficult to figure out which of these sad cases are nearing the end. One observation I made though, is the D.O.C. is actually doing a pretty good job concerning health care and treatment. The nurses and doctors are competent and professional, and patiently responded to my list of questions.
The highlight of the trip came along a lonely stretch of Highway 100, out in the middle of nowhere, when the van driver squashed a freshly-killed skunk. There was no mistaking what it was. The van instantly filled with choking musk. If the military could mass-produce skunk scent and drop it on al Quaida positions, the insurgents would quickly come out gagging, and surrender.
Several days later my wrists and ankles are still bruised and swollen from the steel restraints. Another word of advice—don’t ride in vans for hours in manacles, waist chains, or leg irons. It’s hell if your nose itches or you need to scratch your head. When the doctor examined me, he was concerned about the long, red bruises and abrasions on my wrists. I told him they were from the handcuffs, not skin cancer. He frowned at that.
Speaking of scratching, it seems many prisons are plagued with frequent outbreaks of some kind of skin disease colloquially known as the “itchy-scratchies,” for want of a better diagnosis. Last week one dorm filled with wheelchair prisoners, old men, and other impaired people was quarantined for three days with the “itchy-scratchies.” I should have known better than to mention that—now I have to scratch! Don’t you just hate that?
Charlie
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
THAT'S THE WAY IT IS IN PRISON
NOTE: This is not my typical blog entry, but this particular prison memoir has just completed the first editing process, and I wanted to show how different prison was “back then,” as opposed to the present time. There’s no comparison. I’d appreciate any comments and observations. Thanks. Charlie.
THAT’S THE WAY IT IS IN PRISON
A memoir by Charles Patrick Norman
Murf the Surf and I are walking in the rain past the steam plant heading back to the Southwest Unit. The chapel is off to our left, separated from the sidewalk by tall, thick hedges. We are coming from the Main Gate at the Old Administration Building after escorting out a group of students and professors visiting from the University of Florida in Gainesville.
We are prisoners serving life sentences for murder convictions at Raiford, otherwise known as The Rock, Union Correctional Institution, Florida’s oldest and toughest prison, filled to overflowing with over 2600 desperate men. Raiford is like a small town, with streets, buildings, trees, factories, stores, and housing areas. The steam plant to our right provides power to the laundry, chow halls, and other facilities. A tall brick chimney tower can be seen for miles, and the steam plant whistle, which blasts periodically throughout the day, sounds like a train whistle that can be heard for miles.
We come to the main east/west road and turn right. The school, vocational classes, and print shop are contained in a block-long two-story building across from us. We are talking about the past three hours we spent with Dr. Jack Detweiler and his college students, eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year olds, intelligent and inquisitive, who bombarded us with pointed questions about ourselves, our lives, our families, our sentences, and life in prison. Fresh-faced and scrubbed, neatly and fashionably dressed, they seem like naïve, adorable children after being surrounded by hard-eyed, stone-faced, feral prison schemers twenty-four/seven, day after day, for weeks, months, years.
Coming toward us from the Southwest Unit, a shirtless prisoner wearing athletic shorts and shoes without socks runs as hard as he can while pushing a wheelbarrow. Another shirtless man is sprawled in the wheelbarrow, arms and legs hanging over the sides, limp, reminding me of that sculpture, Michelangelo’s “La Pieta,” of Mary holding the dead Christ in her arms.
The laboring prisoner comes nearer. I see it is Floyd Price, another lifer, a young, strong, well-built man, bulging muscles defined by years of pushing iron. His eyeglasses are fogged and waterspotted.
“Make way, give me room,” he gasps, already winded from his exertions. There is plenty of room in the street, but we step aside. He doesn’t appear to need any help, nor does he ask for it.
Floyd pushes past us at a sprint. We look down and see that the man sprawled in the wheelbarrow is Jim Ealy, and his throat has been cut. A deep gash like a ravine slashes across his neck and down toward his Adam’s apple. Blood runs down his chest, rinsed and thinned by the raindrops that have turned into a shower. His head lolls. His lifeless eyes stare into nothingness. He looks dead.
We grimace and shake our heads in unison, silent in our thoughts. Life and death in prison is selfish. Better him than me. Self-preservation rules. We continue along the street. Floyd races to the prison hospital, a few hundred yards away. It is a good move. Had the guards called for a nurse and a stretcher from the hospital themselves, it might have been twenty, thirty minutes, or an hour, before they came to pick him up, if they got there at all. If poor Jim Ealy has any chance of survival before he bleeds out, Floyd is providing it by carrying him to the hospital himself.
Prisoners at Raiford live in three places. The Main Housing Unit is actually “The Rock,” a concrete and steel edifice first opened in 1913, a three-story fort-like structure that appears to be a strange conglomeration of The Alamo, a low-income housing project, and a haunted dungeon. Evil spirits permeate its cold, thick walls and dark tiny cells. Untold numbers of prisoners have been murdered or died there. Most “newcocks,” young prisoners fresh from the county jails and prison reception center at Lake Butler are initially assigned to the Main Housing Unit upon their arrival at Raiford, a sort of “welcome to prison.” Some of them never come out, consumed by the beasts within.
Reflecting the prison system’s obsession with compass points, the “West Unit” is, of course, on the west side of Raiford, as opposed to the “East Unit,” or FSP, Florida State Prison, a mile or so to the east, across the New River in Bradford County. The West Unit has a rusting, faded arch over its entry, recounting its original role as the “reception center” years before. Consisting of one-story warehouse-type buildings used as dormitories, a metal plaque embedded in the outside back wall of Dorm Five identifies it as “White Women’s Prison—1936.”
We are heading toward the Southwest Unit—that’s right—it’s at the south and west corner of the prison grounds. If you know which way is north, you’ll never get lost at Raiford. The Southwest Unit is the most “modern” prison housing here, built in 1976, during a brief enlightenment period when the Department of Corrections changed its name temporarily to the Department of Offender Rehabilitation. A long circular road loops around a former open field with four housing areas built on its outside edge. Each housing area is fronted by a building of offices, classrooms and canteen, and officers’ station. Inside, three two-story air conditioned dormitories house ninety-six men each in two-man rooms. A thirteenth building, aptly named Building Thirteen, is only one-story, holding forty-eight men, mostly the “elite” prisoners. A chow hall sits inside the circular road.
There is a commotion on the road in front of “A Area,” the first set of buildings we come to entering the Southwest Unit. It appears to be where Jim Ealy got his throat cut moments ago.
Three prisoners with homemade knives are jabbing and feinting at each other while two large, pot-bellied sergeants, one white and one black, stand back and urge them to stop. Don’t get too close! “Shanks” aren’t prejudiced. They will kill white and black alike, prisoners or guards.
It is obvious what this is about, a fight between two pairs of prison homosexuals. The two “female” members, known as punks or sissies, babies or boys, are more slightly-built, have shaved eyebrows and lisp their threats and insults at each other. The “male” counterparts, the “husbands,” “my man,” or the war daddy, as he is known sometimes, play the more masculine role, is often larger and more dominant, but no more dangerous than his chain gang lover. Knives are great size equalizers. A tiny matador can slay a large bull.
In this scene, the two war daddies have taken most of the damage. Jim Ealy and his slashed throat are almost to the hospital by now in Floyd Price’s wheelbarrow ambulance. His “boy” appears unscathed. “Moose,” the other war daddy, another shirtless big man, staggers in the rain, one hand barely holding onto what appears to be a sharpened steel spike, the other hand trying to cover up several holes punched in his chest. Every time he inhales and exhales, bright red blood bubbles and foams out of the holes, a sure sign the wounds have punctured his lung. He is ready to drop.
The black sergeant, a very large man nicknamed by the prisoners as “Idi Amin,” for obvious reasons, is urging Moose to drop his knife and lie down on the road, wait for help, he’s hurt.
“I’m all right, I’m all right, I’m—” Moose drops the blade, teeters, falls to his knees, then sags to the wet pavement onto his back. Falling rain mixes and rinses the foaming blood bubbles that whisper out of his chest. The two “boys” ignore Moose, dancing, pirouetting, making half-hearted stabs at each other. Back down the road from where we came, we see a crowd of prison guards half-hustling in our direction, the “goon squad,” or “doom squad,” as some black prisoners call it, a special group of tough guards who respond to violent incidents. Anyone in the vicinity when they arrive is likely to get jumped on, their heads busted, tossed in lock-up, or worse, so Murf and I hurry up and make haste on down the road, around to “C Area,” where we are housed, and where the GOLAB program operates. Over our shoulders, we look back and see the two “sissies” in handcuffs, on their way to confinement. Moose still lies on the road. Party’s over.
Entering the “breezeway,” we turn right into a hallway that leads to the GOLAB classroom. The control room is to our left and the barber shop to the right. The classroom is empty of people. After the college students and professors left, the prisoners who work with us in the program left to go to their buildings and cells, or “rooms,” to unwind, get ready for supper, take showers, whatever. Folding chairs are set up in a large circle. Several tables line the walls. A blackboard covers one wall. I make sure the coffee pot is unplugged and the trash cans emptied. Murf sweeps the floor with a push-broom.
When the University of Florida students entered the classroom at one o’clock, they were bunched up and scared as rabbits. Eight or nine prisoners sat scattered in the circle of chairs, forcing the students, a majority female, to sit next to and on either side of us. An hour before their arrival down here, a couple of guards had run a little “orientation” session on them, to prepare them for meeting us for the first time. They showed the students a variety of prison weapons, clubs, knives, pipes, chains, that had been confiscated in shakedowns. They told them horror stories. They scared them shitless, as they say.
“You kids be real careful down there with that bunch. They may act nice to you, to get your trust, but that’s all it is, an act. Them boys is murderers, rapists, robbers, kidnappers, child molesters, you name it, the scum of the earth, and if any one of them get half a chance, they’ll put a knife to your pretty little neck, they’ll rape you, they’ll murder you. They’ll sweet talk you, tell you sob stories, try to get your address and telephone number, con you into coming to see ‘em at the visiting park, bring ‘em dope and money, next thing you know, they’ll have you helpin’ them escape. Then you’ll be left high and dry, heading to the women’s prison at Lowell, and they’ll be gone, laughing at you. Don’t believe a word they say. They’re all a bunch a liars and homosexuals.”
Those briefings were so consistently the same that we figured they must have had a script of some sort, and followed it closely each time a new group came in to see and speak with us. And it worked, at least for the first fifteen minutes or half hour, until the college students got a chance to observe and listen to us, and discover that we were scarcely different from them, except that our lives had been ruined by some misstep, and theirs were just starting out.
We usually began the sessions by introducing ourselves, where we were from, what we were in prison for, how much time we had, and any other personal details we wished to share.
“My name is Joe, I’m from New York, I’m in prison for robbery, I’ve done four years, I saw the parole man last year, and I hope to get out in five or six years.”
“Hi, my name is Jerry, they call me Chicago, I’ve done eight years on an attempted murder charge, and I get out on parole this year.”
“My name is John. I go by the nickname of “Tex.” I came in with an eighteen month sentence over twenty years ago. I got involved in the murder of another prisoner, and I never got out. I was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I call myself “Tex” because I don’t want anybody to call me Louise!” (Laughter)
My turn. “My name is Charlie, and I’m from Tampa, where I went to the University of South Florida. (cheers). I’m serving a fresh life sentence for a murder someone else committed, and my parole man hasn’t been born yet. (More laughter). When he is born, I hope he has good parents who love him, who don’t abuse or molest him, who raise him in a good home, he grows up a decent, well-adjusted person, so when he comes to see me in twenty-five years or so, he has a positive attitude, isn’t on some vindictive crusade, doesn’t give me a Buck Rogers date for parole. (Nervous laughter). I’m glad you all could come here today, we are open to any of your questions about prison and the criminal justice system, ask whatever you like. First, though, how about each of you introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about who you are, where you’re from, what you’re majoring in, what your goals are.”
That usually got things going. After thirty minutes or an hour, the room would be abuzz with chatter, the din increasing, as everyone talked at once, it seemed, to the persons on their lefts and rights, prisoners and students, the only discernible difference being some wore prison blues and the rest didn’t. Some were female and some were male. When it was time to go, it was difficult to get them to leave. They’d have plenty to write about in their class assignment papers on their trip to prison.
Murf the Surf and I walked with them from the Southwest Unit to the Main Gate. We each had an umbrella, and of course we had to share them with friendly coeds. Dr. Detweiler, a lean, scholarly man, walked alongside Murf, listening intently as Murf postulated about a fascinating subject—himself—that sounded great, but would be forgotten ten minutes later. The escorting guards had disappeared in the rain and four o’clock shift change. Our little group scuttled across the empty compound, Raiford appearing to be a ghost town in bad weather. An occasional lone prisoner would pass by, gaping, surprised and wondering how and why a covey of young women and men wandered through this ultimate no-man’s land.
For a short while we had been seemingly transported out of the prison and into a university classroom. Walking back from the main gate, we were energized with the mental stimulation that the supercharged students had provided us. Seeing Floyd pushing a bleeding Jim Ealy to the hospital in a wheelbarrow and the aftermath of the knife fight on the road by “A Area” brought us back to earth swiftly to the reality of life in prison.
We heard later that the incident began with an argument between the two “boys” that escalated to threats and shanks. Once the two “feminine” counterparts armed themselves and squared off, the “husbands,” or “war daddies,” were obligated to pull out their weapons and defend their chain gang lovers. Moose was now at the prison hospital. The two “boys” were in lockup, in the same cell, presumably reconciled. Conflicting reports claimed that Jim had died, that he was in the Lake Butler prison hospital, that he was on life support at Shands Hospital in Gainesville.
Prison is an unrepentant rumor mill, fueled by deranged fools who truly believe the made-up facts that pour from damaged brains.
Saturday night we go to the movie in the Main Housing Unit theater, the biggest screen in Union County, a cavernous room on the second floor filled with hundreds of actual theater seats, broken and battered as many of them are. The Rock movie theater looks like something transported out of the Depression in the 1930’s, a dark, dirty, forlorn place, with an ominous slice in the screen that could have been made by some maniac with a sharp knife chasing someone else.
They show the same movie first thing Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, and Saturday night. I have my own reverse movie critic, a psychotic from Duval County named Jimmy, who races to the Rock first thing every Saturday morning to hurry down front and center on the first row to stare up at the fuzzy picture. When Jimmy comes back at eleven o’clock, I’ll ask him, “How was the movie, Jimmy?”
If Jimmy’s eyes light up, his face crinkles into smiles, and he tells me, “Brother, that was the best movie I ever seen. Man, you ain’t gonna believe it. Don’t you miss this ‘un, Bubba, or you’ll regret it,” I know I’ll pass. It will be trash, unwatchable. I’ll make other plans for Saturday night—read a book, write a letter, watch TV.
If Jimmy’s face contorts in disgust, he snarls and spits, balls his fists, scuffles his feet and tells me, dead serious, “Don’t waste your time, bro. That movie sucks. It is pure garbage. That’s the sorriest movie I’ve seen in a long time,” I make my plans. I’m going to see it, it’s probably going to win the “Best Picture” Academy Award. Jimmy is that good. After my friends see me talking to Jimmy, they’ll nod, I’ll toss a thumbs up or thumbs down their way, and they’ll make their plans, too.
The Rock Movie Theater in the Main Housing Unit is one of the most dangerous places in the prison. No guards go in there. Two or three hundred of the deadliest prisoners locked in a dark room, with the inherent grudges, gang enmities, racial issues, bad debts, angry lovers, and who knows what else adding to the violence stew makes for a potential bloodbath every week.
Men go in groups for self-preservation. I’m not affiliated with any cliques or gangs, more an independent who cruises along above the fray, but several other men from our housing area and I ride with the Jacksonville Boys, a loosely-confederated bunch of prisoners mostly from the west side of Jacksonville, forty miles or so to the northeast. I have gained the respect and friendship of their leader, Junior Bullard, the “Bull,” another chain gang legend who had survived the last twenty years at the Rock and FSP.
To long-term prisoners like Junior, men who are “fresh off the street,” comparatively speaking, are like missionaries who’ve been dropped into the jungle amidst a lost tribe long out of contact with civilization. They thirst for information concerning how life is “out there,” a strange and alien world of the future that has passed them by. I am happy to oblige, answering Junior’s questions, and although we have vastly different lifestyles and beliefs, being accepted by him means that I gain the acceptance of his entire crew. Thus I could hitchhike along with his group to the movies, while still remaining a free agent, sort of like the white man who was allowed to travel with an Apache war party, but never participated in scalping. An observer.
In each group will be two or three men armed with large sharp shanks, prepared to step up and bare their weapons if something jumps off. Since every group knows everyone else is strapped down and ready to rumble in an instant, an armed truce usually ensues, allowing us to enjoy the movie in peace.
In our movie group I know of at least two men who are carrying, one, Larry Jefferson, “L.J.,” also called Pinhead, a slightly built thirty-something who sells bags of pot for Junior, who came to prison as a teen, accepted into the Jacksonville Boys, who has grown up in prison, the only acceptance he has ever known. Larry is a quiet, shy man who still looks like a skinny kid, but don’t let that fool you. If necessary, he will pull out that big knife and wield it in an instant.
Roy Yates isn’t really one of the Jacksonville Boys, either, and although he’s a bonafide psychopath, he is trusted. Roy has been in prison for fifteen years and looks it, worn and wrinkled from smoking “RIPS,” the pungent state-issued prison tobacco, drinking buck, potent prison wine, and doing any kind of drug or pill he can get his hands on.
Roy is missing his top and bottom front teeth, which gives him the disturbing appearance known as “cat mouth,” more commonly seen in the discarded men who come to American prisons after serving years in Cuban hell-holes, where new arrivals commonly had their front teeth knocked out. There’s no excuse for Roy not to get his teeth fixed, since Raiford has a large dental office and a dental lab, where prisoners make dentures for other prisoners statewide. He just doesn’t care.
Roy is actually a short-timer, ready to be released in a year or so. He has minimum custody, and works outside the prison at the slaughterhouse every day.
Every Wednesday, they butcher hogs. They call the slaughterhouse the “cold storage,” another prison euphemism, and we can see the large building on the other side of the triple fences along the Rock Yard, the Main Housing Unit recreation field.
Pigs aren’t stupid, but none of the hundreds that are run through the chutes at the slaughter house have ever experienced this, so they don’t know what’s coming until it’s too late. We listen to the squeals and squalls of confusion and hesitation as the first ones are run through the chutes up to the slaughter house killing floor. A “free man” wields a bolt gun, a compressed air-powered tool with a trigger that he places up against the pig’s head, that fires a steel bolt into the pig’s brain, supposedly instantly killing it. The bolt retracts, ready for the next victim right behind the first.
From our vantage point on the yard, we couldn’t see what happened, but the pigs told us everything. We could hear it all. The pigs at the front of the line, the first victims, complacently followed the leaders, never suspecting this was death day. We’d hear the squeals, then the bolt gun would start killing, and Roy would wield his butcher knife. The pigs would see the carnage in front of them, smell the blood, and start freaking out. The squeals would become more panicked and high-pitched, in pig language they were saying, “RUN! Run for your lives! They’re killing us! Stop! Get away!”” But there was no getting away, no turning around in the chutes, no mercy. The bolt gun and Roy waited for them all. Soon every pig down the line would be screaming, but after a time, it would be quiet. All were dead.
Roy acts as the cutthroat. He wields a razor-sharp butcher knife, and as soon as the free man fires the bolt gun, dropping the pig, Roy starts the butchering process by cutting the pig’s throat.
Roy straddles the dead pig, grasps its snout, and raises its head upward. “You sorry ass Anderson, I hate your damn guts. You talked all that shit to me, thought you was bad, you ain’t so bad now, are you?”
With that, Roy brings the knife around, cutting through the pig’s neck with a growl and shout of triumph, blood gushing everywhere. That pig is hooked and dragged away for scalding and gutting, and the next one takes its place.
“Bobby Joe, you piece of shit, you thought you was slick, beating me out of that money, I got your ass. What ‘chu gonna do now?” And he slices, yells, grins, wipes blood from his face with a rag. All day long.
One day the free man with the bolt gun, the prison employee who oversaw that part of the job, became particularly disturbed by some of Roy’s comments to the dead pigs. He’d told others that he’d considered re-assigning Roy to another job, but he was actually afraid of him, and he was the best butcher they’d ever had. He enjoyed his work. He stopped the line for a minute and spoke to Roy.
“Roy, some of this stuff you’re saying might be going a little too far, pretending you’re cutting the warden’s throat, and the colonel’s, and most of the officers here. You ever think you might need some help, go see the psychiatrist, talk about that? You may have a problem, Roy, and with you getting ready to go home, I’m worried about you. What do you think?”
Roy just looked at him, straddled the pig, lifted its head, brought the butcher knife around, held it there. “You wanna know what I think? You wanna know what I think of all of ya’ll? Watch this. This is you, motherfucker,” and with a practiced stroke, Roy dug deeply and almost decapitated the hog. Bloodsoaked from head to toe, Roy stood up straight, looked the free man in the eye, and asked,” Any more questions?”
Shaken, the man shook his head no.
“I didn’t think so.” He went back to work.
Roy’s proclivities were well-known, and when he’d offered his security services to Junior, they were quickly accepted. No one doubted that Roy would use his knife. In fact, he couldn’t wait to use his skills on a human. Heaven help anyone he got a hold of.
There we were, hundreds of prisoners in a long line in the dark, waiting to enter the west gate that led inside the main housing unit. We stood on a wide sidewalk along an old brick street lined with huge spreading oak trees that had been growing there since the Rock was built. If you didn’t know you were inside a prison, you could imagine you were on a tree-lined small town residential street.
We hear the clang, clang, klink, clang, clattering sounds of metal hitting bricks. The armed men at the front of the line are tossing their knives into the street. The guards must be using metal detectors at the gate. There have been rumors of something jumping off in the theater tonight, resulting in the use of metal-detecting wands, and an inordinate amount of steel is skittering into the street. Roy and Larry stick their shanks into the ground next to a large oak tree root so they could find them. Their knives had been specially ground and sharpened in the furniture factory from carbon steel, and they dodn’t want to lose them.
The movie is uneventful. No one gets killed but on the screen.
When we exit The Rock, after 9:00 p.m., it is dark. No guards are seen past the West Gate. The brick road is still littered with discarded shanks, scattered where they were thrown. Men pick through them and continue on. Pinhead and Roy recover their specially-made blades, concealing them in their waistbands. We walk unescorted the quarter mile back to the Southwest Unit in the spooky darkness. The only light comes from blinking stars and distant fences. Just another night in prison.
The next day, Sunday, I go to the visiting park. My mother and father, brother, sister-in-law, and my nephew and niece, Timmy, eight years old, and Tammy, seven years old, have made the four-hour trip to see me.
Timmy is fascinated by the tattoos covering the arms, necks, and some faces of various bikers in the visiting park.
“Charles, why do those men draw cartoons all over theirselves like that?”
“I don’t really know, Timmy. I guess they are bored, or they like those pictures.”
“Will those cartoons wash off?”
“No, you can’t wash them off. They’ll wear them till they die.”
“If I did that, my Mom would kill me.”
“You’re right, young man,” Sandy added.
After visit, I went to the bandroom to talk to Murf. The bandroom is part of the old “Flat Top,” a walled structure that used to house Death Row up until 1961, when FSP was built, the new Death Row opened, and they moved “Old Sparky,” the electric chair, across the New River to its new abode. It gave me an odd feeling walking along the hallway of the old Death Row, lined with tiny one-man cells that once upon a time was home to Florida’s condemned, many of whom had made this same walk to the electric chair.
Now the cells were occupied by prisoner musicians. I quickly passed a man playing a guitar, one with a keyboard, another guitarist, a drummer, a man with a trumpet, then a sax. Murf was in the main room where Old Sparky once sat, which now held all the speakers and amplifiers for the band practice. Plenty of electrical outlets were available in the room that held the electric chair. I didn’t like it there—too many ghosts—and I left quickly.
Outside, I passed a little old man they called The Colonel, supposedly a retired military man who tended the colorful flowers growing next to the concrete walls. I was glad to get back to the relative sanctuary of my cell in the Southwest Unit.
A month or so later I was walking to the patio canteen, the prison restaurant next to the visiting park, where you could buy breakfasts, hot coffee, meals, burgers, fries, and whatnot if you had money. Coming out of the canteen restaurant was Jim Ealy and his boy. A bright red scar defined the grave injury to his neck.
“Jim!” I said, surprised. “I thought you were dead. Last time I saw you, Floyd Price was pushing you down the road in a wheelbarrow, your throat cut open.”
He fingered the scar automatically. “Nah, they tried, but they couldn’t do it, Bubba. I guess I got eight lives left now.”
“Uh huh. Hey, could I talk to you for a minute, privately?”
Jim’s homosexual lover eyed me suspiciously, correct in assuming I had something to say that I didn’t want him to hear.
“Sure, Charlie. Wait a sec, babe,” he said to the boy, who huffed and turned away.
“Jimmy, you’re a good guy,” I said. “You are a decent person, and everyone respects you.”
“Yeah? Thanks.”
“But you’ve got a serious flaw, man,” I said, cocking my thumb toward the boy. “That punk almost got you killed, and next time, you might not be so lucky.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“You gotta give up that boy. That boy is death. You stick with him, you’re not gonna make it.”
Jim grimaced. “Listen, I know you’re right, but you don’t understand. I can’t give that boy up. I love him. I appreciate what you’re saying, though.”
He left with the boy, and I went inside and ordered a hamburger and French fries.
Jim was an electrician, working for maintenance, wore a tool belt anywhere on the compound. That’s a big deal in prison, being permitted to carry hammers, pliers, and other legal weapons as part of your job, providing a degree of deterrence from attack in most cases. While he’d been recuperating in the Lake Butler prison hospital, his boy had not been pining away waiting for him, but as those things happen in prison, he’d been fooling around, playing the very large field, and had linked up with a new war daddy that Jimmy knew nothing about.
Chain gang divorces aren’t like those done in a free society, with no-fault, lawyers, alimony, child support, and the rest. There is an element of violence attached that is rarely seen outside prison.
Jimmy got a work order to replace a light bulb in the West Unit. It was a set-up. When he walked through the doorway, a person unknown ran him through with a very large screwdriver that went in his abdomen and poked out from his back. There was no saving him this time. Floyd and his wheelbarrow were nowhere to be found. By the time the nurse got there with two stretcher bearers, Jimmy was dead.
That night, Jimmy’s former chain gang lover was curled up in the bunk of his new husband. It’s doubtful that he gave a second thought to Jimmy, who thought he loved him. That’s the way it is in prison.
Murf the Surf got out of prison twenty five years ago. Jim Ealy and legions of men like him are skeletons mouldering in the ground of “Boot Hill,” the sad prison cemetery that rests in the piney woods outside the fences and in sight of the Southwest Unit. Many thousands of other men have come and gone and returned to these prisons over and over again. The Rock is long gone, battered to rubble by a wrecking ball, setting loose all those ghosts and evil spirits to find new places to roost and haunt.
As for myself, I am still here, an eternity later, trapped deep inside the pit, watching the bus come in each week, disgorging a new crop of “newcocks,” ignorant young men who think it is a game, who think they have all the answers, who haven’t yet experienced the rude awakening of chain gang reality, but soon will. That’s also the way it is in prison.
THAT’S THE WAY IT IS IN PRISON
A memoir by Charles Patrick Norman
Murf the Surf and I are walking in the rain past the steam plant heading back to the Southwest Unit. The chapel is off to our left, separated from the sidewalk by tall, thick hedges. We are coming from the Main Gate at the Old Administration Building after escorting out a group of students and professors visiting from the University of Florida in Gainesville.
We are prisoners serving life sentences for murder convictions at Raiford, otherwise known as The Rock, Union Correctional Institution, Florida’s oldest and toughest prison, filled to overflowing with over 2600 desperate men. Raiford is like a small town, with streets, buildings, trees, factories, stores, and housing areas. The steam plant to our right provides power to the laundry, chow halls, and other facilities. A tall brick chimney tower can be seen for miles, and the steam plant whistle, which blasts periodically throughout the day, sounds like a train whistle that can be heard for miles.
We come to the main east/west road and turn right. The school, vocational classes, and print shop are contained in a block-long two-story building across from us. We are talking about the past three hours we spent with Dr. Jack Detweiler and his college students, eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year olds, intelligent and inquisitive, who bombarded us with pointed questions about ourselves, our lives, our families, our sentences, and life in prison. Fresh-faced and scrubbed, neatly and fashionably dressed, they seem like naïve, adorable children after being surrounded by hard-eyed, stone-faced, feral prison schemers twenty-four/seven, day after day, for weeks, months, years.
Coming toward us from the Southwest Unit, a shirtless prisoner wearing athletic shorts and shoes without socks runs as hard as he can while pushing a wheelbarrow. Another shirtless man is sprawled in the wheelbarrow, arms and legs hanging over the sides, limp, reminding me of that sculpture, Michelangelo’s “La Pieta,” of Mary holding the dead Christ in her arms.
The laboring prisoner comes nearer. I see it is Floyd Price, another lifer, a young, strong, well-built man, bulging muscles defined by years of pushing iron. His eyeglasses are fogged and waterspotted.
“Make way, give me room,” he gasps, already winded from his exertions. There is plenty of room in the street, but we step aside. He doesn’t appear to need any help, nor does he ask for it.
Floyd pushes past us at a sprint. We look down and see that the man sprawled in the wheelbarrow is Jim Ealy, and his throat has been cut. A deep gash like a ravine slashes across his neck and down toward his Adam’s apple. Blood runs down his chest, rinsed and thinned by the raindrops that have turned into a shower. His head lolls. His lifeless eyes stare into nothingness. He looks dead.
We grimace and shake our heads in unison, silent in our thoughts. Life and death in prison is selfish. Better him than me. Self-preservation rules. We continue along the street. Floyd races to the prison hospital, a few hundred yards away. It is a good move. Had the guards called for a nurse and a stretcher from the hospital themselves, it might have been twenty, thirty minutes, or an hour, before they came to pick him up, if they got there at all. If poor Jim Ealy has any chance of survival before he bleeds out, Floyd is providing it by carrying him to the hospital himself.
Prisoners at Raiford live in three places. The Main Housing Unit is actually “The Rock,” a concrete and steel edifice first opened in 1913, a three-story fort-like structure that appears to be a strange conglomeration of The Alamo, a low-income housing project, and a haunted dungeon. Evil spirits permeate its cold, thick walls and dark tiny cells. Untold numbers of prisoners have been murdered or died there. Most “newcocks,” young prisoners fresh from the county jails and prison reception center at Lake Butler are initially assigned to the Main Housing Unit upon their arrival at Raiford, a sort of “welcome to prison.” Some of them never come out, consumed by the beasts within.
Reflecting the prison system’s obsession with compass points, the “West Unit” is, of course, on the west side of Raiford, as opposed to the “East Unit,” or FSP, Florida State Prison, a mile or so to the east, across the New River in Bradford County. The West Unit has a rusting, faded arch over its entry, recounting its original role as the “reception center” years before. Consisting of one-story warehouse-type buildings used as dormitories, a metal plaque embedded in the outside back wall of Dorm Five identifies it as “White Women’s Prison—1936.”
We are heading toward the Southwest Unit—that’s right—it’s at the south and west corner of the prison grounds. If you know which way is north, you’ll never get lost at Raiford. The Southwest Unit is the most “modern” prison housing here, built in 1976, during a brief enlightenment period when the Department of Corrections changed its name temporarily to the Department of Offender Rehabilitation. A long circular road loops around a former open field with four housing areas built on its outside edge. Each housing area is fronted by a building of offices, classrooms and canteen, and officers’ station. Inside, three two-story air conditioned dormitories house ninety-six men each in two-man rooms. A thirteenth building, aptly named Building Thirteen, is only one-story, holding forty-eight men, mostly the “elite” prisoners. A chow hall sits inside the circular road.
There is a commotion on the road in front of “A Area,” the first set of buildings we come to entering the Southwest Unit. It appears to be where Jim Ealy got his throat cut moments ago.
Three prisoners with homemade knives are jabbing and feinting at each other while two large, pot-bellied sergeants, one white and one black, stand back and urge them to stop. Don’t get too close! “Shanks” aren’t prejudiced. They will kill white and black alike, prisoners or guards.
It is obvious what this is about, a fight between two pairs of prison homosexuals. The two “female” members, known as punks or sissies, babies or boys, are more slightly-built, have shaved eyebrows and lisp their threats and insults at each other. The “male” counterparts, the “husbands,” “my man,” or the war daddy, as he is known sometimes, play the more masculine role, is often larger and more dominant, but no more dangerous than his chain gang lover. Knives are great size equalizers. A tiny matador can slay a large bull.
In this scene, the two war daddies have taken most of the damage. Jim Ealy and his slashed throat are almost to the hospital by now in Floyd Price’s wheelbarrow ambulance. His “boy” appears unscathed. “Moose,” the other war daddy, another shirtless big man, staggers in the rain, one hand barely holding onto what appears to be a sharpened steel spike, the other hand trying to cover up several holes punched in his chest. Every time he inhales and exhales, bright red blood bubbles and foams out of the holes, a sure sign the wounds have punctured his lung. He is ready to drop.
The black sergeant, a very large man nicknamed by the prisoners as “Idi Amin,” for obvious reasons, is urging Moose to drop his knife and lie down on the road, wait for help, he’s hurt.
“I’m all right, I’m all right, I’m—” Moose drops the blade, teeters, falls to his knees, then sags to the wet pavement onto his back. Falling rain mixes and rinses the foaming blood bubbles that whisper out of his chest. The two “boys” ignore Moose, dancing, pirouetting, making half-hearted stabs at each other. Back down the road from where we came, we see a crowd of prison guards half-hustling in our direction, the “goon squad,” or “doom squad,” as some black prisoners call it, a special group of tough guards who respond to violent incidents. Anyone in the vicinity when they arrive is likely to get jumped on, their heads busted, tossed in lock-up, or worse, so Murf and I hurry up and make haste on down the road, around to “C Area,” where we are housed, and where the GOLAB program operates. Over our shoulders, we look back and see the two “sissies” in handcuffs, on their way to confinement. Moose still lies on the road. Party’s over.
Entering the “breezeway,” we turn right into a hallway that leads to the GOLAB classroom. The control room is to our left and the barber shop to the right. The classroom is empty of people. After the college students and professors left, the prisoners who work with us in the program left to go to their buildings and cells, or “rooms,” to unwind, get ready for supper, take showers, whatever. Folding chairs are set up in a large circle. Several tables line the walls. A blackboard covers one wall. I make sure the coffee pot is unplugged and the trash cans emptied. Murf sweeps the floor with a push-broom.
When the University of Florida students entered the classroom at one o’clock, they were bunched up and scared as rabbits. Eight or nine prisoners sat scattered in the circle of chairs, forcing the students, a majority female, to sit next to and on either side of us. An hour before their arrival down here, a couple of guards had run a little “orientation” session on them, to prepare them for meeting us for the first time. They showed the students a variety of prison weapons, clubs, knives, pipes, chains, that had been confiscated in shakedowns. They told them horror stories. They scared them shitless, as they say.
“You kids be real careful down there with that bunch. They may act nice to you, to get your trust, but that’s all it is, an act. Them boys is murderers, rapists, robbers, kidnappers, child molesters, you name it, the scum of the earth, and if any one of them get half a chance, they’ll put a knife to your pretty little neck, they’ll rape you, they’ll murder you. They’ll sweet talk you, tell you sob stories, try to get your address and telephone number, con you into coming to see ‘em at the visiting park, bring ‘em dope and money, next thing you know, they’ll have you helpin’ them escape. Then you’ll be left high and dry, heading to the women’s prison at Lowell, and they’ll be gone, laughing at you. Don’t believe a word they say. They’re all a bunch a liars and homosexuals.”
Those briefings were so consistently the same that we figured they must have had a script of some sort, and followed it closely each time a new group came in to see and speak with us. And it worked, at least for the first fifteen minutes or half hour, until the college students got a chance to observe and listen to us, and discover that we were scarcely different from them, except that our lives had been ruined by some misstep, and theirs were just starting out.
We usually began the sessions by introducing ourselves, where we were from, what we were in prison for, how much time we had, and any other personal details we wished to share.
“My name is Joe, I’m from New York, I’m in prison for robbery, I’ve done four years, I saw the parole man last year, and I hope to get out in five or six years.”
“Hi, my name is Jerry, they call me Chicago, I’ve done eight years on an attempted murder charge, and I get out on parole this year.”
“My name is John. I go by the nickname of “Tex.” I came in with an eighteen month sentence over twenty years ago. I got involved in the murder of another prisoner, and I never got out. I was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I call myself “Tex” because I don’t want anybody to call me Louise!” (Laughter)
My turn. “My name is Charlie, and I’m from Tampa, where I went to the University of South Florida. (cheers). I’m serving a fresh life sentence for a murder someone else committed, and my parole man hasn’t been born yet. (More laughter). When he is born, I hope he has good parents who love him, who don’t abuse or molest him, who raise him in a good home, he grows up a decent, well-adjusted person, so when he comes to see me in twenty-five years or so, he has a positive attitude, isn’t on some vindictive crusade, doesn’t give me a Buck Rogers date for parole. (Nervous laughter). I’m glad you all could come here today, we are open to any of your questions about prison and the criminal justice system, ask whatever you like. First, though, how about each of you introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about who you are, where you’re from, what you’re majoring in, what your goals are.”
That usually got things going. After thirty minutes or an hour, the room would be abuzz with chatter, the din increasing, as everyone talked at once, it seemed, to the persons on their lefts and rights, prisoners and students, the only discernible difference being some wore prison blues and the rest didn’t. Some were female and some were male. When it was time to go, it was difficult to get them to leave. They’d have plenty to write about in their class assignment papers on their trip to prison.
Murf the Surf and I walked with them from the Southwest Unit to the Main Gate. We each had an umbrella, and of course we had to share them with friendly coeds. Dr. Detweiler, a lean, scholarly man, walked alongside Murf, listening intently as Murf postulated about a fascinating subject—himself—that sounded great, but would be forgotten ten minutes later. The escorting guards had disappeared in the rain and four o’clock shift change. Our little group scuttled across the empty compound, Raiford appearing to be a ghost town in bad weather. An occasional lone prisoner would pass by, gaping, surprised and wondering how and why a covey of young women and men wandered through this ultimate no-man’s land.
For a short while we had been seemingly transported out of the prison and into a university classroom. Walking back from the main gate, we were energized with the mental stimulation that the supercharged students had provided us. Seeing Floyd pushing a bleeding Jim Ealy to the hospital in a wheelbarrow and the aftermath of the knife fight on the road by “A Area” brought us back to earth swiftly to the reality of life in prison.
We heard later that the incident began with an argument between the two “boys” that escalated to threats and shanks. Once the two “feminine” counterparts armed themselves and squared off, the “husbands,” or “war daddies,” were obligated to pull out their weapons and defend their chain gang lovers. Moose was now at the prison hospital. The two “boys” were in lockup, in the same cell, presumably reconciled. Conflicting reports claimed that Jim had died, that he was in the Lake Butler prison hospital, that he was on life support at Shands Hospital in Gainesville.
Prison is an unrepentant rumor mill, fueled by deranged fools who truly believe the made-up facts that pour from damaged brains.
Saturday night we go to the movie in the Main Housing Unit theater, the biggest screen in Union County, a cavernous room on the second floor filled with hundreds of actual theater seats, broken and battered as many of them are. The Rock movie theater looks like something transported out of the Depression in the 1930’s, a dark, dirty, forlorn place, with an ominous slice in the screen that could have been made by some maniac with a sharp knife chasing someone else.
They show the same movie first thing Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, and Saturday night. I have my own reverse movie critic, a psychotic from Duval County named Jimmy, who races to the Rock first thing every Saturday morning to hurry down front and center on the first row to stare up at the fuzzy picture. When Jimmy comes back at eleven o’clock, I’ll ask him, “How was the movie, Jimmy?”
If Jimmy’s eyes light up, his face crinkles into smiles, and he tells me, “Brother, that was the best movie I ever seen. Man, you ain’t gonna believe it. Don’t you miss this ‘un, Bubba, or you’ll regret it,” I know I’ll pass. It will be trash, unwatchable. I’ll make other plans for Saturday night—read a book, write a letter, watch TV.
If Jimmy’s face contorts in disgust, he snarls and spits, balls his fists, scuffles his feet and tells me, dead serious, “Don’t waste your time, bro. That movie sucks. It is pure garbage. That’s the sorriest movie I’ve seen in a long time,” I make my plans. I’m going to see it, it’s probably going to win the “Best Picture” Academy Award. Jimmy is that good. After my friends see me talking to Jimmy, they’ll nod, I’ll toss a thumbs up or thumbs down their way, and they’ll make their plans, too.
The Rock Movie Theater in the Main Housing Unit is one of the most dangerous places in the prison. No guards go in there. Two or three hundred of the deadliest prisoners locked in a dark room, with the inherent grudges, gang enmities, racial issues, bad debts, angry lovers, and who knows what else adding to the violence stew makes for a potential bloodbath every week.
Men go in groups for self-preservation. I’m not affiliated with any cliques or gangs, more an independent who cruises along above the fray, but several other men from our housing area and I ride with the Jacksonville Boys, a loosely-confederated bunch of prisoners mostly from the west side of Jacksonville, forty miles or so to the northeast. I have gained the respect and friendship of their leader, Junior Bullard, the “Bull,” another chain gang legend who had survived the last twenty years at the Rock and FSP.
To long-term prisoners like Junior, men who are “fresh off the street,” comparatively speaking, are like missionaries who’ve been dropped into the jungle amidst a lost tribe long out of contact with civilization. They thirst for information concerning how life is “out there,” a strange and alien world of the future that has passed them by. I am happy to oblige, answering Junior’s questions, and although we have vastly different lifestyles and beliefs, being accepted by him means that I gain the acceptance of his entire crew. Thus I could hitchhike along with his group to the movies, while still remaining a free agent, sort of like the white man who was allowed to travel with an Apache war party, but never participated in scalping. An observer.
In each group will be two or three men armed with large sharp shanks, prepared to step up and bare their weapons if something jumps off. Since every group knows everyone else is strapped down and ready to rumble in an instant, an armed truce usually ensues, allowing us to enjoy the movie in peace.
In our movie group I know of at least two men who are carrying, one, Larry Jefferson, “L.J.,” also called Pinhead, a slightly built thirty-something who sells bags of pot for Junior, who came to prison as a teen, accepted into the Jacksonville Boys, who has grown up in prison, the only acceptance he has ever known. Larry is a quiet, shy man who still looks like a skinny kid, but don’t let that fool you. If necessary, he will pull out that big knife and wield it in an instant.
Roy Yates isn’t really one of the Jacksonville Boys, either, and although he’s a bonafide psychopath, he is trusted. Roy has been in prison for fifteen years and looks it, worn and wrinkled from smoking “RIPS,” the pungent state-issued prison tobacco, drinking buck, potent prison wine, and doing any kind of drug or pill he can get his hands on.
Roy is missing his top and bottom front teeth, which gives him the disturbing appearance known as “cat mouth,” more commonly seen in the discarded men who come to American prisons after serving years in Cuban hell-holes, where new arrivals commonly had their front teeth knocked out. There’s no excuse for Roy not to get his teeth fixed, since Raiford has a large dental office and a dental lab, where prisoners make dentures for other prisoners statewide. He just doesn’t care.
Roy is actually a short-timer, ready to be released in a year or so. He has minimum custody, and works outside the prison at the slaughterhouse every day.
Every Wednesday, they butcher hogs. They call the slaughterhouse the “cold storage,” another prison euphemism, and we can see the large building on the other side of the triple fences along the Rock Yard, the Main Housing Unit recreation field.
Pigs aren’t stupid, but none of the hundreds that are run through the chutes at the slaughter house have ever experienced this, so they don’t know what’s coming until it’s too late. We listen to the squeals and squalls of confusion and hesitation as the first ones are run through the chutes up to the slaughter house killing floor. A “free man” wields a bolt gun, a compressed air-powered tool with a trigger that he places up against the pig’s head, that fires a steel bolt into the pig’s brain, supposedly instantly killing it. The bolt retracts, ready for the next victim right behind the first.
From our vantage point on the yard, we couldn’t see what happened, but the pigs told us everything. We could hear it all. The pigs at the front of the line, the first victims, complacently followed the leaders, never suspecting this was death day. We’d hear the squeals, then the bolt gun would start killing, and Roy would wield his butcher knife. The pigs would see the carnage in front of them, smell the blood, and start freaking out. The squeals would become more panicked and high-pitched, in pig language they were saying, “RUN! Run for your lives! They’re killing us! Stop! Get away!”” But there was no getting away, no turning around in the chutes, no mercy. The bolt gun and Roy waited for them all. Soon every pig down the line would be screaming, but after a time, it would be quiet. All were dead.
Roy acts as the cutthroat. He wields a razor-sharp butcher knife, and as soon as the free man fires the bolt gun, dropping the pig, Roy starts the butchering process by cutting the pig’s throat.
Roy straddles the dead pig, grasps its snout, and raises its head upward. “You sorry ass Anderson, I hate your damn guts. You talked all that shit to me, thought you was bad, you ain’t so bad now, are you?”
With that, Roy brings the knife around, cutting through the pig’s neck with a growl and shout of triumph, blood gushing everywhere. That pig is hooked and dragged away for scalding and gutting, and the next one takes its place.
“Bobby Joe, you piece of shit, you thought you was slick, beating me out of that money, I got your ass. What ‘chu gonna do now?” And he slices, yells, grins, wipes blood from his face with a rag. All day long.
One day the free man with the bolt gun, the prison employee who oversaw that part of the job, became particularly disturbed by some of Roy’s comments to the dead pigs. He’d told others that he’d considered re-assigning Roy to another job, but he was actually afraid of him, and he was the best butcher they’d ever had. He enjoyed his work. He stopped the line for a minute and spoke to Roy.
“Roy, some of this stuff you’re saying might be going a little too far, pretending you’re cutting the warden’s throat, and the colonel’s, and most of the officers here. You ever think you might need some help, go see the psychiatrist, talk about that? You may have a problem, Roy, and with you getting ready to go home, I’m worried about you. What do you think?”
Roy just looked at him, straddled the pig, lifted its head, brought the butcher knife around, held it there. “You wanna know what I think? You wanna know what I think of all of ya’ll? Watch this. This is you, motherfucker,” and with a practiced stroke, Roy dug deeply and almost decapitated the hog. Bloodsoaked from head to toe, Roy stood up straight, looked the free man in the eye, and asked,” Any more questions?”
Shaken, the man shook his head no.
“I didn’t think so.” He went back to work.
Roy’s proclivities were well-known, and when he’d offered his security services to Junior, they were quickly accepted. No one doubted that Roy would use his knife. In fact, he couldn’t wait to use his skills on a human. Heaven help anyone he got a hold of.
There we were, hundreds of prisoners in a long line in the dark, waiting to enter the west gate that led inside the main housing unit. We stood on a wide sidewalk along an old brick street lined with huge spreading oak trees that had been growing there since the Rock was built. If you didn’t know you were inside a prison, you could imagine you were on a tree-lined small town residential street.
We hear the clang, clang, klink, clang, clattering sounds of metal hitting bricks. The armed men at the front of the line are tossing their knives into the street. The guards must be using metal detectors at the gate. There have been rumors of something jumping off in the theater tonight, resulting in the use of metal-detecting wands, and an inordinate amount of steel is skittering into the street. Roy and Larry stick their shanks into the ground next to a large oak tree root so they could find them. Their knives had been specially ground and sharpened in the furniture factory from carbon steel, and they dodn’t want to lose them.
The movie is uneventful. No one gets killed but on the screen.
When we exit The Rock, after 9:00 p.m., it is dark. No guards are seen past the West Gate. The brick road is still littered with discarded shanks, scattered where they were thrown. Men pick through them and continue on. Pinhead and Roy recover their specially-made blades, concealing them in their waistbands. We walk unescorted the quarter mile back to the Southwest Unit in the spooky darkness. The only light comes from blinking stars and distant fences. Just another night in prison.
The next day, Sunday, I go to the visiting park. My mother and father, brother, sister-in-law, and my nephew and niece, Timmy, eight years old, and Tammy, seven years old, have made the four-hour trip to see me.
Timmy is fascinated by the tattoos covering the arms, necks, and some faces of various bikers in the visiting park.
“Charles, why do those men draw cartoons all over theirselves like that?”
“I don’t really know, Timmy. I guess they are bored, or they like those pictures.”
“Will those cartoons wash off?”
“No, you can’t wash them off. They’ll wear them till they die.”
“If I did that, my Mom would kill me.”
“You’re right, young man,” Sandy added.
After visit, I went to the bandroom to talk to Murf. The bandroom is part of the old “Flat Top,” a walled structure that used to house Death Row up until 1961, when FSP was built, the new Death Row opened, and they moved “Old Sparky,” the electric chair, across the New River to its new abode. It gave me an odd feeling walking along the hallway of the old Death Row, lined with tiny one-man cells that once upon a time was home to Florida’s condemned, many of whom had made this same walk to the electric chair.
Now the cells were occupied by prisoner musicians. I quickly passed a man playing a guitar, one with a keyboard, another guitarist, a drummer, a man with a trumpet, then a sax. Murf was in the main room where Old Sparky once sat, which now held all the speakers and amplifiers for the band practice. Plenty of electrical outlets were available in the room that held the electric chair. I didn’t like it there—too many ghosts—and I left quickly.
Outside, I passed a little old man they called The Colonel, supposedly a retired military man who tended the colorful flowers growing next to the concrete walls. I was glad to get back to the relative sanctuary of my cell in the Southwest Unit.
A month or so later I was walking to the patio canteen, the prison restaurant next to the visiting park, where you could buy breakfasts, hot coffee, meals, burgers, fries, and whatnot if you had money. Coming out of the canteen restaurant was Jim Ealy and his boy. A bright red scar defined the grave injury to his neck.
“Jim!” I said, surprised. “I thought you were dead. Last time I saw you, Floyd Price was pushing you down the road in a wheelbarrow, your throat cut open.”
He fingered the scar automatically. “Nah, they tried, but they couldn’t do it, Bubba. I guess I got eight lives left now.”
“Uh huh. Hey, could I talk to you for a minute, privately?”
Jim’s homosexual lover eyed me suspiciously, correct in assuming I had something to say that I didn’t want him to hear.
“Sure, Charlie. Wait a sec, babe,” he said to the boy, who huffed and turned away.
“Jimmy, you’re a good guy,” I said. “You are a decent person, and everyone respects you.”
“Yeah? Thanks.”
“But you’ve got a serious flaw, man,” I said, cocking my thumb toward the boy. “That punk almost got you killed, and next time, you might not be so lucky.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“You gotta give up that boy. That boy is death. You stick with him, you’re not gonna make it.”
Jim grimaced. “Listen, I know you’re right, but you don’t understand. I can’t give that boy up. I love him. I appreciate what you’re saying, though.”
He left with the boy, and I went inside and ordered a hamburger and French fries.
Jim was an electrician, working for maintenance, wore a tool belt anywhere on the compound. That’s a big deal in prison, being permitted to carry hammers, pliers, and other legal weapons as part of your job, providing a degree of deterrence from attack in most cases. While he’d been recuperating in the Lake Butler prison hospital, his boy had not been pining away waiting for him, but as those things happen in prison, he’d been fooling around, playing the very large field, and had linked up with a new war daddy that Jimmy knew nothing about.
Chain gang divorces aren’t like those done in a free society, with no-fault, lawyers, alimony, child support, and the rest. There is an element of violence attached that is rarely seen outside prison.
Jimmy got a work order to replace a light bulb in the West Unit. It was a set-up. When he walked through the doorway, a person unknown ran him through with a very large screwdriver that went in his abdomen and poked out from his back. There was no saving him this time. Floyd and his wheelbarrow were nowhere to be found. By the time the nurse got there with two stretcher bearers, Jimmy was dead.
That night, Jimmy’s former chain gang lover was curled up in the bunk of his new husband. It’s doubtful that he gave a second thought to Jimmy, who thought he loved him. That’s the way it is in prison.
Murf the Surf got out of prison twenty five years ago. Jim Ealy and legions of men like him are skeletons mouldering in the ground of “Boot Hill,” the sad prison cemetery that rests in the piney woods outside the fences and in sight of the Southwest Unit. Many thousands of other men have come and gone and returned to these prisons over and over again. The Rock is long gone, battered to rubble by a wrecking ball, setting loose all those ghosts and evil spirits to find new places to roost and haunt.
As for myself, I am still here, an eternity later, trapped deep inside the pit, watching the bus come in each week, disgorging a new crop of “newcocks,” ignorant young men who think it is a game, who think they have all the answers, who haven’t yet experienced the rude awakening of chain gang reality, but soon will. That’s also the way it is in prison.
Monday, September 7, 2009
CHAIN GANG HUSTLES
Dateline: August 17, 2009
CHAIN GANG HUSTLES
There are no more “chain gangs” in Florida per se, but the term lives on, applied to the down and dirty life in prison that continues unabated inside the razorwire fences. Picture a huge dog pound, a barren cage teeming with over a thousand stray dogs of all sizes and shapes collected from across the state.
Each day surly keepers arrive and toss barely enough food into the cage to sustain the thousand-plus hungry beasts. The pit bulls, mastiffs, Rottweilers, Dobermans, and German Shepherds snap, growl, and muscle their way to the food troughs and gorge themselves as fast and hard as they can. The Chihuahuas, toy poodles, Shih Tzus, Yorkies, and other small, weaker, decorative dogs must stand back and wait until the bigger, fiercer dogs are done, hoping they can scrounge the scraps without getting attacked and bitten.
Life in prison has many parallels to that fictional dog pound. “Survival of the fittest” rules. The weak are at the mercy of the strong and heartless. The keepers do little to limit the anarchy. For those prisoners who receive help from family and friends outside, enabling them to buy extra food, supplies, and essentials like soap, shampoo, deodorant, writing paper, stamps, envelopes, shoes, and socks, items taken for granted in society, they must be strong enough to hold onto their possessions from the jackals, robbers, and thieves who prey upon the weak.
For those who have no outside support, their choice is to do without or find a hustle, some way to earn money in prison, to carve off slices of the prison cow for themselves.
For virtually all kinds of hustles that exist in society’s “underground economy,” there are corresponding prison hustles, both legal and illegal, although illegal predominates.
Legal hustles are rare. Fifty men out of 1200 may work at a low-paying prison factory job, such as the Florida PRIDE Prison Industries, furniture factory, print shop, garment factory, auto tag plant, and others scattered singly in various fortunate prisons.
The handful of prisoners who operate the prison canteens, mini-convenience stores that sell junk food and basic necessities to those with money from home, are paid a monthly pittance, which is usually outweighed by the illegal earnings, extending credit at usurious rates for one example. The shoeshine boy and “staff barber,” direct descendants of the former glory days of slavery, also receive monthly pittances on top of tips they receive from guards, along with several hustles they run on the side. The guards usually turn a blind eye to their minor goings-on. One of the unspoken perks of prison staff is access to the inexpensive shoe shines and haircuts available in the staff barber shop. These plum jobs generally go to snitches, who conveniently pass on information behind closed barber shop doors.
Some men sell their trays for cigarettes and cups of coffee. The desire for nicotine and caffeine overrides their hunger. Meals such as baked chicken legs and hamburgers or turkey sausage are prime bartering subjects. Such men who sell their trays are usually rail-thin, a diet fad undiscovered by Jenny Craig.
Food is an overriding concern, and stealing from the kitchen is one of the main preoccupations and money sources. Some prisoners will wrap up their hamburger, stuff it down their pants, and smuggle it back to the housing unit to sell to someone who missed chow or is still hungry. Other men in cahoots with the cook will steal twenty pieces of chicken and attempt to sneak them out of the kitchen. If they are successful, they reap a hefty profit. If they’re caught, they go to confinement for thirty days. No risk, no reward.
Making wine is becoming a lost art in prison. Everyone is locked down more and more, movement is restricted with constant searches and shakedowns, and the easily identifiable smell of fermenting oranges or other fruit have cut back on the wine-making, but hasn’t eliminated it. A huge percentage of alcoholic prisoners fuels the market.
Drug sales and use are endemic. Despite dope-sniffing dogs, urinalysis, widespread snitches and shakedowns, the prisons are filled with drugs. Authorities typically blame the visitors coming to see their loved ones in prison as the main culprits, but everyone knows that is a smokescreen, scapegoats used to cover the drug sales of corrupt guards and other employees who have no qualms about tapping into a ready, captive market. The occasional guard who is snitched out or slips up and is caught bringing in drugs is quickly fired and quietly prosecuted, making barely a ripple on the criminal justice pond. Plea bargains and no mention in the press squelch any public outcry.
Sex sells on the street and in prison. I could write a book about that and probably will. Homosexuality is rampant—some estimate that as many as ninety percent of prisoners engage in homosexuality, although a portion of that number may be otherwise heterosexual husbands and fathers with wives and children who succumb to prison sex to satisfy their urges while inside, living a secret life. They justify their behavior by saying that they aren’t actually homosexuals or gay, and will return to their normal lives upon release, leaving their homosexual lovers behind. Often they take something with them—HIV—and infect their unsuspecting wives with a deadly disease. When that happens, all too often, their secret is out.
There is a large subset of effeminate gay men who actually sell sex, bartering their favors for coffee, food, cigarettes, and other necessities. These men are quite popular. Far more prevalent are the homosexual relationships where one man with money pairs up with a poor homosexual without, like a chain-gang sugar daddy who purchases solo sexual service on a long-term basis. Some of these “business propositions’ evolve into little chain-gang “families,” the “father” paying the bills, subsidizing the “mother” and one, two, or more “children,” younger prisoners they take under their wings and bring along into the incestuous family relationship. It all boils down to money, however. If the “father’s” finances dry up, the “family” quickly scatters.
Some of the traditional prison hustles still hang on, even in the crippled economy which has struck hard in prison. Some men will make beds and clean cells in exchange for cigarettes and cups of coffee. Some prisoners would rather pay someone than to do these chores themselves. Other men wash athletic shoes or personal clothing in their toilets, a primitive, chain gang “washing machine,” and earn their coffee and smokes that way.
The prison laundry harbors one of the best hustles—men pay by the month to have their uniforms washed and pressed, “specials,” and to insure that their laundry bags with underwear, socks, towels and sweatshirts aren’t stolen.
Artists can always make a buck drawing pictures or making birthday cards. At prisons with hobbycraft programs, some prison artists support their families selling artwork. Woodworkers make picture frames and jewelry boxes. Leather workers sell purses and wallets.
Some men run private prison canteens from their cells, extending credit to their customers at a rate of two-to-one. Many prisoners will run up huge bills, struggle to pay them, and “check-in” for protective custody. The large “PC” inmate populations at some prisons are known as the “bankruptcy squad.” The high interest rates charged make up for the frequent losses.
Law clerks and “jailhouse lawyers” reap hefty profits from newly-arrived prisoners desperate for appeals to be filed. Like their “street lawyer” counterparts, many of these “legal experts” are no more than con men, scamming checks from their customers’ families, cranking out fruitless appeals that only damage their chances for relief.
Like their animal world counterparts, men trapped in the chain-gang dog pound must deal with a “dog-eat-dog” world of brutality and subjugation. The weak with money pay “protection” to the strong to keep from being beaten up and robbed. Without protection they are at the mercy of small gangs of marauders, “packs,” who strip them of possessions, so it is advantageous to pay a smaller portion to a “big dog” to act as a “war daddy.” For those small dogs with no resources, subjected to gang rapes by unrepentant sodomizers, submission to one alpha male’s desires is preferable to being passed around by a group. In this hustle, the strongest men gain either canteen purchases or several favors for their primitive protection racket.
Income tax check refunds have been a major hustle and source of cash for decades. Neither the state officials nor feds have been able to staunch the flow of cash from the treasury. Prison con men obtain social security numbers from other men who have been in prison for years, with nothing to lose, and file phony tax returns with refunds into the thousands of dollars. The IRS checks go to addresses outside, where confederates, often prison employees, collect the checks, cash them, and distribute the money.
Gambling constitutes a major prison hustle. Poker games, dominos, Cash-3, football pools, and numerous other activities not only keep a lot of money flowing from losers to winners, but also fuel other illegal activities. Big winners will spend a large chunk on drugs, keeping that economy rolling. Losers will rob, break into lockers, and commit numerous other thefts to get back into the game to recoup their losses. Surprisingly, considering the effect gambling has on thefts and violence, the prison authorities virtually ignore it for some reason.
From just this brief introduction, it should be obvious that that the prisons are modern-day Sodoms and Gomorrahs, cesspits of lawlessness, immorality and degradation, not much different from collections of beasts in dog pounds and zoos. Is it a surprise that humans can revert back so easily to their primitive roots? Perhaps what is more surprising is the fact that even in such a degenerate, perverted environment, a minority of upright men actually resist the evil natures and lead exemplary lives in the midst of such immorality, refusing to compromise their moral values. Unfortunately, it seems that the people involved in determining who is to be released to return to society are as likely to choose the very worst candidates as they are the most law-abiding ones. Is it any wonder that prisons are described as having a revolving door, with men returning as fast as they are released?
Charlie
CHAIN GANG HUSTLES
There are no more “chain gangs” in Florida per se, but the term lives on, applied to the down and dirty life in prison that continues unabated inside the razorwire fences. Picture a huge dog pound, a barren cage teeming with over a thousand stray dogs of all sizes and shapes collected from across the state.
Each day surly keepers arrive and toss barely enough food into the cage to sustain the thousand-plus hungry beasts. The pit bulls, mastiffs, Rottweilers, Dobermans, and German Shepherds snap, growl, and muscle their way to the food troughs and gorge themselves as fast and hard as they can. The Chihuahuas, toy poodles, Shih Tzus, Yorkies, and other small, weaker, decorative dogs must stand back and wait until the bigger, fiercer dogs are done, hoping they can scrounge the scraps without getting attacked and bitten.
Life in prison has many parallels to that fictional dog pound. “Survival of the fittest” rules. The weak are at the mercy of the strong and heartless. The keepers do little to limit the anarchy. For those prisoners who receive help from family and friends outside, enabling them to buy extra food, supplies, and essentials like soap, shampoo, deodorant, writing paper, stamps, envelopes, shoes, and socks, items taken for granted in society, they must be strong enough to hold onto their possessions from the jackals, robbers, and thieves who prey upon the weak.
For those who have no outside support, their choice is to do without or find a hustle, some way to earn money in prison, to carve off slices of the prison cow for themselves.
For virtually all kinds of hustles that exist in society’s “underground economy,” there are corresponding prison hustles, both legal and illegal, although illegal predominates.
Legal hustles are rare. Fifty men out of 1200 may work at a low-paying prison factory job, such as the Florida PRIDE Prison Industries, furniture factory, print shop, garment factory, auto tag plant, and others scattered singly in various fortunate prisons.
The handful of prisoners who operate the prison canteens, mini-convenience stores that sell junk food and basic necessities to those with money from home, are paid a monthly pittance, which is usually outweighed by the illegal earnings, extending credit at usurious rates for one example. The shoeshine boy and “staff barber,” direct descendants of the former glory days of slavery, also receive monthly pittances on top of tips they receive from guards, along with several hustles they run on the side. The guards usually turn a blind eye to their minor goings-on. One of the unspoken perks of prison staff is access to the inexpensive shoe shines and haircuts available in the staff barber shop. These plum jobs generally go to snitches, who conveniently pass on information behind closed barber shop doors.
Some men sell their trays for cigarettes and cups of coffee. The desire for nicotine and caffeine overrides their hunger. Meals such as baked chicken legs and hamburgers or turkey sausage are prime bartering subjects. Such men who sell their trays are usually rail-thin, a diet fad undiscovered by Jenny Craig.
Food is an overriding concern, and stealing from the kitchen is one of the main preoccupations and money sources. Some prisoners will wrap up their hamburger, stuff it down their pants, and smuggle it back to the housing unit to sell to someone who missed chow or is still hungry. Other men in cahoots with the cook will steal twenty pieces of chicken and attempt to sneak them out of the kitchen. If they are successful, they reap a hefty profit. If they’re caught, they go to confinement for thirty days. No risk, no reward.
Making wine is becoming a lost art in prison. Everyone is locked down more and more, movement is restricted with constant searches and shakedowns, and the easily identifiable smell of fermenting oranges or other fruit have cut back on the wine-making, but hasn’t eliminated it. A huge percentage of alcoholic prisoners fuels the market.
Drug sales and use are endemic. Despite dope-sniffing dogs, urinalysis, widespread snitches and shakedowns, the prisons are filled with drugs. Authorities typically blame the visitors coming to see their loved ones in prison as the main culprits, but everyone knows that is a smokescreen, scapegoats used to cover the drug sales of corrupt guards and other employees who have no qualms about tapping into a ready, captive market. The occasional guard who is snitched out or slips up and is caught bringing in drugs is quickly fired and quietly prosecuted, making barely a ripple on the criminal justice pond. Plea bargains and no mention in the press squelch any public outcry.
Sex sells on the street and in prison. I could write a book about that and probably will. Homosexuality is rampant—some estimate that as many as ninety percent of prisoners engage in homosexuality, although a portion of that number may be otherwise heterosexual husbands and fathers with wives and children who succumb to prison sex to satisfy their urges while inside, living a secret life. They justify their behavior by saying that they aren’t actually homosexuals or gay, and will return to their normal lives upon release, leaving their homosexual lovers behind. Often they take something with them—HIV—and infect their unsuspecting wives with a deadly disease. When that happens, all too often, their secret is out.
There is a large subset of effeminate gay men who actually sell sex, bartering their favors for coffee, food, cigarettes, and other necessities. These men are quite popular. Far more prevalent are the homosexual relationships where one man with money pairs up with a poor homosexual without, like a chain-gang sugar daddy who purchases solo sexual service on a long-term basis. Some of these “business propositions’ evolve into little chain-gang “families,” the “father” paying the bills, subsidizing the “mother” and one, two, or more “children,” younger prisoners they take under their wings and bring along into the incestuous family relationship. It all boils down to money, however. If the “father’s” finances dry up, the “family” quickly scatters.
Some of the traditional prison hustles still hang on, even in the crippled economy which has struck hard in prison. Some men will make beds and clean cells in exchange for cigarettes and cups of coffee. Some prisoners would rather pay someone than to do these chores themselves. Other men wash athletic shoes or personal clothing in their toilets, a primitive, chain gang “washing machine,” and earn their coffee and smokes that way.
The prison laundry harbors one of the best hustles—men pay by the month to have their uniforms washed and pressed, “specials,” and to insure that their laundry bags with underwear, socks, towels and sweatshirts aren’t stolen.
Artists can always make a buck drawing pictures or making birthday cards. At prisons with hobbycraft programs, some prison artists support their families selling artwork. Woodworkers make picture frames and jewelry boxes. Leather workers sell purses and wallets.
Some men run private prison canteens from their cells, extending credit to their customers at a rate of two-to-one. Many prisoners will run up huge bills, struggle to pay them, and “check-in” for protective custody. The large “PC” inmate populations at some prisons are known as the “bankruptcy squad.” The high interest rates charged make up for the frequent losses.
Law clerks and “jailhouse lawyers” reap hefty profits from newly-arrived prisoners desperate for appeals to be filed. Like their “street lawyer” counterparts, many of these “legal experts” are no more than con men, scamming checks from their customers’ families, cranking out fruitless appeals that only damage their chances for relief.
Like their animal world counterparts, men trapped in the chain-gang dog pound must deal with a “dog-eat-dog” world of brutality and subjugation. The weak with money pay “protection” to the strong to keep from being beaten up and robbed. Without protection they are at the mercy of small gangs of marauders, “packs,” who strip them of possessions, so it is advantageous to pay a smaller portion to a “big dog” to act as a “war daddy.” For those small dogs with no resources, subjected to gang rapes by unrepentant sodomizers, submission to one alpha male’s desires is preferable to being passed around by a group. In this hustle, the strongest men gain either canteen purchases or several favors for their primitive protection racket.
Income tax check refunds have been a major hustle and source of cash for decades. Neither the state officials nor feds have been able to staunch the flow of cash from the treasury. Prison con men obtain social security numbers from other men who have been in prison for years, with nothing to lose, and file phony tax returns with refunds into the thousands of dollars. The IRS checks go to addresses outside, where confederates, often prison employees, collect the checks, cash them, and distribute the money.
Gambling constitutes a major prison hustle. Poker games, dominos, Cash-3, football pools, and numerous other activities not only keep a lot of money flowing from losers to winners, but also fuel other illegal activities. Big winners will spend a large chunk on drugs, keeping that economy rolling. Losers will rob, break into lockers, and commit numerous other thefts to get back into the game to recoup their losses. Surprisingly, considering the effect gambling has on thefts and violence, the prison authorities virtually ignore it for some reason.
From just this brief introduction, it should be obvious that that the prisons are modern-day Sodoms and Gomorrahs, cesspits of lawlessness, immorality and degradation, not much different from collections of beasts in dog pounds and zoos. Is it a surprise that humans can revert back so easily to their primitive roots? Perhaps what is more surprising is the fact that even in such a degenerate, perverted environment, a minority of upright men actually resist the evil natures and lead exemplary lives in the midst of such immorality, refusing to compromise their moral values. Unfortunately, it seems that the people involved in determining who is to be released to return to society are as likely to choose the very worst candidates as they are the most law-abiding ones. Is it any wonder that prisons are described as having a revolving door, with men returning as fast as they are released?
Charlie
Saturday, August 15, 2009
FURTHER NOTES FROM THE PRISON DIARY
Dateline: August 2, 2009
FURTHER NOTES FROM THE PRISON DIARY
—CELL RANSACKING AND CELL PHONES
Florida has a new law in effect banning prisoners from possessing cell phones. The penalty is up to five years in prison and a $5000 fine. Thursday, a Tomoka C.I. prisoner who’d been caught with a cell phone had a hearing in Volusia County Court. The judge must not have been too impressed with the law, levying only a six-month concurrent sentence.
I’ve never used a cell phone. I don’t want one. I don’t care for an additional five years in prison, and I couldn’t afford a $50 fine, let alone $5000. That’s not true for others. Texas and California have confiscated hundreds and thousands of phones. One man on Texas Death Row called a Texas state senator and threatened him. The Death Row prisoner claimed he bought it from a guard. Another guard was caught smuggling sixty cell phones inside a compressor into a Texas prison.
To combat the proliferation, the Florida DOC recently paid $6000 or so for a cell phone-sniffing dog. I forget his name, but we met last Friday.
A toilet burst and flooded a cell wing upstairs. A guard woke me up at 3:15 a.m. to mop up water. Another hapless soul and I mopped up twenty-two buckets of sewer water. The sergeant told us we could shower and sanitize ourselves, but suddenly all the water cut off. That’s never a good sign.
4:15 a.m. a large squad of prison guards rushed the building. Cell by cell, “out, out, out,” rousting sleeping prisoners out of their cells in their boxers. Strip searches. Sit on the benches and floor of the day room. Over 200 men sat for hours while several dogs were pointed in and out of the cells seeking drugs and cell phones.
I recognized the cell phone dog from a newspaper photo. He didn’t look like much—like a cross between an anorexic German Shepherd and a coyote. He trotted right by me as I sat on the floor, and I reached out and petted him. We don’t get much dog contact in here.
I wasn’t too impressed with his abilities, though. A Puerto Rican apparently slid a cell phone beneath a nearby laundry cart when he came out of his cell, and while we were being hustled back inside a few hours later, a guard moved the cart and found the phone on the floor near where the expensive sniffer dog had passed.
They knew the cell phone belonged to the Puerto Rican prisoner, “Flaco,” since he’d taken several photos of himself with the phone’s camera and left them in the memory. He’ll be a finalist in next season’s, “America’s Dumbest Prisoners.”
My roommate and I returned to our cell and found a scene out of the recent tornado damage videos—every meager possession trashed, dumped, tossed, scattered, mattresses overturned, cups dumped out. They must have missed that rule that says the guards must put everything back the way they found it afterwards.
Final tally: three cell phones, a knife, and five prisoners taken to lock-up. Considering the overtime, travel, (most of the guards were brought in from other prisons), and doggy treats, I wouldn’t be surprised if that exercise cost the state $10,000 per cell phone. No wonder the legislature instituted a $5000 fine—to offset the costs of the shakedowns!
Meanwhile, the ninety-eight percent of the prisoners in my building who are just trying to do their time and get along, who possess no cell phones, knives, or drugs, must endure the same dehumanizing humiliation as those who brought this down on themselves. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? But then, who said life was fair?
We are still preparing to file a petition for a new parole hearing. With the turnover in Tallahassee—Gov. Crist campaigning for the U.S. Senate and two other Cabinet members slugging it out to replace him, we are obligated to file a clemency application, too. We need a lot of help with this, possibly the first “on-line clemency application.” We’re also looking for a “Facebook” expert willing to volunteer some time to the cause. So, if you know of any possible candidates, please put them in contact with me.
And a P.S. from “Inmate dot.com”…as sometimes happens with the chain gang rumor mill, the initial reports of the beating death of the prisoner, “Dave,” were premature or wishful thinking. Like Lazarus, Dave apparently rose from the dead, made a remarkable comeback and is now recovering. Good for him. More later.
Charlie
FURTHER NOTES FROM THE PRISON DIARY
—CELL RANSACKING AND CELL PHONES
Florida has a new law in effect banning prisoners from possessing cell phones. The penalty is up to five years in prison and a $5000 fine. Thursday, a Tomoka C.I. prisoner who’d been caught with a cell phone had a hearing in Volusia County Court. The judge must not have been too impressed with the law, levying only a six-month concurrent sentence.
I’ve never used a cell phone. I don’t want one. I don’t care for an additional five years in prison, and I couldn’t afford a $50 fine, let alone $5000. That’s not true for others. Texas and California have confiscated hundreds and thousands of phones. One man on Texas Death Row called a Texas state senator and threatened him. The Death Row prisoner claimed he bought it from a guard. Another guard was caught smuggling sixty cell phones inside a compressor into a Texas prison.
To combat the proliferation, the Florida DOC recently paid $6000 or so for a cell phone-sniffing dog. I forget his name, but we met last Friday.
A toilet burst and flooded a cell wing upstairs. A guard woke me up at 3:15 a.m. to mop up water. Another hapless soul and I mopped up twenty-two buckets of sewer water. The sergeant told us we could shower and sanitize ourselves, but suddenly all the water cut off. That’s never a good sign.
4:15 a.m. a large squad of prison guards rushed the building. Cell by cell, “out, out, out,” rousting sleeping prisoners out of their cells in their boxers. Strip searches. Sit on the benches and floor of the day room. Over 200 men sat for hours while several dogs were pointed in and out of the cells seeking drugs and cell phones.
I recognized the cell phone dog from a newspaper photo. He didn’t look like much—like a cross between an anorexic German Shepherd and a coyote. He trotted right by me as I sat on the floor, and I reached out and petted him. We don’t get much dog contact in here.
I wasn’t too impressed with his abilities, though. A Puerto Rican apparently slid a cell phone beneath a nearby laundry cart when he came out of his cell, and while we were being hustled back inside a few hours later, a guard moved the cart and found the phone on the floor near where the expensive sniffer dog had passed.
They knew the cell phone belonged to the Puerto Rican prisoner, “Flaco,” since he’d taken several photos of himself with the phone’s camera and left them in the memory. He’ll be a finalist in next season’s, “America’s Dumbest Prisoners.”
My roommate and I returned to our cell and found a scene out of the recent tornado damage videos—every meager possession trashed, dumped, tossed, scattered, mattresses overturned, cups dumped out. They must have missed that rule that says the guards must put everything back the way they found it afterwards.
Final tally: three cell phones, a knife, and five prisoners taken to lock-up. Considering the overtime, travel, (most of the guards were brought in from other prisons), and doggy treats, I wouldn’t be surprised if that exercise cost the state $10,000 per cell phone. No wonder the legislature instituted a $5000 fine—to offset the costs of the shakedowns!
Meanwhile, the ninety-eight percent of the prisoners in my building who are just trying to do their time and get along, who possess no cell phones, knives, or drugs, must endure the same dehumanizing humiliation as those who brought this down on themselves. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? But then, who said life was fair?
We are still preparing to file a petition for a new parole hearing. With the turnover in Tallahassee—Gov. Crist campaigning for the U.S. Senate and two other Cabinet members slugging it out to replace him, we are obligated to file a clemency application, too. We need a lot of help with this, possibly the first “on-line clemency application.” We’re also looking for a “Facebook” expert willing to volunteer some time to the cause. So, if you know of any possible candidates, please put them in contact with me.
And a P.S. from “Inmate dot.com”…as sometimes happens with the chain gang rumor mill, the initial reports of the beating death of the prisoner, “Dave,” were premature or wishful thinking. Like Lazarus, Dave apparently rose from the dead, made a remarkable comeback and is now recovering. Good for him. More later.
Charlie
Monday, August 3, 2009
WHAT IS REHABILITATION AND HOW IS IT DETERMINED?
Dateline: July 17, 2009
WHAT IS REHABILITATION AND HOW IS IT DETERMINED?
“Everyone has the right to tell their story. That’s the American way.”
J.C.Watts
Over thirty-one years ago, Charles Norman pleaded not guilty to the murder of Steve Bluffstone. Despite a series of increasingly lenient plea bargains offered by then-assistant state attorney Mark Ober, offers of reduced charges that would have resulted in his freedom in three-to-five years in exchange for a guilty plea, Charles Norman maintained his innocence and demanded a jury trial. During jury deliberations, prosecutor Ober made a final plea to Charles Norman to cop out, promising “no minimum, no mandatory, no firearm, no opposition to parole” if he did so. If Norman refused Ober’s final offer, he promised to send Norman to Death Row and the electric chair.
Mark Ober was desperate for a conviction, whatever it took. The actual triggerman, Larry Wingate, and his puppetmaster, Keith Chee-A-Tow, both known drug dealers with histories of drug-related violence, were given “immunity from prosecution for first degree murder” for their perjured statements that Norman “told” them he’d shot someone. It is common knowledge that only the guilty are given immunity—the innocent don’t need it. Immunity acknowledges guilt.
Despite absolutely no physical or forensic evidence connecting Norman to the crime and an eyewitness’ uncontroverted testimony that Norman was not the person who shot Steve Bluffstone, that Norman did not even look similar to the man, Norman was convicted of first degree murder. And despite Mark Ober’s strident attempts to fulfill his threat to Norman and sentence him to death, the jury refused to go along with him, recommending “life,” with a mandatory- minimum sentence of twenty-five years in prison before becoming eligible for parole in a compromise verdict.
These are facts of the case that Mark Ober would just as soon forget. Over thirty-one years later, Ober—now state attorney—continues to extract his pounds of flesh by opposing Norman’s release on parole, despite his having completed the mandatory-minimum twenty-five years over six years ago.
Ober has manipulated the news media and the parole commission by arranging for WTVT Fox News Channel 13 Tampa to videotape Norman’s hearings, with the implied threat being that any decisions by the parole commissioners favorable to Norman’s release would result in adverse publicity for the politically-appointed commissioners. Ober has continued to make false, misleading, and malicious statements on the record in opposition to Norman’s parole in furtherance of his own political ambitions for higher office, most notably the Florida Attorney General post that comes open for the 2010 election for which he has been positioning himself.
Based on Mark Ober’s most recent statements on the record at Norman’s 2006 hearing, questions have arisen regarding the issue of rehabilitation—what is rehabilitation, and how is rehabilitation demonstrated?
Curiously, so-called “legal professionals” like Mark Ober are either confused, mistaken, or intentionally obscure as to the actual definitions of “rehabilitation,” choosing to obfuscate what the word means, how it is used, and applied. Examination of the facts is needed.
The following direct quote is from the 2006 parole hearing transcript:
(Excerpt) “Ober…Mr. Norman has never admitted his guilt. Another purpose of our criminal justice system is to protect our society. It is interesting to me how Mr. Norman can be rehabilitated from a crime he claims he never committed. Consequently, Mr. Norman is not entitled to further consideration…”
According to Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 1983, the root word “rehabilitate” comes from the Latin words for, to restore again, and make suitable again. Webster lists four definitions for rehabilitate:
1. to restore to rank, privileges or property which one has lost.
2. to restore the good name or reputation of; to reinstate in good repute.
3. to put back in good condition; to reestablish on a firm, sound basis.
4. in sociology, to restore (a dependent, defective, or criminal) to a state of physical, mental, and moral health through treatment and training.
“rehabilitation”—the act of rehabilitating or the state of being rehabilitated.
These definitions seem very clear, precise and understandable. Taking one step further, Black’s Law Dictionary lists the following legal definition:
“rehabilitation, n. 1. Criminal Law. The process of seeking to improve a criminal’s character and outlook so he or she can function in society without committing other crimes.”
“deterrence, n. the act or process of discouraging certain behaviors, particularly by fear; esp., as a goal of criminal law, the prevention of criminal behavior by fear of punishment.”
“retribution, n. 1. Criminal Law. Punishment imposed as repayment or revenge for the offense committed; requittal.”
Those are Webster’s and Black’s definitions of rehabilitate, definitions that are in direct opposition to Mark Ober’s erroneous opinion as to the ramifications of rehabilitation. In Ober’s view, a person must be “rehabilitated from a crime,” and if that person did not commit that crime, the person “is not entitled to further consideration.”
Does this make sense? A guilty person is given consideration while an innocent person is not. Ober also believes that “Another purpose of our criminal justice system is to protect our society.” With his flawed logic, it appears that Ober believes that society is better protected by freeing a guilty man back into its ranks while keeping an innocent man imprisoned. A guilty person can be “rehabilitated,” while an innocent man cannot. Surely this cannot be correct.
In Mark Ober’s view, no matter how heinous the crime, no matter the evidence or lack of evidence or the circumstances, obtaining a guilty plea is all that matters. Charles norman was punished for refusing to take Ober's plea deal, for demanding a jury trial, for standing on his Constitutional rights to maintain his innocence and not be forced to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, and he paid a high price for it. For making Mark Ober try the case, to compromise his legal ethics and oath by calling perjured witnesses, withholding evidence, and using every dirty trick he'd been taught, for refusing to just fold up and go away, Ober became fixated on destroying Charles Norman, whatever it took. Norman refused to plead guilty, an unforgivable sin.
No matter what Charles Norman says, no matter the travesty of justice he has proclaimed for over thirty-one years, no matter what Mark Ober says, there is one statement of fact that all parties will agree upon: Charles Norman was found guilty of murder at jury trial and sentenced to life in prison for a minimum-mandatory twenty-five years before becoming eligible for parole. He has been continuously imprisoned for over 11,400 days (as of July 1, 2009) since his arrest on April 5, 1978, the state of Florida says (at this time) that he is guilty, and he is serving time with over 100,000 men who have also been adjudicated guilty.
Can Charles Norman be rehabilitated? Can he be restored to a state of physical, mental, and moral health through treatment and training, as Webster’s defines it? Can his character and outlook be improved so he can function in society without committing other crimes, as Black’s defines the process of rehabilitation? How does one determine when a person has been rehabilitated, and it is safe for him to be free to go? How does one found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment demonstrate that he has been rehabilitated?
The Florida Parole Commission’s own guidelines state that “positive parole prognosis” is indicated by past conduct. You can tell what a person most likely will do in the future by what he has been doing in the past. For example, a person who has been released from prison several times and repeatedly arrested and convicted of committing more crimes, been sent back to prison each time, only to be released, arrested, and imprisoned yet again, should not be considered a likely candidate for “positive parole prognosis.”
Are there many examples of prisoners who fit in this category? Yes, the prison system is full of them.
Another example: a person has spent his entire lengthy imprisonment in trouble, has received dozens of disciplinary reports, and served several years in confinement and “close management” for violent acts, stabbings, assaults, drug use and possession, escape attempts, refusing to work, lying to staff, contraband and other charges. He has not participated in any self-improvement programs, educational or vocational programs, has no marketable skills, has been diagnosed with serious mental disorders, is prescribed psychotropic drugs to control his behavior. He has alienated his family, has no support group, no place to go upon release, no job prospects.
Can there be any question in any reasonable person’s mind that the above-described individual is not rehabilitated, and is an unlikely candidate ever to be successfully rehabilitated? Of course not. Are there any examples of such individuals in prison? Yes, the system is full of them. Close management prisons and confinement cells are at maximum capacity statewide.
How do these negative examples compare to Charles Norman and the question of rehabilitation? A better question would be, how do the other 100,000-plus Florida prisoners compare to Norman and his accomplishments? The fact is, they can’t. A review of the voluminous record in the Florida Parole Commission’s file conclusively proves that Charles Norman has demonstrated the highest levels of rehabilitation by his exemplary record of service and accomplishments in prison, continuously and unabated, for over thirty years. He has not only participated in every relevant program available—self-improvement, educational, literacy, religious, among many others—but also, he has conceived, created, and implemented programs of his own throughout his imprisonment that have positively impacted literally thousands of prisoners and their families.
A review of the letters written on his behalf by many highly-respected citizens who know Charles Norman well, leaves no doubt as to his value and worth to society. An accomplished artist and writer, his poetry, dramas, fiction, and essays have received numerous national writing awards and been published worldwide. He is an acknowledged authority on prison, and his views and opinions are widely respected. He has a large, dedicated support group of family and friends who have pledged their help in transitioning back into society.
It seems virtually inconceivable that anyone could endure over thirty-one years in the harsh, unforgiving environment of prison and emerge without being permanently damaged. Only the rarest of individuals possess the character, moral strength, and fortitude—people like Nelson Mandela, whose twenty-seven years imprisonment was surpassed by Norman four years ago—and other extraordinary people, who turned an experience that destroyed lesser men into a positive achievement that refined them in the furnace and made them stronger. Can there be any greater example of “rehabilitation?”
In wide swaths of state and federal law, rehabilitation refers to individuals with mental or physical disabilities, and society’s goal to re-integrate those people with such disabilities into the mainstream of America. The U.S. Congress has spelled this out in 29 United States Code Anno.§ 701, Chapter 16 – Vocational Rehabilitation and other Rehabilitative services, as follows (excerpt):
§ 701 (a)(1) Findings. Congress finds that (1) Millions of Americans have one or more physical or mental disabilities and the number of Americans with such disabilities is increasing; (2) Individuals with disabilities constitute one of the most disadvantaged groups in society; (3) disability is a natural part of the human experience and in no way diminishes the right of individuals to:
A) live independently;
B) enjoy self-determination;
C) make choices;
D) contribute to society;
E) pursue meaningful careers; and
F) enjoy full inclusion and integration in the economic, social, cultural, and educational mainstream of American society;
(4) work; (5) Individuals with disabilities continually encounter various forms of discrimination in such critical areas as employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting, and public services; and (6) the goals of the Nation properly include the goal of providing individuals with disabilities with the tools necessary to:
A) Make informed choices and decisions; and
B) Achieve equality of opportunity, full inclusion, and integration in society, employment, independent living, and economic and social self-sufficiency, for such individuals.
In addition, under Florida law, Chapter 413, Vocational Rehabilitation, refers to: 1) Persons who have physical, cognitive, sensory, or mental disabilities.
The members of “WORKFORCE FLORIDA” are described as: a) individuals who have physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the person’s major life activities; who have a record of such impairments; or who are regarded as having such an impairment.
Clearly, individuals who have endured long-term institutionalization, whether it is a hospital, mental health facility, or a prison, could easily be declared “disabled” in some definition of the term. A paralyzed person, wheelchair-bound, released from a hospital after years of treatment, could not be expected to return to society, get a job as a carpenter, and live a normal life without a great deal of rehabilitation.
In the vast majority of cases of long-term imprisonment, those finally released easily fall under the umbrella of federal and state definitions of disabled. It is not the intention of Congress that these people be cast aside by society, but returned to society.
For many of these people, the challenge is too great, the damage too extensive, the drug addictions, mental illnesses, and other disabilities are too crippling for them to realistically return as a functioning, law-abiding member of society. Sooner or later, they will be re-institutionalized, in a setting where they can subsist until they die.
This is not the case with Charles Norman. He has steadfastly resisted the eroding, destructive effects of long-term imprisonment, continued to improve himself and help many others do the same. Under whatever definition of Rehabilitation one chooses to use, Charles Norman is obviously rehabilitated, poses no risk to society, and deserves immediate release. The vindictiveness of one person abusing his political power should not be enough to negate the voluminous record of Charles Norman’s accomplishments, character, integrity, and good works.
Let us acknowledge that the only reason Charles Norman has not been paroled and released from prison is because of Mark Ober’s opposition, a man with a personal vendetta against Norman, who used Charles’ case as a stepping-stone for his own selfish purposes and ambitions. Ober’s skewed view of “rehabilitation” is just a smokescreen and stumbling block designed to further delay and hinder Norman’s release back to society, where he belongs.
As long as Charles Norman is still alive, Mark Ober runs the risk of being exposed for his part in the wrongful prosecution of an innocent man, along with “immunity” and freedom for the actual murderer, the son of a wealthy man who bragged that his father “paid off” people in exchange for his freedom, a notoriously violent man who has never had the opportunity to be “rehabilitated” in spite of the great need for it.
Charlie
WHAT IS REHABILITATION AND HOW IS IT DETERMINED?
“Everyone has the right to tell their story. That’s the American way.”
J.C.Watts
Over thirty-one years ago, Charles Norman pleaded not guilty to the murder of Steve Bluffstone. Despite a series of increasingly lenient plea bargains offered by then-assistant state attorney Mark Ober, offers of reduced charges that would have resulted in his freedom in three-to-five years in exchange for a guilty plea, Charles Norman maintained his innocence and demanded a jury trial. During jury deliberations, prosecutor Ober made a final plea to Charles Norman to cop out, promising “no minimum, no mandatory, no firearm, no opposition to parole” if he did so. If Norman refused Ober’s final offer, he promised to send Norman to Death Row and the electric chair.
Mark Ober was desperate for a conviction, whatever it took. The actual triggerman, Larry Wingate, and his puppetmaster, Keith Chee-A-Tow, both known drug dealers with histories of drug-related violence, were given “immunity from prosecution for first degree murder” for their perjured statements that Norman “told” them he’d shot someone. It is common knowledge that only the guilty are given immunity—the innocent don’t need it. Immunity acknowledges guilt.
Despite absolutely no physical or forensic evidence connecting Norman to the crime and an eyewitness’ uncontroverted testimony that Norman was not the person who shot Steve Bluffstone, that Norman did not even look similar to the man, Norman was convicted of first degree murder. And despite Mark Ober’s strident attempts to fulfill his threat to Norman and sentence him to death, the jury refused to go along with him, recommending “life,” with a mandatory- minimum sentence of twenty-five years in prison before becoming eligible for parole in a compromise verdict.
These are facts of the case that Mark Ober would just as soon forget. Over thirty-one years later, Ober—now state attorney—continues to extract his pounds of flesh by opposing Norman’s release on parole, despite his having completed the mandatory-minimum twenty-five years over six years ago.
Ober has manipulated the news media and the parole commission by arranging for WTVT Fox News Channel 13 Tampa to videotape Norman’s hearings, with the implied threat being that any decisions by the parole commissioners favorable to Norman’s release would result in adverse publicity for the politically-appointed commissioners. Ober has continued to make false, misleading, and malicious statements on the record in opposition to Norman’s parole in furtherance of his own political ambitions for higher office, most notably the Florida Attorney General post that comes open for the 2010 election for which he has been positioning himself.
Based on Mark Ober’s most recent statements on the record at Norman’s 2006 hearing, questions have arisen regarding the issue of rehabilitation—what is rehabilitation, and how is rehabilitation demonstrated?
Curiously, so-called “legal professionals” like Mark Ober are either confused, mistaken, or intentionally obscure as to the actual definitions of “rehabilitation,” choosing to obfuscate what the word means, how it is used, and applied. Examination of the facts is needed.
The following direct quote is from the 2006 parole hearing transcript:
(Excerpt) “Ober…Mr. Norman has never admitted his guilt. Another purpose of our criminal justice system is to protect our society. It is interesting to me how Mr. Norman can be rehabilitated from a crime he claims he never committed. Consequently, Mr. Norman is not entitled to further consideration…”
According to Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 1983, the root word “rehabilitate” comes from the Latin words for, to restore again, and make suitable again. Webster lists four definitions for rehabilitate:
1. to restore to rank, privileges or property which one has lost.
2. to restore the good name or reputation of; to reinstate in good repute.
3. to put back in good condition; to reestablish on a firm, sound basis.
4. in sociology, to restore (a dependent, defective, or criminal) to a state of physical, mental, and moral health through treatment and training.
“rehabilitation”—the act of rehabilitating or the state of being rehabilitated.
These definitions seem very clear, precise and understandable. Taking one step further, Black’s Law Dictionary lists the following legal definition:
“rehabilitation, n. 1. Criminal Law. The process of seeking to improve a criminal’s character and outlook so he or she can function in society without committing other crimes
“deterrence, n. the act or process of discouraging certain behaviors, particularly by fear; esp., as a goal of criminal law, the prevention of criminal behavior by fear of punishment.”
“retribution, n. 1. Criminal Law. Punishment imposed as repayment or revenge for the offense committed; requittal.”
Those are Webster’s and Black’s definitions of rehabilitate, definitions that are in direct opposition to Mark Ober’s erroneous opinion as to the ramifications of rehabilitation. In Ober’s view, a person must be “rehabilitated from a crime,” and if that person did not commit that crime, the person “is not entitled to further consideration.”
Does this make sense? A guilty person is given consideration while an innocent person is not. Ober also believes that “Another purpose of our criminal justice system is to protect our society.” With his flawed logic, it appears that Ober believes that society is better protected by freeing a guilty man back into its ranks while keeping an innocent man imprisoned. A guilty person can be “rehabilitated,” while an innocent man cannot. Surely this cannot be correct.
In Mark Ober’s view, no matter how heinous the crime, no matter the evidence or lack of evidence or the circumstances, obtaining a guilty plea is all that matters. Charles norman was punished for refusing to take Ober's plea deal, for demanding a jury trial, for standing on his Constitutional rights to maintain his innocence and not be forced to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, and he paid a high price for it. For making Mark Ober try the case, to compromise his legal ethics and oath by calling perjured witnesses, withholding evidence, and using every dirty trick he'd been taught, for refusing to just fold up and go away, Ober became fixated on destroying Charles Norman, whatever it took. Norman refused to plead guilty, an unforgivable sin.
No matter what Charles Norman says, no matter the travesty of justice he has proclaimed for over thirty-one years, no matter what Mark Ober says, there is one statement of fact that all parties will agree upon: Charles Norman was found guilty of murder at jury trial and sentenced to life in prison for a minimum-mandatory twenty-five years before becoming eligible for parole. He has been continuously imprisoned for over 11,400 days (as of July 1, 2009) since his arrest on April 5, 1978, the state of Florida says (at this time) that he is guilty, and he is serving time with over 100,000 men who have also been adjudicated guilty.
Can Charles Norman be rehabilitated? Can he be restored to a state of physical, mental, and moral health through treatment and training, as Webster’s defines it? Can his character and outlook be improved so he can function in society without committing other crimes, as Black’s defines the process of rehabilitation? How does one determine when a person has been rehabilitated, and it is safe for him to be free to go? How does one found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment demonstrate that he has been rehabilitated?
The Florida Parole Commission’s own guidelines state that “positive parole prognosis” is indicated by past conduct. You can tell what a person most likely will do in the future by what he has been doing in the past. For example, a person who has been released from prison several times and repeatedly arrested and convicted of committing more crimes, been sent back to prison each time, only to be released, arrested, and imprisoned yet again, should not be considered a likely candidate for “positive parole prognosis.”
Are there many examples of prisoners who fit in this category? Yes, the prison system is full of them.
Another example: a person has spent his entire lengthy imprisonment in trouble, has received dozens of disciplinary reports, and served several years in confinement and “close management” for violent acts, stabbings, assaults, drug use and possession, escape attempts, refusing to work, lying to staff, contraband and other charges. He has not participated in any self-improvement programs, educational or vocational programs, has no marketable skills, has been diagnosed with serious mental disorders, is prescribed psychotropic drugs to control his behavior. He has alienated his family, has no support group, no place to go upon release, no job prospects.
Can there be any question in any reasonable person’s mind that the above-described individual is not rehabilitated, and is an unlikely candidate ever to be successfully rehabilitated? Of course not. Are there any examples of such individuals in prison? Yes, the system is full of them. Close management prisons and confinement cells are at maximum capacity statewide.
How do these negative examples compare to Charles Norman and the question of rehabilitation? A better question would be, how do the other 100,000-plus Florida prisoners compare to Norman and his accomplishments? The fact is, they can’t. A review of the voluminous record in the Florida Parole Commission’s file conclusively proves that Charles Norman has demonstrated the highest levels of rehabilitation by his exemplary record of service and accomplishments in prison, continuously and unabated, for over thirty years. He has not only participated in every relevant program available—self-improvement, educational, literacy, religious, among many others—but also, he has conceived, created, and implemented programs of his own throughout his imprisonment that have positively impacted literally thousands of prisoners and their families.
A review of the letters written on his behalf by many highly-respected citizens who know Charles Norman well, leaves no doubt as to his value and worth to society. An accomplished artist and writer, his poetry, dramas, fiction, and essays have received numerous national writing awards and been published worldwide. He is an acknowledged authority on prison, and his views and opinions are widely respected. He has a large, dedicated support group of family and friends who have pledged their help in transitioning back into society.
It seems virtually inconceivable that anyone could endure over thirty-one years in the harsh, unforgiving environment of prison and emerge without being permanently damaged. Only the rarest of individuals possess the character, moral strength, and fortitude—people like Nelson Mandela, whose twenty-seven years imprisonment was surpassed by Norman four years ago—and other extraordinary people, who turned an experience that destroyed lesser men into a positive achievement that refined them in the furnace and made them stronger. Can there be any greater example of “rehabilitation?”
In wide swaths of state and federal law, rehabilitation refers to individuals with mental or physical disabilities, and society’s goal to re-integrate those people with such disabilities into the mainstream of America. The U.S. Congress has spelled this out in 29 United States Code Anno.§ 701, Chapter 16 – Vocational Rehabilitation and other Rehabilitative services, as follows (excerpt):
§ 701 (a)(1) Findings. Congress finds that (1) Millions of Americans have one or more physical or mental disabilities and the number of Americans with such disabilities is increasing; (2) Individuals with disabilities constitute one of the most disadvantaged groups in society; (3) disability is a natural part of the human experience and in no way diminishes the right of individuals to:
A) live independently;
B) enjoy self-determination;
C) make choices;
D) contribute to society;
E) pursue meaningful careers; and
F) enjoy full inclusion and integration in the economic, social, cultural, and educational mainstream of American society;
(4) work; (5) Individuals with disabilities continually encounter various forms of discrimination in such critical areas as employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting, and public services; and (6) the goals of the Nation properly include the goal of providing individuals with disabilities with the tools necessary to:
A) Make informed choices and decisions; and
B) Achieve equality of opportunity, full inclusion, and integration in society, employment, independent living, and economic and social self-sufficiency, for such individuals.
In addition, under Florida law, Chapter 413, Vocational Rehabilitation, refers to: 1) Persons who have physical, cognitive, sensory, or mental disabilities.
The members of “WORKFORCE FLORIDA” are described as: a) individuals who have physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the person’s major life activities; who have a record of such impairments; or who are regarded as having such an impairment.
Clearly, individuals who have endured long-term institutionalization, whether it is a hospital, mental health facility, or a prison, could easily be declared “disabled” in some definition of the term. A paralyzed person, wheelchair-bound, released from a hospital after years of treatment, could not be expected to return to society, get a job as a carpenter, and live a normal life without a great deal of rehabilitation.
In the vast majority of cases of long-term imprisonment, those finally released easily fall under the umbrella of federal and state definitions of disabled. It is not the intention of Congress that these people be cast aside by society, but returned to society.
For many of these people, the challenge is too great, the damage too extensive, the drug addictions, mental illnesses, and other disabilities are too crippling for them to realistically return as a functioning, law-abiding member of society. Sooner or later, they will be re-institutionalized, in a setting where they can subsist until they die.
This is not the case with Charles Norman. He has steadfastly resisted the eroding, destructive effects of long-term imprisonment, continued to improve himself and help many others do the same. Under whatever definition of Rehabilitation one chooses to use, Charles Norman is obviously rehabilitated, poses no risk to society, and deserves immediate release. The vindictiveness of one person abusing his political power should not be enough to negate the voluminous record of Charles Norman’s accomplishments, character, integrity, and good works.
Let us acknowledge that the only reason Charles Norman has not been paroled and released from prison is because of Mark Ober’s opposition, a man with a personal vendetta against Norman, who used Charles’ case as a stepping-stone for his own selfish purposes and ambitions. Ober’s skewed view of “rehabilitation” is just a smokescreen and stumbling block designed to further delay and hinder Norman’s release back to society, where he belongs.
As long as Charles Norman is still alive, Mark Ober runs the risk of being exposed for his part in the wrongful prosecution of an innocent man, along with “immunity” and freedom for the actual murderer, the son of a wealthy man who bragged that his father “paid off” people in exchange for his freedom, a notoriously violent man who has never had the opportunity to be “rehabilitated” in spite of the great need for it.
Charlie
Sunday, July 19, 2009
NOTES FROM THE PRISON DIARY: SURVIVING THE FLORIDA DEATH CAMP
Dateline: July 16, 2009
NOTES FROM THE PRISON DIARY:
SURVIVING THE FLORIDA DEATH CAMP
I had hope to be transferred from this place by now, but the early morning wake-up call, “BAG AND BAGGAGE,” pack up, you’re leaving, didn’t come for me today.
The mailing address may be Daytona Beach, Florida, but you’ll not see the sand or surf from my cell window at Tomoka C.I. This is not a vacation destination, either, unless you want to compare it to the Haunted Mansion at Disney World. Too many people die here for it to be thought of as having fun.
In deference to our tech society, the chain gang rumor mill of yore is now called “INMATE DOT COM.” Rumors are rife in prison, spread by prisoners, guards, and other staff daily. You’re liable to hear anything, and I’m not going to spread any here, unless I have to.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Inmate dot com.”
Oftentimes the rumors start on the prisoner side and quickly pass to the guards, seeking confirmation. If the guards haven’t heard it, it spreads like wildfire among them, seeking their own confirmation. And back again.
While I was in the visiting park with my friend, Libby, on the Fourth of July weekend, much was happening on the compound. A convicted murderer named Demetrius Cason, chain gang name, “Cadillac,” from St. Pete, supposedly bum-rushed a cell upstairs housing two middle-aged homosexuals who were known to hold contraband for drug men. Cadillac beat one, David Michaud, a slightly-built convicted murderer, senseless, but left empty-handed. Michaud’s partner supposedly went downstairs and handed a guard a cell phone, stating that was what the robber was after. Dave was rushed to the hospital. The guy with the cell phone “checked in,” going to confinement for protection. When that happens, lists of names of drug sellers usually result.
While this was going on in “B” dorm, the cursed place where I live, more foul play was going on in lockup.
The story says they were painting. It was hot, no ventilation, no air. Malik Brown, a simple-minded man in his 20’s, heavily medicated with “psych drugs,” complained that he couldn’t breathe from the fumes. The guards told him to shut up and “get off the door” (get away from the door where you can be heard and get on your bunk), or get pepper-sprayed.
Malik was right. He couldn’t breathe. They found him on the cell floor dead.
During the commotion, another “bug,” (psych prisoner), known as “Maestro,” tried to hang himself. This would have been quite an accomplishment, had it been successful (it wasn’t), since Maestro was in a “strip cell,” a bare room with nothing in it, and the prisoner has only a piece of canvas as a skirt, specifically for suicidal people or others who “act up.” Maestro had been pepper sprayed a couple of times recently, and wasn’t too happy about it.
Initially, Malik’s death was blamed on “natural causes,” he just keeled over, they said, but prisoners in nearby cells began telling a different story. Foul play. We’ll see.
The guard in charge at the time was relieved of duty in lockup and sent to the compound to run “inmate movement” and the yard.
One of the problems in prison is that some staff members can’t work around prisoners. Because of their personalities, prejudices, hatred for all prisoners, or just plain orneriness, when they are loose around prisoners, bad things happen. The people in charge know this, and often move around “problem guards” to duties more out of sight. Then things happen, and they get shuffled into an area where sparks fly.
And so it happened. Knowing how to talk to people is important, on both sides. It doesn’t take much to instigate an incident.
The guard had words with a prisoner walking by. He told him to “cuff up,” submit to arrest. The prisoner ignored him, kept walking. The guard ran behind him, pulled out his canister, and pepper sprayed the prisoner. The prisoner stopped, turned, and knocked him out. Game on. Yard closed.
We knew when the robbery/assault happened that the “squad” would be coming to ransack “B” dorm soon. On Monday, INMATE DOT COM said that all the guards were told to report to work at 4 AM the next day. Dead giveaway. And at 4 AM they did come. They took a number of suspected dope smokers out for urine tests, and locked up eight or nine. Then, with the plumbing, toilets, and drinking water cut off, they spent the next few hours ransacking every cell, all 114 of them, strip-searching and harassing the 200 or so prisoners who had nothing to do with any of that.
A few days ago, they released from confinement the guy who attacked Dave, “Cadillac,” and put him back in “B” dorm. I had previously helped him with an appeal in the law library, so we were on good terms.
INMATE DOT COM struck again. Word was that Dave’s brain hemorrhaged at Lake Butler, the main prison hospital, and he died. They came and got Cadillac again. If that were true, he’s facing a new murder charge.
Is Dave dead? I don’t know. INMATE DOT COM SAYS HE IS. We’ll see. All I know is that a lot of people die here, for a variety of reasons. They’re calling it, “Tomoka Death Camp.” I just want out of here before anything else happens. Is that too much to ask?
Charlie
NOTES FROM THE PRISON DIARY:
SURVIVING THE FLORIDA DEATH CAMP
I had hope to be transferred from this place by now, but the early morning wake-up call, “BAG AND BAGGAGE,” pack up, you’re leaving, didn’t come for me today.
The mailing address may be Daytona Beach, Florida, but you’ll not see the sand or surf from my cell window at Tomoka C.I. This is not a vacation destination, either, unless you want to compare it to the Haunted Mansion at Disney World. Too many people die here for it to be thought of as having fun.
In deference to our tech society, the chain gang rumor mill of yore is now called “INMATE DOT COM.” Rumors are rife in prison, spread by prisoners, guards, and other staff daily. You’re liable to hear anything, and I’m not going to spread any here, unless I have to.
“Where did you hear that?”
“Inmate dot com.”
Oftentimes the rumors start on the prisoner side and quickly pass to the guards, seeking confirmation. If the guards haven’t heard it, it spreads like wildfire among them, seeking their own confirmation. And back again.
While I was in the visiting park with my friend, Libby, on the Fourth of July weekend, much was happening on the compound. A convicted murderer named Demetrius Cason, chain gang name, “Cadillac,” from St. Pete, supposedly bum-rushed a cell upstairs housing two middle-aged homosexuals who were known to hold contraband for drug men. Cadillac beat one, David Michaud, a slightly-built convicted murderer, senseless, but left empty-handed. Michaud’s partner supposedly went downstairs and handed a guard a cell phone, stating that was what the robber was after. Dave was rushed to the hospital. The guy with the cell phone “checked in,” going to confinement for protection. When that happens, lists of names of drug sellers usually result.
While this was going on in “B” dorm, the cursed place where I live, more foul play was going on in lockup.
The story says they were painting. It was hot, no ventilation, no air. Malik Brown, a simple-minded man in his 20’s, heavily medicated with “psych drugs,” complained that he couldn’t breathe from the fumes. The guards told him to shut up and “get off the door” (get away from the door where you can be heard and get on your bunk), or get pepper-sprayed.
Malik was right. He couldn’t breathe. They found him on the cell floor dead.
During the commotion, another “bug,” (psych prisoner), known as “Maestro,” tried to hang himself. This would have been quite an accomplishment, had it been successful (it wasn’t), since Maestro was in a “strip cell,” a bare room with nothing in it, and the prisoner has only a piece of canvas as a skirt, specifically for suicidal people or others who “act up.” Maestro had been pepper sprayed a couple of times recently, and wasn’t too happy about it.
Initially, Malik’s death was blamed on “natural causes,” he just keeled over, they said, but prisoners in nearby cells began telling a different story. Foul play. We’ll see.
The guard in charge at the time was relieved of duty in lockup and sent to the compound to run “inmate movement” and the yard.
One of the problems in prison is that some staff members can’t work around prisoners. Because of their personalities, prejudices, hatred for all prisoners, or just plain orneriness, when they are loose around prisoners, bad things happen. The people in charge know this, and often move around “problem guards” to duties more out of sight. Then things happen, and they get shuffled into an area where sparks fly.
And so it happened. Knowing how to talk to people is important, on both sides. It doesn’t take much to instigate an incident.
The guard had words with a prisoner walking by. He told him to “cuff up,” submit to arrest. The prisoner ignored him, kept walking. The guard ran behind him, pulled out his canister, and pepper sprayed the prisoner. The prisoner stopped, turned, and knocked him out. Game on. Yard closed.
We knew when the robbery/assault happened that the “squad” would be coming to ransack “B” dorm soon. On Monday, INMATE DOT COM said that all the guards were told to report to work at 4 AM the next day. Dead giveaway. And at 4 AM they did come. They took a number of suspected dope smokers out for urine tests, and locked up eight or nine. Then, with the plumbing, toilets, and drinking water cut off, they spent the next few hours ransacking every cell, all 114 of them, strip-searching and harassing the 200 or so prisoners who had nothing to do with any of that.
A few days ago, they released from confinement the guy who attacked Dave, “Cadillac,” and put him back in “B” dorm. I had previously helped him with an appeal in the law library, so we were on good terms.
INMATE DOT COM struck again. Word was that Dave’s brain hemorrhaged at Lake Butler, the main prison hospital, and he died. They came and got Cadillac again. If that were true, he’s facing a new murder charge.
Is Dave dead? I don’t know. INMATE DOT COM SAYS HE IS. We’ll see. All I know is that a lot of people die here, for a variety of reasons. They’re calling it, “Tomoka Death Camp.” I just want out of here before anything else happens. Is that too much to ask?
Charlie
Monday, July 6, 2009
4th of July In Prison: Somebody Get Me Out of Here!
Dateline: July 5, 2009
4th of July In Prison: Somebody Get Me Out of Here!
Yesterday marked the 233rd anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (notwithstanding the fact that the Continental Congress actually voted on July 2nd). My friend, Libby, and I spent my thirty-first Fourth in prison in the visiting park at Tomoka C.I. Down the street at the speedway, the expensive sports cars raced, thousands of sun worshippers crowded Daytona Beach a few miles away, and I reflected on my 11,414 days of continuous captivity. Does that number sound as long as it feels?
I was in a dark cell when the Islamist radicals stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held the American hostages 400-plus days—an eternity it seemed at the time. 479 days seems like a blip on the screen to me now.
I remember watching Congressman Leo Ryan (was it?) and the reporter get shot at Jim Jones’ Guyana mass suicide. Was that 1978? They even had TV’s in the cells. Then John Hinckley shot President Reagan on TV in 1981. He’s been in a posh nuthouse ever since and recently got approved for a driver’s license, so he can drive himself on his weekend furloughs. That would be nice.
Joe Montana was still in college, and Emmitt Smith was in elementary school. They’ve been retired for years. Jimmy Carter was still President. I shook hands with him in South Miami in the summer of ’76 while he and Hamilton Jordan were campaigning. When was the last time you heard that name?
Barack Obama was barely a teenager, hanging out in Hawaii. Hasn’t he come a long way?
Times have changed. Most of the prisoners I knew then are dead, though some of us graybeards are hanging on. Yesterday, while we visited, a young man on psych drugs died in lockup. He wasn’t even born when I came into the system. Another tried to hang himself, but was unsuccessful. Couldn’t take it.
The upcoming year will be crucial to my fate. Get out or die, quite a choice. With the economy and our society so screwed up, some prisoners feel they’re better off inside. “What ‘chu wanna go out there for?” To be free, I say, just like those folks 233 years ago, who signed that paper and fought an unjust system.
Let freedom ring!
Thanks for your help.
Charlie
4th of July In Prison: Somebody Get Me Out of Here!
Yesterday marked the 233rd anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (notwithstanding the fact that the Continental Congress actually voted on July 2nd). My friend, Libby, and I spent my thirty-first Fourth in prison in the visiting park at Tomoka C.I. Down the street at the speedway, the expensive sports cars raced, thousands of sun worshippers crowded Daytona Beach a few miles away, and I reflected on my 11,414 days of continuous captivity. Does that number sound as long as it feels?
I was in a dark cell when the Islamist radicals stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held the American hostages 400-plus days—an eternity it seemed at the time. 479 days seems like a blip on the screen to me now.
I remember watching Congressman Leo Ryan (was it?) and the reporter get shot at Jim Jones’ Guyana mass suicide. Was that 1978? They even had TV’s in the cells. Then John Hinckley shot President Reagan on TV in 1981. He’s been in a posh nuthouse ever since and recently got approved for a driver’s license, so he can drive himself on his weekend furloughs. That would be nice.
Joe Montana was still in college, and Emmitt Smith was in elementary school. They’ve been retired for years. Jimmy Carter was still President. I shook hands with him in South Miami in the summer of ’76 while he and Hamilton Jordan were campaigning. When was the last time you heard that name?
Barack Obama was barely a teenager, hanging out in Hawaii. Hasn’t he come a long way?
Times have changed. Most of the prisoners I knew then are dead, though some of us graybeards are hanging on. Yesterday, while we visited, a young man on psych drugs died in lockup. He wasn’t even born when I came into the system. Another tried to hang himself, but was unsuccessful. Couldn’t take it.
The upcoming year will be crucial to my fate. Get out or die, quite a choice. With the economy and our society so screwed up, some prisoners feel they’re better off inside. “What ‘chu wanna go out there for?” To be free, I say, just like those folks 233 years ago, who signed that paper and fought an unjust system.
Let freedom ring!
Thanks for your help.
Charlie
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