South LA, I joined a gang and was into meth at twenty. My kid brother Jack and I held up the BevMo in West Hollywood. Someone activated a silent alarm and when we hit the street the LAPD was waiting. They shot Jack down and sentenced me to Life. Felony Murder, I didn't kill him the cops did, but because his death occurred during a felony, I do the time.
You asked, have you changed? Yes, of course . . . and it began, as in all transformations, with acceptance. I learned to endure the tedious march of the clock Inside, forced myself to relax, to discern the eerie reflections dancing with a grimace each afternoon down the dank hallways of the Security Housing Unit. Ignoring a constant dread that lingered deep inside my gut, cold and dank, my half-naked body became accustomed to Time’s pressures, escalating in maddening increments no matter how hard I tried to ignore them. Trapped with a cellee in a space the size of a bathroom, I trained myself to plot ahead; weeks, months, even years. Relentlessly, I speculated on my limited options, determined to compress months of forced idleness into a few terribly violent seconds of revenge. Often, of course, I found my schemes ruined by a change of staff, an unanticipated transfer, or the natural death of one of my enemies. But it didn’t matter because slowly I adjusted to the cold, slippery grip of handcuffs and stylized dialogues with the hacks, pigs, Barney Fifes, turnkeys, suits, screws, and uniforms who attempt without success to control us. Surrounded by a twisted, troubled army of arsonists, murderers, rapists, pimps, armed robbers, thieves, and child molesters, I attained that strange, intuitive ability to read glances of deceit that were previously indecipherable. It saved my ass more than once, the ability to distinguish clandestine prison allies from those who wanted to take me down. Six years in and I began calling the shots.
Rehabilitation, you ask. Don't waste my time. No one leaves this shithole a better man. But not like you hear Outside. Incarceration isn't a school for the practice of crime; that’s all crap, the cons here fouled up their criminal endeavors, why else would they in prison? No . . . it's worse than that, it’s in our minds, our attitudes. Life Inside provides an icy resolve, a blind determination to ignore the standards of decency and discourse of the Outside, a blackening of the heart, so to speak.
Visitors? I don't want any. Prison and its routines are the only family I have now, all the kinship I need. My past is gone forever, and the pale, walking corpses surrounding me with their livid tattoos are the truest comrades anyone would want. To us, a Life sentence isn't an affront but an ideal, a final metamorphosis, a career objective so to speak, an adulthood that follows naturally a childhood of petty crimes and truancy, that adolescent upbringing in the neighborhood gang where we consented without complaint to increasingly senseless violations of our bodies and minds. The only thing better would be a calm walk to the scaffold, thumbing one’s nose at the hangman. “Do it,” we'd whisper to the condemned as they escorted them off the Shelf, “piss him off, roll saliva round your mouth and hawk disdainfully when offered the hood”.
I run free here, brutalizing anyone who crosses my path, desecrating your stupid rules of order, your hypocritical morality, your false standards of respect; embracing instead the convict's cherished counter-signs: a cropped head my glory, ragged tattoos my medals of honor, an orange jumpsuit my business attire, scars my diplomas. It's "corrections” reversed, dear reader, “corrections” ridiculed and the lowest form of groveling, the most personal indignity has become for me a banquet of honors. Deprived of the Outside, of freedom, affection, and light itself, I’ve attained a sense of purpose and will of steel that no amount of Time, no body cavity search, no beating, no lockdown, not even Thorazine can destroy.
William P.
San Quentin State Prison
