Prologue
Every inmate’s circumstances are predicated by certain conditions: either someone was caught and/ or arrested. There may have been a trial, long or short, or no trial as of yet. Inmates might have a state or federal hold on them, making their stay TBA. My charge was misdemeanor assault 4, the most rinky-dink charge there is next to strangulation. I was never arrested but I did go on trial. That lasted two days and there is almost no hell lower than when you are on trial, and it’s nothing like television shows.
I took the stand in my defense and let me tell you that when you’re ‘on the stand’ in your own defense, you will feel indefensible. My judge was quiet and pensive, his brow furrowed and his fingers silently fumbled near his mouth and nose, almost scowling but never looking at me. I was a nervous wreck sitting in that octagonal, stuffy courtroom in my best blazer jacket I’ve had since college. I took extensive notes during the trial, and when I took them home on the first night, I knew I was screwed. It was not my most shining moment.
Since I’m not going to go into the details of the trial, let me just tell you that the important thing was how real and visceral court- real court- can be. Coming into trial with prosecutors and lawyers and judges and cops was a surreal whirlwind that peeled off my skin, revealing the raw underneath that pizza looks like when you remove the cheese. No matter how hard we fought, I was still going to crash and burn, because the state is swift and cunning. The good hope everyone has for you when that happens will help carry you, no matter the verdict.
After my release I became obsessed with true crime television shows and online true crime blogs, because all that morbidly curious stuff is morbidly curious to me. Certain cases jumped out at me like the missing Portland kid Kyron Horman, because it turns out the ‘evil stepmom’ lives right down my street. And this is because once you’ve gone to jail you know what kind of residue it leaves behind: it’s like slug slime. I could never understand the people who are repeat offenders, even before I went inside and saw it for myself. From my experience it seems absolutely certain that it would change a person- until I met all the other men who comfortably spend half their lives in jail. The deplorable conditions in jail would certainly make most men not want to come back to the cells, hold and dorms, the filthy showers and unclean linen for the ‘beds’ and the horrifying food. It’s not like television at all, kids; there are similarities, for certain but county jail isn’t like TV jail. Real jails are full of people who want to take advantage of you, hurt you, trick you and tell you lies. There are very scary people in jail, where they belong; and you will find yourself in the company of these people if you go there. There are listless idiots, hulking brainless giants and pudgy meth smokers. There are conniving lummoxes and toothy hicks, waiting nervously for something. There are truly crazy people in there, too, and people just like you and me, watching the crazy parade go by. 99% of everything inmates say is pure bullshit, so what happens in jail stays in jail, and the stories are in a league of their own. I felt compelled to write my story because I not only saw things that made my eyes bug out, I also had intense experiences inside. As soon as I realized that lowering myself to ‘their’ caliber of bullshit wasn’t going to work; I switched gears and just employed my own madness, which attracted some of the right people and repelled some of the wrong people. Only you can know for certain if you’re frothing diarrhea of the mouth or if you’re being an honest person, and jail is full of lovely characters who spew their froth forth like Old Faithful. But, the flipside is that by being too honest in there leads to others taking advantage of you, so you have to be on your guard all the time, all day and night. It’s stressful; it’s abandon. It’s like spending time thinking critically about your life (if you have the mental capacity) whilst living with two dozen other guys who are all variations of MTV: 1994’s The Real World’s “Puck”. Yuck. Time slows to a meager crawl in jail; babies crawl faster than time does.
And there is more than enough time to think about what you’ve done without any creature comforts. There is no ice cream, no women, no real friends or real food, no interesting conversations and most importantly, there is no love. It’s a hellish, drab and cold place where the rawness of life is as stark as the night’s full moon, while your empty stomach makes many of your decisions for you. It’s not meant to be a nice place to come and reflect; you have to live with deputies and guards that you have to engage with every day (having police folk around me all day has never been on my bucket list). They are like robots, and their disdain for inmates seemed like a perk of the job. Little else is as real and as raw as incarceration, and the slowness of time inside jail should augment your own self-awareness. If it doesn’t then you probably belong in jail.
