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Convict Land: Undercover in America's Jails
Convict Land: Undercover in America's Jails
Convict Land: Undercover in America's Jails
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Convict Land: Undercover in America's Jails

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What is it like to go to jail in the 21st Century? Convict Land: Undercover in America's Jails is an Orwellian tour of the world's most celebrated and controversial system by English journalist Alexander Reynolds.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherBookBaby
Release dateMay 1, 2014
ISBN9781483524979
Convict Land: Undercover in America's Jails

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    Convict Land - Alexander Reynolds

    9781483524979

    Convict Land: Undercover in America's Jails

    Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons. John Ruskin

    The corrections industry is an $80 billion dollar business in the USA. It has to be. The number of Americans in prison and jail has skyrocketed since 1980. A record 7.3 million people are behind bars, on probation or parole. America has 5% of the world’s population and houses 25% of the world’s prisoners. With roughly 2,304,115 million inmates on lockdown, America, a society that prides itself on its democratic traditions, has the biggest inmate population and highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world. In raw terms the United States, the land of the free, locks away more of its taxpayers than any other country on the planet. Something is fundamentally wrong (1).

    Going to jail comes high on the fear index. So why volunteer to explore this American inferno as an undercover detainee? There are two reasons. The first one is the school to prison pipeline. Like jail, school is a place of confinement. Like school, jail is designed for everybody. But you’re supposed to leave school qualified for a trade or university, right?

    Not at William Penn School in South London. My Alma Mater was an animal factory. Punch-ups with teachers in the classroom were a daily occurrence, so were knife fights on the playground and muggings in the toilets. Pupils robbed the neighbourhood and local businesses, fought the boys of Alleyn’s, the local private school, and sexually harassed the posh girls on the twin platforms of North Dulwich railway station.

    In term time, Monday to Friday, 9.00am to 3.30pm, William Penn taught us one lesson and one lesson only. The only welcome in the world was a custodial sentence at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

    The only reason you are here, yelled one teacher, is to keep you off the streets. None of you will get a job. You’ll all be criminals and end up in prison!

    The paper tiger who taught metalwork was right. Nobody was going to Oxford or Cambridge University. We were bound for Feltham Young Offenders Institution and HMP Brixton. That’s what teacher said. No wonder gangs of angry, unemployed, old boys haunted the school gates and besieged the campus with vandalistic raids. Like us, they had been taught a lesson that they would never forget.

    The police were regulars. One day a couple of detectives lectured our class. They told Atwell, Bloomfield, Brown, Dean, DeGraig, Evans, Godden, Gordon, Hassan & Co that their best customers graduated from William Penn.

    One, fidgeting in a blue polyester suit, cautioned us 12-year-olds with an index finger.

    You’ll do hard time for shoplifting. Even if you get caught nicking a 2p chew, you will get sent down, you will get youth custody, make no mistake about it!

    The cops showed us a film, "Seven Green Bottles...a Unit 7 film...made in Association with the Metropolitan Police" (spelt out in caps for every juvenile delinquent to read). It was a grim fairy tale about a gang of youths out thieving, shoplifting, fare dodging and joyriding. It was a propaganda film and all the kids ended up behind bars.

    The two cops in the dingy, black classroom of Form 1BG were not amused when we laughed out loud at the 1970s fashions.

    Check the collars on his shirt, I’m surprised he didn’t take of when the Old Bill chased after him.

    How about them waffle flares?

    Innit. And Dunlop Green Flash. Tramps. No wonder they’re out stinging.

    These kids are small time.

    That looks like Bobby Robson down QPR!

    That is Bobby Robson down QPR, said the cop.

    After the film, the cop told us, with a wary and insistent voice, that we were going to leave school for the dole or the nick and there would be no jobs in the future because everything is gonna be done by robots.

    He marked all of us out as troublemakers and said that our future would be blighted by a criminal offence.

    Some of you are gonna end up down the nick, the cop said gravely, nodding his primitive head at the class. It is only a matter of time. You lot had a right old laugh at the film, but the message never goes out of style, he waved his finger, like a mighty truncheon, at the black and white 11 and 12 year olds, we know you, we watch you and we get you...so keep your noses clean and you will stay out of trouble.

    And with that we were failed by School, one of the most cherished institutions in Society, and doomed to a life of formal and invisible control.

    Years later, I met up with an old school pal. He asked me if I’d ever done time.

    All of our mates from William Penn and Dog Kennel Hill, he said, and I mean all of them, have gone to prison, the only ones who ain’t are you, me and me bruvver.

    He exaggerated. But only slightly. One of our classmates was Robbie, an expert thief who robbed the poor, the rich, the famous, the titled, the untitled and even his friends. Robbie left school a failure but emerged from jail a self-invented, semi-mythological figure, qualified to pick locks, pockets, hot wire cars, bypass alarm systems and make crack -- all marketable skills requiring intelligence and application to acquire.

    Robbie was not scared of jail. He had been in-and-out and knew the regime well. Bad screws (guards), puffing a Feltham zut (a weak spliff), inmate suicides and time down the block (solitary confinement). He had come to view incarceration as an occupational hazard, a routine, a time trap. Robbie, the black kid who was good at French, had become institutionalized.

    He was no different from Parrot, the lanky hooligan who liked old gangster films.

    Jail, prison, the nick? Three meals a day, a bed, a roof, and all the government juice (water) I can drink.

    Parrot was bad boy number 1 at my other 1980s school, Holland Park comprehensive, the so-called Eton of the UK state school system. He was a teenage drug dealer (his most lucrative job), and even supplied members of the faculty. Like Robbie, Parrot was expelled from school and drifted into three decades of crime and punishment. He took up armed robbery and in May 2004 was part of a gang that attempted to steal £33 million worth of gold, cash and diamonds from the Swissport cargo warehouse at Heathrow Airport.

    When the cops nicked him, they asked Parrot what he was doing.

    I’m here for a job interview.

    On remand, as a high security Double A-category inmate at HMP Belmarsh, Parrot had the dubious honour of sharing a wing with hate-cleric Abu Hamza, and the Muslim lads busted by MI5 for plotting to blow up the Ministry of Sound nightclub.

    I would be happy with a ten year sentence, he wrote from HMP Wandsworth. It’s the second biggest failed robbery in England, so it will be up to the judge. I went guilty in December 2004, I had no choice! So maybe he will give me some credit, who knows?

    Parrot got six years and nine months.

    It really ain’t a big problem, I’ve done 13-14 months already and I’ve gone from A-cat Belmarsh to B-cat Wandsworth so really it’s down hill. Alex, I was burning a lot of bridges, so maybe this is as low as one can go. And smell the coffee. Wake up call.

    Years later, I met up with Parrot. I asked about Abu Hamza.

    The man only had one arm, I helped him fill out his visiting orders.

    And being on the same wing as the al-Qaeda wannabes who wanted to blow up the Ministry of Sound nightclub?

    I have no problems with them, we’re in the same boat. It’s us against the cozzers.

    Parrot does his best to avoid the crack scene of the old hood. These days he is lying low in suburbia, talking at sound system volume in his back yard about hydroponic weed.

    I got 96 plants upstairs, cheese, amnesia, proper skunk, Parrot said, pulling out an ice cream container full of weed, here, build one up.

    My old friend had become a super-character, unable to live a normal life back in the community. I asked about our contemporaries.

    All of our mates are inside or on drugs. Even the people who were heroes to me growing up.

    What about going straight?

    Why bother? No one will give me a job. I ain’t got no CV, no need. I love to steal, I love the buzz.

    He was in his 40s. It was too late for him to start over.

    What had he learned from the school-to-prison pipeline?

    To save money. You don’t know what it’s like to come out of prison and have nothing.

    He was right. I didn’t know anything. Warrant for custody outstanding, I had always entertained a vulgar curiosity to see what life inside was really like.

    Jails are standardised for universal consumption. You break the law, you get nicked and maybe do time. Jails have existed for hundreds of years. Detention, removing an individual from society and cutting them off from natural freedom, is a common penalty. But jail is a secret world, one not many people know about except in films and fiction, and that’s what intrigued me. It has an established tradition of secrecy. Journalists and investigators hardly ever have access to these facilities. And with good reason. There is more to this life than we are told, much more than we know. These dark places are where the state abuses its own citizens and the state is sensitive about the general public knowing this.

    The second reason for going undercover in jail is popular culture and mass media. What people know about jail life comes from films, TV shows, newspapers, books and websites. Jail is always presented as a combination of clichés, clichés that clearly have lasting appeal. Homosexuality is rife. Rape is brutal and indiscriminate. Drug use is prevalent. The guards are corrupt and the system is indifferent. All this is taken as gospel.

    But the jail environment that we see is always fabricated and exaggerated and the clichés are taken as fact. Every film and TV show on jail has some young felon being preyed upon by criminals. It is part of the genre. Jail and rape goes together like pineapples and ham.

    Sexual bullying and rape are no doubt visceral and real in the prison environment. But it is the constant depiction, of being a sexual victim, unable to talk your way out of rape, its cruelty and disempowerment that film and documentary makers constantly flock to. There is no mixed message, subtlety, or contrasts, just the same old plot, over and over, again and again, until no one knows anything but fear and fear drives out reason.

    Is life behind bars really a case of fight or fuck? Is it easier to get drugs in jail, as some politicians argue, than it is on the street? Would going inside be like all of those movies and TV shows I had grown up watching? Would I be having a laugh at the guards like Ronnie Barker in Porridge or gang banged by Nazis like Edward Norton in American History X? I wanted to find out first hand and become, for a short time, part of the inmate world.

    Between 2004 and 2009, I wrote to corrections departments worldwide for access as an undercover voluntary detainee. China, Hong Kong, PDR Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Sweden, Norway, Jamaica, Zimbabwe, France, the Isle of Man and the UK all turned me down. They all said that my safety could not be guaranteed. The Zimbabwean Prison Service said the request was considered but not approved at this point in time. I even sent an email to Guantanamo Bay. I got no reply.

    This begs the question, why the USA? Because nowhere else would have me and because it will be the same in the UK soon, that’s why. Besides, the USA believes it can show the world when it comes to cons and crime and UK politicians increasingly talk of moving towards the American penal model – making it only a matter of time before British lags are given orange jumpsuits and housed in super-jails.

    In the USA there are three kinds of slammer, State Prison, Federal Prison and County Jail. Prison is for felons who are incarcerated post sentence. Jails are a holding facility for prison and detain individuals on sentences from 10 days to 3 years. People (and the Media) tend to confuse all three as one. The best place to start was County Jail, but where?

    Down in the desert of Arizona, there is a good ole boy by the name of Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County. Arpaio is a controversial but highly visible public figure. Since the mid-Nineties, he has had inmates work the highway and desert in striped uniforms and leg irons like a scene from Cool Hand Luke.

    Over the years, I had read much about the Napoleon of Maricopa County, not all of it possibly accurate. Feeding inmates food so far past its sell-by date it was green, selling commissary items above the rate of inflation, setting up fake entrapments to get media attention and boasting that the guard dogs are better fed than his inmates.

    I have an open door policy with the media, claims Arpaio, I have nothing to hide.

    I called Arpaio at his home and asked if I could stay undercover at his slammer. He balked.

    No one has ever stayed there. Contact my public relations officer.

    I got a reply.

    We have received your letter explaining your book and invite you to examine our facilities. You cannot spend the night ...there is too big of a liability risk that the county won’t allow it. Also, if you wish to spend time inside the facilities during the daytime hours (until 9PM), you will have to hire an off duty detention officer to stay with you and escort you throughout the jails. The cost is $30 an hour and I will need to know days and times that you think you’ll be inside the facilities.

    If I wanted to spend ten hours in jail it would cost me $300. That was some racket Sheriff Joe was running, charging $30 an hour to go on his chain gang. Surely it would be cheaper to break the law and get into jail for free? It eventually took years of persistent negotiation (and some ass kissing) to get the green light and be an inmate on Sheriff Joe’s mighty fine chain gang. At the time, I was beginning to think I might have to fly out to the USA and actually break the law. I was prepared to do this until I heard from quite a few facilities willing to accommodate.

    Surprisingly, given reports of America’s obsession with security and controversy over how it treats its prisoners, at home and abroad, I was to sample bed and board in county jails all over the United States. Once inside, throughout each term, only the Sheriff or the Jail Supervisor knew I was undercover.

    Suddenly this was all really happening. What would I find there? Would ‘Bubba’ or ‘the Aryan Brotherhood’ make me their ‘bitch?’ Would I be sold as livestock to the Mexican Mafia for a wrap of heroin and a carton of cigarettes? Too late now, the bars were beckoning at last.

    A LIMEY VILLAIN IN THE HOUSE: SALINE COUNTY JAIL, SALINA, KANSAS.

    "As he went through Cold-Bath Fields he saw

    A Solitary cell;

    And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint

    For improving his prisons in Hell."

    Samuel Coleridge

    Jail time would begin in Kansas, wheat capital of the world and the bull’s eye state of the USA. Sheriff Janet Harrington, of the Elk County Sheriff’s Department, had facilitated stays at a number of holding facilities and helped cook up a plausible cover story. I was arrested for driving a stolen car on the wrong side of the road and found in possession of methamphetamine. This was funny for two reasons (a) I cannot drive and (b) I had absolutely no idea what methamphetamine was.

    A deputy with a cobbled face and Death Valley eyes arrested me at Tulsa International Airport, Oklahoma. I was weary from jetlag and hallucinating wildly. Outside the barred window, ghostly figures were riding up and down the Kansan blacktop, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Jay Silverheels as Tonto and Raquel Welch as Pocahontas.

    Is this Indian country? I asked.

    Yes it is, The cop said.

    The town of Salina is drowsy and almost quiet. The seat of the county has 5000 residents. 161 of them are in jail. I am going to be 162. What did I know about this aw-shucks kind of town? Not much. Joseph Naso, on trial for the Alphabet Murders, once wrote about Salina in his 1958 rape diary. Salina, Kansas girl I followed and met at Fred Astaire dance studio. She was gorgeous. Great legs in nylons, heels. Had to rape her in my car on a cold wintery night (1).

    On a dead-end street was Saline (with an e to distinguish it from the town) County Jail, a modest slab of concrete with a crown of razor wire. A huge shutter slid open to the sally-port. The 4x4 wheeled slowly in. There was a thick grey door with a sign.

    Saline County Jail is a Non-Smoking Facility.

    Built in 1995, the jail operated a modern dormitory system. I would not be in a single cell. I would be living, eating and shitting with real criminals in a Housing Unit, a Pod.

    In the Reception Diagnostic Unit (booking room) there was a lattice cage, the pen, stuffed with male and female felons; a quartet of restraint chairs, cells with prisoners on risk watch and a bank of CCTV monitoring your every move.

    The shackles were stripped and I was thrown in the cage. There was a stink that almost choked. It was coming from a pool of liquid in the corner of the pen. It smelled of urine. I sat down on a bench. With an eagle eye, I took in the enemies of the county.

    To the right, a red bearded biker, a barnstormer of a man, with a flip-the-bird tattoo and God forgives, I Don’t (for emphasis), and, quite possibly, the worst mullet on Planet Earth.

    On my left: a white girl with a black eye. She had a creepy child’s doll face, straight off the cover of the Pan Book of Horror Stories. She looked at me with a glazed stare and then curled back into an embryo.

    The pen is cold and I am shaking. Scared, too. No one wants to get ass punked in county jail. That night I went for a vigilant air. I don’t know anything, it was meant to signal. But I’m watching. The cage door opens. Inmates look up. Biker Man is gestured forward. He has some forms to sign. Then his belongings are returned, a set of keys, 1 red cent and half a pack of Marlboro cigarettes and a Bic lighter. He is a felon of few possessions. After he is processed OUT of jail it is my turn to be processed IN.

    The iron hand of a male guard threw me on to a plastic chair. He stood behind while the booking officer, a thin bird like woman with a red curly perm and a bossy voice, asked a series of personal questions -- date of birth, place of birth, occupation, charge, address, social-security number. Am I under the influence of drugs or alcohol? Have I ever committed suicide? Do I plan to? What is my state of mind at this point of arrest? All the bases are covered to reduce liability should you die in custody.

    The guard pulled me up from the chair and led me to a back room for a full body search. I was ordered to strip, bend over and touch my toes.

    I heard the guard slap on a pair of rubber gloves.

    Spread your cheeks.

    Nothing up the ass but shit, he seemed convinced.

    Get in that shower, use the de-louse soap for your body and the shampoo to wash your hair. You must wash all the hairy areas of your body.

    After the shower, I change into the regulation orange scrubs, with Saline County Jail stencilled on the back. Then, just like every other inmate who books into jail, I am issued t-shirt (white), shorts (white), bedding; a blue mattress, blanket, sheets, pillowcase and hygiene kit; index finger sized toothbrush and Maximum Security toothpaste, soap and body wash.

    Finally, a wristband was attached to my left hand with my mugshot, inmate number, booking details and security classification.

    The guard looked at me with ink-black eyes.

    If you break your wrist band, and fail to report it, you will go to the hole. No exceptions.

    They like dutiful prisoners at Saline County Jail. I had the distinct feeling that if I were to fart, the guards would know where and when. Quivering, I folded the mattress into a big U and was escorted by a steamroller to my Pod, Medium 1200.

    Shouting echoed through the circular corridors of the Housing Units. Inmates, blurred, bare-fleshed and orange, stare out at the new fish. Unconcerned, I took in the design of the facility. It had a Jeremy Bentham style Panopticon layout with a ring of cells arranged around a booth where a guard can watch inmates, designed to maximize the effect of an invisible omniscience.

    The guard pulled out a set of brown keys and opened the hefty door to my Pod, Medium 1200.

    My heartbeat quickened. I could feel the pounding of my pulse. Sweat was starting to erupt. I looked at the figures rising in the grey light. A friendly apparition (a dead ringer for Lord Conrad Black) gestured me to an empty bunk.

    In the clutter of faces was a beady-eyed predator, a huge black guy with a flamboyant Don King hairstyle. His face was streaming with interest. With fire in the nostrils, he said to me, You are running with the gangsters here, man. We promise not to cut you up!

    This was no film. This was real and really happening. Survival kicks in. You must have no weakness. Weakness costs. And, like dogs, cons have an extraordinary smell for fear. I was going to play this jail like Carlin, Ray Winstone’s character from Scum. Fortunately, I had watched Scum two hundred and eighty five times on video (and DVD) and knew the part well.

    That’s alright mate, I replied, in a tough sounding, don’t-fuck-with-me voice. You’re in good company.

    He paused to reflect.

    I’m just fucking with ya, where you from, man?

    Liverpool, England.

    What you in for, man?

    I pause for effect.

    In for? Same as you mate, I’m a villain.

    Hey, we got a limey villain in the house.

    I put my bed kit on the bunk and rubbed my hands together. Day 1 and I did not have to crack open a convict’s head to step on his brain.

    You’re from Liverpool? The man who looked like Conrad Black asked me.

    Yep, I’m a Scouser, an endangered species.

    An endangered species? Conrad Black said, looking slightly agog.

    There’s only 850,000 of us left. Hence endangered.

    Is that near London? Don King asked.

    No, but our far is your near.

    England’s a small country. Welcome aboard Liverpool, said Conrad Black, the food stinks and all the guards are pricks.

    The Pod is

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