Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison by T. Parsell (ready to read books TXT) 📕

three days, but I felt like I knew what to expect once we got to Jackson. It was as if these guys had been doing time their whole lives. They said we were going to Quarantine, and that's where the state would figure out which prison they would send us to. There were dozens of prisons in the state, and since I had only been sentenced to two and half years, they said I'd probably go to camp. I wondered what the camps were like.

Rooster, a tall talkative black guy, said the camps sucked and he preferred doing time inside, where there were more programs and things to do. But I figured he was just jealous, because he couldn't go. Rooster was twenty-five and had been in prison once before. He was serving ten years for armed robbery and liked to brag about how he and his rap-partner knocked off jewelry stores on the east side of Detroit, using a sawed-off shotgun and a 9mm pistol. But only nonviolent inmates with a couple of years to serve could go to camp.

According to the guys in the bullpen, there weren't any walls or fences at the camps, so other than a new prison term, there wasn't anything that kept you from walking away. Inmates referred to running off, as breaking camp, but it carried up to five years, which was stacked on top of whatever time you were already serving. Meaning, you'd have to finish the full term of your original sentence, before you would begin serving the added time. It was enough to keep most from running away.

I doubted I'd ever escape, but somehow knowing that I could if I wanted to was comforting. The temptation was even a little scary, but I wouldn't want to get more time.

There was a lot of energy in the bullpens that morning. It seemed as if the inmates were excited to be going to prison, but it had more to do with getting out of the county jail. Doing time in the county was the hardest kind of time to serve. "It's the worst," an inmate said, "because all you have to do here is wait. You're either waiting to go to court, or you're waiting to go to prison, but there's nothing else to do, but wait."

"It's so tight up in this motherfucker," a black inmate said, "that the only thing you have to do-is to get on each other's nerves. You can't even get a job assignment. You got no yard. You got no nothin'. It's enough to drive a motherfucker insane." He'd been there for almost year, held without bail for murder, and then his trial kept getting postponed. "I finally copped a plea," he said, "accepting more time than I wanted, but I just couldn't take it no more." He was sentenced to ten to fifteen years for manslaughter.

The bullpen was loud and energetic. Everyone, it seemed, was in high spirits, because at least once we got to prison, we'd be allowed out of our cellblocks during the day. Even if it was just to walk the yard, or perform a work detail, it was better than sitting around all day counting the time. Yet we'd had to get through Quarantine and Inmate Classification first. "But even then," an inmate said, "they let you out of your cell for an hour of yard each day."

I don't think there was much that could've been said to raise my own spirits. I was quiet and apprehensive.

They brought us down at about 5:30 that morning, before the breakfast wagon had come around with our donuts and milk. I didn't like orange juice, so I was able to trade it for a cigarette the day before. I was hoping they wouldn't forget about us, and the deputies would bring it to us in the bullpen. But they didn't. "They never do," Randy, the donut thief said. "They really don't give a fuck." He was also going to Jackson that day.

As we sat waiting in the last holding pen, out of the corner of my eye, I'd noticed something crawling on the wall. I turned my head to look, but it stopped moving. It was small bug, about an inch and half long, that had the same copper coloring as the rust stained walls. At first glance, it looked to have eight legs, but its body was flat and the two front legs turned out to be feelers. Its front tentacles were swinging back and forth, in a stiff, almost mechanical fashion. When it moved quickly, I jumped, and a large black man sitting across from me raised his voice. "It's a flicking cockroach," he said impatiently.

Embarrassed at my skittishness, I looked over and smiled.

"Stupid ass white boy. Ain't you seen a cockroach before?"

When I didn't answer, he looked left to make eye contact with someone and then shook his head. His look echoing his thought, "Stupid ass white boy."

Having grown up in the suburbs, I had never seen a cockroach before, but now that I had, this guy in the bullpen seemed to overshadow its creepiness. His name, I would learn, was Moseley. And going forward-I hoped to avoid them both, but as luck would have it-we were linked together by handcuff and chain.

Moseley didn't care much for white boys. He was enormous in size, well over six feet six, and his skin was so dark it almost looked purple. The chain that connected us would be looped through hooks on the floorboard of the transport. Our other hand was bound at the belly by a chain that was wrapped tightly at the waist and joined by another, which connected to the shackles at our feet-Belly chains and leg irons. It was a good thing they had us enter the vans from the loading dock, because I couldn't have stepped up from ground level. And I hoped they had the same set-up at Jackson, because my hands and feet were bound so tightly,