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

I glanced back and noticed Moseley was staring at me.

A few minutes later, an inmate with a clipboard came out and called my name. He brought me inside a room where I was given a physical. They took my temperature and a vial of blood. That was it. I waited nearly six weeks to have an inmate nurse stick a needle in my arm and a thermometer under my tongue. It was all the recording and measuring necessary.

Later that evening, I would meet with the prison psychologist, the one who had informed me that I was not going to a camp. He said I was being sent inside until my case was adjudicated.

"Ever been fucked?" he asked abruptly.

"Excuse me?"

"Fucked," he repeated. It was the first time he looked up from his desk.

12

Riverside Correctional Facility

As the state van made its exit from 1-96 and headed north on a small twolane highway, a gas station and a McDonald's blemished the landscape of open fields and farmland. The men inside the van, who were mostly from Detroit, tried to swallow up and devour everything they could see, hear, and smell, and squirrel it away for the oncoming famine. A sign warned motorists-Prison Area: Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers. I wondered how long it would be before I had another Big Mac.

We passed a State Police Post and a small airstrip for private planes. Nestled among the hills and rolling farms, the city of Ionia was home to the world's largest free county fair, where the best in livestock, poultry, and agricultural displays could be viewed. Ionia was also home to four state penitentiaries. The Department of Corrections was the region's largest employer.

"If you're from Ionia," one of the cons in the van said, "you either worked the pigs or you were a pig." The guard smacked his baton against the caged partition and startled the offending inmate. Everyone laughed, including both guards.

We traveled another mile and then turned left. The Michigan Reformatory could be seen in the distance and the van got quiet as we took in the sight. Built in 1876, M-R was the oldest prison in the State of Michigan and boasted one of the largest cellblocks in the world. Its forty-five-toot high concrete walls and soaring gun towers loomed on a hill like an evil fortress. It looked as menacing as its reputation claimed.

Fortunately for me, the van turned left again and headed up a winding landscaped drive. In spite of what that psychologist had said to me, the Classification Committee determined I was too young and vulnerable for Gladiator School. Instead, they sent me to Riverside Correctional Facility until I was sentenced for robbing the Photo Mat.

Riverside was a close-custody prison for inmates serving long sentences, usually ten or more years, who were either very young or old, mentally ill, or in need of protection for some other reason. Protection cases included excops, informants, child molesters, and homosexuals. Riverside was notorious for having lots of sissies.

Formerly known as The Ionia State Hospital, and later The State Asylum for the Criminally Insane, the Department of Corrections had acquired the property a year earlier, and it looked like a mental hospital. It was an aging complex of several large buildings, surrounded by newly installed gun towers and twenty-five-foot-high barbed-wire fences. There were four housing units designated for each class of inmates: one building for those over the age of fifty, another for those under twenty-one, one for the mentally ill-referred to as bugs by the other inmates-and the last unit which was shared by segregation, the infirmary and the hole.

The housing unit for inmates under twenty-one was a bit of a misnomer, since there were only a few inmates who were actually that young. In fact, with the exception of the geriatric and bug wards, most inmates at Riverside were in their thirties.

I was housed in 10 Building, the unit for younger inmates. It was an aged yellow two-story brick building with small block-shaped windows that opened on pivot hinges guided by steel brackets. The openings were large enough to allow for a breeze, but not nearly wide enough for someone to squeeze free. I wondered what would happen in a fire, but the buildings' all-brick and steel construction left little chance for that to occur.

Each floor contained several dormitories and a small number of individual rooms. Though highly coveted, individual cells were issued in order of seniority. Inmates placed their name on a list with the unit counselor and waited for one of the small 8 x 10 foot digs to become available. If you received a ticket, a misconduct report for a violation of the rules, you were placed at the bottom of the list. It normally took years to earn the privilege of a room. This meant that fish were automatically assigned to the dorms.

The dormitories housed eighteen men. There were nine double bunks, eighteen lockers, and a toilet and sink in each. But the toilets were used for the purposes of taking a piss, as the inmates insisted you go down the hall, to the main can, if you needed to take a dump. As one inmate put it, "'Cause don't nobody want to smell a motherfucker's shit when they're trying to cop some Zs."

Some inmates had televisions and radios, but the use of headphones was required at all times, except when walking the yard. The yard was a noisy place where the sounds of competing radios bellowed from all directions. Most of the music was rhythm and blues or the new sound of disco. Even the white guys listened to what back home was called black music.

The day I arrived at Riverside, we sat in the control center for what seemed like hours, repeating many of the same processes we went through in Quarantine at Jackson. We were strip-searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and issued bedrolls. The