That Time I Went to Prison
That Time I Went to Prison
Many years ago, in January of 2001, I took an assignment from a magazine to travel to Florida with a group of writers. The theme of the issue was crime, and I was asked to visit prisons and interview prisoners. Because, as my editor told me, he thought I had the best chance of the various journalists to be able to talk to prisoners. I’ll let you, dear reader, decide exactly what he meant by that!
Anyway, at that time, you could go on the Florida prison website and see pictures and a short criminal curriculum vitae of everybody incarcerated by the state of Florida. You could also send the prisoners a letter. For intrepid journalists, it was necessary to receive advance approval by the inmate to do an interview. I reached out to a random group of prisoners in a series of prisons. Some didn’t reply and a few called me up and asked for money, but I eventually scheduled the number of interviews I could do in three days of driving across the central and southern part of the state. I had male and female prisoners, murderers, carjackers, and some drug dealers. I even had one sex offender.
I was quite struck by the fact that unlike all of those movies where the prisoner and his visitor are sitting on either side of a barrier and speak by telephone, in each prison I was shown to a room with a couple of metal chairs and a table. Even the several murderers I spoke to were ushered into the room and then left to sit across the table from me, unshackled and unsupervised for our conversation. I don’t know and didn’t ask if the conversations were recorded.
The people convicted of violent crimes were almost without exception pleasant and more than willing to converse about the crimes leading to their present circumstances, even if they were all, according to them, victims of a system that hadn’t treated them fairly in one way or another.
Except for the sex offender, who was in jail for his predilection for child pornography. He didn’t have much to say, and if evil has an aura, I felt it. I’m neither imaginative nor introspective, but I left that interview feeling disturbed in a way that I can still feel, recalling the interview twenty years later. I hope he is still locked up, and I hope all his fellow prisoners know exactly why he is there.
Sissy was in jail for an incident involving her boyfriend and her father. But, as she said, she was in school at the time of the murder. Reading about her case, I discovered it had created quite a bit of news at the time, and was extensively covered by the reporter and crime novelist Edna Buchanan. Yes, Sissy was in school, but only after she had left a window open for her boyfriend. They killed her father because he had just won the lottery. For around $15,000, as I remember.
Then there was the guy who admitted he’d stolen the car, but couldn’t understand why his sentence was so long. He neglected to tell me that the owner of the car, a lawyer, was still in the car when the crime commenced, and ended up getting run over by his own car as my new friend made his escape.
And then there was the female gang member serving time for murder. She described the crime in question, claiming that the crime was actually committed by the OG, the original gang member, while she was asleep. I thought she was lying, she knew that I thought she was lying, but she told her story in a very affecting and sincere way. She then proceeded to tell me about her life in prison. Although I’ve never read this anywhere else, I had it confirmed by the warden of the women’s prison I was visiting. Female prisoners don’t have prison gangs, but rather split up in erstwhile family units, with husbands, wives, children, and for all I know, mothers-in-law.
I also interviewed a former running back for the Florida State Seminoles. I assume he no longer had access to the steroids that made big time college football what it was in the 1970s when he was a player, but the weight room at the prison was clearly adequate. Prince was well spoken, and seemed resigned to serving his time for a drug conviction. Unlike the carjacker, who described how he kept a sock filled with quarters with him for self-defense, Prince presumably walked around without having to prove his mettle to the other prisoners.
It is impossible to draw any conclusions from a dozen interviews over three days, although I certainly tried in my article, which was, as far as I could tell, read by at least a dozen people. I did have a fairly uncomfortable telephone call from a lady who did public relations for the private prison I visited, who was most unhappy with the way I had described the facility. In fact, she was more aggressive, at least verbally, than any of the prisoners I talked to. As English barrister John Mortimer once pointed out, murderers were his easiest and most agreeable clients. They had, after all, already dealt with the person with whom they were most angry. I hope she has reached some kind of resolution with her demons, a resolution that didn’t involve any time spent in her company’s for-profit prisons.
The prisoners were convinced that life had treated them unfairly, and that they were in some way victims of a system that was unjust. And maybe it was, and still is. People much smarter than me spend their lives thinking about issues of crime and punishment, and I’m certainly not well qualified, even after my three day visit, to offer an informed opinion. I am sure that fancying oneself a victim, even if true, is a self-defeating plan for organizing your life, either in prison or out.
I was glad to leave the prison system after my three day sentence, and by and large was quite ok with the fact that the people I talked to were still there.