Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison by T. J. Parsell Read Free Book Online Page B

from the secure loading dock that morning, all of them headed for the State Prison of Southern Michigan.
It felt like we were cattle being herded into separate corrals, the way they kept moving us from one bullpen to another. We were shifted three times, as they sorted out the prisoners who were going to court from those who were going to prison. I didn't notice anyone being sorted out to go home.
They returned our street clothes, and I was finally given the carton of cigarettes they took from me after sentencing. I couldn't wait to open them. It had been hours since I last took a drag off a short, and a day and half since I last smoked a whole cigarette. A short was the end of a cigarette where a puff or two remained before the fire hit the filter.
"Save me shorts?" you'd ask a fellow inmate as he lit up, but you had to ask quickly, or someone else would beat you to it.
Cigarettes were in short supply, and the deputies liked keeping it that way. It was one of the few outside luxuries we were allowed. There was no reason they couldn't have given them back to me the night I arrived from court. They hardly mattered to me now, since we couldn't smoke inside the vans. The other inmates warned that any cigarettes would be tossed out when we got to Jackson. I didn't know if I could believe them, but everyone kept hitting me up. "C'mon man, the motherfuckers are just gonna throw 'em out." After seeing one or two others do the same, I started handing them out. We chain-smoked while we waited to be called to the transport chains.

Someone said we'd get a bag of Bull Durham and some rolling papers inside our toiletry kits at Jackson. I'd read about Bull Durham, in a Louis L'Amour western, and was surprised it still existed. It was a roll-your-own tobacco that came in a drawstring pouch. "That shit is nasty," an inmate said. "It's like smokin' shit rolled in toilet paper."
After the Bull Durham, we had to wait for commissary, which could take awhile, until whatever personal money we might have had, was transferred from the county jail. I had twenty-eight dollars in my wallet the day I came in.
I was amazed at how much these guys knew about jailing. Almost more than my brother. I had only been there 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