Sanctuary by Ted Dekker Read Free Book Online

that faced a small television playing HGTV. The rest were either on the yard, in the rec room, or in their cells, Bostich said. Commoners weren’t permitted to work.
    Most prisons had work programs ranging from common maintenance to skilled labor—employment that kept inmates occupied for six to eight hours a day, earning a maximum of ninety-five cents an hour, half of which went to pay fines. A man dressed in jeans and a blue button-front shirt paused his mopping of the gray floor and leaned on his mop to watch Danny. Jeans. An employee, yes, but an inmate? The privileged class.
    Odd. Work, however menial the task, tended to keep prisoners occupied and out of trouble. Here, that privilege was reserved for those who’d graduated to the east wing. The employed would control the prison’s entire underground commerce, which in most prisons consisted of extorting, hustling, and trading of both legal goods, such as potato chips or coffee, or contraband, such as tobacco, prison brew, or drugs. Goods smuggled in or purchased by the wealthy at the commissary were the currency in most prisons, and those prisoners who had the most to trade typically had the most power, just like in all societies.
    Giving those in the privileged wing that balance of power by offering them an easy way to make extra money would create class envy. Violence or threats of violence would be used to extort or rob the upper class in many prison systems.
    Evidently, Basal wasn’t home to typical prisoners.
    The walls and floor were concrete, painted a shiny gray. Guarded steel doors controlled passage into each of the four wings. Black-and-yellow-striped tape ran along the floor, marking walkways and restricted areas. No pictures or images on the walls, no plants or decorations of any kind.
    The silence struck Danny as he followed Bostich across the hub toward a guarded door with a sign that said Commons above it. The hub was massive, hollowed like an echo chamber beneath a large glass dome, and yet an eerie quiet hovered about the several dozen members who quietly watched him. No one seemed to be speaking.
    They were all dressed in the same blue slacks and tan short-sleeved shirts, staring with interest. A cross-section of ages was represented, but fewer younger prisoners than at Ironwood.
    Respect was critical in prison, not of correctional officers as much as of other inmates. Cross into the personal space of a CO and you were likely to be ignored unless you were belligerent. But disrespecting another inmate with anything from a harsh look to an angry word could earn you unending trouble.
    Take a man’s freedom and he will cling to those few needs that make him human: his need for respect and his need for dignity. Take those and he will become an animal.
    Treat a man like you treat an animal, and to the extent he is able, he will treat you like one. Respect and dignity—these were the lifeblood of the convict code, a convention that had as much if not more bearing on how a prison ran than the official prison protocol.
    What few on the outside seemed to realize was that humans were human, regardless of which society they lived in. Government, hierarchy of power, and expectation of social conformity were as real in the prison society as in any other. Rob the members of their dignity and they would only learn to rob others of theirs. Hence, the monster factory.
    Bostich nodded at a brown-headed, lanky CO standing by the entrance to the commons wing. “Danny Hansen, 297, new arrival.”
    The guard checked a box on his clipboard. “Seventy-one.”
    “Let’s go.”
    Bostich led him down a wide hall with two floors of barred cells on the left. Metal stairs rose to a second tiered row with a four-foot walkway for access to cells set back from the railing. Same gray floor, same painted cinderblock walls as in the hub. All of it scrubbed clean and shiny new. A guard station manned by a young officer who leaned back in his chair behind several monitors was