Cell 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned

Cell 17 Interviews With The Imprisoned Robert A. Crimmins

Copyright © 1996 Robert A. Crimmins - Images and Drawings Copyright © 1996 Robert A. Crimmins ISBN 978-0-9648513-4-4

5012 Killens Pond Road, Felton, Delaware, USA 19943, 302-284-8025

Dedicated to Rita Keenan, Joan Crimmins, Judi Crimmins and all mothers who stand by their sons and daughters.

PREFACE In the second half of the nineteenth century outlaws that preyed on railroads and banks became legends. Literally thousands of “dime novels” were written which gave completely false accounts of the exploits of Jesse James, “Wild Bill” Hickock, Billy the Kid, John H. “Doc” Holliday and dozens of other western desperados, bandits and gunfighters. The Eastern publishing houses printed them as fast as they could for millions of Americans. They became one of the most important forms of entertainment of the age and they were not marketed as fiction. The vast majority of readers accepted the fantastic accounts of superhuman marksmanship, just revenge and heroic encounters as fact. Writers and publishers developed a product that glamorized the outlaw. Their output was embraced by a society that craved information and entertainment. The accuracy of the information was not important if the reader was entertained.

The next generation, still fascinated by the invented exploits of Wyatt Earp and the others, produced Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly and Baby Face Nelson; a new batch of legends. Movies of the time showcased Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney in false but entertaining depictions of their era’s criminals. Like the dime novels, the movies had little to do with reality.

In 1971, at the age of fifteen, I made a friend. He was a street fighter; a twentieth century desperado. He and I differed in important ways but we were alike in many ways too. We were on our high school football and wrestling teams. We were both fierce competitors but I think our motivations were different. Like a cross between Marlon Brando and Geronimo he fought and smoked and played the drums and lived a life that his mother and his coaches couldn’t change.

Now, twenty-five years after the practice fields and wrestling mats we are still friends. Much has happened in our lives.

We’ve been grooms and groomsmen together at three weddings. We’ve traveled. We’ve worked together, and he has gone to prison three times. The first time was for eighteen months and the second time was four years. His last stay was for six months.

During his first stay, we corresponded and I sent him a book but I didn’t visit. When he was in the second time I visited on four or five occasions. I lived on the West Coast but I came to Delaware on business often and whenever I could I drove to the Delaware Correctional Center in Smyrna to see him. The visits were short. He said little about his life inside. He might tell me about the others that were sitting near us with their families. If he was in a fight since the last visit I’d hear about that.

If a guard was abusive or kind he would mention that. Most of the time was spent catching up on family matters and his legal actions, or his status as far as release.

The effect that prison had on him was profound and he has had a difficult time on the outside. Life as a proud rebel was tough enough. The burdens of being an ex-con are further testing his mettle.

I care very much for my friend and the last thing I wanted for him was harsh punishment. I certainly didn’t want them to throw his key away. But I also knew his victim and sympathized with her. It seemed to me that his circumstances were unique and our emotions, his and mine, were complicated. I realized that the families of the other prisoners must feel that their husbands and fathers and friends were unique and their problems complex.

My knowledge and perceptions of prison were based on peripheral contact but it was enough to make me think about people in jail in a different light. Before, I considered myself well informed even though newspapers, news magazines and television were my only sources of information on prisons and criminal justice. I was an interested citizen and I had opinions about crime, courts and prisons. Punishment was a prominent aspect of my opinions. As I became aware of the actual conditions and problems my opinions changed. It’s like visiting a new country or meeting someone that you’ve spoken to but never seen.

Places and people are never what you expect. The realities of incarceration aren’t what I thought. Even though my contact with the prison was as an infrequent visitor to a single prisoner it made me realize that the simple solutions that I supported before were inadequate. In order to understand what might work I had to find out more. To learn why crime is so pervasive today and why some children turn into law breakers and others don’t I had to ask questions. To help my own sons I listened to the answers.

In the past one hundred years tastes and technology have changed. Producers and publishers have adjusted. But we are still a society that seeks escape and information. Television and movies, devices for entertainment and profit, give us what we seek. Newspapers and weekly news magazines have deadlines and editorial guidelines. They too seek to fulfill the need and satisfy the craving. Everything we see and hear from these sources is influenced by powerful restraints. Skilled journalists and principled publishers can issue truthful and useful results within these restraints. Others produce modern versions of the nineteenth century dime novel and often, because the presentations are so similar, it’s hard to separate misinformation from truth.

Today, crime and violence isn’t concentrated in the Wild West, Chicago or East LA. It’s closing in on all of us. The time has come for us to look at the problem for what it is and to stop glamorizing and stop being afraid.

The conversations and the people in this book are real. The conditions of their lives and the acts they’ve committed aren’t entertaining. What they say, however, is instructive and at times enlightening. My friend’s situation is unique. Everyone I spoke

with described different circumstances. The differences between their tales are more striking than the similarities but since each path led to the same place there are common threads. In some cases it’s clear that punishment is deserved and in some I saw how things could have been different.

These interviews are windows into the most significant problem our country faces. While gazing at those that are imprisoned through the glass of words on a page we see a reflection of ourselves and our society. In some cases, the images that their words conjure are disturbing. But if we are compassionate we’ll change focus and thoughtfully consider the changes that we need to make.

I am very grateful to Gail Stallings with the Department of Correction for her assistance. Without her help and the cooperation of the Department, it would have been possible, but it would not have been done.

Thanks also to Derrick Johnson and Joe Kelly for their assistance at the Multi Purpose Criminal Justice Facility and to Matt Henderson at the Plummer Center. It was a supreme pleasure to work with these men.

Donna Sharp of Felton, Delaware provided professional editing and valuable criticism. Her efforts are greatly appreciated.

Mike Wolfer of Ground Zero Comics contributed to the cover design and provided inspiration by persevering and remaining on course toward his goals. Thank you Mike.

Special thanks are due the men and women who shared their thoughts. They had different reasons for agreeing to speak with me but a common motivation for each was a desire to help others.

In consideration of their privacy and the families, their real names were not used. Amir was the only exception. He is a Muslim and Amir is the name the he chose for himself. Its meaning has significance and I shouldn’t change it.

Thanks also to the men and women of the news programs of National Public Radio for writing, producing and airing the reports and essays that inspire others to think and write.

Contents 1 JOHN 2 WILLIAM 3 JAMIE 4 NICHOLAS 5 AMIR 6 SCOTT 7 WALTER

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned

1 JOHN

“They say, ‘You’re goin’ to jail,’ but believe me, I’m gettin’ out, and you better be ready.

If I’m not a changed person you better be ready to handle what comes with that.”

JOHN is a resident of the Plummer Center, a work release facility in a working class neighborhood near 40th and Market Streets in Wilmington, Delaware. Most residents of the Plummer House, as it is also called, have jobs and return to the Center daily. John is one of fewer than twenty residents that are confined to the premises. He works inside for the prison staff.

I waited for him in a small, sparse lobby. When he arrived, the guard pushed the button to open the hollow metal door that led to the hallway and common area of the main building. It isn’t spacious; probably just large enough for its 227 residents.

John doesn’t look like a criminal. At first I assumed he was an administrator. His normal expression carries a free and easy smile and receptive eyes. His voice is soft and his speech relaxed, with a pleasing, southern accent.

He led me to a small, hot office where we talked. rc: Where did you grow up?

John is Caucasian, thirty-three John: Newark, Delaware. We moved from Newark, when I was seven, to Georgia. We years old, married and he has moved back to Delaware when I was nine. Then we moved to Tennessee when I was two children; a son who is thirteen. Moved back when I was fifteen. I grew up in Newark. That’s where we kept twelve and an eight-year-old movin’ back to, but I’ve lived a lot of places. daughter. He is serving a seven rc: Tell me about your parents.

John: My father was a civil rights leader back in the fifties. He started out by workin’ year sentence for drug trafficking, five of which are mandatoat Chrysler, in the union. I think he was the first president of the UAW for Chrysler. ry. He has served three of those Because of his job, I never saw him very often. When we moved down to Tennessee or years.

Georgia he would always stay here, for some reason. I don’t even know why we moved down there. I don’t have no idea. That was always a big question in my mind and I still don’t know the answer. My mom was a housewife. There was two brothers and three sisters. I have older brothers and sisters. My oldest brother and sister are about fifty years old. The next one down is about thirty-eight, so there is a difference in age. That’s always been a big question. Why was there such a difference in age? Me, my older sister and my older brother and my little sister, we kinda grew up together. So it just seemed like it was always like an empty family to me. rc: Because your dad wasn’t around?

John: Right, and my older brother and sister weren’t around. I really don’t even know them - ‘cause they always - well, I’m thirty-three now, they’re fifty so there’s a seventeen year difference. When I was born they were practically out of the house. rc: Have other members of your family had trouble with the law?

John: Yeah. My oldest brother was arrested one time for rape. He did eight months in prison, got a commutation of sentence, and never got in trouble again. My other brother, he’s been in and out of jail, mostly because of drinkin’ and drivin’ charges.

My little sister has been arrested for possession of drugs. My oldest sister is a paranoid schizophrenic. She’s been in and out of the state hospital since she was about twenty years old. She just got out a little while ago. She keeps havin’ to go back ‘cause she doesn’t take her medicine right. She’s been down to the White House tryin’ to see the President. The Secret Service calls up the house, and tells us we gotta send somebody down to get her ‘cause she’s tryin’ to see the President.

At the description of his sister and her eccentric behavior, John chuckles. There is more affection than shame in his laughter. rc: Do you know why troubles run in the family?

John: I think it’s because, for us in our age group - I think for my brother and older sister my parents were around when they were growin’ up, but for the four of us, me and my other brothers and sisters, my dad was never around. He always traveled to Florida and Michigan because of his job, so we pretty much did whatever we wanted to do. There was probably a relationship problem with my mom and dad, because of him being away all the time. I’m sure that affected her. So I started doin’ drugs at about nine years old with my brothers and sisters. Started out huffin’ glue and PAM, then smokin’ marijuana, then drinkin’.

Never had to answer to anybody. Grew up havin’ a lot of questions, a lot of unanswered questions. I grew up insecure about me and my abilities, and who I was. I had a real problem with socializin’ with people unless I was high or drunk. At that age, such an early age - I since found out that you stop growing, physically and mentally, from the use of drugs. So when I was in school I didn’t relate to other kids. I’d always want to get home and do drugs and alcohol because it made me feel better.

He pauses often. Talking about himself isn’t difficult for him but he is a bit reluctant to speak of his troubles.

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned rc: Why are you here? Why are you in prison?

John: Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that I was never forced to care about anything. Never. My mom called me home for dinner but that was about the extent of it. At nine years old I was out until two or three o’clock in the morning. I never was told eventually, you’re gonna grow up and get a job. You’ll have to be responsible. You might have kids. You might have a wife. I just floated along all my life, never takin’ notice of anything or anything around me. rc: You never heard those words, or were they just not understood?

John: To tell you the truth, I never even heard the words. I just did what I wanted to do. My dad would come home, my mom would say, “Oh, he’s been bad,” then he would beat me, not beat me, but punish me for the weekend that he was there.

He leaves. I do whatever I want to for the week. He comes home a month later, same thing. You know, it was that type of thing. There was never any consistency. I didn’t have to do my homework. No one sat down with me and said you have to do your homework, and I . . . I don’t really blame my mom because I think that she did the best job that she could under the circumstances. She had four kids. She was alone for months at a time, and who knows what Mom and Dad were goin’ through.

I didn’t really pay any attention to what they were doin’. rc: You love her and we don’t blame people we love.

John: Right. I blame my Dad. [laughs] I love him too. I’ve gotten over that. He could have been a better father, but . . . rc: Does he visit?

John: He comes to see me every weekend. rc: Do you talk about it?

John: We did at one time. We had a counseling session. I told him how I felt. He told me how it was. He had to work. That’s about all we got into. His job took preference over - and the same thing - I guess he says the same thing. His parents never told him what the responsibilities of a parent was. I guess the cycle continues because I’m finding the same thing with me and my son. I told myself that I would never put my son through it, what I went through, not bein’ there and here I am in jail, you know. I’ve been away from him. This is my third time in jail. rc: What happened the other times?

John: Burglaries. I was in jail for burglaries. I was gettin’ money for drugs. rc: Why have you come back to jail twice?

John: It’s the same. It’s the same pattern. When I get out, I seem to be doin’ well. I know in my mind that I can’t do certain things or I’ll go back to that behavior. Say a year after bein’ out you start to relax. You don’t think of the things that you learned when you were in jail. It’s all right to have one drink or smoke one joint, whatever. It’s not gonna hurt ya. You’re not gonna go to jail for just smokin’ it. For me, I’m an addictive person. I was in denial for so long. I used to say I can do it. I can do it one time, but I’ve come to realize now that I can’t do it. I can’t do it one time. I can’t do it ever again. Never ever in my life. I can’t do a drug. I can’t drink. I can’t do anything. Used to be, OK well now I can just smoke marijuana. Can’t just smoke marijuana.

Marijuana goes right into - I’ve shot dope, I’ve done every drug you can think of. I take everything to compulsive behavior.

If I drink coffee in the morning - now I have one cup of coffee in the morning, but just that one cup of coffee gets me goin’ so fast that I don’t like that feeling. Now I drink decaffeinated coffee ‘cause I just don’t like that feeling that it gives me. I am an addictive person. I’ve had some real good jobs. I worked for my uncle for ten years in and out of my incarceration as a heating and air conditioning mechanic. He started me off just delivering oil. I went from delivering oil to installing, then to servicing.

I’m real good at that trade. But then the drugs and alcohol get into the picture and that’s all I want to do. rc: If drugs were legal and cheap would they still wreck your life?

John: Yes. I just can’t get enough. rc: When you got in trouble the first time was there someone special in your life? Were you married then?

John: Yeah. I was married when I was sixteen. That goes to show you another thing. You know, let’s go get married. What’s the big deal. There’s no responsibilities. You know, have a good time, you’re with a woman. I met her when I was fourteen.

That was my first time ever bein’ involved with a woman, kissin’ a woman or anything. She was two years older than me. That goes back to the same thing. I never went through, when I was nine, ten, eleven, pullin’ the girls hair, chasin’ ‘em around and stuff. I never went through that stage ‘cause I was too busy doin’ drugs. When I met her at fourteen that kind of felt good in my life at that time. It made me feel good. It made me feel important. But I was still doin’ burglaries. I mean I’m only fourteen and tryin to please her, give her stuff, buy her things. rc: Are you and she still married?

John: Yes, barely. I really care about her a lot. She’s been a good mother to our children. She’s been good to me. She’s a drug addict too. That creates a problem, ‘cause when I don’t want to do drugs she does and when she doesn’t want to, I do. We can’t never get on the same track. rc: Who writes to you?

Robert A. Crimmins

John: She wrote to me. Every time I go to jail, no friends come to see me. There’s only my mom, my dad, my kids and her, really. My brothers and sisters, every once in a while. rc: Do you have friends?

John: I thought I did. [laughs] I used to have a thousand friends when I had drugs around me, you know, because I was “The Man”, but if you don’t have drugs you don’t have friends. Nobody comes to see me. I really don’t want anybody to come and see me, but it would be nice, ya know. Right now in my life I’m not really too sure that I want those kind of friends anyway.

I’m ready to change. I think I have changed, tremendously. You would not get me to sit here and talk to you before. I was too shy, too introverted. I’ve come out of that shell. I feel like I’m a new person. rc: Is that because of some program that you’ve gone through?

John: I think it - yes. I’ve been through programs but it came from inside of me. Them programs, you could do a thousand of ‘em, but if you don’t have the desire to change, you’ve done nothing. I came to prison with the attitude that something had to change in my life. I had about a fourth or fifth grade education when I came to prison. Since then I’ve earned a G.E.D. I run the education program here at the Plummer Center. I ran the education program at PTA. I’ve been given a lot of opportunities through the staff, and Gail Stallings. I’ve worked for her. I’ve taken a number of drug programs, self-help programs, alternatives to violence programs, decision making programs, and all this because I have to change. I have a mandatory sentence. Until a year ago, that meant that I had to do every day. rc: What was the sentence?

John: Five years. I have a shot now at getting out early. When I first came here I didn’t know that I had a shot at getting out early. I was here two years before I knew that. I said, OK, I’ve got five years. I’m gonna make the best of it. I’m gonna make it a new start on my life and I believe strongly that I have. rc: Your crime was drug trafficking, right?

John: Right. rc: Can you tell me what happened?

John: Yeah. I’ll tell you the whole story. I guess about June of ‘90 I went to my boss and told him I needed a raise. I told him I needed a truck so I could do some jobs on the side. rc: This was your uncle?

John: Right. He said, “Sure, go ahead.” So I went to look for a truck and they said I couldn’t get it ‘cause I didn’t have any credit. I went to my uncle and asked him if he would sign for me. He signed for me and the next week when I got my check there was no raise. I went to him and said, “I thought you were gonna give me a raise.” He said, “Well, I thought about it and I can’t really afford it.” I just bought this truck. So I flipped out on him and told him I’m quittin’. I’ve got the truck now. I’ll just go out on my own and try to make it. For about three or four months I tried it out on my own and I couldn’t make it. I just moved into a house, about two acres of land, needed remodeling, you know, the thing. So, I started gettin’ high again compulsiveness to get high - just couldn’t get enough money to get high. I didn’t want to go back to jail for stealin’, because I’d already been to jail twice for that. So, I figured, I know where it’s plentiful, up in New York, I’d search around, make a connection, go up there, bring it down, sell it. Then I’d have enough to do what I had to do with it. Make a little bit of money so I could go back up. It didn’t turn out that way. What happened was, I was doin’ more then I could sell. I never had any money to go back up, so I would tell my dad that I was doin’ a side job, an air conditioning job. Could he lend me enough money to buy the equipment? I’d take that money to New York, buy the drugs, come back down, sell, maybe $1000 worth, buy the air conditioner, have to put that in, pay him back, just barely. It was crazy, goin’ from one day to the next just tryin’ to catch up with the last. It was really crazy. I went up one day, January fifth, came back over the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the New Castle County Police were waitin’ for me. rc: Somebody tipped them off, cut a deal?

John: Right. rc: How did you make the connection in New York? Weren’t you taking a big chance?

John: I really stuck my neck out the first couple of times. I’d heard you could go up to Lennox Ave. - 141st and Lennox meet Jamaicans up there. Jamaicans were the ones that had PCP which was the drug of my choice. I went up there and got beat a couple of times. Come back with stuff that’s not as strong as you’d like it to be. Then I met this one guy up there who said, “When you come back ask for me, don’t ask for anybody else. My brother looks just like me, don’t go to him.” rc: So you just went up there, hung out on a corner and talked to people until you found the right guy?

John: Yeah, that’s what I did. I’d pay about $250 an ounce and bring it back here and get maybe $1400 an ounce. That’s after a lot of work. rc: That’s not a lot for the risks you were taking.

John: No, plus I could do a lot of it myself. You end up makin’ maybe $200 a day. I took my family up there one time to see the World Trade Center and I was coppin’ at the time. I told the guy to meet me at the World Trade Center. Which was crazy.

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned You shouldn’t take your family up on those kind of things. You never know what could happen. At the time I really didn’t care. rc: Were you ever in danger during these buys?

John: No. rc: So they caught you cold on the bridge?

John: Yeah. It was me and my wife. We left at six o’clock in the morning. We were supposed to be back by twelve or one o’clock; in time to get my son from school and my daughter at day care. We didn’t get back to meet our son. That was a hard scene for him. Our daughter, she was four, didn’t really know what was goin’ on, but the son, he knew because we weren’t there to pick him up. We had to call someone to pick him up and tell him that his mom and dad were at the police station. They might not be comin’ home for a long time. That was pretty traumatic for him. rc: How do you explain this to your kids?

John: Last time I was in jail I told my son, “You don’t have to ever worry, I’ll never leave you again.” That really hurt me. I’m sure it hurt him. He was eight or nine. I’ve always been real honest with him. He knew that I was a drug user. He’d ask me not to use drugs, because of the programs that they teach him in school. He was in a DARE program. I tried to explain to him that it’s an addiction, and for him not to ever do it. I tried not to use it around him, but, at times it does happen. It was real hard to explain to him that again, Daddy would be goin’ away. There was a lot of cryin’, a lot of tears. rc: Was your trial fair?

John: I didn’t go to trial. I took a plea bargain. I just found out a couple of months ago that I never should have taken it. I got a fair sentence, I believe. I got seven years for drug trafficking. I was arrested with six ounces. They never told me when I took the plea that it was some type of Rule Eleven plea. That once you get that, there’s no way to get any time cut. The prosecutors said that I agreed to that but that wasn’t really explained to me. I don’t know if that’s their fault or not. I think the court system is fair, in a way, ‘cause when you have criminals out there, people that are committin’ crimes against other people - I didn’t think this way when I was breakin’ into people’s houses, but if I was the person whose house was broken into, I’d be really upset. They have a lot to deal with, trying to decide who’s guilty and who isn’t, how much time to give a person. The justice system is crowded. Everybody is overworked and underpaid. rc: What kind of comfort or help do you get in here?

John: When I first went in, I went to Gander Hill Prison. I told the counselors there what I wanted to do, how I wanted to change my life. There were two counselors over there that kinda - they cared more than anyone else. They comforted me, and I think I have some kind of magnetic personality. When I’m not doin’ drugs, I’m a terrific person. I’m kind and considerate of other people and I think they saw that in me. They helped me tremendously. They gave me opportunities that maybe they shouldn’t have given me. They gave me jobs. I shouldn’t have been walkin’ around the prison the way I was. rc: Is kindness like that common?

John: No. It only happens in certain cases. I’m not sure how they decide. Maybe each counselor has some chosen ones that they want to look over. In Gander Hill they have 1300 offenders and there might only be six people with the freedom to walk around and do things for the Warden or the Administration. Why they pick who they do, I have no idea. I don’t know why I was picked. I just asked to be helped. They saw that I really wanted the help. You couldn’t get into Brandywine Counseling for a year because the waiting list was so long. I didn’t settle for that. I wrote to the head of Brandywine Counseling and told them how serious I was, that I needed the help. I wrote to the Warden. I wrote to all the counselors. Within a month I was in the program. That’s how it was. They saw my sincerity. rc: And the programs are working for you.

John: They work for me. Some people just want it on their record that they participated in this program. My goal was to get something out of it. I believe I have. rc: Are you ostracized because you participate the way you do?

John: Definitely. The role that I hold here puts me on the spot. Inmates call me CO John, Deputy Warden, snitch. They call me everything under the sun. I have the responsibility of putting everybody in school that’s below an eighth grade level or doesn’t have a G.E.D. or high school diploma. That’s my responsibility. They see you acting differently than they do and they isolate you just like they would out on the street. rc: All together, how long have you been in prison?

John: Six and a half years. rc: What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened?

John: I’ve been beat up a couple times. rc: What happened?

John: I was on the phone. A bunch of black guys were right next to the phone, yellin’ and screamin’. I held the phone and told them, “Excuse me, you’re disrespectin’ me. I’m trying to have a conversation with my wife,” and you only get ten minutes.

They said, “Fuck you,” you know, all that. When I got off the phone I went to the bathroom and about, I guess eight of ‘em

Robert A. Crimmins

came in and beat me up real bad. That’s a real terrible experience ‘cause you hear all the things about what they can really do to you. You don’t know. I was in a dormitory at the time and there were like eighty prisoners and maybe two guards, at the most.

They’re down there playing cards with somebody or doin’ somethin’. So when I came up out of the bathroom and they asked me what happened, I said nothin’ happened. You can’t say who did it. rc: Sounds frightening.

John: It was real frightening. I’ve seen guys get cut in there. I’ve seen guys get raped. I was just lucky it didn’t happen to me, real lucky. The second time, basically the same thing happened. I was on the phone and they were yelling and screamin’. They were like animals. This was the second time I was in jail and the exact same thing happened. rc: What was the first day in jail like?

John: First time in jail I was sentenced as an adult at Juvenile Corrections. rc: How old were you?

John: I was seventeen, and to tell you the truth I don’t remember the first day. I used to do a lot of crank, which is methamphetamine. I mean I was way out there. I only weighed about 125 pounds. I was strung out to the max. My mother’s house got raided. They were lookin’ for drugs because my brother was there. They woke me up out of a dead sleep and took me to court. I was supposed to go to court the next day at noon. I was gonna get up the next day at, maybe ten. Maybe I wasn’t even gonna go at all. I hadn’t made up my mind yet. But for the first week, really, I slept. When I woke up it hit me. I was married.

I was sentenced to an indefinite sentence. That means, whenever they want to let me out I get out. I had more charges pending. rc: The drugs dulled the experience?

John: Yeah. I wasn’t scared then. I was real scared when I was transferred from that prison down to Smyrna. On my eighteenth birthday I was transferred from Ferris to Smyrna. That was the scariest. I was real scared because I was only eighteen. I was white. In the juvenile system you have your own cell. I knew I wouldn’t have my own cell at Smyrna. I was kinda embarrassed about my body. I heard terrible stories. Young white guys get raped the first couple of weeks they’re there. rc: These aren’t just rumors are they?

John: No. It happens. I was very fortunate. When I got down there it was about eleven o’clock. At 11:30 is when they eat and that’s when I went in the chow hall. I saw a guy that I knew that was doin’ a long sentence. He was on “C” tier, like an honor tier. He kinda looked out for me while I was goin’ through the transition. My brother was down there at the time but he was on the other side of the compound. I couldn’t get to him for about two months. It takes a while to work your way through there.

You go through Pre Trial, then they classify you to a building in the compound. So the whole ride down there, until I saw that guy, I was scared to death. I was really scared. I didn’t know what was gonna happen. rc: You weren’t prepared or counseled in any way for the transition from the juvenile system to the adult system?

John: I didn’t talk to anybody. At the Ferris place, because it was my eighteenth birthday, they had a party for me. I was the oldest guy in Ferris. But they never talked to me or told me what to expect when I got down there. rc: They just said get your stuff and get on the bus?

John: Right. It was about a forty-five minute ride, but it sure was the longest one of my life. rc: Who cares about your situation?

John: Family wise? rc: Anybody.

John: I imagine my dad, my second oldest sister. rc: Your kids and your wife too, right?

John: Well . . . rc: Not your wife?

John: We’re kinda goin’ through a real bad time right now, a real bad time. Last March my son was sexually assaulted. I believe that it was because of her drinkin’. She left him alone with someone. That’s why it happened. This past year, my daughter was sexually assaulted. It was the same thing. My wife left her with somebody that she shouldn’t of been with. It’s real hard to forgive. Maybe it’s not her fault but the sickness of the other person. But if she wasn’t so worried about her drinkin’ - she shouldn’t have left them alone or with someone responsible, not just a bunch of drunks. So I have a real hard time dealin’ with her right now. I’ve had the kids taken away from her. I contacted Child Protective Services. It took me about four months to have them taken away. I had to have stuff documented. Because I’m the jealous husband in jail, they didn’t want to listen to me. The social workers finally checked it out. She has a real bad drinkin’ problem. She stays out real late. She leaves the kids by themselves. So we’re goin’ through some bad times. My kids care. My kids love me a lot. They know that even though I’m in here, I have their best interests at heart. I’m very active in their lives and in their school work. I call them every single night.

I haven’t missed many days in three years. They come and see me when they can. rc: Are there any corrections professionals whom you feel really care about your situation?

John: That’s a real hard question. Because they might care but they have their own lives, you know, you can talk to them,

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned definitely, and they can be sympathetic, but they go home and I’m sure that they are trained to leave their work at work. Some of them might not. It depends what kind of heart they have. You talk to people, like when all this stuff happened to my son and my daughter. They did listen. I felt that I needed to do somethin’. They did let me make phone calls. rc: I guess caring is a subjective thing. They help even if they don’t “care”, and they care professionally although they don’t care in the way your family does.

John: Right. rc: How do you deal with isolation from the opposite sex?

John: How do I deal with it? [laughs] Well they have books down there. We have plenty of books and we have plenty of bathrooms, you know. When you get that urge, you have to do what a man has to do. It’s better than lookin’ at other men, I think. That’s my belief. I don’t have anything against people that don’t prefer the opposite sex. I have nothin’ against them. It’s not for me. rc: So the drive doesn’t diminish?

John: No. Sometimes it might be twice, three times a week. It all depends on what’s goin’ on in your life, what kind of shows you see, ‘cause there is nothin like holdin’ a woman and caressin’ a woman. rc: Does it affect you in other ways? For example are you more aggressive or irritable, or do you care less for others?

John: I think you go through mood swings because of it. Sometimes when I feel irritable I’ll masturbate because I think that it might help me. When you’re havin’ a bad time with your partner that’s out on the street. Me - I don’t know. I get some real weird - I think that every time - and this is just my own thing - I think that every time I do, it seems like somethin’ tragic happens out on the street, with my family or somethin’. So I think I’m bein’ punished for it. rc: Well, you’re not, you know.

John: [laughs] I don’t know. I’ve been put through some real tests in this place. My mom died. The thing with both my kids. rc: Are you a religious person?

John: Yeah. Baptist. rc: Does that help you?

John: Oh, definitely. I wouldn’t be nowhere without my God. I wouldn’t be this far, I know. rc: Prayer is an important part of your life?

John: Yes. Every morning and every night. And I try to treat others as I would like to be treated. I try to really watch my cussin’. I’m really conscious that there is a God and that he is with me all the time. I try to behave myself. The only bad habit I have now is probably masturbation [laughs]. rc: That’s not a bad habit.

John: . . . and smoking. rc: That’s a bad habit.

John: I really would like to give up smokin’, but it doesn’t seem possible right now. rc: Does religion become more important for you and the others in prison than it was outside?

John: Yeah, for the majority of the people. rc: Does the fact that there are so many different religions in so close a space ever cause conflict?

John: Not really. I’ve not noticed it. rc: You’ve laughed freely throughout this interview. You’ve managed to amuse yourself a couple of times. How has prison affected your sense of humor?

John: That’s how I know how much I’ve grown. Like I said, before, unless I was high or drinkin’, you wouldn’t hear a peep out of me. Now I’m able to interact with people, on a professional basis and on a friendly basis. rc: So your sense of humor has developed. You laugh more easily since you’ve been in jail.

John: Yeah, and I’m really in a worse position in my life. I take life one day at a time. rc: That’s a very positive development isn’t it? Laughter can only come after peace and a degree of happiness, or insanity, and you’re not insane.

John: This has probably been - I mean all things considered, with life bein’ what it is, and you could say that you would have liked to have lived a different life, maybe - I’m happy and I’m at peace with the life that I have, even though I’m in jail. I’ve learned a lot about people by being in jail, about how society thinks about us and how we think about society, what society lacks in knowledge about people in prison. I’m real active in the community. I take minutes for the community meetings. We’re trying to inform them about what the prison system is doing. This Commissioner is doing that. The past Commissioners never even thought about letting them know what the Department of Correction was doin’. I think that’s real important, that there’s got to be a joined force, instead of a separation between the Department and the community, because one thing they have to realize is we’re gettin’ out. They say, “You’re goin’ to jail,” but believe me, I’m gettin’ out, and you better be ready. If I’m not a changed person you better be ready to handle what comes with that. What can be done to change the mind set of the offender?

Robert A. Crimmins

We just had the biggest escape in Delaware history.

Eight men escaped from Gander Hill just days before. Most were still free at the time that John and I spoke. All were eventually captured.

John: I knew three of those people. One of them; he’s been in jail most of his life. I’ve been in twice with him. His mind is so warped it’s not even funny. I don’t know if he’s never asked for help or if they never tried to help him, or what the circumstances are, but in my opinion he’s a person that should be away until he gets some help. rc: Do you think he’s dangerous?

John: He’s probably more self-destructive than anything else, but who knows? When you’re under pressure, that they might put him under, you don’t know what he’s capable of doin’. rc: Education and therapy are necessary and so is punishment. Breaking the law and hurting others cannot go unpunished.

Given that, and your perspective, but as a member of society, do you think that the punishment element of the process should be harsher?

John: That’s a real hard question, because maybe it should be. Let’s try that and see if it works. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Let’s try that and see if it works. rc: What do you think will work?

John: I think that maybe if the first time I went to jail it was a lot harder I might not have come back, but I still needed to learn about my addiction and other things, so where do you compromise? I think that jail should be the worst place of your life. I do agree with that. A lot of times I see people and you wonder why they don’t stay in for a longer time, instead they keep comin’ back and comin’ back. Then you see one guy that comes in for a week. That’s probably the worst part of the whole sentence.

You go through booking and get sprayed down. Gettin’ adjusted to the people, goin’ to the commissary and the first time gettin’ beat, and all that stuff. He never comes back. Why is that? rc: A third aspect, the other two being punishment and rehabilitation, is the need to identify those that are permanent threats.

There are people, Charlie Manson comes to mind, that need to be held for good. Do you know guys like that?

John: Yeah. I know a couple that would be a danger if they were ever let out. Then again, you think of some guys that have done twenty years and you look at them. They look like they have been beat down so bad that you think - and they do really well. It’s a hard adjustment but I don’t think they’ll ever go back to jail or commit another crime. So where is the boundary? A lot of people are trying to figure it out. They are trying it one way and if that doesn’t work try it the other way. I mean they’ve got this system in Delaware that’s been in effect for twenty years and it’s definitely not workin’. rc: What do you miss most about the outside?

John: My kids. I miss them a lot. rc: What will you do the first day out?

John: Whew . . . the first day out I’d like to take them up to see my mom’s grave, but it’s out of state. That’s what I’d really like to do. I will probably just take them - it depends what time of year it is but I’d like to have personal conversations with them. Try to clear the air. I’m sure there’s a lot of hard feelings toward me for leaving them like I did. That has to be cleared up first before you can grow and create a relationship, so that would be the first thing that I would like to do. I don’t know where that would be, maybe next to a creek or out in a field, or an amusement park. rc: Children are forgiving, unless you’re mean.

John: Yeah, but then, you know, it depends on how - I agree. They’ll probably forgive me. But they can’t forget. When they get in trouble they might say it’s because I wasn’t around. That’s what I want to get clear. A lot of people do that. I don’t want them to say when they get in trouble it was because my dad was in jail. By the time you become a certain age you’re responsible for everything you do and you have to accept that responsibility. If you have a problem because I was in jail than we need to deal with it. We need to get you some kind of help. My son and daughter are both in counseling now. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to go to my son’s counseling sessions and he has expressed how much he hates me for the things that I’ve done, but he does forgive me. He just wants me to know. rc: Maybe with your help he’ll get through it and be a stronger person. New question: Are you afraid?

John: I’m afraid of goin’ back out, yeah. I’m real afraid. I’m tryin’ to get a commutation of sentence because I want to go through a drug program before I leave. My sentence is a five year mandatory sentence and that means that they’ll just kick me out on the street at the end of the five years. I’m not eligible for an in-patient drug program if I don’t get a commutation because the in-patient drug program they have here is in and out-treatment. You’re inside for three months and then you get a pass and start workin’. That’s what I’d like to do but with the sentence that I have I’m not eligible to do that. I do the five years and I get out. You would think that a drug trafficker would - drug traffickin’ is a two sided coin. Most traffickers are drug addicts. rc: The conditions of your plea bargain resulted in a sentence that made you ineligible for drug treatment?

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned John: Right. There is a thing called a TIS 4217 modification that I am eligible for, through the Department of Correction.

When I went up for this modification the courts told me, “No, you took this plea bargain and we’re not gonna go back on it.

You knew at the time what you were gettin’. We’re not gonna cut it or nothin’. You knew what you were gettin’ into.” How did I know what I was gettin’ into? I’m a drug addict. I’m relying on my lawyer to tell me what to do, and for my lawyer to make the right decision. I paid the guy ten grand. rc: They made a mistake too. They shouldn’t have offered a deal that made a drug addict ineligible for drug treatment.

John: And now I need a pardon from the Governor to change it. They say that you’re handed over to the Department of Correction and the Department of Correction should be able to do with you whatever it is they want to do. rc: They can’t because of a technicality?

John: Right. They’re behind me 100 per cent. It only makes sense that a drug addict should go through a program before he gets out. rc: Are you lonely?

John: At times, I get lonely. I try to keep myself real busy. I go to work at eight and work until eight or nine at night. Then I sit down and watch one of them shows. I do that every day. I don’t get too lonely. rc: You’ve mentioned your work more than once and indicated that work helps you quite a bit.

John: Yes. That might be another part of my addiction. I’ve been offered two or three jobs at the school systems that I work with. Both of the places that I run these programs out of - I don’t get any help from the Department of Correction, very little help or support from the Department of Correction. I have a staff advisor from the Education Department. If I have any problems or questions I can go to her. As far as funding, we go to the community for help. DCC gets funding for education and WCI gets funding. SCI gets funding. We don’t get anything, but I feel that we have a better system than they do. We have a better attendance record. We have more people in school then what Gander Hill has and there is only 227 people here. Out of that we have eighty people in school. My work helps me tremendously. rc: You don’t consider yourself a victim, do you?

John: No. I don’t blame anyone, but me. I just thank God that I’m not dead. I used to carry guns and run with the Pagans. I shot at a couple people. I never hit anybody, but just livin’ in that lifestyle - at any time you could get it. My downfall was that I got involved with drugs at such an early age. It stopped my growth. I couldn’t make good decisions. I was just like the smoke off a cigarette. I went wherever the wind blew me. That’s what I did. If the wind blew one way I’d make that decision. If it blew the other way, I’d make another decision. It just didn’t matter to me. I don’t think that I was a victim. I can turn this around. I might not have got a good shake as a kid but I can turn it around.

Robert A. Crimmins

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned

2 WILLIAM

“It was like a dungeon. When I first went there, the scene itself, the scene itself just had me scared and it was like bein’ in a spook house and you didn’t know what was gonna reach out and grab you.”

Guards and administrative staff pass back and forth as I sit in the lobby of the Multi Purpose Criminal Justice Facility.

Everyone calls it Gander Hill.

I’m seated in the expansive, main lobby next to a massive door of two inch by half inch steel bars that closes with a heavy clunk. It’s the portal in the middle of a wall of bars.

Few of those that are coming in and out look at me. The men in uniform, the guards, are stern. Most are swaggering and purposely tough. It doesn’t seem necessary out here in the lobby where there are no prisoners.

At the outside entrance, on the other side of the room, a guard operates the switch that unlocks the heavy door. When she’s done searching people and signing them in she’ll push the button. Some wait with their hands on the bars. Others are buzzed through without delay.

The public address announcements are almost too loud and each is preceded by a blaring tone. Every few minutes announcements that include colors and numbers William is forty-five years old, and names bounce off the painted, concrete block walls. “This facility is now in married and he has seven chilcode RED . . . correction, code GREEN. This facility is now in code GREEN.” dren between the ages of seven “Lt. Butler, twenty-two book in. Lt. Butler, twenty-two book in.” I wonder how and twenty-nine. Most of his the announcements sounded three months ago when several men escaped from this life has been spent in jail. He is prison. The Governor and State Legislature and the newspapers have had a lot to say currently in for robbery, burglary and parole violation. His sentence about Gander Hill.

Gail Stallings, the Chief of Community Relations for the Department of is life, plus twenty-one years.

Correction, will take me inside where I’ll meet the men that will tell me about themselves and what they know about why they are here.

I was early and Gail is a little late. I’m glad for the extra time. There is something about being here that is unsettling.

Safety isn’t the problem but I’m uneasy. Maybe I’m just nervous about conducting the interviews well.

Others are now entering and being searched. A nicely dressed woman in her fifties sits across from me. Two others enter: a woman about my age, thirty-nine, in stretch pants with frosted hair; and a young, powerfully built man with sideburns, a goatee, and a Chicago Bulls hat on backwards. The younger woman and the man sit next to the other woman. They know each other. Maybe they’re here to visit the same man. None of them smile and they say very little. What they do say is in hushed tones and the younger woman occasionally covers her mouth as she speaks.

An elderly man and a small child come in. The man is relaxed, as if this place is familiar. The child is happy.

Finally a guard takes them all through the heavy gate. The child is last and he is the only one of the group that looks at me as they pass. He grins and skips through the doorway in the wall of bars.

Gail has arrived. She is a small woman with a broad smile.

“I’m sorry I’m late. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

Her relaxed attitude and my preoccupation with the other visitors has helped to lessen my apprehension.

“No. I’ve been taking notes and getting used to being here.” There’s no need to say more about my uneasiness.

As the door closes behind us I hold it. It seats hard into the frame. It’s as heavy as it sounds and very strong.

The next door is thick glass with wire and it slides open before we get to it. The operator is watching us but we can’t see him. The third door is like the first, a hinged gate of rectangular, yellow bars. As we walk Gail explains why she was late.

“We’re working on the siren system. After the escapes in November the community became concerned about notification.

When the siren sounds, calls are automatically placed to the police and others. We were working on the list.”

“How many people are called?” I ask.

“Over ninety.”

“I’ve set things up with the Director of the Key Program for you to do interviews with his men,” she says. “Have you heard of the Program?”

I hadn’t.

We are walking down a deserted hall. Except for the cameras, the architecture does not reveal the building’s purpose.

We stop at another door, the fourth. A phone hand set is on the wall next to the door and Gail lifts it, then puts it back down.

We hear the latch disengage and Gail pushes the door open into a stairway. As we walk up the stairs she tells me about the Key Program.

“It’s a new program begun by an ex-con. The men are responsible for each other and because of that they help each other.

The recidivism rate for the men in the program is much better then it is for those in the general population.”

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned

At the next floor there is another phone and Gail lifts it. The latch doesn’t operate so she lifts the receiver again. This time we hear the sound of the lock releasing and we open the fifth door. The hall is a duplicate of the one on the floor below. It is deserted also. At the end is another door with a small window. A man is watching us approach. He opens the sixth door after Gail lifts the phone and the hidden guard operates the latch.

The man behind the door is a resident. (Later in the day I found out that “prisoner” is not complimentary). Another man is seated at a table on the other side of the hall. On the table is a book and as we greet him he asks that we sign in. He then stands and shouts.

“Guests on the floor!”

The man that opened the door is Derrick Johnson. Gail introduces us and explains Derrick’s role as a leader in the Program. He’ll help me with the interviews and show me around.

Derrick is polite and quiet. He listens and smiles while Gail explains why I am here.

Derrick shakes my hand and tells me he is glad to help.

As we walk down the hall I hear shouting. After turning a corner we stop at the entrance to a suite of offices. Across from the offices is a large room with chairs stacked against the wall and a blackboard on one wall. Hand painted posters with goal oriented themes are taped to the walls. A man is standing in the center of the room at attention and another is screaming at him.

Derrick tells me, “You can use this room. I’ll clear these guys out after I introduce you to Director Joe.”

Derrick motions for me to follow as he calls to a man that is walking down the adjoining hall. The man is Joe Kelly, Director of the Key Program.

As he speaks to Mr. Kelly and makes the introduction, Derrick is quiet and polite. His feet are together and he is bent at the waist, almost bowing. His hands remain at his side.

Derrick and I return to the classroom and the shouting stops. Politely, and forcefully, he tells the others to leave. They pass by me and I watch the man that was being reprimanded but he avoids my eyes.

After setting up for the interviews Derrick says, “Let’s meet the Family.”

It’s the first time I’ve heard the term. “Who?”

“The Family. All of us in the Program are a family. You’ll find out why. While you are here you’re a member too.”

One side of the classroom is a window wall so this room is well lit. Outside is a small courtyard. The walls are topped with coils of razor wire. Two old, weathered handballs are near the drain in the center of the court. The hall outside the room is a bit darker but still relatively bright. Crossing this hall, we enter a small, dark room. Opposite the entry door is another small room with glass walls and inside is a guard. Derrick tells me to state my name and the guard writes it down. She then pushes a button to open another door. Derrick and I enter a large room with a high ceiling. Fifty men, all residents, are inside. Some are seated at steel tables that have attached, steel stools. Others are standing, some are mopping the floor. All look at us as we enter.

A large, young man walks toward us, smiling. As he approaches, Derrick introduces him as “Mark” and I put out my hand. He doesn’t take it but says, “We hug here,” and he puts his arms around me.

“Hi Mark. Do we know each other well enough for this?” As soon as I said it I was sorry. I hadn’t expected to be hugged.

As we separate, I look at his face to see if my flippant remark had any effect and, to my relief, he is still smiling.

The others now look at me as if it is my turn to speak. Most smile but some are sizing me up. None are hostile, but men in close quarters, especially men familiar with violence, have to react to other men in certain ways.

This was one of many times in my life that I was glad for having played for so many years on football teams and worked with construction crews, and for the winter I worked as a bouncer at a bar frequented by bikers. Primal instincts and reactions are honed on playing fields and on work crews and in outlaw bars. These men could sense a respectful reaction to their subtle threat. The Family was accepting me.

Derrick, who has spent years honing those primal instincts and reactions, responds perfectly.

He says, “Rob might want to talk to some of you guys later.”

Then to me, “Come on in here and I’ll explain the Program to you.”

He takes me into a small office adjoining the large room and shows me an organizational chart on the wall. He explains that everyone in the Family has a place in the organization. It looks like any other organization. There are a lot of names and positions at the bottom and fewer at the top. The main difference, he explains, is that people at the top can be moved to the very bottom and those on the bottom can skip levels of the organization as they progress. If a leader gets cocky and abusive he is demoted so he can have a taste of how it feels to be humiliated. If the transgressor reforms and moves back up, he is a better leader than before. Derrick is intense and proud as he explains all this. He sounds like a business owner explaining his operation to an interested customer.

At first I am impatient to start my work but as he speaks I realize what he is telling me is important.

When he is through, we discuss my objectives and who might be interesting subjects. After discussing the crimes and attitudes of half a dozen men, we decide William is a good choice. William is forty-four years old and serving life plus twenty-

Robert A. Crimmins

one years.

With everyone we meet there are first impressions. These interviews all begin with first impressions. William’s is strong.

He is muscular and a little larger than average. His head is shaved and his eyes are windows to a struggling soul. As we begin to talk, he feels me out. rc: Where did you grow up?

William: Dover, Delaware. Can I get comfortable? rc: Yeah, sure. Tell me about your parents.

William: Okay my mother and my father were separated, right, and I came from a dysfunctional family. My mother she, uh she liked to party, okay—Can I ask you a question before I get started? rc: Sure.

William: This book is comin’ from you. Are you from Delaware? rc: Yes. I went to school at Concord High School in North Wilmington and I worked downtown as a window cleaner when I was in high school and college and some after that, and I worked out here at the foot of Seventh Street in a fab’ shop. I went to the University of Delaware and then I worked and lived around the country doing different things. I came back to Delaware in 1989 after being away about ten years.

As I speak he watches intently. His head is slightly tilted and his eyes are unblinking, his brow knitted. His lips pursed. I am being analyzed.

William: The reason why I asked you that is because I am talkin’ about my mother and my mother is still livin’, and you know what I am sayin’—and it’s just—anyway—it’s just—anyway. I came from a dysfunctional family and I was the oldest. My mother—she liked to party. She partied a lot and with me bein’ the oldest I had to take care of my brothers and I had one sister, okay. She used to go out at night and sometimes she would take us to a friend’s and I was brought up basically in the ghettos and this place—there was a lot of gamblin’, a lot of prostitution and a lot of cursin’. I mean a little bit of everything was goin’ on in that little area. It was sort of like a little camp. There were other kids there too. We were all in like one great big room, one huge room. In one corner there was gamblin’ and in another corner they’d be havin’ sex and then in this corner here right, it’s like just a bunch of kids in like two beds and that’s the way we slept. We would stay there overnight you know, while she was out partyin’. Then there was also times when she would leave us home by ourselves and with me bein’ the oldest, and I’m goin’ back to about five years old, as far back as I can remember, and we would be layin’ there at that house right, and she would go out and we would be there by ourselves, my brothers and my one sister and they would be scared, real scared, and they would always look at me because I was the big brother, you know. I was always watchin’ out and I would be scared too because we’d be hearin’ cracks in the walls, you know what I mean. You would hear the doors squeakin’. We’d just hear funny noises, and they would all run to me and they would be scared and I would be scared. I was basically their protector but I was a little kid too.

Food, we didn’t have much food. My father okay, okay my father—I had two other brothers—one is dead right—but I had another brother and the three of us have the same father. Well, he was a pretty decent guy. He was in the service and all that. He would always send money to her every week. He would send her like twenty-one dollars a week for food and this was in the fifties when twenty-one dollars was a lot of money. She would party with the money so she wouldn’t buy a whole lot of food so my brothers were hungry and I would have to go in there and make up some kind of sandwiches. It might be a syrup sandwich, or ketchup sandwiches. It might be a mayonnaise sandwich, any kind of sandwich. I mean that’s the way it was for us comin’ up because we didn’t have any food and sometimes the ice box would be bare, you know what I mean. I had to do that. I had to take care of them.

So I specifically remember right, this point right here is where I started my criminal activity. I was about eight years old and I had received a job workin’ on a potato farm. It was like about two miles from where I lived at and this is about 1958. I mean I was workin’ on a potato farm and it was the first job I ever had. Someone had pointed the job out to me and had got the job for me and the job was to take the potatoes that came up a belt and I had to separate the rotten potatoes from the good potatoes, and then I would bag them. I was enjoyin’ this. I ain’t nothin’ but a little kid and I was enjoyin’ this right. So every morning I would get up and this was like the summertime and I would get up and run to work and you know, I liked the job and I was thinkin’ about what I wanted to buy when I got paid. I was goin’ to buy my mother this, and my brothers and my sister this. I was goin’ to save some money to get me a bicycle. This was how I was thinkin’ when I was workin’ this job, right. So the first week came and I got paid and I think I got nine dollars. Now we’re in 1958. That’s a lot of money for an eight-year-old child, so I got the money and they paid us cash right, and I ran all the way home and I was singin’ and skippin’. I’m happy, you know. What am I gonna buy? So I went to my mother and I said, “Look at what I made. Look at how much I made.” I said,

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned “Look, I want you to hold it. I want you hold my money for me and whatever you need, if you need a couple of dollars for food or somethin’, go ahead and get it.” You know, because I had some stuff that I wanted to buy. Well, she winds up spendin’ my money, the whole thing. She told me she was gonna give it back to me and I never got it back so the next week, the same thing. I go to work, you know, bring money back, give it to her and she does the same thing. She spends my money. You know, I’m workin’ and I’m not gettin’ anything. As a child I’m really hurt because I made this money and I’m not even gettin’ it. You know, she took this money from me and the main thing that I wanted to do was I wanted to buy myself a bicycle. I just wanted to get a bicycle, and my father, you know, he’s not there. He’s in the service right, so I’m like real tore up about this money, right. I never received any of this money that I made and it’s been two or three weeks so I just didn’t have any desire to work no more. I just didn’t want to work no more because I wasn’t gettin’ nothin’.

So I started stealin’ little stuff like candy bars and cigarettes and cigars, just little crazy stuff, you know. I just started this habit and um I would like steal stuff and give it to my younger brothers and my sister, you know, little candy bars and big candy bars and stuff like that. So this went on for a while and then I started gettin’ involved with other guys who were stealin’ and we would play cards. We would like play “tonk” or we would play “pity pat”. Who ever loses has to steal whatever the other guy wants him to. So finally I had come to be about eleven years old and I got caught for stealin’ and I was put on probation okay, and after that I am still stealin’ so I ends up gettin’ arrested again. Stealin’ basically the same thing and then I got arrested maybe two or three other times right, so the Judge, he got tired of messin’ with me, so he sent me to Ferris.

Now comin’ up, right, I was never told that I was loved. My mother never told me that, I never even heard the word love in the house. I was cussed at and beaten. Today, they call it child abuse. Then they didn’t call it child abuse. So I was always told that I wasn’t gonna be nothin’. I was always told that I was gonna be in prison for the rest of my life. This was comin’ from my mother! I was told that I was no good and I just always heard that. So when I was arrested I was given this probation officer—what they called a truant officer at the time. The first time I went to Ferris right, well he took me to Ferris, he put me in Ferris and when I got to Ferris this guy would be comin’ to see me every week. He was bringin’ me PX commissary, you know and he was buyin’ me cigarettes and I ain’t nothin’ but twelve years old and this guy was doin’ all this stuff for me. I got attached to him. Now today I understand what was happenin’. I started gettin’ attached to him. You know what I mean, because he was givin’ me attention and I was gettin’ attached to him. His name was Ed Morris, he’s dead now. As a matter of fact, the Morris Correction Center is named after him. Okay anyway um, he was always comin’ to see me and he showed me a lot of care and concern. So I got out of Ferris and I was still stealin’. rc: How did you respond to his attention?

William: Well, at first I didn’t really know but now I know that he was givin’ me what I wanted. He was showin’ me a lot of care and concern. At first I didn’t understand. I liked him because he did stuff for me, you know what I mean, and he cared a little bit, you know, I kinda felt that—I respected him. I had a lot of respect for him, you know. He wanted me to go straight but I just couldn’t go straight. I was just caught up in the grips of stealin’. So anyway I got out of Ferris and right back, the same thing, stealin’, and this went on and I was in and out of Ferris, I don’t know, maybe six or seven times. Now what happened was, my stealin’ progressed. I started stealin’ bigger stuff. I went from the candy bars and cigarettes to wallets, pocketbooks, clothes, stuff like that, it just like progressed, and I’m in and out of Ferris. Today, I’m thinkin’ that it was to seek the attention from him, to get to him. That was my way to get to him. That’s the way I see it today because he would always be there as soon as I got arrested. rc: Can you remember that day, when you were eleven and they took you to Ferris?

William: . . . Ferris. . . . When I first went to Ferris, it was the furthest from home I had ever been. It wasn’t like Ferris was right there in Dover and I lived in Dover. I had to go all the way to Wilmington. I didn’t know anybody. I had that fear of bein’ away from home and didn’t know what to expect. Well, I cried. I cried and begged the man not to take me. I cried from Dover all the way to St. George’s Bridge. I cried a river. I mean I’m bein’ away from my mother and I don’t know what to expect. I was away from my mother and everybody and I ain’t never been away from them, so I didn’t know what to expect. I was scared and then I didn’t know if I was gonna get jumped on or what, so all of them fears I had. Now when I went to the Work House, when I went to prison, I was really afraid then too.

The work house at Price’s Corner, near Wilmington is long gone, torn down in the seventies. If it wasn’t built in the last century its designer was certainly nostalgic for those days. The building was forbidding, with tall brick walls and corner towers. A whipping post stood in the prison yard.

William: It was like a dungeon. When I first went there, the scene itself, the scene itself just had me scared and it was like bein’ in a spook house and you didn’t know what was gonna reach out and grab you. They had lifers that’s doin’ the paperwork, the processing when you’re comin’ in and it’s the lifers that are handin’ you the clothes and tellin’ you to take a shower. I learned right from the door that these guys were doin’ life and I was scared. This older guy used to come up to me every day and bring

Robert A. Crimmins

me coffee and all kinds of stuff and at first I really didn’t know what was goin’ on and then later on I picked up on it, you know, he wants somethin’ because this guy didn’t even know me and he’s tryin’ to butter me up and give me all of this stuff. It was workin’ right, but just so happens that I had an uncle there who had been there for a long time and he was well known. Matter of fact he was doin’ a large sentence and I asked him if he knew my uncle and he said yeah, and when he found out that he was my uncle, he backed up off of me. rc: What did he want?

William: Sex. That’s where he was goin’ at with that. That’s why he was givin’ me stuff and come up to me, “What’s goin’ on young buck. Anything you need just let me know,” and the whole nine yards and he was comin’ at me. At first I couldn’t see and then I started understandin’ it, that somethin’ ain’t right, because this guy cares too much about me and he doesn’t even know me. See what I’m sayin’? That’s when I asked for my uncle and his whole attitude changed when my uncle came up there. My uncle knew that he was comin’ up on me and my uncle approached him and said, “If you even think about messin’ or doin’ somethin’ with my nephew, I’ll do somethin’ to you.” He said, “No man, it ain’t like that,” but that’s where he was goin’ with that. So I had to deal with them kinds of fear because I wasn’t even eighteen and you had to be eighteen to even be—but because of the Court’s decision of tryin’ me as an adult. rc: What is the worse thing that has happened to you while you were in jail?

William: The worse thing that ever happened to me in jail? Um . . . the worse thing that has ever happened to me in jail . . . um . . . that’s a hard one. The reason why it is hard is because see—see I—it’s kind of hard because I didn’t really have any problems in jail. I started as an amateur boxer, then I got into professional boxin’. I was a well known boxer. I was good with my hands, right. Then, like the drugs and reefer and all that—I ran that. I had that, you know what I mean. I made a lot of money in prison sellin’ drugs so I had the control. rc: Okay, you had special status but prison is a difficult place.

William: All right, I um, I um . . . I have forced guys to have sex. I have done that. I feel like I messed them up by doin’ that.

So, I would say that is the worse that has happened to me. I think that happened twice. rc: Do you know what affect that had on them?

William: I mean I forced them and I feel that had an effect on their life. I think that is the worse thing that has happened to me in jail. Doin’ somethin’ bad to somebody else. Because I never really had, you know, I never got beat, jumped on or anything like that. I never had that happen to me. That was early on in a fourteen year sentence but after that I didn’t have to do that because I got what I wanted. I think that was one of my problems too, right, you know, I got comfortable. I was real comfortable in there.

My feelings toward William changed several times throughout the two hour interview. The image of his brothers and sister clinging to him for protection when he was only a child is compelling. Without knowing his victims and their pain and with knowledge of his deprivations, it would be easy to be forgiving. Homosexual rape presents a compelling image too.

William: I would watch my mother have sex, I laid up in the bed, I mean we had like one bedroom. Well, we had two bedrooms but it was like an open door to it because it didn’t have no door to it. Then there was times that there would be one bedroom and I would watch her havin’ sex with different men, but I didn’t know that they were havin’ sex. I thought they were fightin’, you know, I’m young. I’m hearin’ things and I don’t know what was happenin’ so I thought they were fightin’. Then as time went on I realized that they weren’t fightin’, that somethin’ else was goin’ on. Then I realized that it’s sex goin’ on, so now I can’t wait to go to bed because I want a ring-side seat. I want to see this. I was lookin’ forward to it, you see what I’m sayin’, and this went on and on and on. I did a lot of crazy stuff man, just based on when I grew up. I had—I had—I told you that I was the oldest of ten children. I had three brothers that died, a sister that died and my mother went to prison twice for manslaughter. One time because my brother died of malnutrition. rc: How did the other siblings die?

William: Okay one died—well my sister—the only sister that I had died in a foster home. rc: From what?

William: They said pneumonia but it was deeper than that. A lot of things that I don’t even know today, but I knew she went to prison for manslaughter for my brother, because of malnutrition. He wasn’t nothin’ but one year old and he wasn’t properly fed and she got arrested for that. I was in the boy’s school at the time when that happened. Then they sent my sister to a foster home and she died of pneumonia. But see that the thing behind that was—like when I found out, I was in Ferris, and I got the call that my mother was in prison for manslaughter and I didn’t know what the hell manslaughter was, okay. All that I knew was that my mother was in prison. I didn’t really understand what was goin’ on there right, but my brother, he died and her bein’ in prison related to that but I still love my mother. I didn’t even really know my brother.

So she made bail and went to live with her brother and I got out of Ferris and I wanted to see my sister, because that’s the

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned only sister I got and she’s five or six years younger than me, and we were really close. So when I got out of Ferris, I told my mother that I wanted to see my sister and we go to this foster home. She’s in a foster home in Smyrna. So me and my mother goes to see her and as soon as I get in the door my sister runs to me. My sister runs to me and she grabs my hand and leads me to the kitchen, and we go to the kitchen and she wants a drink of water, so I gives her a glass of water. She wants another glass so I give her another glass. She wants another glass of water and I’m like—I’m about twelve years old, eleven or twelve, and my sister wants all this damn water. Now I know that something isn’t right here for her to want all this damn water, you know what I mean. So I gives her water because her mouth was just as dry. I’m only eleven but I knew somethin’ isn’t right. So after we leave I say somethin’ to my mom, you know, why did Patricia want all these glasses of water. I gave her three and a half glasses of water. So she says that she probably pees the bed and they don’t give her water after a certain time. This is what my mother says and I—I ain’t all right with it but there ain’t nothin’ that I can do about it. About three weeks later, my sister is dead from pneumonia . . . and that hurt me. That really did somethin’ to me. When they had her funeral I really went off. I reacted and I told them that they killed my sister. So that had a big effect on me . . . I mean, so much shit . . .

I realized a couple of years ago, when I came back that I was sick. That I needed some help and the only way I was gonna get some help was I had to do some work. I had to get some work done on myself because manipulatin’—my issues were manipulatin’, lyin’—I was a big liar. I believed my own lies. I actually started believin’ that I didn’t do all that stuff that I’m tellin’ you that I did. I was actually believin’ that I didn’t do that, you see what I am sayin’? I got caught up in the drugs, sexual issues. I have sexual issues. I mean there’s a lot of things happenin’. rc: You’ve said you’re sick. Is there a diagnosis?

William: When I say I’m sick I am talkin’ about sick as far as the things that I did. rc: Socially? Socially sick?

William: Yeah. Socially sick. It was just a lot of sick thinkin’. rc: You’re going to a parole hearing soon. What are your chances of being paroled?

William: Reality of it is that, well, I got a shot but my record is gonna be a problem. The long record is gonna be a problem but I know eventually I’ll get it again. I’ve got one more shot and I think they’re gonna give me one more shot. Whether it’s this time or the next time but I am gonna get one more shot. If I mess up again then I’m done. I pretty much know that. rc: How do you feel about that? Do you think you are going to make it?

William: Oh yeah. I feel like I’m gonna make it, because I realize now the disease concept. I realize that I have a disease, a disease of addiction. I realize that I have to talk about how I feel, you know what I mean. If I feel like gettin’ high, if I feel like havin’ sex, or forcin’ someone to have sex, I need to talk about it before I do it. I need to expose what’s goin’ on with me. rc: What addiction are you talking about? You haven’t mentioned a drug addiction. Do you mean the sexual addiction?

William: Okay. Drugs came in at the later part. I’ve always smoked weed and all that, but I never did cocaine or heroin when I was comin’ up as a child or even when I was in prison. I didn’t do that until I made parole in 1985. If I didn’t develop a drug addiction I would of stayed out. See now, okay, now this is—this is deep right here, right. Like I met my wife in 1981. I was in prison when I met my wife. But I always knew her as a child but I didn’t really talk to her so I really met my wife in 1981 and we started talkin’. Her daughter was like two weeks old when we first started talkin’ and my wife is real educated, intelligent.

In ‘81, we started talkin’, she started to come visit me. In 1983, I made parole and they called it Certified Parole with a one year work release stipulation. If I successfully completed that then I was automatically paroled, okay. So I got classified to the Plummer House and this is the first time that me and my wife had been together physically. So I go to the Plummer House and I’m there for one week. You have to go through one week of orientation. Then they give you two eight hour furloughs; one Saturday from eight to four and one on Sunday from eight to four. On Saturday, my wife picks me up. She was my girlfriend then, like I said this was the first time we had been together physically. So she comes to get me—she had taken her daughter over to the baby-sitter. So we go out to lunch and then we go to her apartment to have sex. Somethin’s happened and I can’t get an erection. So okay, I’m thinkin’ that I’m too excited. I’m too excited so that was okay. So we didn’t. Sunday she picks me up and the same thing. I can’t have sex. I can’t get no erection. rc: Had this ever happened to you before?

William: First time it had ever happened to me. So now I’m like scratchin’ my head because I can’t figure this out. But then again, I’ve been down for a while, just give it a little time. So I goes to Level Two and Level Two means that I get a twenty-four hour furlough, overnight. So she comes and picks me up the next weekend because I’m workin’ now. I got a job and I work through the week so they let me go home on the weekend. She picked me up to go home and we try to have sex that whole time and I can’t. I can’t get an erection. So now this is buggin’ me. I’m buggin’ because I don’t know how she is takin’ this stuff. So the next week I go to Level Three. They gave me a seventy-two hour furlough, right. The same shit, I can’t get no erection. I’ve done been out a month and I can’t get no erection. I don’t know what’s goin’ on. I’m ashamed. I’m embarrassed. I don’t know how to talk about this, you know. I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t know what to say to anybody so I don’t say nothin’.

So now I’m out for two months or more and I ain’t’ gettin’ no erection. So one day she tells me that—she said that she wanted

Robert A. Crimmins

to let me know that this guy she used to date, you know, her and this guy decided to go back together. I was hurtin’ because I really cared about her but I feel like it was based on that, you know what I mean? So now I’m like workin’ and all that and I’m like messed up about this and I still haven’t talked to nobody about it and I’m hurtin’. So I ran across this girl that I used to have sex with and we had a real good sexual relationship, so I knew that I’m all right because I’m gettin’ ready to get with her. So I went to have sex with her and I’m still—I’ve still got this problem. So now I’m sayin’, fuck women. I’m done. I was workin’ for a construction company and I was the foreman. So now I been out for seven months, goin’ on eight and I still ain’t got no erection. Nothin’ in this period of time and I still ain’t said nothin’ to nobody. The only people that know was the girl, and my wife, but my wife is gone.

So I get arrested, well I didn’t get arrested—me and a guy is goin’ out to West Dover or somethin’ in Wilmington. West Dover Hills or somethin’ like that. It’s a place where rich people stay at. It’s in Wilmington but it’s on the outskirts. I was asked by my foreman to pick up a truck load of lumber. I had to go to this lumber company, so me and this guy go and pick up this lumber. It was a dump truck and in the back of the truck was two trash bags with trash in them and we gotta get the whole back loaded with lumber, so we pull over to the side of the road and we’re on a back road and we take the two trash bags and throw ‘em in a ditch. This white guy pulls in back of us, right, and gets out of his car and he’s got a suit on. Matter of fact, you look like the guy. The guy gets out of the car with a suit on and he looks and he’s got paper—a pad in his hand, and he’s writin’ down the tag number of the truck and we ask him what’s goin’ on and he said, “You’re littering.” We said, “No problem. We’ll put it back on.” We went and put the trash back on the truck and went on and got the lumber. So a week and a half later, I’m gettin’ ready to go home on furlough and they call me to the office. I got a littering charge so they send me back to Smyrna and they violated my parole and everything for littering.

So I’m back for two years, right, and my wife has heard that I came back and what I came back for. So she has decided that she’s gonna come see me. After a year now, after a whole year of bein’ back she’s decided to come see me. Well, when I found out that she was comin’ to see me I was excited because I cared about her but remember she left me because of this erection problem. So she came to see me, right, and we talked and she said that she had heard about me gettin’ arrested for the trash and all that. She was tellin’ me how her and her daughter was doin’. rc: Do you laugh about going back because of littering?

William: Yeah. I mean I can laugh at it now because it’s crazy. rc: I’m glad, because I just laughed and I don’t want to piss you off.

William: Yeah, no problem. So now she comes to see me and she told me that the guy that she was messin’ with—that they had broke up and he was startin’ to mess with one of her girlfriends. So she’s started comin’ to see me every week now. Now I’m goin’ back up before the parole board and the parole board gives me straight up parole. I made parole on Tuesday and Friday she came to pick me up. She and her daughter picks me up, right, and we’re ridin’ from Smyrna to Dover and I’m thinkin’ am I gonna be able to perform sexually because we hadn’t talked about that. It’s in my mind now, am I going to be able to perform sexually? Sure enough man, it didn’t happen. I was—man, I was hurtin’ because she left me because of this shit and now the same shit’s happenin’. I’m just gettin’ out of prison so we try to have sex and it’s not workin’. I don’t know what to say, I am speechless and she tells me, “Look, we’re gonna work this out.” rc: She’s a keeper isn’t she?

William: Yeah, and that helped me a whole lot. Hey man, I didn’t know what to do so she started buyin’ books on it right and I’m seein’ her with all these books and we’re readin’ the books. The books say to just take your time, don’t force it. Just touch and hold and all this kind of stuff. We were doin’ that and I’m thinkin’ that I’m about ready and I’m tryin’ to force it and she says no, we just got to take our time. I’m tryin’ to do it the book way and the book way ain’t workin’. Now, I’m out for like a month and I still ain’t been able to do nothin’. So um like, like, she was down financially a little bit but we were workin’ together and we were gettin’ the bills caught up and all that stuff. Everything good’s happenin’ except for the sex. So now this is like the second month that I am out and I’m still not havin’ sex and I found out that she was talkin’ to this guy that she used to mess with. They were just talkin’ so now I’m automatically thinkin’ in my mind that she’s gettin’ ready to pull up out of there again on me, you know. We go through a little argument with that and she’s tellin’ me she’s not goin’ anywhere. Then one day I came in and he was parked out back and she had gone to the car and talked to him. We went through a little thing about that so now I realized that I got to do somethin’. rc: Doesn’t this guy realize who you are?

William: Yeah, but he don’t care. He didn’t care at the time, you know what I mean? I finally did get with him. I talked to him.

So I got to do somethin’ now. I got to do somethin’ about this so what do I do? I went to my father. I tell my father that somethin’ is wrong with me ‘cause I can’t get an erection. My father told me that I needed vitamin pills and I know that ain’t no vitamins got anything to do with that so I call Dr. Hooper. Dr. Hooper headed up the sessions at Smyrna and he was always tryin’ to get me to talk about sexual problems that I had and I never would tell him nothin’. He was always tryin’ to get me to talk about it.

I called him and I said, “Doc, I need to talk to you man.” I said, “I’ve been out for like three months and haven’t been able to

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned get erections. I need some help.” So he said, “Okay, look, meet me at Captain John’s,” which is a restaurant in Dover. So we met at Captain John’s and I’m explainin’ to him what happened back in ‘83 to now, so he said, “We’re gonna keep meeting and we’re gonna keep talking.” We kept on with it about three different sessions but nothin’ was ever happenin’. I need some results man because I’m gettin’ ready to lose. This is the way I’m feelin’ cause I just lost her for that.

So I’m workin’ at a place called Con Agra and down there, there are a lot of Haitians. So one day I’m workin’ right, and I was hangin’ dead chickens. After it was killed it had to be cleaned so I had to rehang them. There was a couple of Haitians that were workin’ next to me and one Haitian next to me said that last night he had sex with one of the girls on the job. He was sayin’, “Man, she came over to my house last night, and me and her got some crack. Me and her were smokin’ some crack,” and he said, “Man, my thing got hard as a rock.” He said, “Man, I drilled,” and that’s the kind of shit that I want to hear. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. So I bought a bar of it and he showed me how to smoke it. A bar costs forty dollars.

I zoom home and tell my wife I got somethin’ that’s gonna help my problem, and she says what, and I says it’s crack. It’s gonna help me get an erection and she says that she’s gonna smoke some with me, right. So we smoke half the bar. It shouldn’t take but a couple of hits to make it and we’ve smoked half of the bar and ain’t nothin’ happenin’ yet. I still ain’t got no erection.

We ended up smokin’ the whole bar and what happened was the crack relaxed us, like the problem wasn’t there. We held and we kissed but I still couldn’t get no erection. I started feelin’ better and she was feelin’ better so the next day she asked me if I was gonna bring some more home and I was like, yeah, I was gonna get another one because we liked it. So I got another bar and I got another one the following day. We just liked smokin’ it. It wasn’t helpin’ me sexually at all, right and what was happenin’ was that we were gettin’ addicted and we didn’t even know it. rc: You didn’t know that it was so addicting?

William: No, I didn’t know that. I thought we could smoke it and control it, but we were hooked, and now okay, I’m gettin’ an erection. I started gettin’ erections. So now the sex is good and we’re both enjoyin’ the sex and all that and she’s talkin’ about a child because I’m goin’ good. I’m workin’. I mean I’m doin’ good. Believe me, there ain’t no criminal activities goin’ on here.

I’m all right, you know what I mean? And she gets pregnant. She had the IUD removed and she becomes pregnant right way.

I mean just like that. So now she reads about the effect that crack can have on the child. So she says we’ve got to stop gettin’ high. It wasn’t that easy for me because I’m smokin’ it on the job and off the job, everywhere. She was only doin’ it when I brought it home. So I’m hooked. She needs to stop and I agree, let’s stop. What I did was I stopped doin’ it at home. I was doin’ it on the job and everywhere else and it just progressed. My habit had progressed to the point where I had to do somethin’.

Either I start with the paycheck I was gettin’ or I do somethin’ else. That’s when I started stealin’ pocketbooks. That’s all I was doin’ was snatchin’ pocketbooks, just to get high. That’s what brought me back here to prison. She knows, she lived this story, she was right there with me. That’s why I am back in here. rc: Do you ever think about your victims?

William: Well, okay um, I have remorse for what I have done and today I understand how they feel. Before I wasn’t worrying about how they was feelin’. I was just concerned with myself. But now I understand how they felt then. I understand how a person works all week long and then someone takes their paycheck from them. I understand how they feel. Before I didn’t understand that. I’ve done other crimes—sexual crimes that I did that wasn’t right and I feel bad about it today, because I took something away from them that I shouldn’t have taken. I’m sayin’ that I feel bad about that. Even now I feel bad about it but I’m able to let go of it. I mean I’m not gonna keep beatin’ myself up for it. If I see them, I could tell them that I was sorry and mean it. rc: Has the Key Program made that possible?

William: Yeah, there is a lot of love given here. See a lot of us never got love when we were comin’ up. We never got the love, the attention and the strokes and you get that in here. You know, we tell each other that we love each other and we hug each other, you know, grown men. You go some place else in prison and they think you’re gettin’—it’s a sexual thing but here if a guy is down we go over and give him a hug. I mean it’s huggin’ all day long. It’s guys tellin’ each other that they love each other all day long. That’s all you hear. I love you, man. You know, you hear that. rc: And when you get out, you’re going to still love each other? I assume that’s part of the program, that when you get out you still support each other.

William: That’s the way the program—you see they have Nurturing and Critical. They have a critical side of it too because if you do somethin’ wrong then they’ll call you to the floor and they will stern you. I mean a guy will call you to the floor and he’ll bless you out. He will bless you out and you have to stand there in position and take the information without reactin’. You can’t say nothin’ back and this guy is tellin’, “You this and you that”, and he is hoopin’ and a hollerin’ at the top of his lungs at you. rc: What do you have to do to get that type of treatment?

William: Anything. I could sit up here with my legs crossed—that’s why I asked you if I could get comfortable, because up in there we can’t sit like this because they call this “jailin’” so we can’t sit like that. You have to have a straight posture, even watchin’ TV you have to have a straight posture. You can’t sit back in a chair and lean back with your hands behind your head.

Robert A. Crimmins

That’s jailin’. So if somebody walks in and they see me all down like this here, then they’ll call me to the floor and they will give me some information, you know what I mean, some critical information. Anything that you do wrong, they will call you to the floor and give you some information and a lot of guys can’t take it. A lot of guys react, you know what I mean. But the purpose of this is to get you to think before your react. That’s our biggest problem. I know it was my biggest problem. I would act impulsively. Whatever came into my mind, boom, I would do it, without even thinking. And because of the way we are with each other we can ask for help. Before, I didn’t know how to ask for it. See what I’m sayin’? That was my problem. Now, today I’m all right with it. I can talk about anything. I can talk about the sexual issues. I can talk about the things that I did as far as the rapes. I can talk about the robberies. I can talk about all of that stuff now. Before I wasn’t comfortable in talkin’ about it because I was worried about how you would perceive me. What would you think about me? You wouldn’t have anything to do with me and I’ve done told my wife that. My wife knows about this. Before I couldn’t even tell her. I couldn’t talk to nobody about that and I just recently, you know, in the last two years, been able to do that. This is good for me. I feel like I’m a different person today because I am able to get rid of that stuff. All that stuff is behind me now. I’m not worried about rapin’ nobody or I’m not worried about robbin’. I’m not worried about that. Now I understand why I was sick and what caused me to be sick. If I can identify that, then I can understand that today. That’s the problem with a lot of the guys in here today. They are goin’ through the same sort of problems and they don’t know how to work with it. I didn’t know why I did the things that I did.

I didn’t even understand that I had a problem, you know. I knew there wasn’t somethin’ right with me but I ignored it because I didn’t know what to do or how to do it. You’ve got kids today—see that’s what I do when I talk. When I go off the floor I talk to other inmates, especially the younger inmates because I don’t want them followin’ in my footsteps, man, because it wasn’t nothin’ easy, even though I say I got comfortable. That was even to the point that people felt that I was institutionalized, that I could function on the inside but not on the outside. There are people that still don’t want to believe in me or have anything to do with me. People think that when I get out, I’m gonna be right back and that I should stay here in prison. All of that is ahead of me. I’m goin’ to come face to face with that but I’m all right with it. I understand how they feel. They have a right to feel like that because I lied to them so much and each time I got out, I would go back. Every time that I got out I told them I wasn’t comin’ back no more and they didn’t want to hear that no more. So I can understand how people perceives me today, what people think about me. rc: How can you prove it to them?

William: I have to prove it to myself. I have to show myself that I can do this. I can tell you all day long that I am okay but it don’t necessarily mean that you’re gonna believe what I’m sayin’. So I can’t get caught up in all that. I can’t get caught up to convince you that I’m right. I can only tell you and go from there. That’s what I say with my parole. It’s not gonna be an easy task. It’s a possibility that I might get it but I got a record that is gonna hurt me. It’s gonna hurt me wherever I go. But now, man, I feel good about myself. For once in my life I can say that I love myself and I couldn’t do that before. I didn’t even know who I was or what I was about.

Derrick enters to tell us that it is nearly time for count. He and William and every other resident must now go to their cell and remain there for forty-five minutes. This happens several times a day. After count, it will be time for chow and if I like, I can eat with the family.

Derrick, William and I eat together in the small office with the Key Program organizational chart on the wall. The food is bad. A gray, cold hamburger on white bread, applesauce and rice. Small, black specks are in the rice and I don’t think it’s seasoning. They tell me about themselves and prison.

“It can be like a monastery”, says Derrick, “You know, like in Kung Fu. People wanted to get into the temple for the spiritual experience. They wanted to spend years inside those walls so they could find themselves. Prison can be like that.”

William is enjoying his meal. Derrick’s manner is different here. When he greeted Gail and I and when he introduced me to “Director Joe” he was reserved and deferential. Now he is more expressive and less careful of his speech.

“Most people come back to jail because they don’t try not to, and you have to try real hard. For the guys that do try, they have to reject every single last tendency to commit crimes. You have to let it all go. All of it. I mean every little last bit because if there is a spark, just an ember of criminality left in you, it can flame up again.”

They tell me about the Delaware Correctional Center, “Smyrna”, in the old days.

“It was different in the seventies,” says William. “Fights, riots, hostage situations. Derrick’s a little guy, but he tore people up.”

Derrick says, “Yeah. See, a big guy like you or a guy like Will, you can shock someone with your first shot, but a little guy like me has got to use martial arts. Prison martial arts. Like, if you can bite a guy’s ear and rip it off his skull, that will shock his system. His equilibrium will be all screwed up. Until he gets over that shock you can get in some licks.”

With lunch over we return to the classroom, passing through the large common room and the dark room adjoining the guards station and the slightly brighter hall. This path is one of the few that these men walk every day. Their lives occur in less

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned than ten rooms and the halls between them.

In another interview, I asked a twenty-year-old who has been in over a year and has three more to go, what he misses most about the outside. He paused, and smiling he said, “I want to be free. I want to buy a Coke. I want to walk on grass. I want grass so much that I want to put it in my mouth.”

Once I started the interviews and became familiar with the men my uneasiness lessened, or rather it changed. By the end of the day I was at ease but when I walked out the front door and felt the winter wind I realized what was wrong. Everything is close in there. The walls and the people are so close, and the air is still.

On this day the wind was stiff. Large, white clouds moved across the sky. I left my coat open so the cold wind would wash over me. I pulled the fresh air hard through my nose. As I walked to my car I looked at one of the narrow windows and I could see a man in his cell watching me. Dozens of identical windows lined the long wall behind the razor wire but I didn’t look at them. I looked at the clouds.

3 JAMIE

“I have given up on everything in life, before, and I can’t do it no more.”

Her speech is rapid, as if language is too slow a means of communication. Words and memories pour from her. She speaks with her eyes and hands, and her body. Jamie is a petite woman with red hair, clear, white skin, small hands and a small mouth.

She looks harmless, cute, girlish. I could easily picture her in her Catholic school uniform.

Jamie is twenty-six, married and has two children; a boy who is eight years old and a four-yearold daughter. She is serving a fifteen month sentence for forgery and burglary. Her crimes were committed in order to support a heroin addiction.

rc: Where did you grow up?

Jamie: I grew up in Willow Run. That’s a suburb of Wilmington. rc: Tell me about your parents.

Jamie: Mom and Dad were—they were good parents. My father though—he was—he was abusive, mentally, emotionally. My mother, she wasn’t abusive in any way, just—she always took things. I mean she never stepped in. She just kind of like stayed in the woodwork and let my father take control. You know, when I say they were good people, I mean as far as material things, we always had what we needed.

We never went without, but they were—my father was just abusive. My mother stood back and my father felt as long as he was doing what he was doing as far as material things went, you know, then that was love. That was the way he showed his love, but when you’re growing up—when you’re young you don’t understand that.

You can’t comprehend why a man who is supposed to unconditionally love you treats you this way. rc: He wasn’t affectionate?

Jamie: No. Very rarely was he affectionate. I mean maybe Christmas and birthdays and it had to be like one of the kid’s birthdays, you know. It wouldn’t be his birthday. It had to be like one of our birthdays and then he could say he loved me and that would be it. But, no, not really. My mom was very affectionate. I love you. I love you. And we always told each other that we loved each other until I got a little older and I got embarrassed to tell my mom that I loved her. So every time she would say it I would say, “Ditto,” you know. I wouldn’t say the words. It’s just embarrassing at that age. But it wasn’t a very affectionate place as far as my father was concerned. It was a lot of walking on eggshells—worried about the littlest things. I mean, am I going to do this all right? If I don’t do this right I’m going to get screamed at. You always want to do something right. We couldn’t wait for him to go to work and that’s just not the way it should be, you know, but that’s how it was. It was a lot of mental and emotional abuse. What it was—he would scream. The things that he would scream were things that you and I—I mean first of all you don’t scream at somebody anyway when you are trying to get a point across. The things that he would say were very degrading. A lot of put downs came out of him. I realize that the man didn’t mean—he just didn’t know how to show it. He didn’t know how to show love. Instead of, “You stupid whatever get up and pick that up,” or whatever—he just didn’t know how, but it’s still no excuse. I had a very hard time and I still have a hard time with him because I always feel like—it’s a lot better, but whenever I am talking to him I feel that I gotta say the right thing or he’ll just start screaming at me and as soon as he starts screaming at me that little baby inside, the little kid just—I can feel it all over again and I don’t like it.

I don’t want to feel like that. rc: Have other members of your family had trouble with the law?

Jamie: Yeah. My mom’s side of the family was in trouble with the law a lot. I mean, a lot. My dad’s side, never. But my uncle and my aunt, they’re still running. They were in prison for a while and they escaped and they’re still running so, yeah. If it wasn’t jail it was the police were there to ask them to stop disturbing the peace or somethin’. It was always somethin’. They were always gettin’ in trouble. It was a direct result of doing drugs, everything they did. But as far as my parents—they never got in trouble. I mean we never had nobody—we never had cops come to our—it was not that kind of lifestyle in our house.

My dad was a cop so it was like you had to be a certain way because of my dad being that, you know, because of being who he was. Everybody expected the daughter of the police officer never to get into trouble. But it’s so untrue because the whole time that he was screaming at me to do what’s right I was doing what was wrong. I was trying to do the opposite of what he was—I was rebelling, you know what I mean? For a long time I was out there doin’ things and he had no clue. rc: What did you do?

Jamie: Cigarettes, smoking them in the woods, sneakin’, smoking whole packs in an hour because we were sneaking them thinking that we were really cool and then it would go into getting beer and drinkin’ it in the woods and then it went to marijuana. I was smoking marijuana for a long time. I used to babysit for a couple that had the stuff right there and I would always indulge. They would allow me. Did that for a long time. My dad found out about that and of course he had a fit and he wanted to have them arrested and I was only fourteen and they could of been arrested for like, you know, distributin’ to a

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned delinquent, but nothin’ ever came of it. He just decided to trust me. I guess. I mean, I don’t know if he decided to trust me or if he just wanted to put it in the back of his head and deny that his daughter might have a drug problem. rc: What criminal behavior happened after that and up until now?

Jamie: Well, um, you know, it was like constant. I mean it was just constant criminal behavior. Okay, like, uh, stealing my dad’s car. Now I mean when you’re sixteen and you’re stealing your dad’s car, you think that’s a great thing. I got out of the driveway and I got all the way over here and back home without Dad even knowing I took his car. You just think that it is one of those things. That’s how I always thought of it, but that’s criminal behavior. I mean, I’m stealing my dad’s car out of the driveway and I have no right to be taking this man’s car without asking, you know, legally. I would take the car and go over to the people’s house and do drugs. I would have people sneak in my room when my dad would work at night—eleven to seven—the graveyard shift. I would always have people come over in my room—girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever. Come on in. It was party time then because Mom was upstairs and she was deaf in one ear so she couldn’t hear nothin’. So then I was stealing. I would go into stores and I would steal. That happened twice until I got caught and I never did it again. I had gotten married when I was seventeen. I was going out drinking with my husband. We were going out drinking in bars. I was seventeen. Nobody ever carded me. I was going to Atlantic City. I went there on my honeymoon. Nobody ever carded me at seventeen. I went in there, not even wearing make up. They never said anything to me so I thought I’ll just keep doin’ this until I get caught and I never did. I never got caught and finally when I went back on my twenty-first birthday they decided to card me. So I was coming here all these years and you never carded me and now on my twenty-first birthday you decide to card me.

But as far as real bad criminal behavior, it didn’t start until after I was married. I was married for about three years and then that’s when all my criminal behavior—because I got into drugs real bad. I got into the really hard drugs real bad and I would steal. I had to steal to get money for drugs. rc: Which drugs?

Jamie: Well, I started out with cocaine and crank. The crank was only once in a while, so I wasn’t really hooked on that, but cocaine. I had it everyday—every hour I had to have it. It got so bad—it was like where at first I was calling the dealer and getting it once or twice a week and then all of a sudden he was comin’ to me once or twice every hour! I was calling him up all the time, beeping him, and it got so bad that he was coming over to my house so much that we made a deal. He could use my car if he would give me some cocaine because his car was so well known by the cops. So I said you can use my car all night, all day, whatever you want, just give me the cocaine. I started poppin’ pills and I was takin’ narcotics—Percocet, um, Percodan, Darvoset, Tylenol with Codeine, Zanaxes, Ademeine, anything. Anything that would mellow you out, because after my—after my—after I had done cocaine for about a year I started—it was just really—I started gettin’ very sick and tired of bein’ sick and tired, so I stopped. I mean it wasn’t that easy. Believe me, it wasn’t that easy but I had to stop because I thought I was havin’ a heart attack every time I would do a line. I said, I can’t do this every time I do a line. I’m in the shower lettin’ the hot water on my chest because I thought I was having a heart attack and this is crazy behavior.

So I said I got to stop doing this so my husband and I both stopped. We decided to stop and we weren’t doin’ anything, but we were doin’ pills. In my addiction I didn’t think that doin’ pills was anything. There wasn’t anything wrong with that.

That’s not an addiction. That’s just doing something to make you feel better. And I would use like any excuse, you know, like my back or whatever. Oh, I’m in pain so I got to take a pill. You know I’d never take one pill. I’d take five or six at a time, just to get a buzz. I was callin’ doctors, doctors that I didn’t even know. I mean I was using fake names. I would go through the phone book of doctors. You’d realize who is the easiest ones that are gonna call in those pills, you know, that you’re not gonna have any problem getting them from. I hit them up every week, every week. It got so bad that my husband and I—I would do it one night and he would do it one night. I would do it the next night and he would do—you know it just got . . . rc: How many doctors did you get to prescribe drugs to you?

Jamie: I’d say that all together—I’d say that there was about fifteen doctors that would prescribe to us but there was about seven that were constant. Fifteen that would prescribe just once, and that’s it, but there was seven of them that were just constantly—I mean, you could just keep callin’ ‘em. Right there—going in there picking up a prescription under someone else’s name and it’s not even me, you know. I was using fake names. I was looking in the phone book for people’s names, you know. So right there I could of went into the pharmacy and done that and the cops could of got me for that. I mean that’s illegal and it’s just really amazing to me that I never looked at that kind of stuff as a bad behavior. That was normal to me. That was normal every day to me—to always try and get a pill somewhere. The days that I didn’t have even just a pill—I mean just a pill to pop—I was so bad that in the magazines they have these things that you can buy from this company and they’re pills, okay. They had these caffeine pills and I thought, well, let me get those. They’ll hype me up. I went and bought 200 of these caffeine pills, right. Oh my goodness, that’s how bad it was. I had these caffeine pills in the closet and every morning when I got up I popped three or four of them. They hyped me right up but when they started to wear off, you felt worse then you did.

So it’s just like a drug. It helps you when you wake up but when you come down . . . rc: What came next?

Robert A. Crimmins

Jamie: Well, my husband started doing heroin. To me, heroin was “the” drug. That was the ultimate drug and if you did heroin, then you were the ultimate junkie. So I was never involved in—I didn’t know anybody that was on that. At home, a lot of times we would be having dinner and he would nod off in his plate. I couldn’t figure out why. What was wrong with him? I would ask him, “Why are you nodded out in your plate,” and he would say, “Well I took some muscle relaxer,” because he had a really bad back. I said, oh, but then I was like, well how many times are you takin’ muscle relaxer and never nodded out in your plate. But then I thought maybe he had taken more than normal because he’s an addict too. I thought that something’s up and finally he came to me and he said that he’s doin’ heroin and I looked at him and said, “Heroin!” and he said do you want to try some and I said uh uh, no, no, no heroin for me because that would be it for me, if I do heroin. So then he—he had done it for a couple of months and he decided that he needed help. So he went and he told his mom and his dad and me and the family that he needed help. He was on heroin. They had no idea. I was the only one that knew because, see, I never told anybody. I was always covering his tracks. I wouldn’t tell anybody that my husband was on heroin. So he went and got help and he got clean.

He was clean. He got real clean. He was clean for a year, two years after that. Then one day—this is where it all went downhill.

I was sitting in the kitchen and I was having a really, really bad day. I mean just like today. I’m having a bad day but today the difference is, I’m not thinking about doin’ drugs, but I mean I was sitting there and I was having a bad day and he came home from work and nothing was on the table for dinner. rc: Were you clean at that point?

Jamie: Was I clean? Well I mean, no, no, I was using pills. I wasn’t clean. That’s not clean. I was using pills. I wasn’t using anything like cocaine or heroin. I was sitting at the table when he came home from work and he was just the type of person that dinner should be on the table and all that. So dinner wasn’t even on the table and he came in and was like, “What’s up?” and I said don’t even talk to me. If you want dinner, dinner is in the freezer. Make it yourself. I ain’t got nothin’ to say. He looked at me and said well what’s wrong with you and I said I’m hurtin’. I don’t feel—I just feel, you know, I don’t want to be bothered.

I had two children running around, you know, and it was, you know, it was just like I didn’t want to be bothered. I couldn’t wait for him to come home so I could go to bed. Well, so he said to me, well I know something that will help you out a little bit and I said well what now? I said there ain’t—I said there ain’t—I said—the first thing out of my mouth was there ain’t—there isn’t anything is this house because there wasn’t one pill because I had searched. I mean that’s how bad it was. I had searched everywhere. I said there is not one pill in the house that I can take and he said well I got something that will help you out. I said what, and he said well you might not want to do it. Well just tell me what it is first and he says, heroin. I said well do you got it on you and he said no but I can get it right now and I said go get it because I know—see at that point I was just like, go get it, and so he went and got it and, you know, not even thinking. I don’t know why my faculties were different then what they were two years before when he asked me that same question and I had said no and now I turn around and say yes. So I told him to go get it and he comes back in and he’s got it and I did a little bit of it, and I liked it and that was it. rc: How did you do it the first time?

Jamie: I snorted it and I only started with a very little bit because I was scared. I didn’t, you know, heroin! It just scared me. I could OD on this, just a little bit. I don’t want to die. So I just did a little bit and it just—I mean it just mellowed me out and I said this is it. I knew as soon as I did that drug—I knew that I was going to be going downhill because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get enough of it. I never realized how physically addicting heroin was. See nobody ever tells you that, I mean, I never seen my husband go through the physical withdrawals. He always had it and then he got help, you know, right away, so I never seen anyone go through the physical withdrawals. So I didn’t know. Nobody told me when you can’t have it you’re going to be sick! sick! sick! I did it every day, a bag or two. I mean once a week or whatever.

Nothing bothered me when I was on it. Nothing at all bothered me when I was on it. I mean I dealt with the kids a lot better. I thought I did, but I didn’t. I thought I was dealing with them a lot better because I was so mellowed out and nothing was hurting me. Not a darn thing hurt me on my body for a long time. Then it got real bad real quick.

What happened was we didn’t have any money. I mean, he had a job. He had his own business and we didn’t want to dip into the business funds for our drug habit. We were still at that point that we could think like that. So we were going into our funds. We wiped our accounts out. We sold everything in the house that we could. If it wasn’t nailed down, it was sold or pawned; my wedding bands, my earrings, my jewelry, everything. Everything that ever meant something to me meant drugs to me. Even if I could get twenty dollars, that was a bag, and a bag meant I wouldn’t be sick. So we had done that ‘til we didn’t have anything left. We kept the TV because the kids were there. We couldn’t just take our TV out with our kids there. So we decided that we were going to go and rip off our parents. That’s the first people we thought of and we didn’t think about going out and ripping off some house of people we didn’t know. We thought of our parents. So what happened was I had taken a couple of things from my mom and went and pawned them. I always pawned them because I always had the intentions of getting them back but really I knew I wasn’t going to get them back because any money I ever had went to drugs.

We were on heroin for three months before anyone knew. Nobody knew at all and how they found out was one morning my husband woke up and his arm was huge, I mean like a balloon. He was crying. That’s how bad it hurt and I knew that for

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned him to cry it had to hurt. So I told him to go to the hospital. I knew what it was from. He had done some drugs and the needle had missed and it was infected. He had to go to the hospital. I told him to either go to the hospital or lose your arm. So he went to the hospital and I’m laying there and all’s I got with me is a bottle of pills, no money, and my daughter’s there and she’s two years old at the time.

So I decided that I’m going to play one of those dope fiend moves. I’m going to call my father because I know my father will do anything for me and I’m going to ask him for fifty dollars for food because Joey, that’s my husband, he’s at the hospital.

So I called up my dad and I’m high. I’m high off of these muscle relaxers. I can’t even focus I’m so high. I explained to Dad, and he yelled and screamed, you know, but I didn’t care as long as he came over with that fifty dollars. I stumbled out to the car. I couldn’t even walk. You know when someone is drunk? That’s how I was. I couldn’t focus and I couldn’t walk and he looked at me and he said, what’s wrong and I said nothin’ and he knew somethin’ was wrong but he didn’t know. I think his father instincts kicked in, he just said here, take the fifty dollars, because what if she really needs it for what she is saying.

So now I needed to get a car because my car was with my husband at the hospital. So I got my dad to take me over to Riverside Hospital, where my husband was and he said what are you doing here and I said I want the car and he’s like, for what? I said I got fifty dollars and he said well you’re coming back here right? I said, yeah, I’ll be back.

So I went to Philadelphia. It was the first time that I ever went to Philly. I was so high on muscle relaxers. Okay, I got into the heart of Philadelphia where you get the drugs and I started hearin’ this noise. I didn’t know what it was but I didn’t care either because I was almost at my destination to get high. So I got there and got the drugs and I was leavin’ and the guys on the corner were yellin’ something to me and I was like yeah, yeah, right, you know, I wasn’t listening. All I was thinking about was getting high so I went and got high and I started to go home and I was almost on the freeway and the police pulled me over. I said what do they want? So I hurried up and put my drugs in my pocket in my coat. I was lucky because it was male officers and they couldn’t frisk me but they looked. They searched in my car and they couldn’t find anything. I had a couple of bags, you know, and if they found that I would of been in jail. So the rubber on my tires was completely gone, I was ridin’ on the rims. All four! I was ridin’—I said—I mean it’s not—when it was happening it wasn’t funny but now when I think about that now—all four—and I was riding on the rims! I said no wonder I heard that noise. The cop—the officer said, “Didn’t you see the sparks flyin’?” I said oh my God, and he said what are you drinking and I said nothin’ and he said well you got to take a breathalyzer. I said that I would be more than happy to because I wasn’t drinkin’. So it read zero.

It took me two hours to get home. I had to take a cab all the way home. The kids were with my mother-in-law and she said, “Where were you?” and I said I was at the supermarket, you know, made up this big story and she said, well okay but they figured out that I was using drugs because the car was in Philadelphia and they asked what were you doin’ in the supermarket in Philly. So I said that I felt like going for a ride.

So then that was it, you know, they came in and took my children. Took my kids from me. My in-laws came in and that really upset me. When it happened though, it didn’t upset me because, see in an addicts mind when you’re using—the thing is that the kids are leavin’—boy I could use any time now. I don’t have to worry about the kids bein’ around and me hiding from them because I’m doing some drugs. But I mean, you know, they took them and from there the State got involved and the State didn’t take them though. My mother took my daughter and my in-laws took my son. That was two years ago. Then I went to rehab. I went to this place called Hiddenbrook in Maryland—very good rehab. I stayed five days, just enough to detox, just enough to get them pills and detox and then I left. I started going to the outpatient program that Hiddenbrook had up here in Meadowood. Do you know where Meadowood is? Okay, the State—I guess I was in there for about a month and I was clean.

I was clean this whole time. I wasn’t drinkin’ or nothin’. I was clean for a month. I had totally decided to stay away from my husband but after that month—it was just—I got weak and I went with him and we went to Philly. We had some money and I said let’s go and we went to Philly and it all started all over again. The kids were still gone and I was still just gettin’ high. I was doin’ my thing. I was staying up in Philly all the time. If I wasn’t staying in Philly, I was staying at my house in Elsmere, but my house in Elsmere had no heat—hardly ever had any food. All’s we ever had was eggs and bread. That’s all we had but I didn’t care because I was gettin’ high. Cereal was good for me. Just give me a box of cereal and I’m happy. I was just eating one meal a day, cereal—just enough to coat your stomach and I’d be all right. Then I started stealing my mother-in-law’s checks and writing these checks out. I was goin’ to the Pathmark, goin’ to Shoprite and when you go there, you can write over the amount, you know. Like your purchase could be forty dollars and you could write up to thirty dollars over that. So I would use her ID. It didn’t have her picture on it. You know what a check cashing card is, don’t you? Yeah, so okay, that’s what I was using. I did—I did this about twenty times and then the checks started to bounce and she was like—she would look at it and say this is not my signature and then I got caught. So she decided that she wasn’t going to press charges. She didn’t want me to go to jail. Meanwhile my husband is still using and so am I and he is doing things that are illegal too, you know. So what I did was—okay then I decided that okay, why don’t we get the shop checks. He owned a body shop. So I said why don’t we get the shop checks. So he’s like, okay. So I pulled a dope fiend move on him. I told him that why don’t you write shop checks out and my mom will put the money back in and he said why would your mom do that. I said you know my mom. My mom will

Robert A. Crimmins

help me do whatever. I was lying just to get him to get the money, you know. My mom would never do that, but he did it. He was taking money, money, money and all of a sudden all of these checks bounced and he flipped out on me and I flipped out on him. It was like it didn’t matter. I mean no matter what chaos or whatever we went through didn’t matter. All that mattered was chasin’ that bag and gettin’ that bag. I mean how men, you know, you always seem to have this in your mind—people have in their mind that men are the only ones that go out and commit these robberies and if you hear about a bank getting robbed and women did it you’d be like, this seems strange to you that a woman would rob a bank. But I mean I did things that I just—that when I was straight or when I was in my proper thinking that I would never—I mean right now, I would never think about going into someone’s house, punching them in their face and knocking them down and taking whatever they have in their pockets, in their drawers, whatever. I was arrested four times, five times in a year, and I did time three of those times, but I committed so many crimes that I didn’t get arrested for it was just unbelievable. I mean I went into this lady’s house and I didn’t care if she was home or not. I mean I didn’t care and I went in and she came out and she said what are you doin’ and I popped her in her face. She fell down and I took what I could and left. I didn’t even—didn’t even—I mean all I ever thought of was, oh, that was wrong. That was all that I thought, you know. I shouldn’t of done that, but, oh well, I didn’t kill her. So I mean that was my attitude—or goin’ into people’s houses that I knew—I would sneak into. I mean one girl that I knew—I sneaked into her basement window and stole every bit of tools that this man, her boyfriend, had. I was takin’ ‘em out of the window and puttin’ them into my car. And this is what I don’t understand, is that the whole time I was doing this, I was parked in her driveway and I was coming out of her window, taking all of these tools and there was neighbors all around. The things that you think you’re not going to get caught on are the ones where you do get caught.

When I was doing drugs I made a lot of friends, you know, so called friends, that I would just manipulate to get money from. There was this gentlemen who I had been with and he thought we had something going, a relationship, and I was playing it to the hilt because that’s what I needed to do to get what I wanted and I figured as long as he was happy and I was getting what I wanted, no problem. I never thought about the hurt that he would have to go through and all, but I snuck into his room in his house one night and I climbed through the window and went into his bedroom and he was sleeping in his bed and I went into his jeans to take some money out and he only had twenty-eight dollars on him and I said I can’t do anything with this. So I went out to his car and I went into the car and I always knew where he kept everything. I got his wallet and I opened it up and there was his MAC card and I didn’t know the MAC number because he had changed it. I forget why he had done that but he had changed it and I didn’t know the number so I decided that I am going to search. So I searched and searched for his number and I opened up his bank statement. rc: You went back in the house?

Jamie: Yeah, I was back in the house now and I opened up his bank statements and I should of known that you wouldn’t put your number on your bank statement and I looked into his checkbook and all the way down in the back of his checkbook at the bottom of the page in a yellow highlighter was his number with arrows pointing to it. I said, oh my gosh. So I had it. I had the number so there was no stoppin’ me now. So I went to the bank and I got $250 out of his savings account—came home and my husband was on the couch sleeping.

This was about 5:30 Sunday morning and we had just been talking about how are we going to get money for Sunday morning. Because every day it was how were we going to get money, how were we going to get money, how were we going to get money. If we had $500 today, we’d spend that whole five hundred on drugs and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow, you know. So I went in there and I was like all, you know, and he was like, well, where did you get the money and I didn’t tell him how I got it.

I never liked to tell him where I got it because I was going into my mother-in-law’s and stealing her knickknacks and my mom’s engagement ring—beautiful engagement ring, and they never noticed it was missing until a month later. I had gotten a job and I was working. I was stealing from my job. I was takin’ money and they were calling me every other day, “You’re thirty dollars short.” I am? Yeah, I mean I knew that. I knew that I was short and sometimes they told me that I was thirty dollars short and I was surprised because I took fifty dollars.

It was bad, and I mean it got so bad because after I went to jail the first time and that was on forgery charges okay and I was in jail for twenty-five days before I went to court and I begged and begged and begged my husband the whole time that I was in there to just bail me out. I only needed $100. We always had money to get drugs. Please just bail me out of here. I can’t be in here, but he didn’t bail me out. At that time I couldn’t understand why. Now I understand because he was in his addiction and he was using that hundred that he could put towards me to put towards some bags for him. That’s what he did and I stayed in jail.

After the first time I came out I was all right for a while but then I went right back into it, right back into writing those checks. I stole my mother-in-law’s rings. I stole from my mom. People who were cold, bloody, and down right dirty junkies were telling me to my face that stealing from your mother is the worse thing you could ever do and I’d look at them and say, “Oh well. I’m doing what I got to do for me.”

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned

So then I went to jail again and that was on theft. I had theft charges. No, that was on a capias. There’s so much. But anyway, that was on a capias and I went and the judge gave me a $1,000 secured bail because I was a risk. I begged my husband and he said no, so I spent thirty days in jail that time—got out and that’s when I started committin’ a slew of burglaries. That’s when I started really going into people’s houses—not carin’. Knocking people’s windows in—don’t care who hears it. Just get in there and get out. Believe me, I wasn’t no cat burglar because I wasn’t sneaky.

Then I had come down to my end. I mean I had really come down to the end of the road. I was in my house, well yeah, “house” because I no longer called it a home. It was a dwelling—just a place for me to sleep when I needed somewhere to sleep.

I’m wanted on forgery charges and Elsmere is a small community. Every Elsmere cop knew me but I was in this house and I wasn’t leaving it unless I had too. So this girl that worked in a pub up the street offered me a job on New Year’s eve. She said you come to work on New Year’s eve and you’ll make some good money and I said okay. So I started workin’ at this pub and this guy in there, this old guy, he was talkin’ to me and all this and he wanted to pay me all this money just to go out, just to go out to dinner with him and do this and that. My addiction was so bad but I had not got—you hear about girls out there on the streets selling themselves to get drugs. I never got that bad. I mean I’m saying I wasn’t on the street corner doing that, okay. But it wasn’t like I didn’t because if a drug dealer came up to me and said I could have ten bags if I had sex with him, I was having sex with him. I was addicted and I needed that drug.

Finally one day I went into this girl’s house that I knew. I broke in. I had no phone or no nothin’ and I was totally cut off from the outside world and I would always depend on my husband to come over and see me. He never did. He stayed at his mom’s with the kids. Once in a while he would come over and that’s when the marriage started to crumble. I could just tell then that he wasn’t coming over to see me. He was just coming over to see what I had. If I had anything, you know, drug wise.

I used and manipulated a lot of people in my addiction but when I got into this woman’s house—I broke in and I knew her. I broke into her house just to use the phone and it was easy. I just opened her window and climbed in. When I left, the neighbor next door spotted me and she told this girl and she went right up to the police and pressed charges against me because she told me just a week before not to come around her anymore because of the trouble I was getting into. I said well, you know, whatever.

Anyway, I ended up—what happened was that day—see it happened on Thursday when I broke into her house, well that Saturday, I was in Philly and I was gettin’ drugs. I didn’t even know that she knew I was in her house yet. So I had no idea that there was a warrant out on me. So on Saturday, I’m up in Philly and I’m coming home and I think everything was hunky dory.

I’m high and I’m feelin’ good. I called home and they told me they’re looking for me. So I got into the car and went to where my husband was living and I said just take me—take me wherever. I got to get out of here so he took me—he took me to my aunt’s house and she didn’t have any idea. Let’s put it this way, she probably knew but she didn’t care. So the next day, I went to Chuckie Cheese with my daughter and we celebrated her birthday. The day after that I woke up and went up to the phone at the pizza store. I don’t know what I was thinking—like they are never going to catch me—I mean there’s the highway right there. I called my husband. I started depending on him. I started depending on him as far as my drug habit goes. I tried not to because he could never come through with anything. He would always come through for himself and I would get it for myself but we were no longer in it together. I was on the phone—the police, they got me and when I got off the phone I tried to run to my house because I’m only two minutes away from the pizza store—not even that. Boy I was almost at my door and he was yelling and screaming, like, I mean, like they’ve always had trouble with me, you know, like I’ve always tried to run from them. I never, you know, just stop, don’t move, put your hands on the car and okay, I was doing what they said. They said if you got anything on you take it out and I had a half-dollar in my pocket. So I threw it on the car and he said is that all you got and I said that’s all I got. So anyway he said are you sure that’s all you got and I said yeah. He said if you have any needles or works on you and we search you and we find them and all that and I didn’t. They think that just because you’re a drug addict, you have drugs on you all the time. So I went to jail that day, ten months ago, and I haven’t been out since. rc: What was it like the first time in jail?

Jamie: Real scary ‘cause they were holding me in a little cell. I would just rather be in WCI, get with the program and whatever I got to do, I got to do, you know. Don’t hold me in this cell. So I’m sitting there and these guys come and get me and they pick me up and they take me and I’m scared because I’ve never been to jail and they looked at me and I probably weighed about 120 pounds, if that. I was lookin’ bad, of course I thought I looked great then. I did. I thought I looked great then. So they said, you know, you’ll be all right and I said this is a bad prison because I’ve seen TV and I know what women’s prisons are like. They really couldn’t tell me because they don’t know. So when I got in there I asked the guard, do they beat you up and rape you in here because that’s exactly what was in my head, that I was going to get beat up. I’m going to get raped, whatever. She looked at me and said it’s not bad in here at all. I guess it took me a while to get adjusted, you know, to everything and it was about a week or two. I was scared and I wanted out and I was crying everyday but I mean there weren’t people trying to hurt you all the time. You had your people that were the bullies, the ones that wanted to beat you up but you just ignored them people.

Robert A. Crimmins

That’s what I learned and I’ve learned a lot in jail. I mean I’ve learned a lot about me and I learned a lot about how to deal with the outside. There are people in jail and there are people just like that outside. Before I went to jail I was always scared and I guess you would say, wimpy. You could say something to me and hurt my feelings. You could say boo and I would be crying. So that person right there, the person that was always scared and everything—I never showed that when I was in my addiction, you know, you could of done anything to me but I was still gonna get my drugs. rc: It’s a much different experience for women than it is for men in prison isn’t it?

Jamie: Yeah, I think the men have it harder, a lot harder than the women. Over in the women’s prison we’ve got it made. rc: How’s that?

Jamie: Well, in the women’s prison you got your own room. You don’t have to share it with nobody. You’ve got your own bathroom and your own shower. You don’t have to share it with nobody and I’m not talking about being in the same room as you’re sleepin’ in. It’s separate. There’s carpeting. You ain’t got all the stainless steel like usually in the men’s prison. We got doors, like regular doors that you can close and lock yourself. We have a Warden that is a really, really nice man. We couldn’t ask for a nicer man. He tries to help anybody he can. He doesn’t want to see anybody sitting in there. He knows that people have to be sitting in there but it’s just—we do have it a lot easier. The food is a lot better. The food is much better because I’m telling you the first two months that I was in there I gained all my weight. I was eatin’ everything. Anything that was sweet because when you come off heroin you want anything that is sweet. I was buying whole cakes and nobody was getting any because I was eating that cake. Oh, it was terrible. rc: But you live here now?

Jamie: Yeah, I live in the Crest now, the Crest Outreach Center now and I have for about two and half weeks so that’s an adjustment. It’s just hard because you think about walking away from here and it is so easy. You just walk out. You’re not always being watched. You can just leave if you want, at night or whenever. rc: It doesn’t sound like this is an experience that will necessarily change you.

Jamie: As far as what? The Crest? rc: As far as what needs to be changed. Do you think that when you get out you’re going to be different?

Jamie: Do you mean that when I get out am I going to do drugs? rc: Yes. Jamie: No, uh uh! rc: Why? What’s happened since you’ve been in jail to change that?

Jamie: Just a lot of things. I’ve learned a lot of things about myself. Like one thing, when I was out there I used to have this attitude that I’m not an alcoholic. I could drink. I could go out every Friday night and drink beer. So what if I went out to get drunk once a week. So what. I mean lot’s of people do it. I’m not an alcoholic. I don’t have to have it every day. I’m not stealing for it. That’s how I used to think, but now I understand that if I start drinking, then that drink is going to lead to smoking marijuana, then that marijuana cigarette is going to lead to what’s next, cocaine, heroin, and it’s going to be back into the same cycle. I don’t want to go back to jail. I don’t want to live that life again and I want to get out and get myself together and stable so I can have my children in my life again. I’m going to keep the positive attitude because things could be a lot worse. I could be under the ground somewhere because of addiction. I could be dead. rc: The Department is doing positive things for you. Your family has put up with a lot but I suspect that they will welcome you back. There are a lot of people taking care of you and interested in your success.

Jamie: There is. When I first went to jail this time, my dad—I used to call him up and he wouldn’t want to talk to me at all.

He was just so disgusted. I could just hear it in his voice. I really let him down. Then I wrote him a letter and really let him know how I feel and let it out and now, he helps me. I filed for divorce in jail and I’m just waiting for it to go through. My dad knows that this man, my so-called husband, didn’t do a thing for me and never did when I was in jail, maybe ten dollars here or twenty dollars there. My dad took care of me. My mother and my father took care of me. They got me the clothes I needed.

They got me what I needed. They never wanted me to be without. If I wanted a TV, they were out the next day getting me a TV. They try to make it as comfortable as possible. I’m grateful to be over here at the Crest Program because they help you with your behaviors. They try to help you with your attitudes and behaviors and I got some behaviors that really need to be worked on. I think it all stems from low self-esteem. I wanted to be a part of the crowd, you know, not loving myself enough. I mean, thinking that the first man—which is my husband, that came along and said that he wanted to marry me I went with. If I loved myself enough I could of stepped back and said, “Whoa, I’m only seventeen,” and I would of looked at it totally different. I mean, this man was twenty-nine when we got married and I was seventeen. So I mean, I would of looked at it like what the heck, you know, it’s all right if we go out but to marry me? Why would you want to marry me? How come you’re twenty-nine and you ain’t never been married? I would of thought of all those things if I just loved myself enough and I didn’t. I think that’s where it really all stems from the low self-esteem and the drugs. I mean it’s all a way of just gettin’ to jail. rc: Nothing particularly traumatic has happened to you in prison?

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned Jamie: Nothing violent or drastic happened but there was a couple of things, you know, like when I was in—when I worked over in the kitchen. I was secretary in the kitchen and I was getting blamed for things that I didn’t do and that got me terminated.

Having the people that are on top, the top staff not believing me and terminating me, that hurt. That really did. That really did hurt me because it was unjust and getting my mother’s time taken away. When I could have my kids overnight—because of that incident my kids were taken away. They took my night visits away for like two weeks and I was cryin’ like a baby because seeing my kids every week, even though it was just one night, overnight, was the best thing that happened to me. Over here so far it’s all right, except today. I’m getting ready to get in trouble for the first time because I did something that I wasn’t supposed to. I’m a “baby”. I’m in orientation for thirty days. If you’re in orientation they call you a baby. You’re not allowed to give anybody any money, nobody, right. So this guy comes over to me and I know him and he asks me if I have two dollars and I said sure no problem, because I’m just that way. I will do for you. I’m just that way, if I know you and I know that you are all right, I’ll give it to you. Oh my goodness, you might of thought that I might of tried to stab you or something because that was it! I mean they’re getting ready to throw a contract on me, which is like I’m going to have to do this stuff. So I’m depressed about that. rc: How do you explain to your children what’s going on?

Jamie: Well, right now they just think when I was in WCI—they thought that it was a hospital. They thought Mom was in a hospital because she needed to get—they knew it was a drug—they knew I needed help with my illness as far as drugs went.

They didn’t know it was prison. Every time they came to visit me and they saw the officers they never said anything to me. I always wanted to tell him. My son has been through so much already. I was afraid of making him go backwards some more. rc: What’s going to happen when you get out?

Jamie: Well, I got a lot of hopes. My short term hope is to get my own place and have some nice things in there and be with my children like I was before and keep recovery a part of my life—not to use anymore no matter what it is. In the long run I’d like to give to others, to help people. Not only children but everyone. I would like to speak on what I know about drugs, even though my horror stories are not as horrible as some people’s but I feel that I’m an example to show everyone that no matter what, no matter where you come from—you could go to Catholic school for nine years and be a police officer’s daughter. Everybody expects certain things from you but really we’re all just human. I’m just an example of how you can get caught up in crime and being in the system. I mean I never thought—if you told me three years ago that I was going to be in jail, I would say you’re crazy. I don’t do anything like that. I don’t do anything to go to jail for. Here I am. I mean here I am, the nicest person that you wanted to meet, committin’ burglaries, you know, breaking into people’s homes, stealing people’s checks and don’t even care. rc: Where would you be now if drugs were cheap and legal?

Jamie: I wouldn’t be here because then they would be legal and they would be cheap. It’s a lot easier to get a couple of dollars as opposed to twenty, you know what I mean. But no matter if they’re cheap or legal, the drug is the drug and it’s going to get you no matter what. It’s going to get you and bring you down and it will take the same amount of time. It doesn’t matter. I’m not even looking at in the aspect of going to jail over them. I’m saying that no matter what you do, no matter what, I don’t care what it is, drinking, taking pills, whatever, if you have to do it all the time just to feel good, it’s going to become such a habit to you that you are going to want to do it all the time. It’s going to be just more and more and more and drugs are going to bring you down. Your whole life is going to revolve around chasing that drug and it is a cat and mouse game and you’re the cat and it’s the mouse and you’re lucky when you catch it but one day if you don’t stop the mouse is going to kill you. It is. It is. That’s really where it’s going to end up for any drug addict. I don’t care what you do. I’m not saying that I don’t think about leaving and getting high because I do, but what I learned is that you can’t. You can’t give up. I have given up on everything in life, you know, before, and I can’t do it no more. I have to start playing the tapes all the way out. Instead of stopping them in the middle and saying well I could stop now and go get high and not think about the consequences. Play the tape out and know that the consequences are very great and they will be no matter what, for anyone.

Robert A. Crimmins

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned

4 NICHOLAS

“A lot of times if people bring a knife to a gun fight they back off.”

Nicholas is strong, with thick, hard hands. From the feel of them, I knew that he worked with stone and mortar. He is an appealing man. Women and children are attracted to him, I’m sure. He smiles easily. A life on the streets of Wilmington or South Philly is revealed in his accent and inflections.

He rides with motorcyle clubs and he’s been in prison before, but those aspects of his past do not define him. rc: Where did you grow up?

Nicholas: I grew up in Wilmington, born and raised in Wilmington. I started out Nic is Italian American. He is in Centerville. Went to private schools. St. Joe’s on the Brandywine. I was an altar thirty-seven years old and marboy. Came from a split family. I was raised by my grandparents. They came over ried. His daughters are seven, from Italy. I had the best upbringin’ there was. eleven and fourteen and he has rc: Where were your parents? an infant son. Trafficking in Nicholas: My mother and father split up. My father went back to live with his PCP got him a three year manmother and father until he got remarried. He went off and started another life with his new wife and had more kids. Basically I just stayed with my grandparents up datory sentence. He has served two months. to the age of eleven. rc: How old were you when you were taken in by your grandparents?

Nicholas: I’d just turned three. rc: What kind of people are they?

Nicholas: Great people. I love them to death. They taught me all the respect that I know. I lost some as I grew up. They gave me everything that I needed. A good upbringing, clean clothes all the time, best schools, everything. It was just like livin’ in heaven. It was too good to be true. The best childhood any boy could ask for. My mother had visitation rights so I used to go over her house. She remarried. Her new husband was into motorcycles—ridin’ with a bunch of people. Where I lived at in Centerville was all country back then. There weren’t many houses around there like there is now and when I went over to visit my mother in New Castle it was different as night and day from Centerville. There was kids over there to play with so I thought it was great over there. In Centerville it was just me and my sister and there wasn’t really much to do. My mother lived in a ranch home and she had other kids. Goin’ over there was more fun. I didn’t realize what I had with my grandparents. At my mom’s I could go do what I wanted. I could go have fun. I could stay out late. Over my grandmother’s I was in before dark and studyin’ and gettin’ ready for school the next day. There was a lot more freedom at my mother’s. rc: Too much freedom?

Nicholas: Yeah. It led to a lot of things. I went over to my mother’s every other weekend. At the age of eleven she asked me if I wanted to come live with her. I said sure. Shoot, that was gonna be fun with all those other kids over there. So we went to court, Family Court, and they fought for custody, and my sister and I said, yes, we want to go live with our mother. My grandmother was very upset. She still loves us and she told us then that one day we would be sorry for leavin’. Now, I wish I’d never left. So I went to live with my mother and I thought that everything was great. My hair went from above my ears to the middle of my back. I went to public schools and everything that they were teaching in the sixth and seventh grades I learned in third and fourth grade. So I kinda slacked off at school ‘cause I already knew what they was teachin’ and then I got into a clique with other boys that were just as wild as me. I’d never been in a fight until I moved over there. I got chased home from school the first year and my stepfather kept sayin’, “Well, he’ll learn to fight or he’ll keep gettin’ his butt whipped.” That’s the way he was, a biker. rc: I can tell from your nose that you’ve been in at least a few fights since.

Nicholas: [laughing] Yeah, quite a few. I keep hopin’ someone will catch the other side. I got arrested the first time when I was eleven, not long after I moved over there. It was a burglary. We had a bottle of whiskey and we were tryin’ to pick a lock on a screened in porch to get sodas for the whiskey and a neighbor caught us. He stuck a gun out the window until the cops came.

We were too scared to run. We didn’t know what to do. Went to Bridge House and my mother and stepfather came to get me and I thought that I was gonna get my ass kicked up and down New Castle Avenue but instead they took me out to breakfast and said just don’t do it no more. rc: Your stepfather didn’t take it seriously?

Nicholas: He basically let my mother deal with everything. After the first year he washed his hands of me, ‘cause I was gettin’ uncontrollable. I was just goin’ buck wild. I did whatever I wanted, when I wanted. Like I’d run away from home and stay at a friend’s house for two or three days without them knowin’ where I was and then come home and nothin’ would happen. They’d

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned just be glad that I came home. At the age of thirteen or fourteen I was gettin’ arrested for drinkin’, breakin’ in houses and finally they said I was uncontrollable and they put me in a boy’s home called Camelot and I stayed there for a week and during that week I ran away three times. So I graduated to Ferris. I stayed there off and on for three years. I kept runnin’ from there and I’d go home and they’d talk me into goin’ back and then I’d run again. Finally, I was discharged out of there at seventeen and I was kinda on my own. I stayed with friends, you know, never worked. I hustled here and there, sellin’ a little dope. I figured that was the way to get by. That’s what I was always seein’. That’s what I knew. I didn’t know no trades. I quit school in eighth grade. rc: So Ferris didn’t provide education?

Nicholas: Back then there wasn’t really a whole lot. The counselors were guards. We called them counselors. Mostly they’d smack the shit out of ya whenever they had the chance. There was a type of a school there but I remember puttin’ on headphones and listenin’ to The Doors. Every time I went to class I’d put on headphones and listen to The Doors. They had some tutors from the University of Delaware. There was a guy that tutored me named “Termite”. He was a really good guy. He partied and he got a pass for me one weekend and he took me out to the first concert I ever went to. It was the Moody Blues and the Climax Blues Band. We went up there, smokin’ reefer, you know, and this is my tutor now, right. We did our thing and we stayed at his place with his other roommates which was cool and I went back to Ferris. He’d come in and try to counsel more than anything ‘cause I was buck wild in Ferris too—doin’ drugs in there, gettin’ caught doin’ them sea sick pills, Merrezines. I’d eat like sixteen of them. They’re hallucinogenic after you eat so many of ‘em. There was a bunch of us that got busted up at Ferris for that, like fifteen people. A guy came in with a couple of jars of ‘em and passed ‘em out. They sell ‘em over the counter in drug stores. I was game for anything back then. rc: Was there no adult guidance?

Nicholas: Not at Ferris, not in the early seventies. It was strict—bustin’ ya up—puttin’ ya in the hole underneath the cafeteria. rc: The Hole? What was that?

Nicholas: It was solitary confinement. There was a rock bed down there, no mattress, no nothin’, ‘cept for one blanket. They’d leave ya down there in your underwear for days at a time. Basically it was a just a reform school then. They didn’t start building and fixin’ it up until after I left. I resented my parents for lettin’ me go through that. I always thought, how can they let me go through this. I’m their kid. They finally let me go and they put me up in the YMCA on Walnut Street. I lived there by myself. rc: The State paid for that?

Nicholas: It was fifteen bucks a week. rc: Why didn’t you go back to your mother’s?

Nicholas: My stepfather didn’t want me there. Him and I had a couple of incidents. I pulled a butcher knife out on him one time after I’d escaped from Ferris. He said he was gonna call the cops and tell ‘em where I was and I told him, “You ain’t nothin’ to me. I’ll slice you from one side of your throat to the other if you even reach for that phone because you caused all this.

You took my mother away from me. All you’re worried about is your motorcycle friends.” That rubbed off on me eventually. I went out and started gettin’ into motorcycles, runnin’ with gangs, and later, at the age of twenty-one, joinin’ a club. rc: Which club?

Nicholas: Sons of Satan. rc: Where are they from?

Nicholas: We’re all over the West Coast. We’re national. We share one club house with the Pagans in PA. But mainly West and Midwest. I lived out in California and then I moved to Texas and got my colors out in West Texas. rc: How did that come about?

Nicholas: I came to prison at first in ‘76 for a drug bust down the beach. I went to Georgetown and I stayed there just a couple of days. I’d just turned eighteen. I was scared to death. I didn’t know what prison was about and Georgetown back then was dirty. I was scared to death. I was thrown in a tier that was the old type cells with bars on the front and other cells across from mine. I’d heard all the stories about young guys in jail and I was scared shitless. I actually started sweatin’ as soon as I saw the place from the cop car while we were pullin’ up. My stomach was doin’ flips. I never felt like that before or since. They always said that I would graduate from Ferris to prison and here I was. I thought back. Why didn’t I stay where I should of? I had the best of everything and they would never let me get in trouble. So they brought me in. I was handcuffed and they were treatin’ me terrible from the second I walked in. Really intimidatin’ me, yellin’ at me, “You’re doin’ this. Strip your clothes off.” They spray you down with this insecticide to kill bugs. They make ya bend over and spread your cheeks. I’d never seen anything like this done. They spray ya down out of a can, all your hairy parts on your body. It stinks real bad and ya gotta stand there for like ten minutes with it on and it’s ice cold. Then they tell ya to go take a shower. They dress ya in whatever color you’re wearin’; grays, blues, greens, whatever color they decide to put ya in. rc: Does the color mean something about your status?

Nicholas: Right. They put me in a cell block with guys with life sentences. And here I am, this young boy with all these older guys and several black guys approached me already and said, “I want you in my cell.” I was scared to death. I went straight in

Robert A. Crimmins

my room and I won’t come out, not for chow or nothin’. I was scared to death. rc: Who was your cell mate?

Nicholas: He was a big black guy. I forget his name but he was doin’ quite a bit of time. rc: How did you get along with him?

Nicholas: He tried to intimidate me and he tried to give me stuff but I knew that you don’t want to take anything from nobody ‘cause if they say they want the same thing back and you don’t have it then they’re gonna ask you for somethin’ else. It was real intimidatin’. I was scared. I wanted to call for the guards and tell them, hey, get me outta here. This guy’s threatenin’ me. rc: You were not a physical match for this guy?

Nicholas: No. No way. I was a skinny little eighteen-year-old goin’ on thirty and this guy brought me down to about twelve.

So there was this guy and the other guys that had approached me and then this one guy told ‘em to leave me alone. “He’s only a boy. Leave him alone”. rc: Who was he?

Nicholas: Another white guy doin’ a life bit. I went over and started talkin’ to him and he told me what goes on and my roommate is the type that goes to homosexuality. This here is killin’ me ‘cause I got to sleep with this guy. That night he did try to make a pass on me. I told him to get away from me, “I’ll fight ya. You ain’t touchin’ me.” He let it go at that. The next day they brought me in front of the judge and I told the judge what happened. I was damn near cryin’ in front of the judge. I begged him, “Please, let me outta here.” He showed some kindness ‘cause he seen what I was goin’ through and I told him that I didn’t have nobody, that I couldn’t get bail, so he let me go on my own recognizance. I told him I’d come to court. So they let me go. What did I do after I got out? I went straight down the beach and started sellin’ more dope. The summer went by and I kept gettin’ in more trouble, assault charges, burglary charges. rc: Why didn’t the awful experience of the prison have an effect on you?

Nicholas: I was scared but I was also hard headed and stupid. The shock lasted for a while but I figured that I was doin’ what I had to do on the streets to get by ‘cause I didn’t have nothin’ or no one to turn to so I went back to my friends, or so-called friends, and they were still doin’ their thing. I did my thing along with ‘em. I guess the only lesson I got from goin’ in was don’t get caught. I kept gettin’ in trouble. Then me and this other guy met a couple of girls that had some stolen credit cards and they bought us a shotgun, from Sears. So this boy and I decide to rob somethin’. I was eighteen. We decided to rob a delicatessen and we flipped a coin to decide who goes in, around the corner from the store. I won so I told him, “You go in. I’ll stay out here and watch.” I didn’t think he was gonna do it ‘cause we were both pretty drunk. Well, he went in and did it and came runnin’ out and while we’re runnin’ I asked him how much he got and he said thirteen dollars. Right, thirteen dollars. So we went over to the liquor store across from the place that we robbed and bought beer. Eventually the girls with the credit cards got caught and they knew that we robbed the place so they told the cops to make some type of plea agreement on their card scam. They caught us and charged me with conspiracy. I got six months in Smyrna and my mother came down and told me not to worry ‘cause my stepfather was in there. She’d been married several times. rc: Was this the man you threatened?

Nicholas: No. It was the one before him. I didn’t know him all that well. He supposedly did somethin’ to my mother’s sister and he was servin’ a life term for that—stabbed my mother’s sister so many times, but uh, I get in there and he comes to receivin’ to see me and tells me, “You’re gonna be all right. I’ll take care of ya in here.” And he did. The six months that I did in Smyrna was a breeze. rc: So he met you as soon as you came in.

Nicholas: Yeah. He knew that I was comin’ in and he had status in the prison where he could go wherever he wanted and do whatever he needed to do. I did five out of the six months. I got five days per month good time. I got high. I drank. It didn’t really phase me. So I’m thinkin’ that prison ain’t really that bad. I didn’t have no problems down there ‘cause they all knew who my stepfather was so they left me alone. He already had seventeen years in so he had a lot of clout. So after I got out I got back into the stuff I was doin’. Mostly drugs now, methamphetamine, shootin’ it. rc: Were you in the motorcycle club?

Nicholas: Yeah. While I was in prison I ran into a guy that I knew as a kid who was in the club, and he said that he thought that I could get in under a jail house prospect. He was prospectin’. rc: What does that mean?

Nicholas: He was in recruitin’ guys for the club, jail house people, so the club could get bigger in this area. rc: He didn’t go into jail for that purpose did he?

Nicholas: No. He was there for kidnappin’ a professor, a chemist. Him and another brother out of the club. This was back in the early eighties, when I got my colors. I did what I had to do in there to get my colors. Go around lumpin’ people up, jumpin’ on people. Havin’ dope comin’ in through me through visits. So I got my colors in jail and my leathers when I got out, my patches and all. I tattooed myself in jail, “Sons of Satan” over my heart. Because if someone wants to take your patch they got

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned to cut it off of ya and if it’s over top of your heart they gotta kill ya. It was a lot more of a respect thing when you’re in jail and you belong to a clique. As well as out on the streets ‘cause this was my family. rc: That makes the club strong?

Nicholas: Right, exactly, ‘cause now I got a family. Now I got somebody. I got brothers I can turn to whenever I need ‘em. I felt, like I said before, that my family just let me go. They said go on, do your own thing. But back to space one, my grandparents never left me. They still loved me for who I was no matter what my hair looked like. Whenever I did go to see them, like every couple of years just out of the blue, they’d tell me, “Cut your hair and get that stuff off your face. You look rotten. You were such a good boy. You had beautiful teeth.” I just kept goin’ downhill. rc: Are your grandparents still alive?

Nicholas: Yes. God bless ‘em. rc: Do they visit you?

Nicholas: No. I went to see them just before I came here but I didn’t tell ‘em because I didn’t want to hurt them. I brought my kids over there and it was the first time they saw their great-grandchildren. I asked for pictures of them because they’re both very old now and they’re sick so I don’t know if they’re gonna be around when I get out. So anyway, I got out and got my colors and I kept in touch with my brothers in jail. Whatever they needed, I’d help ‘em out, money wise, dope wise, and I kept their names goin’ strong out on the streets—fightin’ with other motorcycle clubs and gettin’ with other clubs as brothers.

They were my family now. If I needed a hand I made a phone call. If somebody else needed a hand, bang, I was there. That’s the brotherhood thing. We were real close and we did things together. Then I moved out to West Texas, Odessa, Texas. I was on the run from Delaware. What was the charges I had in Delaware then? Forgery charges for credit cards, other things, there was felonies out on me, so I ran. I lived in Texas about three years out in the desert, workin’ the oil fields and topless bars at night. rc: Bartending or bouncing?

Nicholas: Bouncin’. I got caught out there and got extradited to Delaware. I had a lot of people from Texas send letters to the judge and he dropped my charges as long as I got out of Delaware, so I went back to Texas and lived out there for three more years and finally came back to Delaware in ‘86. rc: Were you engaged in any criminal activity while you lived in Texas?

Nicholas: I was runnin’ with a club called The Last Few. I was hustlin’ out there. We were runnin’ pounds and pounds of pot from El Paso comin’ over the border, garbage bags full, me and a buddy I had down there, and his mom. She was a hooker years before, but she only dated high class people, lawyers and guys like that and she got a connection who gave it to us, pounds of Skunk Bud. Some of the best stuff I ever smoked in my life. We were gettin’ it dirt cheap. We were gettin’ it for 350 bucks a pound. We were takin’ it from El Paso, and the Skunk Bud was from Nevada, to Odessa, either on Southwest Airlines or drivin’ it through to Odessa and from there I’d take it to Delaware where I would sell it for $2000 a pound. That Skunk Bud was outrageous. I’d only seen it in a magazine and I realized that I could make a killin’ with this back in Delaware. So we figured that I would move back to Delaware, and my mom was sick. She had cancer, so I wanted to go back anyway, and he could ship it to me and we could make a killin’, both of us. So I moved back.

My mother was dyin’. I met a woman. My mother kept sayin’ all she wants was me to come back and settle down. My hair was down to my ass and my goatee was down to the middle of my chest, and my mom said, “Nicholas, they don’t look like that no more around here. Everyone’s clean cut.” For my mother’s sake I went and got a preppy hair cut, got my hair spiked up on the sides and shaved my beard. I was lookin’ good and I kinda liked it. rc: You were quite an outlaw? How did you feel about yourself?

Nicholas: I loved it. ‘Cause I was a free child. I could adapt. rc: Shaving and cutting your hair was a matter of adapting.

Nicholas: Yeah. It was what my mother wanted and I did that for her to make her a little happier durin’ her last days. Then I met this woman and she got pregnant. I was twenty-nine then. At that time I put the motorcycle club to the side. I kept in touch, just every now and then but I stopped runnin’ with ‘em ‘cause I was runnin’ pot now, quantities of pot. My mom told me too, “I know what you’re doin’. If you keep that long hair the cops are gonna look at you but if you get clean cut, and look like a normal person walkin’ down the street they’re not gonna bother ya.” I figured that she was right. I figured I’d do the right thing with this girl and marry her. My mother loved her to death. She thought she was perfect for me. I wasn’t really in love with her but for my mother’s sake, I married her. The marriage lasted about two years until my mother passed away and then the marriage went to shit ‘cause I was gettin’ all this pot in and I had drawers full of money. Then I started gettin’ into the cocaine scene.

I found out coke was $600 an ounce up in Philly so I told my buddy in Texas about the coke and he was sendin’ me eight pounds of pot a week through UPS and Federal Express in overnight packages. Everything was paid for so I didn’t have to sign for nothin’. They’d leave it on the front porch everyday and I knew that if I had to sign for anything then somethin’ was up.

The packages were wrapped in a certain way so I could tell if it had been opened and resealed again. We had chemicals inside

Robert A. Crimmins

the boxes so the dogs couldn’t smell it. I had everything sent in my wife’s name and it all came from a company my buddy’s mother had in Texas which made it look legitimate. So my buddy flew up from Texas and he brought six or eight pounds in a suitcase and I took him up to Philly and showed him this cocaine. Coke down there in Texas is twice as expensive as it is here so I started sendin’ him the coke. The pot’s comin’ and the coke’s goin’ and this went on for a while and everything is lookin’ good. I bought a brand new car, paid cash for it. Bought a motorcycle. When I had to send him money I wouldn’t wire it. I’d put it in a book—$100 bills between each page—and I’d send it FED EX Overnight and insure it. I was workin’ as a foreman in a concrete crew all this time too. The company treated me great. They were real good men and they grew up with my father, my real father, Nicholas Jr. These people were great. They took me in like family. Then the State Police got tipped off and they set it up where a DEA agent dressed up like a UPS driver and I’m at work the day the package came. It was two days late so I called Texas and asked the guy where my package was and they said they sent it out. When I got home from work that day I asked my wife if the package came and she said, “Yeah. It’s in the bedroom.” I always told her never touch it, never open it. I looked at it and I could tell it was opened so I asked her if she opened it and she said, “No, but they made me sign for it.” I said, “You know not to do that. Somethin’s wrong.” One of the guys that worked in my crew was there and I told him to take the box and throw it in the back of the truck, in the back bed. So I start cleanin’ out the house. I got my scales and everything out of the house in like two minutes and got about a mile from the house, ‘cause they wanted me to get home and open the package and then they’d bust in but I got in and out quick because I knew somethin’ was wrong. They pulled us over and drew their guns and got the pot out of the back. They knew what they were lookin’ for and they had pictures of us comin’ out of the house with everything. I got busted for that and it cost me a lot of money but I got off with probation on it because my wife took the rap for everything because it was sent in her name. I got charged with possession with intent to deliver instead of traffickin’ and it was her first offense. She never had a ticket or anything. The lawyer said to let her take the rap for it ‘cause they’ll just slap her on the hands and they’ll let you go. I’m thinkin’ I got off—three years probation—hell, that’s another one for me. I stayed clean for a while. I quit doin’ coke and was just smokin’ marijuana. rc: You haven’t mentioned your own drug use much.

Nicholas: I was into just about every drug there was. I did acid when I was eleven. I shot crank, done THC, the old Tic when it was around. rc: Any addictions?

Nicholas: Yes. I was addicted. After crank I started smokin PCP. I fell in love with it. I loved the high and I quit just about everything else ‘cept pot. Started out just on the weekends. I was workin’. I always worked but I wanted to make the quick money too. What I was makin’ was good money but it wasn’t good enough. I wanted to give my kids more. I didn’t want them to be wanting like I was. rc: Do you feel now that they should have you rather than those things?

Nicholas: Yes. It kills me when I sit in here and have to look at my daughter and my baby through glass and I can’t touch ‘em. rc: Is this the first time that you’ve been in since you had your own children?

Nicholas: Toni, my oldest, she’s fourteen, was born while I was in jail. I wasn’t there for her. The other two daughters, they’re eleven and seven, I was there for them, and my son was just born in December and I came in this past January so I haven’t seen much of him. Before I came in, I used to stand over him while he was sleepin’ just to be with him. I held him as much as I could ‘cause I knew that I was leavin’ for three years. rc: What’s your total time in jail since Toni was born?

Nicholas: About five years. There were a bunch of small sentences. I think the longest was eighteen months. I never looked hard at myself during any of those bits. It’s killin’ me now ‘cause here I am, thirty-seven years old and I got a beautiful family and I’m in for three years. The PCP grabbed me. I didn’t realize it. Right before I got busted I OD’d on it. What happened was a buddy that I was sellin’ it to really got messed up doin’ the stuff. He came out of his house with a gun and the cops killed him.

That upset me because I felt that I had a lot to do with that. He was my best friend and PCP was messin’ up his life. He fell in love with it also. He started strayin’ on his wife a little bit, here and there with other women and his wife blamed it on me ‘cause he was gettin’ high with me. He was over my house all the time. He’d be tellin’ me that he had to have it and he couldn’t sleep without it so I’d give him some. His mind was totally gone. rc: His mind was gone? Even when he wasn’t high he couldn’t think?

Nicholas: Right. Exactly. He could lay off for a whole day and still be high from it. That’s how much we kept in our systems.

I went from just the weekends to every day and I was walkin’ around like a tickin’ time bomb. The littlest thing would make me spaz out and I was carryin’ guns, you know. I just didn’t care. rc: What happened with your friend?

Nicholas: He and his wife got in an argument late one night and he threw her out of the house. There was snow on the ground.

She went down to a 7 Eleven on the corner to call someone for help. Robert had three little girls plus there was her three kids in the house, so there’s six kids in there with him. He’s wacked out. He stayed that way pretty much and she sees a State cop

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned at the store. Well, he told her that he was gonna throw her youngest son out the door, out in the cold. Robert would never do that. He loves kids, but she took it to heart and she was mad at him so she tells the cop that she just got thrown out of the house.

She didn’t have no coat on and it was cold. It was during one of those ice storms last year. She told the cop that he was high on PCP so now the cop knows what he has to deal with. The cop goes back up there with her and Robert told one of his daughters to load up his .22 rifle. She only put one bullet in it ‘cause he told her to only put one bullet in the gun. Robert comes out of the house with the gun so the cop is yellin’ at him to drop the gun and he takes a defensive position behind the car door and he’s got his shotgun pointed at Robert and Robert’s wife is to the cop’s left, out in the open. So Robert’s talkin’ to her with the gun pointed at the ground. The cop keeps yellin’ to drop the gun and Robert’s yellin’ at his wife, “Is this what you want!?” His daughter told me what happened ‘cause she was at the front door watchin’ the whole thing. rc: How old was she?

Nicholas: Thirteen. Twelve or thirteen. All his daughters call me Uncle Nicholas. I was over there almost every day. We raised pit bulls together, Robert and I did. So what she said happened was that the cop shot him, once in the side of the face and once in the chest, with that double aut buck. She said, “Uncle Nicholas, you want me to tell you what he looked like?” I said, “No. I want you to block that out of your mind. Just remember that your dad loved you very much.” I went over his house the next day and his wife said, “It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault that this happened.” I told her that if he wasn’t gettin’ it from me he would have gone over to my sister’s and got it there or from someone else. I wasn’t the only person that has that stuff around.

But I knew that a lot of it had to do with me ‘cause he was always with me.

The cops found out that I was the one givin’ him the stuff so they came after me. They started watchin’ my house from DP&L trucks in front of my house and they started following me. I came up to the van a couple times and asked them if they wanted coffee or if they wanted me to order a pizza for ‘em. Finally they pulled me over and I had PCP on me so rather than gettin’ caught with it, I ate it, bags and all, swallowed everything, seven bags. rc: How much is in a bag?

Nicholas: About a half a gram each and this was stuff that I was gettin’ from Philly. It was laced with heroin and this and that, they’re “Philly Black Bags”. I thought that I’d get back home and puke ‘em up. So I got away from the cops. They didn’t find nothin’. I got home, stickin’ my finger down my throat tryin’ to get ‘em up and they wouldn’t come up. So I went to bed and went into convulsions. I didn’t know it. I got stiff as a board. My wife called some friends of mine and they got me out of bed and I was stiff. They stood me up against the wall. Finally they called an ambulance and took me to the hospital but no one would tell the doctor what I had done because they didn’t want to get me in trouble. Finally my wife told him that I did PCP. They said that there was nothing that they could do, that it had to work its way through my system, but my wife told me that they had tubes in me everywhere, up my rectum, down my throat, in my nose, I.V.’s in both arms. They were really thinkin’ that I wasn’t gonna make it. They thought that my heart was gonna burst. I made it through that but then I went into a coma and I was in a coma for seven days. I remember wakin’ up in the hospital and my wife told me later that she stayed with me almost the entire time, like twenty-three out of twenty-four hours all seven days. My family visited and they didn’t think that I would come out of it and if I did I would have brain damage. I remember comin’ out of the coma but my wife said that I just babbled and I thought that she was my mom. I didn’t recognize anybody. I talked about Texas. A couple days after that I sat up in bed and I saw her sittin’ there and I said to her, “What’s goin’ on?” She said, “You all right? Do you know who I am?” I said, “Yeah. You’re my wife. You’re Gina.” She just burst out cryin’. So I asked what was I doin’ there. Why are these needles in my arms, and she told me, “Nicholas, you’ve been in a coma for seven days.” I didn’t believe it at first and I couldn’t talk right. They gave me some therapy for a while but one night, about 9:30 I just said I was tired of sittin’ in there so I pulled the I.V.’s out of my arms. They let me go. I went home and I kept askin’ my wife about it but she wouldn’t tell me. She said she didn’t want to talk about it but I had to stay away from that stuff. She said, “I almost lost ya. The kids almost lost ya. I don’t want this.” I stayed off it for about three days.

I’d been out of work. We got laid off before all this, and I had to make some money so I went up Philly again to cop some Black Bags. One of the guys that I was gonna sell to got busted and he set me up. I got back and went to pick my wife up at work and my sister was with me. She went with me lots of times. While we were waitin’ in the parkin’ lot for my wife I start lookin’ around and I see a cop parked in the lot and another across the street—one up the road, and I’m high. We’d smoked some on the way back and I said to my sister, “Somethin’s goin’ down.” She says, “Naw, you’re paranoid.” I said, “No I’m not,” and one cop looked right at me. He made direct eye contact and I knew it was gonna happen. Right about then a buddy of mine pulled up. He saw my truck parked there. I asked him to take me down to Maryland Avenue and I told my sister to wait and pick up my wife. I told her to give me her stuff and she wouldn’t. It was like pullin’ teeth but I finally convinced her that somethin’ was wrong so she gave me her bags. I got in the truck and laid on the floor of the truck and we took off. We got away, I thought. As soon as my wife came out she and my sister took off and the cops swarmed on ‘em. They put a gun in my wife’s mouth, to the back of her head, they had their knees in her back. They said, “Bitch, we’ll blow your brains out.” She’s flippin’ out. She don’t know what’s goin’ on. She doesn’t do drugs. She’s drug free. She drinks a little bit but very seldom. They yanked

Robert A. Crimmins

my sister out and they expected me to be in there but I wasn’t so they asked her where I was and they said that they knew I was carryin’ a gun. rc: Were you?

Nicholas: Yes. I think I felt secure with it ‘cause my mind wasn’t in the right phase at all, not at all. rc: Did you have it for fear of being ripped off or because you were ready to fire on the police?

Nicholas: Anything I needed it for. rc: Had you used a gun before?

Nicholas: I pulled it before but I never shot anyone. rc: Usually just showing it is enough?

Nicholas: Right. A lot of times, if people bring a knife to a gun fight they back off. I never really had to use it. I fired shots in the air and then pointed it at ‘em to make ‘em know that it was real. I got away, I thought, but they put an APB out on the white truck ‘cause they put two and two together and figured out that I got in that white truck and left. We got off the I-95 exit and as soon as we did a cop got behind the truck and my buddy said, “Nicholas, there’s a cop just whipped right in behind us,”—unmarked car—State cop. I told him to just keep goin’. I had the stuff in my hand. “Go down the road a little bit,” and he said, “Hup, we got another one just pulled in behind him.” Now we got two of ‘em. I said, “Okay, go up here in front of the fire station and turn left across the traffic. See if you can make ‘em wait on a few cars.” So he did. He whipped in front of one car comin’ and they had to wait for a couple cars to pass before they could make that turn. As soon as we made that left we took the first right which put us out of sight of the police. But here they come. He made the next right and I discarded the drugs underneath a parked vehicle. I opened the door and flipped it out. We got three blocks ahead of them and I’m thinkin’ maybe we lost ‘em so we got back on Maryland Avenue and I told my buddy to slow down. I’m stoned and I thought we got away so I rolled a joint and we smoked it. You know, I’m celebratin’. I thought I was celebratin’. We’re comin’ up to a red light and then we saw ‘em comin’ so I told him to slow down, I’m gettin out. So I jumped out of the truck while it was still movin’ and I ran, and I ran in a circle. I went around the corner and jumped a six foot fence, and ran right back to where the cops had pulled the truck over. I was sittin’ fifteen feet away from them, hidin’ underneath a tree, like a Christmas tree with branches right on the ground, thinkin’ that they ain’t gonna find me there. I’m shakin’ ‘cause they’re gonna catch me but then after a minute I thought maybe they won’t. I saw them look my way but they didn’t see me. I’d discarded my gun. I threw it on a roof.

Then the guy that lives in the house comes out and he sees me. It was a young guy, with a beard, long blonde hair and a pony tail. He looks at me and says, “They lookin’ for you?” and I said, “Man, please don’t say nothin’, please”. He said, “I can’t get involved,” and he yelled, “He’s right here!” Them cops jumped over that fence so quick and wrapped me up, jerked me around and asked where’s the stuff. “What stuff?” “Well, where’s your gun.” “What gun? I don’t have no gun. I don’t even know what you’s are doin’.” “Why did you run.” Well right away I say, “I thought I had a capias out of Court 11 for not payin’ a fine and I don’t have the money to pay it.” They brought me in and an hour later they found the stuff. Evidently the guy that was drivin’ the truck told them that I threw somethin’ out because they were gonna impound his work truck. He had a plumbing business. rc: Did that anger you?

Nicholas: No. He had a family to take care of too. I put him in the predicament. I didn’t fill him in on everything that was goin’ down. At the police station my wife was out front. They didn’t charge her with nothin’. They tried to charge my sister but they didn’t find nothin’ in the vehicle so they couldn’t charge my sister with nothin’ either so they put all the charges on me; traffickin’, possession with intent to deliver. Told me that if I’d work with them that they’d work with me. I told ‘em, “I don’t go that way. You do what you gotta do to me,” and they did do what they had to do. rc: That’s the trafficking charge you’re in on now?

Nicholas: Yeah. One cop came in and he asked me if I knew who he was. I looked at his badge and said, “Yeah, you’re the guy that shot my brother,” and he said, “Nic, we were gonna get you one way or another,” and he’s holdin’ the bag with tweezers and he said, “We’re gonna look for your fingerprints on this bag and if we find them it means this stuff is yours.” They asked me what kind of cigarettes I smoke and I told ‘em Camels, and I had some bags in a pack of Camels that I threw out too. He said, “Oh, what a coincidence. Here’s a pack of Camels with some bags in it.” They gave me a $35,000 bail and I made bail.

What did I do? I go right back out on the streets doin’ the same thing. My wife’s up my butt now. “Didn’t you learn,” and this and that. Everything’s goin’ up in smoke now—leavin’ my family again. I was tryin’ to settle down. I stayed out of jail for twelve years. I ain’t been in jail in twelve years—twelve full years and then bang, here I am again. I thought all my wild days were gone but I’m back because I never sought help. I never asked nobody but people were always tellin’ me, “Nic, you need help,” but I thought I didn’t. Every time I came to jail there was no help offered. It was, sit in your cell, watch your TV, listen to your radio, write your letters, get high. There just wasn’t nothin’ there. I came in this time and heard about the Key Program and decided that it was time for me to do somethin’. I’ve got two babies out there that I adore and I’ve got two older ones that love me and know what I’m goin’ through. rc: If a similar program was available when you were in before, would you have tried to get in it?

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned Nicholas: I think I was too young before. I thought I knew everything. I didn’t know nothin’. I guess because I’m older and because of my kids I feel different this time. I’m lookin’ at myself with a clear head and I realize that I’ve got to try to be a better man and a better father. I’ve got to work with society instead of against it, stop trying to find a loophole every time, the easy way out, to make it easy for Nicholas. It ain’t the right way to do it. rc: Despite the drugs you seem to be a clear thinker. You know yourself. Considering all that has shaped you, can you say why you’re here?

Nicholas: Basically I’m here because I put myself here. I was raised right but I got too much freedom and I kept takin’ more and more and more until I went just plain crazy. I did whatever I wanted to do. I started followin’ a trend. I became a follower instead of a leader. I made myself a bed and I laid in it a long time. Now the bed is so lumpy it’s time to get a new mattress.

Now I’m tryin’ to get a new mattress so I have somethin’ to lie in comfortably. rc: How is your family getting by without your income?

Nicholas: They’re on welfare and my wife tells me it’s real rough. She’s enrolled at Del Tech and it’s hard for her to take care of the kids and study. My ex-wife has a boyfriend and she’s in construction. She’s an electrician, so she’s gettin’ by pretty good.

I was payin’ child support, $143 a week for the other two that weren’t with me, so they’re roughin’ it too. rc: How do you explain where you are to your kids?

Nicholas: I was pretty straight forward with the two oldest ones. I told them that I was a hard head and look where it got me.

Like I said, I thought I knew everything and no one could tell me nothin’. It was partly because of the drugs, ‘cause I was in a fog a lot of the time. My perception of life itself was . . . just shit. I was honest with the older ones. Toni, my fourteen-year-old, she doesn’t live with my wife, she was from a girlfriend of mine when I was a kid, and we had a baby which we thought was the right thing to do then. rc: It was. She’s alive, and well.

Nicholas: Yeah . . . exactly . . . She is very smart, very intelligent, very understanding. She still loves me. She doesn’t look at me no worse. She don’t look down on me. I’m still her father. She’s knows what I did and that I gotta pay for it. rc: Sounds like you’ve won their love.

Nicholas: I’ve always had time for my kids, even if I was high. We’d do things on the weekends and weeknights I’d do schoolwork with ‘em. I tried to get ‘em whatever they needed. My wife now—we got my eleven-year-old, Maria, and my baby by her. Maria really took it rough, but she said, “Dad, I’m with ya.” She comes up every week to see me. I really look forward to it, ‘cause she provides a lot of support and she seems a lot older than eleven, in my eyes. My seven-year-old really took it hard.

She’s from a previous marriage. I got all my kids together the night before I came to jail and she went crazy. She’s my cupcake out of all of ‘em. She broke down. She said, “What am I gonna do without you? I’m not gonna have a daddy.” I told her that she’ll always have a daddy because I’m always there in her heart but it’s hard to explain to a seven-year-old. She’s just learnin’ to write now and she sends me letters and pictures and it’s killin’ me ‘cause as soon as I see ‘em I know they’re from her.

Robert A. Crimmins

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned

5 AMIR

“What we have to face is that the community is toxic, it’s poison. It is a crime factory. Once we get to jail we actually become healthier than at any other time in our lives . . . When they go back to the community they start to get sick again.”

We sat in an interview room in the Delaware Correctional Center. It had glass walls on two sides. Amir watched the officers and residents walk past and he waved and smiled to most. Everyone knew him.

At first he seemed reluctant to speak. He listened to my explanation of what I hoped to accomplish without comment.

His name means “leader”.

Amir: How did you determine that I would be one of your subjects?

Amir is forty-one years old, rc: Gail Stallings suggested that I speak to you. I told her that I wanted to speak an African American and a with people that represented a cross section of the prison population.

Muslim. He is divorced from Amir: Can I say something before you ask your questions? the woman that was his wife rc: Sure.

Amir: There are over a million black people in prison today. Blacks comprise ten when he came to prison nineper cent of the general population and fifty percent of the federal and state prison teen years ago. They have two population. This indicates that the prison problem can’t be separated from the race sons who are twenty-one and problem, and the race problem has been goin’ on in this country since black people twenty-two and a daughter who were kidnapped from Africa and brought over here. So to understand any problem is nineteen. He is serving a life we have to see it in context and see it in its relationships and the dynamics of sentence for first-degree murthose relationships. So to view our prison problem we have to look at the overall der. international, global, economic and military war that’s been going on among the races, actually since Alexander the Great invaded Egypt a couple thousand years ago. The war has been going on and our being in America, and our being incarcerated is an outgrowth of that war.

Our solution won’t be solved domestically. There is not a willingness of the people in power to alter the status quo. It’s ludicrous for us to think that we are equal and wanted citizens in the United States. The recent Republican victories in the House and Senate is indicative of the mood when it comes to the social aspects of the country. In general, black people are unloved and unwanted by the majority of the population in the United States.

Consequently, it makes sense to me that we retrace our steps. Our being in this country and being enslaved and the neo-form of slavery that we call incarceration or prison—to change that and to undo it we need to retrace our steps and look at alternatives such as paroling people back to countries in Africa—setting up a means to both provide their transport and for their initial well being and we also need to look at the possibilities of the United States paying reparations to the countries from which we were taken.

Some of our best scientists are of African descent. Some of our doctors, our scholars were taken from Africa so Africa is in the deplorable state that it is in because its best minds were taken from her. If we were to take America’s top physicists and top biologists and then destroy all the books as Alexander and Napoleon and others did when they destroyed our libraries in Alexandria and other places, the people would fall backwards and each generation would appear to be dumber than the previous generation with the result that a couple of hundred years later someone like this recent racist would write a book like The Bell Curve that has statistical proof of our intellectual inferiority. I would like for people who are looking at the prison problem to not stick their heads in the sand and try to separate it from the race problem.

I’m not looking to blame anybody but I’m looking to identify a problem. Myself, I believe that all racial differences are actually artificial. That we really are one people but until we can recognize that, until we reach that level of maturity, we have to realize that America is steeped in racism. It permeates every aspect of our society. My people can’t afford to wait until the rest of America catches up and lives out the meaning of its creed that we’re gonna be judged by the content of our character and all that.

People are easily manipulated. We have been manipulated to practice behaviors that are criminal behaviors and that are deplorable but the human mind is very programmable. The mind is easier to program than a computer. That’s why you have certain demagogues who are able to get people to do stuff like kill themselves by drinking silly Kool-Aid and what not.

It’s easy to program a human being. Our people, en masse, have been programmed and because we haven’t been taught to think creatively the only material gain that many of the young people see is through crime. Others have learned to see other alternatives and been able to create a different reality but the masses of people cannot. The normal black leaders have been taught and trained and made in the institutions of their oppressors therefore they can’t think of a new way or a new solution.

They don’t have a creative way of thinking. I love and respect the leaders who are trying, but they don’t have a creative

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned solution. All they can do is go and beg for more money.

The country itself could use a type of enlightenment, let’s say even an initiation. Our leaders should be superior men and women. They shouldn’t have the same base desires that we have, or that the common people have, and they should be enlightened. We don’t have too many enlightened leaders. I doubt that there has even been anybody reaching for enlightenment since President Kennedy and his staff. An enlightened leader will hire people who are more brilliant than he or she is. rc: Don’t you need enlightened masses to recognize such leaders?

Amir: Yes. Jefferson or Franklin, one of those two, said you get the government that you deserve. Because the masses have been dummied down we’ve accepted dumb leaders. We need to accept that our leaders don’t have a solution to any of these problems.

Lastly, the prisons around the country need to stop being a refuge for Ku Kux Klan mentality people. Most prisons are moved far from the black community, out into what we would call the boondocks or the sticks, to the last refuge where whites are able to exercise their superiority over black people in a comfortable manner and outside the spotlight of the public’s vision.

If we are talking about changing people we need to start looking at hiring staffs at all levels, and empowering those staff at management and supervisory levels who can at least relate to the majority population. In Delaware we only have one black warden and she’s probably on the hot seat now for something that is probably not her fault [the escape, two days earlier, of eight prisoners from the Gander Hill Prison in Wilmington—rc]. At one time there were four black wardens in Delaware. In this institution we don’t have a single black at a management level. The Warden, Deputy Warden, Treatment Superintendent, Security Chief, everybody at the upper level of the counseling apparatus, the Education Department, the Chaplaincy, even in the kitchens, blacks have been segregated. rc: So the fact that . . .

Amir: An inmate that is part of eighty per cent of the population has difficulty coming in with the same root assumptions. If we’re from a similar culture we share a basis of understanding. We don’t have that, and then you go to things like classification.

People are emotional and they classify others based on how they feel about them. The black inmate has to fight through twenty layers of crap before he can get a fair hearing where the white inmate can start from a basic assumption that, “I’ve made a mistake. I’m trying to get my act together and now what do I do?” The black inmate has to fight all the stuff like, “If I sit too tall in my chair they’re going to think I’m militant. If I talk like I have any measure of intelligence they’re going to think that I’m too slick and I’m conning them.” There’s an old plantation mentality, “beware the slick nigger.” rc: The word “uppity” comes to mind.

Amir: Yea. All that, and you have to fight that every minute of your day. rc: So you feel isolated geographically because you’re out here in the country and culturally because you can’t relate to the people that are in charge.

Amir: Yes, and worse than that, they can’t relate to us. We can relate to them to some extent because of our dual consciousness.

W.E.B. Du Bois called it the divided soul in that we relate to whites or authority in some aspect all our lives, but middle class and upper class whites have very little experience relating to blacks. We need to integrate the management of prisons, and also the secondary hustle of prisons. Blacks are the victims of crime in the sense that we get hustled. If you look at all the industries that operate within the prison; the vendors that bring in food, the clothing providers . . . rc: Let me stop you here. You’ve spoken on a number of topics and you have made some interesting points and suggestions.

But time is becoming an issue and we haven’t discussed your situation. We need to get into that. Let me ask some questions about you.

Amir: Yeah ok, that’s fine. rc: Where did you grow up?

Amir: Chester, Pennsylvania. rc: Tell me about your parents.

Amir: My father was the second black disk jockey in Philadelphia. He was on WHAT radio. My earliest memories of him were of him in the radio. I couldn’t understand how he got in there. My mother died when I was fifteen. She was very brilliant.

My father was brilliant. He was a genius in my opinion, and—briefly about my father—he fought for two world boxing titles after the war. He was from Salt Lake City, Utah. How he got to Utah, I’ll never know. He fought for the lightweight title of the world and the welterweight title of the world and lost both times—got knocked out by a guy named Ike Williams who is considered a legend. I wasn’t born yet at that time. Then he attempted to be a business man, and I say attempted because he never made the money that I think he should have made. He’s trained people and most of his protégés have gone on to be millionaires and what not and even now in his seventies he’s starting new stuff up, you know, that’s my dad. I really love him.

When I expressed a desire to be a writer when I was a teenager he bought into a weekly tabloid newspaper so that I would have a forum for my writing. Since that time I’ve written a few books and novels and political books and I owe all that to him because he said, “OK, you want to be a writer, I’ll give you the opportunity. I’ll give you someplace to write.” He is

Robert A. Crimmins

very optimistic and my only hope is that before he dies I’ll be able to see him in a free environment.

My mother was in the civil rights movement. I grew up going to demonstrations, marching. My mother was one of the Freedom Riders down south. I was lucky enough to meet all the big shot civil rights leaders and attend strategy sessions with them when I was a child. She also was a writer, mostly about civil rights for the local newspapers. I have less sense of low self-esteem because when I was little there was a thing in the black community where light skin blacks were considered better looking and superior to dark skin blacks. When I was very little, like three years old, I came running home one day, crying because some of the older kids called me black. That meant I was ugly. My mother asked why I was crying and I said they teased me. She asked what did they say and I said, they said I’m black and she said you should be proud to be black. I said, why, because I couldn’t think of a reason to be proud to be black and she said because Jesus was black. That hit me like a ton of bricks. But I believe he was black. He certainly probably was not Nordic as he is often depicted. At any rate that was the kind of start that I got from my mother. She and I discussed politics. She taught me French. She was from the upper class of the black community. She kinda married down. I always felt that the rest of my family, aunts and uncles and what not, sort of sneered at, or looked down on my father. She was one of the leaders of the NAACP in Chester, what was called the Committee for Freedom Now, which became a more radical offshoot of the NAACP. She knew Malcolm X. rc: Sounds like an exciting childhood.

Amir: I loved my childhood. I never knew I was poor until we moved out of the projects to the suburbs. That’s when I discovered that we were poor. I used to ask my daddy to do something for the poor people on TV. Why don’t you send them some money or somethin’? That’s my parents. rc: Where did you go to school?

Amir: Elementary school, Perry Wright. Junior high school, a school called Franklin and I went to Swarthmore High School.

That was a culture shock because there was only three blacks in the high school. rc: What was school like for you?

Amir: School was a ball for me. I got A’s when I wanted to and when I didn’t want to I didn’t. rc: So it was a good experience.

Amir: Oh yeah, it was lovely. I had great teachers. Most of our teachers at that time, in Chester, came from Cheyney State Teacher’s College which was an excellent teacher’s college. I don’t know how great a university it is now but it was a great teacher’s college. You’ve got to remember that most of the black teachers at that time probably would be doctors or something like that today. Because of segregation you had overqualified people doing things like teaching. I was a beneficiary of that.

Today, teachers are underqualified. rc: Was there someone special in your life when you got in trouble the first time?

Amir: This is the first time. You talkin’ about criminally the first time? rc: Yes. Amir: This is the first time. I was married. My wife was special to me. I was very much in love with my wife. I am still in love with my wife. We’re divorced, but she’s still a friend. We went through a period when we pretended that we hated each other. That lasted several years. We both outgrew that. Now she’s like a different person. We were both so young at that time.

She’s grown into a woman and I’m almost grown into a man. She’s an excellent person. She’s done an excellent job raising our children. My boys are in college. My daughter got a scholarship but for some reason didn’t go to college. She’s living in New York, studying to be some sort of, something in medicine. I don’t know. She’s back home now and I hope I see her before she goes back. It’s funny, their lives seem to change so fast that by the time I catch up to what they’re doing they’re doing something else. My wife has done an excellent job so if I ever get rich when I get out of here I’ll have to repay her for all that she did for the children and for me. rc: Considering all that you know about yourself and the events of your life, can you say why you are in prison?

Amir: OK. I’m currently in prison for political reasons, but that’s got nothing to do with why I committed the crime. rc: Maybe there isn’t an easy answer to the question. There might be an answer that you usually give, but what’s the real answer in your mind. Why are you here?

Amir: You mean, why am I here now, or why did I commit the crime that brought me here? There’s actually two different things. I was supposed to be released in ‘93. rc: Answer it however you want.

Amir: I’m in prison—I committed the crime that I committed because of a weakness on my part to prove that I was a man to the guys that I should have been sayin’, “The hell wich ya’ll”. No one made me do what I did. I did it willingly. I wasn’t the leader of the crime. Most people think that because I am a leader—I don’t say that to brag it’s just that some people take the first step and other people follow that first step. In that situation I was not the leader. I wanted to be Norman Mailer. I wanted to be George Plimpton. I had two childhood heroes. Norman Mailer and Sandy Koufax. Since I couldn’t throw a fastball ninety miles an hour I decided to try to become a writer. At the time we were into participatory journalism and I felt that since I had

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned moved out of the black community and lived almost exclusively around whites, and that’s who I hung out with, and that’s the music and the cultural thing—I started diggin’ Led Zeppelin and the Beatles. When I went back to Chester it was like I had lost something. I had to prove to my boys that I was still a man, that I could still hang. So I asked them when they started going into crime—I almost pleaded with them to let me participate, knowing that, not in my wildest dreams would anybody get hurt.

It was like a TV thing. I wanted to be able to one day write the great black American novel. It was like the way jazz musicians feel like they have to become dope addicts to play jazz. I was stupid enough to think I had to really suffer in order to be able to write, and to be justified to write about the black experience because I thought that I had lost it. I was always trying to prove my blackness, prove my ghetto credentials. So when my crew graduated from petty stuff to crime, to actual, real crime, I pleaded with them to let me be a part of it. Let me participate, and they would like, “Oh, you’s a college boy,” and in that community, being a bookworm or college boy is negative. It’s like you’re a punk and I said, “Oh please, please, please. I can do it.” It’s odd. I had just written a front page story. I was a photographer also, for Inquirer Magazine, the Sunday supplement, and I had a front cover story in a magazine called Sepia which was like Ebony. It’s now defunct and I was discussing with publishers a biography of Diana Ross. My writing career was going through the roof but the more success I was starting to have the more guilty I felt. It was like a form of liberal guilt. So I asked the guys to let me participate, to let me take part in a crime, a robbery.

I was visiting. I was livin’ in Brooklyn, New York at the time, because New York is the publishing Mecca. I was visiting my father in Chester, and feeling good and hangin’ on the corner, and it’s like the ambiance, of where I’m from and one of my boys drove past and said, “Yo man, you keep talkin’ about how you want to go down wit us, we gonna do one,” and after that fate took place, ‘cause I was lookin’ for an excuse not to go—but my big mouth. I’d been runnin’ my mouth for weeks about how bad I was, and how I wasn’t scared and all that. It was put up or shut up time. My weakness is that I was driven to impress people who were not worthy of being impressed. The people that I should have been trying to impress, like my father, and some of the people who mentored me—their respect was less significant to me than the respect of the crew that I was hangin’ with. rc: You don’t feel the same way now, do you?

Amir: No. I had to deal with that. There was nothin’ in the prison, like counseling groups. Most of those are crap, in the sense that they teach people to go along with intolerable circumstances. If I am a follower of somethin’ in here, when I return to the community, since now the majority of the community is criminal, I’m gonna follow that. Prisons don’t inspire leadership. They make you dress alike, think alike and go with the flow. If the sheep are all runnin’ off the cliff then I’m gonna run off with them.

In our groups here most people are taught behavior modification to go with the norm. If you go against the flow, if you think in any kind of way that’s non-conformist you’re considered to be a threat and a radical and all this kind of crap. In order to get out of jail people play the game and go along with these asinine counseling groups, and what happens when they get to the street? They are totally ill equipped to deal with that because in the street you have to go against the flow because the flow in the street is criminal. At one level or another just about everyone in the inner city is connected directly or indirectly to criminal activity because the economy of the black community is a drug based economy. Even if I’m a store keeper, my income is based on drugs. I don’t sell anything unless the drug market is going well. In the groups that I teach and lead we try to teach people to go against that criminal flow. We can’t seem to get that into the minds of the upper echelon of treatment. In indoctrinating their people to be good, model prisoners, to not be individuals, you are actually setting them up to come back to jail. rc: You were saying why you’re here.

Amir: Ah, OK. We were supposed to rob a—I think it was a housing development. They were supposed to have a safe, and we were supposed to go rob that. It was like a Keystone Cops thing, because when we got there the place was closing down, so the whole idea was that one of us was supposed to go in and inquire as if they wanted one of these apartments and then a guy was supposed to come in and stick ‘em up. They didn’t have it worked out because the place was closed down. I was like, whew, OK, I’m out of that, I proved my macho thing and now I can get the hell out of here, right. So while we’re goin’ one of the guys said, “Wait a minute. I used to work at this liquor store,” and what he said was, and I’m not saying this, he said that this place was a front. The liquor store was a front for a mafia drop off of money, OK, and I think he just said that so we would think that there was big money there, as opposed to, oh, we’re just gonna go rob a liquor store. He said he was once employed there and that on this particular day, all this money was there and this night the people from the mafia would come and pick up their money and there was never less than $30,000 in the safe. The guys said, OK, let’s go hit that place. I said, wait a minute, we don’t know anything about this, this is kinda crazy, to just jump up and say, let’s go do this place and they said man if you’re scared you shouldn’t he here, and da, da, da, but then we can’t do it without you. We need someone to lookout and someone to drive the car and all this. Here was the moment of truth for me. I said wait a minute. I said that I would participate. This one thing was supposed to be so well planned and it wasn’t. I’m not doing this and every instinct in me, every atom of my body said don’t do it. I didn’t listen. So, we went to a liquor store in Claymont which is real close to Chester, it’s right on the Pennsylvania and Delaware border. There were five of us and there were supposed to be two getaway cars. We would ride away in the first one and then everybody would get in the trunk of the second car except for one guy who would drive so the police would be looking for a mob of five people but there would only be one person in the car and that would be the basic getaway plan. We

Robert A. Crimmins

parked the cars in two different places and even walking up to the place everyone was arguing about who was gonna do what, who’s not gonna do what and all that, right. I wanted—if we were gonna do it I wanted the full experience. I wanted to go inside, but because I was a rookie the other brothers felt that I was a liability. So my punk position, or whatever in the thing, was I was to stand at the front door, unarmed, and they said that since you are a college boy, if anybody comes up your job is to talk to them until we come out. So that’s what I did and in fact someone did come up who knew me and who identified me and that’s how I got convicted. During the robbery I did the ultimate sin. I ran. There was a police car coming down the road and he stopped in front of the store. He looked and I didn’t have a contingency plan to deal with if a policeman came up. I banged on the window and went. I got away. My co-defendants were caught before I was caught. Amongst our crew, that was tantamount to—I was worthy of a death sentence. Amongst the internal structure of the guys—because to leave them where they could be shot—then my life was expendable, OK. There is a code among criminals where two things; snitching on people and running out on them in a time of their duress, even though they are doing a crime—you have no rights after that. I didn’t know then but I found out a few hours later that someone had been shot in the store, and the next day I found out that the person that was shot had been killed. So, I ran away and I ran to a house and I talked my way into the house, and slipped past the police that were looking elsewhere and returned to Brooklyn. Another co-defendant was caught and he gave them my name. That’s when I moved my family to California where we lived for six months, before I was captured and brought here. rc: Was your trial fair?

Amir: No. rc: Why? Amir: First of all it was done in a fast food manner. They tried five people and all of our involvement was different, but because of the law, if you were involved at all, you had felony murder. For me to tell my story, so to speak, at trial would be to condemn the other four people. My own morals at that time would not permit me to do that and also that would have meant putting a nail into my own coffin in terms of, I might have gotten a shorter sentence but I wouldn’t have lived through it. rc: What happened to the others?

Amir: One of the guys took the deal. The funny thing is, because it was so confused, and nobody got it together, only two people went into the store, and the two who went into the store are the ones who got the breaks. One guy pleaded to robbery, and was sentenced to twenty years, which was commuted to five years. He went back to Chester and he was killed. The other guy received a pardon and he’s been released about a month ago. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have been released. I think that twenty years is a significant amount of time for anyone but the funny thing about justice is that if they’re gonna go by culpability, the two people that were armed, and the two people that actually were inside are the only two people that have received any kind of mercy. rc: What about the other two? There were five, right?

Amir: Right. Clarence, Clarence Hooks, or Sheik Akmed is his Arabic name, he’s in minimum security, elderly, basically gets around in a wheelchair. He was the oldest one of us. The other, Wilbur Shabas is in Missouri. He was transferred to the federal system and then sent to the state system. I was also at one time moved to the federal system. During a time when the prison was overcrowded the administration saw they had a means of getting rid of the leaders in the prison and sixty of us were moved to the federal system. They happened to be the sixty that were the most intelligent and the most courageous so therefore the inner conditions of the prison collapsed in terms of prisoner’s rights and they’ve never been rebuilt ‘cause when we got back we were a little bit too tired to start that all up again. So Wilbur is in Missouri and Clarence is in the building that I live in. rc: Does anyone inside, either prisoners or staff either comfort or help you?

Amir: Not since Warden Redman left. Warden Redman was sort of a father to me. I could always go to him. He was a tough guy. He was a bad man so I could always be for real with him. Since he’s left I’d probably say, no. I’m able to speak honestly to certain people. I’ve been here so long that most of my closer friends are staff members. The inmates are transient. As far as comforting, no one comforts me. rc: Is there anyone that you help through their time here?

Amir: Probably, scores of people. I run programs and I have—I call them kids—in what we call the Youth Community, where inmates between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six are part of it. I’ve gone from being a young boy in the jail to an old head in the jail. I work with them all the time and now also with their families when they have problems. The families are upset because they have guys in here. They wonder what’s he gonna do when he gets out. Also staff members. I’m older than a lot of the guards in here now so just as an older man sometimes I’m helping them, which I don’t mind doing. It’s part of me paying my dues and not doing that with my own sons. So, yeah, I’m a—I guess a support person for a lot of people, and that nourishes me also. It’s a two way street. It gives my life some meaning and purpose. It’s something that I need as much as them. rc: Who writes to you?

Amir: A lot of people. My family, ex-girlfriends, sometimes people in Africa. Some people write to me to translate Arabic.

I read and write Arabic. Some ask for commentary on scriptures. Some ask for astrological profiles. I’m an astrologer also.

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned rc: Is correspondence with others one of your primary activities?

Amir: Yes, I enjoy receiving letters and writing letters. rc: Would you rather get a letter or a phone call?

Amir: I’d rather get a phone call, but we don’t have phones. rc: The only way you can use a phone is when you call out. Is that right?

Amir: Yes, and it’s a ten minute thing with recordings interrupting throughout the call. “You have two minutes left.” rc: Describe a typical day.

Amir: OK. I get up. I eat my bran. No, I’m kidding. I saw that commercial on TV. I get up around six a.m. and I go to work around 6:30. I work as a computer programmer for Food Service Division and that’s in a warehouse called Central Supply.

If there was a problem with one of the computers the day before I’ll fix that or I design a new system or improve a system.

I’m always working on designing a system or improving an existing system or something. I do that until two o’clock. It’s not constant work. If there’s a break I’ll play computer games—shootin’ down airplanes or somethin’. At two o’clock, if I’m not too lazy I’ll run three or four miles but if I’m lazy, I won’t run that day. At three o’clock we have class with the young guys.

Lately I’ve been teaching them because some of our teachers left but we just got two new teachers, so soon I won’t be doing as much teaching myself. I conduct class on a number of subjects. We’ve developed our own psychological and social system we call “Nass”. It’s an Arabic word that means mind. We don’t believe in Freudian psychology, or Skinner or Rogerian and all that doesn’t address our particular needs properly so we developed our own. I normally teach the class until five. At six I’m usually writing something or back in my cell. I try to catch the news so I can have some idea of what’s going on. Somewhere between then and eight o’clock I do Yoga, Hafa Yoga. At eight, if there is nothing great I want to see on TV I’ll usually meditate and meditation will usually go on for a half hour to an hour and a half, depending on how I reach the state that I want to reach for some inner peace. After that I’ll either write something or I’ll read, either something scholarly or something fun. I love horror books. I love Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz. I also read about ancient Egypt and Bhuddist philosophy. Sometime after Nightline I go to sleep and start it all over again. On Fridays we have families come in from six to eight and I work with the families and the inmates themselves. So that’s my week. On Sunday I’m a couch potato watching football all day long. rc: What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you in prison?

Amir: In prison? Probably my divorce. I was stabbed once, but that wasn’t too bad. I also stabbed someone once since I’ve been here, and that was scary because I thought he was gonna die. rc: Tell me about those incidents.

Amir: In ‘77 or ‘78 we had a banquet and I gave an award to Warden Redman and that was considered to be an Uncle Tom move by some. Then, the place was a lot more radical. A crowd of guys wanted me to apologize and I refused because he deserved the award. So they got out their shanks and they were gonna attack me. It happened to be count time and the guard came out in the yard. We were in the “Old Max”, and the guard called count time which meant that everyone had to get in their cells. They were makin’ their move and I knew that it was over. There was no way I could of won that one. So, for the first time in my life I was glad for count time. That evening—I knew that this wasn’t something that was going to end. The same thing was gonna happen tomorrow, right. So I decided that, since I was gonna die anyway, and I wasn’t gonna go to the guards and say I need some help, that I would kill as many of them as I could before they killed me, and— did you read Shogun? rc: Yes. Amir: OK, you remember the ritual the guy went through when he was about to kill himself? My experience was very similar to that. I was ready to die and I was gonna die as a warrior and I was gonna kill those that would kill me, and, that’s it. I said good-bye to people, and it was the strangest feeling I ever had in my life. I went out, and the leader was in the chow hall, looking at television and I went to him and I stabbed him. I’d never stabbed anyone before. I’d never done anything, other then punching people, to cause bodily harm, and—the knife was a street knife, a store bought knife, that had been smuggled in. It broke off inside the person. The blade stayed inside of him, OK. So I went back to my cell to get another knife. In the meantime the officers saw what was happening, so they started locking down the gates so I couldn’t get in. I was going to go down to the tier where all the other guys that wanted to kill me were and I couldn’t get there, and it was really frustrating because this was supposed to go a different way. It was supposed to all end here. That was the worst period of my incarceration. The person didn’t die. I’m glad he didn’t die. I didn’t know I was capable—I didn’t at that time feel fear. I probably reached a state beyond fear where some sort of transcendence had occurred. I’m not proud of that. I would certainly do it differently today, but at that point—that’s how that was done. The time that I was stabbed a guy was on drugs. If you want to get drugs you can get drugs anywhere. Anything you really want you can get. What was odd was that he and I were pretty cool and he came to me and said, “Amir, your phone call is right before mine. I’m not gonna use my call, so you may as well use my phone call.” So I said, cool.

At the time I had a girlfriend that lived in Chicago. So it was easier on her phone bill to have one long call than a bunch of short ones. I was talkin’ to her and the same guy came up and said, “Man, you tryin’ to chump me off? You takin’ my phone call.” I thought he was joking. I said, “Are you kiddin’ man?” My girlfriend said, “What’s that?” and I said, “Oh that’s just my friend

Robert A. Crimmins

actin’ crazy.” So I go back to talkin’. When I finished, I was supposed to have a visit and me and this guy was close enough that my girl and his girl were supposed to come down together and I got off the phone and he said, “You must really think I’m a punk.” I said, “What are you talking’ about?” Then it hit me and I laughed and said, “Ah man, you been gettin’ high. You high as a kite ain’t you?” He said, “No, I ain’t high,” and he pulled out a knife—one of the biggest knives I ever seen in my life. I said, “What the hell?” and he came at me and I tried to do my amateur karate thing. I tried to kick him or kick the knife or somethin’ so he stabbed me twice in the leg. Later on he told me he was sorry and they tried to get me to snitch on the guy.

They wanted me to go down and testify but that wasn’t my thing. rc: You were in a different world when you stabbed that man, weren’t you? The Japanese samurai is a good analogy.

Amir: Yeah. I wasn’t thinkin’ about any consequences. At that time—if I made up my mind to get somebody for doing something to me or the people I cared about, it wouldn’t matter. It could have been in the Warden’s office. That wasn’t a reality. It didn’t mean anything to us. It didn’t mean anything to me. I’ve never been afraid—I had the death penalty. I was on death row. I never was afraid of dying. I’m not afraid of dying now. Death would be liberation for me. I would just reincarnate and hope I don’t screw up like I did this time. That system didn’t mean anything to me at that time. Our own system meant something to me then. I’m not the same now. I know more about the awesome power of this system, the official system, so it means more to me now. At that time it didn’t mean anything to me. Honor, what some might think is a perverted form of honor, meant something to me and that’s why I think I understand these kids. You ask, how can a kid throw away his entire life by going to shoot somebody with his boys, ya know, but that is his reality. That is his value system. That’s what counts and the schools and his coach and all that is less significant to him. He doesn’t see that one day, he’s going to have to, by hook or by crook, merge with the official system, the establishment, in one way or another. That doesn’t mean anything to him. I try to remember what my thinking was and begin our communication with the younger guys at that point. rc: Tell me about your first day in jail.

Amir: I was in LA County Jail first. I spent twenty some days in LA before I got here so I don’t know what you want, my first day when I got extradited here? rc: No. I’m asking about your first day of incarceration. The first day of a new life, a life of incarceration.

Amir: OK. My very first day, I spent a day in the Compton, California City Jail and I was in a cell with a heroin addict and he was constantly throwin’ up. At the time I was under an assumed name, and I was hoping to make bail before they found out who I really was. This heroin addict was throwin’ up and going through all the things that they go through with withdrawal and for a while I was miserable. Well, I mean I was miserable all the time but I remember thinking I wish this guy would shut the hell up but I realized that I couldn’t do anything about it so I began to try to help him or talk to him to keep him functioning and that got my mind somewhat off of my situation. When I was arrested they took me to Compton City Jail. They were trying to get me to tell on the guys that helped me. We were—I got arrested for trying to rob a bank. I was trying to get my boy Wilbur out of jail on bail, so I had to raise $100,000. I messed that all up too. I was handcuffed and I wouldn’t talk and they said, “Oh, you tryin’ to be a smart ass?” The policeman punched me in the jaw. Then they made the mistake of undoin’—they do the good cop/bad cop thing. So the good cop came in and took my handcuffs off and then the bad cop came in so I started punchin’ him and they were punchin’ me and I was punchin’ them and I was havin’ a great time, cause I was knockin’ them down and they weren’t knockin’ me down. Then a whole bunch of them came in, and I said, oh boy, you’re about to get your ass kicked and the FBI came and someone said, “Don’t beat him up, don’t beat him up, the feds are here,” because bank robbery’s a federal thing. So they didn’t want me to be all beat up with the feds so I never got my ass kicked in that kind of manner with the cops. I mean it was an exchange. They got theirs in and I got mine in. So then I went to the cell with this heroin guy. That whole night I stayed up tryin’ to get him to—I don’t know what, to stay alive, and flush the toilet when he shat, if that’s a word, and hoping that I would make bail and scared to death that they would find out that I was Sterling Hobbs, the wanted fugitive in all these different states and all. What was odd was, one thing I remember is this finger here [indicates the ring finger of his right hand] cracked. When I moved it, it would crack and that happened December 5, 1975 and it still cracks. So this is like my internal radar system. Whenever this thing stops crackin’ I know I’m gettin’ out of jail. rc: So there wasn’t a great deal of fear your first day?

Amir: No. There was just me and this one other guy in the cell. He was nasty but helpless. Then I went to LA County Jail and it was the first time I ever saw a man give head to another man. It was—everyone was in line. You held cash money with you there, up to five dollars, somethin’ like that, so I thought, stupid me, it was a commissary line. So I’m in line and everyone’s goin’ through and I noticed that no one’s comin’ out with a bag. So I got to the door and they say, “OK man, you’ next,” right, and there was a poor guy down on the ground—for a quarter a shot, givin’ head and I thought, this poor guy. I felt extremely sorry for him and he didn’t look feminine or anything. He looked like a guy. I said, naw, I’m not gonna—it just made me—I just felt sorry for the guy that he had to—they were—they were takin’ advantage of this dude. That was my second day or third day or something like that after they let me into the population. My first day, the very first day a guy got killed there, he got stabbed sixteen times with a knife. Oh, and Manson was there and I was hopin’—but he was in a different part, and I’m still thinkin’

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned like a writer, right, “Damn if I could only get moved to where he’s at I could interview this guy.” At the time, you’re talkin ‘75, his crime was still kinda fresh. We seen enough of Charlie by now but at that time he was still a mystery to people and I wanted to interview him but they had somethin’ about “Old County” and “New County” and I was tryin’ to get into New County so I could interview Charles Manson. I guess that was a form of denial because it was, “Wait a minute Jack, your interviewin’ days are over,” but I hadn’t accepted that yet. So I saw a guy get killed. I couldn’t sleep. I’m up at night and a guy got killed. I saw a body fly past, zoom, and I said, what the hell was that? ‘Cause LA county is real high, not a skyscraper, but almost, and the dude went over—they had killed him. rc: You saw him fall past your window?

Amir: He flew past our—the cells are open—they’re like bars, like the old timey cells. I was layin’ in my cell just worryin’ about myself and what am I gonna do. What’s my wife gonna do? She’s gonna get another guy, all the stuff you go through with that. Hope my kids are all right, and a dude flew—flying and screamin’, past the front of my cell. That was scary. I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know what you could do and what you couldn’t do. I mean I might say hi to somebody and that might be me flyin’ across the thing. When I got here, the only time I was afraid here was when—have you ever come in here at night? It’s very dark comin’ in here and I wasn’t used to people of the almost southern style that Delaware had at that time. When we came in off the highway, down that long, dark road, I thought, oh my God, they’re gonna lynch me out here. It was gonna be one of those things where they say, “Prisoner Kills Himself in Cell.” I didn’t think there was a jail back here. It’s pitch black out here man and I thought oh my God, these cats are gonna—’cause they were all talkin’ with southern accents. This was somethin’ I hadn’t experienced much of. They were, “Yeah, boy,” and this and that and I was scared and they thought that I killed a white man. I’m a black man and a Muslim. I thought my ass was done. When I saw the prison I was overjoyed. There actually was a prison. They weren’t gonna lynch me. So my first day here was a relief, that I lived through it. rc: How do you deal with isolation from the opposite sex?

Amir: . . . um . . . strenuous and dedicated masturbation. I don’t have sex with guys. I don’t have—if other people choose to do that I don’t have a problem with that. I’ve been nineteen years of celibacy. That’s the answer. It’s the only thing you can do.

Now that I’m an old man I don’t even do that much any more. rc: So the drive continues and tapers off just like with the rest of us.

Amir: Yeah. It doesn’t command you as much. I don’t know if it’s the age or the yoga or what but I’ve gotten a little more control over myself. When I was twenty-two it was all that was ever on my mind. That’s the case with the young guys and it’s inhuman. It’s the height of viciousness to deny a human being physical contact with the members of the opposite sex. One day we will look at this and our social scientists will see that this is as backwards and vile as when people used to cut holes in people’s heads to get the demons out if a person was suffering from schizophrenia or something. One day we will—generations will look at the American penal system, some aspects of it and they will say, what a brutal, brutal system. We even accord animals in the zoo an opportunity to have love relations and we don’t do that with human beings. That was a hard thing to get used to—having been married and being a man. It would have been better if I had been bisexual. Then I could at least have had a facsimile. Women turn me on and men don’t. rc: Do you think prison should be harsher? What role does punishment play?

Amir: . . . I think punishment should have no role whatsoever. If we mean punishment beyond what is necessary to provide public safety. If we are here for vindictive purposes than the whole thing should be punishment and we should get it on, and may the best man win, you know. Punishment works on children to some degree. For adults it doesn’t have the affect of changing behavior. As far as people coming back to jail, it almost doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do within the prison.

It matters what you do and don’t do in the community. What we have to face is that the community is toxic, it’s poison. It is a crime factory. Once we get to jail we actually become healthier than at any other time in our lives. We eat better, most of us. We go to school. We go to church or mosque. We start to read. We start to use introspection. Most guys here are healthier psychologically, socially and physically than they have ever been in their lives. When they go back to the community they start to get sick again. If you look at a guy who is about to get out and you see him four, five, six months later, the light that you may have seen in him in jail—you’ll see a diminishing of that because the waste material is in the community. You can give us bread and water and just enough food to sustain us and it won’t have an impact on recidivism. Or you can treat us as quote, coddled criminals and it won’t have an impact. I think if anything the punishment aspect may make things a little worse because man is vengeful by nature. That’s why Jesus had to try to get us to turn the other cheek. That’s not a natural thing for us. rc: How has prison affected your sense of humor?

Amir: I laugh a lot. I’m a little more cynical than I might have been. There’s a lot to laugh at here and I laugh at myself most of all. It’s not as miserable, day to day, as you might think, once you get used to it. There are a lot of good people who work here. There are a lot of good people who visit, and there are a lot of good people who are incarcerated here. We laugh at a lot of things. rc: How do you prepare for parole hearings?

Robert A. Crimmins

Amir: Shadowbox. I talk to myself and I do a Muhammad Ali thing. [gets up and shadowboxes] They gonna do it. [jabs and moves] They gonna do it. They gonna do it. [keeps jabbing] They gonna give me parole. That’s why they here. They gonna do it. Then when it happens I go in and sit down and it’s like, “You’re here to give me parole and I’m here to answer your questions honestly and truthfully and there’s no problem between us,” and I convince myself that they’re gonna be open minded and I’m gonna be open minded and that I’m gonna be for real and honest with them and all the other stuff is—’cause we get all these horror stories that they’re gonna tear you apart and all that. That’s one of the ways that I prepare myself. Normally we’re in one of those rooms right down there [points down the hall] and I’m in the back bouncin’ around. Anything, all the important stuff I have to do, when I have to go make a speech for the class or when outside people are comin in, I talk to myself. rc: What happens in the hearings?

Amir: I’ve only been to one so far. They gave me a positive recommendation. They felt that I should receive a pardon. rc: Do you think that’s going to happen?

Amir: Yes, I do. I think I’ll be free, whether through pardon or some great court decision or whatever. I don’t think my destiny is to die in prison. They gave me a pardon. I got it once, I can get it again. rc: What will you do your first day out?

Amir: Sex, sex and more sex.

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned

6 SCOTT

“I am really tired of people blaming the white man for his problems. You know what? I’m sitting in jail today, not because of what the white man, the black man, the Puerto Rican man or what Mom and Dad did to me. I’m sitting in jail because I wanted to, apparently. I knew what I was doing. I control my destiny. I do what I want. I’ve got to reap the consequences.”

Scott’s countenance is studious, his eyes and smile bright. Only after a close examination of his features and hair would you determine that he is half Puerto Rican and only after knowing his heritage could you detect an accent. He expressed himself freely and confidently. rc: Where did you grow up?

Scott: I grew up in Puerto Rico. The first six years of my life I spent in San Juan Scott is Puerto Rican. He has and then I lived for thirteen years near Ponce, which is the second largest city in served nearly four years of a Puerto Rico. We lived down there in a small community in the country. six year mandatory sentence rc: Where did you go after that? for trafficking in cocaine. He is Scott: I moved to the United States in 1979 and I have been in Delaware the last thirty-four years old. His sons six years. When I left Puerto Rico I was searching for something. My mom is from Michigan so I went to Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo. I lived there are four, five and nine. for about three years and I was totally confused and lost and moved from there to Allentown, Pennsylvania. I lived there for nine years where I went through a series of things and then I came to Delaware in 1988. rc: Was the confusion that you mentioned related to differences in language and culture?

Scott: Maybe some, but not really because my mom is American and although my first language was Spanish I was very fluent in English so there was no confusion as far as language. I think the confusion was when I came to the United States I got involved with cousins and friends and I started adapting to—I guess you could call it, the American way of the young people having fun and going out and enjoying themselves. When I was in Puerto Rico I was more or less sheltered. Like I said, I lived in the country and I was the only child for a lot of years and there wasn’t much to do. It was kind of boring, really. So when I came to the United States I got into partying and the drinking. The drugging and that coupled with low self-esteem and an assertiveness problem that I had and not being able to keep up with my studies—I became totally caught up in the drug scene and the alcohol scene. So after going through three years of that and finally being expelled from the University because of an incident, my parents asked me to come to Allentown and at that point—it was on my twenty-first birthday—I got on a bus and came to Allentown to kind of get myself together. rc: What are your parents like?

Scott: Well, my parents are an interesting couple. My dad is Puerto Rican—short guy—five-foot-two or three. He’s got the Indian, tan color. I kind of always wished that I had that color. Mom’s American. She’s about five-foot-five. They’re both educated people, both have Master’s degrees. My father’s a priest for the Episcopal Church. He came up here to Allentown as a pact that they had between the Dioceses of Bethlehem (Pa.) and Allentown and the Diocese of Puerto Rico. They wanted a priest to come up to Allentown and work with inner city people. Especially, I think the main focus was on Hispanics. So my dad came up and that’s where he was doing most of his work. He has had some complications because of my arrest and drug involvement. He was fired from his job as a priest, or released from his duties, but he does still practice his priesthood. He goes from church to church if they ask him to celebrate a mass. He has changed professions to Drug and Alcohol Counseling. Mom is a teacher. I believe her major was in Literature and English and minor in Spanish. It could of been reversed. I’m not quite sure but she spent most of her time as a teacher in Puerto Rico. She taught college, high school, middle school and elementary school. When she came to Allentown she did some substitute teaching and kind of stayed home to take care of us. Now she works for an accounting firm. I’m the oldest of three boys and I am eight years older than my second brother. rc: You have been smiling the whole time that you have been talking about them. You obviously love them very much.

Scott: Oh yeah, I love them. I smile about them because they are great people. I used to laugh at them because when you’re young you are rebellious. Dad and Mom tell you to get yourself together or you better do something with your life. I used to joke with them, “Well look, what have you done?” You know, “Look where you are. You’re barely making $30,000 a year and both of you have Master’s degrees.” I used to really make fun of them and now, as I’m going through this jail experience, I look back and I see that my way was wrong and their way was right. As children going into adulthood we don’t want to look at it that way. Sometimes it takes an experience like jail—I call this a desert experience. It’s a wake up call. It’s made me aware. I needed this. I don’t know if I needed six years, mandatory; however, by the grace of God my sentence has been commuted and I will probably end up doing four years and I am lucky to get out and pick up where I left off with my family because everybody is

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned sticking with me, especially the woman who I’ve been involved with since 1988, who has my children and she is still waiting. rc: You were with her when the arrest happened?

Scott: Yeah. I got involved with Jacki, while running from a bad marriage, a marriage that was on the rocks. I married a woman that I had courted from 1982 to 1986. She was eight years older than me. I always had reservations about the marriage.

The commitment on my part was not there. It only lasted about a year and three months. I started seeing other women and I got involved with Jacki. We had an affair and she became pregnant. I took advantage of my parents moving from Allentown to Delaware to start a new job, so I thought, let me move with them and I’ll start a new life. So I came down here and I got an apartment and I brought Jacki down with me. She was pregnant with my first child. We lived together. We never married and that is a sore issue right now on her part because I put the marriage off several times and during our period of living together we had two children, two sons and she has a son from a previous marriage. Going back to the day I got arrested—she was not in the house. My oldest son, who was two years old at the time, was in the house when the undercover policemen and State Police and everybody came in and did their drug raid. rc: What happened?

Scott: Okay, well, the circumstances only dealing with the arrest? rc: Start wherever you want.

Scott: I had been exposed to drugs and drug trafficking since 1987, maybe 1986. I had several close friends that were involved in it. I used to do drugs but I quit when I was twenty-one. One morning I just woke up and said no more and I quit. The only thing I could not quit was alcohol.

When I moved to Delaware I was heavily in debt. I had a new family so when I moved to Delaware I started working two jobs. I always worked two jobs. I was still being exposed to people who did drugs, so I began to think, well here I am and I know all these people who do drugs. I’m working two jobs and barely making a living. Why not take advantage of that black market? Supply them with what they want. I was very cocky about it because I figured my father is a priest and they’re good upstanding people in the community. The most I’d ever get was a slap on the wrist if I ever get caught and I was very naive and ignorant of the possible consequences. You know, I thought I could get people and friends to vouch for me and I would go in front of the judge and he would look at me as not the everyday “Joe Criminal”. So I was dealing from that viewpoint and I started supplying people that I knew with drugs and I got larger and larger. I always laugh about it because the person that I started with—I went to him and said that I know a lot of people where I work. I was working at a restaurant full time and at a bank full time, and at the restaurant everybody that worked there did drugs. I said, “How can I get into this business, this trade?” He said that $250 would get you started and I said that I don’t have it. So he said here’s seven grams, a quarter-ounce.

Go make your money. He said this is what you charge per gram. So I said okay and I called him about a half-hour later and said I sold it all. He said that’s great but I didn’t have any money. I had fronted it. I gave it out on credit. So he yelled at me and said that you don’t do that in this business because you might not get paid back. So I got started with seven grams that somebody had lent to me and I had lent it out and all the drug money came back and that’s how I began to get into the drug business. I wasn’t a major drug player but I got to the point where I was living pretty comfortably. I was no drug king pin but I think that I had associations that were major players. I was living pretty good. I was able to pay off bills. Credit collectors were calling, pestering me. I remember that I paid off a $5,000 debt in two months. I mean this was great for me. My pride went up. I mean I was ecstatic about it. I was buying things that I never had. I’m a car fan so I bought little race cars. I was really looking for the material stuff and I sacrificed a lot of things because of the drug involvement. I sacrificed the relationship that I was in with a woman that is still hanging with me. I thought I was taking care of her needs and taking care of her emotionally and everything.

I was buying her anything. I had money in the drawers. If she ever wanted anything she had it. Now, I realize that I was a pretty selfish. You know, all the proceeds that I got was mainly to pay off the bills and see what I could buy for me, to make me feel good because I guess I felt—and I still have to deal with it, because this is an addiction, it really is. I told you, and I’m going to clarify this, I’m not drug addicted. I don’t do drugs. rc: Period?

Scott: Period! But I drink alcohol so if alcohol is considering a drug—I drink. But I get into very, very major discussions with people and I’m not a psychoanalyst and I’m not a drug and alcohol counselor . . . rc: That doesn’t mean your opinions are invalid.

Scott: That’s right. I don’t believe that drinking led me to deal drugs and a lot of people say that drinking inhibits your judgment, which maybe led you to—Okay, well, I’m saying fine, that’s a valid point but I think what led me to deal drugs was an addiction to materialism. I’ve always been very material oriented. I’ve always compared myself to other people. “Well, he looks nice and he is driving a BMW and I look just as nice but I’m driving a Volkswagen. I could be doing that.” So I chose the quickest route that I could think of at that time—the fastest way to make money, which was dealing drugs. And it worked!

It was exciting. As I talk about it, you probably see me smiling. I smile because it was exhilarating. It was a high. I had several run-ins with the police before I got arrested and I got away. Here I am thinking I am a big criminal and now I realize as a

Robert A. Crimmins

criminal I was a real failure. So I wasn’t all that, but at the time I thought I was, you know, and coupled with the movies that they put out, like Scarface. I used to watch it once, twice a week and I thought that this is what I want to be. I want to be like this man, with all those millions, controlling people with power and bags of money where I could probably walk into a store and buy anything and that is what I wanted to be. That’s what I wanted to be and like I said it took a wake up call. If I hadn’t been arrested I would still be doing the same sort of thing today. I’d be dealing drugs. rc: How much money were you bringing in?

Scott: On weekends—because most of the business that I was doing was mainly Thursday, Friday, Saturday and a little bit on Sunday—but on a weekend I was probably making anywhere from three thousand to four thousand dollars. That’s why I say, I’m not—I wasn’t a major trafficker but I was living comfortably. Three or four thousand dollars, that was turn around. It was exciting. rc: We were leading up to the actual arrest?

Scott: Oh yeah. What happened was—most of my clients—I first started at the restaurant and most of my clients were people who worked there, but I began to expand a little bit and I began to pick up private clients, people who owned businesses, people who didn’t really want to be on the street corner buying drugs. They just needed somebody that they could call and who would deliver it to them, to their home, so that’s what I was leading my business to. rc: They were all white collar, business people?

Scott: Exactly, exactly, but I still had one or two stragglers from my restaurant days and that’s how I got arrested. I was dealing with this one person who moved a lot of drugs. He really did move a lot of drugs and when he couldn’t get a hold of me he would go down to Fourth Street in Wilmington where he had another connection. His connection in Wilmington got arrested and I believe he put the heat onto the guy that bought drugs from me. He was making drug buys off of me so that put us both under investigation. This went on for a month and finally we made, and when I say we, I mean my co-defendant and me, we made four sales to the police. The final sale was Friday, April 19, 1991 at about one o’clock. They came in on a drug raid and they caught just me in the house with my son. My codefendant called me and said that his friend—he called them his friend—was on his lunch break and wanted to make a buy for the weekend—a $3000 deal. So I said fine and I’ll meet you at the regular spot and he said no, I have to meet you. He said he is in a hurry. Can I meet you at your house and that was a no-no in my business and I should of seen the writing on the wall on what was happening.

The day before, when I went to buy the drugs that I needed for the weekend, my source asked why did I need so much and I said that I have this guy who is really starting to buy major quantity and they said be careful. It’s a set up. It could be cops.

I really didn’t believe them. I thought I had everything under control. He came to my house, my co-defendant did, and picked up the drugs and we talked and he said, can you give me a ride and I took him to where his ride was waiting for him, which was the police and I dropped him off and went back home. I pulled into my driveway, went upstairs and grabbed a beer and the drugs, which is another no-no and I believe that everything is destined to happen because I never kept drugs in my house.

I began to get very paranoid about two months before the arrest so I moved all drugs, all scales and all money, everything, out, but the night before they came to arrest me I was out late making a drug buy, so instead of going to the place where I kept it and waking those people up at three o’clock in the morning I just took it home, not thinking about it, and that’s when they came and got me.

I was sitting on the couch. My briefcase with the drugs and the money was sitting there and I heard a knock on the door and my door was open. I figured that it was my next-door neighbor coming to say hi or maybe ask to turn the stereo down or somethin’. So when I looked up I said, “What do you want?” and then I seen that he had a gun out and several cars with their doors open and the next thing I know there was police coming in from the back door, the side door and the front door and some of them had ski masks on and they had guns all over the place. I knew what was going down so I stepped back and put my hands up and my son was standing right next to me and he started crying so I held him. The police said to sit down in the chair and asked me questions. Who else is in the house? Nobody. Do you have any guns? No, I don’t have anything and they patted me down and asked me several questions and one thing I always admire—I asked the detective, the one at the door with the gun—I asked them what is going to happen to my son. He said, “Oh, I don’t know. The state will probably take him,” and that really perturbed me and so I asked him can I make a phone call and he said yes. I’ve always admired that because they could of been real hard core if they wanted to but they allowed me to make the call. I called my dad and I said, “Dad, I don’t have time to talk right now. Just come and pick up James. I’m at the house. I’ve got the police here.” Dad might have suspected that I was involved with drugs so he came and picked up my son and that’s the first time that I’d seen my dad cry and he tried to hide it.

He came in and asked the police what was going to happen to me, and they said well, he is under arrest and they asked that he not mention this to anybody.

I am glad they let me call my dad for my son’s sake. I’m also very glad that my wife—I call her my wife even though we’re not married. I love her very much. I’m glad that she wasn’t there because anybody that was there would of been arrested.

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned It would of been disastrous. I think that it might even of torn us apart. If she had been arrested too, the kids, I guess, would of been wards of the State. I really don’t know but I’m just glad that she was not there because she really had nothing to do with it. She knew because you can’t be that naive and that stupid to think that I wasn’t dealing drugs but she was opposed to it. rc: So you never discussed it with her?

Scott: I discussed it but any time—if anybody—let’s say that I get a call and I wasn’t able to deliver myself and if any hints were made to have my wife deliver—no! She is not involved in this. This is me. She reaped the rewards. She spent the money, but she was very adamant against it. Her first marriage ended up in failure because of drugs. From what I understand, her first husband was abusive towards her and it related to a drug problem and she didn’t want to be involved with anybody who did drugs. So I did not do drugs. I supplied drugs which is bad but I guess she kind of accepted that. We discuss it and there is a lot of anger and a lot of hurt on her part that I just up and left her for four years. She warned me about it, that this could happen.

I didn’t listen. rc: Was the arrest traumatic for your son?

Scott: I wonder about that because my brother just this past Christmas gave me a ski mask, a full mask, the same as the police used. rc: Was that a joke?

Scott: No. He gave it to me because it was cold. My father put it on when my son was there and he didn’t have any real reaction to it but he told my dad to take it off. So I think he remembers or he has some flashbacks but they’re loving children. rc: So you are very close to your family?

Scott: They have been very supportive. rc: Your parents and Jacki?

Scott: Well, yes and no. My parents have been very, very supportive and Jacki has been very supportive in the sense that she accepts my phone calls because I call collect. When in jail you call collect, and she allows the children to come and see me just about every weekend. No more than two weekends will go by without me seeing my children. When I first began doing time—it’s almost like this was more important, you know, the salvage of my relationship to her, was more important than the time that I was doing. I had to come to grips with the realization that I was in jail and there was nothing I could do. I had to let go. It was only through talking to guys that have done time, because everybody in jail has advice for you, but when you sit down and start looking at the guys who have done time, massive time, to where they have experienced the loss of a spouse, maybe a divorce or the break-up of their family and when they tell me, look you’re very fortunate that she even accepts your calls. You’re fortunate that she allows your parents to bring your children. You’re fortunate that she comes and visits you once a month or once every two months. She has been very supportive. I get angry at her because I say, why don’t you write to me more often or why don’t you come and visit me more often or why don’t we communicate more. But I have to understand. I guess I haven’t walked in her shoes and I guess I don’t understand what she is going through. rc: Is she still in the house you were living in?

Scott: No. When I got arrested she didn’t want to go back to the house. When they did the drug raid they pretty much went through everything and it was just a complete mess. The day I got arrested I called my parents and my brother and said to go back to the house and get the valuable stuff. Take the electronics out, get the car, because I didn’t know if they were going to come back and confiscate anything. rc: Did they?

Scott: You know, amazingly, they didn’t. I don’t know why they didn’t pursue it because they could have. On the warrants there was two vehicles that I did drug transactions in that was mentioned. Now the race car that I had—I call it the race car—I guess they never knew that I had it because I always had it in the garage. I had one policeman ask me, “Was this video camera bought with drug money,” and of course, I said no. But I imagine that if I had said yes, he would of taken it. But Jacki didn’t want to go back to the house. She went back to clean up and got everything back to where it was supposed to be but then she went back to Allentown to live with her mom. rc: That’s where she and the boys are now?

Scott: Right, and they have done great. Jacki has done absolutely great on her own. My mom used to tell me, she used to say, “Scott, you better start treating that girl right.” I guess I got cocky during the end of my drug adventure and thought that I was invincible. What Mom was trying to tell me was I should marry her. You know, I used to be cocky and say that nobody is going to want that woman. Nobody is going to want her with three children. Now I see what she’s done, because she’s done it on her own. I didn’t leave her any money. I didn’t leave her anything. She’s gone back to an old job that she had which is a manager at McDonald’s, and she’s taking care of the kids. I admire her for what she is doing. rc: Part of the wake up call?

Scott: Yeah, yeah. I think she has found herself as far as what she can do. We both have problems, you know, we have our problems but she’s doing great. She is still angry and bitter at me because I’m not there to help when she’s having the bad days

Robert A. Crimmins

with the kids because the children do get on her nerves. I mean three children, nine, five and four, you can imagine. rc: Was your trial fair?

Scott: I didn’t go to trial. I was nailed good and I knew that I couldn’t go to trial, especially in Delaware. If I was to go to trial I knew I would of gotten at least fifty-seven years, mandatory. That was just on trafficking alone. So the best thing that we could do was plea, plea out, and I took a plea to two traffickings. We had five altogether, my co-defendant and me, and they threw three out and I plead to two. rc: What have you learned?

Scott: I have learned my lesson but I have to state this for the record that I don’t think it is fair when the Attorney General looks at a case, he says, well, this guy was a drug dealer and he should be punished harsher than the person who buys the drugs. Now everything is relative, I understand, but I have an addiction. I have an addiction to materialism. I have an addiction to money, I have an addiction to power. I don’t have an addiction to drugs like cocaine or crack. It’s not fair, I don’t think, to say because he was strictly a drug dealer who did it strictly for profit, we need to give him a stiffer penalty. I’m sure there is two views to everything because everything, you know, if it’s black, it’s white, if it’s yes, it’s no. We can have opposing viewpoints. rc: So you think your problem is a different form of addiction?

Scott: Definitely. rc: Is there treatment for your particular kind of addiction? Or do you just have to recognize it?

Scott: You have to recognize it and I guess there might be an overall or general treatment for addiction, because I guess all addictions are the same as far as certain symptoms, certain warning signs, certain relapse factors that go into it but when I go to this drug program, which I am going to today at three o’clock, hopefully they can teach me something about addictions in general and not about drugs. rc: Your addiction is one that you should have. The world turns around power, and money and material things.

Scott: Right. Right. My addiction wasn’t wrong. The avenue that I used to achieve what I wanted was wrong. That’s why I smiled when you asked what I’ve learned. Yeah, I have learned my lesson. I know now what the consequences are if I were to go out and do this same thing again. I could lose the woman I love. I could lose my fatherhood with my children. I would hurt my mom and dad. I would lose my freedom. I think about it every day. rc: The money and the cars?

Scott: Yeah. In certain situations—looking at something on TV or talking to drug dealers that are in it for profit—we sit down at dinner and have a conversation. It’s exciting, and I feel myself right back there and I have to pull back. So the addiction to power and money and wealth or materialism is not bad. It’s just the avenue that I used and I need to find something to replace it. I’m searching for something. Maybe it’s right there. rc: Was this your first arrest?

Scott: Yeah. rc: How did you feel the first day in jail?

Scott: When I was arrested I was taken to the State Police barracks on Rt. 13. They threw me into this little cell and it was the most—they only had me in there for two hours but it was the longest two hours, and then I was transported to Gander Hill.

I wasn’t scared at first. They took me to Gander Hill and put me through booking and receiving. They threw me into one of the holding cells and I was back there with about five or six guys and everybody is interested in everybody else’s business.

Everybody said they’ll probably give you a quarter-million dollar bail. I’m thinking that maybe they’ll give me a two or three thousand dollar bail or something that I could post. Well when they started talking a quarter-million dollar bail—this was from the jail birds—the guys that know, I’m thinking, I can’t post that kind of money. Sure enough, about nine o’clock at night I went before the judge and they set bail at $260,000. I couldn’t believe it. There’s no way I could make that. So I called Mom and she was crying. I called Jacki and she was upset. She went back to smoking. They threw me back into the holding cell with a sandwich, because I hadn’t eaten all day, since one o’clock. Here I am, used to eating fairly good, and I’m eating a bologna sandwich. I didn’t get upstairs, which they call the main pods, ‘til about two o’clock in the morning. Every time I think about this, from the booking and receiving—this was the old Gander Hill—they took us down from booking and receiving through this corridor that must of been the length of a football field, at least. All I could think about was The Longest Yard with Burt Reynolds—that long corridor. There was three of us, and I think there was a spiritual experience because at the time, I knew about God and spiritual things but I had put that on the back burner. I wasn’t even thinking about that. I knew that a change was needed about a month or two before I got arrested. I would come home and look at my children in bed and say to myself, I need to be a better father to these kids. When I was doing drug deals, at times I would find myself saying the Our Father. I need a change—whoever is listening, if it’s God, it’s God, whoever is listening. The change happened. When this guy took me down this longest yard, up to this pod, it was dark and everybody was sleeping in their cells. There are two men to a cell.

Everything was dark. I couldn’t see, and the guard says, “. . . Cell 17”. I couldn’t see. Where is Cell 17? I can’t see. So I try to find it—touching the wall to find my way and I’m wondering, who’s my cell mate. I didn’t know. I didn’t know if it was going

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned to be this big brute. I’m not a big guy. So I find the door and I walk in, real quiet. And the first thing that I saw when I walked into Cell 17, was this window and outside there was a light pole. The light beaming into this window was hitting a cross on the wall and I swear when I looked into this cross something said to me, everything is going to be all right. I got into my bed—this narrow, steel frame thing with a thin mattress and scratchy sheets, and that’s when the shock—that’s when I realized, “Hey bud, you’re in jail.” I cried that night, a little. I was scared because this was the beginning of a very long trip. rc: What happened in the morning? What was it like waking up in jail for the first time?

Scott: Well the next morning was funny. I woke up and my cell mate asked all these questions like who are you and are you Spanish? Then he yelled out to the pod, “Hey, I got your cousin in here!” He called out to some Spanish guy and everybody’s like, who? I ain’t got no cousin in jail. There was two or three Spanish guys out there. I, of course, gravitated towards Spanish people because I could identify with them quicker and I could talk the language. They called chow and again, another shock to my system. My first meal in jail was what we call SOS, you know, “shit on a shingle”, and I had never eaten SOS. I thought it was Cream of Wheat and when I put this stuff in my mouth, I just about gagged. I thought I would have to run to the toilet and I spit this stuff out and I said, “What is this stuff!?” and they were laughing. “Let me have it”, someone said and they had a good time with SOS but I’m starvin’. My first two or three days were hectic. I lost a lot of weight. People used to tell me, don’t think you are going to starve yourself in jail. They got a place for you if you want to do that. It’s the Pink Room. rc: The Pink Room?

Scott: The Pink Room is a room down in the infirmary for you if you are suicidal or if you’re causing too much trouble.

They’ll put you in the Pink Room and many times they’ll take your clothes because if you’re suicidal you can’t have anything that might cause harm. I went through a lot of depression. I contemplated suicide. I planned it all out. I was getting all these pills. I was calling medical and saying I need to get on this and they say what is wrong with you? I was planning on taking a lot of pills to take me out because I was facing a lot of time and I was really scared. rc: At that point, how much time did you think you were going to get?

Scott: A lot of guys that I knew in jail said they’d give me three years. That’s all they’re giving traffickers. But then they hit me with what they call a Rule Nine—a secret indictment. The next thing I know, I’m facing twenty-seven years, mandatory. I lost it. I said, “Aw man”. So when I went up for my first plea, my attorney said fifteen years mandatory. I said no. I can’t do it.

I’m not—I can’t do it. My exact words were, “You go tell that prosecutor that I’m going to kill myself. I’m not doing fifteen years.” I’m a first time offender. I knew I had broken the law in a big way. I’m not trying to deny that, but God! Fifteen years for a first offender. Cut me a break! Things worked out. I was offered a plea at eight years and that was it. The prosecutor said he wouldn’t go any lower and I was willing to go with that after six months of fighting with these people. I was willing to go with it on the assumption that I would do four years and try to get commutation. By the grace of God, when I went up to sign the plea—my mom had written a letter to the prosecutor, from a mother’s perspective, kind of begging for mercy—he said okay, six years mandatory under the condition that when he finishes his six years he’ll go to a two and a half year drug program that they have in Allentown. It’s a Hispanic drug program that my father has been instrumental in getting started. I was really excited about that and I signed that plea but when I went before the judge he said that I’m going to give him six years mandatory and we’re going to forget about the drug program. If he wants to do drug rehabilitation he’ll do it while he’s in jail and I’ll give him a lot of probation, fifteen years. rc: Was that because he knew that you were not a drug addict?

Scott: No, he didn’t know. I mean my whole story has been that I’m a drug addict because I can’t go in with a story saying that I’m not. rc: Why? Scott: They could of hit me hard for just selling drugs. If I say that I’m not an addict—if they prove that I’m not an addict they can give me a stiffer penalty. They can give me more mandatory time. They could give me three years for the trafficking and another six mandatory or twelve mandatory for just not being an addict—just being a seller for pure profit. When I first went—when I walked into booking and receiving there are forms there that the nurses fill out. Do you do drugs? And I said yes, I do drugs. What do you do? I do cocaine and alcohol. I do everything. I wrote everything under the sun. You had to tell them that you’re an addict and that’s what my story was. I was an addict. It’s always been that. rc: Is it still a secret?

Scott: I keep it under raps for certain people but when I get close to certain people—I’ve told some of the counselors here that I don’t do drugs and they have been understanding. I don’t care who knows the story now. My sentence has been commuted.

I’m going to a drug program. It won’t hurt me unless I come back to jail and I’m not counting on that. rc: Has anything particularly bad happened to you in prison?

Scott: You know, I can’t think of any really bad experiences that I have had in prison. The normal stuff. You know how society thinks of prison. If you go into the bathroom and you drop the soap look out. They got rapists in there, you know. It never happened to me. If you bring anything bad upon yourself then it is really your own fault because it depends on how you

Robert A. Crimmins

carry yourself. I don’t carry myself as some big macho guy. I sort of stay to myself and I’m not in everybody’s business. If I see something that goes wrong, that’s their problem, and I might turn and act like I didn’t see it. It’s not very often that you see fights in jail. One thing that wasn’t real bad but it wasn’t so great either happened with a cell mate. When you’re in jail you go through a lot of cell mates, especially when you’re in pre trial. I was in the same cell for two or three months and I went through four cell mates. I had this one that was strange. When he came in he was very inquisitive about the bathing tactics.

Was this communal bathing? Is it true what they say, if you drop the soap and everybody is watching and they might rape you and this and that. They have something in prison called shake down. They strip you down to nothing and make you bend over and pick up your genitals and they look. They’re looking for contraband. I explained to him all the details and he didn’t take a shower for a week. He really didn’t. He would come out and eat and then go back in. I try to be friendly and if you’re nasty or I don’t like you then I’ll leave you alone or be nasty back but first I’ll try to accommodate you. So I’m trying to like, you know, what’s wrong with you? I got him in our Bible study and I was trying to get him in this or that and the other Puerto Rican guys told me that I better be careful. Something is funny about him. He didn’t tell me that he was homosexual or give me any indications that he was. So one day my friends were telling me that he’s going to do something to you tonight. So I’m in bed on the bottom bunk and I see him trying to look over his bunk, to look down at me. I immediately knew that something was wrong but I kept my eyes closed and I fell asleep. Well about two o’clock I heard him get off his bunk and go to the toilet. We had a toilet in the cell, but he didn’t do anything. He just stood there like he had to urinate but he didn’t. He went to the window and was looking outside and I was trying to watch but I don’t want him to know that I’m up and I doze off again and the next thing I know—I feel—he touches me. This guy is touching me and you can imagine where he is touching me. He’s touching me on my privates. I froze. I said wait a minute. I’m not home with Jacki. I’m in prison in a cell with another man so I just hauled off and punched this guy as hard as I could. He took a couple steps back and he was upset and he was yelling at me and I was just banging on the door and I said, “If you ever do that again . . . !” I know I cursed at him, because I was upset and you know how the adrenaline flows in you. I kicked the door and I got the guards to come and it was just an embarrassing experience.

I woke the whole pod up and I know they heard me saying that this guy is playing with my you know what. So it was a big thing and they were going to take me off of the pod and I said, “He’s new. He’s only been here for two weeks. Why don’t you move him.” They ended up moving him. It was the most embarrassing—because everybody knew. The next morning, here I am going to breakfast with sixty men and they’re saying somebody was playing with his johnson and it’s like, Oh Lord! That was probably the most embarrassing thing.

Another time I was really angry. I really got involved with public speaking: Toastmasters International. We competed and won several times and moved up the ladder and we were getting ready to go to the division level. Everything in jail is security and paperwork. There is too much bureaucratic red tape and they just canceled it on us at the last minute and the Warden couldn’t be found and the Deputy Warden didn’t want to make a decision for us to go out and compete. We had already been out eight or nine times and we weren’t a risk. We were trustees and they just yanked it and that really upset me.

You try to find somebody in jail to talk to. There are no real mentors in jail but you always find somebody that you try to identify with, maybe I can learn from his experience and he used to tell me, “Look, just remember where you are at.” rc: Who was that?

Scott: This is one guy that has been down for a while. rc: How long?

Scott: Twenty years probably. I’ve always looked up to him and I could always go to him when I had a problem and at least listen to him. He knows what he is saying and then I would have to go back into my cell and meditate on it and I would be at peace with myself. He always encourages people, you know, “Remember where you came from. Remember what you are trying to do and don’t act on your emotions.” It is very easy to get tied up on your emotions when you are in jail. Jail can be a stepping stone or a stumbling block. You can come to jail and just lay around and play cards and lift weights and do push ups and who cares. “I don’t know how to read. I don’t know how to write a letter and I don’t know God and I don’t care.” Or you can come to jail and say well, I’ve made some mistakes, yeah, I’ve got time on my hands. I know there is more to me and I know that I can do better, let me do something about it. rc: What are you doing?

Scott: I have done a lot of things. One of the things that I did—and I fought it. I fought it tooth and nail. I had to come to peace with God, with my maker. When I came to jail I didn’t come looking for God, and that’s why I believe there was a spiritual experience. When I came to jail I was thrown in with a Christian. rc: Cell 17?

Scott: Right. And everybody says that it’s a blessed cell. A lot of people that have been in that cell go home. So I saw all of this Christianity stuff around and I come from a Christian background. Whether he picked up Christianity when he came to jail, I don’t care. The point was I was exposed to that. They were having Bible studies and I fought going. I wasn’t going. I’m not going. For three weeks I fought it.

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned rc: Why? Scott: Because everybody that comes to jail becomes Christians or Muslims but they weren’t thinking about God on the streets. I’m not going to do that. I wasn’t thinking about God on the street. Going to Chapel was a big thing and they offer Chapel for the prison three or four nights a week. So our night was Wednesday. It was a night to get together with your buddies.

I was going down with the Puerto Ricans and we were having a good time joking and laughing. But the first time I went down I was listening a little bit to the preacher but I wasn’t going to stand up and praise the Lord or accept Jesus Christ because I didn’t want to be the sissy of the group. The second week I went down and I didn’t do it. The third week I went down and I couldn’t resist. I just had to get up. I closed my eyes and I got up and I felt peace. That was the first thing that I had to do, was come to peace with God. Religion and racism and all that is something else. The second thing that I had to do was study myself. I was writing things down. What type of person are you Scott? What are your weaknesses and what are your strengths? Why do you think you dealt drugs? I’ve done this myself. There’s not a group in jail that can really break it down. I’ve done all the groups that they wanted me to. I’ve played the game but I don’t give those people any credit. I did it. I’ve read a lot of books. The first day that I was in jail—I came to jail Friday. With my dad being a priest, he was able to get access to jail so he came right in to visit me. He came right in on the pod on a Saturday and he brought me a book. It was, As a Man Thinketh, and my mom wrote on the inside something about you can do whatever you set your mind to do and that got me interested in reading things of a positive nature. I really got hooked on Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schooler, Anthony Robins. They’re motivators.

I read the Bible and I picked scriptures that are positive, like, “I can do all things through him that believes in Christ” and “the Kingdom of God is within” and I meditate and I repeat these things to myself. rc: You treat them as rules to live by or aspects of therapy rather than things to worship?

Scott: It’s therapeutic but it’s spiritual too. I have had a spiritual awakening. I know I have because I felt complete peace when I accepted Jesus Christ. I’m not at peace when I talk about any other religion. I have peace when I talk about Jesus Christ. Now I’m not going to get involved with all that, all of the theology about it, but I use the spiritual principles or the Biblical principles also, like you said, as ways to live. When I get away from the spiritual—let’s say that I get away from the Bible for a month.

I’ve gotten away from reading my daily bread in the Bible for a month—I feel turmoil. I feel—I’m not at peace, but when I get back to reading it, it gives me some sort of relaxation. Another thing that I had to do is—I’ve really gotten into physical fitness in jail. I lift weights now more in jail then I did. I took paralegal courses. One thing I wish I could of done, was to take vocational training. I like carpentry. I like electricity and they don’t offer these things. They might offer it down at DCC but at Gander Hill they don’t. Then they wonder why it is when guys get out they go back to doing the same thing. There’s been a big movement since I have been in jail towards education. They talk about how important education is. Well big deal if I get a G.E.D. It might boost my self-esteem and it might even motivate me to go on to college but what kind of living can I make with a G.E.D.? Now if I learn a vocation, a skill like carpentry or data entry, something that I can go out and use, I can see how I can make money. I think you would not see as many guys coming back. I see too many people coming back. rc: What do you think of the idea of making prisons tougher on people?

Scott: There could be more discipline. Now when I say discipline though I’m not talking about a write up because I had two packs of sugar on me. I mean big deal! I’m a coffee drinker and they give you three packs of sugar in the morning. If I have more than three packs of sugar in my room I get a write up—loss of all privileges and this goes into my file and when it comes to classification time, oh Lord! look at all these write ups! Or an orange, “Oh, he had an orange!” Well, excuse me for trying to get vitamin C while I am here in jail. I mean discipline as far as, wake up, get structured, you know. Wake up at eight o’clock and make your bed but have something for them to do. Don’t just wake me up at eight and not have anything for me to do. I mean if you are going to keep me—if I broke the law and I have to come to prison, okay, punishment is one of the aspects of this whole thing and make sure that he doesn’t go out and commit crimes, but I know for me, one of the reasons that I did what I did was that I am very undisciplined. I can’t keep any commitments. I have problems with low self-esteem but I think that my lack of discipline, my lack of commitment is part of my problem and I think that’s where prison should be tougher, from a discipline standpoint. Don’t call in the goon squad and beat this guy up because he cursed at a guard; not discipline like that.

I look at guys that come through here and I’m blessed because I come from a good family background and I’m going to make it. I know that I can make it. But there are guys—blacks and Hispanics that can’t communicate. I mean, what kind of job are they going to get, and then they wonder why they come back. The people in this administration—maybe it’s a game. Maybe it’s a way to make a living. It’s definitely a money maker. Let’s build more prisons, you know. It’s one of the careers for the next century, Correctional Officer. And does that term really apply? Are they Correctional Officers or are they merely being guards? rc: What’s your answer to that?

Scott: They’re guards. There’s a movement to make them, the officers, more aware that the badge they wear is “Correctional Officer” and there is more to it then just being a guard and watching us and coming in at eight and leaving at four and make sure that he is a Code Red where he is supposed to be and Code Green and all this other craziness that they go through. rc: Are Officers and the Corrections officials working on changes?

Robert A. Crimmins

Scott: Maybe some, not all, I mean how do you think that drugs get into prisons? There are other ways to get it in but the main way drugs get into prison is through officers and more than likely it is an officer that has a habit. Because if he brings something in for me, maybe the connection that I have outside can give him something. rc: Is it a pervasive problem? Are there a lot of drugs in jail?

Scott: Oh yeah! Yeah, there is drugs in jail. Sure is. And another thing. I have a serious problem with a jail that is all men being run by all women. Gander Hill—I mean, I don’t know what kind of background this woman comes from? What if she has been abused by a guy? If she has feelings against men then she’s not going to be in my best interest and these are comments that circulate through the prison. The Deputy Warden is a man but the Warden is a woman, the whole classification staff in Records is all women. I don’t know the personal lives of those women that run Gander Hill but what I know first hand, from speaking to them, is that a lot of them don’t like to make decisions. They are afraid to make a decision about an inmate because if the inmate screws up, uh oh, it looks bad on me. Your job is not to try and predict the future, you can’t predict my future behavior.

I’ve played the game, I’ve done all the programs that you want me to do and now if I go out and I screw up, that’s because I guess I did what I wanted to. I also did what you wanted while I was here. I wonder, can a woman, dealing with people’s lives as far as moving them on through the classification system to where more benefits are open to him—is the fact that maybe she was a battered spouse, is that going to hamper that decision? Can she actually separate it? I don’t think so. Where are the men counselors that maybe we can relate to? rc: Another man that I interviewed had a similar objection to your’s about the staff, but his problem was with race rather than gender. He commented that it’s wrong that most of the staff is white and they can’t relate to the black prisoners because of cultural differences.

Scott: Well, that could be. How about a white guard relating to a Hispanic inmate. You might have a white guard, that because a Hispanic does not know how to talk English and when he tries to communicate, he gets excited. That’s just part of his nature.

I mean if you don’t understand the cultural differences or the man when he speaks—he is speaking loud, maybe that’s just the way he speaks, and all of a sudden you’re going to lock him down. Then you wonder why he’s now getting violent. In jail—I told this to my mom the other night. Jail has made me hate people. I used to be the type of guy who would do anything and everything for you but I am tired—I am really tired of people blaming the white man for his problems. You know what? I’m sitting in jail today, not because of what the white man, the black man, the Puerto Rican man or what Mom and Dad did to me.

I’m sitting in jail because I wanted to, apparently. I knew what I was doing. I control my destiny. I do what I want, and I’ve got to reap the consequences. Nobody else made me deal drugs. The white man didn’t put no gun to my head. “Oh, the white man brings the drugs into this country”, well God bless him. He brought them into this country and I made money. I used to teach PRC classes, Pre Release, life skills and stuff like this. I used to get the guys to look at themselves. If you don’t know how to read don’t blame somebody else. Can you do something about it? I just hate people when they start blaming somebody else.

In prison you have a lot of that.

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned

7 WALTER

“Bein’ locked in the hole and being told when to go to bed and when to get up and when to eat, that’s bad, but the most humiliating part of the entire experience is that initial blast of the delouse spray, and the way that it’s administered: from a bug spray can.”

I spoke with Walter at the Plummer Center in a room the Officers use as a break room. Walter is a large man and he was dressed in a poorly fitting and carelessly laundered prison uniform. His hand was bandaged.

He walked in very slowly and he only nodded during the introduction. He sat down in the chair at the end of the table, put his hands behind his head and leaned the chair against the wall.

He spoke slowly. His voice was deep and his tone malevolent. At first I thought that he was an angry man unable to express himself. As our conversation progressed it became clear that I was right about his anger and wrong about his powers of communication.

rc: Where did you grow up?

Walter is forty-five and single. He Walter: Grew up in Newark, New Jersey. has three children. His crime was rc: Tell me about your parents.

Walter: My mother—her name is Elizabeth. My father’s name is Charles. They possession of cocaine with intent separated when I was very young and I grew up in the projects—Boyd Street to deliver and he is serving a six projects in New Jersey. It was a pretty rough neighborhood but I can’t remember month sentence. He previously ever wanting for anything. Not like the typical stereotype—poor, and you know, served sixteen years for kidnapping. not enough to eat, clothes to wear, stuff like that. We were poor but I can’t ever remember being hungry or cold or not having something to wear, nothing like that. I stayed there ‘til I was about fourteen and then we moved here. At that time I did fit a stereotype in terms of getting in with the wrong crowd, but by that time in my life I was the wrong crowd. I did graduate from high school and went to college. I had a lot of opportunities that a lot of kids don’t have or won’t take. I came from a two-side-of-the-track family. On my mother’s side there wasn’t very much, but on my father’s side I had a lot of aunts and uncles and there was school teachers and my grandfather was prominent in the community.

We moved to the projects again over here in Riverside. When I went into the service, I went to Vietnam and got honorably discharged. When I came back, almost immediately, I went to jail and that’s where the downward spiral started, in 1975. I went to jail for kidnapping. rc: What happened?

Walter: Well, I had a girlfriend and her parents didn’t approve of our relationship. She was a little younger than I was and they didn’t approve of our relationship because she was white and I was black. It was always a constant battle of trying to gain their approval. So one night they said that I kidnapped her right, and they forced her to say that and she said it. So I went to jail on a sixty-five year sentence. rc: Was it a false charge?

Walter: Yeah. I didn’t kidnap her. It was just that she was younger and whatever they said do, she did. I have seen her a couple of times since I got out, but we um, haven’t talked. I don’t want to talk. That’s over. rc: Was that the first time you were ever arrested?

Walter: The very first time as an adult. I was incarcerated a whole lot of times as a juvenile. Little stuff, like joy ridin’ in a stolen car and little petty theft and burglaries and stuff like that but never—never like any of the stuff you see today. Never anything like what you see today. No shootings and all kinds of that stuff. I never did that stuff. rc: No violent crimes?

Walter: No. We might do break-ins or steal a car or hot wire a car, you know, stuff like that. The guys I hung around with— that’s basically what we did, is steal cars and joy ride in them. You know, try to impress girls and stuff like that. We never went into robberies. I never did robberies or stuff like that. When I went into the service and when I came back I had a girlfriend and that’s what happened. rc: How long were you in?

Walter: Sixteen years. rc: Where did you go to school?

Walter: I went to P.S. duPont. I went to Norfolk Jr. High School in New Jersey. I went to Bradford Music Institute in New Jersey and I went to Norfolk Middle School and P.S. duPont High School. I went to the University of Delaware and they wanted to give me a full track scholarship and all that. I hurt myself and I became disillusioned. See that’s why I can’t hold anyone responsible for the opportunities that I missed out on in my life, because a lot of the things I had opportunities to do, I didn’t take advantage of. That’s why I am reluctant to listen when people give up the “poor me” thing about how they don’t

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned have opportunities. We all have choices about what direction in life we take. You have to choose and it may not seem that great or that logical in the beginning, but the choices that are not that pleasant are usually the ones that are necessary. So I make no excuses in terms of the things that I missed. I make no excuses. rc: What were the pivotal choices in your life?

Walter: Well, I could of—I believe—I sincerely believe that I could of went to the Olympics. I sincerely believe that. I was that fast. rc: What event?

Walter: Hundred yard dash. I believe that I could of went to the Olympics, I was that fast. I was that fast, really that fast, and I was so fast that one night—we were in a stolen car over here on 23rd Street, by the park, and they got behind us because they knew. Back in those days it was a family thing. The police knew your mom and dad and all that. And we parked the car and jumped out and then started runnin’. There was three of us and I was in the back seat and the car had bucket seats. It was like a fashion statement to have a car with bucket seats. It was a two door. A four door was a sin—four door was a family car and that was like the Nelson’s car. You didn’t drive that, stolen or otherwise. We knew that they basically had us. So we pulled off to the side of the road, and turned the car sideways so the police couldn’t get past. I got out and we took off running towards the projects. The other guys took off before me but I passed them before we got to one side of the park from the other. They caught them but I was already gone. They knew it was me so the next day—they didn’t come to my house that night, the next day on my way to school they pulled up and stopped me. “Well, you didn’t catch me last night so there is nothing that you can do today. Last night it was dark,” you know. I don’t have anything to say. You know, following the basic codes, you don’t tell the police anything. They pulled up and got out of the car and they handcuffed me and took me to school and we went in and talked to the principal. The principal called the gym teacher and they all talked. They called me in and took the handcuffs off of me and the gym teacher said, “I want you to sign up for the track team.” I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be the star of the basketball team. That’s where all the girls were and that’s where the prestige was so I was like, no, I don’t think so. They called my mom, and my mom and dad showed up and they told them that your son needs to sign up for the track team because he is this and that. I said no, I don’t want to try. The officer took me out in the hallway and said that we haven’t told your parents yet that you were in a stolen car and we haven’t told them anything about anything else. If you do this we won’t tell them. And it was sort of funny because I would rather you arrest me than tell my mom, you know. If you have to call the police, call the police, just don’t call my mom. Call my dad in the middle of the night but don’t call my mother whatever you do. So I agreed and they tried me out. I didn’t look at it as being all that great because that’s all we ever did was run and horse around and play.

It was a game. I never looked at running as real serious. I instantly made the team. I stayed on the team from the tenth grade to the twelfth grade. I got hurt in the twelfth grade. Then they took me down to Delaware State and I ran against their track team and they had three guys for the hundred yard dash. I trained with them for a couple of days and blew them away. Then they really wanted me to go to the University of Delaware—full scholarship and everything. I got hurt. I pulled a hamstring. I didn’t tear anything, just pulled a hamstring. They had pumped me up so much with how fast I was and how great I was and when I got hurt I didn’t feel that anymore. I felt like that was the end. So I ran again but I ran to the service. It sort of broke everyone’s heart that I did that. The injury really wasn’t that bad. rc: What did you do in Vietnam?

Walter: I shot at people. I was an infantry soldier, that’s all. The talent for running pays off there, when bullets are flyin’.

It’s not an experience—I’m not particularly proud of it and looking back, it’s not an experience that I would have liked to encounter. But I think for me, in a lot of ways, it was necessary. rc: Why is that?

Walter: Because when you are in a situation like that, where everything is serious, there is no contrast. Everything is very, very serious. You have to grow up real quick, you know. There is no time for fun and games. There is no time for laughin’ and jokin’.

This is a very serious situation and you need to be aware of that if you wanted to stay alive. That’s what it is all about. Cut and dry. There is no fine print at the bottom of the page, none of that. So you do one of two things. You either take the situation as seriously as it is or you die. That’s probably why I have had so many problems with the Department of Correction—with the decisions that I am making in my life, because I chose to not consider anything else but me, and when you do that, then you do the same thing over again. There is no contrast, you know; everything is in gray. You see, life isn’t like that. There are five point nine billion people on the planet. I’m not the only one. So even though you get bumps and bruises you have to consider other people. You mentioned earlier about society being able to appreciate my situation and my circumstances right, and being able to understand where I am at or where I am coming from and I don’t necessarily agree. I don’t think that a person that commits a crime needs to be appreciated, right. However, I do feel that prisoners need to be treated humanely. That’s all, just humanely.

And society needs to be aware of the fact that the money that is put into prisons don’t necessarily get a whole lot. It is not like I live in the Hilton when I am in prison. It’s not like the dollars spent to keep a person in jail are put into my commissary account.

I only see it in the terms of the nasty ass food that they serve and the clothes that don’t fit that they give me and the sheets that

Robert A. Crimmins

are too rough, you know. And the second grade basketballs and weight equipment and all that, right. That’s how I see it and that’s how I get it. That’s how I get that back. The money can be better spent. rc: You raised a point about society’s recognition of the conditions. A lot of people believe that jail should be more harsh than it is. Could that help somehow?

Walter: I don’t think they need to be harsher, per se, because when you get into harsh, right, now you’re crossin’ the line. If you’re saying that people need to be treated more roughly, you’re getting into an abuse thing. Servitude breeds insurrection. If you abuse somebody long enough eventually that is what you get back. So that’s what society gets back, the way people are treated in jail. If I sit there—if I’m allowed to sit there and feel sorry for myself for sixteen years, right, when I leave prison I am going to come out thinking that you owe me something for those sixteen years I spent in prison. You owe me something for that, right, because I haven’t addressed any of the issues or problems that I may be having in my life that caused me to be incarcerated. So, no, they don’t need to be more harsh. What they need to follow is a more rigid and stringent guideline in terms of treatment, therapy and punishment. Okay, bottom line, you’re there for punishment right? That is the purpose for locking you up. Punishment need not exceed that. The mere fact that you are locked away from your family and loved ones is enough.

That is punishment. Now, what do we do to offset the attitude that comes along with me being locked away from my family and loved ones? What do we do to make it easier for me to accept the fact that I am locked away from my family and friends, loved ones and society? What do we do? We have to change the attitude before you can change the person. So you have to give that individual something else to think about besides the fact that he is locked away from his family, friends and loved ones.

Because 99.9 per cent of the people that are incarcerated live for three things: visits, telephone calls and mail. Now all three of those things take place outside the prison structure. They have to come from the outside. People have to come visit, people have to write and people have to accept phone calls when you call. All three things take place outside the prison setting. It doesn’t need to be harsher. rc: Confinement is punishment enough?

Walter: Confinement is punishment enough. rc: Are you saying that if adequate support comes from the outside, such as the letters, phone calls and visits, you won’t be bitter about confinement? You might accept it?

Walter: No. That is not what I am saying. What I am saying is, these are the only things we have to rely on in the terms of support. It’s not enough, because the outside support is fine, it’s needed, but it doesn’t bring about the changes that I have to make. It doesn’t necessarily change my behavior. See what I am saying? Those things create resentments. When my little girl comes to see me in prison and in forty five minutes you tell me that it is time for her to go and then you take me back and you treat me like a dog the only thing I am holding on to is the fact that an hour ago I saw my daughter. I don’t care about you because I know that you don’t care about me, but if I have a class to go to or a meeting to go to or something to occupy my time, it will enable me to have some glimmer of hope that I can, one day, see her minus you and live like a quote, normal human being, unquote, whatever that is, or by society’s standards whatever that is. I am saying that the period of adjustment is easier for me because I can take something with me, something with me that perhaps will cause me not to come back. That is what the whole thing is supposed to be about, not coming back. But we have a recidivism rate of eighty-seven per cent. What is the prison doing to contribute? rc: Let me ask you about recidivism. The dictionary definition says that it is a recurrence of behavior and conditions. What are the conditions that recur in your life that lead to the criminal act?

Walter: Well, my behavior in terms of recidivism is cyclical. It follows a cycle. rc: Well, I was wondering about conditions as well as behavior. Like the conditions in your life such as lack of money . . .

Walter: That is always a condition. rc: . . . the wrong people you associate with. The conditions as well as behavior.

Walter: Yeah. rc: You can’t separate the two, conditions and behavior?

Walter: Conditions? The behavior is ingrained so deep that it is almost genetic. The criminal behavior has been there since I was a kid. I grew up in a neighborhood where criminal activity was a way of life. So it is—it’s sort of like my persona, right.

It’s geared to the criminal element because that’s all that I had, for the most part, exposed myself to, the criminal element.

Now I have had other experiences in my life but overall, the foundation for my persona is criminal. That’s basically what I am comfortable with. I am really not comfortable with a nine to five job and all that. I can do it. I can probably do it for an extended period of time but I would not be as comfortable with that job as I would be with doing something criminal because that’s all I have ever done. So I need to readjust myself and the same way I learned how to do the criminal activities, I have to relearn how to do the job activities and the social activities and all that. I have to reacquaint myself with that so that I can become comfortable with it. rc: It is a way of life.

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned Walter: It is a way of life. It is no big mystery. People that commit crimes or involve themselves in criminal activities—it’s a culture thing. It is what their particular culture dictates. It’s not to say that they can’t get away from it. That’s not to say that you can blame society because you can get away and you can do other things. rc: What is your rap sheet? Can you run down the list? The number of times you have been arrested?

Walter: I have only been arrested—well as a juvenile, I couldn’t tell you. It is probably as long as Market Street. But as an adult I have only been arrested three times. rc: What were those charges?

Walter: Well the first one was for the kidnapping charge and the other two were for drug charges. The rest of the time I was in prison so I couldn’t get arrested. rc: You went to prison in 1975, got out in 1991 and went back in 1992?

Walter: Right. I did sixteen years the first time and then came out for a short period of time and went back to prison. rc: The first time, with the kidnapping, was your trial fair?

Walter: No, it really wasn’t. rc: Why? Walter: Well, because the investigation—the whole thing was unfair. It was like, all right, they went to question me and I told them that I wanted a lawyer. Then they came in to court and said that I didn’t want one. Some kind of way they rigged it up so that they got away with it. The whole racial thing was like in full bloom. That’s what bothered me the most, the racial issue.

This was my first exposure, my first raw exposure to true racism. Like racism was on the rise and I am talking about Alabama racism and I’m talking about Mississippi racism and I hadn’t been exposed to it like that. rc: Why did you put it like that?

Walter: Well, I was born in Alabama and I know what it looks like but I had just never been exposed to it until that particular time. rc: That was in Wilmington?

Walter: Yeah, and I thought, you know, that the only place it happened was in the South, but I found out. I don’t harbor any resentments concerning that situation. I have addressed that situation. rc: If you were falsely accused and the trial was unfair, why wouldn’t you harbor resentments?

Walter: What good would it do me? Resentments don’t hurt nobody but you. I can be resentful and be feeling all this anger but nobody else would be feeling that shit but me. The prosecutor don’t care, and the judge, he don’t care. It serves no purpose at all. You’ll just harm yourself. You see in the movies, where the guy does thirty-five years in jail and he comes back and he gets the whole family of the person that put him there. For what? For what? No matter what, I can’t change that situation. Never.

No matter what I do I couldn’t change it and things that you can’t change you should try to get past. So I just try to get past. rc: Tell me about a typical day in jail.

Walter: In prison? Uhhh, let me see. For me—I get up around 7:30, just before count and get up, wash up, do a couple of things in the room and wait for the guard to come by and hope that me and him is cool so I can get my door opened a little early so I can go make a cup of coffee. I get my little coffee and go back and watch a little television ‘til they open everyone’s door, then I clean my room. I may have gotten a letter the day before and I usually try to answer them in the mornings while it is quiet. Maybe after that, take a shower and sign up for gym and go and play a little basketball or somethin’. Then I go to lunch and come back and maybe play a little chess or cards, might gamble, might do anything, you know. Just basically the same stuff and then it is time to lock down and clean up. The shifts change and doors open at 4 o’clock so you go and sign up for the phone. Go to dinner, come back, made my phone call. I might have an activity that I am involved in for that night. If so, I go to that and come back and get a cup of coffee and might talk to a few people. If there is a movie comin’ on I’ll go and lay down and watch the movie.

Walter often pauses between sentences. He is deliberate in his speech.

At the end of the description of his typical day he leaned forward. Looking deeply into my eyes he said, “End of story.

Then you start over again tomorrow. Over . . . and over . . . and over . . . for six . . . teen years.” rc: Tell me about your first day.

Walter: I can’t even remember the first day. I guess I was—I was afraid because I had never been in a situation like that but I kind of turned that fear into courage because I’d heard all of the stories about prison and what they do to people in there and all that kind of stuff. So I went in with a mental attitude that it would never happen to me. The first day they took us all in and they lined us up in the shower room. They take all of your personal effects, all of your jewelry and street clothes, everything. They give you a towel about the size of that piece of paper and a washcloth that is even smaller and then they put you up against the wall and spray you with the delouse spray. Which I think is the most humiliating thing about the whole experience. Instead of

Robert A. Crimmins

giving me the opportunity to spray it on myself they spray me. Like, everybody has to stay back away from you because you are the lowest form of society so everybody has to stay back, and, “I don’t want you to get too close to me because you may have somethin’” you know, it’s like I have a disease or somethin’. All I am is a criminal. That is all I am. Which is really—it’s not a good thing, but it is not as bad as all that. It is humiliating. The most humiliating part of the entire experience. That part is the most humiliating part, sincerely. Bein’ locked in the hole and being told when to go to bed and when to get up and when to eat or clean or do whatever, right, that’s pretty bad but the most humiliating part of the entire experience is that initial blast of that delouse spray, you know, and the way that it is administered: in a bug spray can, with a pump on it with the holes and the little nozzle, you know. That was the first time in prison that I cried. I wasn’t crying because I was afraid but because I was so angry and I couldn’t do anything about it. When I went to prison the first time, shit, it really wasn’t all that. It was never that good but the experience was not all that bad because most of the people that I grew up with were already there. So I didn’t have a real obvious period of adjustment. I had adjustments that I had to make but I covered it with the fact that all my friends were here. rc: Did they or anyone else, then, or since, comfort you?

Walter: No. I don’t want to be comforted. Because if someone does something for you, you are going to get the attitude, what do they want in return? Since you are not willing to give up anything at all, you don’t want anybody to help you because you don’t get something for nothing in prison. There is always a stipulation. There is always some red tape and there is always something added. So no one comforts you in prison, nobody. Unless you want them to try and turn you into a faggot because that’s what’ll happen. If you are looking for security or whatever, that is what will happen to you. rc: How has being separated from women affected you?

Walter: Hmm. rc: Is that the worse part of being inside?

Walter: After about ten or eleven years it becomes the worse part, you know. It may not be the worst part right away but it becomes the worst part. Like I said, there’s nothin’ soft. Can you imagine not being held for sixteen years? Sixteen years, you have not been touched by a woman and it doesn’t have to be sexual, you just have not had a hug or nothin’ for sixteen years!

At first it seems that he is asking a rhetorical question, but he doesn’t continue. He wants an answer. rc: No, I can’t.

Walter: There you have it. There you have it. rc: Are there any racial tensions here?

Walter: No, I don’t even know why people assume that—that it’s like that—that there is a racial war going on or whatever.

That may be happening in other places but it’s really not like that here. I mean the blacks stick with the blacks and the whites stick with the whites. But, because the situation is so compact and the jail is so small, on some level you have to interact. In jail everybody is trying to get and nobody is trying to give. It don’t make no difference what color you are. Everybody is trying to get and nobody is trying to give anything, and that pretty much knocks the racial thing in the head. It’s a battle of economics, not race. I may not be having somebody sending me money so I got to do what I got to do to take care of me. Because I want nice stuff too. I want bars of soap on my shelf and I want bottles of shampoo. I want bottles of lotion. I want sneakers and I want to dress nice. I want to do all of those things. Since I don’t have any money, I have to hustle. I got to do what I got to do to take care of myself so if there is a white guy that’s got it and I can get it from him, then so be it. But I’ll get it from a black guy too. Whoever I can get it from to maintain my balance, it doesn’t matter. It’s a battle of economics not race. Now in certain instances I may prefer the white guy because he may have more. He may have more and it may be easier to get. It starts to look like I am takin’ advantage of him based on the fact that he is timid or afraid or whatever and I’m this big black guy. But I’ll get it from anybody if it becomes necessary. If I don’t have no soap, I’ll get it. rc: You’d intimidate anybody to get what you need?

Walter: Anybody. No matter who it is. If you’re in prison and you’re weak, you’ll crumble. You will crumble. It’s a battle of territory. It’s a battle of courage. It’s a battle of everything. You have to be strong. You can’t relax. You have to be on top of everything. You can’t relax. Not even when you are in your cell by yourself. rc: Why can’t you relax when you’re alone?

Walter: It’s just like lions in the jungle. When the male lion becomes too old or hurt, somebody takes his place. They run him off and he goes off and dies. So you have to be abreast of what is happening at all times because even if you are not a part of it, right, the vortex of it is so powerful that it sucks you in. It just sucks you in. Because that is what it is, a black hole. That is all it is. It is just a black hole and they need to—it needs to be redone. They need to redo it, man. They got to get programs and all kinds of that shit. rc: Is there no light?

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned Walter: No light. No light. Like this is a work release center right? I don’t see it. I don’t see it. rc: There must be someone who cares about your situation?

Walter: Me. rc: Only?

Walter: That’s the only person who has to. rc: That’s not the question though.

Walter: I don’t know. People say a lot of things. So I can’t really judge how somebody else feels because people say a lot of things. They say they care, okay, Do you? Fine, thank you. I have to start caring. rc: People that love you care. You mentioned a daughter.

Walter: Yeah, I imagine she cares. I imagine she cares. But people get tired of this kind of shit. People get tired of this. You know, it is hard for your loved ones to see you in a situation like this. It is hard for them to view you through glass or across a tabletop in a restricted environment. You have to watch what you say, how you touch people, the whole thing. It is hard for people to be able to adjust to that. It’s unfair. It’s unfair to ask a loved one to adjust to that. It’s hard to even ask them to adjust to that. It’s like asking them to be in prison because you are in prison. You can’t do it. rc: Do you think they’ve stopped caring?

Walter: It’s sort of like it’s unspoken. If they cared they’d come. If they don’t come, fine, but then sometimes you get the attitude that if they don’t come, they didn’t care anyway and that’s the reason why you start feeling sorry for yourself again. rc: It’s so cold.

Walter: It is definitely cold, definitely cold. Jail is cold. Nothing’s soft. rc: You don’t have much longer in do you?

Walter: No, I have about thirty-three days left in here. rc: What are your plans?

Walter: This is it. I am done altogether. I am going to start doing the things I have to do instead of the things that I want to. See that’s where the record skips, when you start doing things that you want to do. I have a three-year-old daughter and she will be four in a couple of months. You know, will the cycle continue? Will I watch her grow up from prison? No. No. I watched my other kids grow up from prison because of what I wanted to do. Just remember I mentioned that it is always a me first thing in the cultural revolution. Like crabs in a basket, right. A crab will crawl on your back to get out of the basket and pull you down to get out. Have you ever watched crabs in a basket? The primary goal is to get out of the basket, right. Pulling another crab down, whatever it takes to get out of the basket is all that is primary, the rest of it means nothing. I’m getting out of this basket. rc: When you get out, what do you plan on doing?

Walter: Go to work everyday. As soon as my hand heals up, I’ll go to work everyday and just learn to accept the simpler lifestyle. It may not be what I want but it’s better than what I’ve had. For me, at forty-five, that makes a difference. I mean how much worse can it get. It can only get better but I have to want it to get better. I have to allow it to get better. It just won’t get better on its own. It will continue to repeat itself, if I continue to repeat the same behaviors. rc: Have they done anything here to prepare you for release?

Walter: That’s what it is supposed to be about, right, but it ain’t shit. rc: Have they tried? Have you been in some programs?

Walter: Programs that I instituted on my own. rc: Like what? What did you do?

Walter: I go to counseling. I try to occupy myself, I try to occupy my time as much as possible, right, and I try to get my support systems in place, because thirty-three days is not a whole lot of time to get ready, but I have been getting ready for the last six months so I have a better chance. Coming from jail to society without a support system is really not a good thing. All of these things should be in place from the door. If you are going to move a person through the system, right, than move them all the way through the system, all the way through. All that should be in place. Don’t get me here after sixteen years in the penitentiary and tell me to do it myself because the only thing that I can think about is the fact that I am free. I am ready to run, you know what I am saying. I’m ready to take off. I don’t know anything about all the shit that I haven’t had in the last sixteen years. I am ready to self-destruct now, so don’t expect me to just automatically come out and pick up where I left off like nothing happened, because that’s bullshit. A whole lot of shit has happened. I got to reacquaint, re-experience and re-do a whole bunch of stuff. This place, the Plummer Center, is a work release. It’s supposed to get you ready. It’s not supposed to be like jail. This is supposed to be like freedom. People come up here and they go to work. They got jobs. They got responsibilities, right. They have things that need to be taken care of, right. They are reacquainting themselves with society. This is another chance. You’re not supposed to get hassled and harassed and shit like that, man. That’s not supposed to take place here. If anything, you’re supposed to get help, you know, because this is an opportunity, right, and the one thing that society wants them to do is to take full advantage of it. These people need to be left alone and in a lot of ways, this place is worse than jail.

Robert A. Crimmins

rc: Why? Walter: A lot of the officers here have the jail mentality and that’s the way they treat you. Like last night, an officer wrote me up last night because I ate a meal in this multi-purpose room. He wrote me up. He said it was count time. I’m on the clean up crew and there is no movement during count so I sat in there and ate because there is no movement during count, so what are you talking about? Because he maintains that jail house mentality thing he thinks that this a jail, right, and it’s not a jail. This is a work release center, this is community confinement. So, you know, I just say, hey man, I know how they do. rc: When we first started talking you mentioned the types of crimes that are committed now, the violent crimes, and the crimes that you committed when you were younger. It indicated you had a value system.

Walter: Yeah. Yeah, like I would never snatch an old lady’s pocketbook or carjack a woman’s car and she’s got two or three kids in the car, no shit like that, man. I mean that’s crazy. Society and the people in it—where do you get your values from?

From your parents. Who teaches you right from wrong? Your parents. Always say please and thank you, yes ma’am and no ma’am, right. Kids nowadays don’t have none of that. You know, they don’t have none of that. They don’t have respect for their parents. They don’t have respect for their elders. They don’t have respect for nobody. Why? Because nine times out of ten their parents don’t have any respect for nobody. It’s a learned behavior. Manners are a learned behavior. Don’t put your elbows on the table. I’m forty-five years old and I was taught that when I was six and I never forgot it. It’s a learned behavior, right.

Respect is a learned behavior. It’s not something that you acquire automatically. You may disrespect someone unintentionally because you did not know. You have to learn how to not disrespect somebody. You have to learn what respect is. It’s a learned behavior. These guys now don’t have no respect for nobody, period. Period. rc: Is there a way to rehabilitate them?

Walter: No one can be rehabilitated unless they want to be. If he is learning then he should be given the benefit of the doubt and an opportunity towards change. Not granting an opportunity is a failure on the system’s part. Failure on my part is not taking advantage of an opportunity once it is given. We all can fail. Society just can’t say that because I am locked up I am a failure. If the opportunity doesn’t exist for me to take advantage of, society has failed too. Society has to learn too.

CELL 17: Interviews With The Imprisoned

afterward

The page one headline of the Wilmington Sunday News Journal read, “Prisons threaten to lock up Del. funds”.

Governor Carper has informed the state legislature that the state must spend between $72 million and $114 million for new construction to accommodate the growing prison population. It will cost as much as $30 million a year to operate the new prisons. It’s a very high price for a small state and it forces hard choices. The article tells us that other programs will suffer.

School construction, beach replenishment and libraries; programs involving direct economic and social benefit were mentioned as possible targets.

While the Governor and legislature address the funding issue they are also wondering about fundamentals. Like the rest of us, they wonder what’s wrong and what can be done to correct the ills that lead so many to crime?

In some cases severe punishment as a result of mandatory sentencing helps. Those that are aware of the consequences are discouraged from committing certain crimes. Scott and John, drug traffickers interviewed for this book, know what will happen to them if they are arrested again for dealing.

However, mandatory sentencing is an expensive solution. That’s the point of the News Journal article. If the court is forced to send offenders to jail and there are no cells, more must be built. It also precludes consideration of individual circumstances. Even when a Judge knows that a less expensive remedy will be effective he can’t apply it.

Behavior modification and education programs are being offered and these efforts, by providing guidance and explanations, are helping to reduce the numbers of people that return to prison, but it’s hard to change bad habits.

Punishment, in the form of confinement, discourages crime. Despite the availability of exercise equipment, illegal contraband and other minor amenities, prison remains a very unpleasant experience. For all the men and women I spoke with, freedom is preferable to incarceration. They would trade anything in prison for one night with a woman, or an afternoon with their children, or a day on the beach.

Punishment is necessary but it is not the solution. If it were, recidivism rates would not be so high.

Judicial reforms and programs meant to change the criminal can have positive affects. Some of those that are caught do change. Effective punishment can be a deterrent. It is important that development in these areas proceed.

But to change the trend, those that haven’t been caught and those that haven’t yet committed a crime need to be affected.

Families, friends and communities will play a more important role than government and law enforcement because the solution lies with the individual. Most crimes are personal; one criminal and one victim, face to face. The criminal, the individual with a past, chooses to hurt another. Family and community, not government, shape the individual.

People are in jail because, one way or another, they made bad choices while they were free. Most accept the blame, even though abuse and neglect ruins lives and can destroy the ability to make correct decisions.

In the end, success or failure depends on choices and decisions of what to do from one minute to the next. Will I study tonight? Should I watch TV or write? Will I slap the child, or be patient? Do I have to pull the trigger? Will I smoke my first joint? Will I tell my son about the world and it’s beauty or will I remind him of his limitations?

Amir decided to go with the others that day and it cost him a life sentence. It may have cost him a lifetime. He might have been a great writer. Scott chose to deal drugs, to poison others to get what he wanted. He got caught. Jamie chose to inject heroin into herself and assault people in their homes. If Nic’s mother hadn’t taken him from a secure and safe home he never would have gone to jail. Different choices and hard work might have taken Walter to the Olympics.

In jail, choices are nearly nonexistent. That’s the punishment. Existence occurs in a few rooms and corridors. The food, the surfaces, the nights and the faces, don’t change. Life outside includes sunlight and grass, family and variation. What they are missing occupies the minds of the imprisoned.

Making the right choices and persevering is the key. Deciding what’s right isn’t necessarily difficult. If we learn that for ourselves and teach it to our children crime will diminish. We all make our lives and the lives of others better or worse. We can wear wings or chains. We can give wings or chains and it all depends on our choices.

Robert A. Crimmins

glossary bags — small, individual packages of heroin Bridge House — juvenile detention center in New Castle County, Delaware certified parole — a person is certified for parole upon completion of a specific program within a halfway house, home confinement setting or an inpatient treatment center. classification — the process of evaluating prisoners for early release, program placement and other privileges. This evaluation is based on the prisoner’s performance and the judgment of the professional staff or community representatives.

CO — Correctional Officer Code Green — the condition that exists in the prison when the inmate population count is complete and all inmates are accounted for.

Code Red — the condition that exists in the prison when the population is being counted. When the facility is in Code Red all movement is restricted compound — the areas occupied by the general population under medium security at DCC. DARE — Drug Abuse Resistance Education program for school children CREST Outreach Center — the drug treatment program run by the Delaware Department of Correction for inmates in a work release program DCC — Delaware Correctional Center (also called “Smyrna” or “Smyrna Prison”, after the lower, New Castle County town where the prison is located) DP&L — Delmarva Power and Light Ferris School — maximum security, juvenile detention center and school in Wilmington Gander Hill — the common name for the Multi Purpose Criminal Justice Facility; a medium-high, medium and medium-low security prison in the Gander Hill area of Wilmington.

Georgetown — the Sussex County, Delaware seat and the location of the Sussex Correctional Institution Key Program — a new program of behavior modification and awareness for the incarcerated, longtime drug user Morris Correctional Institution — a medium to minimum security prison in Dover, Delaware Pagans — a motorcycle club headquartered in Southeastern Pennsylvania and active throughout the East and Mid West PCP — angel dust Philly Black Bags — a mixture of cocaine, heroin and other substances sold in small, black, plastic bags Plummer Center — work release center in Wilmington pod — a section of the Gander Hill Prison that includes prisoner’s cells and common areas PTA — Pre Trial Annex, a Wilmington prison recently renamed the John L. Webb Correctional Facility SCI — Sussex Correctional Institution, Georgetown, Delaware skunk bud — an extremely potent, resin laden marijuana Smyrna — a town in lower New Castle County, Delaware and another name for the Delaware Correctional Center tier — a portion of an inmate housing area within a prison TIS — Truth In Sentencing WCI — Women’s Correctional Institution, New Castle, Delaware recently renamed the Delores J. Baylor Women’s Correctional Institution Work House — a maximum security prison in Wilmington, torn down in the 1970’s

CELL 17 Interviews With The Imprisoned “They say, ‘You’re goin’ to jail,’ but believe me, I’m gettin’ out, and you better be ready. If I’m not a changed person you better be ready to handle what comes with that.” - John “It was like a dungeon. When I first went there, the scene itself just had me scared and it was like bein’ in a spook house. You didn’t know what was gonna reach out and grab you.” - William

“CELL 17 is an intimate look at a diverse group of individuals as they depict their childhood memories, their entry in the criminal world, and finally their current state of incarceration . . . a thoughtful contribution to our further understanding of the lives of prisoners and the institutions that confine them.”

Dr. James Inciardi, author Historical Approaches to Crime, Drug Treatment and Criminal Justice Professor and Director, University of Delaware Center For Drug And Alcohol Studies

“What we have to face is that the community is toxic, it’s poison. It is a crime factory. Once we get to jail we actually become healthier than at any other time in our lives . . . When they go back to the community they start to get sick again.” - Amir “I have given up on everything in life, before, and I can’t do it no more.” - Jamie “I am really tired of people blaming the white man for his problems. You know what? I’m sitting in jail today, not because of what the white man, the black man, the Puerto Rican man or what Mom and Dad did to me. I’m sitting in jail because I wanted to, apparently. I knew what I was doing. I control my destiny. I do what I want. I’ve got to reap the consequences.” - Scott “My seven-year-old sends me letters and pictures and it’s killin’ me ‘cause as soon as I see ‘em I know they’re from her.” - Nic “Bein’ locked in the hole and being told when to go to bed and when to get up and when to eat, that’s bad, but the most humiliating part of the entire experience is that initial blast of the delouse spray, and the way that it’s administered, from a bug spray can.” - Walter

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