I was “found to be a poor candidate for treatment” because … ah, the rest was a bunch of words I didn’t give a damn about. Just another reason for the Parole Board to hit me when I came up. Like they needed another one.
You never count the days unless your sentence is in days, like that county-jail slap I got before. Ninety days, that’s a number you can count. Felony time, the faster you move, the slower it goes.
They sent me to the joint I wanted. Not because I asked or anything. Probably because they figured it would be the last place I’d want.
Dannemora. “Little Siberia” is what everybody called it. Just a few miles from the Canadian border. Nobody wants to jail there, because it means your family has to travel a whole day just to get a visit. Most of them, they come up the day before, stay at some motel. So it’s really a three-day trip. That all costs money, makes it even harder.
Black guys really hate the place. They’re all city boys. Not only do their people have to come all that distance to see them, but the town where they have to stay, everyone knows why they’re there. The Latinos don’t like it much, either.
But it’s a good place for a guy like me. Everyone wants to transfer out, so the race-war thing is dialed way down. And if you don’t try to go into business for yourself—like getting your girlfriend to mule in some dope, or opening a gambling book—you don’t make anybody mad at you, either.
Lots of notorious guys were there when I was. I mean, guys you would have read about in the paper. Like that “Preppie Killer.” When the jury hung on his first murder trial, they let him plead to manslaughter, and threw in a bunch of burglaries, no charge. Another one had killed hookers. Lots of them.
For most cons, the more of those kind, the better. They were always getting money sent in, and you could usually muscle them off a piece of their haul when they drew commissary.
I never did that. The best way to do your own time is to stay out of the rackets—even the little ones, like trading your phone time.
You never take favors. Like when a con offers to get a girl to visit you. His girlfriend, she’s got a friend. All it’s supposed to cost you is a slice of whatever you manage to work the girl for.
No use telling the other guy you’ve already got a girl, since anyone can see you’re not getting visits. So you have to say no and make sure he never asks you again.
The first time I hit the yard, I was a little surprised that I didn’t know one single guy out there. Eddie was gone, but I figured, my life, the odds were pretty good I’d know someone. I guess any decent outlaw would have managed to work himself into a joint where there was more action.
Action was what you needed if you were pulling a long piece of time. Me, I was probably the shortest guy in the whole pen. They used to keep this place reserved for the hardcores: double-lifers, cons who had stuck a guard, top-shelf gangsters. Then the dumb fucks who run the system figured out that a joint full of men with nothing to lose wasn’t such a bright idea. I think it might have been the guards’ union that tipped them off.
My account was always kept full, so I could get what I needed without going on the arm, or putting in work for one of the crews.
I paid for smokes, never borrowed any. After a while, I just quit. Whole goddamned place was supposed to be smoke-free, so you couldn’t walk around with a pack, much less a crate. You had to do one at a time, and you’d catch a ticket if you got caught, too. Fuck all that.
You’d think prison, it’d be the last place to change. From the outside, it might look that way, but things had really shifted since I’d been away the last time. Even what the cons called the guards: it was “hacks” my first time, now it was “COs” or “cops.”
Changing what you call things doesn’t make them different.
There’s two kinds of contraband: the kind that gives you power inside the prison, and the kind that you could use to get out.
The first kind mostly comes from drugs. Which means