Part Two of Two

Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - This is the story of my time in prison. Certain names have been omitted or disguised in order to protect the identities of people in harm's way.

Like everything else in southern Louisiana, the educational system, the level of government corruption, the notorious - nay, infamous corruption of law enforcement - the prison system here has been rated among the worst in the nation.

If the plantation mentality defines this area of the United States, then the prison system ranks right up there as the equivalent of modern slavery. Convicts in the major lock-ups in Louisiana are assigned to pick cotton.

Louisiana has no shame.

The New Orleans Police Department has no shame, either. As recently as last year, senior police officials were indicted for extorting over $10,000 from organizers of a party for the previous year's Essence Festival who had hired them to act as off-duty security. No one in New Orleans is surprised that our cops would do a shakedown.

You would be hard-pressed in Orleans Parish to find a cop that was not on the take. It's a regular complaint that people being arrested never get back the money they had on them at the time of their arrest. That money does not show up in evidence. So where do you think it goes?

Orleans Parish Prison

I knew things were bad, but I had to dig into the archives of the local press to figure out how bad.

Bloated jails don't tell whole story

by Lolis Eric Elie, Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA)
April 4th, 2003

In its new report, "Deep Impact: Quantifying the Effect of Prison Expansion in the South," the Justice Policy Institute lays bare some damning statistics.

As is so often the case when it comes to negative trends, Louisiana is near the top of the list.

In this case, the list has to do with our incarceration rate: the number of people per 100,000 citizens who are incarcerated in our jails and prisons.

Relying on data from several sources, including the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2002, the Justice Policy Institute concluded that in 2001, Texas had an incarceration rate of 711 people per 100,000. It trailed Mississippi, with its rate of 715. But Louisiana outpaced both, incarcerating 800 out of every 100,000 Louisianians ...

... By comparison, Canada, a country much larger in population and land area than Louisiana, had only 31,000 inmates in 2001.

Now here I was institutionalized, another statistic of O.P.P. Another victim of a criminal injustice system that makes its money by keeping as many people in jail as it possibly can.

Like most news stories, the operative phrase for this one on New Orleans jails is "Follow the money." The Sheriff's Department of Orleans Parish, as every inmate can tell you, makes its income from keeping people incarcerated. Sheriff Foti's office is paid per head by day for every inmate. Incarceration is a growth industry because the voters have been convinced that locking people up makes them safer. Meanwhile, the crime rate in New Orleans and over the state of Louisiana continues to go UP, not down.

On Election Day, politicians and sheriffs and judges tell the voters how many people they have put behind bars. They don't talk about the fact that we are not safer. Wonder why?

O.P.P. is a vast complex at the heart of the city of New Orleans than houses tens of thousands of locals and tourists. The concrete structures that comprise it are jam-packed every day of the week. Meanwhile, it's common parlance around these parts that you can hear about three - four murders per night on the local news. The lock-ups continue but the crime rate gets worse and no one manages, with rare exceptions, to ask why.

It's easier for the cops to bust people like me than actual criminals.

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Rod Amis

During my nightly collect call to Matt, my conduit, who had been trying to organize my friends to get me out of jail, I got new info. It seemed that, as no one had the resources to cover my high bond, a group of local drag queens - some of whom had been my patrons at The Cat - had decided to throw a benefit show for me in order to raise money for my bail or legal defense. I was nonplussed. This because many of them were friends of Melissa, my roommate or myself and knew what police harassment was all about. That was good for the long term, but I wanted to be out of jail yesterday.

Scott had referred Matt to a lawyer for me, another former Cat patron. I was advised to call him. He told me to be prepared to stay in jail until mid-July, as the police had up to sixty days to file a report and the District Attorney's office didn't need to set a trial date until they received the report.

I thought: Is this lawyer working for me or just going through the motions to get a fee? An attorney on my side would be talking about getting out me of jail, wouldn't he?

Two days later, I would instruct Matt to find me another attorney.

"How are you holding up?" Matt asked me.

"I'm pissed off," I said. "I can't even get a pencil and paper in here. There are no newspapers, no magazines, no books. There's nothing but the endless television garbage and people talking shit. I feel like I'm in some bad TV movie where I'm serving time for no reason and my only contact with the outside is these collect calls to you where I hear my lawyer and everyone else aren't doing anything except asking me to 'hang in there'.

"I used to write about days like weeks. Days here inside last for months. Months of boredom and nothing happening except bad television blaring through a room full of yelling people. I'm going nuts. I just want to get the hell out of here."

Matt tried to be diplomatic and assure me that the people outside were very concerned about my situation and doing everything they could think of to get me out. He said that Scott claimed the lawyer was a good one. I doubted it. He said that everyone was actually working on ways to spring me.

I guess it surprised him when I got upset on Wednesday, my fourth day in jail, when he informed me that, for the first time, he had bothered to contact a bail bondsmen. What rattled me was that even my lawyer hadn't bothered doing that.

"Find me another lawyer," I demanded. "I need a lawyer who has a sense of urgency about getting me out of here. Don't argue with me about it. Do it! Okay?"

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I STARTED TO UNDERSTAND BETTER THAN EVER WHAT TUPAC WAS SAYING in his song "Picture Me Rolling". The happiest thing that happened on the cellblocks was when one of C.O.'s would call some inmate's name over the public address system, pause, then say "Roll out." It gave all of us hope, no matter what our sentence was. The fact that people could roll out of the joint made us believe we all could. The day I finally got that roll out call a number of brothers bumped fists with me. "Good luck in the world, Pops!"

With all the hours you have to kill, you spend a lot of time inside talking about what you'll do when you get back to "the world", as we called life outside. You talk about what you'll eat first, what you'll drink, how you'll chain-smoke that first pack of cigarettes, who you'll fuck.

I was transferred to Templeman One, Tier F-4 after I had been in jail for five days. That's when they decide you should join the general population because you are going to be in jail for a while if you haven't bonded out. I had been told that being in the general population would mean better food and better conditions. That was another of the prison lies I would have to learn about.

There are jailhouse lawyers, philosophers, preachers, experts on every aspect of life and crime. So you have to double verify every bit of information you get from somebody behind bars. People front like they know so much and have sussed the system, but that is only fronting. When somebody tells you you don't have to worry about your charge(s), you should start worrying.

These are people whose days are filled with hours of "The Young and The Restless" and "The Jerry Springer Show", after all. These are people who crowd around the television set when the local news is broadcast to hear about other people who will soon be joining them behind bars. When I told one inmate that I could go (and had gone on occasion) for years without watching television, he asked me why.

Joining the general population was much worse. Tier F-4 is not a cellblock, it's more like a dorm. The bunk beds there line three of the walls of the room and are stacked three high. One of the first things I noticed, assigned a middle bunk, was that the level was set such that - looking up at the metal sheet above you - you felt like you were lying in your coffin. The dimensions and effect were perfect! My feeling was confirmed some days later when another inmate called to a friend, "Hey, Black, get out of your coffin and come over here." Jailhouse humor.

There were forty of us incarcerated in F-4. In the center of the room were four metal picnic tables, bolted to the floor, like you might find in some public park. They were painted dark green. On the fourth wall, where the double-locked doors leading out of the tier stood, was a bathroom with three stainless steel commodes, two stainless steel sinks, and a shower designed to accommodate four people.

According to the rules posted on the wall, we could only shower between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. Do the math, that meant - if we were willing to shower in groups of four - we had twelve minutes per man. Because of some remaining sense of modesty, most of us avoided showering at the same time. That meant that we had three minutes per man, if we had all decided to shower on the same day. That never happened.

There are lots of silly rules made to make the life of an inmate humiliating. I guess it must make people out in the world feel better to know that we have numbers instead of names, that we have to get up at four in the morning if we want to eat breakfast, that we call out the last three digits of our case numbers twice a day - once at 6:30 a.m. and once at 8:30 p.m. for roll call, that we have to walk single file everywhere we go, that we have to turn to the concrete wall and stare at it if we stop in a hallway, that we get sent to hole for talking on line, that our meals are grits and a slice of government cheese in the morning, our one hot at midday is usually sphagetti or rice, that we get a baloney sandwich and some chopped pineapple at night. "You're a criminal. We're not going to coddle you."

I wasn't the only person I met inside who was arrested just so some cop could meet his quota. I had the most unusual case most of the other inmates had ever heard, but I heard some other hinky stories, too. I heard about people arrested for things that people with more money would have gotten a wink and a nod for, especially white people.

So when that roll out call finally came, I was both elated and angry. I had spent ten days in jail and I hadn't committed any crime. I had spent ten days in jail because I didn't have the money to leave.

I was just another angry Black man who wanted to chain-smoke a pack of cigarettes.

LET'S DISPEL A MYTH. Most of the people I met inside admitted that they had done their crime. People say that everyone in jail claims they are innocent because it makes them feel better, I guess. But it's not true. Most of the people I met inside admitted to the crimes they had committed and others besides. They knew it had been stupid and they regretted being so loaded at the time (which is usually the case) that they got themselves busted. The older inmates counseled the younger ones about NOT staying in the institutionalized life, all the while knowing that the odds were that the person they lectured was already on the road to perdition.

I can't tell you what it's like in jail, my love. I wouldn't want to. When I told one of the other inmates that it was my first time, he said: "So you had a lot to learn, huh? This ain't like the world at all."

Because my first attorney had prepared me for the idea of my being incarcerated for up to sixty days, I mentally adjusted to the fact that I might not get out for a while. I knew this was so when I dreamt about talking to my ex-wife about buying things for me that someone at liberty to move about the world could purchase. I had subconsciously accepted that I could not go beyond the double-locked doors of my tier. My entire world had been reduced to that one, crowded, smoke-filled room full of forty men. My life had been reduced to four walls and iron bars. I tried to be Zen about the endless hours of the same bullshit routine everyday. I tried to be Zen about the fact that I was behind bars because two White cops didn't think it was alright for an old Black man and a young White man to be talking on a street corner in New Orleans.

I was bitter, learning about American Justice: New Orleans Style.

30 May, 2003: Last night I attended the benefit show given by the drag queens at Mama's Blues to help me pay my legal fees. It was great fun and a few of my friends showed up to give me support. A local comedienne introduced herself and asked if I'd mind if she organized a comedy benefit on my behalf. The local alternative paper, the Gambit weekly, wants to do a story about my case. Since Mayor Nagin was a subject of one of the interviews here at The World's Magazine, I plan to make sure his office gets a copy of this story, too. In other words, I'm not going to let this case lie. Not for a minute.

My new attorney, who sprung me, called yesterday and left the message that the New Orleans District Attorney's Office plans to pursue my case. I wasn't surprised.


Go to Part One of Rod's GLASS HOUSE "The End of Life as We Know It".

Pages: 1 | 2 | 3

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