by Larry Lawton
“Since the tier had only one door, the warden would walk up one side and when he got to the end, he’d have to walk down the other side speaking to inmates in all the cells. On this particular Thursday, when the warden walked to the far end of the tier, as he started walking back toward the entrance, someone kicked his door, giving everyone the signal for all the inmates from all the cells to squirt the warden and his flunkies with their mixture of piss and shit. While the inmates were squirting away, all the while they were screaming and making sounds like insane monkeys in a crazy house.
“I didn’t participate,” said Lawton. “I was somewhat new to the system, and my cellie, who had built up more anger against the prison than I did, wanted to do this more than I did. I had nothing against the prison at this time. As I watched through the little ten-inch window over my cellie’s shoulder, I could see him squirting away with a vengeance. I could see the warden, ducking and running, his clothes ruined. He was beyond angry, scrambling to get out of there. He and all his prison staff were covered in a heavy spray of piss and shit. The smell was nauseating.”
Such disobedience didn’t go without punishment. Severe beatings followed.
“Even though I wasn’t involved in this, it didn’t make any difference,” said Lawton. “About three hours after the warden got his ass out of there, the goon squad – the special operations team – six or seven giants -- went from cell to cell and beat everyone’s ass. Four big fucking gorillas, white boys who were six foot four, 280 pounds, all goons, came into our cell wailing away. Whether you were involved or just an innocent bystander, they didn’t give a fuck. They went down the tier, opening every door one at a time and beating everyone’s ass bloody.
“I could hear them coming, and when they came to our cell, they ordered, “Cuff up,” meaning we were supposed to put our hands in the opening in the door so they could handcuff us. Of course, once we knew why they were coming, there was no way we were going to cuff up. I knew we couldn’t kick their ass, but at least I wanted my hands free to protect my face. At that point they came in anyway, and all you could try to do was protect yourself. Ater you were knocked down, you dropped into a fetal position. There was no point trying to resist at that point. No matter how tough you were, you couldn’t beat four giant goons. And they beat the shit out of us. Simple as that. After they left, I was spitting up blood, and my face was all puffy. You might think, They aren’t going to hit you in the face because they might leave a mark? Bullshit. They didn’t give a shit about bruises or cuts. After they beat us, they left us lying there in a heap. I was beat up bad, but it was no big deal. I had been beat up bad before.”
*
On the day Lawton was transferred out of Lewisburg, he was handcuffed and shackled along with a number of other inmates, put on a bus, and taken to an airport near Allenwood, Pennsylvania. He was travelling on ConAir, an operation run by the U.S. Air Marshals. Once again Lawton was belly chained and black boxed, and he was shackled with ankle cuffs as well. He was then searched again by the Air Marshals.
Said Lawton, “They make you open your mouth, pat you down, check your balls for weapons or a key or a razor blade or a bobby pin, which you can use to open handcuffs, and then they send you hobbling up the stairs onto a huge plane that holds about two hundred passengers.”
Once Lawton and the other inmates took their seats, they were told they were forbidden to get up for any reason. If you had to go to the bathroom, it was tough luck.
“One time I was on ConAir for sixteen hours,” said Lawton. “If you have to shit, they don’t give a fuck. You just hold it in. You risk constipation or worse because your shit is poison, and you can actually die from the poison in your system. Or your intestines can explode.
“I used to watch the rookies, the young kids, get on the ConAir plane and eat the lunch they were given. I’d tell them, “Are you an idiot? It’s better to be hungry than have to go to the bathroom and not be able to go.” But they thought they were bad-asses, and they wouldn’t listen, and hours later they’d be in purgatory.”
The women prisoners were kept together in one section at the front of the plane.
“You could sit a row or two behind them and try to sneak a peek,” said Lawton, “but boy, did they look nasty. Picture it, an ugly broad, no makeup, in handcuffs with a prison travel uniform. Not too appealing.”
The plane’s destination was FTC Oklahoma, the hub of the Bureau of Prisons transportation system. No matter a prisoner’s final destination, first stop always was FTC Oklahoma.
“You might be going from Pennsylvania to Atlanta, or from Southern California to New York but you still had to stop in Oklahoma City,” said Lawton. “I’ve gone from Coleman, Florida to Jessup, Georgia, and I had to go through Okla-fucking-homa. I even went from Jessup, Georgia, to Edgefield, South Carolina, normally a two-hour bus ride, and I had to go through the Oklahoma hub. Go figure.”
His destination, the Federal Transportation Center in Oklahoma City, is a sixteen-story building located at the Oklahoma City airport. Yes, the prison is at the airport. The plane pulls up to the building, the ramp is extended to the plane, and everyone walks right into the prison. The prisoners’ feet never touch freedom.
After Lawton and the other prisoners disembarked, they walked into the prison past a huge guard standing six foot eight and weighing 300 pounds. He was an American Indian, and he was a legend.
“We were all in line,” said Lawton, “and the Indian ordered this one prisoner to do something, and he didn’t do it fast enough, and he snatched him out of the line, took him out of our sight, and gave him a beating.
“He snatched the dude out of the line, dragged him into a cell, and beat the crap out of him,” said Lawton.
Lawton was placed in a holding cell with a hundred other prisoners. Immediately he could see that that FTC Oklahoma was a zoo. Several bloody fights broke out immediately.
“An inmate might recognize someone from another prison, a guy he didn’t get along with, or there might be two guys from rival gangs who recognize each other, and without warning a fight breaks out,” said Lawton. “Or a guy gets sentenced, and he’s pissed off, and he thinks another guy might have snitched on him, and pow, it’s on.
“I saw two Latino guys get into it. This one guy knocked the other one down, and his head was up against the steel toilet, and the first guy kept kicking the guy’s head against the toilet. You heard ding, ding, ding every time he smashed his head against the steel toilet.
“No one interfered. The goon squad came ten minutes later, after the fight was over.
“They won’t just open the cell and help the guy, because there are a hundred guys in there. Can you imagine if they opened the door, and a hundred guys tried to escape? They had to wait for the goon squad to come in. In most instances, like this one, the fight is over before they arrive.”
At Oklahoma Lawton kept to himself. No one bothered him there.
“I do my thing,” he said. “I didn’t have co-defendents. I’m a good convict. I know how to handle myself. A lot of inmates have bravado, and they end up getting killed.”
Oklahoma housed about three hundred men on each floor. The prisoners never left the floor and never went outside. There was one little recreation area with a basketball hoop, but that was about it. The purpose of this prison was to move prisoners within the system. The guards had one goal: make sure no one escaped.
Once a prisoner arrives at FTC Oklahoma, he has no idea how long he’s going to be held there. It can be two or three weeks, or it can be three months, but chances are, it won’t be a quick turnaround.
On Lawton’s floor there were sixty cells in his pod, three pods to a floor, and each cell were supposed to hold two men. Because there were more prisoners than beds, in some cases three men were in a cell, and one of the men had to sleep on the floor.
Lawton’s main gripe
with the Oklahoma facility was the poor quality of the food.
“The food is made in the kitchen, and it comes up on a cart,” he said. “You get fed breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a tray. The food is shitty processed, bullshit food. Mystery meat was the norm. Was it chicken? Was it beef? What was it? We never knew. It was mystery meat, something you wouldn’t feed your dog.”
While housed there Lawton felt lost and helpless. He had no possessions. He didn’t know when he was going to leave. He had trouble falling asleep.
“You own no property at all, are given a golf pencil to write a letter, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get the two stamps a week they’re supposed give you, if they come around,” he said. “The prisoners heading off are awakened at one in the morning for their flight out. You get awakened all the time. You can’t get comfortable. You can’t sleep. You want so badly to get to where you’re going, regardless of what other hell hole that might be.”
While staying at the Oklahoma City hub, he informed one of the guards he was headed for Atlanta.
Said the guard, “Oh man, I’m sorry. You’re fucked. You’re a white guy in that prison. They’re going to torture you there.”
Lawton couldn’t imagine such a place could possibly exist in America – until he got there.
CHAPTER 9
The Worst of the Worst
Lawton left Oklahoma before the crack of dawn. At Oklahoma prisoners rarely see daylight. He had arrived in the dark, and he was leaving in the dark.
The plane’s first stop was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. After the plane landed on the tarmac, Lawton sat there waiting in his seat for what seemed an eternity. A lieutenant walked onto the plane and started reading off names. Prisoners got up and hobbled down the stairway at the back of the plane. Lawton could see prisoners, standing in front of their assigned busses, again being searched for contraband. The Air Marshals then reloaded the plane with new inmates heading to God knows where.
The next stop was Atlanta. After hearing all the horror stories Lawton was beginning to feel an unsettling nervousness.
“You’re a white boy in a prison with all black guards. You’re the shit of the shit,” he was told. Another prisoner who had spent time there told him, “The guards are going to beat your ass.”
Lawton thought to himself, How am I going to survive this?
Lawton’s name was called. Handcuffed and shackled, he got up and shuffled off down the center aisle to the back of the plane.
“Name and number,” barked a huge black lieutenant.
“Lawton, 52224-004,” he said.
Still in irons, he hobbled down the ramp and looked around. The plane was surrounded by guards with shotguns.
No getting away from here, he thought.
He headed to his assigned bus and waited to be searched.
Lawton sat on the bus as it drove through the slums of Atlanta. There was a sign for the Atlanta zoo. Fitting, he thought. Then he saw the prison, which was built in 1903. He could see the forty-foot high walls that ringed the place. A series of gun towers were prominent. Underground the concrete had been poured twenty-feet below the ground level, a guarantee that no one would dig himself out. In one brick tower Lawton noticed a flock of pigeons. He envied their freedom. In 1903 the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary was the largest poured concrete structure in the world, designed to make sure he wouldn’t see the outside world for a long, long time.
This place is a dungeon, he thought.
As it was supposed to be. After all, it was designed to house the worst of the worst. Al Capone had resided there in the 1930s. The Cuban criminals who made up a large part of the Mariel Boat Lift ended up there, as did Tommy Silverstein, perhaps the most violent criminal Atlanta had ever seen.
Silverstein had been one of the founders of the Aryan Brotherhood, a Nazi hate group that targets blacks and Jews. In the 1970s Silverstein was in the hole when someone passed him a key and he was able to slip his handcuffs. He murdered a Black Panther by the name of Cadillac Smith, and when the guards came after him, he killed two guards, including a lieutenant. Silverstein was put in solitary confinement, alone with no human contact, and he’s been in solitary since 1983. He has since been moved to Leavenworth, Kansas.
“Friends have told me he’s a totally fucking psycho,” said Lawton. “Everyone was worried about bringing members of Al Quida from Guantanamo to the U.S.? Are you kidding me? I laugh. Put them in there with guys in penitentiaries like Atlanta and they’d be lucky to survive.”
*
The bus pulled up to a garage area and stopped. Lawton could see the gate open. After the bus pulled into the garage, he could hear the gate clang shut behind him.
“Okay, file off,” everyone was ordered.
Lawton walked into a huge elevator with fifteen other inmates.
“Turn around and get against the wall,” came the order from a burley guard with a deep voice. “Nuts to butts, tighten it up.”
Lawton, who had traveled on a plane and a bus shackled for twelve hours, ached all over.
I guess I’m not going to get any sympathy from this place, he thought.
The elevator ascended, and after it stopped, the elevator door opened, and everyone entered receiving and discharge. The prisoners were ordered into a large cell. One by one the prisoners were uncuffed. They stood body to body crushed in like cattle as each prisoner’s name was called for processing.
“Lawton, 52224-004.”
Once they determined that Lawton was actually Lawton, the first thing they did was conduct a thorough body search.
“You lift your cock, bend over and spread your ass, then you squat and cough,” said Lawton. “They want to make sure you don’t have any contraband on you. They check to see you’re not suitcasing – hiding something up your rectum.”
Some of the prisoners were only staying at Atlanta overnight before being transferred to another prison. Those convicted of non-violent crimes were going to Atlanta’s camp. Most, like Lawton, were headed to the SHU, the special housing unit, or the hole, where each prisoner with violence in his record had to spend from a few days to a month while undergoing what is known as the Captain’s Review.
For his review, Lawton had to wait ten days, and during this period he learned just how hard living in the hole could be.
“The first thing I did was size up my cellie both physically and mentally,” said Lawton. “I’m good at that. I’m a pretty intimidating guy, even though I wasn’t all tatted up like I am now, and I wasn’t nearly as hard-looking.”
His cellmate, he saw, wasn’t going to be a threat. But that didn’t mean he didn’t feel uncomfortable over his situation. He was used to living on his own terms. He was used to having privacy. Quickly Lawton learned that having the luxury of privacy was a thing of the past.
Because he had been traveling on ConAir, the first thing Lawton had to do when he was assigned a cell in the hole was make a bowel movement. But the toilet was not three feet from the bunk beds, and there was another inmate already housed there who he didn’t know. Lawton was used to privacy in the bathroom. This was entirely different.
“You gotta shit,” said Lawton. “I asked him to turn around. I didn’t want him watching me. When you’re sitting on the toilet, you’re used to being alone. I sat down on the toilet, and he lay on his bunk, his head at the far end of the cell faced toward the wall. If I had wanted to, I could have reached out and touched his leg. That’s how close we were.
“This time I was lucky. My cellie was okay. Later in other prisons I had to room with cellies who were animals. That’s when you fight in the cells. One time I beat a guy until he couldn’t move, because when you’re locked in, it’s either him or me. No referee. Lucky for him, I had a heart, or I would have killed the guy. I was worried he was going to kill me first. But not this time. I became comfortable wi
th my cellie rather quickly. We started talking. If you don’t get along, then when it’s time to go to sleep, you better sleep with one eye open. Which is what I did that first night anyway. Atlanta was one place where you never got comfortable.”
In the hole, Lawton quickly saw, he and the other prisoners were at the mercy of the guards.
“You find you have nothing coming to you,” said Lawton. “Meaning there’s no point banging on the door and saying, ‘Hey man, I don’t have a blanket.’ What blanket? You’re lucky you’re alive in there. If you bang on the door, the guard comes up to the door and says, ‘What do you want? You want a blanket? Now you don’t get one.’ They do whatever they want to do. You’re under the command of the fucking Gestapo.”
The inmates in the hole were also at the mercy of the elements. Temperature, both from the weather and from the water temperature of the showers, was a serious problem.
“Atlanta had air conditioning, but it was either broke most of the time or the guards were fucking with us,” said Lawton. “In the summer the place was a sauna, and in the winter the prisoners froze. We’d beg for blankets. We didn’t always get them.”
Showering was a problem because the guards controlled the temperature of the water. If a guard felt like it, he could turn off the hot water in the winter so the prisoners would freeze. But that wasn’t nearly as bad as when they turned off the cold water, because the result was boiling hot water. When the guards turned off the cold water, Lawton quickly learned you couldn’t shower or you would be scalded. One time Lawton didn’t shower for fourteen days because the guards refused to turn the cold water back on.
Lawton lay on his bunk in the hole listening to the mayhem around him.
“You hear everything that’s going on around you,” he said. “You’ll hear the other inmates talking or screaming. You hear the drug deals going down. The orderly will come up to your window and say, ‘Do you need anything? What you got?’ I didn’t have anything. I was new to the system. I didn’t know how it worked. What he was saying was, If you need heroin, if you need weed, whatever you want, he could get. And if you had it, he could find a buyer for it.
