by Mateo Hoke
The DOC made a deal. After seven and a half years on the circuit, they took me off, gave me a bit of money, and left me alone for a little while. About the same time, there was another guy, Tommy Ortiz, also on the circuit, who got like $750,000 in damages because they beat him so bad. It got national attention. We had exposed the circuit, and they modified it so that guys could stay for six or seven months in one place before being transferred. They added access to a law library. They stopped most of the physical abuse, the tactical team training. Guys could go to the yard together sometimes. Basically, not so much solitary confinement no more.
A HUNDRED DEGREES IN THIS BOX
After the lawsuit settlement, I finally got off the circuit and was in general population for a while. Then they sent me down to New Mexico, sent me out of state, never found out why. I was in a minimum-security prison. I made the officers’ uniforms. This sounds weird for being in prison, but I finally knew what it was like to have a semi-life, I guess. I had a job. I was able to go to church. I was able to have visits. Even though I was in New Mexico and my parents were in Illinois, I was able to talk to my mom when I wanted, for the first time since I was locked up. I spent a year, maybe two, in New Mexico.
Then, in March 1998, all of a sudden, US marshals come running into the prison, weapons drawn. They chained me to a dolly cart, put me in a van, put me on an airplane in Albuquerque, and transferred me to Tamms.9
At Tamms I had nothing. I was in a gray box, and there was one time in Tamms where I was in a cellblock all by myself. Just left on B1 by myself, no property—all I got is two pairs of underwear, two pairs of socks, one jumpsuit, and shower shoes—and they would take my weight every week because I got so small. I mean I looked like I’d given up. I had no appetite. Nothing. I just wanted it to end.
It was like, I just can’t do this, I can’t do this no more. I mean, my whole life you’ve put me by myself, I’m just tired. I think it might’ve been six months before they forced me to see a mental health professional. I might’ve been there nine months before they started putting me on medication. And I was tired of life. I was tired of being in a box by myself.
I spent my last two years in prison begging them for help, “My out date is coming, I need to get ready, I need help.” And instead of helping me they kept giving me more and more medication. As my release date got closer, I got transferred out of Tamms to Menard, and they wrote me a disciplinary report saying that I was a threat to the safety and security of Menard. And they put me in a building by myself in Menard for my last twenty days in prison. No soap, no toothpaste, no shower, no yard, no nothing. A hundred degrees in this box, and that’s how I spent my last month in prison.
I was on five types of psychotropic medication. But when I walked out I had no medication, no prescription, nothing. So not only am I shocked by being out, I have to cold turkey from medication, and I’m scared shitless out here.
I DON’T FEEL LIKE I BELONG OUT HERE
I got out June 29, 2010, and I was terrified. My mom drove up to get me. I was basically a caveman going into society.
The trip home, I had been out maybe fifteen, maybe ten minutes, we stopped to get ice cream, and a guy walked in behind me, and I started shaking. I became so scared and enraged just because he had gotten in line behind me. And my mom was looking at me like, What the fuck is wrong with you? What did they do?
In solitary, there were times where I completely lost track of time. I have maybe a hundred watches now. I’ve got some very expensive watches, but most of them are ten-, twenty-dollar watches. I have one watch on, I have a pocket watch, and I have the clock on my phone. I have time everywhere around me, because I’m afraid of losing track of time again.
I’m worse off now than when I first got out. There’s a lot of days that I don’t feel like I belong out here. Talking to other solitary survivors, they feel the same way. It’s real messed up to feel like that. Like, it’s not our world out here. I wish I could have like just a week without it coming up, without a nightmare, without that garbage.
I’ve been seeing a psychologist regularly for four or five years now and also talking to a trauma specialist. The sad part is, the doctors out here don’t know what to do for me. They don’t know any ways to treat it. They know how to treat the guys inside in prison, but they don’t know what to do for me out here.
Out of most of the other guys I know who came out of solitary, I’m the only one who has a job. They are on social security for post-
traumatic stress. They can’t handle working around people, or being around people.
I hear people say, Let’s save the whales, let’s make sure the doggies don’t get hurt. Well, what about the human beings? You know? If you can’t sit in your bathroom for three days with none of your gadgets, you can’t understand what they did to us. I did something wrong, I deserved to go to prison. But I didn’t deserve to be tortured.
I once tried to write a book about it. And when I read what I wrote, I was disgusted at myself. Because I was talking to the cell like it was a person. And how lonely the cell has to be without me there. I was shocked that I had even written something like that. It is a gray box, a cement box. It is not a person. But the sad part is, when I was in there, it was. It was my chess partner. When I was talking to myself, I would be talking to the cell. I’d be like, What, you’re not going to answer me now? It’s screwed up, but it was my reality.
What is helping me though is reading prison letters all day and trying to figure out a way to respond and help the guys inside. I read sometimes a hundred a week, sometimes two, three hundred. I track the trends in all the prisons.
Sure, they closed Tamms, but now they have mini-Tamms in the medium prisons—Pontiac, Menard—where people are still in solitary. The conditions are maybe slightly better, but it is still horrible. Torture. All that’s gonna stop is they’re not gonna call it solitary confinement. They’re just gonna change the name. Like the circuit, temporary housing, maximum-security housing, the SHU, they’ll just keep changing the name and have it hid somewhere in the system.
It is sorta like my own therapy, doing this work and answering letters from family members and people on the inside. There are times when I want to stop doing the work, but I can’t stop. I’ve got friends in that box. I’m not going to forget them.
* * *
5. The Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, popularly referred to as the Audy Home, after Superintendent Arthur Audy, who ran the juvenile hall in the 1940s, is a massive juvenile detention facility that at the height of its population was referred to as “the largest juvenile jail in the world.” Facing widespread allegations of deteriorating conditions and staff abuse, it was the subject of numerous lawsuits, including a class action lawsuit that resulted in a federal court monitor from 1999 until 2015.
6. The Illinois Youth Center facility, also referred to as “Valley View,” was located in Kane County, in the western suburbs of Chicago.
7. Menard Correctional Center is a maximum-security prison holding about 3,500 people that was first opened in 1878. It sits on the Mississippi River in the southwestern part of Illinois on the border with Missouri.
8. “Truth in sentencing” refers to legislation popular in many states and incentivized by the federal government from the mid-1980s through the 1990s that aims to abolish or curb parole so that people convicted of a crime must be incarcerated for all or most of the prison term to which they have been sentenced.
9. Tamms Correctional Center, located in Illinois, was a supermax prison with five hundred solitary confinement beds that opened in 1998. After years of allegations of brutal conditions, lawsuits, and a public campaign to close the prison, Tamms was shuttered in 2013.
AARON LEWIS
age: 35
born in: Stamford, Connecticut
interviewed in: Northern Correctional Institution,
Suffield, Connecticut
When Aaron Lewis was growing up in the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1990s, Connecticut’s prison population was ballooning.10 A prison population of six thousand in 1986 grew to sixteen thousand in 1996 as a result of the “war on drugs” and other tough-on-crime policies. Instead of reforming those policies, Connecticut—like a lot of other states—simply started building more prisons, especially harsh “supermax” prisons like Northern Correctional Institution that soon became synonymous with abusive and inhumane conditions.
In 1999, when he was just a teenager, Aaron was arrested and incarcerated at the height of this prison boom. In 2000, Aaron arrived at Northern while he was still awaiting trial. He was seventeen. Aaron would spend ten of the next twelve years confined there, the vast majority of that time in solitary confinement. In these conditions, litigation became a means of resistance and survival. Though Aaron had never done well in school and was without a high school diploma, he taught himself the law and filed and won his own cases, and for years he’s assisted other prisoners with their legal challenges.
At thirty-five, Aaron’s spent half his life behind bars. He faces the prospect of remaining in prison until at least 2035. We first meet Aaron in the fall of 2016 at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, Connecticut. The room, past two steel sliding doors that slowly and loudly grind open and close, is small and nondescript. We sit at a metal table bolted to the ground.
A LOT OF THINGS THAT HAPPENED
IN MY PAST, I JUST FORGOT
The only thing I remember about my childhood is getting in trouble with the law. Everything else, I don’t remember none of that. It’s probably there, I just don’t remember it because I pushed all of that out.
That’s part of what comes from being confined. When you’re numb to emotions, your memories of emotional experiences start to fade away. You suppress them and you start being bitter and you care less about things. The more I became bitter, the more I pushed things out my mind like family, childhood, friends, and all that. I haven’t been in tune with my emotions, save for anger, in eighteen years.
This numbness blocked me from revisiting my childhood days when I felt happiness, joy, love, appreciation. I only remember things from my past that I could identify and associate with what I’m feeling in my present. I figure this is why I could remember how frustrated and pained I felt growing up. Being bitter and fixated on such bitterness, pain, and hate, I haven’t focused on anything that makes us human. This fixation accounts for why my memory of my childhood is a blur. Actually, my vision of most of my adolescence is a blurred one. I’m pretty sure there are happy days in my family history growing up; I just don’t remember them.
I was born in Stamford, Connecticut, on April 18, 1983. My mother’s name is Connie. My father’s name is Aaron. I really don’t remember nothing about growing up in Stamford, but that’s where all my family is from. All my pain comes from growing up in New Haven and Rockview Circle. That’s the projects. That’s where I basically grew up.
I’ve got five sisters, and I’m the youngest, the only boy. My aunt’s kids came to stay with us for a while. My cousin, Winter, she’s like another sister. Then my mother had a boyfriend and his daughter, Serena, was with us for a period of time too. So, it was a household full of girls, and that basically drove me crazy. My other little cousin, Iroquois—that’s my aunt’s son—he was always under me. He was a year younger than me. Everything I did, he wanted to do. I always treated him like a little brother. I knew he looked up to me.
At our place in New Haven, my mother was harder on me than she was on my sisters. She was more punitive with me because she said she was scared. I don’t know what she was scared of. Probably growing up in the projects, and me being her only boy. One day I remember, when I was littler than twelve, I told her, “I’m going into the army.” She said, “Hell no. I’m not losing my only son.” Growing up, we all had chores and my sisters would try to get out of doing them. They’d try to get me in trouble because they knew my punishment would be to clean the whole house. So it was a battle and my mother always took their side.
My father didn’t live with us. He lived all the way in Stamford. He was a man of few words. I would see my father whenever my mother took us to Stamford, which probably was a few times a year. Besides giving me life and money, he never gave me too much of anything else. I really don’t remember my mother like that during my childhood. The only thing I remember of my mother growing up was that she was associated with discipline. Which meant “trouble.” I could only remember my mother in the times I got into trouble. Since I associated her with trouble as a kid, I tended to want to avoid her. So I did. As much as I could, I avoided her growing up. I had more of a mother–son relationship with my aunt Amy. She passed away of a heart attack from complication with diabetes in March. It hurt me when my aunt passed away. It still hurts me to this day. It will hurt me for the rest of my entire life.
I got in trouble in school some. My first time in juvenile detention was for something petty. I had a BB gun and I let one of my friends see the BB gun, coming from basketball practice at school. We wouldn’t let another kid at school that we weren’t friends with see the BB gun, so that person told on us. So I got a “facsimile of a firearm” charge and got sent to juvenile detention for a month, waiting for resolution of the BB gun charge.
Juvenile, for me, wasn’t that bad. I’ve always been a little taller for my age, so I wasn’t really vulnerable to other kids based on my size. I was more protecting the vulnerable from the bullies. It didn’t feel like being in jail. But you don’t realize how much you miss home until you go to juvenile. At home, you always feel like you want to get away. But you go to juvenile, you feel like, Home is better than this shit right here.
For the BB gun charge, I was sentenced to some probation time and twenty-four hours of community service. I had to wash the windows of the New Haven Juvenile Courthouse. My mother made sure I did that community service. After I did the community service, I went to school, and then afterward I’d be running the streets with my friends, especially my best friend. We did everything together. Everything. He got me smoking weed. He had brothers. All his brothers, they were like my brothers.
We moved out of the projects to Sherman Avenue in New Haven in ’97, but I’d still go to my best friend’s house in the projects. You couldn’t separate me and him. We’d do little petty crimes. We’d steal car stereos and sell them for $40 and buy weed with it. We’d go get some Subway, we’d eat, and we’d get high. Flirt with some girls. All that came to an end quick because my best friend moved out of the projects to somewhere else in town.
I was away from home for a while in the summer of ’97. One night I stayed out too late, and I didn’t want to go back home because I didn’t want to get in trouble for having stayed out all night. I was planning to go back and face the punishment, but the next day I was like, nah. Then it became two days, three days, then I felt like I couldn’t go home. I just stayed out and lived with friends.
The police picked me up in Fair Haven. I was with somebody else who was selling drugs. When they picked me up, I wasn’t holding any money or drugs, but they had me down as an “86,” and I asked the officer, “What’s an 86?” He was like, “A runaway.” A runaway? I ain’t a runaway.
I called and asked my mother if she called the cops and said that I ran away. She was like, “Yeah, yeah.” I told her that I didn’t run away. She was like, “You didn’t come home. You haven’t been home all summer. What am I supposed to think?” I’m like, “Alright, Mother, you win. If you want to put it that way, I guess so.” But that was the first time I realized I wasn’t home all summer.
Just send me then and get it over with
The cops knew that I wasn’t holding drugs when they picked me up. I had no money on me or anything. But the other kid that I was with at the time had been caught many times
with drugs. When the cops brought me in, they wanted me to say the drugs were the other kid’s. But I wouldn’t say what they wanted. So they took me down for conspiracy to possess narcotics.
I was in detention for four months, and my lawyer, he just kept saying, “They’re thinking about sending you to Long Lane.”11 I said, “Just send me then and get it over with.” He said, “Alright.” And so I entered Long Lane on December 21, 1997. My mother was pissed because they didn’t ask her about anything. She didn’t even know that I pleaded guilty. The police had to tell her. They gave me eighteen months.
At Long Lane, they didn’t call us inmates. They called us “YJOs,” youthful juvenile offenders. Or “SJOs,” serious juvenile offenders. Or they just called us by our names.
My time in Long Lane was—I cannot describe it. It was difficult. All of us in there just felt like it was preparing us for Manson Youth Institution as the next step, even though none of us had been to MYI.12 We just heard stories. If you were being kept at Long Lane, you could earn passes to leave the grounds or get furloughs. But I didn’t want any passes, I didn’t want any furloughs. I just wanted to do my time, get this over with, and go home.
We lived in cottages on the grounds. At that time, Long Lane was like a college campus. You had dorms, a medical center, a swimming pool. We could move around where we wanted, but if we got in trouble, the officers there would serve us with misconduct reports. Sometimes with a report we’d get confinement to our rooms. If it was serious, then the officers would take us to what was known as “the unit”—isolated confinement.
I was in and out of the unit, usually thirty days in the unit. If you were in a unit, you’d wear a jumper. You were in a cell by yourself, and you cleaned your own cell. The windows were glass with a mesh grate on the inside. You could hear the kids outside—it wasn’t like soundproofed or nothing. In the unit you came out four hours a day to go to the gym and class—two hours in the morning, two hours at night.
