Six by Ten

by Mateo Hoke

  At first when I would run away, I basically scavenged to survive. I slept in garages, snuck into friends’ houses once their parents were asleep. I even lived in a vintage Jaguar E-Type for about a week. Once I was so hungry that I ate food out of a fast-food restaurant dumpster. Eventually though, when it started to get really tight, I began to turn to crime. Initially, I would steal food from stores, but then I got good at it and started stealing 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor from the local corner stores and would sell them for a dollar at this pool hall hangout in my neighborhood called D&N’s. From there I graduated to stealing clothes and electronics from malls.

  I BECAME A WARD OF THE STATE

  At thirteen I was charged with grand theft auto and taken to Wayne County Youth Home. It was a huge, menacing complex with a prison wall around it and everything. I had never been locked up before and Wayne County Youth Home had a reputation for violence. I was processed, given a set of youth home clothes, which were jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of cheap S. S. Kresge gym shoes. The next day I would wake up to what has ever since become my consistent reality of life in Michigan institutions.

  I have spent thirty-two years in various Michigan facilities, and Wayne County Youth Home ranks in the top three most violent. Besides the wooden chairs that were everywhere, there were few weapons used, but young dudes went at it all day. One fight would lead to an entirely different fight for the most random reasons: changing the channel on the television, saying something to someone in the wrong tone, even winning a ping-pong game.

  Legally I was in bad shape. The referee (that’s what they called the judges) in juvenile court had found me guilty of being in possession of a stolen car. I was, but I was expecting probation because I had no prior felonies. Instead I was committed to the state. Which means my parents lost custody and I became a ward of the state who would be sent to either a private juvenile placement or a state training school. In other words, I would be locked up in kids’ jail. I couldn’t believe it!

  I was placed in a halfway house for boys on the east side of Detroit. I stayed there for like a month. My mother came to visit me on a regular basis. In the beginning of November, I was sent eighty miles away to Starr Commonwealth School for Boys, in Albion, Michigan. This place was much more structured and supervised, with a program called PPC, or Positive Peer Culture, and it required the “students,” as we were called, to cultivate and develop positive behavior and problem solving among ourselves. We had regular group therapy sessions. Being in Starr was a very positive experience. I grew and learned so much while I was there and made some lifelong friends. Starr also allowed us to go on home visits every major holiday. You had to be at Starr for at least one holiday before you could go home though. So I missed that Thanksgiving, but Christmas I was home and hanging out with my mom! We had fun together, but she was sick some of the time. In fact, one night we went to the movies, and she started throwing up in the parking lot. She thought that she was pregnant. I didn’t know what to think. All I know is that I went back to Starr on January 2, and about three weeks later I found out that my beautiful mother was sick and had been in the hospital for a couple weeks. I was taken to go see her and she was really in bad shape. We barely spoke because she was only half conscious most of the time. I went back to Starr not realizing that that was the last time I would see my mother alive. She had just turned thirty-six. I was fourteen.

  On the morning of February 2, 1984, my father called Starr and told them that they needed to get me to the hospital as soon as possible because my mother was in a bad way. So they immediately put me in a car with one of the head members of my group’s staff. We arrived at the hospital an hour and a half later, where my dad was already waiting at the entrance. As we walked down a hallway, he leaned in and said, “Shearod, your mother passed away.” His words landed on me like a mountain. My entire life with my mother passed through my mind in a matter of seconds, and then my knees gave in. I just collapsed in tears.

  My very next thought was Damn, now I have to be all alone with this dude. They actually gave me the choice of returning to Starr or receiving an administrative release. I chose to return. We had the funeral and then I went back. I didn’t want to be home with my dad.

  I was released from Starr on May 5, 1985. I was fifteen years old. I was home alone with my bitter, angry father. And to make things worse, he was in the early stages of a crack cocaine addiction. The year my mother died, 1984, is the year that crack started really having a presence in the city of Detroit. And my father was among that first wave of addicts.

  I RAN ALL THE WAY TO THE INTERVIEW

  The last thing that my mother ever said to me was, “Shearod, be good.” So when I got out of Starr I was determined to do the right thing. I had no criminal plans whatsoever. Coming out of Starr I was trying to prepare myself for success, so I went to school in the mornings and worked at Burger King in the afternoon. From the very beginning though I made two very serious mistakes. I started hanging out with the wrong people and I started smoking weed. Because I stayed high much of the time and had to catch the bus to work, I was chronically late. By the end of the summer my boss, Mr. Miles, finally became fed up. He demanded that I leave the premises and never come back.

  While at Starr I had met and become very close with a boy I called “Black.” This kid was the genuine article and was in Starr for getting caught with thousands of dollars’ worth of heroin. He was the kind of young dude I admired. He was strong, intelligent, street smart, and a warrior. Plus, he had all kinds of style. I wanted to be like that.

  When I came home Black was ready to celebrate, partner up, and become young drug lords. Black wanted me to sell drugs with him. For a sixteen-year-old boy, at least moneywise, he was doing well. He would flash large wads of cash and all kinds of expensive clothes and jewelry to try and convince me to get into the dope game. He and I had truly forged a family bond, and I was one of the only people that he really trusted. But I was committed to living a clean, crime-free life, until I got fired from Burger King. After that, something clicked in me, and I gave in to the weakness and temptation of fast money. I also had my first fistfight with my dad, which he won by punching me in the throat. That knocked all of the fight out of me.

  As the final months of 1986 went by, I began to hang out with Black and started making more money. I continued to sell in my hood to my little rinky-dink clientele, which sometimes included my father and his circle of cracked-out associates. Getting money with Black, hustling out in the open, was probably the rawest level of street life that I had experienced. Until then, violence had barely been a factor in my drug-dealing history, but this was eighties Detroit, and everything was hyper-aggressive.

  1987 came and my hope was that I would graduate and be in college or university within the next year. But at times it seemed like my problems only got bigger by the day. At the end of the school year, my guidance counselor told me that there was no way I would be graduating. I had done a terrible job of keeping track of where I was in the curriculum, and she told me that in order to graduate I would have to go to summer school and take the GED test. But there would be no walking across the stage with cap and gown. I was hurt. Part of the problem was that my school records from Starr had gotten lost in the move from school to school, so the time and grades from those classes were lost.

  I was exhausted, frustrated with my life, using drugs more than ever, and becoming more and more disillusioned. Instead of the pipe I smoked coke rolled up in weed. In Detroit that’s what we called a “51.” I was also carrying a gun sometimes, which I had never done before. And then out of the blue, one of my stress-induced irrational decisions turned out to be one of the most rational things I could have possibly done: I said to hell with it all, sold my remaining product, and started looking for a job. I didn’t want to live like that.

  I ended up getting an interview with a company called Reymer & Gerser Associates, which was a telemarketing
outfit. I still didn’t have a car, which presented a problem. The day before the interview I asked my dad if he would take me to the Reymer & Gerser offices. He agreed, and I went to bed that night feeling good about the possibility of a new job. So the next day while I’m getting myself together, I notice that my dad isn’t showing any sign of preparing to take me anywhere. So I go to his bedroom doorway and comment that he needs to get ready. His response was “I ain’t takin’ you nowhere.” I ran all the way to the interview. All three and a half miles, almost nonstop. When I made it to their offices I was sweating and everything, but still made it on time. I gave a great interview and got the job! I feel good about that to this very day. I worked at Reymer & Gerser for what was probably less than two months and got fired for chronic tardiness. It was a combination of having no transportation and being high all the time.

  I started selling again, this time “from the hip,” meaning man to man, plus I opened up a “spot,” which is Detroit slang for a drug house. I had a friend named Johnny, and his friend Clyde, who were both working for me, and I was doing pretty well.

  On September 13, 1987, some friends and I went into this restaurant called Jeff’s BBQ. While we were there some guys spotted us outside, and went and gathered a few more dudes who came into the eatery and started threatening us. They either didn’t know or didn’t care that I was a ticking time bomb. Out of pure rage I shot a boy named Robert Woods, and I chased down another dude with every intent of killing him, too.

  Shearod was convicted of second-degree murder and a felony firearms charge and sentenced to twenty-five to forty years in Michigan state prisons. He spent his first two years in prison in segregation. After eight years, he was transferred to Carson City Correctional Facility, in Montcalm County. While at Carson, Shearod stabbed two inmates. When guards came to break up the fight, Shearod and other inmates began stabbing officers, and a riot broke out.

  I-MAX TORTURED YOUR SOUL

  For the incident at the Carson City facility, I ended up getting sixteen to forty years. So instead of getting out in 2009, my first possible out date is 2023.

  Ionia Maximum was the state’s only level 6 facility. That means every cell is an isolation cell. The entire facility was long-term segregation. I-Max was supposedly a facility for the system’s “worst of the worst.” Most dudes who got into serious trouble like murders, serious staff assaults, escape, et cetera were sent to ICF, which is the acronym for Ionia Correctional Facility. I used to say that “ICF” stood for “Insane Criminal Facility” ’cause a significant number of its population was mentally ill in some way. Some were like that when they got there, and others were made that way by the prison. I-Max tortured your soul.

  Those I-Max doors were super-oppressive. The cells were probably eight by seven. Like being locked in a closet or bathroom. I-Max had these colorful cells with tile floors, a brick-red desk mounted to the wall with an attached swinging stool, yellow heat registers, and a green window frame with a shuttered window that you could open by turning a knob at the bottom. The window was right above one end of the bunk. The toilet was at the other.

  Inside, the walls were made of cinderblocks, which means they were hollow on the inside. Guys would tear off the metal stools attached to the desks and use them as sledgehammers to break through the walls to go at their enemies. The officers were major players in this as well. Many of them were like cruel children torturing fenced-in dogs. They would emotionally torture the inmates, assault them, starve them, throw away their mail, tamper with the food of prisoners they didn’t like, all kinds of craziness.

  Dudes would wage noise warfare on each other with nonstop banging and biological warfare with urine and feces. When you entered some units you were immediately struck by the pungent smell of human excrement. There literally were shit wars.

  I had a neighbor in detention who used to routinely yell, scream, and bang his metal cell foot locker lid all night. He would also smear feces all over his door and the heat register, which was almost the same as him smearing it in my cell. Nothing smells worse than human feces.

  Plus, I-Max was infested with mice. In maximum-security facilities the power goes out at 12 a.m. From midnight until six in the morning, the lights are automatically turned off, which means for six hours your cell is in almost complete darkness. You would barely notice the mice during the day, but at night they would come alive. The sound of rodents romping through the heat registers was loud enough to wake you up. It may sound weak, but being awakened by the sounds of mice in the middle of the night is extremely traumatizing. That along with everything else was a form of psychological terror. It either brought the aggression out of you or drove you crazy. I feel blessed to have survived it with my faculties intact. Many men didn’t.

  The yard cages are how we got yard in the hole. For one hour, five days a week, each man is put in a separate cage. They look like kennel cages. There are seven cages in total, all of them attached to the other. At most Michigan max joints the yard cages are made of heavy-duty steel, but at I-Max the cages were just made of plain old fencing. Because of that, dudes would tear the cages apart and have actual cage fights.

  Because I had come for something considered super serious, I was automatically put on suicide watch, which is MDOC policy.27 The hostility began from the very beginning. Officers refused to feed me and threatened to assault me if I came out for showers. I-Max had an in-cell intercom system and they would give me my food trays and then get on the intercom and say things like, “How did you like that ball sweat on your tater tots?” Officers were known to break into an inmate’s cell at unexpected times and kick his ass, so to protect myself and be prepared for late-night combat, I slept fully clothed on top of my sheets and blankets for two months straight.

  In Michigan they have two levels of segregation, punitive seg and administrative seg. They both are the hole, but one doesn’t allow you to have any property and the other does. I-Max had five units. All segregation. You could call units one and two “the hole inside the hole.” Those two units were nonstop bedlam and also where officers kicked the most ass.

  I was in unit two. The officers were seriously whooping ass over there on a daily basis. Fear was a constant. Eventually I was released from detention and put in an administrative segregation cell in another unit.

  I BEGAN TO REMEMBER WHO I REALLY WAS

  I once heard a guy say, “If you are Black and you do a substantial amount of time in prison, it’s going to have one of two effects on you: make you hate white people or make you want to kiss their feet.” I believe that there is some truth in there somewhere. The MDOC is almost completely run and staffed by white people. The majority of the prison population is Black.28 It begs the question, why does crime in urban Black areas translate into jobs for rural or mostly white areas? There are white-majority towns in the state where the main industry seems to be corrections.

  The cell I was placed in had such a drafty window that ice would accumulate all over the frame and surrounding walls. It was winter by the time I was moved there so I had to sleep under two blankets with a hat and towel over my head, plus socks, thermals, and coat. I brought the problem to the attention of staff many times, but they didn’t care. I don’t know if I was put there by design or not. But again, as a kid I’d slept in abandoned garages in the dead of Detroit winters. So I could deal with all of this.

  It seemed like once you were in I-Max, it was impossible to get out. There were different levels to the place, but no hope of leaving. Two positive things happened while I was there though: around ’96, my father started trying to reach out and support me. Up until then I barely heard from him. The other thing was I had a spiritual epiphany.

  At I-Max, once you were released from detention, if you could afford it, they would let you listen to music in your cell. Throughout my life music has always been a source of comfort. That has not changed in prison. Besides music and books, my major focus was
analyzing my existence. I would constantly ask, How did my life come to this? I investigated my every thought, memory, and emotion. The primary question was always, why?

  One day I was listening to a Jimi Hendrix song, “Straight Ahead,” that I’d never heard before. In the song, Jimi sings: “The best love to have is the love of life.” This small statement hit a massive switch in my mind. I rewound the tape to that lyric three, four times, and the tears began to flow. I felt different. I was different. From that moment on I had a feeling of rediscovering myself. I began to remember who I really was: not this hateful, bitter, violent, racist predator but a lover of people, and music, and art, and kindness.

  MORE HOLE TIME

  I was seeing the SCC (Security Classification Committee) one evening in January 2000 when the resident unit manager asked me, “Are you ready to get out of here?” I paused in surprise and said, “Yeah, I would love that.” She replied, “Okay, I’m putting in a transfer for you.” I couldn’t believe it. After four and a half years I was leaving this insane asylum!

  My heart did a little dance. I was told the night before I left that I was going up to “Marquette.” Marquette was Marquette Branch Prison in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the second-oldest prison in the state, and the oldest max joint. All maximum-security facilities are filled with the most aggressive prisoners. My main concern was the staff though. Serious assaults on officers were not easily forgotten by MDOC staff. The department holds grudges like no other. But at least I might be getting out of the hole! And Marquette was known for giving the worst of the worst a shot in general population, or GP.

  I faced SCC at Marquette wearing an all-white jumpsuit. I tried to say what I thought they wanted to hear to be persuaded to release me to GP. Then I heard the words that made my heart stop: “Maybe one day someone will give you a chance in population. Put him in D block.” I was drained and dejected. More hole time, with nothing definite to look forward to. I was escorted, cuffed up and on a human leash, to D block. These blocks were old, dirty-looking, dark on the sunniest of days, stank like a sewage treatment plant, and LOUD!