by Mateo Hoke
IT’S CHANGED THE ENTIRE DYNAMIC OF THE FAMILY
At the end of September 2015, I was told that Nikko’s level had dropped because of his outbursts and that they would revisit the idea of him getting visits again in October 2016.52 I literally counted the days until October 2016. And on September 28, 2016, he went into a medical crisis. He had been through multiple beatings and cell extractions, and he had to be put into the crisis unit, which completely removes visitation from the table. So he’s being punished for going into a crisis state.
Every year it happens. He goes into a medical crisis and can’t have visits. And it’s going to happen again. And when it happens, it will happen worse than the last time. This could be the year that he ends up dead. I am not a dramatic person. I am a realist. I really am. It’s so basic what needs to be done, and the fact that I cannot hire an attorney for fifteen, twenty thousand, whatever they’re asking—that’s a crime. It’s a crime what’s happening to Nikko. And he will end up dead. He’s got another five years. He will not last.
It’s destroying the family. My health is failing, the girls are witnessing their mother suffering, knowing their brother is painfully suffering. It’s changed the entire dynamic of the family. It’s put a strain on my husband and our marriage. It’s a crime in itself. My daughters are at the age when they are still sweet and innocent—they’re eleven and thirteen—and to rob them of their innocence . . .
It’s hell. Nikko suffering is the last thing I think of before bed, it’s what I dream of, and as soon as I open my eyes in the morning it’s the first thing I think of. It’s a very difficult thing to explain, but every part of my life is affected by it. I live in a constant state of panic. I want to be able to give Nikko a hug. I want to smell my son. I want to be able to touch him and make him dinner and make his bed and know that he’s in my home and he’s safe and he’s not being tortured.
IT’S PRETTY OBVIOUS WHAT I’M DOING
I have a very small house, a small two-bedroom. And you know, I have five foster rescue dogs, plus my four dogs and my ferret and cat, and there’s Jackie, Nicole, and Fred. Oh, and I took my nephew in as well. So it’s tight. It’s tight.
It’s pretty obvious what I’m doing. I mean it’s not that hard to see. I can’t help my son, so I’m running around the state of Florida rescuing animals. I rescued the ferret because it was in solitary confinement. It was in this tiny birdcage. I named her after one of my favorite bag designers—Louis Vuitton. So her name is Louis, and her nickname is Vicious Vera.
I’ve been working with the ferret every day for the past seven months. You couldn’t touch this ferret before. Ferrets have very sharp teeth. They usually don’t bite, but this particular ferret was drawing blood. She basically treats Freddy like a piece of meat, but I won’t put her in a cage.
She has to have her own space. So she sleeps in my closet. I hate to use the word damaged, but she will have the effects of that solitary confinement for the rest of her life. Her personality will be altered forever. But the good news is that she is able to trust as long as you put the work in and you let her know, “I’m here. Even if you bite me and I’m bleeding, I still love you. And I’m here.” I can call her and she comes and kisses me on the lips. I’m just consistent with her. But no, I will not put her in a cage.
In early 2017, Heather was featured in an online news video (produced by Mateo) about the impacts of solitary confinement on her and her family. At the time Heather hadn’t seen Nikko since October 2015. Following the video’s release, she raised enough money through a crowd-funding campaign to hire an attorney. With the pressure from the attorney, Heather was able to secure two ten-minute phone calls and one two-hour visit per month with Nikko. She still can’t touch him, however. Their visits take place through glass. Nikko is currently held in solitary confinement in a medical wing at Union Correctional Facility in Raiford, Florida. Heather says he’s improving with regular visits and calls. “I have hope now,” she says. “But I’m scared he could slip again and I’ll lose him before I can get him out.”
* * *
50. Thompson Academy was a privately run juvenile detention facility, located in Broward County. Owned and operated by Youth Services International (YSI), Thompson was shut down in 2013 following allegations of rampant physical and sexual abuse and neglect of minors at the facility. In 2016, the state of Florida cut all ties with YSI.
51. “Pill mills” are pain clinics that recklessly prescribe opioids. In 2011, NPR called Florida the “epicenter of a prescription drug abuse epidemic,” citing that “doctors in Florida prescribe ten times more oxycodone pills than every other state in the country combined” (“The ‘Oxy Express’: Florida’s Drug Abuse Epidemic,” March 2, 2011).
52. “Level” here refers to security levels within a maximum-security prison. For more on the classification of security levels, see glossary, page 260.
MICHAEL “ZAHARIBU” DORROUGH
age: 64
born in: Cleveland, Ohio
interviewed in: Solano State Prison, Vacaville, California
With the exception of the drab prison jumpsuit he wears, Michael “Zah” Dorrough looks like an archetypal college professor. With a slight frame, a full head of hair, and light-brown eyes framed behind prison-issue bifocals, Zah is thoughtful and quiet. He has been in various prisons in the California system since the 1970s and is currently serving a sentence from 1985 for a murder that he says he did not commit. Now in general population, Zah spent nearly thirty years in solitary confinement in various California state prisons.
We visit Zah at Solano State Prison, where he is currently incarcerated. Located in Vacaville, California, Solano sits amid rolling green hills thick with oak trees and rows of eucalyptus and palms. Prison rules prevent us from bringing in recording equipment, so we correspond with him primarily via mail. Through dozens of letters, Zah tells us of his early life in the Watts housing projects in Los Angeles and the horrors of being locked up for decades in solitary confinement for his alleged prison gang affiliations.
GROWING UP IN CLEVELAND WAS SPECIAL
I have been in prison for almost all of my adult life. I think that, sometimes, turning your life around requires that you start your life all over again. Like being reborn.
I was born in 1954. I’m originally from Cleveland, Ohio. I had one sister, Marnetta. She was a dear friend. She passed away several years ago. And I have one brother, Craig, who is still alive. I grew up in a two-parent home. My mother, Thelma, is still alive. My father, Clarence, passed away two years ago from cancer. I was crushed. My parents were my dearest and most trusted friends. They were married sixty-five years.
Growing up in Cleveland was special. I loved to play baseball. I can remember how a buddy of mine and I would get on the bus when we had the money and go down to Municipal Stadium and watch the Cleveland Indians play. I was a huge fan. Block parties were big then. We would block off the ends of the street, someone on each end of the street would bring record players and sound systems, and everyone would bring food, and we would have a party until the evening. During the summer we used to sit out late at night and sing. We all wanted to be the Temptations. We loved Smokey Robinson and the Miracles too, but no one could hit the notes that Smokey hit. The O’Jays were very popular when I was growing up in Cleveland, not just because they were bad, but they were also from Cleveland. They lived around the corner from my grandmother’s home. I used to stand out in front of their house and listen to them practice. I think this was pretty typical of how it was growing up in inner cities during that time.
SURVIVING WAS ALL THAT MATTERED
When I was maybe nine or ten the police mistakenly came to our home, then realized they were at the wrong home. I remember one officer saying, “It’s just a N----- home,” and my mother cursing out the police and my being afraid the police would kill my mother.
I remember th
e rebellion.53 It was during the afternoon and several buddies and I were going to a local park to play baseball. It was a quiet afternoon. There were armed National Guardsmen protecting a bank. The bank sat on a corner and we were waiting on the light to change. We were told to keep moving, but we couldn’t do so until the light changed. One of the guardsmen walked up to one of my buddies, Anthony, and said, “N-----, did you hear us?” and started to beat him with his rifle.
The streets were a lot different in the 1960s, particularly in Cleveland. Surviving was all that mattered—when and where you will sleep, where your next meal might come from, your next bath. So you think that you must steal from someone in order to eat. You sleep where you can. There was this food place we would go to at night. It’s where I started to get into trouble. I started staying out late. We would go to Akron, Ohio, and steal cars and drive them back to Cleveland. I also stopped going to school. And, eventually, I started staying away from home. My family did love and support me, but as I got older, I just seemed to drift farther away from my family. And the more I got in trouble, the farther away I would drift. I think this was my way of keeping that part of my life away from my family.
My first arrest in Cleveland was for robbery when I was twelve. I went to juvenile hall for about three months. It was pretty frightening. I no longer had the shelter of my family. I was around people I knew nothing about. And it didn’t take long before I learned that I was in an incredibly racist environment. A very hostile boiling pot.
When I came home after juvenile hall my parents began to make arrangements for me to leave Cleveland. My father traveled to Los Angeles to find work, and when he did, my family moved. My father stayed at that same company for forty years. He was a machinist at a company called Western Gear.
It was 1968 and I was fourteen years old. I’ll never forget when my family and I moved out to California from Cleveland and the disappointment I felt when I learned that we would not be going back home. But I fell in love with Los Angeles almost immediately. I couldn’t believe the energy. The streets were full of life. We also traveled to San Francisco where my grandfather lived and I fell in love with that city too. My grandfather stayed on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in 1968. I loved the idea of people from different cultures and genders being together and loving each other. It was unlike anything that I thought possible. I used to sit on my grandfather’s porch and just watch people. I think that experience made it possible for me to see people at their finest. Haight-Ashbury represented to me what humanity was capable of being.
we’d be uncuffed
I think there were two incidents that defined the direction that my life would take. When I was sixteen there was a fire at my parents’ house, and I thought that my mother had been trapped in the fire. It caused me to have a nervous breakdown. I was hospitalized for it. After I ran away from the hospital I’d been committed to, I was kidnapped by what eventually became a rival gang, sat on for about four days, and beaten up on pretty badly.
I wasn’t involved in any gang activity at the time. I had no interest in it. The guys who were responsible for taking me were under the impression that I was out of the Nickerson Garden Housing Projects, which was a rival neighborhood in Watts. I was not. At the time the area I ran in was a park, 109th Street Park, in Watts. The park was directly next to the Nickerson Garden Projects, which is why they made the mistake they did. To protect me, my parents sent me to Detroit where I had family, to heal and to be taken care of. I returned to California about fourteen months later. I did make the Nickerson Garden Projects the area that I ran in, and I became a member of the gang that was eventually formed over there, the Bounty Hunters. The Bounty Hunters were formed in response to attacks that had taken place against people in the Nickerson Gardens by this rival gang. We considered it to be our responsibility to protect the Nickerson Gardens Housing Project. Many of us who lived there were fiercely loyal to each other. And regardless of how misplaced some may think this loyalty is, that matters to young people who live in a world in which the deck is stacked.
The gang task force used to arrest some of us out of the Nickerson Gardens. We wouldn’t be charged with anything, but we’d be taken down to the police station, kept in handcuffs, and officers would take turns punching us. Occasionally we’d be uncuffed, giving us a chance to fight back. And we would fight back, even though there were three or four officers surrounding us. The choice was to get knocked out fighting back or get knocked out without fighting back at all.
I joined the military in 1973 in the hope of putting my life back together. Well, saying “back together” might be misleading. My life was never together. I was eighteen. I enlisted in the National Guard with the intention of going into the army. My uncle was in the army and at the time it was like my way out of Watts. It really opened me up to the world. It put aspects of my life in perspective for me.
My parents as well as my grandparents, aunts, and uncles raised me to be a responsible thinking and acting person. It was just something about the street, the life, that always got me. When I came home from the military, it was just a matter of time before I found my way back to Watts, the Nickerson Gardens, 109th Street Park, and in particular the Bounty Hunters.
I became a father for the first time in 1973. My second son was born in 1974. I was arrested in 1974 and incarcerated in 1975 for two counts of second-degree murder. A young lady who was very dear to me was raped. I was convicted for the murder of the person who was accused of raping her.
I was also accused of shooting a person in the Nickerson Garden projects who had threatened to bring a rival gang over to the neighborhood. I honestly had nothing to do with this shooting. There were a host of witnesses willing to testify that I was at a party on the other side of Nickerson Gardens at the time the shooting occurred. At the trial, the only witnesses who testified and connected me to the shooting were two guys (they were biological brothers) who’d been arrested for the shooting themselves and agreed to testify against me for deals. My attorney, a public defender, didn’t call any witnesses to testify on my behalf, even though they were in the courtroom during the trial. The jury convicted me of second-degree murder. During my sentencing the judge stated that the jury could have certainly found me not guilty. I was sentenced to fifteen years to life.
After that, I received a general discharge under honorable conditions from the military in 1975. My parents said my past had caught up to me. I was sent to San Quentin a month after my twenty-first birthday.
SENT DIRECTLY BACK TO SOLITARY
It’s been said that California prisons were perhaps the most violent and brutal in the United States at that time. I certainly believe it. And San Quentin was perhaps the most violent. I remember arriving there. As I got off the bus and was being escorted to the SHU, or security housing unit—it was called “the hole” then—someone was killed. I was convinced at that moment that San Quentin was all that I had heard it was.
In 1978, while I was in San Quentin, several guys and I were engaged in a conversation about baseball. I was an avid fan at the time, particularly of the Giants. There were some officers observing the conversation from a window on the third floor.
I received a chrono a few days later stating that based on the officers’ observation, this was a Black Guerilla Family conversation taking place and that I was directing the discussion.54 The BGF, as I understand it, is a political/military organization that believes in creating a society in which the humanity of everyone is respected, and a “chrono” is a document that explains and identifies an action or decision that was made and why. They are documents that log information used in the “validation” of a prisoner. The chrono I received also stated that I was a captain in the BGF. When I filed an appeal on this and told the reviewing appeals officer that the conversation was about baseball, he laughed. I’ve always rejected the characterization of my being a prison gang member. I’m always mindful of the fact that it served as th
e basis for my being buried in solitary, along with others like me.
On one occasion I received a chrono that said I admitted to being a member of the BGF and to being a captain. I never did any such thing. There is hardly any kind of defense against an alleged admission, except to say that I didn’t admit to anything. I don’t know, nor have I ever been told, what the alleged circumstances were: where I was, who I was talking to, or why I made this admission.
A lot of information is recycled. Informants pass on information to each other, and then multiple informants will use it when they are debriefing.55 It is, naturally, considered reliable because multiple sources have provided it. And it is in turn used to justify placing supposed gang members in solitary.
I left San Quentin in 1976 and was transferred to DVI in Tracy.56 I was transferred back to San Quentin in 1977. After I came back to San Quentin, as far as the CDCR was concerned, I was what they considered me to be. I stayed there until 1983, and spent almost all of my time in the SHU as a validated gang member.57
Back then, in each SHU there was what were called strip cells. This was a cell that was stripped of all property: your mattress, blankets, and sheets were taken at breakfast and given back to you at about 9 p.m., if not later. What you were provided really was up to the staff who worked in solitary. You weren’t allowed to go outdoors to the yard if you were housed in a strip cell. You were fed on paper trays, and you showered a couple times a week.
I came home on May 30, 1983, Memorial Day. I thought that I was coming home to this woman that I was absolutely crazy about, but she was raped and killed three months before I got out. I was absolutely crushed when I was told that she had been killed. It was one of the few times that I remember my legs giving out from underneath me. I don’t remember the details of what happened and I honestly didn’t want to know. She was raped, stabbed, and killed by gang members. I should’ve left California. I was actually told by my parole officer that I should leave the state.
