Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three

by Greg Day

  There were two five-inch square windows in the cell, and it was through these portals that Mark got his first look at the prison yard. Because he was in a ground-level cell, the inmates out in the yard also got a good look inside at the newest guest, though it felt more like he was in a zoo on display. He slept—if you could call it that—fitfully that first night, hearing the sounds of other inmates screaming while enduring a beating or rape, crying for their mothers, or cussing and fighting with men on different tiers. It’s never quiet in prison, and it’s never dark; there’s always a light on somewhere. In the morning, Mark was called out of his cell. “Now the prison is alive,” Mark recalls. He had no idea where he was going or why, but he soon found out that this was “pill call,” where he would be given the medications that were listed on his intake form, less those that had been removed by the prison doctor, who deemed them unnecessary. Seeing how the pills were dispensed, Mark had one thought: “I’ve got to somehow take that pill cup back with me.” Since he couldn’t exactly ask for it, he committed his first offense on the inside: he “palmed” the cup after it was set down, and smuggled it back to his cell. At least one problem was solved; he now had something to drink out of. The next step in the intake process was to have his hair cut and be issued his prison photo ID. One need only look at the face looking back on Mark’s prison identification photo to see what he was thinking: “I am totally fucked.”

  The Diagnostic Unit near Pine Bluff is exactly what its name implies. Upon sentencing, inmates are brought here for classification and assignment to their new prison “homes.” After a four-day stay in his private cell, Mark was moved into a barracks with 125 other men. There he listened to the other inmates, many of whom had previously done time, talk about which prisons they might be sent to. Various prison names were batted around, but one name consistently came up as somewhere you didn’t want to go: Brickeys. Mark had been assured by his lawyer that he would do his time in a minimum—to medium-security prison, such as the North Central Unit (NCU) at Calico Rock. NCU is home to the ADC’s pre-release program, and as such there is comparatively little trouble there. Many inmates there are “short-timers” and aren’t interested in jeopardizing their impending parole hearings. Because all of the charges against Mark had been for nonviolent offenses, he had a reasonable expectation that he would be sent to a minimum-security facility. He was wrong. On the eighth day of his confinement at Pine Bluff, Mark’s name was called out, and he was given new prison “whites” and a sack: he was moving. He and some other men were cuffed, shackled, and sent packing. The bus that transported Mark from Pine Bluff was a typical prison bus. It was essentially a converted school bus, but the windows were caged so they couldn’t be opened, and forget about air conditioning. The oppressive heat and humidity inside the bus were unbearable, and minutes traveling seemed like hours, hours like days. There were two inmates to each seat, one handcuffed to the other, with their paper sacks tucked between their legs. Anything left of their old life not deemed contraband was contained in those bags. After one hundred miles or so up Arkansas Route 79, the bus took a dog-leg turn onto Route 131 and then bounced along a gravel road for half a mile before pulling up to the sally port at the Eastern Arkansas Regional Unit (EARU) at Brickeys. Home sweet home.

  Brickeys

  The EARU, near Brickeys, Arkansas, is a menacing looking place, set in the middle of farm country near the Mississippi River in east-central Arkansas. Located some fifty miles southwest of Memphis, the prison itself is situated on 2,500 hot, dusty acres surrounded on three sides by a muddy bayou. It is the archetypal maximum-security prison, an undisguised fortress consisting of a series of sprawling one—and two-story red brick buildings, surrounded by twenty-foot razor wire fences (lethal electrified fences for ADC prisons were approved in 1997, though in Brickeys they hadn’t been installed) and gun towers at each corner. Sitting at the end of a short gravel road, its location is symbolic to many of the facility’s 1,200 inmates: this is the end of the line. Although there are prisons in Arkansas with higher security levels—the Supermax Unit at the Varner Unit, for example—Brickeys has a reputation for toughness and is one of the least desired destinations among inmates in the system, and not only because of the other inmates. “It seemed like the ADC was just putting uniforms on gangbangers and sending them to Brickeys,” one former inmate says of the guards there. “They were beating inmates left and right there. If they got mad at someone, they’d say ’fuck you; you don’t get to eat today.’” The food, the same inmate says, was horrible even by prison standards (he has done time in four prisons in the ADC). Spoiled vegetables and milk were common, as was food containing dirt and insects. “You know that it’s dirty when you get a piece of chicken and it has feathers on it.” The cuisine at Varner Supermax, he says, is a close second.

  Brickeys has a high population of class III and class IV inmates—long-timers and lifers—who have little incentive to behave. The inmate population at Brickeys has been on the rise since it was opened in 1992.131 Its initial capacity was reported to be two hundred inmates. In 1993, capacity increased by four hundred. An additional four hundred beds were added in 1997. In 1998, over four hundred more beds were added, more than half of those for maximum-security inmates.

  Twenty-five years ago, racial segregation officially still existed in the ADC. The Tucker Unit, for example, held only white inmates, and the Cummins Unit held blacks. Today Arkansas reports a racial mix in the state prison system of 51 percent white and 46 percent black.132 That ratio doesn’t hold across the board, however. For example, Calico Rock had a 60 percent white population until racial tensions in 2006 forced the ADC to relocate some thirty inmates. At the same time, the rise of prison gangs had become one of the most pressing problems facing the corrections system. ADC officials estimate that some 1,750 prisoners statewide, some 13 percent of the total prison population, are gang members, and this is probably a low estimate. “We have the same problems everyone else does,” said Sgt. Wallace McNary, who tracks prison gangs at Brickeys. “They’re not going to change their behavior because they’re locked up.”133 Gangs in Arkansas prisons include Bloods, Crips, Nazi Low Riders, Black Guerilla Family, Latin Kings, and the Hispanic-based Surreno 13. There are also several white supremacist gangs, including the ultra-violent Aryan Brotherhood and spinoff associates such as the Dirty White Boys. Although necessarily denied by the ADC, among inmates it is well known that just as blacks are disciplined by a trip to Calico Rock—said to be a predominantly white-staffed and white-populated prison—whites are given the same treatment by being transferred to Brickeys, where black officers, administrators, and inmates dominate.134 The upshot of this policy is that Brickeys is a place where the racial scales, at least in the eyes of the inmates, are tilted toward black inmates. A recent search of the ADC website, however, reveals a black majority only by 6 percent. Of course, this is now, and that was then; things have most likely changed. Regardless of what the numbers show, in prison, race matters.

  Along the front row of an elliptical driveway are Brickeys’ inmate barracks, twelve buildings containing twenty barracks holding anywhere between sixty and more than one hundred men. When the bus carrying Mark Byers pulled into the sally port around the back of the intake building, the doors closed securely behind it. The men were hustled off the bus two by two, to the shouts of the guards—“Let’s go! Get in line! Move your asses!” The men were eyeballed by the few inmates working intake or laundry detail. They sized everyone up, whistling at the weaker-looking “fish”—new inmates—while trying to stare down others. Mark knew the drill. “My look to them said, ‘Eat shit.’” The new arrivals were told to line up against the wall to wait for their number to be called by one of two guards seated at a long table. “115446!” Mark’s new identity since arriving at Pine Bluff some eight days ago, and all he would ever be to the ADC, was called out. He dumped the contents of his sack onto the table to be inventoried and was sent back to stand against the wall. When the last
man had been inventoried, the inmates were sent for a “squat and cough”—a strip search for contraband—and then down a long hallway to a receiving desk, where they showed their “cut slip” and were issued barracks and rack assignments. Mark was sent to barracks number 8.

  The barracks at Brickeys resemble a split-level home in build. Inside the entrance to the barracks, the “day room”—the only social area for inmates, since Brickeys has no “yard”—is up front, and there is a wall down the center of the room with sinks and commodes located along its length. Also in the center of the room are two flights of stairs, one going up, another going down. Located at the end of these staircases are the actual sleeping quarters. If you were housed in a “sixty-six,” there would be thirty-three “racks”—beds—upstairs and thirty-three downstairs. The beds themselves were hard and confining, located in narrow rows less than three feet apart, “close enough to reach out and touch someone”, according to Mark. It’s not hard to imagine how the tension can build in such an environment, where each man’s personal territory is so precious, hotly contested, and defended. Mark often had difficulty writing letters without having them previewed by the prying eyes that were all around him, but such is life in the barracks.

  It was also an environment permeated by unpredictable terror as well as totalitarian control. During his first seven days at Brickeys, while he was still in the “fish tank,” Mark had a rigid routine to follow. Meals had to be eaten in three minutes. Batons and pepper spray were used on those inmates who weren’t quick enough to obey an order. “They didn’t take any shit; you were in their house now.” Mark witnessed things that, even with his somewhat jaded outlook, left him speechless. For example, shortly after he was received into Brickeys, a fight broke out in one of the barracks. Mark happened to be in the main hallway at the time. Suddenly, guards were flooding the hallway, screaming, “Everybody, up against the wall! Now!” As Mark pressed his nose against the wall—standard protocol to control a hallway filled with inmates—he managed to turn his head in time to see a stretcher racing past holding an injured inmate. What he saw was so grotesque that at first it didn’t even register. What the hell? he thought. The inmate on the stretcher had a broomstick handle poking out of his abdomen. Almost immediately behind him was a second stretcher, holding another inmate, this one also seriously wounded; one entire side of his head appeared to be caved in. As horrible as these incidents were, they were not at all unusual and came with little or no warning.

  In this setting, it didn’t take long for Mark to face his first test—it took six hours, to be exact. While he was still settling into his rack, three black inmates approached him. “No point getting comfortable,” they said. “We’re going to take all your stuff anyway.” The one doing the talking, who also happened to be the biggest, went down so quickly that the other two just stood staring.

  “I’ve seen what fear did to people,” Mark said. “I had to act like I wasn’t afraid.” A hard right hand to the head had quickly disposed of the would-be thief. The other two inmates jumped Mark, but someone immediately yelled “Guard!” and the men quickly fell out to their racks. Though he would always be on the lookout for retaliation, this was an important precedent for a fish to set. “I had to show them that that shit was not going to fly. I wasn’t going to be anybody’s punk.” Although he had presented the fearless image he was shooting for, afterward Mark’s hands were shaking so badly that he could hardly roll a smoke. “I dropped two of them before finally getting one rolled.”

  A new inmate’s survival depended on the reputation he made for himself and the alliances he forged. The highest priority for a fish in the general population was to earn the respect of his fellow inmates, and he would quickly be tested by the other cons to see if he would back down from a confrontation. Failure in this area would identify an inmate as a “punk,” someone from whom money could be extorted, favors extracted, and in the worst case, sexual services demanded. Cons prey on the weak; Mark’s encounter with the three men on his first day in Brickeys made it clear that if anyone tried to take anything from him, it was going to hurt.

  Another way for an inmate to bolster his reputation was to demonstrate that he was a “stand-up” guy, one who wouldn’t snitch on his fellow cons. Conflicts between inmates were to be settled by inmates. Guards—also known as COs (corrections officers), hacks, or the “police”—were not included in inmate disputes. They couldn’t be trusted any more than most of the inmates, often less. For example, the altercation between Mark and the three black men in his barracks was covered up by the other cons. Trouble for one meant trouble for all. Nobody wanted to go into lockdown, where the inmates’ freedom of movement could be restricted or commissary privileges suspended, or both. Mark’s days as an informant for the drug task force held a certain irony now that he was in prison, where that kind of behavior could get him killed. Snitches ended up in protective custody (PC), in the infirmary, or in the ground. That didn’t mean Mark’s acts would be forgotten. Nothing in prison is forgotten.

  Connections were also vital in the system. It wasn’t uncommon for inmates who had gone through diagnostics together at Pine Bluff to meet up at their new prison assignment; Mark’s friend and envelope artist “Bad News”—a tough Native American bank robber—was one such inmate. Another was an inmate in barracks 8 to whom Mark had traded some of his Xanax for cigarettes and coffee while he was in Pine Bluff. The word quickly spread in the barracks at Brickeys, and Mark soon was being approached by other cons looking for drugs. Mark had none and took none; drugs are serious business in prison, an infraction that could bring “free world” criminal charges and new sentencing. It did, however, improve Mark’s reputation as someone who could get things, and that, in combination with his straightening out of the three black inmates, earned him a measure of respect.135 This respect manifested itself in different and often very subtle ways. For example, when he left Pine Bluff, he had on a nice new set of prison whites; keeping them was another story. On his second day at Brickeys, his barracks and three others were sent for shower call. Here, up to two hundred inmates stripped, gave their whites to a trustee in charge of laundry, and hit the showers (“I’ve seen enough asses to last me a lifetime,” Mark observed in one letter home). When an inmate surrenders his whites, he doesn’t get them back. The next set on the shelf of that approximate size is issued to him, regardless of condition; some sets were pretty shabby. Mark was already missing his nice, new whites when, a day or so later, he returned to his barracks to find the shirt that he had come in with, washed, starched, and marked with his name on the label, lying on his rack. That’s respect in prison.

  He also made a fortuitous connection in the form of a prison official who had been a family friend back in Marked Tree. This man—code named “Monster Man” in the letters Mark sent home—was able to call Mark out of his barracks at almost any time to shoot the breeze, share some information on the games that cons play, and give Mark pointers on what to do and not do to maximize his “good time” credits. As a class I inmate—a status not attainable until at least sixty days into an inmate’s sentence—Mark could lop one day off his sentence for each day served with no disciplinary incidents. This is much harder than it sounds. An incident such as that which occurred on Mark’s first day, had the hacks gotten there in time, would have meant a sure thirty days in the hole, in addition to thirty days of lost good time.

  Monster Man was also able to influence barracks assignments, which was a big bat to swing around the joint. At Brickeys, barracks 1 through 4—“Little Saigon”—largely consisted of class III and IV inmates with little or no eligibility for sentence reductions or parole. In short, Little Saigon was filled with men who had little to lose and therefore was no place for an inmate who just wanted to do his time. It was a place where trouble was almost impossible to avoid and a place where a con just trying to ride it out could find himself slapped with sanctions, including a trip to the hole, loss of good time credit, and loss of visitatio
n and commissary or some combination of privileges. Fights and contraband were the two easiest ways to “catch” a violation. Contraband was dealt with by a disciplinary committee, as were many infractions. Some offenses, such as attacks on a guard, were adjudicated on the outside—so-called free-world offenses—and could result in new criminal charges and a fresh sentence, one usually imposed to run consecutively with the inmate’s existing sentence. The objective in prison was to keep one step ahead of trouble.

  Hoedown

  The EARU at Brickeys lists the prison operations as “field crops, education, jail operations, leash dog program, and substance abuse.” Its annual report states that the prison harvests soybean, rice, cotton, and other “cash crops.” The report doesn’t mention another “crop” that is harvested: Johnson grass. This tenacious weed can be found in all but four American states and has virtually no agricultural use. Growing up to eight feet tall, it is a choking, unsightly weed and is extremely difficult to eradicate; the preferred method is to simply rip it out by its roots. This makes for a perfect prison industry: a useless and labor-intensive task, designed to break—and sometimes kill—any inmate who has the misfortune of performing this task during the warmer months. At Brickeys, this labor is the mainstay of the “hoe squads,” gangs of inmates who hack at the roots with a hoe—not a homeowner’s garden hoe, but a long, heavy, industrial tool with a steel head mounted to a thick hardwood handle—and rake it back into piles, where it ends up rooting itself for future squads to remove. It is physically exhausting work, exacerbated by the counting of the number of hoe strikes an inmate makes into the hard soil. Poor performance can lead to solitary confinement, disciplinary write-ups, and worst of all, loss of good time credit. Excellent performance can lead to death by heat stroke. If during an inmate’s diagnostic time at Pine Bluff, he is deemed fit for duty on the hoe squad, he can expect to be out in the fields on his first full day at Brickeys. This was not the case for Mark Byers; he had no work boots issued to him and had to wait for them before he could do any field work. Sadly, within two weeks he had his boots, and at first light on June 7, 1999, he joined the squad.