Other inmates can make life in prison miserable, but their power can’t compare to the power officials wield. A corrupt or malicious officer can make an inmate’s life hell, and there was such a man at Grimes. While it seemed that half the men at Varner had wanted to kill Jason, at Grimes, it was a particular captain who first made his hostility known. When Jason arrived at the new prison, the captain informed Jason that he did not just dislike him; he hated him. The captain never explained why. Jason assumed that, like most others, the man saw him as a Satanic child-killer. Whatever the captain’s reasons, Jason distinctly remembered the captain telling him that he and his officers intended to treat Jason “with utmost prejudice.”
The captain proved true to his word. He looked for opportunities to give Jason grief, especially in the one part of Jason’s life that actually brought him joy. She was a slip of a girl from Little Rock, the same age as Jason, who had been writing to him since shortly after his conviction. She wrote regularly, as did he, and she visited him often, starting at Varner. But, bad as Varner was, Grimes—and that captain, in particular—was another matter. Here, when she visited Jason and he held her hand, the captain came out and told her to leave. Holding hands was allowed, and other couples were doing much more, but as the captain had promised, Jason was being treated with prejudice. After having been a Class-1 inmate for five years, he was busted to Class-2 for holding his girlfriend’s hand. He was denied mail and phone calls for thirty days and visitors for sixty days.89
“Other guys were out there kissing their girlfriends, but they were overlooked,” Jason said at the time. “I have been blessed with a lot of friends and support, and I know that I will be free someday. That makes me happy and gives me hope. I can even smile and work at getting an education and all kinds of stuff while I am in here. But no matter how good things may be going, there is always a deep sense of sorrow inside of me.” He said he felt that sorrow “always”—except when he was with his girlfriend. When the captain ordered her to leave, “We were singled out and punished.”
The school became Jason’s sanctuary, encompassing him in something as close as he could get to the life he wanted, work he valued, and people who cared about learning. The free-world teachers shared a lounge that had chairs, a table, and a refrigerator. They couldn’t bring inmates food; that would breach regulations. But nothing said they couldn’t bring extra for their lunches and leave it in the refrigerator. “Every one of them was like my grandma,” he said. “Every one of them was trying to fatten me up. They were like, ‘We left a bunch of food in the fridge that needs to be disposed of.’”
Jason did mainly administrative work, tracking attendance and grades. As most students were working for their GEDs, the school sorted them into levels. The ones at Level Five were almost ready to take the exam. Those at Level One had trouble adding, spelling and sometimes even writing their names. Of the five hundred men at Grimes, Jason estimated that at any time, about four hundred, on average, had dropped out of high school and lacked their GEDs. He saw many reasons for that grim statistic, all of them interconnected. “Every little thing contributed,” he said. “You can’t pull any of it out. Poverty. Poor neighborhoods. Drugs. Taking up crime at young ages. A lack of positive role models.”90 He recognized that culture too played a role. Though a regional prejudice against heavy metal music may have helped convict him, Jason, for his part, found nothing to like in rap. To him, it represented the sound of “glorified violence and drug culture,” and he’d seen “a lot of guys in prison as a result of it.”
“Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.”
~ Roger Miller
Jason worked at the school from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. When a few college courses were offered, he signed up for any classes he could fit into his work schedule.91 In addition, he became a peer counselor. Administrators at Grimes chose Jason to be one of fifteen inmates who would live with prisoners who, “had been addicted to either alcohol or drugs and who were ready to leave that part of their lives behind.” The idea was that Jason, having endured some tough experiences himself, would be able to serve as a role model. The counselor’s job was to show the men in the program that, as Jason put it, “As difficult as things may be, you still have a choice. Even though the choices might suck, some suck less than others.” Though he was younger than most of the men he counseled, Jason understood that it would not be easy for them to change practices that had brought them to prison. “They don’t usually know what to do besides what they have always done,” he said, “which is to be a ‘fuck up.”
Inmates flowed constantly into and out of the program. One evening, while Jason was fixing a meal he’d bought for himself and some friends at the commissary, a new inmate walked in. Seeing Jason, the new man approached. “I don’t know if you remember me,” he said. Jason did, instantly. Standing before him was one of the men who had cracked his skull and broken his collarbone at Varner. The man apologized and asked Jason not to hold the incident against him. Jason knew that this was more than a simple apology. The inmate needed to complete the prison’s substance treatment program to apply for an early release, and he needed Jason’s approval to complete the program. “‘I accept your apology,” Jason said. “I forgave you long ago.” Then he invited the new man to join in the dinner.
Life got better still when a friend smuggled a tape deck into the prison for Jason. He listened to Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, and the Deftones. Guards retired or resigned and were replaced by new guards who had not heard all the horror stories about the men being transferred from Varner, so they tended to be not so rough. Through letters and phone calls, Jason kept in touch with the four Californians who’d founded the website with the bold intent to “Free the West Memphis Three.” He heard news from them, from the local TV, and from newcomers to the prison. He learned, for instance, that Judge Burnett had rejected all of Damien’s legal arguments and denied his Rule 37 petition.92 He also learned that Damien had married a woman from New York named Lorri Davis, with whom he’d been corresponding for years. But one of the best surprises for Jason in 1999 came by mail directly to him: a warm letter from his high school art teacher, Ms. Sally Ware.
She wrote: “I didn’t hear anything around town when Damien was here for his hearing. Seems like things are kept kind of hush-hush around here.” Noting that Jason had been in her class for two years, which she calculated to have been “three hundred and forty classes,” Ware assured Jason, “I knew you couldn’t have been involved in the West Memphis murders. For you to be capable of doing that, it would make Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde look like Minnie Mouse.” Besides, she added, more soberly, “There was no evidence against you.”93
Grimes offered one thing that most prisons did not: space. The barracks at this unit were bigger than he’d ever been in and the day room felt “humongous.” In the beginning, inmates had access to recreational items in the day room, including Hacky Sacks. Jason had been introduced to the foot bag at Varner by none other than a relative of Damien’s stepfather, who happened to serve a short time there. “We kicked a little bit,” he recalled. But a novice needs room to practice keeping a stuffed sack in motion without using hands, and Varner had no such space.
At Grimes, Jason picked up a Hacky Sack and found that, “right there where you lived, you had all the room you needed.” Gradually, kicking the Hacky Sack became a central, grounding, and comforting part of his life. “I don’t meditate,” he explained. “Not that I have anything against it. I just have no experience with that. So I’d just put my headphones on and kick the Hacky Sack for physical exercise, to—not tune out but—tune in. It’s like the same feeling you get when you go walking or jogging or biking. You get this oneness feeling, especially when you get caught up in it, and you’re not losing control of it, and an hour has gone by and you’re drenched in sweat, and you got to take a shower, and you feel good.”
As equipment broke down or disappeared from the day room, most was not replaced. That forced Jas
on and other prisoners to make their own faux Hacky Sacks, using cloth from old uniforms, popcorn kernels for fill, and a pattern for sewing a baseball. They had needles and thread because this was a time, now gone, when prison uniforms still had buttons and commissaries still sold sewing kits.
Sometimes, when Jason was kicking, other people would jump in, kick a bit, and jump out, but mostly he kicked alone. Eventually, he got good enough that he could kick in a very small space. A fellow inmate, Dung Thai Tran, enjoyed watching Jason kick. “That your discipline,” he’d say.
As a counselor, Jason got to know hundreds of inmates in a more than casual way. Part of his job was to assess them, for purposes of their early release. But he didn’t judge. Most of the inmates assigned to him were African-Americans—men who’d grown up in street gangs that had supplanted their families. “Their father might not have been there. Their big brothers were in gangs. They grew up in gangs, and there they went—selling drugs to make money to help mom out—or whatever. And then the next thing you know, they’re in prison. I guess they could have refused to deal, but who knows what the scenario was? To go against all that takes tremendous will power. And people who decide to go against it might not even survive the decision.”
He offered counseling and learned in return. He met many men who were shaped by experiences that made his own look rich by comparison. After all, he had a caring mom who, he knew, loved him. And, while a couple of prosecutors had attempted to have him killed, at least he’d never felt the fire of a bullet through his flesh. “In prison I met so many people that had been shot multiple times,” he said. “It was unreal, I couldn’t imagine being shot or making the decision to shoot someone else. But these guys just acted like it was nothing, just a normal thing. Lots left with the same state of mind they had when they came in. Some would come back. Some, you would hear they got shot and killed after they were released.” He learned: “You can tell a person what to do or not to do until you’re blue in the face, but it’s always their decision. And, again, what opportunities do they have?”
Besides restraining inmates physically, prisons affect the inner workings of every person inside them, including staff, and the effect on each person is different. Some prisoners, especially those in solitary confinement for long periods, go mad. Others, whose mental health was marginal when they committed their crimes, deteriorate further. By contrast, some inmates adapt well to prison, finding in them the structure they couldn’t create for themselves outside. Some inmates get mean or meaner, some find strength and purpose in faith, some succumb to lifelong dependency on a government institution, and some leave, only to return again and again, like yo-yo dieters. A very few find in prison a sense of freedom such as is rarely encountered even in the “free world.” For these, mastery of self can transcend their physical confinement—at least at times. This was the case for Jason.
Whatever an inmate’s personality, it’s never easy living surrounded by chain link, coiled razor wire, iron bars, concrete walls, yelling, disrespect and despair. Men who considered their punishments fair fared better. But for men who were wrongfully convicted, hurt or outrage over the injustice torqueing their lives could push the bounds of sanity. The odd thing about Jason’s early twenties in prison was that, even as he faced life in prison, he thrived in studying and handling responsible jobs. Meanwhile, Jason witnessed the lives of his younger brothers crash and burn.
Neither Matt nor Terry had returned to school after Jason got locked up. Gail lacked both the emotional and the financial resources to pack and leave Marion, and, living there, her boys could not endure the stigma of being a convicted child-killer’s kin. As years passed after the murders, the families of the victims, the families of the convicted, and everyone associated with the murders continued to suffer from the crimes, in countless different ways. In 2000, Jason said, “I just wish there were some way that I could motivate my brothers to finish school and learn a trade or go to college. I see so many kids here in prison that do not have either hope or guidance to keep them out of this place.” Yet he understood why Matt and Terry had dropped out. “They could not stand the talk, the gossip, or the jeers of everyone there about me.”94
“the highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.”
~ Woodrow Wilson
Attitudes in the Arkansas-Tennessee section of the Mississippi River delta were hard-set against the three men in prison. Jason knew that. Gary Gitchell, the former chief of detectives for the West Memphis Police Department, summed up the easy acceptance of the verdicts that characterized much of the region when he told a reporter: “You’ve got a lot of circumstantial evidence is what you’ve got. There’s no smoking gun. This is not a smoking-gun type case.”95
What he did not know—and what no one could have foreseen at the end of the twentieth century—was how forces of new media would impact the West Memphis convictions. Jason understood that many people outside Arkansas found the case outrageous. But he also understood that no one quite knew how to fight what was wrong with the case—especially since the state Supreme Court had found nothing wrong.
Nevertheless, new media was driving the case into uncharted territory, a fresh American landscape. Significantly, the murders of the three boys in West Memphis occurred at a turning point in the public’s ability to see into trials. Because the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishes the right of an accused person to a “public trial,” citizens can physically enter a courthouse, as in To Kill a Mockingbird, and watch almost any trial, providing there’s enough room. But between the country’s founding and the end of the twentieth century, it became less and less practical for most people to keep track of—much less attend—the growing number of trials conducted in local courts. In most places, especially as the War on Drugs began to ramp up, even members of the media could not report on all the trials being held. In addition, prosecutors were winning more and more convictions through the use of plea deals, avoiding trials entirely.96 Public awareness of judicial activities plummeted. A troubling disconnect between the courts and the citizenry took hold.
But public interest in certain cases remained high, as Court TV (now trutv) demonstrated in 1993—the year of the West Memphis murders—when it broadcast the trial of the Menendez brothers in California and HBO dispatched Berlinger and Sinofsky to document the case in Arkansas. In 1994, Court TV proved the strength of viewer interest in high-profile cases with its live coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial.
While the role of cameras and television was being debated in the mid-90s, the public gained access to new technologies that would impact courts. The West Memphis murders and trials roughly coincided with the public debut of the World Wide Web and the introduction of email. Ownership of personal computers and smart phones soared during the 1990s. By 2000, WM3.org had already been online for four years, and emails about the case were flying. Ironically, the West Memphis trials, with all their talk of the occult and Satan, occurred at the dawn of a media revolution. Perhaps there is some significance in the fact that this was not the first time that “witch” trials coincided with a technological revolution involving media.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans endured a particularly terrible plague of “witch” burning. At the same time, due to the recent invention of mechanical movable type and the printing press, the continent witnessed an unprecedented surge in book publishing and literacy. The clash of irrational and rational forces led to confrontations with some of the time’s most prominent institutions, especially the Roman Catholic Church, as Europeans’ advancing ability to read and interpret the Bible themselves gave rise to the Protestant Reformation.
In a similar way, Judge Burnett’s decision to allow cameras into his court just as the Internet was beginning to flourish would have ramifications that no one at the time could have predicted. Seeing Paradise Lost changed Jason, but he had no Internet connection. What mattered was that the film also affected countless o
thers, and they did have Internet access—and the Web provided them with a means to discuss and examine what they’d seen. Now, as large numbers of Americans became able to see some trials for themselves, they became more informed about legal processes and more willing to criticize perceived abuses. The case of the West Memphis Three, in particular, led many to think that prosecutors in it had crossed a line by evoking fear over reason and emotions over evidence. Some saw in the result a version of “justice” they could not abide.
Those who reacted were not Don Quixotes, tilting at abstractions. They had families to support, careers to nurture, and plenty to do with their lives beyond line up in various ways to support three prisoners in Arkansas. Most assumed there were innocent men and women in prison—probably even on death row. They understood that these men and women, like the West Memphis Three, probably also hoped to somehow be freed. And they knew that most of these innocent but faceless prisoners would live until they died in prison. That’s how it goes. Not every injustice can be righted.
But where, against all odds, cameras had recorded what many considered a court-sanctioned crime, many found they simply could not turn their backs. Paradise Lost galvanized tens, then hundreds, then thousands. They responded in large ways and small.97 Media fostered interest. Interest fostered money. And the combinations of media, interest, and money fostered new attorneys and new investigations. Together, they represented—at least, for Jason, Damien and Jessie—a basis for new hope.
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