By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 6: What You Need Is a Regular Schedule

The bright light came on.  We scurried to put on our uniforms.  Sergeant Wong appeared in the cell, lined us up, and welcomed us to what he called “your first morning behind the High Walls.”

The Sergeant supervised us as we made our beds and turned our blankets into tofu cubes.  Then he conducted us and our blue plastic pails to the Wash Room at the end of the corridor, and guarded us as we waited in line to squat over the 20 toilet holes, piss in a steel trough accommodating 20, and use our pails to wash and shave our faces in the water flowing into the sinks, which were also troughs accommodating 20.  He then returned us to the cell, where he “organized our labor” by giving out jobs.  There were two prisoners for every job—“this is the PRINCIPLE of COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY.”  Two prisoners got the job of cleaning the sink, two got the job of swabbing the floor, and so on.  I got the worst job—scrubbing the shit holes.  Me and Farmboy.  We had 15 minutes to get our brushes out of the locker, bend and scrub, and wash the brushes thoroughly in the trough—sorry, I mean the “sink.”  The Sergeant walked past and told us to go deeper into the holes.  We did.

We’d just finished washing the brushes and ourselves when he marched Cell 10 to the Chow Room for a delightful breakfast (“First Feeding”), consisting of fried bread, oatmeal, a slice of apple, and a little plastic cup of coffee.  Appetites quenched, we joined the stream of prisoners leaving for the Parade Ground–the former factory floors, joined together—where we would spend six hours in Training Exercises, three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon.  Some minutes were allowed for a lunch (“Second Feeding”) of fried bread, lima beans with ham, collard greens, and fruit drink, and we returned to the Parade Ground.  After all, we were in the Training Team, and it was our job to be trained.

In the distance, “queues” of prisoners were marching across the Ground in blocks of 50 at a time, but we were the Noobs, so we had our own section of concrete.  It was us and the other cellfuls of Noobs who were with us.  Sergeant Wong and three colleagues who looked identical to him stood in front of us and formed us into a queue, eight wide and eight deep.  They made us answer the Three Questions, three times.  After that our training in Postures and Motions began.  By Postures they meant Squat, Stand, Stand at Attention, Stand at Ease, Sit, and of course Stand for Posture Training.  By Motions they meant Left Face, Right Face, Step in Place, Step Forward, Slow March, Fast March, Run in Place, Run, Goose Step, Count Off, and more.

We didn’t learn all this in one day.  We were in the Training Team for three months.  We were taught one thing at a time; we practiced until we did it perfectly.  Then we learned the next thing, and came back to the first for more practice; then on to the third thing, which we learned by hundreds of repetitions, then back to the first two things . . . .  Fifty times a day, we heard the Three Questions and recited the Three Answers.

Do you ever wake up in the morning with a song running through your head, a song you don’t even like, and it keeps doing that for the rest of the day?  Soon, the Three Questions were in my head, all the time.  Nothing could chase them away.  If I tried to think of anything else, it just made them louder.  And if there was any possibility of forgetting them, even for a minute, there were signs all over the property, repeating them.

There were other “songs” that we had to learn, chants that we had to shout while we marched.

Hey hey, ho ho,

Crime is not the way to go.

 

Officer, officer, you’re my man,

Send me to prison on the Paris plan.

 

I’m a jailbird, in my prime,

I did my crime, I’ll do my time.

 

Mama, mama, can’t you see

What my crime has done to me?

Gave me a number, gave me a suit,

Made me a part of the Training Troop.

 

The Training Team wasn’t a military school.  We weren’t being trained to do any military jobs; we weren’t learning the pride of soldiers.  The Training Team wasn’t even a boot camp.  None of the Exercises was totally challenging.  Even when the queue learned to Run, it wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t long, unless you think that twice around a 600-foot slab is long.  It’s much longer, as I found, when you’re wearing little blue canvas shoes with little rubber soles that are flat and hard and make you feel as if your feet were dying.  But even a duck can waddle around the slab.  I kept looking at the old guy who had fallen down on his first trip to the Parade Ground.  He was sweating like a pig, but he was making it.  Even the Goose Step, which was the last thing we learned, could be done by anybody, if he had enough weeks to “practice” it.  The purpose wasn’t to make us strong; it was to make us weak, to cut off our nuts, to make us do things without having a thought in our heads.

From the start, it was unthinkable that anyone might refuse to follow an order.  You might fail to follow one because you didn’t know how; but with enough repetitions, you would learn, and you could not resist.  Often one of us would get confused and accidentally not do something, but enough time spent huffing around “the Perimeter” would keep it from happening again.  This happened to everyone.  It happened to me several times.  Being punished that way, having to run by yourself in that vast concrete space, having to be by yourself while constantly visible to everyone else, soon convinced your brain not to get on that sequence of synapses again—whatever the aberrant sequence was.  You were 1/64 of the queue.  You could not exist alone.  You needed to do what the rest of them did.

Who are you

If you’re not in the queue?

But in case you’re picturing a boot camp full of angry drill instructors, this wasn’t it.  Our guards didn’t scream or rant; they shouted to make themselves heard, but their words were calm, clear, and clipped as if they were reciting from a playbook—which they were.  Everything they did was scripted; it was all from some Boy Scout handbook—as written, you could guess, by Gordon Bridger.  And so was everything that we prisoners—criminals—were required to do.  Before we began a march, our arms must be set to move in exactly the same way, exactly the way prescribed for them, with exactly the same angle and distance from the body.  To determine this, we were ordered to extend our arms as they should be at the one-count, then the two-count, of the march, and maintain them in place for inspection.  Inspection was conducted with the aid of a measuring stick, which was used to identify the correct angle of the arm and then to raise or lower the arm until it was perfectly aligned with that position.  By the end of inspection the guards had looked down each line of prisoners to make sure that all arms were parallel in each position—right arm raised, right arm lowered, left arm raised, left arm lowered.  Only when uniformity was achieved could the Exercise begin.

I was soon made to realize that my Head and Shoulders Positioning was completely defective and must be changed.  This made me an object of attention.  Before starting the Team on any kind of Motion, the guards would inspect and correct the position of my neck, head, and eyes (“eyes FORWARD”).  With their help, I finally got it right, and my Postures were identical to those of all the other criminals.  My body was trained to default to uniformity; my eyes were trained never to rove, never to look for new things to see.

Training did not end with the day’s final Exercise.  Like the other meals, dinner (“Third Feeding”—fried bread, rice with beans and ham or fish, peas or steamed carrots, water) was an exercise in discipline.  Because silence was enforced in the Chow Room, no complaints could be heard about the cheap, heavy food and its massive challenge to digestion.  What you did hear was the sound of criminals’ lips and teeth sucking and gnawing on their feed, hungry for anything that would get them through the days and nights of constant, machinelike motions.

Because the Training experience didn’t stop at night.  After chow, Cell 10 trooped to the Wash Room, where we waited in shift-and-line with the other 240 members of the Training Team.  It was the same at night as it was in the morning.  Most of the convicts were older in Team than we were, so they laughed at us and tried to trip us up, and elbowed us in the showers.  If you saw a hot dude, the next thing you’d see was his arm pushing you away from the shower head.  Guards sharked through the mob, enforcing silence and shutting down any attempt of Noobs to retaliate.

Night was when we had a chance to do our laundry, which also happened in the Wash Room.  Half of us put on fresh uniforms that we carried from the cell, and washed our used ones, by hand, in the steel tubs appointed for the purpose; the other half would do their laundry the next day.  Guards, of course, were on hand to instruct us.  Sergeant Wong was especially vigilant about making sure that proper methods were followed.  He ensured that we wasted no time in lugging our soggy clothes next door to the Drying Room, where we hung them on long steel rods tagged with our cell and bunk numbers and hoped that the guards in charge of the other cells made sure that we’d find them there the next night.

Back in the cell, the prisoners who weren’t washing their uniforms were busy swabbing the floor or shining the sink for the second time in the day.  I was glad that Farmboy and I had different laundry schedules.  It was worth doing twice the work, just to avoid his company.  Scrubbing the holes made me sick, and he made it worse.  He didn’t want to clean; he just wanted to tell me how he didn’t belong in prison, it wasn’t a real crime that he committed, it was just a prank, his dad was one of the most respected car dealers in the state and would soon get him out.  Farmboy’s name was Carl, and he wanted me to call him Carlito, cuz that’s what his frat bros called him.  But the rule was, we could only be called by our numbers.  Our “old names” were obsolete; they weren’t even on our badges.  And when you’re Training every day, who has the energy to start remembering words that aren’t in use anymore?  The Sergeant called us by our last four digits; most of us gave up and did the same.  So if I needed to call my “partner” something—out loud, anyway—I called him by his number, 4405.  He didn’t like it.  Fine—don’t let the Sergeant find out.  “Negativity” was strictly forbidden.

So now we come to the final event of the evening, when the Sergeant comes into the cell for Count.  This is when all the beat-up, tired-out criminals line up and bow and shout “Yes sir!” while he reads our numbers from his roster, so he can determine whether any of us have been able to escape.  Then he leaves, and we take off the thin little flat-soled shoes that have made our lives miserable all day and stow them under our bunks, and we take off our shirts and pants and  hang them on the hooks by the door, and we remember our caps and take them off and hang them up too, and we get into our bunks, and this is the end of another day.  During the day I was just another zombie marcher in a cheap blue prison suit.  At night I was just another mound of greenish yellow blanket heaped on a prison bunk.

So what’s your question?  Are you wondering what I was “thinking and feeling”?  I was feeling like a bug that’s just been squashed.  I was thinking—nothing.  I didn’t have enough brain power to think.  I didn’t have enough brain power to have dreams at night.

So much for six days of the week.  Maybe you’re guessing that on Sunday we got to relax, walk around by ourselves, have visits, write letters . . . .   No.  No communication was allowed between the Training Team and the world beyond the High Walls, as prison people called that beautiful world, now slipping into memory, that existed less than 100 yards from our bunks.  And there was no point in wasting a day that could be spent on Training.  So every Sunday morning we were marched to the Education Wing, where each of us picked a little blue plastic stool off a big stack of little blue plastic stools and carried it to a Classroom, where it became one of 64 little blue plastic stools lined up in perfect order, each one precisely two feet away from the ones around it.  We sat with our hands on our knees, palms down, until the instructors arrived.  Some of them were guards.  Some of them, like 7930, were prisoners.  During the first hour we studied the Book of Regulations, a tiny yellow pamphlet that we carried in our right shirt pockets, setting forth the 36 Rules of the Penitentiary.  Among them:

“What is forbidden is an offence; what is permitted is a privilege.”

“The word of the Officer is law.”

“Orders are not subject to appeal.”

“Schedules for all cells and units will be strictly followed at all times.”

“Lack of hygiene will not be tolerated.”

“All labor has quotas, and all quotas will be met.”

“Respect and positivity will be apparent at all times.”

“Bunk, cell, and labor assignments will not be changed without approval by the Colonel.”

“Unless excepted by an Officer, shirts will be fully buttoned at all times.”

“Sex of any kind is not permitted.”

Every week we were required to “study,” memorize, and recite three of these rules.  Every week we were required to recite the rules previously memorized.  When mistakes were made, we were required to begin again, until the recitation was complete and perfect.  If more time was required, it was given; the quota must be met, even if the Second Feeding could not be attended.  The sound of 64 voices reciting the rules appeared to please the instructors greatly.

The afternoon was occupied by the Lecture Forum—four lectures every Sunday, delivered in the Big Classroom, attended by all prisoners in the Training Team, who carried their stools into the Classroom and placed them in proper order, ready to be lectured.  The topics were diverse:

Your Duty to Your Officer

Your Duty to Your Cell

Your Duty to Your Labor Detail

Your Duty to Your Uniform

A Proper Day in Prison

The Ideal Prisoner

Respect Your Officers at All Times!

The Right Way to Clean a Toilet

Crime Never Pays

I Work to Quota!

The Development of the Paris State Penitentiary

Stop! Look!–and LISTEN!

Your Officer: An Understanding Friend

Discipline Is Fundamental!

I Learned My Lesson

Varieties of Punishment in the Paris State Penitentiary

The Importance of the Four Questions

Sex Hygiene in the Modern Prison

Most of the prisoners in the room had heard all the lectures before, and they did not change.  Their message was always clear enough for everyone to understand.  If you heard, “The convict uniform is an important functionality of the prison” at the beginning of a lecture, you were going to hear, “And so we see, the convict uniform is one of the prison’s most important functionalities” at the end.  Prisoners were required to sit erect with eyes forward throughout the lectures, except for the obligatory bow and “Thank you, Instructor!” when they finished.  Each lecture included a Discussion Period, in which prisoners seated in the first rows asked questions such as, “Is it really true that the convict uniform is essential to our reform?”, and the lecturer, who was usually a convict dressed in the convict uniform, replied, “Yes, that is true.  The convict uniform is essential to our reform.”

Every lecture featured electronic illustrations.  The illustrations for the lecture on The Ideal Prisoner were especially strong.  They showed a fresh-faced young criminal doing everything exactly right: marching in queue with precisely the same movements as the other convicts, buttoning his uniform quickly but with perfect results, cleaning toilets so diligently that light glared up from them, eating his chow rapidly and with obvious satisfaction, shouting “I am a prisoner! This is a prison! I am here to serve my sentence!” with confidence and zeal.  “As you observe very clearly,” said the instructor, a tall, thin convict with the face of a junior high-school teacher, “at Paris State Penitentiary you will definitely become all that you can be!”

He was right.  At the conclusion of my three months in the Training Team I was everything I could be.  I was locked up, buttoned up, automatically obedient Department of Corrections Convict Number G023104411, with nothing in his brain except the fear that he would be spending the rest of his life like this.

To be continued…