At some point in the future, I want to sit down with Craig to watch a TV show. That might sound inane to you, maybe even comical. Who knows? But that’s only because you don’t know my reasoning yet. By the end of this chapter, you’ll see what I’d like to get out of that little recreation time and as a little preview, it’ll likely be way more educational than just fun … and sound a lot like something you may have seen before.

In the meantime, let’s talk about adjustments. There were many that had to happen as Craig made his way through the Arizona penal system. First, before even getting into the system, there was a huge adjustment to the reality that his personal freedom was about to be stripped away. That rationalization came quickly considering the circumstances for his incarceration. Then, after sentencing was complete, adjusting became about the day-to-day life in county jail, and once that cacophony of senses-deafening noise and interaction was finished, his intake into the prison system was an adaption all its own. That was where a whole other set of rules, regulations and equating admonishments awaited.

Upon reaching the Central Unit in Florence, Ariz., he began serving his time in the system as a Level 5 inmate, the highest rank you could be labeled, yet let’s be realistic: that’s not an achievement you’d want to write home about. Nothing about that situation – the single-man cell, locked in your less-than-50-square-foot room for all but one hour a day, and the absolute lack of regular interaction with anyone let alone normal, civil human beings – could be construed as worthy of public consumption. Luckily though, Craig picked up on a key piece of information during his pre-sentencing research and talking with others during his stay in county: if he was able to get a job, and keep it, he’d be able to get some time out. That’d be the only way in the first few years – not months, years – that he’d be able to get off the 23-1 schedule where he’d otherwise be shacked up in his cell for all but an hour a day.

It’s unlikely many of us who have thought about Craig’s situation have gotten to the level where we envisioned him writing a resume and finding references while he was locked up. Yet, that is essentially what he had to do at this point. There weren’t always enough jobs for everyone, but if he had a skill or an ability that was unique enough, that set him apart from the typical prison crowd, then he might have a chance to spend some time outside of his cell and learn a bit more about the system, the people, the place before he reached a Level 4 yard. And that’d be good because in one of his first indoctrination sessions with administration officials, as he called them, when he got to the Central Unit, he was told that frankly there was little chance, based on his charges, that he’d get to a 4 yard within the first four years of his sentence. It easily could stretch out to be five or six years before he got there. Sure, the system allowed him to be reviewed and potentially moved to a 4 classification after two years of being locked up, but they thought the likelihood was remote. Too often, the sergeant said, prisoners get in trouble so they don’t qualify to get classified lower.

“I don’t know if it was scare tactics or a prediction of some kind, but he let me know where I was at and the lay of the land as he saw it,” Craig said. If that held true, it’d be 48 to 72 months before he had a roommate, regular interaction with another person on a consistent basis. That adjustment – understanding how alone you are, and gathering everything in to see how long you have to get through – was daunting. Thankfully it wasn’t the only option.

Craig took advantage of the system he was learning about. He wrote that resume. Included his background with engines, mechanics, his enjoyment of math and physics, and how he grew up learning to work with his hands and think through complex problems. Not necessarily the curriculum vitae the officers would expect from someone in his position. But, it worked. He wrote the inmate letter, a job application of sorts, sent it to the department he wanted to work for, which in his case was maintenance, and it happened that there was a position open. He got the job.

“They gave me a trial run, to see if I knew anything. I am pretty good with mechanical stuff, so that’s the job I had. If you didn’t have a job, you were in your cell 23 hours a day except 1 hour for rec and then to go out for meals. The really interesting thing about that was that the maintenance crew I was on, it was a two-person crew and we repaired cell doors, gates, that kind of thing. I was on call 24 hours a day. So if something broke on the weekend, after hours, whenever, they’d say, ‘You’re going to work.’ Because the place was so old and decrepit – it was held together with bailey wire and duct tape – I averaged probably 50 hours a week with my regular hours and call outs. I was very fortunate because I was very busy.”

A quick search at Rapsheets.org shows a pretty solid work picture as well. It only goes back to 2007, picking up when Craig had been incarcerated for more than half his sentence already, but it portrays someone who continued to work steadily, which isn’t always easy when moving yards. Once you get moved, you have to start all over again. You’re new. You’re unknown. Except … if you’ve been in long enough, you may have made friends. And one or two of those friends may have moved yards already ahead of you. And once you get to the new yard, you might bump into that old ‘friend’ and renew the acquaintance, albeit in a tactical way, because that right there might help you land a job. If you have a good work ethic, which is something Craig had steadily proven from the outset, then that friend could mention to his boss that you’d be a good fit.

Word of mouth hiring doesn’t only happen at the highest level of business in the corporate world; it also happens at the lowest end, which this would have to qualify for considering the pay. Craig’s compensation, at least in the records available online, ranged from 20 cents an hour working in building trades, up to 50 cents an hour, including his last job being an arc welder in the maintenance department. That was a fairly standard range, and positions that reached 50 cents an hour or higher were harder to come by and worth holding onto. Then again, having a job in general, at any pay scale, had more value than we might think.

“It’s like the old saying, time flies when you’re having fun. When you’re keeping busy, you’re keeping out of trouble. It was very healthy for me, so I was fortunate to get a mechanical job early, working with my hands, my brain, fixing things. That really works for me.”

The other fortunate part was that it helped him build some normality early on during his adjustment periods, first as he went in and then at each move along his journey. Doing something he would have chosen anyway if he actually had a choice, if he had his freedom, that normalcy was something Craig craved. Just being able to think, at least for an hour or two, or even a few minutes if that’s all it came down to, that he was doing something he wanted to do – using his hands and working his mind to solve a problem – instead of sitting in his bunk with nothing but time on his hands, that made all the difference in keeping him going.

Strangely, he related it to a movie that likely all of us have seen, one that over the course of our conversations in the past two years he’s referred back to numerous times. The Shawshank Redemption is a movie he saw during his research phase before his trial and sentencing were complete. It came out in 1994 and I’m sure you know it. Hell, haven’t we all seen it like 440 times each? The one with Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. They’re in prison and you see the daily life, their grind. To us, or at least this is what I thought for the longest time before talking about it with Craig, it was a movie that had good writing, seemed pretty forthright in what it portrayed, and you came away thinking not everyone in prison is so bad. What Craig sees isn’t necessarily different, but his view of it is on a much deeper level because he said the movie took very little artistic license. It’s like it was reality. It actually was his reality.

“A lot of that movie is so spot-on perfect in the way that it was (inside), it’s kind of scary. Like the scene where they’re having a couple of beers when they finished the roof for the building. They were doing it just to feel normal for a few minutes.

“Those kind of moments really do mean the world to you. You actually can feel like you’re not there.”

I added the italics there, but when Craig ended that last sentence on our phone call, it was one of the few times in our conversations when his voice broke. It was emotional for him. He has let down his guard on a number of occasions in our talks, but at this point, speaking about the topic of feeling normal when you’re inside this mass incarceration center, of not being ground down in the chain work of day by day by day institutionalization, well, that really struck a chord with him. It showed me how different it could have been had he not found that job early on, and if he hadn’t continued to be honest to himself, grow within his set of boundaries that he wasn’t going to let change just because of where his choices had led him to this point.

Sticking to his plan, focusing on the things he needed to get from the situation, and not letting the situation dictate his outcome, was crucial. And it worked. Unlike what the sergeant had said to him, he did get reviewed in 2 years and was reduced to Level 4. It took another 6 months — still in a single-man cell and stuck on solitary — before he was able to get pushed through to a 4 yard where he picked up his first roommate.

And quite like Shawshank, this is where we see how art can imitate life, and life can imitate art.

Craig has said it many times that the real world and prison are way more alike than people think. After I heard this next story that he shared, I think it’s safe to say the art we create actually is, in its simplest form, a function of how we live, whether we realize it implicitly or not.

His first cellmate when he got moved to a 4 yard was called Irish. He was maybe 10 years older than Craig, and already had been down about 7 years. They were put together based on the administration’s policy of trying to alleviate as many problems as they could early on. They obviously weren’t going to mix races, but they also went as far along as they could to get people at least in some scope similar in age, sentence lengths, etc., even if it can’t be exact. They weren’t going to put a 19-year-old first-time felon in with a 64-year-old who had already served 22 of his 30 years. That’s not going to turn out well, as Craig said, because the older guy is going to want to do things his way since he’s got the time inside, and the young kid is going to want to do it his way because he thinks he’s swinging the bigger dick. It just ain’t going to work out well very often.

Craig was brought in, the officer unlocked the door, piled in his legal boxes and personal stuff inside and said, “There you go.” That was the introduction. From there, the new tandem had to split up less than 80 square feet, which included a bed, desk/wardrobe combo like a college dorm room, and four hooks on the wall. That was it. So one guy got half the space under the bed for his boxes and one half of the inside space for the wardrobe. The other guy got the opposite space. Craig was new so he got the top bunk and he put his TV on top of the wooden wardrobe so he could see it at eye level when in bed. Irish’s TV was on the edge of the desk where he could watch from the bottom bunk. Each of them got two hooks.

Thankfully, he said, it was an easy adjustment. They got along well, not much conflict at all. That’s not always easy considering it’s such a small space to have to share, but it helps when you start with a hard conversation and lay the ground rules. What’s expected from each of us? Do you do drugs? Are there going to be drugs in the cell? Because when they come to shake us down, they are going to find them and if you do do that, you are going to have to take responsibility for your drugs. As it happened, both Craig and Irish chose not to participate in that culture, so it was a moot point.

Oh, and one other key tenet had to be followed to make a bunkie duo work well: if a guy is sitting there reading, don’t start talking. If he wants to talk, he’ll put down his magazine or book and engage in conversation. In that sense, both Craig and Irish fit together well. Neither was too nosy, neither had high-maintenance needs.

Interestingly, the reason Irish was in prison was because he wouldn’t rat. And this part of the story is really good.

Before he got sent down, Irish was married, and had a girlfriend on the side. A kept woman, if you will, whom he paid all the bills for, the apartment, everything. Then they broke up, and here you can see it coming, right? They parted company, and she had a storage area that had some of his stuff in it. They met to get it out and ended up, as Craig said, “… having a little adult time for a last hurrah, old time’s sake if you will.” Soon after that, she got caught on a drug bust, but it was more of a setup than anything else. The feds knew she was dating Irish on the side and they wanted him. So they pinched her in the drug deal, gave her the whole nine-yards, telling her she’d go away for so long and never see her family again, unless she could help them get to this other person they wanted to talk with — Irish.

The short of it, according to Craig, was that they got to him by saying he raped her, added on kidnapping and sexual assault. She went along with the bogus accusation to get herself out of hot water. They picked him up on the charges and started squeezing him. Why? Because there was a rumor that the IRA – like the real, real serious dudes from Ireland – were trafficking guns in southern Arizona. The feds wanted the information about the people running the weapons, which at the time they didn’t know if they were just guns or weapons larger than that, and through their investigation, they believed that Irish knew about the activity. Their plan: leverage the rape charges against him to make him testify against the people they thought were running the operation.

Irish’s response? “A rather emphatic, ‘Stick it where the sun don’t shine’,” Craig said.

After the feds couldn’t get information out of him, they let it go and dropped the charges. But, Arizona being Arizona, as Craig is all too willing to tell anyone who will listen, the state picked up the sexual assault charges and prosecuted on them. All of these actions went on even though the woman stood up and said she was lying to just get out of the drug bust. Irish obviously ended up being found guilty as it’s how he ended up being Craig’s first cell mate.

This is the point where Craig, in a mischievous voice that anyone would be able to identify, said, “The part of the story that’s really interesting is that he actually did know the information they wanted. But like he said, he’s way more afraid of those people than he is of the state of Arizona.”

That’s also kind of how Irish ended up in the United States in the first place, because of some of those affiliations. He said he had a visitor one evening back home and was told, “You need to be out of the country before the sun comes up.” Craig didn’t know anything more about this particular story than what Irish said right there, and he still does not want to know to this day.

Now, tell me, if you wouldn’t want to sit down and watch season 3 of Sons of Anarchy with Craig as much as I do?

 

Editor’s note: When I originally wrote this post, I included the actual name of the person known here as Irish. I hesitated at first, and even took it out at one point before reinserting it prior to letting Craig have the first read, which I’ve commonly done. I always try to be transparent to Craig about what I’m writing simply so I can make sure what I put down ‘on paper’, if you will, is accurate. I haven’t lived through these situations like he has, so I rely on his insight to guide the storylines. He has never asked me to change even one thing in any of the bi-weekly posts … until today. He said he’d prefer if I didn’t use Irish’s last name and instead only identify him by his first name. He said the convict code of ethics, as I’m calling it, does not allow disclosure of too many exact details. More importantly, even 5 years after he got out and 20 years after the story took place, Craig’s gut feeling was that it’s a bad idea to use his real name. He learned to listen to that gut instinct on the farm and it kept him whole for 18 years. I had to respect that intuition now. So, it was my decision to not include a first or last name and instead use just Irish, which may or may not be the nickname his cellie went by. Still, the facts he relayed are, to his knowledge, accurate, which is the most important part of telling his stories. I hope you’ll understand and respect this decision.