Craig looked like a clown. I mean, really, there’s no other way to describe it.

It was 1988 and he was driving this teeny, tiny little yellow car that probably spent its weekends doubling as a Shriner’s parade vehicle. Two doors, a seat on each side and rubber band with two sticks in the engine compartment. He could do U-turns in a single-stall driveway with it and just stick his foot out the door to make it come to a stop. And let’s remember, he’s never been a little dude. Slightly built is only a way to describe his weight. Neither completely skinny nor stocky or beefy – and definitely not the dreaded ‘husky’ many of us fat kids of the ‘80s were labeled with. No, he was tall, like about 6-foot-5 and maybe 180 pounds, soaking wet, so seeing him in this car the size of a baby stroller was quite the sight.

He drove that car everywhere, and everyone knew who it belonged to. That seemed to go hand in hand with many of us. Like Dwin’s old silver Mercury. It was a beast of car, one that could probably handle Craig driving his little yellow pillbox right up into the back seat. Then there was Rush, he of muscles and tank tops and gold chains, with his fiery Camaro, always looking to race.

Mine? It was a piece of shit ’76 Cordoba. I bought it from a relative for 500 bucks when I was 15 and started driving it the day I turned 16. That’d be August, right after school started. That car didn’t last through the spring. By the end, it only had one gear – second – and it didn’t even have reverse. I had to improvise by never parking into a stall I couldn’t drive through, and at night at home, I would drive up the hill we lived on, put it in neutral, and let it roll backward down the hill and quickly crank the wheel to back it into the driveway. That way I could drive it out forward – in second gear – the next morning.

None of this pertains to the story this chapter is really about other than that last part about improvising. I only wanted to have a chance to call Craig a clown without him being able to retaliate.

Improvisation, though, is a central theme of Craig’s story as he had to learn, had to digest, had to follow through completely on the fly and without directions at nearly every stop of his prison term. Learning the ropes, dealing with situations, issues, people, it was all on him. There wasn’t a Big Brothers program in the pen. No funny little directions packet like setting up IKEA furniture. It was keeping his head low, watching 360 degrees around him every minute of every day, and then trying to find the right path. And let’s be clear, there were only two paths: the one where you bought into the prison mindset and the one where you didn’t. Both had their own perils and neither had a guarantee of getting through 18 years whole. So, he had to wing it and hope for the best.

Or did he?

“Interestingly enough, early on, when you come into this, come to prison, you figure you’re all alone,” Craig said. “You’re being cautious to let anyone help you, because you have to pay it back, and you don’t know what they want in return. It’s good to have some radar about that, but the interesting thing was that there was so much generosity from person to person and groups of people helping out a specific person for whatever reason. It was so broad and happened so often, it was like, ‘OK, this is just the way it is.’”

That social welfare was the norm was quite unexpected. Craig saw people who were making 35 cents an hour and were gladly – almost eagerly – sharing their bounty, daily. It was nothing extravagant but for the ones who couldn’t make do, often someone else would step up and help out in some small way. The people who didn’t take advantage of the situation were blessed, and were the most grateful.

The almost random acts of kindness he described were eye-opening, sobering. They looked at it like they all had to get through together. Let’s be clear again, by “all” it was your race. And by “together” it was this one time only. Never assume you’d get another handout just because you got this one. But it made Craig understand and solidified the point that prison is a situation where they take everything, strip everything away that they can and leave you with absolute nothing. So you have to learn to appreciate the little things and understand what is important, like a small gesture of goodness. It could be giving a guy a cigarette, a ‘rollie’ as they call it, because he doesn’t have anything else. You’re not giving him a whole pouch of tobacco, only a single smoke. But you do it because it’ll give him a couple minutes of enjoyment, a few moments of normality.

That aspect of prison was quite refreshing to Craig, especially that the kindness was so wide-spread. It really wasn’t a once-in-a-blue moon event. Prisoners were always helping other inmates. Because of those unexpected interactions, I asked him which stood out more, the charity or viciousness? He didn’t hesitate. Generosity and charity, he said.

“The viciousness you already expect. You’ve seen that in movies, heard stories. But the kindness, it doesn’t fit even though it’s the right thing to do. And that’s good. That helps keep people going, because if they only had the viciousness to internalize, well, it wouldn’t end well.”

Sometimes, people do end up on that side of the equation. Craig mentioned that with the exception of only two or three times, that viciousness was normally justified, too. In those instances, the perpetrators were dealt with harshly.

His simple comment about their fate?

“The rest of the time they had it coming. I didn’t feel sorry.”

You can see why they’d go down that path. Literally, you can see it.

When Craig began his imprisonment at Central Unit, he went into it believing it was the worst place he could be with the worst of the worst criminals. There was a stigma about going to a 5 yard, the highest in the state. Except, it’s actually not the worst. That’d be SMU 1 and SMU 2. That’s Special Management Unit 1 and 2, or what’s also known as Super Max Unit 1 and 2. That’s where you are in a single-man cell and never let out unless you’re in handcuffs, with six officers surrounding you as you walk, anywhere and everywhere. Craig called it the Russian gulag of American prisons, and that’s where you find the worst. This place is what the sergeant was talking about the first day Craig went in prison when he said, “If you don’t behave, I will send you some place worse than this.” And Craig believed it. The sergeant was letting him know that he may not have many choices left to his own volition, but moving forward within the rules of Central Unit or fucking up and getting sent to SMU 1 or 2 was definitely up to him.

Going to Central Unit wasn’t what Craig had made it up to be in his head. He called it, “strikingly calm.” Inmates were out and about, walking around, outside of their cells either going to the medical area or a handful of other allowed places. Surprisingly for a maximum security yard, there were a lot of people milling around, he thought. And that kind of threw him off until he learned there were specific reasons people could be out of their cells unescorted. They couldn’t wander around as he first thought, but with a direct route to a job or specific venue, it wasn’t such a desolate place.

In fact, that calmness continued longer than he could have expected. Once he was settled in, he realized that real violence was pretty rare. He estimated that it was every 2, 3 maybe 4 weeks or even every other month between any kind of confrontation that affected the entire yard, something pretty exceptional considering the clientele. It was 1,000 people living in – or more accurately locked up in – 5 square acres. Typically, you’d think that would lead to continuous problems but in this self-contained ecosystem, trouble had a way of taking care of itself.

When things did go wrong on the yard, someone always had to answer for it. The people at the top of the food chain made sure of it, Craig said. When an inmate had to be dealt with, that person was made an example of, and it was typically very violent. That way, anybody who heard about it would stay in line in the future. They may not know what that person did, but they’ll want to find out and then not do that themselves. This form of self-policing is bad for the individual but good for the community. Craig offered up an everyday example we likely see in the real world: You go to work on a specific route every day and for the past 9 months, you haven’t seen a single cop. Then one day there are officers every mile or two and they start pulling speeders over every morning, handing out tickets. Once you see this a few days in a row, you make sure you’re doing the speed limit because you now expect that it could happen to you if you don’t obey the traffic laws. It was bad for the people who got tickets, but for the rest who slowed down when they saw it, it was a warning.

“This is the same concept, just that in prison, it’s a more personal and violent manner. In the dichotomy of niceness and harshness, people were reasonably nice until it was time not to be nice. And then the pendulum swung way, far to the other direction for a short period of time before coming back to the nice side.

“That’s the community in general, the people I stayed away from. It’s horrible, but there are people who enjoy being violent. For whatever reason, that’s the way they are.”

One of the places where you could easily find those violent people was CB3. It was known that you pretty much had to fight your way in the door to get into the place because that’s where all the troublemakers were housed. These were the guys who always liked to get into fights, cause problems, create a raucous. They were always up to something. The administration kept them together in one of the crappier buildings among the 10 on the yard. There was little crossover between buildings. Many workers were housed together, so they would live together, work together and then have chow together. So CB3 lived together and ate together, like the maintenance workers, the kitchen staff, the yard crew, medical staff and on and on. And then it was segregated by race within each.

At one point there was even an ‘honor run’ where the best senior workers would be able to live. They left the cell doors open during the day so they weren’t locked in the cell. The run was closed and they couldn’t wander the yard, but could come and go from the cell to visit with other neighbors within the run, and take a shower when they wanted. That was near freedom because it meant that instead of waiting for some officer to come rapping at the door to tell you you could now go to the shower for 7 minutes, you could pick and choose when to do your thing. As luck would turn out, right before Craig got seniority when he could have made it into the honor run, they shut it down.

“The administrative philosophy was to take away any privilege they could. My plan of staying out of trouble, staying busy and working went into effect immediately when I went in, and it put me on the good side of town. Bad things could still happen, but guys with good jobs did not want to risk losing a job over something stupid. ‘Is it worth losing my job just to punch you in the face?’ That governed people’s attitudes. People who wanted a job, had a good work ethic and all that, they were better decision-makers anyway, so they’d usually get a good job to better their life. One good choice leads to another and another.”

Those choices can also go the other way. Remember the speeding analogy? If we don’t do what we’re supposed to do, they can take away our ability to do it at all. In that case, they take our license away. If you like yours, you don’t speed, or at least don’t get caught speeding.

Some people, though, they can’t get out of their own way. One kid Craig mentioned may be the poster boy for this. He couldn’t follow the rules that had been established within the prison system. Not only the rules the administration had put down, but the real rules that the inmates used to govern themselves. He wanted prison cred, wanted to be known. But the powers that be knew he was a powder keg waiting to explode and wanted him to be, “voted off the island,” as Craig put it, so they intentionally gave him an assignment that would get him removed. They told him to beat up a guy. This would have been all fine and solved the problem except, as fate had it, the guy who was marked to get his ass kicked wasn’t in the place he was supposed to be at the time this kid was told to make it happen. But no one could get word to the kid that it wasn’t the right guy, so he went ahead with the mission, taking out the random guy who happened to be there at the appointed time. Instead of doing the job he was told to do on a specific person that the hierarchy wouldn’t have any problem with, he actually beat the piss out of a 65-year-old guy who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had done nothing wrong and had no reason to be marked. But this young buck broke his arm, broke his ribs, gave him a concussion, pretty much stomped him within arm’s reach of death.

Turns out, this poor guy who got whooped was a teacher’s aide. He was bilingual and his niche was that he was in the education department where he helped Mexican inmates get their GED.  This senseless act that left the old guy in the infirmary for no reason nearly started a race war. It was so far reaching the administration had to get involved. Typically, the rule is that if you are in a fight, whether you started it or are the one taking the brunt of it, you get a ticket. This was the old guy’s fifth ticket, which meant that he had to lose his job. And if you lose your job because of tickets, you can never go back to that same job. Both of these rules were overlooked by the administration and he was back in his job in a couple months because he was more important to the staff by helping educate the Mexican population than enforcing the rule was.

“On top of that, every white boy on the yard knew what happened and they gave him so much, he had more store than anyone could think of. He didn’t buy commissary for a year, he had so much stuff.”

And the young kid who wanted his prison cred?

“Never heard about that guy again. Likely put in a very dark hole.”

Once again, there are only two paths in prison. It all comes down to what one chooses to focus on.