Thanksgiving is next week. It’s a time for appreciation, reflection, and hope. Often, whether we’re getting together with family or enjoying some quiet time at home during the holiday, we think of the loved ones we’re blessed to have in our lives, the successes we’ve had over the past year, and maybe even talk of the soon-to-be new year with renewed inspiration to reach our greater purpose in life. We have those thoughts and feelings because we can see the world change around us. We watch it go by and some are happy to be a part of it while others push and pull, leading to the change they hope to see. It’s a great feeling, knowing you have control of your life and the opportunity to send it in any direction you choose.

Now, imagine that you didn’t. You didn’t have a choice in how tomorrow would look. You didn’t have an opportunity to change the course of your life. Imagine you were in Craig’s place in 1995, when, for the first time in your life, next Thursday wasn’t a holiday to enjoy with family but was just the day after Wednesday, one mark on the calendar just like all the other days before and all the ones to come. Maybe you’d get a little different food at the chow hall, maybe you’d get an extra card in the mail, but essentially, the malaise and drudgery of living in a regimented, choice-less world means that no day is different than any other.

It took about five years of incarceration before Craig was able to find the coping mechanisms to deal effectively with holidays and special occasions. Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, funerals. He had no choice in the matter that he was going to miss them all. They’re not everyday occurrences, he said, so most inmates put them out of their minds. Yet with all the moving he did in the first several years, going from yard to yard and eventually to different custody levels, it made sense that the huge amount of change kept him busy, so much so that it was almost easy to look past little things like a holiday spent without family or friends. Almost. That same monotony, the day after day after day grey feeling of what he came to know as being institutionalized eventually turned into something that nearly resembled what many may call ‘normal.’

And in case you haven’t been paying attention at home, that was not a good thing.

“It was probably around the 7- or 8-year mark when it was like, you kind of catch yourself thinking of this place as home because it’s so comfortable. Then you think, ‘Wait, what the fuck dude? This is not home, it is not a happy place.’ But it did get to that because it was such a routine. You meet the same people, same personalities, and it’s just different faces attached to them.”

Occasionally some of those inmates, the ones with different faces with the same personalities, would form a ring around you, not quite in a pseudo-family way, but more in the manner of a band of brothers. In this case though, a band of thieves may be more accurate, especially when sometimes they have to take matters in their own hands to get out of their normal routine.

One such time happened to come at Thanksgiving when Craig was on the farm in Texas. A whole 16-pound turkey was “procured”, let’s say, from the kitchen. Your first thought, as was mine when I first learned of this little escapade, might be, “How the fuck did they cook a 16-pound turkey in prison without being seen?” I mean, I know they’re all despicable human beings and all, but they surely don’t just turn into wolves and eat raw meat, right?

Right?

It seems the answer is no. Technology was on their side. Prisoners have few items of luxury that they get to possess individually. As we’ve discussed, television sets are one, maybe THE No. 1 item considering it allows a prisoner to stay connected with the outside world, as we’ll see more of soon. A close second on that luxury list would be a stinger.

I didn’t know that the hell a stinger was either until he told me the story of how they cooked the turkey. Turns out, it’s a basically a simple heating element. It’s what they plug into a wall socket and use to boil water for a single cup of coffee. That may not sound like it has much power, but some of them come in the 500 watt variety and will boil a cup of water in 30 seconds. Now, the word is, if you take two stingers and put them in a large bucket of water, say one that contains a garbage bag with a 16-pound turkey in it, and you submerge those stingers on either side of the bird, it will cook.

And according to Craig, not taste too bad.

Little moments like that, where he could savor some good home cooking and not have to do so in the same slop line as every other meal each day, were just one of the ways he stayed in touch with reality. Most of the time, his intersection with normality came via a television screen, which let inmates get connected to the feeling of still being a part of society as a whole. Almost since the very beginning of his incarceration, I wondered what he did with his free time. He did his part to fill me in over the years with his letters, giving me a slight glimpse into his daily life, but at no point did I realize just how connected he still was to the outside world.

Take, for instance, his first response when I asked him what big events in the country or world he knew about happening while he was in prison. That’s a large list to pick from considering he went down in the mid-1990s and didn’t step outside as a free man again until 2013. Think about what you remember happening in the world during that time. Elections, wars, the turn of the century, the Digital Age. So many things to wonder if he knew anything about them at all. That his first response wasn’t what I expected shouldn’t be surprising any more: it was the home run record chase between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire in 1998.

Of all the things he could have said first, that’s what came to mind. He’s not a huge baseball guy either, which is why it kind of stunned me that their epic back-and-forth challenge for slugging supremacy was what was so memorable to him. But I get it. That race, the aura around what they were doing and the nostalgic nature of the sport, truly America’s first sport, lent itself to permeating everyday life for Americans all around the country. It was the water cooler talk of the year. Did Sammy get another home run? Did you see that bomb Mac hit? It was newsworthy, and it was fun. Even in prison.

Sort of like following Lance Armstrong. The Tour de France was another big event that Craig enjoyed staying updated on, as Armstrong dominated like no one had before or since. Sure, there were the PEDs. Everyone was on something, at least all the riders at the top, he figured. But the physical feats that Armstrong accomplished in that sport were mind-boggling when you put all of the riders on the same illicit pedestal. Still, Craig enjoyed the logistics of it, how one slip-up, one blown tire could derail a championship run. And, before it was finished, it would take a couple weeks of time off his plate.

One item he mentioned that came a little closer to his personal life was how he followed the rise of Tony Blair coming to power in England. His first roommate, as you might remember, was Irish, the interesting guy from the United Kingdom who makes us wonder just how real some of those made-for-TV biker movies really are. He told Craig of several stories regarding how Blair came about to be a political mover and shaker, including a handful of not-so-flattering vignettes that were nonetheless interesting.

Another personal connection to history that affected Craig and those at the prison in Yuma, Ariz., was the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Unless stuck in solitary confinement, there was little chance inmates across the country didn’t know what was going on that fateful Tuesday despite being tucked outside the public consciousness. At the time, Craig’s penitentiary was located in a border city, right across from San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico. He eventually heard that 10 percent of the prison staff at Yuma were not U.S. citizens but instead were Mexican citizens with work permits to come across the border, essentially across town, to work at the prison each day. Following the attacks, the border was closed as a precaution based on the idea there could be more terrorists coming into the country, and this affected those guards and prison employees more deeply than most. And in affect, disrupted the prisoner’s lives as well.

“When 9/11 happened and they closed the border, those guards at work couldn’t get home and the ones at home couldn’t get to work. It was kind of interesting because as a result of the borders being closed, we were on limited movement. We weren’t locked down but we didn’t get as much free reign as we normally did. We still got turned out for chow and stuff like that, but by being short staffed, we didn’t always get rec time, work crews didn’t always go out.”

Instead, they spent extra time inside and watched on TV all of the events that gripped the nation as the aftermath of 9/11 unfolded. Today, Craig leaves for work by 7:30 a.m. and often doesn’t get home again until after 8 p.m. The only way he’d know if something major happened is if someone came into the shop and mentioned it. Back then, he was on a Level 3 yard with 35 guys in an open run, all of them just sitting around with nothing to do, probably because a good portion of the guards weren’t able to make their shift change. He had a single bed space and his own TV. So he watched all the developments because he had the means. And he watched because his brother Kirk – the one who did all the legwork to help find the great lawyers his family used to set him up as best they could – he is a pilot. Craig was initially worried. He knew what kind of airplane Kirk flew and it wasn’t until he saw on TV the actual plane that crashed into the Twin Towers that he thought, “Ok, my brother doesn’t fly that particular airplane, so Kirk is good.” And then he mentally moved to Kirk’s wife, Ruth, who was a flight attendant. He did not know what kind of plane she flew on so he had to ask his mom when he was able to get through on the phone, which wasn’t right away. “Have you heard?” she said. “Cut to the chase, what does Ruth fly?” was his response. Thankfully, the planes weren’t coming from where she normally flew from so he breathed a sigh of relief.

Those tense moments continued on the farm just as they did among the general public across the country. A little while after the Towers came down, his building was finally turned out for rec so they could get some fresh air. He says he doesn’t remember the guy who blurted it out, but someone inappropriately said something along the lines of, “There weren’t any Jews in the building since they’re behind it. They all called in sick that day, and it was a government conspiracy.”

“How that dude made it to the building without getting his head pounded in I have no idea. We were all standing there and looking at him like, well, it was like a needle across a record as things got quiet. We stopped and turned to look at the dude like, ‘Oh shit, shut up now.’ No one needed to say anything because everyone felt the atmosphere.

“Interestingly enough, everyone was kind of in a haze, like, ‘What the fuck?’ you know? What now? The yard was put on not necessarily lock down but extra security to make things run smoothly. They weren’t sure something like that would instigate us to do something or stress us and put everyone on edge or maybe start at each other a bit. That happens. People do weird shit when locked up. When you put people in a confined area and add extra stress, everyone deals with it differently, and not always in a good way. Sometimes you take it out on each other for whatever reason.”

That begged a good question: what about the Muslims on the yard? How were they treated? This one was asked by Dwin and seems to be a logical line of inquisition even if the answer was less than dramatic.

“I didn’t think of that. To me, they are American Muslims, not ‘We hate you, America’ Muslims. I never heard of any Muslims on any yard having it taken out on them for any reason after this. Maybe there was extra security I didn’t pay attention to, or maybe they kept an extra eye on them.”

Maybe having everyone being able to see what was going on, watch the live details for hours on end on TV or listening to the radio on a Walkman was helpful to the overall psyche as well as provide a sense of commonality that they were all in the same boat, something they could understand considering their current residence. It connected people to the story and helped them deal like everyone else on the outside with the national grief.

Similar to the 9/11 attacks, the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster in early 2003 also took on a personal bend for Craig. At the time, he had been transferred to east Texas from Arizona. Because of the prison’s proximity to the trajectory path of the debris from the explosion, he watched nightly for news reports regarding the search. It was actually a pretty big deal out in that rural area near the Texas-Louisiana border, and they continually had to warn people out in the woods or anywhere else within a few mile swath that if they found something, any piece or part that could be from the shuttle, to leave it in its place and notify the authorities immediately. Story after story came across the screen, documenting how residents shouldn’t touch or move any possible parts they found because of the investigation, which was on-going so they could figure out what happened in the horrible tragedy that took the lives of seven crew members.

That technology played such a large role in Craig’s life while in prison was slightly ironic considering how much technology rocked his world once he got out.

Well, let’s be clear though. It wasn’t that he didn’t know about technology when he was released. He understood what a laptop was. He had read about what a smart phone with a touchscreen was. He heard about what the Internet was. What baffled him at first, and what was the hardest adjustment to make from prison life to reentering society as a whole, was the speed of the information we have at our hands today. The way information was gathered and processed – not just by machines, but by the humans working the machines – in such a lightning-quick manner was what was completely foreign to him.

In the span of less than two decades, our world shrunk as we went from understanding that telephones were these static, immovable communication devices with super long pigtail cords that were attached to the walls in our kitchen to, all of a sudden, every four-year-old now knows how to navigate a touchscreen of an Android to watch their favorite YouTube videos while being pushed around in a shopping cart in Target. Craig had already been in prison for 11 years, 10 months and 29 days before the iPhone debuted in 2007. In the next 6 years before his release, it revolutionized the way humans communicate with each other on personal, business, and societal levels. But he didn’t get to take it slow and feel his way along like we did. Upon his release, it was thrust upon him and it was a sink or swim moment.

“I’m like a monkey with a typewriter. I had no idea what I’m doing. I don’t have any reference to work from. Driving cars, interacting with people, using things that existed before I went in weren’t the trouble. A car for example. Cars are still the same basically although there are more technological features. A steering wheel is still a steering wheel. Doors, windows they’re updated but still the same. I’d been absent almost 20 years, but I had a frame reference where the basic parts go so there was some familiarity of where to work from. Not so with all technology though.”

The day he got out of prison we saw it. We stopped for some food at McDonald’s before making the trip from Safford, Ariz., back to Phoenix for his first night out. While we were there he mentioned he needed to activate his debit card and within three seconds, seven blank phone screens were pushed in front of his face. All of us offered up our cell phone for him to jump on the Internet to do whatever business he had. He could only stare at them.

“I don’t know how to turn these on. I understand the concept of the touch screen. But how do you get it to turn on, or find a button to find just the first screen? It hit me smack in the face that I have absolutely no idea.”

He had used computers before in college, but as he said, that was before there was a mouse to even go with it. He understood what the mouse did based on seeing it on TV but had never actually touched or used one so he had no reference to work from. That didn’t stop him from learning about it, however. During one of his human resources management classes he took in a correspondence course, there were two sections of the book where they taught the students to use Microsoft Word. Obviously these weren’t written with state prisoners in mind as the intended audience as they taught Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, all programs that needed hands-on interaction to learn. Or so you would think. Craig read the book, did the worksheets, and took the test at the end of the chapters. He did everything except use the “computer disk” as he called it recently, to walk through it. You know, since he didn’t have access to a computer. But even without one, he could systematically move through the steps and in essence learn Microsoft Word.

“I did have a reference to be able to use Word even though I had never touched a computer. Once I got a laptop, it was very helpful. The keyboard shortcuts, I already knew the terminology. It was that I could start putting it to use and then it was like, ‘Oh, this is what they were talking about.’ I found that very interesting.”

Possibly the only place he was up to speed on the digital world was as it related to money. In prison, you don’t get to walk around with cash. You probably don’t want to even if they’d let you, but the fact is, they won’t let you. In the real world, most people choose not to as well. Instead, what they do at camp is put your dollars in a spendable account. They have what’s called a ‘money check.’ That’s where an inmate would go up to a counselor to have him look up on a computer how much was in his account. Sometimes, depending on the facility, it may be in the form of a printed sheet where an officer would come around and tell a prisoner how much he had left on his spendable. That part of our digital society was completely understandable upon his release.

“That is very much the way we live our lives now. You never touch your own money. It’s all numbers on a piece of paperwork, a credit card, or the computer screen. Interestingly, that took very little transition. I liked touching my own money and put my paycheck in my bank account, but you don’t get to do that anymore with direct deposit. But because of the prison experience, how I do my books, there was no transition. I’ve been doing my books this way for the past 20 years because I had no choice. I track my money, when I get paid, when it’s posted. How I check on it is different, but not that it’s all just digital.”

Weird, isn’t it, how mundane some transitions are compared to others?