Imagine you know where you’re going tomorrow, but you don’t want to be there. This isn’t like going to your grandpa’s house where his stale breath and bad jokes and cheap-ass boorish behavior — he’s always wanting to pay you a nickel for chores that grown men wouldn’t do for $25 an hour — help to keep you in the perpetually anxious state of a 9-year-old. It’s not even like walking into the boss’s office knowing that you’re about to get your ass chewed, possibly even lose your job if you speak up, which, man, there’s always the chance you’ll open your mouth or raise your voice. That little inner demon makes life interesting, but you can’t have it this time. No, this time is different. This is going into the unknown, going where so few people actually make it back whole.

Then, try dealing with that feeling of heightened tension for six straight weeks. How would you hold up? What would you do with your time knowing that any day now, they could pull up to you and say, “It’s time.” What would your days look like? Now, pile on all this extraneous hubbub around you. There’s no certainty. Everything is just hanging precariously and it’s as if no one knows who will step up to pull out the plug on the bath water, or when. But, soon, someone will, and everything will go swirling down into the black.

What would you do?

Well, for Craig, a big part of his time was spent on research. And that figures, if you know him at all. He’d want to be sure of his circumstance as much as possible, so hitting the library would make sense. Except, this whole time he’s had this feeling of anxiousness in the pit of his stomach, this boiled over almost-bitterness evolving in deep, dark recesses of his mind, it’s all come while he’s been holed up in the county jail awaiting his final ride to be taken to the state prison. His freedom is already gone before his real research began.

Following his sentencing and starting with intake at the county level, he was separated from the general population. They didn’t like mixing the ones moving on up — cue the Jefferson’s theme song here, as a side of gallows’ humor — with those staying locally. That’s one theme you’ll hear him talk about a lot is how so much of prison life is about not mixing, but staying with your own. Knowing which side you’re on, and making sure the shot callers know you’re on their side, which is equally, if not more, important than the first part. It’s somewhat terrifying to talk about race relations from my perspective as a privileged, middle-aged white male, and likely not much easier from his, although when you make something a way of life for so long, whether you really deep down want to agree with it or not, it just comes off as matter of fact. There’s no question this was how he sounded when the topic was broached. Natural isn’t quite the right word, but his inflections weren’t strained as if he was ashamed to talk about it or use words I rarely even say in my mind let alone out loud. It’s parts of the conversation like this that make me start to understand a semblance of just how different the paths of our lives have been.

Despite his location, he still did what he called “research” and used the only readily available resource: other inmates, especially ones who had been there, done that, and earned a round-trip ticket back into the state system. If he was going to be rolling there soon, he figured he should get a little reconnaissance in so that he knew what the playing field looked like.

“A lot of guys there had been there before. They’d been in, got out, and came back,” he said, noting they were his best source for intelligence on what he was heading toward. “For me, it was shut up and listen. Find out and learn what’s going to keep you safe. Learn the unwritten rules. What do I need to do? How do I need to do it? Don’t do this around these people, but definitely do this. Stuff like that.

“In a sense it’s kind of a boot camp to absorb as much as possible and not get sucked in. There are a bunch of idiots there and I did not want to start out on that foot.”

That’s a good philosophy to adhere to when you’re staring down the front end of 18 years. But it wasn’t easy. The cacophony of everything that jails entail makes it difficult to think straight. The sounds. Sights. Unending, continuous bombardment of senses. People coming and going, everyone with a different focus, a different reason for being there. Acting out. Not caring. No emotions or maybe all the emotions at once. It wasn’t — or at least doesn’t seem — intentional on the administration’s part to help break down the newbies from the start. That said, it was overwhelming, making it of higher importance than you might expect to get a grasp on the situation before he was transferred.

“Basically, I had six weeks of that. In a way, it was mentally very busy. There was a lot of things going on. Lot of stimulus. And I had to figure out where I was going, who I should be around, how to act, how not to get in trouble, learn all the do’s and don’ts.”

When his day came, he knew there wasn’t going to be a choice. He would have to leave the county lockup. Now, he did want to get out of that facility, but when that happened, his wishful inner self still hoped it would be so he could get back on the outside. The reality was that leaving county wasn’t a best-case scenario. It was the only scenario, and one that started a whole new life for him.

It took him to where it all started: to the Central Unit.

“After six weeks, I made it to the yard I was going to,” he said of reaching Florence, Ariz., and its a 5 yard, a somewhat notorious place where they hold maximum security felons.

“So I thought to myself, ‘OK, I’m here, I’m going to be here for a good many years.’ That’s where and when it sinks in: ‘Shit, I’m going to be here for 18 years. Maybe not all in this cell, but here.’

“How do you prepare for that?”

After leaving the intake facility in Phoenix, inmate No. 114704 started his actual incarceration. The gravity of the situation had weighted him down. He was owned by the judicial system of that god-awfully hot state, and had no reason to believe that situation would change any time in the next two decades, let alone before the start of the new Millennium in five years.

Like solving a mechanical problem, Craig decided he needed a plan of attack. A game plan for survival. He had starting doing some of his homework before going in, and, along with the information provided by his lawyers, had the foresight to put a strategy in place that would keep him focused for the next six years. That was the script he made for himself to follow anyway. Six years at a time, three phases to serving his full time as there wasn’t any real hope for early parole.

As we talked about it, he said that when you get older, the way you view things changes. Maturity. Life experiences. So many things that you go through today changes how you are going to view tomorrow. Everyone goes through that process. We get older, life makes us adjust.

Knowing this, he hoped to use what he learned early on as a coping mechanism, something that helped him formulate the plan of how to get through 18 fucking long, hard years. Because of the classification system, such as it is as a reward system, when you behave, you end up on a lower-custody yard. When you end up on a lower-custody yard, you gain more privileges, gain more freedom. It only made sense that he’d learn the ropes and file away those experiences, helping him exploit the system that has no give, and instead only takes. Unless you can figure out just enough to stay out of its way.

If everything went smoothly, he’d spend the first six years getting his custody level as low as possible. The classification at the time was 1 to 5, with 5 being the maximum, the worst offenders. That’s where his crime dictated he start. Then it went down from there, 5 to 4 to 3 to 2 to 1. The likelihood that he’d see a 2 yard wasn’t guaranteed, and a chance at a 1 was about as likely as the judge reversing his opinion. It wasn’t going to happen. But that wasn’t the point at this juncture in time. He was just trying to find a way to face what he had coming, and that meant starting his time with the worst of the worst, and then working his way down from there.

Seems pretty simple, right?

Maybe it would have been, but then bureaucracy caught up. That’s another theme you’ll hear talking with him, how the red tape – look up how that term came into existence if you don’t already know – kept rearing its ugly head at almost every turn.

“When I first got there, it was 1 to 5 system, then halfway through, the new administration changed it up. We had a three-hour lecture on the new system. The way it laid out, if you’re on a 5 yard, you’re there for 2 years; if you’re a 4, then you’re also there 2 years; but if you’re a 3, you’re there for the duration.”

He was partially kidding, at least about the three-hour lecture. They gave a lecture, and yet every day the inmates had to learn and re-learn what it all meant. He had to do his own digging to find out and by the end, he could have presented the three-hour lecture and more, mainly focusing on how ass-backward the system was if its real intent was to rehabilitate.

So essentially, he had no choice. He’d go where he was told, did what he was told, and like it. Or at least, put up with it. Whatever.

That system wasn’t difficult to decipher. He would serve out two years at max security, and then drop to a high medium, which would also take two more years to clear. Then he’d be eligible to drop to a standard medium. At that point, it’s basically riding out the time. It was just a question of, what could he make of the time and how fast could he make it go?

“The way I looked at it, with my first six years, I had to behave, do what I need do, and then that’ll be as good as life can get before I get out. Then the middle six years will be cruising. You’re hanging at level 3 and just getting by. You do the deed, plug along. The last six years were devoted to all the paperwork, getting prepared to get out. You do everything by mail, and it takes fucking forever.”

Seems like a straight-forward plan. Take a little time to think about what your time will look like and then attack it. Unfortunately, as he witnessed all too often, it wasn’t always approached that way.

“If you wait until you have six months to go, you’re screwed. Later on, I ran into a guy, and what he said, it was very, very true. He said if you’re not preparing to get out of prison from the first day you’re there, you’re already behind.”