By this time, Craig was already in prison, but it may make sense to take a step back and talk about how he got there. Not really ‘how’ as in what he did, because for a ton of reasons we may discuss later, that isn’t the purpose of our little talk here. But instead, the specifics of where he was before he got placed in the state system.

The murder occurred in 1994, May to be exact, and he was pretty much arrested immediately afterward. From the sounds of it during our conversations and the scattered little tidbits acquired from news sources pre-Internet, it didn’t seem like it took the authorities long to figure out the situation. In fact, it was pretty quick. Someone else from their apartment complex told the police that the guy was missing and he thought it was Craig who had something to do with it. In the end, that dude, no matter whether you think he was a fucking douche narc or Good Samaritan, ended up being right and led the police to the appropriate person of interest, currently known as our boy Craig.

So, he was arrested. He spent two months in jail before his parents, Harlan and Karen, were able to bail him out in July. Then it was another year of hearings, motions and legal wrangling. During that time, the fact that he was out on bail and not incarcerated, not locked up as many would have preferred, was all by the grace of one person: the judge. He said he was basically bonded out for the year while doing court stuff because the judge was “a very decent individual.”

It’s kind of interesting to hear him talk about the judge in his case. Most of the time when this type of story is on TV, whether in the news or as some kind of special mini-series or documentary, you typically only hear about defendants who want to come back to smear or attack or even attempt to kill their judge. But every time that particular public servant has come up in our conversations, Craig has been highly deferential in his comments, even downright in awe of him for what he did.

Craig never mentioned this to me, but over the course of our discussions, I think it became pretty clear why he was allowed out. Most of it boiled down to the facts that he had no past indictments of crimes against him, and he was upfront with law enforcement and the legal system since Day 1. You’ll hear about it later on how his lawyer was frustrated with the fact that he was too competent, too sane to be in the situation that he was in, at least if he wanted to try to be able to plead his way out of it. No, by stepping up and handling his business the right way – well, after, you know, being put in handcuffs and hauled off to jail anyway – he set the stage for the judge to find a reason to be lenient.

That softness would turn into a rock-fucking hard landing in no time.

The way it worked was like this: Once he’s sentenced, his sentence is legally recorded and then everything starts the day he goes into custody. The typical situation has him heading into county lockup, staying there three weeks, maybe a month before he’s transferred to an intake area for the prison system. It’s really just a processing facility where you do testing to find out where your education level is and determine whether you have to take mandatory schooling. There is physical testing, which he said “was fucking crazy, relative to and considering the clientele.” That sentence in itself is worth pondering a couple times.

As he put it, you’re there for another handful of weeks, usually trying to get through as quick as you can. That’s where you do the evaluations to get the classification you begin with. The classification system had about 10 sections to it but the main two were the ones that mattered: a public risk score and an institutional risk score.

“That’s funny. How much danger are you to the public and how much a danger are you to prisoners?” he said with a chuckle.

“There’s also a work score, an education score, and they take into account your sexual offenses, mental health, physical health. Could they send you to a better medical yard? It’s kind of thought out to try to take care of you, so it’s kind of a neat system.”

Once you’re classified, though, you wait until there’s an empty bed so they can place you. “If there’s no room in the inn, they can’t put you there,” he said.

The total time in custody for Craig to reach his first yard was about five weeks, just long enough to have a single letter from his mother find its way through the system and actually make it into his hands. Otherwise, the whole time he was just sitting around. Nothing else. Just taking the time as it came because there was nothing else he was allowed to do. That’s something new, having just come from the outside where he could do what he pleased, when he pleased, where he pleased, as long as it was within the law. Ah, those pesky laws. But, considering his transgression, his time twiddling his thumbs on the outside was short. It was the interactions during his processing that signaled the beginning of something completely unfamiliar.

Once he went in, the change was stark, dramatic. More pronounced than anything anyone could be prepared for without prior knowledge of how things worked.

“You have nothing. Seriously nothing. They come around every three days, and if you have dirty clothes in a hamper, it’s ‘What size do you need?’ and they take what you have. They hand you a pair of clothes, and that’s it.

“It’s an experience.”

That time in custody before going into his first 5 yard was enough to throw him off kilter, unsettle him. Going through county holding and the intake process, there’s lot of commotion. People come in, and they go out. A lot of stuff going on. People may be moved from this holding area to this other area. When he got to his yard, it was pretty much the exact opposite: everything came to a screeching halt. And the realization really started to hit home hard. The fact that 18 years – long, hard years – stood ahead of him in this brutal place.

“I’m going to be living in this cell for the next however many years. There’s no moving, it’s mundane, very striking,” Craig said of his first thoughts when he entered the prison system. “At that time, the basic rule was 23 and 1 – you have 23 hours in your cell, and 1 hour at rec. There’s a lot of time to think about stuff, and a lot of stuff to think about.”

So what would he do with that time? What would you do?

Early on in those first weeks, he started to realize he had a lot of time ahead of him and that some of those moments, some of his thoughts may be worth keeping. Some maybe not so much, but over an 18-year period, he likely wouldn’t be able to remember all of his thoughts. They needed to be written down. Then he could go over them later if he wanted to. Or share them with others after he got out, as he’s done. The first step of this project was him sharing his journal with me, allowing me to get a little insight into his day to day activities. Well, almost day to day, as he didn’t record something every single day, but when he did, it was something he deemed worthy to remember. Maybe it was a thought he had about another inmate or guard. Or a quote he read in a book that day. Or a comic he saw in a magazine, a drawing he made, anything that stood out.

The journal turned into a way to organize his thoughts, a record of some of the absurd things, others of the mundane moments he wanted to be able to remember over time. As he started to mature, it occurred to him that what he was writing down would have more value than just a record of thoughts. It was a way of life. For instance, take the forms. There’s a form for everything when you are affiliated with a government agency. There isn’t anything you could do in prison that did not have a form, other than possibly breathing, and he kept a copy of almost every single one. Property forms. Store lists. Menus. Bed instructions. Orientation booklets. Money disbursement forms. Even commissary lists. Each facility had a different one and different way it was handled, and over time, you can see how that process changed by looking through his file folders.

That wasn’t the only thing that changed. It wasn’t until much later, but he noticed that internally, his focus was different. His mindset grew as he did his time. Early on, much of his journaling was about things you’d think typical for the situation. It was stuff like you’d see in a movie, very prison-esque with violence, ugliness, the disregard and lack of respect for others. Exactly what Hollywood has helped us believe is all that happens behind those walls. But then there was a shift, if ever so gradually. At a certain point, it became more pronounced as he expressed feelings about the normalized life he had come to know, one that was restricted and regimented, but regular to him. And finally, it became about the enjoyable moments, as obscure as that may seem in prison. Sometimes it was even about the people.

“There weren’t many but some decent individuals who were well worth knowing. There were worthwhile experiences on a few occasions. You witness or hear about decent humanity, people taking care of each other. It’s expressed in a different manner, because it’s all guys and in a prison setting. Differences aren’t nearly as great between prison and real life than people think. Because there’s, I’m sure you’ve seen too, plenty of people out here walking around on the streets that console themselves by saying, ‘At least I’m not in prison.’

“But here’s the thing: a lot of times, they are a completely miserable, horrible person who probably should be in prison, and if not in prison, then he’s just an asshole. That’s what’s funny about our group of guys back home. The CCMP guys all joke around about being assholes, but they’re really a decent bunch of guys.”