The staggering, life-altering adjustment had to sink in. He was in prison. He was a prisoner. He wasn’t free. He was owned by the system. Comprehension wouldn’t be an overnight transition, couldn’t be, what with the dramatic change, not just of scenery, but the pace of life. Everything was different. Everything was on someone else’s time, by someone else’s rule. Nothing outside of his mind was done without permission.

Immediately, Craig knew he had to start learning the ropes, working within the system to be able to survive. You might have thought ‘succeed’ was the word you should have read there at the end of that last sentence, but there isn’t much of that going on in prison, unless you’re talking about staying alive long enough to eventually get out. That’s the only way you succeed. And that was the goal. So, understanding the rules, who made them, how they were enforced or which ones weren’t, and why they mattered became the topic of the day as he talked with people he came across.

Remember, he had a plan. It was broken up into thirds, six years at a pop. It gave him something to focus on, a goal, a project. The first project was dealing with the mental aspect of being in prison. He remembers thinking, “I have to be here, I have to fit in, follow the screwed up standards, find out what’s good, what’s bad, what’s acceptable, what’s not.” That’s the starting point. But then he began to see there were other underlining questions of fitting in that he hadn’t thought of that were, quickly, jumping to the forefront. The first being how he would integrate within his group, which means how he wanted to be viewed by the whites. After all, everything in prison always came down to race. Always. White. Black. Brown. Other. That’s something we’ll dive into more later on.

For now, he had to decide how he wanted to be viewed by those who could make his life easy or hard. How far did he want to go, want to change himself? The goal was to get out on time, remember? That’s a long time to play a part that’s not you. That’s Oscar material if you can pull it off because he knew all too well that, over time, what you emulate becomes reality. That was a serious concern from the beginning.

“The question is do you play the part or do you assimilate? Do you honestly start thinking that way, and accept it as personal belief, or just play a part and get by? I did not do that very smoothly. At times, I caught myself starting to think in the convict-prisoner mindset, which is just unacceptable in society. There are a lot of thought processes not acceptable in prison. It boils down to what kind of person do you want to be? A few times I had to check myself, say, ‘You know what, get your head out of your ass, you’re becoming a person you don’t want to be.’ I may have to look like that guy because I’m here, but I don’t want to assimilate and take that on as my belief system.

“It’s a rocky road, but if I want to be a decent human being when I get out, I can’t be accepting and make these beliefs my own. It looks like it went smoothly; inside my head it didn’t go as smoothly.”

The spectrum of people he met and dealt with during that assimilation period, and then eventually over time, was wildly diverse and led to another great conversation as we discussed his process for on-boarding into the system. It started with a simple question: what consistent misconceptions have you found people on the outside have about life in prison? I just wondered what we’re getting wrong. It’s natural to have a predetermined idea of what it’s really like at camp, but the problem is that, at least for me and I’d assume most of you, we don’t have a context to really base it on. I’ve never been in prison or a prisoner. In fact, I’ve spent very little time behind bars, amazingly. I can mostly only go by what I’ve heard from others – family members, friends – who spent more time than me under arrest or in jail, but even at that, few of them truly were imprisoned. That only leaves one high-level source of information for those of us who obey the law of the land, or at least don’t get caught: late-night cop shows on MSNBC. Really, that equation, basing my context of what ‘prison’ is like on a reality show, says a lot about how we deal with people who’ve been in prison and then released back into society, and how wrong we might be about many of our preconceived notions.

One of those notions would be that there really can’t be any happy people in prison. Craig begs to differ, even if it only happens intermittently.

“One of the things I believe a lot of people have the misconception about is that prison is so dramatically different than the real world. It’s really not. There’s a staggering amount of parallels. It all boils down to, ‘Your happiness depends on you, not your circumstances.’

“There are people in prison who were the happiest I’ve met in my life. Those were the caliber of people I tried to be around because I tried to be one of those people. Life lesson: you find what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for trouble, you’ll find it. If you look for happiness, you’ll find it. It may not be easy, circumstances can make it easier or harder, but you’ll always find it.”

That’s pretty powerful based on the fact that he’s talking about real prison; scary fucking prison; dirty, dingy prison where bad people go because they did bad, bad things. Sometimes, many bad things many times. But maybe, just possibly, some of those inmates aren’t completely lost souls. Maybe they just made a big mistake, made a poor choice that one time, made a decision that they’d never make again in 1,000 tries but did it in that instance and it caught up to them. Maybe some convicts just deal with the situation they put themselves in better than others. That, too, could be a possible outcome. Some people make do and don’t let their surroundings dictate their circumstance. Craig tried to be a part of that group more often than the alternative.

A perfect example is sitting down to eat in the chow hall. He said there were typically four-person tables, and the same people normally ate together. Day after day, week after week. It was the safest way to make it through the day, staying with those you know and are comfortable with. Sticking together was a big deal.

The officers kept control, held a tight rule on moving people around. Everything is timed. All day long, timing matters. Chow time was no different. They had 8 minutes to eat. Move in line, get your slop, move down the line, sit down, eat. All in 8 minutes. That’s the pattern, every day. Every meal. That can get pretty tedious if you let it. And when you don’t let the monotony settle in, you stand out, as Craig found out.

“On the 4 yard I was on, we were sitting in chow hall, a four-person table, where we usually ate together. The officers would look at us, and we would be laughing so hard, we’d run out of time. The officers would look like, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you people? How can you be this happy here?’

“Everyone in the world knows being in prison is miserable. Why make it worse? Happiness is to be found if you look for it.”

Most of the time, it’s the little things that sneak up on you that mean the most and provide the brightest moments. Craig mentioned a great example: his life skills class. Over several conversations, he had railed on the prison system and the fact that it did little to teach inmates or to provide an actual correctional education. It rarely did anything other than to serve as a roof over their heads so that they were out of the sight of society. But occasionally, there was some learning that happened. In this instance, it was Craig who was doing the teaching and who helped several inmates find some joy in what they were doing, even if only for a short period of time each day.

The class was four hours a week, two hours over two days. There were plenty of options, what with morning, afternoon and evening classes which basically ran four days a week. It was a shit-ton of people, with about 20 per class, all spread around with only about six counselors to lead the instruction. Instructors were required to cover certain material. Like you’d expect, they just chugged through it, not really caring because, hey, the students had to be there and didn’t give a shit either.

Or so they thought.

Craig and a guy he ran around with took over the class because nothing in the book was what they wanted to talk about. They said, “What would we like to talk about today?” They made it about current events, things that mattered, that meant something to the inmates. After a few weeks, guys came into class time saying, “I heard about this on the news. I want to talk about this.” For Craig, it was pretty powerful. After a month or two, almost everybody wound up participating. The counselor was like, “This is fucking awesome. Instead of having to force you to look at each other for 2 hours, you are participating.”

There were some good conversations, something different every week. It kept the topics lively, timely. Not every conversation was memorable, even though some stood out.

“There was one in particular with this young Mexican kid, who I remember because of the phrase he used. We got to talking about court cases, having lawyers, and being able to pay for things like that, and it being a life skills class, it was asked, ‘How do you live correctly?’

“The idea is to school you on a way to live without doing illegal things. The young Mexican kid, his phrase was ‘living right.’ That’s what you do when you’re living right. What he meant by this was, taking out a portion of profit from selling drugs and setting it aside like you and I would do for retirement or to buy something like a car. His concept: you have this much profit and set this much aside. And he referred to that as ‘living correctly.’”

At first they thought that the kid’s got it. He understands what you’re supposed to do, how you’re supposed to set yourself up for a better life. There’s only one problem: he was talking about setting aside money to pay for a lawyer for when he was caught, because he knew he would need a lawyer of a certain caliber to get a good sentence so that he would only have to do 5-8 years in prison for selling drugs. Because he knew he would be caught selling drugs again. Again. That’s the key word here.

Setting money aside out of the profits of the drugs he was selling was his idea of “living correctly.”

“We were like, ‘You’re really close on this one, but counting on and planning for going to prison is not living correctly,’” Craig said. “Dude you’re doing the right thing, except for you shouldn’t be selling drugs and using the money you make to set aside for retirement, cars, family. He was like, ‘Oh yeah, I set aside that for while I’m in prison too.’

“It’s funny but sad because he was completely honest.”