Читать книгу Phantom Justice - Young Boone's Koo - Страница 7

November 12, Thursday

Reclassification

At 5 a.m., the officer knocked on the cell and informed me that we were to move after chow. At the appointed time, I carried my belongings and went up to the third floor. There were nine prisoners together in the dayroom. I believed the RDC received an order to move ten mixed-colored viable human goods to the prospective retail stores.

Once we got together, the officer stepped in the day room, put shackles and handcuffs on us, and then marched us to the outside. We got on the bus. It rained a lot. I sat next to one black prisoner.

The well-barred correctional bus stopped at the central office and two officers with rifles got on the bus. Then the bus began to roll and kept moving toward the north. Fortunately my nose got better from the outside air.

About thirty minutes later, the bus stopped at Attivery Camp and dropped one of the goods, but they found out soon enough that that merchandise was not for the camp, so he was put back in the bus. I wondered myself how come this correctional facility could not tell where each merchandise belonged to. What do we need the RDC for? I thought.

The bus arrived at the Pendleton Reformatory first and they dropped five prisoners — three blacks and two whites — and then continued the drive to the CIC. It was close and only about several blocks away from the Reformatory.

CIC (Correctional Industrial Center), Pendleton, Indiana

When the bus stopped at the CIC front gate, we got off the bus. It was drizzling, so we got wet immediately while standing outside. The correctional officer came out and ordered us to get inside the checkpoint so we did. When I got inside the building, they strip-searched us again. After they double-checked the papers from RDC, they told us they would take us to the clothing department.

When their initial inspections were done, we were taken outside again and waited for the transportation. It was cold and I began to chill because I did not wear a jacket but only had on a T-shirt and sandals from RDC. All of us were shivering while waiting for the van at the outside of the receiving post.

The van finally arrived and they moved us inside the prison compound. As the van took us inside the CIC compound, they led us to the clothing department first. I felt chills all over my body. I could not concentrate where I was, and I was holding both arms tightly and rubbing.

CIC Prison Supplies

When we got to the clothing department, they gave us prison supplies each as if welcoming our arrival.

One by one we received our supplies: one toothpaste, brush, razors, state boots, seven pairs of pants, seven pair shorts, one jacket, ten pair socks, seven T-shirts, one belt, one set of linens, four towels, two washcloths, three thermals (thermo-underwear), one winter hat, two blankets, and one bedspread. They were all new. I was very impressed by the prison supplies.

As they dropped the items, my eyes went wild and lost focus because of so many items dropping at the same time. While receiving clothes, my body was hurting and I felt pain all over from the cold, but I fought hard to keep my composure. After we received our clothes, they took us to the A-Dorm where we were supposed to spend time until we were reassigned to our destination dorms.

A-Dorm

Half of the A-Dorm was for new arrivals and was used as the detention facility inside the prison. The other side of the A-Dorm was a facility for kitchen workers, and in the middle of the dayroom there was a lot of weightlifting apparatus. Through the window I was able to watch some inmates working out. The detention side of A-Dorm had a single bed and single room.

The CIC was a clean and newly constructed prison, so that the view was good and its look did not suggest the idea of a typical prison at a glance, but it resembled somewhat one of those dormitories for cadets. It seemed better than I was used to seeing in my early life in Korea during the Pacific War.

The other, bigger part of the A-Dorm was for segregation units for those who violated or were penalized over their own convictions.

I put all my clothing in the dresser. There was a lot of screaming coming from all directions but I endured their vulgar words patiently. I believed they were condemned jailbirds so they had every right to scream and yell over the hell that was the prison and their lives.

In the meantime, I asked the officer for my medication, because my nose started to run and I was sneezing terribly. Around 5 p.m., the nurse brought cold medicine and I took them, but because of body chills I could not sleep, and instead I ached all over.

When I got in the room, I checked the clothes again. I was so surprised and wondered again why in the world they gave so many clothes at one time. The room had a dresser and a desk, so I stuck them in the dresser. Immediately I noticed that the modern prison facility was entertaining us for the usual selling purposes. After all, we were expensive goods so they ought to take good care of us.

C-Dorm

After our ten days of living at the segregation A-Dorm, they gave us each one’s dorm assignment in an auction procedure. I was sent to the C-Dorm.

When I got in the C-Dorm with my government issues, I saw a young black inmate who had been my next-cell neighbor at the RDC so I recognized him immediately. I was going to say hello but he ignored me. When I was at RDC, I gave some commissary items to him and treated him as a young man. I felt strange but I did not make any remark to him, and then followed the clerk who introduced my new room.

As I walked in the dorm, everybody looked and stared at me like wolves. I ignored their eyes and then carried my stuff in my new home, the prison room. I was kind of scared at first by people’s moods and the way they were staring at me. It gave me a different feeling than I had in jail and at RDC, probably because I noticed that these prisoners were really people abandoned by society.

CIC Dorm Structures

The CIC warehouse was a two-story building and had six dorms: A, B, C, D, E. and F. Two dorms were adjoining each other so that they looked like three large dorms from a distance. A-Dorm was for the kitchen workers and the segregation facilities, and B-Dorm was for the institution workers and idles. The C and D-Dorms were for idles, and E and F were for the prison workers, school-goers and college attendants.

It was well structured so that it appeared to be a pretty and a good prison dorm to show off to outsiders. Were it not for the heavy wire fence, I could not tell it was a prison; otherwise the way it looked in my eyes was a military training quarters or dormitories.

Each dorm had been divided into two sections from the entrance. In the middle of the dorm the control station was located, but each side was separated by the thick Plexiglas windows right to left, so the officers could monitor inmates’ activities plainly. Each side took in 100 inmates so each dorm practically had on average 200 inmates, and the CIC warehouse could be stocked with over 1,200 units of expensive merchandise.

As I looked around inside the dorm, something struck my eyes — the structure of the dorm itself. It was just like the Star of David or Jewish flag or the police badge. It was hexagon-shaped. It meant to say we were protected by the Star of David or were prisoners of Jews. I quickly thought that the architect must have been a Jew. It was my impression when I looked around the inside of the dorm.

Anyway, to me it was a very destructive shape for a prison and it was a disturbing realization, but when I asked one young inmate, he did not even recognize the shape of the dorm, although the structural diagram was posted on the walls for reference during fire emergency. When I pointed out the dorm diagram, others then began to study the dorm structure on the emergency fire posts.

The washrooms and showers were just on the corner on each side of the angles. The layout of the prison inside was very neat and comfortable for bad guys. It told of the commercial wholesale house structure of the prison system of America.

The middle of the dorm was a dayroom, and in the dayroom there were three picnic tables and one pool table, and then in the corner, just behind the control station, the TV room was situated. And splendidly one big ice maker machine stood at the left side from the entrance so it was very convenient for inmates especially during the summer season. The DOC knew these inmates were long-term tenants so they wanted to facilitate things nicely to welcome them again. Anyway, I could not shake off my impressions at the shape of the prison.

Room Features

Each room was 7 feet by 9 feet and had a steel door so it was unlike most cell configurations, and there was one steel bunk spring bed, so it felt like a bed outside prison. It seemed the state paid tons of money to give bad boys a good sleep every time. Each room had one desk with bookshelf on the top, one fiberglass mirror on the wall, and two chairs and one dresser, so the room looked crowded but gave a full sense of a rich capitalistic American prison.

Surprisingly, in the room, every place was covered with pasted pictures of nude women. I felt like I was looking at pages of Penthouse amid scenes and pictures of Las Vegas. It told about how these young inmates were hungry for girls. On the other hand, my question was why they had to register at the DOC if they wanted girls that much. They should have realized when they registered with the DOC that they’d lose their rights and girls.

New Roommate Rich Swanson

I was sent to room 4T-1C-Dorm. When I got in the room, I immediately met my new roommate: white, about fifty, with tattoos all over the body and a significant big swastika tattoo on his back announcing he was one of the Aryan members. He had a long beard and mustache, so he noticeably had the look of a typical or traditional inmate portrayed in institutional full-body-pose images. From my first impression, he was ugly and dangerous, and he also gave me an impression of a member of KKK. It scared me at first look and it plainly told of who he was before coming to the DOC.

He said hello and introduced himself. His name was Rich Swanson. He was medium built, 5 feet 6 inches and around 160 pounds. He then left me alone. I felt immediate danger within a few minutes of meeting him in the room. I put my stuff away but I could not sit and keep alone in the room so I ventured out to the dayroom. I just felt nervous.

As I suspected, my roommate Swanson was charged with murder, had worked as a taxi driver on the street, and was imposed a sixty-year sentence. He had served twenty years at the state penitentiary in Michigan City and recently met the parole board member, after which they cut his time to fifty because he had behaved well during the course of imprisonment. When he got credits from the parole board, his class dropped to level 3 so he was transferred to CIC.

He looked like a gangster, but I was not sure yet. He said he was forty-seven but to me he looked over fifty, and his body appearance gave me a feeling he was an old-timer. As I believed, his mentality was limited and his brain function must been restricted by something. His movement was slow, like that of a snail, so I easily recognized him as a big timer.

When I got out to the dayroom, there were almost thirty inmates out in the dayroom and playing card games, pool games and chess, but the rest of my dorm mates were staying inside their rooms and watching TV or reading books.

Once I settled a little bit, people then began to knock on my door and introduced themselves, some to satisfy their curiosity. Some of them said they recognized me from the news in the newspaper and TV, but it seemed I was not the same man they were talking about. I did not want to disappoint them so I did not protest their words.

Interestingly, they knew my profession by my appearance and my name, and especially from my skin color, and also knew my nationality from my broken English. I did not deny my profession and told them I was from Korea.

Inmates’ Common Ideolog

The very interesting fact I discovered was like that at the RDC.

“Hey, Koo, how much time did you get?”

“I received twenty for the rape charges.”

“Don’t lie. No one gets twenty for a rape. You must have more to it.”

I immediately realized the inmates’ common sense and knew they had experience with all kinds of inmates who were at various stages of serving their sentences, so they wouldn’t believe my words. And so quickly I told them about attempting murder with rape. Since then, they never bothered me asking my time.

However, I circumstantially had to lie to them. It made me think again of why the dishonorable, gay temporary judge Page sentenced me twenty years for rape charges. I believed the reason why he gave such maximum was to satisfy his gay perversity.

It was clearly personal punishment against me by Page but there was no way I could protest as long as I was inside prison walls. It made me feel angry whenever an inmate asked about my sentence, but I knew Page was not a normal person so I had to hold my temper and I then tried to forget Page until the appeal would be over.

On my first week at the CIC, I was nervous that I could not rest completely, because I would not know what would happen to me while living with young commercial livestock. I surely felt I was an exception among the viable monsters, primarily because I did not belong to either of the color categories: black or white, but other. I tried to keep cool and digest the atmosphere of the prison, but it disturbed me a lot thinking of the professional prisoners of America.

I could not believe how my life happened to be transformed into being that of a convict. I lay down and fell in deep thought to recall how I happened to be incarcerated.

A sudden onset of fear struck my heart. My immortal soul seemed to be disappearing into the darkness of injustice. I held my chest in two arms and lost my mind for a while. I wanted to know the justice of America.

Insidiously the last day of the trial came back to my mind, slowly and steadily, and then I tried to figure out how the verdict had been reached without evidence. I could not hold my emotions, so that I wrote a poem about how I felt about the verdict.

Verdict

Suddenly the “guilty” hit my soul from nowhere,

Verily, verily, thinking of how I was convicted.

The solid portrait of the justice fell in the shadow;

Hearsays assailed the integrity of the court.

Reaching out and touching the emptiness,

Who knew the evil justice proclaimed?

Appealing my grotesque masked into the cell darkened.

It’s end of the life in this wicked society,

“Guilty,” so please forgive me.

November 14

Idle Dorm and State’s Pay

C-Dorm, where I was in, was the idle dorm so that most of the inmates were often wandering inside the dorm except when a few went to school and had jobs. Each “idle” got paid $15 per month, because the DOC did not want their merchandise to die and dry out.

It was good to know inmates could possibly get some money while obtaining their education. Although the DOC paid them to go to school, most of them were not interested in education, but they were eager to learn criminal skills and techniques instead. Surprisingly, inmates did not take advantage of the DOC educational programs.

I was confused as to why these inmates did not take advantage of given opportunities with the DOC providing credits. It seemed to me that most of them were born to commit crime.