Way down in the hole.........

Hole time. The prison boss in the Movie Cool Hand Luke called it "Gettin your mind right". I did a 10 day stint in the hole the first year in to my bit. My mind wasn't wrong, and the 10 days never made it more right than it already was. I got in a little scuffle on the handball court, a couple of punches were thrown, the guard in the tower called it in. We played it off, nobody got locked up right away, the disciplinary hearing officer gave us both 10 days to think it over, 3 months after the fact. It wasn't a big deal, just a part of the life. You go in, you while away the hours, you do push ups, you burp the nephew, you try to remember every woman you ever slept with, you read the bible front to back because that's the only book you are allowed, you write long rambling letters if you have someone to send them to, you do push ups, you pace, you burp the nephew some more. Then you are out and it's over, like it never happened.

Going to the hole is the end result of getting caught doing something you shouldn't be doing, or finding yourself in a situation that leaves you a limited set of options. It's a part of prison life, and one you either never experience, if you do you try to not repeat it, or you spend repeated trips there. Unless you are like one of the guys in yesterdays post, hole time is just one aspect of prison, like parking tickets in the free world, a minor inconvenience. If you are smart, you come out of the hole, you do your time to yourself for the most part, you lose yourself in the day to day routine, you get in to a rhythm, you do your bit. Serving time in prison is all about your mindset, and I've always maintained there are 3 different mindsets, how you chose to do the time.

The Convict:
There are guys who are professional convicts. They were piss poor criminals, they got caught more than they got away. You could tell a recidivist convict the second he hit the yard on his latest new arrival. It was like reunion for them. They would walk over to the picnic table where all of the other Cons in their clique sat, the ones they had done multiple bits with. Even the walk, the gait, the posture, gave these guys up as Convicts. They have that certain complexion, covered in blue green ink, the skin grayish white, like old bone, after months of county lock up. Slaps on the back, maybe a little package, couple of matchboxes of weed, some groceries, an old school con welcome home. Within a week, or a day the guy is back in to whatever small hustle he had prior to his brief stint back on the bricks. He would get a new tatt gun, or have his wife mule balloons filled with weed or tar when she came to visit with the four or five kids the guy somehow managed to father in between prison sentences. Prison was home, and they found a modicum of success there, one that eluded them in the criminal or square world on the outside. These were the guys who couldn't be reached, the ones that movie boss deemed needing to get their "minds right". The hard core recidivists, the group the statistics show returning over and over. The reason for a large portion of recidivism, the guys who return over and over, they come back because they want to come back. As hard as that is to wrap your mind around, it's a true story.

The Degenerate:
Dope fiends, persistent DUI offenders, sex offenders, square world guys who maybe decided the wife was worth more dead, but never counted on the hit man they met online being a cop. It's a mixed bag of prisoners who either lived their lives mostly in the square world, and due to a particular vice, be it drugs, greed, or some kind of sex thing, find themselves standing before the bench. You can find these guys over at the bank of phones, they practically lived on them. They believe they are victims, the judge didn't understand, they don't belong here with these other people, these animals. Even when they aren't on the phone with that barely controlled look of panic, they are easy to spot. They look down, they look out of the corner of their eyes a lot. It's called looking out of the side of your neck, like a person who is afraid of dogs won't make eye contact with them, for fear of being bitten. They are walking targets for the first group. The wildebeests with the lame leg caught separated from the rest of the herd.

The Kappa:
No it's not a fraternity. It's a tag, an identifier used by some prison systems. The first group, the Convicts, in a Missouri prison would be identified as Alpha's. When the institution assigns you a cell house they use the Alpha, Kappa, Sigma, system, at least in Missouri, the Feds have a different way of doing the same thing, but for this post, we'll use the Missouri system. You don't put a Sigma, which would be one of the Wildebeests from group 2, in a cell house full of Alpha's. It would be like pricking a hemophiliac with a straight pin a couple hundred times and tossing them in shark infested waters.

Back to group 3, the Kappa. Most Kappa's are career criminals, but with at least some degree of success. They aren't happy to be in prison, they just want to walk the bit down, so they can get back out to the streets. Be it fraud, selling drugs, steal cars, whatever. They don't have a violent history, they don't go out of their way looking for trouble, and they don't consider prison so much a badge of honor but more of a glaring example of a misstep. This group is the least likely to return to prison. They usually realize after one or two stretches in the joint, that the easy money just isn't as easy as it first seemed. The prison administration loves the Kappa. You can put a Kappa in just about any cell house and he won't be a problem. He has no interest in preying on the weak, and he isn't green enough to fall for the thinly veiled traps that cons try to run.

You won't see very many Kappa's growing old in prison. For the most part they hang up the old career and go straight after the first bit or two. A 45 year old Kappa in prison is rarer than a black guy at a Nascar race.

The Sigma's are either doing lengthy stretches in protective custody, or shuffling to the med line for some psych drugs to deal with the day their incessant phone calls home are no longer answered, their names only coming up at mail call when the letter is marked returned to sender, the red stamp image of a finger pointing at them from the envelop addressed in their own writing.

The Alpha's, the cons, they keep coming back until the judge has had enough, gives them more time than they can possibly do. Forced retirement, the criminal world equivalent of a trailer park in Flagstaff or a condo in Florida. They'll hold court, year after year, at some picnic table bolted to concrete. The blue green ink blurring and bleeding together, until it looks less like individual tattoos and more like the mark of Cain. They'll die in a cell, or the prison infirmary, skin the color of old bone and blue green ink.