Locked Down

What it's really like inside Philly's overcrowded prisons.

by Tom Namako

When you are sent to prison in Philadelphia, your first stop will probably be a holding cell at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (CFCF), named after two wardens who were killed by inmates 35 years ago. Several other men are already there, sitting and lying on the benches along the walls, and you may have to sit awkwardly on the floor. After a while — maybe an hour — your name is called. You give up your wallet, money, keys, jewelry and belt, along with any other items that could be either used as a weapon or stolen from you.

Illustration By: Bill Westervel

You're taken to another holding cell, where you wait for the physician. First, you sit in a special chair that will detect if you're hiding drugs in your anus. The doctor then checks you for tuberculosis, syphilis and hepatitis-C. He also asks if you're addicted to drugs. If so, he prescribes methadone for the wretched withdrawal symptoms soon to come. Another series of questions determines if you are mentally ill.

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You take a shower under lukewarm water with a small piece of soap. You shower by yourself, which won't happen again for some time.

Your next stop is another holding cell. There, you're given an arm band with your police photograph (or PP) number — the six or seven figures that your family will utter every time they visit and that your friends will write in the address of every letter they send. If you haven't made a call already, you do so now.

Next you're taken to a quarantine block, where you might sit with two other inmates in a cell designed for two people, or perhaps with three others in what's called a "multipurpose room" — a windowless space that was once a utility closet. Otherwise you're taken across I-95 to Holmesburg Prison, which closed in 1995 and now catches inmate overflow, and sit in a retrofitted gymnasium with about 80 other inmates and two showers, two toilets, two sinks and two urinals. You wait for about two weeks.

You're waiting for a spot to open up, either at the Detention Center or the House of Correction — Philly's facilities for people who've committed nonviolent crimes. One of these two will be your home for the remainder of your sentence.

If you wind up in the House of Correction, you'll find yourself in the kind of prison you see in the movies. It's the oldest facility in Philly's system, and most of its metal, cross-bar gates still open with massive keys. When you approach one of these gates, a correctional officer stands on the same side as you. Just beyond him is a small space, about 20 feet long, which is empty. Just beyond that is another cross-bar gate with an officer on the other side.

Much of your time here will be spent doing what you're about to do: standing, waiting for corrections officers to move you in small increments. The officer near you calls out to the other, making sure his gate is locked. He opens the fence. You walk into the center space, and the fence behind you is closed and locked. Only then does the next gate open. You see why this makes sense: Each officer has a different set of keys. Even if the inmates rushed a CO in the two seconds his gate was open, they'd get only as far as the next, locked gate.

As the officers pass you along, you go by the social service classrooms, the visiting auditorium (where the seats are similar to those in an airline terminal) and the armory, where the officers' riot gear is kept. A gate opens. You take a dozen steps. A gate closes. You wait. A gate opens. A dozen steps. A gate closes. You wait.

You end up inside a semicircular rotunda, with windows on the ceiling. All the inmates, wearing dark blue scrubs, are walking around the perimeter — as if moving from left to right field using only the warning track. They're all conscious of a yellow line painted on the floor, not far from the wall. No one is allowed in the center except officers.

Still, it's bustling. Upstairs, you might see an inmate pulling a cart of boxed lunches; on the other side, a line to go to the law library. There are three corridors in front of you, with letters above each: D, E, F. Perhaps you're taken to F block. The gate opens. You walk in. The gate closes.

The prison block is a long corridor, with 78 cells in all. There probably aren't many inmates milling in the hall — about 12, only five or six cells' worth. As you pass by, though, everyone in the cells stops to stare, sizing you up.

You come to your cell. Outside is a spider-web of plumbing; the door is made of blue strips of metal that form small, square openings. Inside is a 10- by 12-foot chamber, furnished with an empty gray box for the belongings you don't have, a metal cot with a white mattress, a toilet in the corner, and a small window. The paint is chipping off the walls onto the concrete floor.

This cell is built for a pair of inmates, but there are already two people in here — you make a crowd. That's life in the city's prisons, though: They're woefully overpopulated — with about 9,000 inmates — and have been for several decades. Efforts to fix this problem have come up against the seemingly immutable fact that, on an average day, 108 people enter the six-prison system while only 105 leave it. Many of these inmates, you'll learn, are in for minor crimes like DUI and criminal trespass, and are waiting for the backlogged courts to call them to trial because they can't make bail. In the meantime, it will become obvious that the mental and physical effects of this space crunch, combined with daily prison life, take a serious toll on inmates and corrections officers.

Behind you, the guards close the gate by sliding a blue bar into the concrete wall. When the key is turned, you hear the pin inside the wall fall into place. You look around and take stock. With your two cellies, you've got about 40 square feet of personal space — maybe the size of a small cubicle. Your options are to either sleep or stare at the wall.

Michael T. Regan CLOSE QUARTERS: Curran-Fromhold is so overcrowded that many inmates have to sleep in "blue boats" - plastic cots on the floor. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

It would be best to try to get comfortable in your cell. You'll be spending a lot of time here.

Technically, an inmate should spend 13 hours a day inside his cell: while sleeping, while officers eat lunch and when "count" is taken at 6:30 p.m. Now, though, it's more like 15, 18, maybe 20 hours a day; inmates are on what's called "restricted movement," an arrangement in which guards let them out four or five cells at a time to call home, take a shower or go to the commissary for cheese puffs. Things have to work this way because there simply aren't enough guards to move around the unwieldy number of prisoners: Inmates even have trouble getting spots in basic social-service classes, like those for drug and alcohol abusers, because there aren't any open seats.

Hierarchies have always been important in prison, but this crowding situation increases the importance of the in-cell hierarchy, as someone like Lynwood Ray will tell you. Ray, who is 6-foot-3 and visibly muscled, immediately establishes his authority to newcomers.

"Anytime a new guy comes in, first thing I say is, 'All right, look, I've done federal, state and county time. And want to get out of here. Don't do anything that's going to make that hard,'" he says.

On paper, Ray is a bad man. He's spent more than half of his life in some kind of confinement, beginning when he was 11, after he commandeered a freight train running through York, Pa., his hometown. "My friend and I jumped into the engine and hit the controls," he says. "I found out that's a state offense. I got out when I was 19."

Ray says he has explanations for his later offenses, which include attempted murder, attempted rape and, recently, failing to register on the sex offender list. The attempted murder, he says, came when a woman tried to rob him with a razor, slicing his hand in the process. "I went nuts on her," he says. When the parole board later asked how he'd handle the situation differently, he told them they didn't understand because they "didn't live in a world where a woman tries to rob you with a box cutter. There's no time to call the police.

"I was too cocky with them," he says. "I should have just told them what they wanted."

In prison, Ray says, the alphas tend to share two traits: They're strong, and they've done time before. Sometimes a hierarchy can be established without words even being exchanged: Ray did time at CFCF, where three inmates are squeezed into a two-person cell with the help of what's called a "blue boat." It's a piece of plastic on the floor, with an indentation for an inmate to sleep in. The other two inmates are on bunks.

"Who sleeps on the blue boat? The weakest person," says Ray. When he first walked into his cell, it was just understood that by day's end, the smaller, 5-foot-4 man would be in the blue boat, and Ray would be lying in a bunk.

Outside the cell, hierarchies matter, as well. At the bottom rung of the cell block ladder are the inmates who Ray calls the "nerds," but are also called "bitches." You're a bitch if you're beat and picked on. "They stick together," Ray says. "Very loyal. If they see you're meek or a first-timer and you're getting rolled on, they'll call you over."

Then, of course, there are the bullies. You don't need an explanation for their role.

The "middle classes," as Ray calls them, include religious men; jocks, who spend every waking moment doing push-ups; intellectuals, who will help you out with your case work; and the "I'm-not-going-to-bother-you-but-don't-get-up-in-my-face" types, as Ray calls them.

"You got your peaceful Muslims," Ray says. "Then you've got your militant Muslims who will give the bullies shit. They feel like it's their calling." The social rungs are clearly defined, with the occasional exception of ethnic solidarity. "The Latinos, they stick together," he says. "If you beat up on one of them, you're probably going to face another one later."

These hierarchies affect almost every facet of prison life. Benjamin Mitchell, who recently did a stint for burglary in the Detention Center, says one of the most blatant, nonviolent ways is the food tax.

The bullies have a way of getting good jobs, like food distribution. "When a quiet type gets his meal, it might be down two cookies, maybe a slice of bread," he says. "The stronger guys use that to swap for things, like cigarettes. It's like paying the man, only you got no money."

Unless, of course, you stand up for yourself.

Michael T. Regan (EVEN MORE) LOCKED DOWN: Often, because of a shortage of guards, prisoners are allowed out of their cells only a few hours a day. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Tension is constantly building around you in prison, and often, it will lead to violence. It usually develops slowly, over several weeks, and then erupts in a sudden flash.

Those who sleep in blue boats are generally tense people. Ask Keith Thomas, who's currently doing time on CFCF's quarantine block B1, pod 4, cell 32, for domestic abuse.

"It's like sleeping in the wilderness," he says.

Watch him tuck himself in at night to find out what he means. People who sleep in the boats have a certain way of wrapping themselves.

"You tuck [the blanket] around you, if you can," Thomas, 45, says. "Make sure your feet are covered. Then tuck it in under your arms, then wrap it near your neck, then around your head. Make sure everything is tucked right."

He still wakes to find mice and a few cockroaches in the boat, he says. But at least they're not in his clothes.

The cells at CFCF are smaller than those at the House of Correction, Thomas says. He's spent time in both. There aren't logistically many places for the boat to go.

Around 2 a.m. on May 1, Thomas dreamt he was out in the rain. This was strange, since he's barely been outdoors since he got to prison on April 22.

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The dream started to feel real. He forced himself to wake up. It was no dream. He was actually getting wet.

"Oh, my bad," his cellie said groggily, redirecting his urine to the toilet. Thomas' blue boat was about 20 inches away from the latrine.

He was infuriated. But he couldn't have done much about it. "There's a reason I'm down there," Thomas says. "I'm 5-foot-5. I'm the small guy." He had to either toss the blanket and sleep with mice, or sleep with the urine-soaked blanket and avoid the vermin. He chose the mice.

The next day, his cell block spent most of the day on restricted movement. Thomas and the urinator sat just feet apart from each other for long hours. His cellie apologized again. Thomas was humiliated.

When they're on restricted movement, a million tiny things can grate on inmates. In the summer it's sweltering without air conditioning. Sometimes inmates whip themselves into insanity, wondering if their girlfriends are with other men. "You sit there and stare at your cellies," says Ray. They're already telling the same stories they did last week — only now they're even more embellished, to keep up the entertainment value. "Let's say you try to eat something, you try to sleep," Ray says. "But you can't because it stinks — you're cellie's taking a crap."

When the inmates are finally allowed out of the cells, all the pent-up tension can bring about a scrum on the block. The guards break it up and put everyone back in their cells. The process starts over again.

Much of the violence in prison is carried in from the streets and just exacerbated by the maddening conditions. Marcus Malave, who has done time for drug charges, says that when an inmate sees a person he knows from the neighborhood and has a beef with — well, that's when people make weapons.

It seems impossible, with the alert prison officers. But Malave says that making a shank might involve working for weeks at one of the metal spokes on the grill of a fan. Or ripping a chunk of metal off the Ikea-style shelving in a computer room. Or buying one of those brown, hard-plastic spoons at the commissary.

Once an inmate has the body, he'll scrape the tip against the concrete floor. "The people who made the best weapons will find a piece of cloth, and wrap it around the base of the shank," Malave says. "Then you find some tape, and make yourself a handle. Some guys even fix up a leather strap, so they can slip it around their wrists and not lose it in a fight."

It also has to be hidden. Officers often do visual inspections, making sure beds aren't pushed up against walls (so they can see if anyone is digging out, Shawshank-style) and that there aren't any drugs in the room (pills are often tucked into powder containers or shoved into deodorant bars, while other drugs can be wrapped in plastic and shimmied into a loosened pipe of toilet plumbing).

The way some inmates hide shanks, Malave says, is to tie the weapon on one end and tie the other end to the air vent on the wall. Then they drop it inside and leave it there until it's needed. "Sometimes, people will get their hands on a piece of cardboard and something to color it with," Malave says. "You can slip the shank outside the window onto the side of the building, and cover it with the cardboard. The COs think it's part of the wall."

Some older inmates scoff at this behavior. They just carry a ballpoint pen in their pocket. It's just as effective, they say, and it's not contraband.

Either way, the shank provides peace of mind. Once an inmate makes or trades for one, Malave says he becomes less worried about the cell block bully or that guy you might have known on the outside.

Some inmates also see it as a tool to dole out justice. Malave points to last October, when a young, small guy, likely a teenager, joined F2 block at the House of Correction. His cellie was one of the block's largest men, with a reputation for making aggressive sexual moves.

"About 90 minutes into this kid's stay on the block, he came running out of his cell," Malave said. "He told people that the big fella tried to rape him, make a move on him."

This was behavior some of the other guys on the block wouldn't tolerate any longer. About 30 minutes later, Malave says, while he was watching a talk show on television, the big inmate walked slowly out of his cell with what looked like a profuse amount of sweat on his back.

"He made it to the officer desk and pulled up his shirt," he said about the incident, which prison officials couldn't confirm. "I'd say I saw about six stab wounds."

The guards moved everyone into their cells and called for a response team. Of course, this only pissed off some of the other inmates. They'd just gotten out! Finally! They were watching television!

Was it worth sacrificing block time for? Does Malave really think he tried to rape that kid?

He shrugs his shoulders. "Who knows?"

Besides your fellow prisoners — who become like a dysfunctional family — the most important people in your prison life are the correctional officers. They are, in a way, like a dysfunctional God or government, granting and rescinding your free will, determining when you can come or go.

One of the COs you might have seen patrolling the block, before he retired, is Capt. Seymour Collier, a solidly built but very soft-spoken man who believes in establishing a good rapport with inmates. "You show mutual respect, and then you can find out what's going on," he says.

Collier has been in the system longer than some of Philly's jails. He took the civil service test when he was 19, hoping to get a position as a mail carrier. The first vacancy was prison guard. "Those first few years," he says, "I was scared. People didn't want to take directions from a 19-year-old kid."

It didn't take long for him to see what inmates were capable of. In 1970, he received a frantic call at his home in North Philly about a riot at Holmesburg. Collier raced to the prison, suited up, and ran into the gym to help detain and remove inmates. He was interviewed by a Philly newspaper because he injured his hand. "That was the worst I've seen," he says, "because it was incited by race." One-hundred and seventeen guards and inmates were injured.

Attacks on COs have been decreasing for at least the past five years, but the tension is still there. Last August, Officers Brian Wynder and Patricia Brown were each brutally assaulted: Brown when a group of inmates came up behind her, put a bag over her face and tried to choke her during an escape attempt at the House of Correction. Wynder was stabbed with a shank several times in the back while trying to stop inmates from beating one another. He was treated and returned to work the same day to finish the investigation report.

The Holmesburg riot and threats of similar violence have changed the relationship between generations of officers and inmates, but not always in a physical way. "It became more of a mental game," Collier says. "It's a question of how much each side is willing to give."

You'll start to see what he means as you watch officers and inmates interact. For one thing, members of the two groups weren't necessarily strangers before they met inside; they may have previously gone to school or hung out together.

For another — and this is of great psychological significance — officers don't carry guns, batons or handcuffs. They're not making arrests on the street like police; in the 12-foot-wide hallways of cell block F1, it'd be too easy for an inmate to grab one of those weapons and use it against a guard. So, instead, they have to get up-close and personal, using their hands, bodies and pepper spray. Fighting can become an intensely personal matter — and the officers are in it to win.

Still, says Collier, the real stress of the CO's job comes in the day-to-day give-and-take.

Take, for example, that inmate an officer knows from the old neighborhood. "One day, they'll say, 'Hey, think you can bring me in a pack of gum? I'm dying for some. It's just gum,'" he says.

Some officers, Collier says, will do this. It's a basic game of persuasion, eliciting sympathy, getting a foot in the door. This will go on for a few weeks, maybe a month. Hey, it's just a pack of gum.

But after a month or two, that gum request turns into shoes, or sandwiches. This, Collier says, is where the danger comes in. "Sooner or later, they're asking for drugs," he says.

Collier knows officers who have fallen for this. And, as he tells new recruits, this simple deception has a simple solution. "The word 'no,'" he says, "is a complete sentence by itself."

This isn't to say that COs are foolish — everyone is susceptible to sympathy. And besides, you can see that they're immensely worn down. As the inmate population rises, and with about 180 correctional officer positions waiting to be filled, guards are doing more overtime, and many use sick time just to get off.

"In the summer months, between the heat, vacations and the stress, you might have 10 to 15 guards call out a day," Collier says. Simply put, morale is bad. Publicly, corrections officers don't get the respectful press police do, and privately, the pay disparity between the two is growing wider by the year. A non-ranking CO can make, at most, about $39,000, while a police officer makes more than $41,000 after graduating from the Academy.

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Last year, Collier tells you, the inmates in the Detention Center's B block threw urine and water on an officer. "That's a no," he says calmly. "We weren't happy about that." In response, the staff woke up inmates promptly at 7 a.m. every day for a month. The day began with a shakedown, essentially a thorough inspection of the block with a very strict eye for what is allowed and what isn't. "We found smokes, bottles of hot sauce, one guy had some pork chops — 'Oh, OK,'" they laughed, "'we see you're being taken care of.'"

Months after, Collier was guarding a block where fights broke out every time the cells were opened. He'd had enough. He and several other officers locked everyone in, and the usually calm and quiet Collier went on an expletive-laden tirade, losing his cool on the entire bock. Some of the officers had never even heard him curse before.

"We kept them on tight restricted movement for a month, let them shower every two or three days," he says.

"When that was over, we had their respect," says Collier. But meanwhile, the inmates were back to staring at walls, the tension building all over again.

If you're paying attention, you might hear that there's a plan to fix the problem. The governor has a plan. The mayor has a plan. The prisons commissioner has a plan. Electronic monitoring, you hear, of nonviolent prisoners. Job placement plans, you read, to keep people out of the system. And in the meantime, a civil rights lawyer, David Rudovsky, filed a lawsuit this year seeking to change the conditions.

But then you might meet a man named Gary T. Hall, who does his time in a recreation room retrofitted to hold inmates in the Detention Center. He's older, with fading tattoos around the back of his neck.

He's been in and out of jail so many times, one of the veteran officers says, that he and Hall "grew up together" in the prison system.

For his most recent stint, a criminal trespass charge, Hall has been in jail for 80 days. His bail is $1,500, which means he needs to pay $160 to get out.

But Hall has only $130 to his name, he says, and no family to help.

Thirty dollars. An inmate, in general, costs the system about $91 a day.

If Hall does his entire sentence, his $30 bail will cost taxpayers $7,200. And his mere presence contributes to the overcrowding problem. An inmate is waiting in a windowless multipurpose room for people like Hall to move out.

It doesn't make sense, you hear both inmates and corrections officers say. They wonder where the help is.

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On those mornings when Collier shook down the entire block, his officers sometimes found cash, which was confiscated as contraband.

Sometimes, Collier says, the cash would wind up on a certain inmate's account; just a few bucks here and there so they can make bail.

"If not, we'd pitch in a five, a ten ourselves, and spring a guy who might stand to lose his work on a silly bail," Collier says. "Or we'd give them the number to the [Pennsylvania] Prison Society."

This might stun inmates, and some politicians. Maybe it stuns you, too, to see an officer helping an inmate like this. But if you get to know prison, you'll know that one less guy inside is one less stressful situation waiting to explode.

"We'd put that $10 down on the books," Collier says, "and tell them, 'Here you go. Now don't come back.'"

(tom.namako@citypaper.net)