No, those aren’t my words. They are the excited utterance of an inmate in here a couple of weeks ago when I was trying to talk him out of further violence against another inmate. My heart has been heavy the past couple of weeks for a multitude of reasons. The murder of George Floyd, reading “The Freedom Writers Diary”(somebody sent it to me; thank you to that person, whoever you are), thinking about Sherrice Iverson and her family, contemplating the broken state of affairs in our country, remembering the asshole kid I was as a teenager, missing my loved ones, being locked in a cell 24/7 with no end in sight, wanting to do more to help but unable to…So many things at once. Injustice. That’s a big one. Injustice, racism, inequality, intolerance, blind hatred. They are a pestilence, a deadly rot underneath the shiny veneer of America’s public image. So I write this to do my part to combat it, overcome my own fears and self-doubt for the sake of something greater than myself.
Everyone in here has been under a building pressure, more so than everyone out there (which in no way is meant to minimize the pressure out there) because of Covid-19 and the heavy-handed government response thereto. In here, we’ve been locked in our cells 24/7 for months on end and let out for a shower every three days when we’re not working. We haven’t been given yard at all, can’t call our loved ones, can’t visit our loved ones, can’t do the vast majority of things we were normally able to do before to alleviate the pain and suffering of being in prison. We are all scared for our loved ones out there—their health, their finances, their futures. It’s under those pressures that the following took place. The names have been changed to protect privacy.
So, as the clerk at work, I oversee about 130 inmates, of all different backgrounds and dispositions. It is a community consisting of every different color, race, creed, sexual orientation, and philosophy you can imagine. I take my job seriously, and I take it as my job being about more than just quality control and number crunching. My job is to help every worker to achieve their goals, to keep everyone as happy as possible, to keep them out of trouble, and to make sure everyone gets along. I am friends with just about everyone in here—black,white,brown…everyone.
So, when we come back from work after an eight to nine hour shift, we are all sent back to our respective units and pods. The bulk of the P.I. workers are in a couple pods in Unit 9, with my pod consisting of all P.I. workers (except for two porters and two guys waiting to be hired). There are 28 double cells, for a total of 56 inmates. There are four phones, seven showers, one microwave, and one kiosk. The way the guards run it is arbitrary, and changes from week to week based on who’s working. One day they will let us all stay out for an hour, with everyone making a mad scramble to get a shower, call their people, check the kiosk for messages, order store on the kiosk, and cook something to eat. The next day they will tell the top tier to lockdown while the bottom tier stays out. The day after that they’ll tell us all to lockdown and they’ll let us out later. All this lockdown shit is under the guise of preventing the spread of Covid-19, but we just spent eight or nine hours packed into a warehouse together, so why are we being separated in the pod? It makes zero sense.
A couple of weeks ago, under the clusterfuck conditions described above, the guards told the bottom tier to lockdown. Some of the bottom tier guys had stayed out anyway, including a big white guy we’ll call Don. Don has a long list of assaults and batteries on his record, currently doing time for the last guy he hospitalized on the streets. He’s probably around 6’3” and 250lbs, on psych meds, and has a temper. He’s actually a jovial and laid-back guy most of the time, but he bristles at anyone—particularly other inmates—telling him what to do. Then there’s a friend of mine, Ronnie, a Mexican Indian dude who’s about 5’9” and 165lbs, with a temper and a mouth on him. The aggressive manner in which he talks to people rubs them the wrong way at times, but Ronnie has a good heart and he judges by the content of one’s character—not the color of one’s skin or one’s past.
So, we get back from work and Don is using the phone Ronnie was supposed to use when Ronnie gets out of the shower. Let me also preface this story with the fact that Ronnie and I have had our own verbal altercations in the past, with him threatening violence, but we never came to blows and patched it up afterwards—probably because Ronnie’s temper runs away with him, I always try to defuse those situations(even while standing my ground), everyone knows I always preach non-violence, and my personal rule is that I will never be the one to strike a blow first. I will defend myself, but I will never be the one to throw the first punch. A person can say whatever they want to me, and I won’t do shit. But once a man hits me and lands that first hit on me, I will physically respond with enough force to neutralize the threat. I always try to understand or infer the underlying causes of someone’s actions and words before I react to them. Not everyone does the same, though.
Now, Ronnie and Don had exchanged words before, nothing too serious, but enough for you to know they should avoid each other’s company. On this day, they didn`t avoid each other. Don got done with the phone, Ronnie went to grab the phone, but Don tried to hand it off to someone else instead. Words ensued, challenges issues, and Don and Ronnie moved to another area to fight as they talked shit to each other. Ronnie was walking behind Don when he sucker punched Don from behind—a big, loopy haymaker that Ronnie literally had to jump to deliver to Don’s face. Don turned around, cursed, told Ronnie he was really gonna fuck him up now, but then turned his back on Ronnie again. Yup, you guessed it: Ronnie punched Don from behind a second time. At that point, Don turned around and they grabbed each other and went to the ground. In prison, it’s a tacit rule that when two men are fighting, you don`t intervene: you let them fight it out, only breaking up the fight if one of them is helpless (i.e. rendered unconscious). It’s a fact of life that sometimes men need to get frustrations out their systems by fighting each other. From the perspective of the prison guards and administration, if you intervene to stop a fight, you will be treated as if you were fighting or ganging up on someone, regardless of the nobility of your intentions.
I had to get a shower in, and a phone call, so I couldn’t intercede at that point. Prison code wouldn`t allow me to anyway. I got a description of the remainder of the fight from other guys afterwards. Ronnie and Don rolled around on the ground a bit, then Don got on top of Ronnie and started punching his face and head. After he got a few good punches in, another inmate—a Mexican- Indian like Ronnie—Speedy, grabbed Don’s arm and pulled him off of Ronnie. Don had a bloody mouth, and Ronnie had a big ol’ lump on his forehead and a bloodshot eye. Don was amped up, still talking shit, and I stepped in between them, telling Don whatever I could to get him away from Ronnie, with a couple other guys doing the same. Before the fight had started, a few of us had tried to tell Don and Ronnie to not fight, but our words fell on deaf ears. I fell back after they were separated.
Now Speedy and Slim, a couple other inmates were talking to Don. Slim is white, but he is close friends with Speedy. So, Don is telling Speedy he shouldn`t have pulled him off of Ronnie, to which Speedy responded that he could have just easily jumped in and beat the shit out of Don, but he stopped the fight instead. At that, Don started spouting off about how if Speedy wanted to, it could be all the whites against all the Mexicans, which is when I jumped in between them and told Don that shit ain’t happening, that we are not with that race shit or politics back here.
Then I herded Don away from everyone else, letting him know he was bleeding a bit and should get some water. He drank some water then got in the shower. I used the phone then made sure Ronnie got it when I was done, since talking to his people would likely calm him down. After Don finished showering, he went to the other end of the tier, and after Ronnie got off the phone, I talked to him to make sure he was okay and to see if I could get everything between him and Don squashed. Ronnie said he was willing to sit down and talk to Don before we all locked down, so I went to talk to Don.
Don sat down with me, and his racist rant began: “He wanted to play Cowboys and Indians, and I`m going to fuck him up. He sucker punched me! I`m a proud white man, and I`m not going to hang my head down for that fucking Indian. He needs to lower his eyes when he walks by me! Fuck that faggot! And you can tell him I said that!” My entreaties for him to let it go fell on deaf ears, and I knew it wouldn`t be squashed that day. So, I thanked him for talking to me, then went and told Ronnie that Don didn`t want to talk. Relaying any of the other shit Don said would not have helped. It was important to me that this fight between two hotheads didn`t escalate into a race riot (which a few of these guys had been in before, and the Mexicans were already getting ready to rally). Fortunately, we were all getting locked in our cells for another five days, so the odds were that tempers would cool over that time, and any further violence could be avoided if Ronnie and Don could be kept separated until we locked down. It worked out, they went to their cells, and everything has calmed down. Neither Don nor Ronnie are talking about getting each other anymore.
I`ve been in quite a few situations like that in prison over the years, but I generally don`t talk about them. The reason I`m talking about this more recent situation is to point out to people that you can have a positive impact in your immediate community by small actions outside of view of the rest of the world—in your neighborhood, your school, at work, or just with your friends. In my instance the other week, there was no way I was going to convince Don that his racist views are wrong (he’s in his fifties, and set in his views), but I could at least prevent violence and the further spread of hate. And maybe—just maybe—one of the younger guys in here will see that standing against blind ignorance can make difference. Even if not, it’s the right thing to do, and we owe it to ourselves and each other to do the right thing.
I thought long and hard about writing this post about race and inequality in America because a part of me feels I have no right to talk about these things, that people will read this and judge me, speak out against me and say that I have no right. A large part of my motivation to overcome that and speak anyway is what I`ve read of The Freedom Writers Diary so far. I went to school with those kids, and they were able to find the courage to speak their truths back then, to stand up for the right things when they were still just kids. Surely I, as a man now, can find the same courage to publicly disavow racism and intolerance and speak against it to the world, as well as in the small community I live in here in prison.
I grew up in Long Beach, California, one of the most polyglot melting pots in the world. I don`t recall ever thinking much about race before the riots in 1992. My only thoughts about race before that were totally self-involved, wondering about my own race because I was adopted and had no racial identity I could call my own. Lack of identity will fuck a kid up, for sure. That’s a different story for a different time, though, After Rodney King, race became more prevalent in my consciousness. I had never thought about the fact that I was predominantly surrounded by white people my entire life—from my neighborhood to my friends to my school. One of my best friends was Mexican, and I was friends with the few black kids at my school in my neighborhood, but I never gave any thought to how they might feel like outsiders. Especially since I always felt like I was the outsider, no matter what environment I was in.
Looking back, I was never a racist, but I never spoke out against it. I’ve always had friends and girlfriends of every ethnicity and color, but I would join in stupid shit with friends and so-called friends in order to be liked and accepted. I think every race, every culture, every community has its own biases against others who don`t look or act the same. Kids are especially vulnerable to ignorant thought processes born of fear and lack of experience of exposure to different cultures and experiences. Unfortunately, a lot of people grow up in those insulated, isolated communities, never getting any exposure to different cultures, leading them to become racist adults who see the differences in humanity as bad things instead of seeing differences as good, instead of seeing the similarities all human beings share.
So here we are again as a country, almost 30 years after Rodney King, 60 years after the Civil Rights movement, finding ourselves simultaneously torn apart and brought together by race and a corrupt police state that would rather cover up corruption in our justice system and government than expose it and hold the corrupt accountable. George Floyd’s death was not just the result of one—or four—corrupt cops.
It was the result of a system that discards equal justice for all and puts its limitless resources towards consolidating power, covering for corruption while using strategies of war (e.g. “divide and conquer”)to keep all of us on the lower rungs of society suppressed and compliant. Those in power, the billionaires and bureaucrats and politicians, will gladly use race as a divider to keep the most vulnerable segments of the American population fully repressed and under control.
Right now the country has a chance to truly change this broken system, but we all need to unite and identify concrete goals to be accomplished to change things for the better. Worse than one racist cop is a whole system that would protect that one racist cop from being held accountable for violating the civil rights of American citizens. I have had my civil rights violated, I have had prison guards set me up to be killed, I have been shot in the face with shot gun pellets and choked out only to wake up with my hands cuffed behind my back with a prison guard pressing his knees into my back and neck with my face smashed into the ground, and I have suffered for years in isolation because of corrupt prison guards lying and nobody in the system lifting a finger when I begged for help. It wasn’t just me: it was my best friend, Dre. It was countless other inmates of every race, creed, and color without any voice.
That is why I have fought so hard in my lawsuit: it’s not just for me. It’s for Dre, and for all the other inmates who are voiceless. The key is to not only get the corrupt guards (or cops) held accountable, but to also get those faceless bureaucrats and politicians who protect those corrupt guards/cops held accountable. For those out there protesting today: keep it up! Use your voices and your First Amendment rights to speak out for equality and justice for all. But don`t let that be all of it. Learn to use those same tools your oppressors use. For example, I have learned to use the law as an effective tool, and you can, too. Use the law, use your votes, find where and how the corruption takes hold, and shine a light on it. Share what you learn with others, coordinate to vote people into power who would fight for you instead of against you. Ever notice how the Attorney General’s Office of any given state pretty much always defends corrupt prison guards and cops against the citizens who sue them for civil rights violations? I`ll tell you, from personal experience, that those AG’s will use every possible tactic—ethical or not—to win those cases. So when you sue, and the AG uses those abusive and deceptive litigation tactics, don`t let them get away with it! Seek sanctions against them and report them to your state’s bar association for violating their ethical duties to uphold the Constitution.
To that end, I am giving my own legal filings for compelling discovery(ECF147)—with all the citations for fighting against the corrupt government bureaucracies that would hide the truth—to lawyers representing George Floyd’s estate and Byron William’s estate here in Vegas. That’s something I can do, some small bit of assistance I can provide in the hope that work I`ve done can help them in their fights against government corruptions, inequality, and injustice. If anyone reading this blog has anyone in prison who is suing for their rights and the rights of their fellow prisoners, here’s a digital copy(ECF147)of my motion to compel for anyone who can use it. That motion is the product of hundreds of hours of research, reading, and writing.
Don`t let the faceless bureaucrats get away with covering corruption under the cloak of darkness and secrecy! Call them out for it. In prison litigation cases, the Deputy Attorney Generals automatically defend corrupt guards without even examining the facts. In my case, there was Deputy Attorney General Robert DeLong who lied to the court and did everything he could to protect the corrupt ex-guards I`m suing and he never even reviewed the evidence. He got fired because he wasn’t doing enough to beat me. His boss, Senior Deputy Attorney Douglas Rand, took over and continues blindly defending the corrupt ex-guards, using abusive and deceptive litigation tactics to prevent the truth from coming to light, even openly admitting in court the other week that he had never even reviewed the evidence he has fought so hard to keep from turning over to me for years. After I win this lawsuit, I will make sure they are held accountable by the Nevada Bar for their unethical actions.
It may take countless hours of toil, it may take countless years, but as long as you don’t stop fighting for what’s right, you will achieve your goals. We need to hold our law enforcement and judicial officers to higher standards. They would hold us to a higher standard, but using our voices, our pens, and our minds, we can hold them to that higher standard. Stand united in solidarity to fight for justice and equality for all. Force the laws to change so the people in power are held accountable, and the rest of us most vulnerable citizens aren’t silenced and kept in prison forever.
I know this post is a bit convoluted and scattered, but I have a lot on my mind right now, and it’s hard to compress it into a cogent whole. I really hope the kids from The Freedom Writers Diary—who are adults now—are speaking up in Long Beach to keep the protests there peaceful, are still using their voices for positive change in their community and the world. And I really hope anyone reading this is doing the same thing in their own communities. Each voice makes a difference. I proclaim my solidarity with all the peaceful protesters out there. Black lives matter. Equal justice for all. Until next time, stay strong, keep your voices raised, and peacefully fight for what is right. By the way, I`m not a proud white man: I`m just a person trying to lead a good life in this crazy existence, the same as all the rest of you.
a life without parole 