On the way to prison shackled and chained for maximum security transport, I was 19 (having had a birthday while in the county jail in Beaumont Texas).  I was 6’ tall, weighing 145 lbs, with blond hair and blue eyes and still suffering brain injury and trauma, from a major car wreck, that would take years to heal.

     During my six-month stay in the county jail, preparatory to the capital murder jury trial, I had heard all of the stories of how the hardened criminals of the maximum-security penal institutions (the prison units that the seriousness of my crime and eventual length of sentence would mandate I be housed in) abused teenagers . 

     I was scared to death and striving desperately to not let it show. Hardened prisoners smell fear with an animalistic instinct that is as precise as it is strong.

     A whiff of fear and they begin to circle and hone in for attack and total domination...

     After the first hour of the transport from Beaumont Texas to Huntsville – an hour of bone-shaking fear and the inability to think beyond the rapidly circulating, panicky, thought of, O God! What am I going to do?! What am I going to do? WHAT AM I GOING TO DO???!!! – a shackled man in the row in front of me, turned and scornfully, contemptuously, asked,

How you going to do that time, youngster?

You gonna get you a man to take care of you?

How you gonna do that time, boy?

     The questions were rapid and spoken with the gleeful undertone of a twisted man who already could visualize this young, scared, boy under him...

     In that instant, my heart turned to stone inside of my chest and all of my fear congealed into a hard, solid, all encompassing rage. My shaking and quaking instantly ceased; replaced with a calm but highly explosive, rage.

     I answered the questions in the manner and stance I would operate from until God renewed my mind and I could begin to see another way –– The way, The Truth, The Life, The Peace, The Love, that is found only in Jesus Christ.

     My answer was: I tell you how I am going to do my time, mister... I am going to do it killing anyone who F***S with me. Are you F*****G with me???

     The facial expressions and body-language of both myself and my antagonizer changed and abruptly so.

     Mine; the instant my all-encompassing and barely controlled fear congealed into a proportionate degree of rage, the antagonizer's;from a hungry wolf circling its prey, to the wariness of a wolf pack leader who finds himself, unexpectedly, in the presence of a lone wolf who is better left alone...

     The man’s answer was to turn around in his seat to face away from me, while muttering the first positive words I had heard in a long, long, time: You’ll be alright down here (meaning in maximum-security prisons).

     Shortly after entering the prison system, and while at work in the fields, several convicts jumped me. They knocked out one of my front teeth, cracked my jaw and bruised my rib cage lining...

     They jumped me on a day when the men on the cell block would go to spend money – if they had any – at the Unit Commissary.

     When the cells doors rolled open to allow the convicts to come out for commissary, several of the men who had attacked me earlier in the day, confronted me with a list for $20 of the $30 allowed to be spent in the commissary every two weeks.

     They informed me that I would get more of the same (beatings) if I did not provide this money on a continuing basis (every two weeks).

     They added that I would have to catch the cell for some big-six (dominoes) later that evening. This was prison-speak for entering someone else’s cell, to be locked in with them until the doors were again rolled open.

     The playing dominoes reason was subterfuge, nuanced to allow me the fallacy to hope against hope that it was to just play dominoes and not to be raped...

     During the short months prior to the beating, I had prepared a prison shank –– a weapon fashioned out of a bean ladle handle.

     Instead of commissary, I gave the leader a shank in the chest and the other two ran off.

     I was subsequently told by the medical personnel who checked on prisoners confined to punitive solitary confinement and the restrictive dietary rations then in effect, that I had just nicked the muscle of the man’s heart, but had missed puncturing a valve or severing an artery, so the man had lived.

     Ultimately, however, it had the same effect upon other prisoners as if the man had been slain. They viewed me in an entirely different light.

     They viewed me with wariness, and the fear that is the equivalent of respect in the prisons of the world. They saw the demonstrative evidence that to mess with this teenager was to risk losing their lives. They determined I was better left alone.

     My existence took a radical turn.

     From quaking fear, to evidenced rage – from being preyed upon, to being left alone – these changes were instantaneous and directly connected to the violence displayed...

     When this environmental shift was coupled with my brain injuries and disabilities, it was a recipe which provided a sense of security and well-being for the first time in my relatively short confinement... a term that had then seemed forever in passing.

     Additionally, it filled me with the bedrock certainty that such actions would guarantee that I would be left alone for the duration of my life sentence...

     It was the illusion of an oasis to a man dying of thirst in the hottest part of the desert of all deserts –– it was the proverbial recipe for disaster, but it was the only one available to my limited mental capacity.

     It was the only path I could see where I might come close to being left alone for the two decades necessary to initial parole release possibilities.

     Ignorance, a damaged and improperly functioning brain, the only rewards coming from rage exhibited through violence, fear congealed into a hard knot of anger and temperament; this is not a combination conducive to decision-making on a rational level.

     This is especially true when the only alternative is to return to a continual state of living in dread and fear and palpable anxiety –– returning to the state of a rabbit for whom ravening wolves await at every hole of the warren, each time it pokes its head up.

     Due to these facts and actions, stemming from my inability for rational decision-making, I was placed into administrative segregation in the most dangerous prison in the state of Texas, at that time (The Eastham Unit: Home of the Criminally Insane –– though it was a prison and not a mental institution) and from there into total isolation: security detention... for attempting to burn a man alive in the cell next to mine.

     I, effectively, went to prison within prison, and then to prison within prison within prison, as the State determined that I was too dangerous for the general population of the prison which held the worst of the worst in Texas...