Speaker 1: M h I walk straight line, shackle chain, ohsome girdie,
it's calling my name. There is no mercy and it's
been a tentery juice as the huge stream game Wrangle three.
Speaker 2: I'm here be by me to die.
Speaker 1: Inside these walls, inside the wild.
Speaker 3: And when the walk girl as I'm.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, and welcome back to Bloody Angola, a podcast
one hundred and forty two years in the making, the
complete story of America's bloodiest prison. I'm Jim Chapman, and
it is Thanksgiving week. So I hope, first of all,
that you're spending some time with family and friends and
you're thinking about all the things that you're thankful for. I,
of course, am very thankful for all of you. Couldn't
do this podcast without you, and I thought it would
be fitting today to bring you some prison stories as
it relates to Thanksgiving. A lot of people ask me
how do convicts spend the holidays inside behind bars? And
so I scoured the internet. I came up with several
interesting articles. So I'm going to give you a look
inside of a prison right now and how these convicts celebrated.
And I'm going to start off with one from the
Prison Journal and it's titled why my first Thanksgiving in
prison was the best one I had in forever. This
is written by an actual inmate, starts off between being sober,
getting a visit, and having a surprise feast with the
mean girls in my unit. I still cherish the day.
Thanksgiving was not the worst holiday in prison, but looking back,
I think maybe it was the saddus behind bars. The
best holidays were usually the ones that have been the
least exciting in the free world, things like Labor Day,
Memorial Day, and Sunday. These were times when we didn't
miss our family as much, when it didn't feel like
an entire season of celebration was continuing without us. Still,
in a sense, my first Thanksgiving and custody was better
than the ones before it, when I had been addicted
to heroin and selling drugs to feed my habit. Back then,
most of the holidays were a druggy blur, save the
occasional near disaster, like a year a housemate got chased
down the street with a baseball bat and had to
spend the rest of the day in hiding because he
urinated on another guy's cokestash. I was too high to
be bothered by it. At the time, it was just
another crazy drug story, But if I had been sober enough,
it might have seemed sad and lonely. A few years later,
I got arrested with a tupperware of heroin, and I
was stone cold sober from my first Thanksgiving in prison.
That was in twenty eleven, a few months after a
judge sentenced me to two and a half years behind
bars for fell Any drug possession. In the New York
prison where I did a lot of my time, we
lived in dorms that looked like warehouses. It was always
cold in the winter and the heat was never high enough.
On weekends and holidays, they only fed us twice a day,
lumping breakfast and lunch together with meals never particularly worth eating.
But on Thanksgiving I skipped the mess hall. I was
lucky I had a visitor. The person I was dating
had driven two and a half hours to go to
the Outboyn Correctional Facility's tedious screening process and sit across
from me at a beat up table in a noisy
visiting room. We didn't have our families around, and we
were surrounded by prisoners in green and officers in blue.
Our celebration was pitiful, but we had each other. We
played scribble as per usual. Then we enjoyed one of
the major perks of visitation, snacks from the visiting machine.
We used up all our quarters on soda and candy.
Then we took a paper clip and carved the words
turkey on the snickers in Rees's. We called it our
holiday meal. Then I went back to my dorm. At
that point, I lived in an absolutely awful unit. Everyone
hated each other and my bunkie had it out for me.
There were thieves who would steal your toilet paper, and
there were fights in the bathroom. It seemed like we
all had a creepy and mean officer assigned to us,
the one who would watch us change and hand out
disciplinary tickets like candy, and send people to solitary for
things like wearing pajamas in the daytime. But that Thanksgiving
we had one good officer. He came in and spotted
a few women hogging the hot plates in the day room,
making food only for the people they liked, and he
issued an order quote, it's Thanksgiving. If you're cooking, you're
cooking for the whole damn unit. So they did we
all got together and donated commentsary items.
Speaker 3: I lived on canned.
Speaker 2: Peas, so I pitched in some of those. Other people
showed up with instant mashed potatoes, rice beans, and dry pasta.
Speaker 3: They cooked all day and.
Speaker 2: Everyone with any culinary inclination pitched in. Supplies were limited.
Most spices weren't allowed, but some people had already bought
them on the prison's black market. Now, despite the lack
of tools in the hodgepodge of ingredients, the result was
amazing pasta, salad, spice, cabbage, rice, yams, turkey, cranberry sauce,
green beans, mac and cheese, and ten or fifteen different
kinds of cakes and pies.
Speaker 3: Most of it was a little.
Speaker 2: Orange, because Sason, the number one spice in prison is orange.
Speaker 3: But it tasted so good.
Speaker 2: No one thought, now, this is what I think of
and I think of redemption. It was only one day
and then everything went back to.
Speaker 3: How it was.
Speaker 2: But this is how change happens. One day at a time.
People learn about the kindness and hope and change through
individual moments that eventually add up to a different person.
Those moments felt so scarce behind bars. That's why this
Thanksgiving makes me so sad. I think of all the
people in prison living with the pandemic, the lockdowns, and
the maths of closed wreck yards and day rooms and
visiting rooms. Some facilities have restarted visitation and are trying
to get back to normal, y'all.
Speaker 3: Incidentally, this was written.
Speaker 2: At if you can't tell during the pandemic, but many
aren't there yet. And either way, crowding around a hot
plate to cook a buffet meal is not safe anymore.
People behind bars will not witness the fleeting scene of
redemption I saw them as ten years ago. The year
twenty twenty have made prison holidays even sadder. This week,
I message Jamain in solitary come. He communicates with his
family and friends on the outside through a contraband phone.
For him, pandemics and lockdowns do not make much difference
this holiday season, he said, the mood is much the
same as in years past. It's always desperation. That's not
to say he won't celebrate.
Speaker 3: He will.
Speaker 2: Last year he had a cell mate and together they
made tacos and drank smuggled in gin. This year he's
hoping to swape out GIN for something a little more efficient,
like everclear. I don't know how fishing that is, and
to figure out a way to feed his whole pod,
whether they are indingent or not. Whatever prison magic he
pulls off, he will celebrate it and wanting to sell
in a lock up ravaged by coronavirus, and if he
wants to witness any redemption, he will have to supply
it for himself. I know this year is harder for
some of us, as we cancel friends givings and weigh
the risk of going home against the sadness of staying put.
It's harder to remember what we're grateful for now. It's
hard to see the light in such dark times. Personally,
I have not handled this year's isolation well.
Speaker 3: Even in a good year. I'm not an optimist.
Speaker 2: Still, when I think back to Thanksgivings past, it's so
much easier to be grateful than I am. Not where
I was that I am out now and working an
amazing job where I can tell the stories of people
who are still on the inside, plotting to score some everclear,
carving turkey on their snickers and counting down the days
to freedom. That was his story, and obviously, as I said,
that was during the pandemic, So an interesting view of
what the pandemic was like during the holidays. I'm going
to tell you another one, also from the prison journal.
It says the holidays in prison are depressing and most,
if not all, of us wish it would just hurry
up and pass. Mail, which is very important for prisoners,
is delayed and programs are canceled, which leaves little to do.
Prisons are short staffed, and those who are working are disgruntled,
and they take it out on the prisoners. And maybe
the worst torture is that the same tired reruns on
TV remind us we are away from our family. And
that's something also to keep in mind is the CEOs
are working during the holidays too. They're in there with
the prisoners, and they ain't happy about it a lot
of times when it's during the holidays. As you can understand,
He goes on to say, I was born on Thanksgiving.
My family would gather at my grandparents' farm. I remember
Grandma in the grand kitchen cooking, baking and fluttering around
creating memorable smells. Grandpa would greet everyone at the door,
would cheer. He entertained us with grand stories.
Speaker 3: And bad jokes. Love the way this guy writes.
Speaker 2: He played games with us in the basement, and when
he would get up he would say I should put
another log on the fire, and we all shot and
know he was a bit of a pirate maniac. I've
spent them as eighteen thanksgivings in nine different prisons. Prior
to Correstionial Industries, that's sea I taking over food services,
we looked forward to a homemade brunch of chocolate chip pancakes, waffles, sausage,
crambled eggs, chocolate milk. Dinner used to be a large
baked turkey leg, homemade stuffing, cranberries, yam, pecan pie, ice cream,
and a treat bag. After CI took over, the brunch
was replaced with our usual tasteless, unhealthy breakfast consisting of
four slices of bread, frozen peanut butter and flavored corn syrup, packets,
a brownie in chips for lunch to eating ourselves. Dinner
was a slice of processed turkey stuffing, over cooked vegetables
and heated whole yam, maybe cranberry sauce, maybe frozen pumpkin
pie with no ice cream, and the usual writing fruit
and if you're curious, SEAI that is like a giant
supplier to presents of food.
Speaker 3: So it's you.
Speaker 2: Know, a lot of these presents. They're not like Gola.
They don't cook everything right there on site. They order
out if you will, and it's not as you can
see here in the most tasty of food. And it
goes on this letter to say, but there are some positives.
It's one of the few times that we set aside
prison politics to watch a game or play guards together.
I call my family in the early morning because I
know it's harder to get to the phone and it
gets lighter later in the day. Although there is no lending, trading,
barring or giving allowed, the guards usually look the other way.
As we make and share or spread of prison cuisine.
Different groups get together and make their spreads, which are
usually nachos or top ramen burritos. Others line a table
with a trash bag and turn it into a community
nacho spread for the entire pod. Airway Heights was probably
the most creative. In the morning, a group who had
the money would make omelets with powdered eggs, French toast
pancakes made from Ensta potatoes and bacon up for everyone.
After afternoon or evening meals will consist of various different
takes on the standard burrito or nachos. Cold burritos made
with shredy beef, cream cheese, lettuce, and sometimes tomatoes if available,
and nachos with chili beef crumbles, squeeze and block cheeses
in a mix of various different chips. With the pandemic,
there was a little training of various Thanksgiving dishes because
we had to eat in our cells. There were no
special spreads. We were mostly locked down. We hope this
year will be more relaxed than all the working staff
will have been vaccinated. I think everyone is tired of
hearing about COVID nineteen. The supply chain issue has already
affected the commentary, which is continuously out of staples like beans, rice, cheese,
and even popcorn. It's hard to tell what Thanksgiving meal
will be this year. Still, I can be thankful that
I probably won't be in the hole this year. Is
I stopped filing grievances and lawsuits against the prison staff.
I have Turner classic movies on my cable package. Although
they are all reruns, they are old enough that I
probably have not seen them yet. The prison journalism project
has also made me feel like I am contributing to
society and hopefully I will be part of fixing a
broken system.
Speaker 3: And that was his letter, and both.
Speaker 2: Letters there gave you kind of a eye of what
the pandemic looked like to these prisoners. And we'll move
on to an article from Newsweek. Thanksgiving in prison is
a beggar's feast. This Thanksgiving, I will enjoy roasted turkey
surrounded by squabbling family members. For the first time since
two thousand and two. I have a lot to be
thankful for. For the past eleven Thanksgiving afternoons, I had
just minutes to eat slimy turkey roll off of plastic
trade gross, rushed along by guards eager to get home
for their holiday meal. Thanksgiving in prison was a meal
that implied I deserved no better. I was arrested in
November of two two thousand and three for five charges
of arm robbery. I graduated from New York University in
the year two thousand and begun a career in publishing,
but I also dabbled in drugs, and after two years
of a heroin addiction, I had one hundred dollars a
day habit and owed my violent Ukrainian dealer five grand.
Using the same pocket knife I once took camping as
a boy, I turned to ribbery. Luckily no one was hurting.
The newspapers dubbed me the apologetic bandit for the apologies
I expressed to my victims. Nevertheless, the judge gave me
twelve years. I was released in February, and, having paid
dearly for my crime, finally have a turkey breast and
feuding uncles in sight. New York State calls its jails
correctional facilities. The goals of improving prisoners includes eventually returning
them to society, but many convicts have never fit well
in the conventional world to begin with. Some have not
had the experiences of civilian takes for granted, whether it's fishing,
summer job, going to high school, flying on airplanes, or
even having parents. I learned the telltale signs of a
group home youth in prison mess halls. The guys who
wouldn't touch the vegetables had been raised without parents to
teach them to eat greens on Thanksgiving. The clue was
a stuffing. Men who had graduated from state care to
prison never ated. They didn't know what stuffing was and
were not prepared to rest trying it in their lives.
Most surprises have been bad news without alcohol or the
opposite sex. All celebration in jail is done through the
alimentary canal. Four holidays are marked with special food turkey
on Thanksgiving, fried chicken on Fourth of July, chicken breast
on New Year's Eve, and roast beef on Christmas. Lesser
holidays like Columbus Day, Memorial Day and Labor Day call
for two hamburgers and two hot dogs. Martin Luther King
Junior's Birthday isn't on Albanese calendar, while Saint Patrick's Day
is commemorated with corn beef despite being a national holiday.
Introducing those from the margins of society to the shared
national culture they preyed on is a good reason to
celebrate Thanksgiving in prison, but doling out turkey to fifty
seven thousand prisoners is expensive. Real meat in New York
prisons was phased out twenty years ago along with higher
education programs. For the most part, soy substitute satisfies the
nutritional requirement for protein, although a weekly chicken leg survived
the budget cuts. The Thanksgiving solution is to serve the
cheapest substitute. They can still pass for turkey.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: The regular Thanksgiving dinners three slices of turkey, roll, a
log of something white and speckled with the occasional beak
or bone.
Speaker 3: Ah Man.
Speaker 2: There's also stuffing, cranberry jellies, and carrots. The meal is
early by five o'clock. The prisoners are locked in their
units by a skeleton crew. The rest of the staff
is at home celebrating with real turkey. Holidays are approached
with ambiguity in prison. The administration appears to encourage inmates
to celebrate them the staff resists. I once spent Christmas
in the Special housing unit. It's a prison on the
Canadian border, comprised entirely of solitary confinement cells, and it
was as far from New York City and my family
as it is possible to be while remaining in New
York State. Not a very correctional setting. Just as grass
grows through the grass of the pavement, inmates celebrate despite
their limitations. They are not consciously asserting themselves as human
beings who deserve to participate in our society's holidays. They
just know it's jail house. Tradition to cook big on Thanksgiving.
Prison culture is short on meaningful dates, although convicts in
New York State memorialized September thirteenth by going to the
mess hall but not eating the food. That's how they
commemorate the Attica Riots, which began on that day in
nineteen seventy one. Young prisoners are taught this and all
other customs by older ones, and they also learn to
save their food money for Thanksgiving to make the biggest
meal of the year. After the trays of turkey roll
are served at four in the afternoon, the prisoners return
to their dorms or cell blocks, where the cooking has
been going on since early morning. With only a few
stoves and pans and microwaves available, every hour of the
day is required, especially since three feasts are being prepared.
There are three chefs and their assistance. Three long tables
are set up in the common rooms using every card
table in cardboard box available and homogenized in appearance with
white sheets that serve as tablecloths. Plastic trash bags keep
the flies off the food.
Speaker 3: There will be.
Speaker 2: Three batches of mac and cheese, three pitchers of kool aid.
The incarcerated population can be divided into three main groups, Whites, Blacks,
and Hispanics, and each of the three tables is for
men of the use each race. Since the state of
race relations in prison is about where the nation was
in nineteen forty eight, Whites, blacks, and Hispanics eat separately.
When the real enemy appears, as it did in Attica,
the men unite, but in everyday life segregation remains the rule.
The gravity of breaking bread with a man is understood
with an almost biblical earnestness, so the races do not
share foods. Men usually live in trios of cooking squads
so that the business of procurement, preparation and cleanup can
be delegated. These teams are almost always uniracial. I was
firmly told that if I cooked with African Americans or Hispanics,
I could not return to the whites table. However, on
Thanksgiving many rivalries are put aside to share specialties like
the curry powder Jamaican smuggling, or the Latinos method of
boiling an unopened can of condensed milk to make dulci delation.
And I'm sure someone knows how to pronounce that better
than me. There is also a friendly competition between the
races to have the most elaborate meal. As bellies fill,
the men soften and often break their usual rules and
racial barriers by sending samples from table to table. The
whites spend most of the money by ordering smoked meats
from a company specializing and selling hams in Turkey brust
to inmates. The mail order business was roomored to be
run by correctional officers, and this was the reason given
by many who would not order from them. Latinos were
deemed the finest cooks. They knew their way around the spices,
though their devotion to garlics sometimes killed the vampires in
our sealed dorms. The black table always had the most
food within their community. The dilemma was pork. Prisoners with
nothing to contribute will buy a place at the table
by doing dishes or just waiting until the others finished
For leftovers. No one goes without and the rest of
the week is devoted to polishing off leftovers. Without access
to refrigerators in can eat quickly. Prisoners are not wealthy.
I live on one hundred dollars a month and I
was in the one percent. These elaborate Thanksgiving meals bankrupt
many inmates, but the men are willing to spend half
a year's accumulated state pay on food for this day,
only to give away much of it. It's not rational,
but when has rational ever been in prison? Just as
the state makes its point with disgusting and dispiriting turkey logs,
the prisoners make their own in excess. Being locked away
from family and friends hurts a little more on the holidays.
Hardened convicts can still be susceptible to pain of loss.
An acquaintance of mine once went out to the row
of thones in the yard to call his wife, learn
that she had left him, and hung himself ten minutes later.
While prisoners generally mistrust and plot against one another, every Thanksgiving,
I saw men play family for each other, singing songs
to only tells, and making lots of curtuitous physical contact,
along with simply feeding one another. All right, and I
got one more for you today. And this one's very
recent as a matter of fact, it was actually written
just a couple of days ago, and it's titled What
Thanksgiving looks Like Behind Bars. For many, the holidays are
emotionally tough for those with strained family relationships, and for
those who suffer from drug and alcohol addiction, and for
those who are in prison. Quote, there's a somber mood.
Mike Cantrell, a retired corrections officer who worked for the
Missouri State Penitentiary in Federal Bureau of Prisons, tells an
e Crime and investigation it's just quiet, almost eerie. If
you work in a men's prison, there's always a roar
of men's voices in the background, except for the holidays.
On Thanksgiving Day, prisons often serve holiday meals to their population,
but the fact fact the prison food is so unappetizing
makes the gesture towards a Thanksgiving meal worse. That from
Henry Dillard, who was incarcerated from nineteen ninety five to
two thousand, it feels like a slap in the face.
Dillard said, you get this plastic tray with a scoop
of dressing, a slice of manufactured turkey, some gravy, something fruit,
and a couple of slices of bread. It would be
easier if they just gave us the normal stuff. As
an alternative, Dillard said, a lot of incarcerated people band
together and make their own meals.
Speaker 3: And you remember we.
Speaker 2: Talked about that just a few minutes ago at the
Parnell Correctional Facility in Jackson, Michigan, where Dillard spent the
last five years of his sentence. That meant getting together
in the day room and using the microwave to cook
up a meal, often at the crack of dawn to
avoid the bottleneck of others who wanted to use the microwave.
Cooking up the meal was a multi step process, he said, quote,
maybe we got a frim working in the kitchen who
can get us the onion and bell pepper. Those veggies
would be microwaved, along with chopped up sausage, maybe twenty ramen, noodles,
ree fried beans, rice, and cheese purchased from the commonsary.
All of it would be layered into a casserole and
served on a cardboard platter and wrapped in a garbage
bag that kept the food warm and facilitated easier clean up.
Dillard said they would do it every holiday occasion, but
especially on Thanksgiving, because that's when you cook and eat
and break bread with your people. Other incarcerated people retreat
into themselves on the holidays. That's what Reggie Chapman with
a Tea said while he was incarcerated from nineteen ninety
eight to twenty twenty two. Chapman, who now works for
a nonprofit called The Fortune Society, said that during his
Thanksgiving at Coxsacki Correctional Facility in New York, said he
was excited to partake in a meal similar to the
one that Dillard described. Years old and barely two months
into his sentence, Chapman felt mining joy as he received
ingredients by post from his family and then cooked with
other incarcerated individuals. But once the meal was over and
his belly was full, the reality of Chapman's imprisonment hit
him in a profoundly new way. Quote, this wave of
loneliness came over me. This was the first time I
recognized the depth of my situation, that I would be
doing this for the next twenty something years, he said.
It was a gloomy November day. After that year, I
never got excited about Thanksgiving anymore. According to Cantrell, prisons
will offer extra visitation hours on the holidays, but there
are limitations on who gets to visit. Dillard said his
darkest holiday seasons were during a multi year stretch of
time he was serving at the Muskegon Correctional Facility in Michigan. Quote,
Me and my mother and my brother were all incarcerated
at the same time. He said, I'd be I myself
the entire time. That made communication among family particularly difficult,
Dillard said because prison to prison communication was tightly controlled
and costly, and visitation, of course, was impossible. But even
after his family members got out of prison, visitation was
hard because of the criminal records. Dillard, who today works
for The Last Mile, a nonprofit aimed at reducing recidivism
and breaking the cycle of incarceration, thinks prisons should do
more to ease visitation rights for families like his quote,
you have a lot of people who are formally or
currently incarcerated who come from generational incarceration, and when people
are formally incarcerated, it's hard for them to come in
to see you. But Dillard still remembers his last Thanksgiving,
approximately five months before his release, when his mother visited.
It was their first time together in twenty five years. Quote,
that visit was crazy. I'd be disappointed by the lack
of support I'd received from family during incarceration, but when
she came, I was too happy to be mad. She
was beautiful, older for sure, but she still reminded me
and my mama, And getting that hug it's different from
any hug you can get, and having her arms wrapped
around me, sitting across from her in that visiting room,
her being unable to take her eyes off me, it
made me feel like I was a kid again. She
died a year after I came home, he continues, but
that one memory wiped away years of pain and anger
and greet can Trell said the holidays are a time
when incarcerated people in guards have a more amicable relationship
than usual. Quote The holidays are a pretty easy shift,
he said, adding that because CEO's shifts are so long,
they often miss their own family meals, and that generates
solidarity with the incarcerated.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: It's a strange situation. A lot of people that work
there and living there have the same thoughts.
Speaker 3: And we say that a lot on Blooding Gola that
these these you.
Speaker 2: Know, correctional officers and people that work for these prisons
they're doing it's almost like they're doing time with the prisoners.
Dillard said the correctional officers are usually helpful during the holidays,
they tend to be more lenient around certain rules, for example,
not limiting how many people sit together at a table,
while doing a better job enforcing other rules, like making
sure calls home are kept a fifteen minutes so everyone
in line gets to use the phone to call their family.
As for Chapman, he's just happy to be out and
to this day he doesn't like Thanksgiving.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: I've gotten better, but I guess the habit of not
celebrating has carried over. There are lasting effects. But he
still does celebrate other holidays. I love Halloween, he said,
it's the magic of dressing in a costume.
Speaker 3: Huh. Imagine that, and you have.
Speaker 2: Mobility, the freedom to move around. Plus it wasn't something
we celebrated in prison. And there you have it. Few
stories for you. So I've had a lot of people
ask me what exactly goes on if you're curious. Louisian
Estate penitentiaryt in Gola, at least the last time that
I checked, they did do specialized meals, just like some
of the ones I read to you just now. In
Louisiana State penitentiaryt in Gola. So it is something that
they try to keep these prisoners' minds occupied with some
specialized programs and things of that nature, and a special
Thanksgiving meal even behind the wire. I'll see you next week.
We'll return to a regular schedule. I'll bring you a
more typical story from the United states most notorious prison.
And until next time, I'm Jim Chapman, your host of
Bloody in Goa, a podcast one hundred and forty two
years and then making the complete story of America's bloodiest prison.
I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving peace.
Speaker 1: I walked straight line shackle change, Oh goosome girdie, it's
calling my name. There is no mercy and this being
a tentery juice as the huge stream game Wrangle of three.
Speaker 2: I'm here, be by mere to die.
Speaker 1: Inside these walls, inside the wild and't went no Wales.
I'm no it's superbody Angola, ohbody Angle