Read Online Doing Time by Bell Gale Chevigny - Free Book Online

sheriff’s car to drive into Graterford’s cavernous sally port area. Once the gate fell shut, I was immediately hustled out of the car by some very large, serious-looking corrections officers. I knew I would have to submit to a cavity search, but it wasn’t the strip-search that would dominate my memory of this event. It was the noise.
    Since concrete and steel do not absorb sound, the clamor and voices from within just bounced around, crashing into each other to create a hollow, booming echo that never ended. It sounded as if someone had put a microphone inside a crowded locker room with the volume pumped up to broadcast the noise. It was this deafening background noise that would lull me to sleep at night and greet me in the morning for the next five years. Though I have been out of Graterford for many years now, its constant din still echoes in my ears.
    The prison guards finished their search and escorted me up Graterford’s main corridor, a dim, gloomy, fifteen-hundred-foot-long stretch. The lack of natural light and the damp, dungeonlike air was oppressive. As I took one tentative step after another, I became so disoriented that I lost track of how far I had been walking. I promised myself never to take bright and sunny places for granted again.
    Things changed with sudden permanence once I reached the central corridor gate that separated the administrative section from the prison proper. I saw, for the first time, the faces, shapes, and shadows of the men who would become my friends, enemies, and neighbors. They stared at me and I stared back, as scared as I had ever been in my life.
    Once inside, I was walked through a gauntlet of desperate men. Their hot smell in the muggy corridor was as foul as their appearance. Most were wearing their “Graterford tan,” an ashen gray pallor. The discoloration of these distorted human forms reflected the prison landscape. At Graterford you work, eat, sleep, and idle indoors. You never have to go out unless you want to risk the sometimes deadly yard. Many inmates served their time like cave dwellers, never leaving Graterford’s concrete-and-steel shelter.
    My first impression was that most of these men brandished their scars and deformities like badges of honor. None seemed to have a full set of front teeth. Many displayed tattoos of skulls or demons. They all seemed either too tall or too small, but none seemed right. Eyes were buggy, beady, squinted, or staring. Heads were too big, too small, pointed, swollen, or oblong, some with jutting foreheads, twisted noses, massive jaws. None seemed human.
    One could argue whether it was the look of these men that led them to prison or whether it was the prison that gave them their look. What tales of suffering their bodies told seemed to be of no concern to them. They were content to wear their scars openly like a warning, the way farmers use scarecrows to keep menacing birds away. Today I feel pity and compassion for those who have had to suffer so much pain and tragedy. But on that hot June day, all I wanted was to get away from these ugly creatures as quickly as possible.
    Now when I watch a new arrival walking “the gauntlet of desperate men,” I can always sense his hopelessness. I know my stare is as horrifying to him as the stares were for me on my first day, and I know what I must look like to him.
    Getting Classified
    Toward the end of the main corridor I was shepherded into yet another corridor that led to the Clothing Room, a cold, damp place equipped with a tile-walled shower, and endless rows of mothballed clothes hung on racks like mismatched goods in a thrift shop.
    I was still wearing my nice suit and tie from the courthouse. My escort guard ordered me to “get naked” and surrender my personal effects to an inmate dressed in brown prison garb. As I stripped down, I handed the silent inmate the last vestiges of my social identity. He tossed them impatiently into an old cardboard