Read Online Uncaged by Frank Shamrock, Charles Fleming - Free Book Online

Lassen County Jail in Susanville for three or four months. That was real jail. It was pretty hard-core—all men locked up because they were criminals. After I had been processed, when they keep you apart from the rest of the population, I was put into a two-man cell with a guy who was accused of beating his wife to death with a telephone.
    He had been a very successful local businessman whose marriage had fallen apart. He was very high-strung, and the breakup was upsetting to him. He started taking Prozac, which instantlyfixed him, except when he’d go into these rages. His wife had moved out and found another place about ten houses away. One night they were arguing on the phone. He said, “Can you hold on a minute?” He walked out his front door, walked down the street to her house, took the phone out of her hand, and beat her to death with it.
    â€œIt was the Prozac,” he said. “I’m innocent.” He was the nicest guy, but he was a murderer. And he was going to sleep two feet away from me, every night.
    I was working on my plea bargain. I was trying to figure out which things I could admit to, and how far they’d reduce my sentence. My cellie was also waiting to go to trial. The whole process moved very slowly and took a couple of months, so we got a chance to know each other.
    His trial date came up before mine; he had been there for almost a year. He was sentenced to twenty-six years to life. It would have been twenty-five years to life, but he was carrying a concealed weapon at the time his crime was committed, and so that added a mandatory year. He was in the habit of carrying around large sums of money and had gotten a gun and a concealed-weapon permit, but the law didn’t care about those details.
    When he came back from the sentencing he looked sort of crushed but also sort of outraged. He kept saying, “It’s not fair! I had a permit for that gun!” He didn’t seem that upset about the twenty-five to life for first-degree murder, but the extra year really pissed him off. I kept thinking, “Dude! You killed your wife.” Besides, what was the difference between twenty-five to life and twenty-six to life? Either way, he was out of there. Being a convicted and sentenced murderer meant he had to go to a different part of Lassen County Jail. So I lost my roommate.
    Once I had my plea bargain session, it was time for me to move on, too. I wasn’t that worried about being sent to the California Youth Authority. How bad could it be? Like juvie, but bigger? Likejuvie, but for longer? It didn’t seem that scary. A bunch of screw-up kids, like me, who’d gotten busted and put away for a while.
    Besides, my wife had started visiting me again in jail. She brought me my son. We rekindled our relationship. She was going to keep visiting me. We were going to be together. The future looked kind of bright.
    The next stop for me was the CYA induction center in Sacramento. I didn’t expect to be there long; I’d been told I was going to be one of the first one hundred prisoners to be sent to the new “Chad” high-security facility near Stockton. (This became one of the state’s most notoriously violent institutions. At the time it was described as a facility for California’s “worst of the worst” juvenile offenders. Its real name was N. A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility.)
    I knew right away that I was in trouble. I’d had this romantic idea about CYA, that it was just like the adult prisons I’d seen in the movies. I imagined tiers of cells, with everyone quietly doing his time. I imagined something orderly and quiet.
    This was hell. This was
Lord of the Flies.
This was thousands of kids who were disconnected from life, who had no connection to anything. They were seriously screwed up—tattooed, like lifelong gangsters, at twelve. I felt completely unsafe.
    I was a good-sized guy by then. I had a fair amount