11

At that point in the world, things were in disarray. The country was in a panic over an economic crisis and in a tizzy over the closing of Guantanamo Bay. There was a heavy, precarious pressure weighing on the United States’ penal system. Too much money was going into sustaining the living prisoners, too much money was going into killing the death row prisoners. A new political regime was coming into power.

We heard about it first in the jails, which was uncommon. We got our newspapers a day old, a constant source of complaints for the men who were interested in sports. They couldn’t stand waiting an extra minute not knowing who had won the big game, the World Series, the Super bowl, or any other number of uninteresting exhibitions of so called skill that were exactly like the last.

But in this case, we heard before everyone else. They didn’t want to give the public a chance to panic, they said. This was strictly an experiment, but as long as it lasted longer than a month, it would ultimately save the government money. And then the plans went into effect.

The idea was this: instead of keeping criminals in individual cells, they were going to have us live communally. All security personnel would be let go and food would be administered through a slot in the door. It was essentially social Darwinism.

Those who survived their terms were sent back out into the world with a clean slate, running under the assumption that the daily struggle for their lives would give them a healthy respect for the law, or at least a paranoid fear that they would be sent back into the harshest environment they could imagine.

And so murderers would be mixed with rapists with con men and petty thieves. White collar meant nothing, status meant nothing; you couldn’t buy your way out of a worse sentence. Once you went in, you were essentially gone to the world until you came out—if you came out. Though they never revealed this information to the public, it wasn’t just that the security was downed, it wasn’t just that they didn’t enforce the rules: they encouraged belligerence.

More dead criminals meant fewer mouths to feed.