It was intended to make experiences like his far less likely. I n 2003, while John was still in elementary school, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, now usually known as PREA. John obeyed though still a fish, he had been down long enough to know that snitches suffer fates worse than rape. When David was finished, he told him to keep quiet. John would later estimate that it lasted seven minutes.
John tried to resist, but he was less than 140 pounds, and next to David’s bulk of more than 200 he stood little chance as this powerful man forced his way in, slowly and painfully and in silence, without a condom or lubricant. One night after the last count before bed, John says, his cellmate suddenly attacked him, pulling down both of their pants and wrestling him onto the bottom bunk. “I just kind of laughed it off,” he recalled.Īnd then it happened. John knew himself to be heterosexual he had lost his virginity to a girl the year before. He asked him if he would ever get involved sexually with a man. They talked about their families and the crimes that had gotten them locked up.īut then David said something that struck John as strange. He was in his early 20s, over six feet with a tuft on his chin and a thin mustache. His new cellmate, whom we’ll call David, had already served a little more than a year out of a minimum of eight for robbery. From the prison library he pulled volumes ranging from the poems of Langston Hughes (“They’re so simple, but they explain so much”) to thriller paperbacks by Dean Koontz and James Patterson. He settled into GED classes and shifts serving breakfast and lunch. John didn’t take these letters seriously he threw many of them away.
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“You need a white man to show you how to act.When the opportunity comes I want to sneak in your house and hit that.” Another letter said he had a “fan club.” John would get a lot of letters from other prisoners over the next few months, and while they were not always explicit, some certainly were. It was around this time that the letters started sliding under his cell door. His second cellmate was also a lifer, and friendly enough, but after a few days the man asked to be paired with another lifer, so John was moved again. John requested and received a new cell assignment. Something about him seemed a little off, and that night, John says he awoke and saw this man sitting at a desk, wide awake, and staring right at him. His first cellmate was an older man, black like John, who was serving a life sentence, and he didn’t say much. But he also noticed that he was one of the youngest prisoners on the block. Over the next few days, while bringing trays of food around the blocks for his new kitchen job, John would learn that he had been placed in one of the nicer units (another he saw “looked like a basement, with the lights busted out”).
Once inside, he could try grimacing to look tough, as he had in his early mugshots, though he couldn’t hide his skinny frame or his high-pitched voice. Standing in a line with several dozen other men, John stripped off his navy blue scrubs, squatted, and coughed to prove he wasn’t hiding anything. This story was produced in collaboration with The Atlantic.