Behind the cold iron gates of Bryan Penitentiary, inmates struggle to make it through their sentences. Life is hard, and it makes one wonder what these young people could have done to deserve to be locked away.
“I moved out of English,” says junior Paul Facknitz, who wishes to remain anonymous.
Facknitz seems resigned to his fate. He doesn’t appear angry or resentful as he describes his living conditions: “It’s hard living in here. The air kind of stinks, kind of moldy. I don’t get out too often.”
Facknitz shows me a tattoo he got during his time in Bryan: “It’s a bird. It’s there to remind me of the day I fly away from here. Unless they put bars on the sky, too.”
I ask if the prisoners have tried to do anything about their treatment. “No, we’re all too scared at this point,” said Facknitz. “We can’t do anything like the Milner riots. We don’t have that kind of courage.”
Stepping through the gates of Bryan Penitentiary reminds me just how lucky I am to be a free man. Some of the prisoners sweating in the mid-day heat couldn’t be more than 19 or 20 years old. I wonder about their families, and how they deal with having a loved one locked away.
Jean-Paul “Eurotrash” Vadeboncoeur lives in the same conditions on the third level of cell block A. I wipe the sweat from my brow as I look around the bare walls of his cell. “It’s pretty rough, really hot. They don’t feed us very well,” he says.
I ask Vadeboncoeur to tell me what he’s seen and he just stares at the floor, as if to avoid the memories. “I’ve seen things no one should see,” he finally says. “The other day I saw someone shiv a first-year.”
Vadeboncoeur’s cellmate, John “Two Thumbs” Willis seems to be taking things even harder. “I’ve forgotten what it’s like on the outside,” he tells me.
Willis recounts with horror one of his first experiences on the inside, the inhumane method which the guards used to deal with overcrowding. “The guards handed out weapons to the prisoners, and then they made us fight. They said it was an exercise in ‘getting to know each other.'”
When I ask Willis how long he’s been in Bryan Penitentiary, he averts his eyes with the kind of shame that only life in the big house can instill in such a young man. “Only a few days,” he admits. “It’s horrible, I saw someone shiv a first-year.”
I’ll never forget what Paul “Anonymous” Facknitz told me as I concluded our interview. “What’s the worst thing I’ve done in here? I traded my roommate for a pack of cigarettes. Also, I shivved a first-year.