A New Line To The Outside

Crime Fiction by David Hagerty

Prisons evolve as slow as alligators and are about equally pliable.

Some dudes I knew had spent decades locked up at San Felipe State, and in all that time they hadn’t seen the paint color change. We marked time on calendars, not digital clocks. The library still relied on a card catalogue rather than a computer database. The pay phones were still hardwired. And not even the turnkeys could bring in cells or smart watches.

So when the guards started passing out computer tablets like trays at the mess hall, a lot of us old heads got suspicious. Some of the senior convicts didn’t even know what email was. The ones who’d been locked up before the Internet started couldn’t comprehend how they could type out an address with just an @ symbol and have it land in the right mailbox. They’d adapted to passing kites down the tier hand to hand, where you knew which breeze had carried them.

“What I’m gonna do with this?” asked one of the old heads, who held the tablet by one corner as if it were somebody else’s used condom.

“Text,” said the guards.

Which explained nothing to the lifers and three strikers. Typical. But the youngsters took to those tablets like rats to traps. You’d see a green glow from their cells after lights out as if they bunked with space aliens, hear their texts swooshing out as if they were whistling into outer space.

Beyond upsetting the natural order of things, I worried about what this headway meant for my side hustle. Every inmate needs two professions. The prison gives you a job, which pays 40 cents an hour and usually involves some filthy, manual labor—like laundry or plumbing. It never leads to prosperity, but it pays for a few necessities at the commissary and takes time off your sentence. Most guys, though, have a side hustle to help them get by. They’re traders or dealers or tattoo artists—anything that’s officially unallowed but necessary to a barter economy.

My job was tutor, but my side hustle was penman. For guys who couldn’t, I wrote letters, legal briefs, grievances to guards. Anything in ink on paper. Which is how I got my prison name: Cyrano.

And scribing kept me busy. The average inmate can barely read a comic book or write a shit list. Most never even attended high school much less graduated. Not that they’re dumb. Some are geniuses at deception. But only a few had learned their letters and numbers in the library’s literacy program, where I worked my day job, and where I recruited my best clients.

This new tech threatened my free enterprise. Nobody used textbook English in texts—it was all abbreviations and code words: LOL and IMHO, SMH and IKR. Plus, if you were to pull some term out of a proper dictionary, the tablet would spell check it for you, even finish the word you meant to write or prompt you with the word that ought to come next. In a couple months, I could be as outmoded as single-shot pistols. I’d become one of those indigent inmates, reliant on the charity of the institution for my weekly roll of toilet paper and tin of tooth powder.

So like a lot of the old heads, I didn’t welcome this new line to the outside. Instead, I set myself to study the problem on the down-low, trusting that the answer would betray itself.

Meantimes, I helped out guys who’d still hire me. As expected, the new tech restrained the demand for my services, but a few of the old heads asked me to hammer out their words on the tablets.

Memphis Mike was a Southern brother who’d grown up under Jim Crow and barely got to attend school. Even though he mistrusted every white man, my literacy made me valuable to him. He’d never learned to type and got tired of hunting and pecking like a hungry bird. So when he asked how much I’d charge to craft a text, I bid high.

“A soup,” I said.

“For one line? I could get a fat blunt for that.”

“Every company’s got a minimum order.”

True, you could buy ramen for spare change on the outs, but they cost two dollars at the commissary, so it seemed a fair price to me. Ever since the prison outlawed cigarettes, those noodles were the basic unit of currency inside, and they could be traded for almost anything—shampoo, soda, even sex.

MM bitched about the cost for a couple minutes, asserting his alpha status. He stood a head taller and a half foot wider than me, which in the prison hierarchy should have made him my master. Except I wasn’t about to split up ramen packages into halves or thirds, which would be as valuable as a fraction of a dollar bill.

Once MM kneeled to my price, we set to work on his message. For privacy, we sat at the little desk in his cell so he could see what I wrote. Normally, Black and white convicts wouldn’t get that intimate unless it was involuntary. Intermixing the races unleashed a lot of set tripping, but my trade often brought me into close contact with all color of characters, and an unaligned prisoner like me didn’t benefit from allegiance to any one gang. Like most annoyances of incarceration, I ignored my discomfort and focused on his words:

Tell Teresa send me a fresh pic of buds and hair in a hot mess.

As he dictated, I felt another prickle of unease at our proximity. All over his grey walls hung snaps of topless girls and headless crotches, telling me the man had been locked down too long. That close up, I could smell the liniment oil he used like aftershave. Still, once we finished I suggested he add the word “her” before buds. I knew what he meant, but would she get the insinuation?

MM liked it as was and snatched the tablet away from me to hit send.

Once we got the OK reply, I walked off with a shrimp soup. Maybe this new freedom of information would set me up for more easy work. Instead of waiting hours for guys to compose a love letter to women they might never touch in the flesh, I could condense seduction to a lewd proposition.

***

Not an hour later, as I was losing that soup in a game of pinochle, four guards led away MM in chains. A few of the other guys shouted down encouragement like “stay strong” and “fight the power,” but I was more preoccupied by how he’d run afoul of the law so soon after our meeting. True, it didn’t take much for a man to land in the hole—a couple wrong words to a guard, a beef that got out of hand—except I hadn’t heard any ruckus on the tier, and I was sitting not a hundred paces from his cell. In that old stone fortress, sounds ricocheted like bullets, and the only thing I’d heard was somebody banging on the desktop to a heavy backbeat from a radio. Plus, I’d developed an instinct inside for when things got tense, and my riot radar hadn’t tripped on any change in the atmosphere.

I checked the gossip wire, but none of the other crows had felt a disturbance either.

“Why you think they rolled up MM?” I asked Toker, who stank like smoke from inhaling a pack a day despite a prison prohibition on all tobacco.

“They need a reason up in here?”

For MM, they did. He had a supply line running in and out of the prison for all brand of contraband: clothes, smokes, magazines—whatever a man wanted but couldn’t order through the commissary. The guards looked the other way so long as it wasn’t weapons or drugs, and I’d always assumed that he cut them in on the profits.

So why the sudden crackdown? Especially so soon after a liberation? Rather than address this head on, I decided to pursue it side long. I asked one of the guards about the tablets, acting grateful. Really, I wanted an explanation for the abrupt about-face, allowing us such unchecked contact with the outs when for decades they tried to cut it off.

“To free up the phone lines,” said Guard Gray, as we called him. With OT, he spent almost as much time locked down as the inmates and had the pallor to prove it. His hair and skin were equally ashy. Unlike a lot of badges, who enjoyed conflict even more than the convicts, Gray only wanted to go home to his family each night with all his teeth intact. So he kept his usual bland expression, staring at me as if the answer was obvious.

Except his use of the word “free” set off my internal alarms. No guard wanted to give us more freedom. If it weren’t for state mandates, they’d confine us to our cells all day every day. They liked that guys had to wait in line for 90 minutes to make a 15-minute phone call and work for two hours to earn the funds for a postage stamp. Both kept us occupied.

I could have capitulated there. The convict code trains you not to intrude in another man’s business. Old heads are always schooling the youngsters about ear hustling and doing their own time. Except MM had given me a conspiratorial look as he passed. Not that I expected him to snitch me off. You don’t last long as a fence if you turn in your clients. Only everybody knew my trade, and plenty of guys had seen me transacting with MM before his descent into the dungeon. All it took was one enterprising informant to connect me to his crimes and add to my time.

I asked Revere to ask MM what tripped him. Revere worked in the kitchen but delivered meals the guys who couldn’t collect them themselves: to the infirmary, the chapel, and the hole. That made him the messenger to all the damned and departed—his side hustle. It cost me two soups—twice what I’d made for the work—but if it kept me out of a solitary cell, I’d count it a fair deal.

At third feeding, Revere replied: “that blurd.”

I expected more to the message, but those few words were as much as MM would utter. I pride myself on my vocabulary, keeping up on the latest slang so I can transcribe any communication, but that term was foreign, like some cipher. Except if MM meant to encode the message, shouldn’t he have given me the key to interpret it?

It sent me searching all my sources for a translation.

First, I looked up the word in the prison’s one dictionary, but the closest I found was blur. The bitch of it is, nobody ever created a compendium of prison slang. If they did, it would fill up volumes. Inmates are always inventing new terminology to deceive the guards.

Then I asked a couple of my associates, who acted as ignorant as I felt. They shrugged it off as some “brother talk.”

Out of desperation, I quizzed the teacher who oversaw my tutoring, a light-skinned Black man who didn’t play in the prison politics.

“Blurd?” he said, sounding surprised. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Radio,” I lied.

He snorted and said, “Not a term I’d associate with in here.”

“What’s it mean?”

“It’s a blend of two words: Black nerd.”

Which explained the text, but not the subtext. Teacher was right: nobody like that occupied a cell. If some dark-skinned brother were to get popped for a white-collar crime, he’d probably go to a club fed to do his time, not an old-school institution like this. True, he might reside on some other tier, run with another set, hide in his cell during yard time, but I’d still have heard about a foreigner like that.

Which left the staff. The guards we saw walking the floors, but none fit that aka. The technicians hid inside booths, behind mirrored glass, interacting with us only through scratchy speakers. Still, you could glimpse them in the mirrored windows when the light hit them just right or through the mail slots when you were passing up forms. Word spread fast about the ones who were new or gullible, and no insight had drifted my way. Beyond the tiers, the prison employed a whole gang of repairmen and administrators and secretaries who we rarely saw—except it had to be someone with inmate contact to fit MM for a chainmail suit.

That’s when it came to me: since that message had highlighted MM, I should follow its string to escape this maze. I used my tablet to write a note to my ex-, who’d blocked her phone number so my calls couldn’t harass her. After a day’s delay, I filed a grievance, said the network had dropped my connection.

I got a reply in a bureaucrat’s red ink. “All messages have been delivered as addressed. Check the phone number.”

Whoever wrote that clearly didn’t know me. I had many flaws, but forgetting a number wasn’t one of them. As a youngster, I learned the criminal trade as a runner for the numbers game. I’d take bets for that unofficial lottery, and my bosses forbid me from writing them down, so I had to memorize everything. The painful consequence of forgetting a wager taught me all manner of tricks for recollection.

So I fired off another message to a dead number—a tow company that got busted dragging cars to a chop shop for conversion into second-hand parts—and filed another grievance. This time it bred a more hospitable reply: “Come see me.”

The signature said Alfonse Derrico, an unfamiliar name but one that rang true to that alias. I showed the note to Guard Gray and requested an escort to whatever office he occupied.

“Why you want to see The Wizard?” Gray asked.

I explained the dropped calls while noting Gray’s own aka for Alfonse—further proof that I’d reached the right number. Gray cuffed my hands loosely at the front and led me down a long corridor toward the infirmary. Only we bypassed that sterile room, which stank of disinfectant, and passed out a squeaky slider, into a wing housing secretaries who clacked away on keyboards. Compared to our confines, with their grey walls and skinny windows, this space looked supercharged, with bright, white paint and flickering fluorescents that hurt my unadapted eyes.

Finally, we turned into an office that looked like a home electronics store—one with sound-proofed walls and chill temperatures that could keep meat fresh. No windows adorned that space, only an octopus of wires connecting stacks of computers, telling me we stood inside the brains of the institution.

Alfonse sat smack dead center of this control room, looking every part the blurd, with a cashmere hoodie and a pair of designer gym shoes I’d bet cost more than I earned in a year as a tutor. His gold-rimmed glasses and weak build fit the stereotype. Only his bronze skin and natural curls veered from it. I pegged him as an outcast from the tech world, one with the skills but not the connections needed to land a job with stock options. Either that or he was slumming in the civil service until he finished his degree. He looked barely old enough to work legally, let alone mastermind a prison.

Still, he greeted me with more courtesy than I ever received from a badge and offered me a rolling chair with a padded seat—another luxury denied to the downtrodden. He even shook my hand, despite my restraints.

“So, Cyrano,” he said. “I hear you’re a pen for hire.”

“I trade favors,” I said, maintaining the pretense that there was no underground economy in the prison.

“And I see from your rap sheet that you’ve got some technical skills.”

“A man’s got to feed his family,” I said, which is a jailhouse cliché for every manner of criminal activity.

“Then why can’t you get a message to go through?”

“You’re The Wizard,” I said, to see how he’d react to his nickname. He didn’t.

Instead, Alfonse rolled himself over to a wall of computer screens, banged on a keyboard faster than a stride piano player, and pulled up a long string of nonsense characters.

“There’s an error message,” he said.

“Not on my end.”

He summoned up some other data set and speed read it. “Looks like that phone number’s not in service right now.”

“My people give it to me the day you handed out those tablets.”

“And you’re sure it works….”

“Did on the pay phone.”

He stared more closely at that text as though searching for some hidden meaning. “I don’t see that you tripped any of our sensors, so it must be a problem on the receiving end.”

I assume he meant sensors with an s and not a c, although all our snail mail passed through censors of the old sort. “My people wouldn’t cut me off,” I said to distract him.

He pushed back to the center of the room to face me. “I’m sure it wasn’t us.”

“So how’d I know if you flagged my message?”

“We’d tell you,” he said, and smiled secretly.

However, in one line of code on his computer screen I noticed a pattern of highlighted words—every third. Which told me what I really wanted to know.

***

Back in my cell, I reviewed MM’s message using my new sleuthing skills. By underlining every third word, I got the true subtext:

Have Teresa send me a fresh pic of buds and hair in a hot mess.

Send fresh buds in mess. Clever. He’d disguised his true intents with lustful ones, which would have fooled most censors, but not a computer algorithm.

MM was moving into the hash business, and not the kind made out of potatoes. I knew he imported all manner of contraband, but I didn’t know it included reefer, which would upset the balance of power inside even more than those tablets. It’d also upset the deputies when guys blunted their time with pot. No wonder they led him off in waist chains.

What happened to him wasn’t my worry. If he wanted to carry weight like that, he could take the pressure once it fell on him.

What concerned me was this new mode of surveillance. I knew the prison wouldn’t give us unfettered access to the outside, not after years of denying us every kind of contact, but I never guessed they’d deploy technology to analyze each word we wrote. Instead of having somebody listening in on our phone calls and reading our mail, they were scanning our messages like luggage at the airport. Plus, they were recording and saving every line for eternity. In case any secret message slipped past the censors, the evidence would be lurking in some database—like the DNA samples that sit in storage rooms for decades, waiting to pin guys for sex crimes or murders.

The guards, who acted like such Luddites, were getting smarter. They realized that the new generation of criminals so loved technology they’d incriminate themselves on it, like the fools who posted videos online of their assaults and break-ins. The convicts too young to remember Edward Snowden didn’t understand how the g-men operate nowadays. They used our cell phones to track us, our credit cards to catch us, and our social media to convict us. Which meant that every line we committed to electrons could be used against us.

My associates needed to know this before they incriminated themselves like MM, so I sent a message the old-school way, mouth-to-mouth, and let it spread like a contagion to every corner of the prison. Pretty soon the epidemic of texting subsided and even the youngsters returned to pencil and paper, which saved my business. But it left me wondering.

Did this mean we’d all be doing life, one stretch at a time? Most guys didn’t last three months on the outs before they got violated by their PO and brought back to custody. This new surveillance meant we’d never even reach the prison gates without reoffending. We’d be re-upped like guys in the military, always in uniform and always on papers.

If technology could keep us in chains, did that put the rest of the world in a lockdown state, as mistrustful and overreaching as our prison?

Disclaimer: Despite the subject matter, no Artificial Intelligence or technology more powerful than a word processor was used in the creation of this tale.

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Bio: David Hagerty is the author of the Duncan Cochrane mystery series, which chronicles crime and dirty politics in his hometown of Chicago. Real events inspired all four novels, including the murder of a politician’s daughter six weeks before election day (They Tell Me You Are Wicked), a series of sniper killings in the city’s most notorious housing project (They Tell Me You Are Crooked), the Tylenol poisonings (They Tell Me You Are Brutal), and the false convictions of ten men on Illinois’ death row (They Tell Me You Are Cunning). He has also published more than 50 short stories online and in print. Read more of his work at his website HERE.

He has published his story ‘Heiress” with The Yard: Crime Blog

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