A Career in Crime: AKA The Convict Codes Vol.11

Crime Fiction by David Hagerty

As I studied the other convicts in that tight, airless classroom, the pre-release teacher passed around a resumé template mimeographed in inky, old-school purple.

“For now, just fill in the blanks,” she said. “We’ll type it up later to make it pretty.”

Funny word to use in prison, pretty, but it fit her. She wore a flower-print skirt that fell to her shoe tops and a matching turtleneck that covered everything but her hands, clothes worthy of a grandma even though she showed no gray hair or wrinkled skin. A typical middle-class, middle-aged, middle-school mom. Still, I caught many of my classmates ogling her as if she’d traipsed through the cellblock in a bikini. Half the guys took her class just to get a sniff of her body wash and a brush of her soft skin. Some had been locked down since women wore bell bottoms and tube tops. The only females they’d seen were cut outs from magazines. Didn’t matter. The teacher circulated through that colorless, airless, windowless classroom with the ease of a missionary among lepers even though she came within arm’s reach of half a dozen murderers and rapists. Maybe she was oblivious to the attention—or had experienced enough not to take it in earnest.

Didn’t matter. I penciled in my pen name, Cyrano, then erased it after deciding to play it straight by using my birth name instead of my prison one. Not to say I’d been institutionalized, but it’d been a minute since anyone called me anything else but.

The next line said objective. Another term I hadn’t encountered for a while. Most inmates treat prison stays like combat missions, their only objective being to survive with a minimum of collateral damage. I assumed by objective she meant a legit job. After debating between a half dozen trades, none of which you’d find listed by the Better Business Bureau (entrepreneur, inventor, fabricator), I left that line blank, unsure how to put my calling into words.

“Aye, Cyrano,” whispered Ozark. Compared to me, he looked like a hulk of flesh and tattoos. Compared to her, he smelled like an oil change and acted almost as slippery. Still, he was a player in the prison politics, while my vote hardly counted, so I gave him my full attention.

“How you spell mechanic?”

I told him, then offered to write the rest—for a price.

Unlike most convicts, I took the class not for information or stimulation but to build my business. My side hustle was as a penman: writing letters, grievances, and legal briefs for convicts who couldn’t. Classes were my best grooming grounds. I’d attended recovery even though I’m not an addict, took violence prevention even though I’m docile, joined vic/perp reconciliation even though my crimes were victimless—unless you counted the federal government.

I’d even sat in on Bible Study a few times despite possessing no faith in a higher power who’d answer our prayers. If there were one, wouldn’t He have rescued more guys from lifelong incarceration? Plus, the cross wearers usually wanted me to explain verses that made no sense in a modern context, especially a prison. Sure, the prohibitions on killing and stealing still applied, but how could you keep the sabbath holy when the institution treated every day the same, or avoid taking the Lord’s name in vain when every minute you heard guys using Jesus Christ and God Damn and Allah Akbar as curses? What’s more, everybody trafficked in lies since too much honesty could get you an earnest punch in the face. Prison teaches you nothing if not the impossibility of purity.

The pre-release class was one of the few I hadn’t tried before—mostly because I’d only just become eligible. A few months remained before I tasted freedom again, yet my mind focused on the here and now. No point projecting too far ahead when your everyday reality is so stark. Plus, even on the outs I didn’t plan to apply for any jobs that required a resumé. In my trade, the less evidence left behind the better.

Which was why that handout stumped me. In all the classes I took, I tried to act as if—aping deep reflection on what landed me in custody (again) and what I could do differently next time—only I couldn’t fake this as easily. What could I put as a work history when I’d never held a legal job? Since I turned fifteen, I’d created false identities for underage drinkers, migrant workers, even a few tech geeks who needed an extended Visa, but that was as close as I came to citizenship.

If I included my rap sheet, I could fill up many pages. Last I saw, it ran over a hundred charges—mostly for forgery. That represented the truest statement of my work history. Was there a legal version of faking documents I could riff off? Likely not.

Of course, I could lie, as I did for my true trade. On the outs, I could imitate an ID so not even the DMV could detect it, forge a birth certificate that would fool any government bureaucrat, invent a social security card that would convince even the IRS, create a new identity for people better than witness protection. But a legit employer might check that history, and what would you call that work? Image consultant, relocation specialist, makeover maven . .

To play it straight, I had to stifle my inmate impulse for invention. I titled my job as “Document maker” and penciled a few bullets about my skills with word processors. Then I added a line explaining my specialty in rebranding. As she strolled by, the teacher peered over my shoulder, giving me a whiff of her body wash, which enticed me too, as if a fresh breeze had infiltrated the prison.

“Sounds a bit . . . suspect,” she said.

She put a hand on one hip, as if that would help her think. In that moment, I could picture her as a younger woman, the curve of her silhouette drawing the attention of all the boys like it did now in class.

“List the work you’ve done in prison,” she said to us all. “Just disguise your employer. Use their initials—PIA—or a company on the outside who contracted for your work.”

There she was thinking more like a convict, concealing her true intents with innocent ones. Except my prison job was harder to hide than for guys who toiled in the laundry or the kitchen. I taught convicts their letters and numbers in the library. Not a profession you encounter much on the outs. True, I could write that I worked in education, but how would that translate to legit schools? I decided to ask another teacher.

Later that day, I hit up my boss at the tutoring program for some advice. His security badge read Mr. Rexall, but we all called him Rex, the king of the school. He was the most civil guy I knew inside, speaking in the calm, refined tone of a professor and addressing us all as “gentlemen” (he said because that’s how he wanted us to act). He was one of the few citizens we ever met on the inside. Instead of a uniform and an official sneer, he wore a sport coat and these tinted glasses that colored his view of everything. Plus, he smelled of some organic soaps and deodorants. I classified him as a deluded liberal, but he may have chosen a naive view to rationalize spending his days among sociopaths.

I interrogated him during a quiet time in our classroom, which was really a wing of the library, complete with sagging shelves of dusty hardbacks, decaying paperbacks, and a donated card catalogue. Still, by prison standards it was a think tank.

“How could I get a job like yours?” I asked.

He flipped open a textbook with the casual anxiety of people who think they’re about to be robbed. “You want my job?”

“When I get out.”

“After you’re free, you want to come back to prison?”

“Wherever. Just in teaching.”

He took off his tinted glasses as though he needed to see the words more clearly. “Schools usually run background checks. Yours . . . might hurt your chances.”

“I don’t have any violence on my sheet,” I said. “No sex or drugs or thefts.”

“That’ll help,” said the teacher, but he sounded unconvinced.

“What about teaching adults?”

He closed the textbook as if it failed to offer any answers. “Possibly. They have programs like this at the public libraries.”

“They pay good?”

“Mostly volunteer, I think.”

We compromised at listing my work as tutor and him as my supervisor.

That’s the problem with prison jobs: they exclude industries that translate to the outs. The Prison Industry Authority doesn’t want to compete with for-profits, so they make road signs, inmate clothes, Braille books for blind people. That old stereotype about convicts stamping out license plates isn’t too far from true. Sure, a few guys learn electrical or plumbing, which citizens get paid to do, but I’d never cottoned to dirty jobs. In my middle age, I couldn’t convert to squirming through the dust and decay of other people’s crawl spaces to install an electrical wire or copper pipe.

Thus far, my resumé contained two true lines, but that left a lot of “white space,” as the pre-release teacher termed it. Then I recalled her saying we should fill in the gaps with self-employment. In prison, I’d always hustled to survive. With no one outside to pay for my commissary, I had to barter my literacy skills for shampoo and D.O. and toothpaste. Did that count as a job? To me it did, so I added scribe and ghost writer to my bonafides.

For education, the teacher suggested we put down any classes we took in the joint that didn’t betray a criminal history. “If you earned a GED, put that,” she said.

Years back, I’d completed a college degree through correspondence courses—not from any place anybody would have heard of, but that paper had my name imprinted on it next to the phrase “bachelor of arts.” Took me only two years, half of most free men. The irony was, I’d never put in much effort at learning until I landed in lock up. I could’ve graduated high school like my peers—I just didn’t see the point. I was too busy forging fake IDs for my classmates. But once I found myself with time on my hands, I discovered a talent for reading and writing. It’s mostly just creative rearranging of the facts—like my profession.

Except I lost that diploma in a shakedown when the guards threw out everything but my bed frame and mattress. They even pulled pictures off the wall as if guys would be hiding an escape hatch behind them, Shawshank style. They claimed they were looking for contraband, but usually they only uncovered a few batches of pruno—jailhouse wine brewed in a plastic bag. I knew those raids were just another method of punishment, taking away what little we possessed.

Still, my higher education was the purest part of my life history, the one element with no criminal taint, so I put it down straight.

This paper exercise reminded me how little I’d accomplished—in my forties and I couldn’t even fill up a page with a legit life. What had my time on earth amounted to but a bunch of failed schemes? I stared at the blank lines on the page as if they represented my obituary. At the end of it all, what would I leave behind but a few spare rolls of toilet tissue and a stockpile of ramen noodles that my cellie would inherit?

The last lines asked for three references. I already had my supervisor, but that left two blanks. Who else could testify for me? Not other convicts. Half of them couldn’t complete a sentence without some profanity or conspiracy. Plus, their prison addresses and lack of phone numbers would give me away. Not anybody I’d worked for on the outs, either. None of them put up even a legal storefront.

Truth was, I had more associates inside than out. My family had all renounced me, including my brother, who’d gone straight decades ago, my ex-wife, who’d divorced me during one of my stints inside, and my teen son, who’d quit writing me years back. Even my mother, who’d been saved from a bad boyfriend by forged documents, had grown intolerant of my criminal habits. Not that I blamed her. I’d spent more time in custody than on the streets, and anybody would tire of standing in line to fund my commissary. Still, I needed some other citizen to testify for me.

The pre-release teacher suggested a prison staffer, presuming we could find somebody who’d say nice things about us. Guard Gray, as we called him, had always been the most hospitable to me. Compared to a lot of turnkeys, who enjoyed conflict more than the convicts, he was downright polite, probably because he preferred leaving work with all his teeth intact to putting us all in our place. His nickname derived from his appearance—the ashy color of his hair and skin, a side-effect from taking too many double shifts that exposed him to as little sun as us inmates—but it was equally accurate to his personality, which never veered too dark or light.

I stopped him that night after third feeding to test his tolerance.

“What would you say about me if somebody asked?”

“I can’t testify for you.”

“Not even at a parole hearing?”

“Not even.”

He hooked his thumbs through his work belt, which lacked a firearm but offered plenty of other means to subdue an incorrigible inmate.

“Anyway, I didn’t mean it like that,” I said. “I mean after I get out.”

“What, like a character reference?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“What’do’ya want me to say: he always locked down on time?”

“How about ‘He follows directions well and takes initiative without prompting.’ “

Gray snorted with amusement. “Even for you, that’s creative.”

“Aren’t I cooperative?”

“On the surface.”

“Compared to most inmates?”

“That’s a low bar to clear.”

So I told him straight up: that this was for an employment class, that I needed a reference for my resumé, and that I didn’t know any free citizens after spending four years locked down.

“Would you out me if somebody called you?” I asked.

“I never heard you talk about living an honest life before.”

“No point profiling the civilian life on the inside.”

“You really think you could tolerate a legit job?”

“Why not?”

“As soon as they sniff any fresh air, most inmates go straight back to their old ways. They forget all the resolutions and reforms they pledged in here. Get seduced by the sins of the world.”

“You don’t believe in rehabilitation?”

Gray pushed against his heavy belt, which must have pinched his soft middle. I’d seen him reading some diet books and assumed he wanted to lose weight, but no guard would admit such weakness to an inmate. “I once heard a shrink say it takes a traumatic event to set you on a new course. You have anything like that happen to you lately?”

On the inside, I’d witnessed plenty of fights between inmates and acts of brutality by the guards. Shanks, batons, and pepper spray were everyday. Outside, I saw guys being tuned up, women being turned out. I even saw a guy get shot—twice.

“Nah, nothing,” I said.

“Then you’ll probably swim downstream with the rest of the fish: repeating catch and release. Last I checked, two-thirds of you guys recidivate within three years. How many times you been back?”

“Too many to count.”

“What’s so different this time?”

“Maybe I’ve aged out of crime.”

“Pretty late in life for a growth spurt.”

To that, I had no come back.

That night, in my cell, I debated with myself why I was taking this assignment so seriously. As Guard Gray said, I’d never given much thought to going straight until recently. I’d committed myself to a career in crime before I was old enough to get a legal job, and I’d rarely veered from that trade since.

A foot above me, my cellie coughed, rolled, and farted. Not far off, somebody was slapping a metal desktop in time with a heavy backbeat. Then a toilet flushed with the suction power of an industrial vacuum. You grow inured to these sounds and smells, to all the indignities of incarceration, when you can’t escape them, like a train that rumbles past your apartment every hour. Yet that night the realities of it eroded my tolerance, like paper that grows brittle with age.

Lately, I’d been feeling the effects of too many years on a concrete bunk: the stiff joints and sore back. What would happen when I grew old? Would I age out of the system? Maybe get compassionate release after I became too decrepit or senile to forge a signature anymore? Or would I finally catch a case that put me away for life—a third strike or an enhancement for being an accessory to some scheme ripping off elderly widows—like my old associate, Sylvester, who’d played that video game until a DA decided not to give him another life. I could end up one of those guys who dies in the prison infirmary and gets buried out behind the institution without even a headstone to mark his legacy.

Lately, I’d daydreamed about retiring to somewhere with sunny skies, broad mountain ranges, and sparse desert plants—a place as distant from the prison as I could find. I pictured myself sitting under an awning, sipping tequila sunrises, and reading pulp fiction. How would that ever happen if I never even paid into social security much less a retirement plan? Plus, the government confiscated everything I’d acquired every time I got popped, and my savings mostly went to lawyers. I owned only a few out-of-fashion clothes that my landlord had stashed in a storage locker. Maybe he’d give me a recommendation?

No. That was too pessimistic. I had to stop viewing myself as others did.

Instead, I filled in the blank lines for references with the names of two ex-convicts who’d managed to stay out more than a couple months. They weren’t model citizens, but at least they were free. I could write their testimonials and warn them to expect a call. Still, that left a lot of white space.

Then I recalled the pre-release teacher talking about guys who’d never held a job inside or out. “A skills-based resumé can disguise a thin work history,” she’d said.

What talents did I possess? Skilled liar. Expert forger. Master manipulator. Not many transferrable to the legit work world.

No. Again, I was thinking too literally. Anybody who could survive several decades of incarceration without the muscles or affiliations to defend himself must have some talents. I started sketching out a new resumé including all the identities I’d assumed to get by:

teacher

tutor

ghost writer

replicator

penman

Not a bad set of qualifications for someone seeking a new way of living. Now I just needed to apply those skills to my own life as I’d done for so many others before.

That left one line unfilled: objective. Again, I debated half a dozen professions, none of which encapsulated my vision. Not teacher, not tutor, not graphic designer. What could I be then?

Finally, it came to me: citizen.

---

Bio: David Hagerty has published more than 50 short stories online and in print, plus four novels in a political mystery series. He often writes about crime and incarceration since he spent seven years in a jail (teaching, not doing time). Read more of his work at: https://davidhagerty.net.

Cover photo by pexels/Liudmyla Shalimova

Read more Criminal Fiction on The Yard: Crime Blog

Follow Us On:

Looking for a book to read? Try our Bookstore, or True Crime Library

Support The Yard through Patreon

Find yourself a new cell phone through the affiliate button below. Maybe there’s a deal.

Buy a Sabre door stop alarm. These things are LOUD. They will wake you up if someone tries to enter a home. Get for travel. Place in front of a hotel door or a door at an Airbnb. get pricing and details through the affiliate button below. Read a Review