Keeplock: A Novel of Crime Read Free

matter. The skills that enable a prisoner to survive in a Max A prison don’t apply to the world.
    I was the only prisoner to be released on that May 4th. That was because, technically, I wasn’t given parole. The board had turned me down three times. I think they would have liked to keep me inside for the entire fifteen years of my sentence, but in New York prisoners who behave themselves must be granted conditional release after serving two thirds of their time. (This, of course, does not apply to inmates serving life sentences. What, after all, is two thirds of a life?)
    A short, fat screw named Pierre Braque came to get me about ten o’clock in the morning. Having nothing to pack, I’d been dressed and ready since five-thirty, listening to the radio for any news of New York City, which was where I was going. The Cortlandt Correctional Facility is located in the town of Danville, twenty miles from the Canadian border. It was forty-one degrees in Danville and fifty-five in Manhattan.
    Braque and two other C.O.’s led me through the tunnels that connect H Block to Administration. Technically, I was entitled to protection until I left the Institution, and that’s what they were going to give me. We passed other prisoners in the tunnel and a few of them greeted me, offering good luck. I tried to smile back, but I kept my eyes on their hands.
    I didn’t relax until I was in the office of Deputy Warden Jack Camille. His greeting, “Hello, scumbag,” twisted my fear into anger—that barely suppressed rage felt, justifiably or not, by every prisoner. There are only two industries in the town of Danville: lumber and prison. Jobs in Cortlandt are handed down from father to son, and most of the C.O.’s are related. Their own code of honor requires them to humiliate the prisoners at every turn. The prisoners’ code of honor requires them to hate the C.O.’s. It all works wonderfully until the day you come out.
    Camille had a special reason for hating me. Five years before, when he was an ordinary C.O. with a special reputation for provoking prisoners into responses that justified violence, I’d made him look bad. Not that it was my fault.
    Prisoners coming into the mess hall at Cortlandt divide into two serving lines. One line is entirely black and the other is white and Puerto Rican. It was like that when I got to Cortlandt and it hadn’t changed in ten years.
    For some reason the white serving line on this particular evening was much longer than the black line. The evening meal is voluntary and many cons choose to stay out in the yard. Apparently, more blacks had taken this option than whites and Puerto Ricans. It could easily have been the other way, with the black line running out the door while the white line was empty, and I wasn’t paying much attention until Camille, who had mess hall duty, said, “Get over in the other line. Even it up.”
    At first, I didn’t realize that he was talking to me. Then he called me by name and number, his voice dripping sarcasm. “Frangello, 83A4255, get your ass over to the other line.”
    I’d never had a beef with Camille, though I was aware of his rep. Why did he choose me? I didn’t know and never would. But I had to react. To accept his disrespect, to step into that black line, would have meant an extreme loss of face. Blacks, whites, and Ricans, with rare exceptions, don’t mix in prison. If there had been a third serving line in the dining area, either the whites or the Puerto Ricans would have been on it.
    “You mean me, boss?” I asked.
    He walked up close to me. His square red face was twisted with rage. “I told you to get in the other fucking line. What’s the matter, you too good to eat with the niggers?”
    There are no blacks living in the town of Danville. No Puerto Ricans, either. Eighty percent of the population is made up of French Canadians who wandered south a hundred years ago. The younger screws are afraid of the inmates, most of whom come from