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Essay: "The View from My Cell"

When they first dragged me off after duping 12 fools into putting a murder on me, it was to their sorriest prison, called “McAuschwitz” Oklahoma. The cage was solid steel, 5 x 7, for two men. The captives before me had gone berserk with the constant, daily harassment and torture, and burned down everything that would catch fire. Now it was worse than ever. The only thing that wouldn’t burn was the cages, and now we’re locked in them, 24/7. The only view is out the bars of the gate at the front. It shows us more bars, of the catwalk, three feet further away. Twenty feet away is a set of barred windows, broken glass glinting in the winter sun, and swinging with the freezing draft. Beyond them is a triangle of dirt “yard.” The only grass on it is in the narrowest, longest point of the wedge, where everyone goes to piss. This scummy prison has been here killing people and sending us into madness for 80 years, and the great state of Oklahoma has never put in any sanitary facilities. Sixty feet further, the view is blocked by a six-story building textured by peeling latex paint and rust-streaked bars. Left of that, the view is blocked by an 18 foot white wall. We can see one guntower, a patch of blue sky, and pigeons on the roofs or wheeling in the sky. Every hour or so, the kop in that tower gets off his fat ass, gets his rifle and walks 20 feet out of his cozy, plate-glass habitat along the wall and poses with his gun. It’s a scene out of the movie “Cool Hand Luke,” complete with the bug-eyed sunglasses and the crooked-toothed scowl. Each time, it’s like he’s telling us, “I could kill you, or just look at you; your choice!” The captives endured this until July, then went berserk again, in an event I call the “Candy Riot.” An account of this is on my site somewhere.

In prison, one of their most common and beloved harassments is to force us to abruptly move to a different cage somewhere else. The psychopaths who run prisons love to experiment with different designs. They always have varieties of dungeons, jails and isolation pods within their prisons. These sick minds quickly discovered that the most sadistic way to treat a man is to simply take away the view entirely. “Holes” have no windows. They have an armored food slot which is opened, a food log thrown in, then quickly slammed shut and locked. Modern civilized morality made them put a light in these places, but it too is used as a torture device. When it’s not on all the time and deliberately designed too bright for natural sleeping, it can be turned off for the blackest night in the middle of the day. When ethical people saw this total isolation torture was too common and used for mere malice with no purpose, they made the psychopaths put in a radio speaker. This also was used for off-hand torture. They turned it on full blast and pretended they could not hear our screams or wall-banging. We spend an hour throwing blobs of sodden toilet paper at it before managing to cover it enough to be bearable. Our window to the outside is often a bit dangerous to use.

Over 35 years, public outrage over what they could see of prisoner torture forced these cost-cutting maniacs to more than double the size of new cages, from 35 square feet to 78 for two men to share! In response to this hated requirement, they put in solid steel doors with tiny gawk-holes for the kop to count us through every two hours. Plus, they cut ventilation to almost zero. A single fart takes two minutes to clear. The slit window is sealed shut. Since fences are cheaper than walls, we can now see, through layers of glass, mesh, fence and rolls of razor wire, the kops parking lot and the farmland they are concreting over to build another prison just like this one.

During the Candy Riot, a friend and I were able to climb six stories of the “new” cellhouse and look over the city of McAlester. It was the same day that the coke-bottling plant burned down. Despite the gouts of black smoke among the streets, trees and cars, it was the best view I had from within prison for 36 years. When we held our faces against the bars, we could see far above the wall, with no intervening reminders of state oppression.

After nine years of standing in line, they decided to drag my thirty miles down the road to a “medium” prison. This is where you can actually walk around “outside” in an area the size of a Wal-Mart. It would have been better without the other 650 captives, but we could see forest in the distance, and tiny cars and trucks speeding down a two-lane road to Texas or Kansas. (Come to Oklahoma on vacation, leave on probation.)

Nice as this view was, with the perks of bird watching and glimpses or skunks, possums, coons and coyotes, it didn’t last. The kops took away the talk back TV college access. Worse, the kops were taught to chase dope for rapid promotions and bonuses. One kop, called “Race Horse” got me transferred back to McAuschwitz because I wouldn’t let him put a court case on me for 20 more years. During the Falklands War, I was buried on “The Rock” for 90 days. There was no view in that hole, but the shower was interesting. They’d have you naked, in manacles and shackles, inside a chain-link cage, which was locked while two of them watched you trying to shower. If you slip, go ahead and fall to the concrete, because if you grab the showerhead to stay upright, it will shock the hell out of you. Somehow they’d managed to electrify it. This always made them laugh.

A few years later, they dragged me North 90 miles, to Hominy Prison. It had a murderous view for “Dank.” He was standing on the second floor tier, leaning on the rail, watching the madness through the glass front as everyone else rioted over the food. At the same time, a guard or highway patrol was looking at him through his own glass, which magnified his view, and put crosshairs on it. This anonymous, vicious coward pulled his trigger, putting a 30 caliber slug in Dank’s chest. He was dead before we could get the pigs to let us bring his body close to the gate. Dank was the only fatality of the 1983 Hominy Riot. It cost us him, and them $45 million, for them to cheat us on the food and harass us for having the gall to complain about it.

Thanks to the destruction the state prisoncrats caused in Hominy, and the fact that I had rotted peacefully in their hell holes for 13 years, they sent me to a minimum, situated just below the walls of McAuschwitz.

The view there was magnificent. We could walk up and down rocky roads to dairy yards, pig farms, pecan groves and chicken barns. There was one big tree where, in the spring, several species of birds would gather in a thick hoard, all quacking, chirping, squawking and whistling musically with each other; a mate-seeking symphonic orchestra. The view got a lot better about a year later, when I left the place behind me, taking off overland to Dallas. I recount this 200 mile hike in my book, “Jailbreak!” available free on www.jamesbauhaus.org

It took me eleven years to uncover what I needed from their files by sneaking back weekends to ransack their legal warehouses. Soon as I came back to rub these facts in their faces, they cunningly stole my escape trial and re-buried me at McAuschwitz. I’ve been here ever since; enjoying the view while rubbing their corruption in their crooked, sleazy faces, waiting for something to break.