Over these past months, I’ve published many of the portraits from A Muddled Brotherhood, my collection of the inmates and guards who remain part of my memory of prison. I thought I would return this week to the introduction I originally wrote for the collection.
A MUDDLED BROTHERHOOD
On certain days, prison feels like afterlife, other days, like a typical work day, and most days a bad dream enduring the slow torture of meaningless, menial tasks. I lived among one hundred other inmates, more wilderness than community. There is nothing more solitary than living among the exiled.
In a crowded courtroom, the presiding Judge—a round Black man with a kind face—asked us to stand. Something deliberative about him, like an uncle you could confide in after failing an exam. Though momentarily reassured, my legs trembled as a group of investors stood behind me, silently pleading for the maximum sentence.
Before sentencing, the Judge delivered a long narrative that was difficult to hear, the acoustics compromised by a high ceiling and a dizzying scent from the rich paneled wood that covered the walls. I could only grasp certain phrases and the last few sentences before he announced his decision. He told me I had “already sentenced myself to a prison without bars,” something about a “prison of my own making,” and that I was not connected to humanity, “disconnected to what makes life meaningful and worthwhile.”
Then, after a short pause, he sentenced me to eighty-five months in prison for two counts of wire fraud. He said I had a challenging life ahead. I was seventy-six years old. With eighty-five months of incarceration looming, my life was over. I left the courtroom in disgrace, leaving my family, company, and investors in financial ruin, the disconnect from humanity complete.
I was assigned to a minimum-security prison camp in a remote area north of Boston, FMC Devens, a former military base where the Spanish Flu began. My pre-prison research advised me to make friends slowly, live under the radar and become a ghost to the staff.
When I arrived at Devens, a muddled brotherhood was waiting for me. It was a diverse group of one hundred and twenty inmates, comprised of Hispanic drug dealers, Black gang members, violent offenders, insurance fraudsters, internet scammers, income tax cheats, sex offenders and white-collar offenders like me. Those with more serious violations had earned their transfers to the camps through good behavior at higher security prisons, and most were serving the last few years of their sentences.
I was the oldest inmate at the camp, having turned seventy-six a few months before my arrival. At first, it was more wilderness than community. But over time, we coalesced into a community, a true melting pot if there ever was one.
The camp facility comprised a long, low-lying industrial building resembling a giant storage shed with a crumbling recreation area adjacent, where our entire lives played out. The camp building was initially constructed to house seventy-two inmates, but by the time I arrived, it housed one hundred and twenty-eight, all cramped into tiny cubicles in an open-floor environment of approximately ten thousand square feet.
Decay was pervasive there. Mold in the showers, broken urinals and sinks, frayed sheets, stained blankets, dented lockers, a foul smell in the bathrooms and a mossy film everywhere. The dorm for inmates was a maze of dark corridors and cubicles that was more barracks than dorm. From a bird’s eye view, it resembled an experiment for mice.
The pods were eight by seven feet, six feet high and had no privacy. Each cubicle housed two inmates with a bunk bed, two low-lying lockers, two plastic chairs and a narrow drawer that fit under the bunks. Every surface was hard: cinder block walls, plastic chairs, steel beds and concrete floors.
Over time, after the period of adjustment is over and a routine is established, each inmate comes to terms with the frightening prospect that this is home.
The cubicles morph into neighborhoods, tribes form and inmates move next to theirs. It’s inevitable, I guess. I made up the names based on my New York City roots: Northern Boulevard (as in Queens, NY; the only corridor of mixed identities), Spanish Harlem (the Hispanic drug dealers from Puerto Rico), Harlem (the young Black gang members), Jamaica (several island guys), the Middle East (the Muslim community), Israel (including the Russian Jews), and Park Avenue, where the white guys congregated.
Corridors weave between the sixty-four cubicles and there’s a continual passing in the hallways where each inmate is confronted continually by the repassing. Some inmates looked straight ahead without a word, others employed a slight nod of acknowledgement and some a “what’s up,” without a look, which became the most popular form of passing. I never really figured it out. It was always uncomfortable.
Prison camps are working camps. Everyone’s assigned a job. There were no great options: orderly, maintenance, the kitchen, landscaping, the commissary, the power house and the military base. I chose the kitchen.
I learned to do the washing, the loading, and even operating the long stainless steel washing machine, a frightening apparatus that had to be reassembled every morning and rumored to have taken limbs from prior inmates. By the time I was released, I was the Number One dishwasher.
Guys used to kid me. “DiMenna, you can always get a job now when you’re out.”
Such a distinction.
Actually, I was proud of it. I even got to like it. Something about the tactile there. Can’t explain it. Sometimes, I think it saved me.
Despite the conditions, I embraced a life of contemplation, renewal, and earnest self-reflection. I considered myself to be a person of conscience. Reconciling this with the reality of my crimes and exiled in prison would provide an existential challenge.
I concluded that men can always dream of a new start and redemption but can never extinguish the history of their malfeasance. Overcoming disgrace is a fool’s errand. I could only accept it and try and move forward.
I decided that this was my new community and that these men would form a new circle of life for me and I would embrace them.
Since my early release in 2020, due to Covid-19, I’ve had time to reflect on those who were most impactful, whether they were friends, inmates I worked with or those I didn’t interact with but were present for me in some fashion and were a significant part of my experience.
Below are profiles of those inmates who continue to haunt me as I try, like all of them, to reassemble my life after prison.
Up Next on White Collar Journal:
Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform
Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections
Sunday (Prison Camp): More Stories from prison
If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.
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