No Human Contact #

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About. #

Another great read about life of two (former) Aryan Brotherhood (prison gang) members Thomas Silverstein and Clayton Fountain both given multiple life sentences in U.S. penitentiary system.

Interesting moments from book (spoiler alert). #

Silverstein soon was mouthing the same mantra that he heard from AB gang members, such as Dallas Scott. Most whites don’t stand up for each other, he wrote later. If black guys jump a white guy, the other whites will turn to the side and think, “Boy I’m glad it’s not me.” It’s sickening. They don’t realize that a day or two later, they are going to get beaten up. It’s not that I’m on any kind of racist trip or anything. It’s just how it is in prison. If you’re white, you either bend over and get fucked or you align yourself with stand-up guys willing to fight.

Beef with Raymond Lee “Cadillac” Smith:

I’M KILLING YOUR ASS, SILVERSTEIN.” It was the morning of May 11, 1982, and Silverstein had been looking at a nude photo of a former girlfriend when he’d realized someone was threatening him outside his cell bars in the Control Unit. He looked up, but didn’t recognize the Black inmate speaking to him. “You hear me, cracker? I’m killing your punk ass,” Raymond Lee “Cadillac” Smith continued.

“I don’t even know you. I don’t want any trouble,” Silverstein replied. “You killed two of my homies, you punk-ass cracker.” Silverstein was confused.

…Silverstein flew by Fountain and tackled Cadillac, knocking him off his feet. The Black man’s head smacked hard against the concrete, stunning him. “I grabbed the shank he was holding, with my bare right hand, as he struggled to stand,” Silverstein said. “He tried to rip it from my fingers, but I held on and managed to pull the blade away from him. I slammed it into his chest before pulling it out and then jabbing it again and again and again as quickly as I could. He tried to block each thrust with his right arm while trying to punch me in the face with his left fist. One of his blows hit my jaw, causing me to back up and gulp for air before I lunged back at him. I heard him scream, ‘What did I do?’ and I thought, ‘You fuckin’ serious? Suddenly he’s the victim?’”

Fountain’s literacy:

Davis (~ Ron Davis, energetic twenty-nine-year-old reporter, Springfield News-Leader newspaper) began drafting preinterview questions to mail Fountain, in case the BOP turned down his face-to-face request. He typed up seventy-six pages of queries, leaving space on each page for answers. Days later, a thick parcel arrived. Davis rushed into Ziegler’s office with it. Fountain had written such detailed answers that he’d run out of space on each page and had attached twenty-five extra ones. Davis and Ziegler marveled at Fountain’s impeccable penmanship and noted that the convict had not erased or scratched through any of his handwritten answers. At the end of several sentences, he’d added a smiley face or some other image. “He was using emoticons before most of us knew what they were,” Davis recalled. There was not one misspelling in the thousands of words he’d written.

THOMAS SILVERSTEIN on doing life:

Most of us lifers are down for so long and have so much time to kill that we actually fool around and discover our niche in life, often in ways we never even dreamt possible on the streets.

THOMAS SILVERSTEIN on no human contact:

Kollerer knew about Silverstein from reading The Hot House and she asked him to write a two-page article about his no-human-contact status. She printed his reply with one of his drawings. A physical beating causes pain but ends, he wrote. Total solitary is more of a slow constant peeling of the skin, stripping of the flesh, the nerve-wracking sound of water dripping from a leaky faucet in the still of the night while you’re trying to sleep. Drip, drip, drip, the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years constantly drip away with no end or relief in sight . . . You hear yourself screaming . . . wanting to badly, with all your heart and soul, to leap from your seat, not only to stop ’em but slap the holy shit out of ‘em for driving you this insane, where it’s caused you to resort to violence after you could not bear it anymore . . .

Torture:

The woman had been four-pointed, with each of her limbs chained to a hook for twenty-three days. Prison officials said it was for her own good because she was suicidal. “There was no psychiatric treatment, so they’d simply chained her down and only freed one of her hands three times a day to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” Strick remembered. Strick wrote an article for the Xpress. She began contacting local women’s groups and got their members to write protest letters to the Florida governor. Her campaign forced the bureau to transfer the woman to a medical center. “The public had no idea what was happening in these prisons,” Strick said later. “They didn’t want to know.”

Ramzi Ahmed Yousef:

Yousef drove a truck filled with explosives into the North Tower’s underground parking garage on February 26, 1993. He thought the blast would send the tower crashing into the South Tower, killing as many as 250,000 people. It didn’t, but 6 people were killed and 1,042 were injured, including 88 firefighters and 35 police officers.

First conversation in 22 years:

“Who’s there?” a prisoner in the cell next to him hollered.

“Who are you?” Silverstein shouted back. He’d not had a conversation with another inmate in more than twenty years.

“Ramzi Ahmed Yousef.”

After twenty-two years of not being able to speak to another inmate, I was excited to have the opportunity to talk to anyone, Silverstein wrote. We had to shout to each other and it was difficult to hear, but it was still nice to be able to hear your own voice in conversation, and a friendly voice replying.

David Shelby:

Another ADX prisoner, David Shelby, had schizophrenia and had become convinced in 1995 that God wanted him to free Charles Manson by sending threatening letters to President Bill Clinton. He arrived at the ADX in 2000, and after spending nine years in solitary confinement, he tried to commit suicide by slashing his arms, legs, and stomach. He’d cut off the top of his left pinkie finger and eaten it mixed into a bowl of ramen. “After he ate his finger, they were taking him out of his cell and one of the officers asked him what his finger tasted like,” Aro said. “That perfectly illustrates how fucking insensitive these people were at the ADX. It was a level of inhumanity that was unfathomable to me.”

ADX’s D Unit cellhouse:

On April 3, 2008—after spending thirty-four months isolated on Range 13—Silverstein was transferred into the ADX’s D Unit cellhouse. At first, he was the only prisoner on a floor, but he eventually was moved to a regular tier with other prisoners. “A prison orderly was supposed to clean empty cells between occupants, but clearly hadn’t bothered. As soon as they locked me in, I assessed the sweat I’d need to scrub my new cell. We were not allowed to have detergent, nor much needed disinfectant, only water from the sink and a towel. I inspected the toilet/sink combination first, since it’s usually the nastiest in need of cleaning. Then the shower, where some guys masturbate, blow their nose, spit, piss, but rarely clean, so the stainless steel is covered in months and years of fossilized slime. The toilet bowl was covered with some stranger’s feces that I would have to remove with bare hands, without soap to wash afterward to kill the germs and stink off of them. The shit was literally caked on and petrified. It not only reeked, the sight made me want to vomit while wondering how many dirty, diseased prisoners with AIDs, Hep C, had sat here before me. The former occupant had thrown dried turds through the bars onto the cell’s outer steel door. I couldn’t reach the steel door to clean it off, so the stink lingered.”