Another busy week, another week without a lot of links. I'm traveling next weekend, so it may be a couple weeks before we're back to normal. ----- 3 stars ----- 'This Place Is Crazy' / Esquire Joe said he was sentenced to two years. Attempted robbery in the second degree carries a minimum of three and a half years; the judge must’ve allowed him to plea to a lesser charge and given a “skid bid”—a short sentence. For most, that would mean time served in one of the state’s thirty medium-security facilities. But Attica is maximum-security, arguably New York’s toughest. Its notoriety mostly stems from a 1971 uprising that erupted over long-simmering complaints by prisoners of mistreatment. They took control of the prison, killing one CO and three prisoners in the process; five days into the standoff, under Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s orders, state police stormed the fortress, killing thirty-nine, including ten hostages. The whiff of distrust between COs, mostly white, and prisoners, mostly not, still lingers. “Why’d they send you here?” I asked. “Bro,” Dave cut in, “he’s a bugout.” Prisonspeak for someone with mental illness. “What’s your diagnosis?” I asked. “Schizoaffective disorder,” Joe said, a form of schizophrenia. He asked what I was in for. “Murder,” I replied. In 2001, when I was twenty-four and living in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, I’d shot a fellow drug dealer to defend my turf; six years into my sentence—twenty-eight-to-life—I was shanked six times by his friend in retaliation. Ambulanced to an outside hospital with a punctured lung, I didn’t snitch. In this upside-down kingdom, my backstory gave me cred. “Oh, man—you don’t look like a murderer,” Joe said as if this were the first time he noticed the hard cases who surrounded him. “Bugout” was the label Joe carried, just as “murderer” was mine. Here, where bugs were considered bottom-feeders, I wouldn’t want to switch places.
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Another busy week, another week without a lot of links. I'm traveling next weekend, so it may be a couple weeks before we're back to normal. ----- 3 stars ----- 'This Place Is Crazy' / Esquire Joe said he was sentenced to two years. Attempted robbery in the second degree carries a minimum of three and a half years; the judge must’ve allowed him to plea to a lesser charge and given a “skid bid”—a short sentence. For most, that would mean time served in one of the state’s thirty medium-security facilities. But Attica is maximum-security, arguably New York’s toughest. Its notoriety mostly stems from a 1971 uprising that erupted over long-simmering complaints by prisoners of mistreatment. They took control of the prison, killing one CO and three prisoners in the process; five days into the standoff, under Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s orders, state police stormed the fortress, killing thirty-nine, including ten hostages. The whiff of distrust between COs, mostly white, and prisoners, mostly not, still lingers. “Why’d they send you here?” I asked. “Bro,” Dave cut in, “he’s a bugout.” Prisonspeak for someone with mental illness. “What’s your diagnosis?” I asked. “Schizoaffective disorder,” Joe said, a form of schizophrenia. He asked what I was in for. “Murder,” I replied. In 2001, when I was twenty-four and living in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, I’d shot a fellow drug dealer to defend my turf; six years into my sentence—twenty-eight-to-life—I was shanked six times by his friend in retaliation. Ambulanced to an outside hospital with a punctured lung, I didn’t snitch. In this upside-down kingdom, my backstory gave me cred. “Oh, man—you don’t look like a murderer,” Joe said as if this were the first time he noticed the hard cases who surrounded him. “Bugout” was the label Joe carried, just as “murderer” was mine. Here, where bugs were considered bottom-feeders, I wouldn’t want to switch places.