Free Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by William L. Simon, Kevin Mitnick, Steve Wozniak

juvenile authorities for three years and eight months, the maximum term I could be given.
    But I was hooked—locked up and still looking for ways to beat the system.

All Your Phone Lines Belong to Me
     
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    A fter sentencing, I was transferred once again to the facility in Norwalk, for classification. I took refuge in the library and then realized it had a very good collection of law books. They became my new focus.
    A number of the kids in custody there wanted to file appeals or find out what rights they had, and I began lending a hand by doing research for them. At least I was doing some little good for others, and I found satisfaction in that.
    The library’s collection turned out to include the procedural manuals governing the California Youth Authority.
How convenient
, I thought.
They’re going to let me find out how they’re supposed to be doing things, so I can look for flaws and loopholes
. I dived in.
    I was assigned to a counselor who talked to me a few times and then drew up the recommendation that I be sent to Preston, the juvenile equivalent of San Quentin, a place full of the most dangerous, most violent kids in California’s juvenile prison system. Why? I must’ve been one of the few “white-collar” criminals the juvenile system had ever handled.
    He even told me he picked the place partly because it was so far away—a seven- or eight-hour drive, meaning my mom and Gram would be able to visit only once in a while. Maybe he figured this middle-class kid had had all the opportunities that the tough guys from the inner city had never had, and instead of getting a college degree and asteady, well-paying job, I kept landing myself in trouble… and if he sent me to a dangerous, hard-core place, it might be enough to scare me into “going straight.” Or maybe he was just a malicious SOB, misusing his authority.
    But whaddaya know? In the CYA procedural manuals, I found a list of the factors that must be taken into consideration in deciding which facility a youth should be sent to. He should be close to his family. If he was a high school graduate or had received a GED, he should be at a facility that offered college programs—which Preston certainly did not. The facility should be chosen based on his propensity for violence and whether he was likely to try to escape. I had never even been in a fist fight, and had never attempted an escape. Underlying it all, according to the manual, the goal was rehabilitation. Great.
    I made copies of these pages.
    The grievance process also made for an interesting read: an inmate could ask for a series of hearings, ending with one at which an outside arbitrator came to listen to the facts and render an impartial, binding decision.
    I went through the stages of hearings. When the impartial arbitrator was brought in, members of the Youth Authority staff—
five
of them—presented their side of my case, complete with copied pages from their procedural manual to support their decision.
    A clever move, except they were using what I knew was an out-of-date copy of the manual, with provisions not nearly as favorable to me.
    When it came my turn to speak, I said, “Let me show you the
current
revision of the manual that these folks have not turned over to you.” And I made a fervent appeal that I wanted to rehabilitate myself.
    The arbitrator looked at the dates on the pages that the counselor had submitted, and looked at the dates on the pages from me.
    And he actually winked at me.
    He ordered them to send me to a facility with a college program. They sent me to Karl Holton, in Stockton, east of San Francisco. Still a very long way from home, but I felt I had won, and felt very proud of myself. Looking back, I’m reminded of the lyrics from that Tom Petty song: “You could stand me up at the gates of hell but I won’t back down.”
    Karl Holton turned out to be, for me, the Holiday Inn