Free Uncaged by Frank Shamrock, Charles Fleming

lunch. There was no visitation, either. Maybe that’s why there was so much kiting and telephoning. It was the only way for anyone to communicate, and we all had too much time on our hands.
    It was a big facility, and the yard was huge. Everyone was in orange, and everyone was broken into groups. This was my first introduction into the racial self-segregation of prison life. In the youth system, I was aware of people being from different places. I was aware that I looked Mexican. It was no big deal. At Tracy, it was much more serious. There were three groups—white, black, and Latino. In that facility, the whites had most of the control. They were the most trusted, and they had the most access. But the blacks had all the power. Everyone was most afraid of them. If you weren’t black, you couldn’t walk through the black guys’ area. But if you weren’t Latino, you couldn’t walk through the Latino area, either. And if you were North Mexican, you couldn’t walk throughthe South Mexican area. When I first arrived, some old-timer took me aside and laid it out for me. He asked me what I was and who I ran with on the streets. I wasn’t sure what I was. He told me I was “other”—not black, not white, not Latino, but other.
    â€œOther” was for the leftovers. “Other” was for Indians, and Pacific Islanders, and Asians. This was the smallest group, maybe 10 percent of the population or less. That’s where you’d find the Japanese guy and the Hawaiian guy and the Samoan guy. And me. Mostly they don’t bother anyone because they don’t have any power, and no one bothers them because they’re no threat. But they’re also the most exposed because they have small numbers and no protection.
    It was tense, like all jails are tense. Everyone is scared. Everyone is angry. You have all these violent men, and everything has been taken away from them. They have nothing left. They have no power, and they’re scared. So they grab what they can and are ready to die for it. This is
my
piece of the yard, and you can’t be on it, holmes.
    I was at Tracy for only forty-five days. It felt like a long time. No one bothered me. No one assaulted me. I was pretty good at figuring out how to survive and be OK. I got some tips. I figured out who went where and what part of the yard to stay away from. I did the time and waited.
    At the end of my induction time I was sent to Corcoran. I was in real prison. I mean,
real
prison: Charles Manson was on the yard next to mine. I could do my time, and maybe make something out of it. In real prison, you could get a job. I got a job bending sheet metal. I got an apprenticeship, and I made eleven cents an hour. After a while I transferred out of that and got a job in the kitchen, where I made a little more money. I treated it seriously, like a real job. I had decided to be a provider for my family. I was making as much money as I could and making the best of a bad situation.
    I had realized by then that I was not going to be able to manipulate myself out of prison. I wasn’t going to be able to talk my wayout of doing the time. No one wanted to hear my story. I saw I was going to have to do my time and work the system the hard way. So I decided to play by the rules. I found out you could get an education in prison. I decided to start going to college. I had graduated from that continuation high school up the hill when I was seventeen. Now I had lots of time on my hands. I knew I was smart. I knew I could study and learn. So I learned sheet metal on the job, and I took psychology classes and history classes. I took business classes. I took all kinds of other classes. I figured that one day I was going to get out of jail and I was going to need a trade. I didn’t know how to do anything, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do anyway, so I studied everything they had.
    I also learned about being Native American. My