Citizen Outlaw by Charles Barber

Author:Charles Barber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

Citizen

The darker the night, the brighter the stars.

—FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Chapter 6

How to Escape Your Prison

“Doc” Whitmire, Lewisburg.

Courtesy of Richard Whitmire.

UPON READMISSION TO LEWISBURG ON AUGUST 14, 1995, OUTLAW, NOW twenty-seven years old, was assigned to A Block, which turned out to be the most notorious unit in the prison. A Block was like a strange dark castle: everything was made of stone and red brick, the hallways were narrow and mainly windowless, and the stairwells jutted out at odd angles. The block was comprised solely of single cells, an extremely unusual arrangement in the Bureau of Prisons. All inmates on the unit had serious criminal pasts, and most had life sentences. But strangely, Outlaw, initially at least, found A Block to be relatively peaceful. He found his block mates to be more secure in their personas than typical inmates, perhaps having less of a need to prove themselves. The inmates were much older than was typical too; in fact, Outlaw was the youngest among sixty men. The other oddity was that A Block was an open unit. Inmates could freely congregate in the common areas and keep their cells unlocked to receive visitors. Guards were supposed to make their rounds every fifteen minutes, but often they didn’t appear for an hour at a time. It was almost like living in a dorm—which, of course, Outlaw had never done.

In order to maintain his street cred, Outlaw resumed selling stamps. One day after an inmate hadn’t paid a five-hundred-dollar stamp debt, Outlaw stood at the bottom of a stairwell holding a shank, waiting for him. He heard the steps of the man as he descended the stairs. The inmate, nicknamed Shorty, was five foot five. The moment Shorty saw Outlaw he froze, and in the next instant Outlaw grabbed him in a headlock and plunged the shank into Shorty’s rear. Outlaw pushed the knife in and out: once, twice, three times. Shorty fell to the floor, and Outlaw ran up the stairs to his cell, where he washed the knife off and slipped it under his mattress. He was unconcerned about any repercussions. There was no way Shorty was going to report him after the maiming that he had just suffered.

Later, in the yard, an older inmate lashed out at Outlaw: “Why’d you have to stick it to Shorty?”

Outlaw yelled back, “I don’t care if the dude was a giant, a midget, an Indian, a black dude, a white dude, he owed me money! I wish he’d been the biggest dude in the prison. I have to show everybody what happens when you don’t pay!” Outlaw felt like he needed to keep up his smoldering, seething image at all costs.

But then, oddly, almost inexplicably, things began to change.

EIGHT MONTHS INTO his second admission to Lewisburg, Outlaw received a phone call from his daughter Marquetta, who was now ten years old. Outlaw had not seen her for four years, since he’d left Somers. She attended Catholic school in New Haven,

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