Money Rock by Pam Kelley

Author:Pam Kelley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620973288
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2018-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

13

THE CHRISTIAN INMATE

In July 1990, two months after Judge Potter pronounced his sentence, Belton arrived at the Atlanta penitentiary in leg shackles and handcuffs. Guards trained rifles on him as he exited the prison bus. A strip search followed, requiring him to squat and cough to ensure he wasn’t smuggling contraband. He was handed soap and bed linens and sent to a cell in the Big House, an imposing building that reminded him of a haunted mansion, “one of those old prisons with ghosts running around.” Built in 1902, the Big House was a sixty-foot-high granite fortress with a portico and belfry. Its exterior had changed little since completion. But its inmates and their crimes—that was a different story, a glimpse of twentieth-century America through the lens of incarceration.

Early prisoners included counterfeiters who’d tried to exploit flaws in the nation’s young banking system and men who’d violated the 1910 Mann Act, also known as the White Slave Traffic Act, which was supposed to combat forced prostitution.1 Socialist Eugene Debs, a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, did a stint in the prison for sedition after he urged resistance to the World War I military draft. Gangster Al Capone became a celebrity prisoner in 1932, managing to wrangle cigars, a typewriter, and a rug to decorate his cell.2 In the 1980s, the penitentiary’s population included hundreds of Cuban detainees. They’d sailed to the United States during the 1980 Mariel boatlift and were being held indefinitely because Fidel Castro had refused to take them back. In 1987, days after the U.S. Bureau of Prisons announced plans to deport them back to Cuba, they’d rioted, torching buildings and taking dozens of hostages during an eleven-day uprising, the longest prison riot in U.S. history.3

By the time Belton arrived, the prison had completed a multimillion-dollar facelift to repair damage from the riots. The Cubans were gone, many either released or deported, and the inmate population was evolving once again. By 1990, half of the penitentiary’s inmates were serving time for drug offenses.

Belton was happy to be there. Though locked in his cell at night, he enjoyed sunlight and fresh air during daily walks from building to building. This was a welcome change from his year in county jail, where outdoors had been the piece of sky visible only from a walled pen during recreation hour. He also appreciated access to washers and dryers, an improvement over the five-gallon laundry buckets he’d used in state prison. And Atlanta offered more educational opportunities. He enrolled in business law and Spanish.

The prison also provided a surprising new world of illicit activities. Inmates made poker game bets with quarters from their commissary accounts, and when gambling grew so rampant that the commissary ceased handing out quarters, the currency switched to postage stamps. Once the chow hall closed after dinner, resourceful prisoners used food smuggled from the kitchen to run in-cell food stands, heating irons to make grilled cheese sandwiches and boiling hot dogs in water heated with the live-wire ends of cords cut from appliances.

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