Dark Spell: Surviving the Sentence by Mara Leveritt

Author:Mara Leveritt [Leveritt, Mara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, True Crime, Murder, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781499175752
Google: PD6QoAEACAAJ
Amazon: B00KVHILPI
Publisher: Bird Call Press
Published: 2014-05-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter SIX

VARNER II

August 1, 1998 - October 7, 2005

Prisoners wanting to relocate are not given a lot of options. On September 11, 2001, Jason was back at Varner, working the morning shift in the staff ’s dining room, when Al Qaeda operatives hijacked four airplanes to attack the United States. “There was all these rumors about what was going to be happening with inmates,” Jason recalled. “A lot of guys had this fantasy that the state was going to give them this opportunity to get out of prison to fight. Others thought that the government was going to declare martial law and execute everybody to make space for prisoners of war. And some of the staff talked up the same rumors. It was a very weird time.”

Jason had returned to Varner, where Jessie already lived, just seven weeks before the terrorist attack. “It was not one of my better decisions,” he later reflected. “I should have stayed at Grimes. But when you’re in there, you want to get out so bad, you think you’ll do anything just for a change. What you’re seeking is release, but once you get to where you’ve been transferred, you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. It’s just another prison.’

The problem was that Varner never had been “just another prison.” It was huge to begin with, packed with young offenders, many violent—and now it was expanding. In response to the nation’s War on Drugs, the federal government had offered states unprecedented amounts of money to build ultra-high-security “supermax” prisons. The deal would cost the states little—at least, on the front end. Arkansas officials, like their counterparts in many other states, jumped at the chance for federal money. They opted to build their new Supermax Unit adjacent to the maximum-security one at Varner. Inmates did much of the construction. Jason was there to watch the isolation cell blocks go up.

When the Supermax Unit was complete, Damien and the other death row prisoners, who until then had been held at another unit under more moderate conditions, were now moved to the Supermax’s more severe isolation. Though the Supermax was a separate brick building, connected to Varner by a tightly barred corridor, the move meant that Jason, Jessie, and Damien were now living on the same prison compound, closer to each other than they’d been at any time since their arrests.

Existence of the Supermax changed conditions at Varner. The sudden availability of hundreds of adjacent isolation cells meant that Varner prisoners could be transferred into them for a wider array of infractions. “With the Supermax, everything got harsher,” Jason said. “More rules were put into effect, which meant there were more opportunities to get in trouble. The police were able to start enforcing all kinds of rules, including those regulating the length of inmates’ hair, how they shaved, and general grooming. When I first went to prison, it was hard to get put in the hole. Even when I got that disciplinary for having the twenty-five cents and the Motrin, I never spent a single day in the hole.

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