Untying the Knot: John Mark Byers and the West Memphis Three by Greg Day

Author:Greg Day [Day, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Chuck617, Kickass.to
ISBN: 9781475911701
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2012-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

Hoedown

The EARU at Brickeys lists the prison operations as “field crops, education, jail operations, leash dog program, and substance abuse.” Its annual report states that the prison harvests soybean, rice, cotton, and other “cash crops.” The report doesn’t mention another “crop” that is harvested: Johnson grass. This tenacious weed can be found in all but four American states and has virtually no agricultural use. Growing up to eight feet tall, it is a choking, unsightly weed and is extremely difficult to eradicate; the preferred method is to simply rip it out by its roots. This makes for a perfect prison industry: a useless and labor-intensive task, designed to break—and sometimes kill—any inmate who has the misfortune of performing this task during the warmer months. At Brickeys, this labor is the mainstay of the “hoe squads,” gangs of inmates who hack at the roots with a hoe—not a homeowner’s garden hoe, but a long, heavy, industrial tool with a steel head mounted to a thick hardwood handle—and rake it back into piles, where it ends up rooting itself for future squads to remove. It is physically exhausting work, exacerbated by the counting of the number of hoe strikes an inmate makes into the hard soil. Poor performance can lead to solitary confinement, disciplinary write-ups, and worst of all, loss of good time credit. Excellent performance can lead to death by heat stroke. If during an inmate’s diagnostic time at Pine Bluff, he is deemed fit for duty on the hoe squad, he can expect to be out in the fields on his first full day at Brickeys. This was not the case for Mark Byers; he had no work boots issued to him and had to wait for them before he could do any field work. Sadly, within two weeks he had his boots, and at first light on June 7, 1999, he joined the squad.

There are actually two variations of the hoe squad at Brickeys. One is called a “field utility unit,” and the timetable it follows is simple: fifty minutes at the hoe, ten minutes for rest and water, and pack it in after four hours in the field. The second type of squad is for inmates who have been acclimated to the heat by previous time on a field utility squad and who can presumably work longer with fewer breaks. These men work for four hours straight and then take thirty minutes for lunch—the ubiquitous prison-issue baloney sandwich and an apple, or some variant. They are put back to work until 3:00 p.m. and are then marched back to their barracks.

Mark was on a field utility squad. During the squad’s ten-minute water breaks, small cups hanging from a long chain were emptied one at a time by the first group of cons. After an inmate finished his cup of water, he would go to the back of the line till he came around for another cup. When the ten minutes were up, whatever water he had gotten was all he was going to get, and he was put back to work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.