directions but I endured their vulgar words patiently. I believed they were condemned jailbirds so they had every right to scream and yell over the hell that was the prison and their lives.
In the meantime, I asked the officer for my medication, because my nose started to run and I was sneezing terribly. Around 5 p.m., the nurse brought cold medicine and I took them, but because of body chills I could not sleep, and instead I ached all over.
When I got in the room, I checked the clothes again. I was so surprised and wondered again why in the world they gave so many clothes at one time. The room had a dresser and a desk, so I stuck them in the dresser. Immediately I noticed that the modern prison facility was entertaining us for the usual selling purposes. After all, we were expensive goods so they ought to take good care of us.
C-Dorm
After our ten days of living at the segregation A-Dorm, they gave us each one’s dorm assignment in an auction procedure. I was sent to the C-Dorm.
When I got in the C-Dorm with my government issues, I saw a young black inmate who had been my next-cell neighbor at the RDC so I recognized him immediately. I was going to say hello but he ignored me. When I was at RDC, I gave some commissary items to him and treated him as a young man. I felt strange but I did not make any remark to him, and then followed the clerk who introduced my new room.
As I walked in the dorm, everybody looked and stared at me like wolves. I ignored their eyes and then carried my stuff in my new home, the prison room. I was kind of scared at first by people’s moods and the way they were staring at me. It gave me a different feeling than I had in jail and at RDC, probably because I noticed that these prisoners were really people abandoned by society.
CIC Dorm Structures
The CIC warehouse was a two-story building and had six dorms: A, B, C, D, E. and F. Two dorms were adjoining each other so that they looked like three large dorms from a distance. A-Dorm was for the kitchen workers and the segregation facilities, and B-Dorm was for the institution workers and idles. The C and D-Dorms were for idles, and E and F were for the prison workers, school-goers and college attendants.
It was well structured so that it appeared to be a pretty and a good prison dorm to show off to outsiders. Were it not for the heavy wire fence, I could not tell it was a prison; otherwise the way it looked in my eyes was a military training quarters or dormitories.
Each dorm had been divided into two sections from the entrance. In the middle of the dorm the control station was located, but each side was separated by the thick Plexiglas windows right to left, so the officers could monitor inmates’ activities plainly. Each side took in 100 inmates so each dorm practically had on average 200 inmates, and the CIC warehouse could be stocked with over 1,200 units of expensive merchandise.
As I looked around inside the dorm, something struck my eyes — the structure of the dorm itself. It was just like the Star of David or Jewish flag or the police badge. It was hexagon-shaped. It meant to say we were protected by the Star of David or were prisoners of Jews. I quickly thought that the architect must have been a Jew. It was my impression when I looked around the inside of the dorm.
Anyway, to me it was a very destructive shape for a prison and it was a disturbing realization, but when I asked one young inmate, he did not even recognize the shape of the dorm, although the structural diagram was posted on the walls for reference during fire emergency. When I pointed out the dorm diagram, others then began to study the dorm structure on the emergency fire posts.
The washrooms and showers were just on the corner on each side of the angles. The layout of the prison inside was very neat and comfortable for bad guys. It told of the commercial wholesale house structure of the prison system of America.
The middle of the dorm was a dayroom, and in the dayroom there were three picnic tables and one pool table, and then in the corner, just behind the control station, the TV room was situated. And splendidly one big ice maker machine stood at the left side from the entrance so it was very convenient for inmates especially during the summer season. The DOC knew these inmates were long-term tenants so they wanted to facilitate things nicely to welcome them again. Anyway, I could not shake off my impressions at the shape of the prison.
Room Features
Each room was 7 feet by 9 feet and had a steel door so it was unlike most cell configurations, and there was one steel bunk spring bed, so it felt like a bed outside prison. It seemed the state paid tons of money to give bad boys a good sleep every time. Each room had one desk with bookshelf on the top, one fiberglass mirror on the wall, and two chairs and one dresser, so the room looked crowded but gave a full sense of a rich capitalistic American prison.
Surprisingly, in the room, every place was covered with pasted pictures of nude women. I felt like I was looking at pages of Penthouse amid scenes and pictures of Las Vegas. It told about how these young inmates were hungry for girls. On the other hand, my question was why they had to register at the DOC if they wanted girls that much. They should have realized when they registered with the DOC that they’d lose their rights and girls.
New Roommate Rich Swanson
I was sent to room 4T-1C-Dorm. When I got in the room, I immediately met my new roommate: white, about fifty, with tattoos all over the body and a significant big swastika tattoo on his back announcing he was one of the Aryan members. He had a long beard and mustache, so he noticeably had the look of a typical or traditional inmate portrayed in institutional full-body-pose images. From my first impression, he was ugly and dangerous, and he also gave me an impression of a member of KKK. It scared me at first look and it plainly told of who he was before coming to the DOC.
He said hello and introduced himself. His name was Rich Swanson. He was medium built, 5 feet 6 inches and around 160 pounds. He then left me alone. I felt immediate danger within a few minutes of meeting him in the room. I put my stuff away but I could not sit and keep alone in the room so I ventured out to the dayroom. I just felt nervous.
As I suspected, my roommate Swanson was charged with murder, had worked as a taxi driver on the street, and was imposed a sixty-year sentence. He had served twenty years at the state penitentiary in Michigan City and recently met the parole board member, after which they cut his time to fifty because he had behaved well during the course of imprisonment. When he got credits from the parole board, his class dropped to level 3 so he was transferred to CIC.
He looked like a gangster, but I was not sure yet. He said he was forty-seven but to me he looked over fifty, and his body appearance gave me a feeling he was an old-timer. As I believed, his mentality was limited and his brain function must been restricted by something. His movement was slow, like that of a snail, so I easily recognized him as a big timer.
When I got out to the dayroom, there were almost thirty inmates out in the dayroom and playing card games, pool games and chess, but the rest of my dorm mates were staying inside their rooms and watching TV or reading books.
Once I settled a little bit, people then began to knock on my door and introduced themselves, some to satisfy their curiosity. Some of them said they recognized me from the news in the newspaper and TV, but it seemed I was not the same man they were talking about. I did not want to disappoint them so I did not protest their words.
Interestingly, they knew my profession by my appearance and my name, and especially from my skin color, and also knew my nationality from my broken English. I did not deny my profession and told them I was from Korea.
Inmates’ Common Ideolog
The very interesting fact I discovered was like that at the RDC.
