Voices from Solitary: A Sentence Worse Than Death
by Voices from Solitary
William Blake has been in solitary confinement for 27 years. When he was 23 years old and in
county court on a drug charge, Blake murdered one deputy and wounded
another in a failed escape attempt. He was sentenced to 77 years to
life.
This essay earned Blake an Honorable Mention in the Yale Law Journal’s Prison Law Writing Contest, chosen from more than 1,500 entries. When
we originally published it, in March of 2013, it went viral
worldwide--garnering over 200,000 hits on Solitary Watch alone, and
being picked up by numerous other sites and translated into at least
five languages. The author began receiving numerous letters from all
over the world, sometimes dozens a week.
Last
week, we learned that Blake, now 50, had been moved from Elmira, where
he has been held for many years, to another prison within the New York
State system. He remains in solitary confinement ("Administrative
Segregation") in another "Special Housing Unit." It is unlikely that his
correspondence will follow him.
Reading
and writing are what Billy Blake after nearly three decades in the box.
He may be reached at William Blake #87-A-5771, Great Meadow
Correctional Facility, 11739 State Route 22, PO Box 51, Comstock, New
York 12821-0051.
To
help us provide the gift of correspondence to thousands of other people
in solitary confinement, please consider making a year-end donation to
our Lifelines to Solitary project: https://donatenow.
--Jean Casella and James Ridgeway
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“You
deserve an eternity in hell,” Onondaga County Supreme Court judge Kevin
Mulroy told me from his bench as I stood before him for sentencing on
July 10, 1987. Apparently he had the idea that God was not the only
one qualified to make such judgment calls.
Judge
Mulroy wanted to “pump six buck’s worth of electricity into [my] body,”
he also said, though I suggest that it wouldn’t have taken six cent’s
worth to get me good and dead. He must have wanted to reduce me and The
Chair to a pile of ashes. My “friend” Governor Mario Cuomo wouldn’t
allow him to do that, though, the judge went on, bemoaning New York
State’s lack of a death statute due to the then-Governor’s repeated
vetoes of death penalty bills that had been approved by the state
legislature. Governor Cuomo’s publicly expressed dudgeon over being
called a friend of mine by Judge Mulroy was understandable, given the
crimes that I had just been convicted of committing. I didn’t care much
for him either, truth be told. He built too many new prisons in my
opinion, and cut academic and vocational programs in the prisons already
standing.
I
know that Judge Mulroy was not nearly alone in wanting to see me
executed for the crime I committed when I shot two Onondaga County
sheriff’s deputies inside the Town of Dewitt courtroom during a failed
escape attempt, killing one and critically wounding the other. There
were many people in the Syracuse area who shared his sentiments, to be
sure. I read the hateful letters to the editor printed in the local
newspapers; I could even feel the anger of the people when I’d go to
court, so palpable was it. Even by the standards of my own belief
system, such as it was back then, I deserved to die for what I had done.
I took the life of a man without just cause, committing an act so
monumentally wrong that I could not have argued that it was unfair had I
been required to pay with my own life.
What
nobody knew or suspected back then, not even I, on that very day I
would begin suffering a punishment that I am convinced beyond all doubt
is far worse than any death sentence could possibly have been. On July
10, 2012, I finished my 25th consecutive year in solitary confinement,
where at the time of this writing I remain. Though it is true that I’ve
never died and so don’t know exactly what the experience would entail,
for the life of me I cannot fathom how dying any death could be harder
or more terrible than living through all that I have been forced to
endure for the last quarter-century.
Prisoners
call it The Box. Prison authorities have euphemistically dubbed it the
Special Housing Unit, or SHU (pronounced “shoe”) for short. In society
it is known as solitary confinement. It is 23-hour a day lockdown in a
cell smaller than some closets I’ve seen, with one hour allotted to
“recreation” consisting of placement in a concrete enclosed yard by
oneself or, in some prisons, a cage made of steel bars. There is nothing
in a SHU yard but air: no TV, no balls to bounce, no games to play, no
other inmates, nothing. There is very little allowed in a SHU cell,
also. Three sets of plain white underwear, one pair of green pants, one
green short-sleeved button-up shirt, one green sweatshirt, ten books or
magazines total, twenty pictures of the people you love, writing
supplies, a bar of soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, one deodorant stick
but no shampoo, and that’s about it. No clothes of your own, only
prison-made. No food from commissary or packages, only three
unappetizing meals a day handed to you through a narrow slot in your
cell door. No phone calls, no TV, no luxury items at all. You get a set
of cheap headphones to use, and you can pick between the two or three
(depending on which prison you’re in) jacks in the cell wall to plug
into. You can listen to a TV station in one jack, and use your
imagination while trying to figure out what is going on when the music
indicates drama but the dialogue doesn’t suffice to tell you anything.
Or you can listen to some music, but you’re out of luck if you’re a
rock-n-roll fan and find only rap is playing.
Your
options in what to do to occupy your time in SHU are scant, but there
will be boredom aplenty. You probably think that you understand boredom,
know its feel, but really you don’t. What you call boredom would seem a
whirlwind of activity to me, choices so many that I’d likely be
befuddled in trying to pick one over all the others. You could turn on a
TV and watch a movie or some other show; I haven’t seen a TV since the
1980s. You could go for a walk in the neighborhood; I can’t walk more
than a few feet in any direction before I run into a concrete wall or
steel bars. You could pick up your phone and call a friend; I don’t know
if I’d be able to remember how to make a collect call or even if the
process is still the same, so many years it’s been since I’ve used a
telephone. Play with your dog or cat and experience their love, or watch
your fish in their aquarium; the only creatures I see daily are the
mice and cockroaches that infest the unit, and they’re not very lovable
and nothing much to look at. There is a pretty good list of options
available to you, if you think about it, many things that you could do
even when you believe you are so bored. You take them for granted
because they are there all the time, but if it were all taken away you’d
find yourself missing even the things that right now seem so small and
insignificant. Even the smallest stuff can become as large as life when
you have had nearly nothing for far too long.
I
haven’t been outside in one of the SHU yards in this prison for about
four years now. I haven’t seen a tree or blade of grass in all that
time, and wouldn’t see these things were I to go to the yard. In Elmira
Correctional Facility, where I am presently imprisoned, the SHU yards
are about three or four times as big as my cell. There are twelve SHU
yards total, each surrounded by concrete walls, one or two of the walls
lined with windows. If you look in the windows you’ll see the same SHU
company that you live on, and maybe you’ll get a look at a guy who was
locked next to you for months that you’ve talked to every day but had
never before gotten a look at. If you look up you’ll find bars and a
screen covering the yard, and if you’re lucky maybe you can see a bit of
blue sky through the mesh, otherwise it’ll be hard to believe that
you’re even outside. If it’s a good day you can walk around the SHU yard
in small circles staring ahead with your mind on nothingness, like the
nothing you’ve got in that lacuna with you. If it’s a bad day, though,
maybe your mind will be filled with remembrances of all you used to have
that you haven’t seen now for many years, and you’ll be missing it,
feeling the loss, feeling it bad.
Life
in the box is about an austere sameness that makes it difficult to tell
one day from a thousand others. Nothing much and nothing new ever
happen to tell you if it’s a Monday or a Friday,
March or September, 1987 or 2012. The world turns, technology advances,
and things in the streets change and keep changing all the time. Not so
in a solitary confinement unit, however. I’ve never seen a cell phone
except in pictures in magazines. I’ve never touched a computer in my
life, never been on the Internet and wouldn’t know how to get there if
you sat me in front of a computer, turned it on for me, and gave me
directions. SHU is a timeless place, and I can honestly say that there
is not a single thing I’d see looking around right now that is different
from what I saw in Shawangunk Correctional Facility’s box when I first
arrived there from Syracuse’s county jail in 1987. Indeed, there is
probably nothing different in SHU now than in SHU a hundred years ago,
save the headphones. Then and now there were a few books, a few
prison-made clothing articles, walls and bars and human beings locked in
cages… and misery.
There
is always the misery. If you manage to escape it yourself for a time,
there will ever be plenty around in others for you to sense; and though
you’ll be unable to look into their eyes and see it, you might hear it
in the nighttime when tough guys cry not-so-tough tears that are forced
out of them by the unrelenting stress and strain that life in SHU is an
exercise in.
I’ve
read of the studies done regarding the effects of long-term isolation
in solitary confinement on inmates, seen how researchers say it can ruin
a man’s mind, and I’ve watched with my own eyes the slow descent of
sane men into madness—sometimes not so slow. What I’ve never seen the
experts write about, though, is what year after year of abject isolation
can do to that immaterial part in our middle where hopes survive or die
and the spirit resides. So please allow me to speak to you of what I’ve
seen and felt during some of the harder times of my twenty-five-year
SHU odyssey.
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