Published Wednesday, October 07, 2009 1:48 PM
Updated Wednesday, October 07, 2009 1:48 PM

 

Lowcountry Riffs: A tour of hell

The first thing I notice after I put my shoes back on and line up to the right of the red line on the sidewalk was the solid clang of the metal door behind us.

“Stay to the right of the line and a foot behind me at all times,” says our guide with authority. “Do exactly what you’re told. You’re inside now.”

This Lieber Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison, the place the state sends its worst of the worst. Death row inmates live here although they will actually pay their ultimate price in a tiny, almost clinic-like room in Columbia.

This day is a part of the Leadership Berkeley course with which I have had the pleasure and privilege of being involved this year. We have learned about and experienced many topics, from beautiful historical places to the condition of healthcare in Berkeley County.

A maximum-security prison at first seems a little out of place in the curriculum, and yet by the end of the day it makes perfect sense to me.

This place, too, is a part of the community, an economic contributor, a purveyor of a very necessary service. The people also belong to the community. Its employees are obviously dedicated to the mission; they couldn’t possibly be doing it for the money. Its residents are largely examples for the rest of us; they live their lives under the absolute control and direction of someone else.

We provide structure, something many of these guys have never experienced, says our guide. Once inside these walls, every aspect of an inmate’s life is controlled. They are told when to get up, when to go to sleep, when to eat, when to bathe, when to work, when to move from point A to point B. It’s repetitive, rote, boring. It’s dull, dangerous, disturbing. There’s a saying inside ostensibly pertaining to food but illustrative of the entire prison life experience. That is, you have variety – you get eggs and grits one day and grits and eggs the next.

The employees are quick to tell you that the prison, indeed the entire S.C. Department of Corrections, is not feasting at some government trough. For example, the officer in charge of food services has managed to feed his charges for about $1.55 a day. Surprisingly, the food is not bad, certainly not any worse than my old high school cafeteria. But it is boring. It is bread, and rice, and cabbage, and beans, or some variation of that, every day.

Hell is not necessarily fire and brimstone. It’s more akin to starring in a really bad, mind-numbing tape loop playing over and over and over and over and yet over again.

Most of us on the outside would probably shrug and say, “Hey, you do the crime, you do the time, and you deserve whatever happens to you.”

While I’m certainly not one inclined to be merciful to violent criminals, I’m also not sure that’s entirely true.

A visit to the lock down facility, home to the state’s death row and something of a jail within prison for those who do not conform, is a stark lesson that this place certainly is home to many of society’s monsters. And yet, a good many of them did not start out that way. Addiction, poverty, lack of education, lack of structure, lack of self-control, mental illness, all of these and much more plays into the bad decisions many of these men made. But you don’t have to be poor, uneducated, drug-addled, or crazy to wind up here.

Just ask the four inmates who spoke to our class at the end of the day.

If you ran into any of them on the street, you wouldn’t think twice about them. One of them, now in his upper middle age years, has been in this place for more than two decades. If he wasn’t wearing prison tans, his patrician face and lean stature might lead one to believe he is a middle manager or stockbroker type. In fact, he was something like that once, even comes from a wealthy Charleston area family. He speaks candidly of his years of alcoholism and cowardice; he would get drunk and beat his wife. Eventually, he got drunk one night and shot her.

Another panelist, barely in his thirties, looks like most of the guys with whom I went to college.  Soft-spoken, mild mannered, he looks like anyone’s hard working next-door -neighbor family man -- which he once was -- and he speaks candidly about waking up from a drunken stupor to find he had beaten his wife to death with a shovel.

The third man, college educated and formerly in a successful career in the military, speaks of his night in the ruts, when some drunk got in his face one too many times and threatened him. As he said, he is here, and that man is dead.

The fourth panelist looks to be about my age, give or take a few years, a former hometown sports hero with a promising future who got in with the wrong crowd and allowed drugs to take over his life, eventually bringing him to robbery and murder.

Thankfully, some seven hours after we entered this place we are leaving it. It has been an interesting, insightful, sobering, eye-opening day.

As I stand in the parking lot fumbling for the keys to my car, I look back at the fences, the walls, the guard towers, the razor wire, and I wonder if a man could ever leave this place ready for re-entry into life as I and my classmates currently know it.

From what I can see, every sentence is a life sentence, be it one year or 100.