The Maximum Security U.S. Penitentiary Experience: “Bloody Beaumont”

All prisons in the federal prison system are not equal. On one end of the spectrum, you have the Club Fed camps. This is where most of the nonviolent white-collar offenders go and this is why the prevailing notion is that federal prison is like a country club. You know the kind of federal prison—yoga classes; tennis courts; no fences; and a bunch of nonviolent, white-collar offenders who are relatively spoiled. Make no mistake, it's still a prison. Nevertheless, it's relative comfort and relative freedom. It's where they send guys like "Mike ("The Situation") from The Jersey Shore after he was convicted of tax fraud.

There's almost no violence. Then, there are the low-security prisons. They’re a step up from the camps. These prisons are not as soft as the camps, however. Still, let’s call them Camp Cupcake. The next step up is medium-security prisons. Now, things are starting to get real. These prisons are serious. They are constantly plagued with lockdowns and violence. Gangs and violent offenders are prevalent, and large-scale riots can pop off at any time.  

And then there are the maximum-security U.S. Penitentiaries (a.k.a. USP), which make hard-core medium-security prisons look like a Holiday Inn and the camps look like the Ritz-Carlton. A maximum-security federal prison is designed to house the worst of the worst—a high concentration of the most violent, problematic, dangerous criminals in the nation. For perspective, state prison is a walk in the park compared to a maximum-security U.S. Penitentiary. The culture at a maximum-security Penitentiary is different. Its culture is pervaded by extreme violence and brutality. Violence is the native tongue. That's how their prisoners express themselves, how they handle situations, and how they live. They are largely innately violent people, and those who do not have a propensity for violence must be violent at some point to survive.

THIS IS EXACERBATED BY THE FACT THAT THERE IS NO PAROLE IN THE FEDERAL SYSTEM, A POWERFUL FACT THAT HAS PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS ON EVERYDAY PRISON LIFE THAT ARE HARDLY INSIGNIFICANT.

A ONE-WAY TICKET TO HELL

But let's back up a little. Before a federal offender is sentenced, he (or she) spends time in a federal pretrial detention center. During the entire two or so years that I spent at the pretrial detention center, I heard one thing over and over—you do not want to go to the Beaumont Penitentiary (USP). The prisoners referred to Beaumont USP as Gladiator School.

And oftentimes we would come across the rare prisoner who had actually survived Beaumont USP. It was like he had been to war in Vietnam or something. Like a bunch of kids sitting around a campfire in the woods telling scary stories, the prisoner would tell us horror stories from his time at "Bloody Beaumont." We would listen on the edge of our seats. One prisoner claimed to have PTSD from his time at Bloody Beaumont. 

Good thing I didn't have anything to worry about. After all, I have no violence in my background.  My crime is a white-collar crime tied to making misrepresentations to investors. Wrong. After I was crushed with a 30-year federal prison sentence, I asked my Case Manager where I was going to spend my time. His answer?  

"Beaumont."  

"Oh, Beaumont low (security)?" I replied. 

He cleared his throat, looked me up and down with worry in his eyes—not a good sign—and said, "No, Beaumont USP, the Penitentiary." 

After my shock wore off and the room stopped spinning, I told him that there had to be some kind of mistake.  

"Nope—no mistake," he assured me. I think I saw a smirk on his face. Sadist.

Beaumont USP, it was. It was going to be a long 30 years.

A SENSE OF IMPENDING DOOM

During the 12-hour bus ride to the Pen, I was shackled and chained. At that point, I thought about requesting my last meal.  

Of course, it was a rainy day. I will never forget how I felt as that bus pulled up to the prison. I could not have faced more uncertainty about what I was walking into if I were about to step out of a spaceship on a different planet to meet a new species and live among them. My point of reference? Shawshank Redemption. Definitely not good.

If I were 6’3”, 250 pounds, covered head-to-toe in prison tattoos, and I were in for murder, it would still be scary walking into a maximum-security federal prison. Now, I'm far from some push-over wuss. And I wasn't exactly a small guy. I'm 5’11”, and while I'm usually about 185 and extremely fit, I put on some weight—I wasn't really worried about my six-pack at the time—to prepare me for the "Gladiator School," so I was about 210 at the time. Still, I was a different breed.  

I was raised in the suburbs of Dallas (McKinney, Texas). I spent my adult life in the Uptown/Highland Park (Dallas) bubble, which is like a yuppie paradise—everything looks like a movie set and everyone looks like an actor or actress in a movie. Southern Methodist University was a stone’s throw away. Remember the hit show in the '90s, Beverly Hills 90210? The school in that show is loosely based on SMU. (Aaron Spelling attending SMU.) My friends were attorneys and engineers and nurses and financial managers and investment brokers and business owners. Now, while I'm a tough guy, being tough on the mean streets of McKinney, Texas, or in the yuppie-infested Uptown scene is a lot different from being Penitentiary tough. Still, I refused to walk with my head down, and I decided that I would respond to any violence accordingly. I had nothing to lose, so, in my mind, I became dangerous. 

INTAKE

Before walking into the general population, inmates go through an intake. While in the holding cell, two prisoners spun wild tales about all of the stabbings and killings that they had witnessed during their time at The Pen. This wasn't good at all. This was consistent with all of the crazy talk that I had heard over the previous two years. Then my name was called.

A fairly pretty Case Manager interviewed me. As she was looking down at my paperwork, she said, "Soooooo, you were an investment broker of some kind.  Hmmm. What are you doing here?”

This struck me as odd. Exactly—What am I doing here? I wanted to yell. She proceeded to look me up and down, and then, with a worried face, said, "Oh, boy. You're really green." She actually looked worried for me. This was a bad sign. She then advised me not to borrow or accept anything from the "whites."

At that moment, I wanted her to take me home with her. Maybe we could start a life in Beaumont. 

After intake, there was a long walk to the housing units. As the new inmates—fresh meat—and I walked the plank, about 2000 inmates beat on the Plexiglas (facing the prison yard) at the same time. They call it the Thunderdome. This was our welcome. Things felt a little dicey.

A NEW WORLD

Walking into the housing unit was surreal. Culture shock is a mild way to put it. I now know what a wild animal feels like when he's faced with a bunch of predators. I just remember how fast things were moving—like, fast-forward fast. There were about 200 inmates inspecting us, the new guys. Everyone was in their own little group. You had the white gang members, the white non-gang members, and about ten different gangs made up exclusively of Mexicans or African-Americans, or Native Americans. Remember, unlike a state prison, federal prison is composed of people from all over the country. Everything was racially divided—everything. The problem was that I was the alien life form, and they were trying to figure me out. I could see their brains turning.  

First, was my living assignment—the selection of a bunkmate. It was either Rick, Barlow, or Andretti. Rick had just done seven years at the SuperMax prison in Colorado after murdering his former cellmate, so that was a hard "no." Barlow was serving four life sentences for killing an entire family (he was in a religious cult). Yeah, I'll pass. That left Andretti. He was from Georgia and part of the Dixie Mafia. He was 70. While serving a 30-year sentence, he escaped, and after being on the run for a year or so, he was captured and given an additional 30 years.  

As I sat there trying to decide on whether to live in a tiny 5 x 8 concrete box with steel doors that shut every night at 9 pm and opened at 6 am with a psychopath, a sociopath, or a mobster, I thought to myself that it wasn't that long ago I was sitting on a terrace overlooking the Dallas skyline, listening to music and sipping wine with my lovely girlfriend, trading kisses and sweet looks while trying to decide where to have dinner that night. That felt like a different lifetime.  Now, my choices were much bleaker. I snapped out of it. The choice was easy: Andretti, the 70-year-old mobster.

What struck me as odd was that I didn't see any other “normal” people. Everyone seemed, well, mentally “off.” Rough around the edges would be a radical understatement. I was a little too polished. I soon found out that my teeth were a little too white, my eyes a little too blue, my hair a little too shiny, my speech a little too crisp. I thought about shaving my head, but I wanted to keep some individuality.

Plainly, I stuck out like a sore thumb. I felt like some exotic bird in a glass case that everyone was staring at. Yeah, I was the weird one. Go figure.

Remember the worst kid in high school? Okay, well, imagine if they took a collection of the 2000 worst kids from the 2000 worst high schools, gave them knives, confined them, took away everything they had to lose, and put them in one big cage.

That's Bloody Beaumont. 

Were there good people there? Absolutely. Absolutely, there were. There were great people there. But the culture and environment force those things out of people, kind of like war does. And most of these guys have been violent people for a very long time. There was a lot of mental illness—untreated mental illness.

At any rate, like hungry (or curious) sharks darting to chum in the water, I was immediately surrounded by the whites. They promptly checked my paperwork to ensure that I was not a) a snitch, or b) a sex offender. Once this was out of the way, a nice gentleman missing many teeth and covered with swastika tattoos provided me with some light reading material. Yep—you guessed it—consistent with the gentlemen's body art, the books were centered on white supremacy and Hitler. I accepted the books and smiled. I wasn't going to make it, I thought.

THE MAYHEM ENSUES

There was a beat down on my way to dinner, so we all had to hit the dirt. After the victim of the brutal attack—who was lying unconscious in the dirt—was carted away on a stretcher, the mass feeding continued. This was such a typical event that it wasn't even given a second thought: The beatdown ensues, we hit the dirt, the pepper spray is used, the attackers are debilitated, cuffed, then carted off to solitary confinement. They clean up the mess, cart the victim off, and depending on how bad the beatdown was, the victim would go to the prison infirmary, the Intensive Care Unit, or the morgue. Sitting there eating my meal, I was in shock. The whole thing felt like I had walked into some wormhole and entered an alternative reality. It was a whole new world—a world of savages.

I figured that I would just immerse myself in the law and in other books. I figured wrong. That night—my first night—as I was walking across the yard to the Education Department (where the law library is), a mini-riot broke out. I say a mini-riot because it was only about 50 inmates (rather than 1000 or 2000) beating and stabbing one another. At the Pen, if you don't hit the ground and stay on the ground, you will be shot. There are towers all over the prison yard with sharpshooters. They also throw concussion grenades (that make a very loud bang) and flash grenades and release pepper gas. It felt a little like a warzone. It was chaos. Two different gangs were at war.  

40 DAYS AND 40 NIGHTS...OF BOLOGNA SANDWICHES AND SINK BIRDBATHS

This prompted the prison to go on 24-hour-lockdown, during which all prisoners are confined to their (tiny) cells 24 hours a day. Sometimes this lasts a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month, or months, during which one must shower in his sink, and he is fed through a little hole in the door—bologna sandwiches three times a day...oh, and an apple and a bag of chips. This allowed my new roomie—Andretti—and me to spend some quality time together. The sink is the shower, and the toilet is in the cell—gross. The cell is the size of a small mop closet, about 5x8.  After 40 days and 40 nights of bologna sandwiches (I hadn't had an opportunity to go to the prison commissary just yet) and sink showers (yes, it was all quite humbling), the lockdown was over. 

But the violence never stopped. I remember calling my sister and she said, "Oh, that place looks nice. We looked it up online." I almost dropped the phone. She was clueless. She was talking about the Beaumont prison camp, which was right down the road, but which might as well have been a world away. 

There were almost daily acts of extreme violence. It was brutality like I had never seen before. I have endless stories, too lengthy to detail here. Bloody Beaumont was certainly living up to its name. 

THE TOOTHLESS NAZI TATTOO GUY

It wasn't too long after the lockdown that I was attacked while I was in my cell. Remember the toothless guy with the Nazi tattoos who was trying to recruit me to join a white supremacist prison gang? Him. I knew he was trouble. I guess I should have read his literature. 

If you've never had to fight for your life in a tiny cell while others are holding the cell door shut, then you haven't really fought. They call it "hell in a cell." In prison, extreme violence occurs over the smallest things. The Nazi tattoo guy had gone into my cell and stolen my coffee, which is a serious offense in prison. When I found out that it was him, the word spread, and naturally, he wanted to get the jump on me. So, as I'm brushing my teeth, he walks to the door of my cell with his shirt off, then runs right at me while someone else slams the cell door shut. Remember the days of WWF wrestling? They had the cage match, where the cage would be lowered down, locking the wrestlers in the ring. Okay. It's like that, but a little more vicious. The space is small, and everything is steel and concrete. It's very dangerous. 

The Nazi tattoo guy was actually dating his aunt. He didn’t have any teeth. His horrible prison tattoos were dripping with hepatitis. This guy screamed hepatitis. I had three concerns that flashed through my mind as he charged me: a) don't get your teeth knocked out (the prison will not fix them); b) don't get this guy's blood on me (do I really need to add hepatitis to add to my list of problems?); and c) don't die—in that order. After he and I tussled a bit, the Texas boys found out that he has stolen something—a big no-no at the Pen—and beat him unconscious, then they dragged him to the door and told the officer to "get him out of here."

The officers did a body check and saw that my hands were swollen (from fighting). That was my ticket to solitary confinement.

THE HOLE: A PRISON WITHIN A PRISON

I was promptly sent to the hole, a.k.a., solitary confinement. One second I'm minding my own business, the next second some toothless inbred with a brain the size of a squirrel steals from me, then attacks me; and now, I'm too violent to be housed in the general population with a collection of the nation's most violent criminals, and therefore I need to be tossed in the hole. Things went from bad to worse. The first night, there was apparently a book on the window ledge. (When I say window, I mean a tiny slit that one cannot see out of.) Naturally, I needed to be punished further. I was yanked out of the cell, whereupon I was ridiculed and berated. My new punishment: my oversized prison jumpsuit and blankets and sheets were replaced with a paper gown and paper sheets—very thin paper—and my pillow was taken. Within a day, the thin paper was ripped. And when it's 50 degrees in the cell, paper sheets and paper clothes do very, very little.  

So, not only was I in prison, but I was at arguably the worst maximum-security prison in the country. Now, I'm not even fit for the prison, so I'm in prison within the prison. And now, because of my problematic behavior (there was a book sitting on the window ledge), I’ve lost the privilege of clothes and sheets and blankets and a pillow? I had no idea that was a privilege. My thought: I wasn't going to make it. No way. Can't do it. Sign me out.

Given the length of this piece, I cannot even begin to talk about the lunatic that they eventually put in my cell while I was in solitary confinement. Think of it like this: you are in a tiny bathroom that has two steel bunks, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And they throw a clearly mentally ill psychopath in with you. I would rather have been in that room with a rabid dog that was foaming at the mouth. Somehow, he had managed to procure a razor blade. Throughout the day, he would make ambiguous statements about cutting my throat while I slept. The guy was mentally ill. I was really getting the full prison experience, that's for sure. 

STREET CRED

After four months in the hole, I was released back into the general population. My new roommate was—wait for it—Rick, the guy who murdered his ex-cellmate. Yeah, that Rick. As it turns out, Rick was an alright guy. After listening to his well-reasoned rationale for killing his ex-cellmate, my goodness, it was all starting to sound logical. Rick liked to eat pills and draw and paint. As long as he was subdued with pills and had his artwork, he was as cool as a cucumber. And he loved his mother. He was desperate to get out before his mother died. Rick wasn't so bad. In fact, sometimes he was just plain pleasant.

He was fascinated with me. We are from different worlds. He got a kick out of me buying bottled water from the prison commissary. It blew his mind that I would buy water. 

The upside of my stint in solitary confinement and the attack against me was that my street cred went through the roof. I showed that I had a heart by fighting. I did time in the hole. I kept my mouth shut. Now I was one of the guys.

I was actually well-liked and respected after that. I never tried to be like them. I never tried to fit in. I was always me. And that went a long way. I forged some friendships with some bikers and other guys. I found a flaw in a prominent Outlaw Biker's 60-year sentence for a bombing (regarding a rival Biker gang) in Chicago. I became part of the inner circle.

Still, Penitentiary life was grueling: beatdown or stabbing, lockdown, end of lockdown; beatdown or stabbing, lockdown, end of lockdown; repeat. It's that simple. This is what life at a maximum-security prison was reduced to.

HOPELESSNESS SETS IN

I just remember being really tired all the time. I threw myself into studying law and other subjects and working out. I ate healthy and read and kept to myself. But I was always tired. I honestly felt like I had no soul or spirit. The daunting reality of spending the next 30 years in prison just overwhelmed and zapped me. I didn't have any contact with the outside world. It didn’t matter that I exercised and ate healthily. It was my spirit that was making my body sick. It was there that I learned that misery and depression are a matter of degrees. And what I thought was misery before was nothing even close to what real misery is. I just floated through my days, extremely fatigued, and stayed in a constant state of despair for many years.

SOFTBALL SEASON AT THE PEN

I joined the softball team. I figured some team sports and male bonding, outside of violence, would do me some good. 

Softball season was short-lived. While I was playing centerfield a massive prison-wide riot broke out. It involved two large Mexican prison gangs. The entire prison went berserk—all three recreation yards, all 12 housing units, the chow hall, The Medical Department, the Education Department. The officers were overwhelmed. They were literally falling and running in circles, as every inch of the prison popped off.

The sharpshooters were in the guard towers, so I had to crawl to the first base line, where the group of whites was. Over the next 45 minutes, I watched in amazement. Guys were crawling on the ground and pulling out previously stashed ice picks from the dirt, which they then used to stab the other gang members. About 30 feet from us, three inmates were stabbing some poor soul, while an officer had a steady stream of pepper spray shooting directly at the attackers. They weren't even phased, impervious to it because of pure adrenaline.

The sharpshooters couldn't get to them since they were protected by a backstop (behind home plate) and a concrete enclosure for the outdoor bathroom.

The madness ensued for about an hour. Eventually, the cavalry was called and order was restored...kind of.

After that lockdown ended, softball season continued. But my softball coach (Chris, a white supremacists gang member from Utah) murdered our second basemen. This was in the summer of 2014. Here's the news article. Chris got the death penalty for the murder.

They were in the same gang. Chris and another gang member stabbed him 70 times and then stuffed his body under a bunk. After dinner, everyone had to hit the dirt. They found the body. We locked down again. That was the end of softball season.

Life became predictable. There was no escaping violence. I would be eating lunch and someone next to me would be stabbed and then beaten; I would be studying law in the library and someone three seats down would be brutally attacked; I would be sitting in the medical clinic and someone would be beaten within an inch of his life; I would be running the recreation yard and someone would get their head stomped in until they stopped moving. It was all becoming very normal.

I KNEW IT

After enduring the nightmare that is Bloody Beaumont for quite some time, I got curious about why I was being housed there. So I dug in and learned how the custody scoring works. Turns out, I wasn't supposed to be there—I knew it!

I unwound the problem and articulated it to my case manager. He waved me off dismissively, like a pesky little fly, so I detailed the errors in a formal grievance (filed with the Warden). My position was grounded in the unambiguous policy of the Federal  Bureau of Prisons. I was clearly right. The errors were glaring. My score had been artificially inflated.

About a month later, while I was jogging laps around the Gladiator ring that they call a rec yard, my case manager stopped me. He informed me that the Warden actually agreed with me. I was being transferred to a medium-security prison.

Then he added, "I have no idea why you were sent here in the first place. You don't belong here." What! 

This was the same case manager who dismissed my arguments out of hand. Lesson learned: persistence = results.

I have shared the sanitized made-for-TV Lifetime special version with you. I dared not to delve into the inner workings of the Pen or the real violence. Given I'm still incarcerated, there are things I simply cannot share.

At any rate, there was a happy ending—well, a relatively happy ending (I'm still in prison): I was shipped to a medium-security prison, which, while still bad, was a night-and-day difference, a real breath of fresh air. I was no longer the fresh meat white-collar guy from Uptown. Now I was the guy who got to dazzle the prisoners with stories from the Pen. 

After having survived one of the most dangerous and volatile maximum-security prisons in the United States, I walked into the medium-security prison like I owned the place.