Breaking Racial Barriers in Prison

IN A PRISON CULTURE IN WHICH MEANINGFUL FRIENDSHIPS ACROSS RACIAL LINES IS TABOO —AND DANGEROUS —IN OVER A DECADE IN PRISON, I FORGED THREE IMPROBABLE LIFELONG FRIENDSHIPS.

Prison is a different world. It is all about race on the inside. It's as if the clock was turned back one hundred years. Everything is racially divided. If you're white, you cannot live or eat with prisoners of other races. And when things in prison go haywire, the races are pitted against one another. Even the TVs are broken up into races—for example, there’s the white TV, the Black TV, and the Mexican TV. If you work out, you work out with your race. In prison, race trumps all.

In fact, it's such a cultural norm in prison to stick with your own race, it's almost taboo to make meaningful friendships outside of one's race. And such a brazen flouting of cultural norms can alienate one who dares to be so bold.

When I was at the Seagoville Federal Pretrial Detention Center (before sentencing), I met a white guy who had been in and out of prison his entire life. I distinctly remember him telling me, "If you weren't racist when you came in [to prison], you will be before you leave." 

MY VERY WHITE UPBRINGING

For context, I was raised in the suburbs of Dallas. But about halfway through my junior year in high school, my mother and stepfather separated. During the separation, my mother rented a house overlooking beautiful Lake Texoma in Pottsboro, Texas. It was out in the country with lots of trees, overlooking the lake. It was a stone's throw away from the biggest inland marina in the world and home to Tanglewood Resort. But the high school was all white. Pottsboro was a small town.

Accordingly, all of my friends were white. There just weren’t any minorities around. At that time, at least, Pottsboro was just a small town with an all-white community. So, the only experience that I really had with minorities was in junior high. And sadly, the experience wasn't a good one. I was really skinny. I had big dumbo ears and they picked on me, relentlessly.

I loved Pottsboro. I loved the small town, and I loved living on the water.

And when I spent my adult life in Uptown (Dallas), I was yet again in a bubble, as it was predominantly white. Thus, my whole world was white, at least those in my inner circle. 

Fast-forward to federal prison. Given my background, entering a prison culture in which the emphasis is squarely on race, it seemed only natural that I would eschew meaningful relationships with other races.

But this is not a story about prison making me a racist. This is a story about prison opening my eyes and expanding my horizons, allowing me to forge lifelong friendships with people from other races despite the nature of prison.

Over more than a decade in federal prison, I have been transferred to five different prisons, from Texas to Louisiana, to Oklahoma, to New Hampshire. I've been to maximum-security prisons, medium-security prisons, and low-security prisons. I've met tens of thousands of people. And of all of those people and at all of those places, I really forged deep friendships with four of them; three are African Americans. I consider all three of them brothers and lifelong friends—kindred spirits. Given the nature of prison, this is highly improbable and extraordinarily rare. 

THE CHESS MASTER

First, there is Vince Bazemore, an African-American. I met Vince while I was at the Seagoville Detention Center. Vince looks like Tyler Perry. 

Vince was a white-collar offender. And he was smart, like really smart. He certainly had people skills. He was also very charismatic. He’d played football at Ohio State University. He was a chess master. When we would walk to the law library, inmates from other housing units would scream, "Hey, it's the Chess Master!" Vince was larger than life.

Here's a picture of Vince.

And aside from being super smart, he was incredibly funny. To top it all off, the guy had a heart of gold. We clicked instantly and our friendship took off. Vince was different from the other prisoners. People in prison are extremely petty. Violence can erupt over a $0.25 container of ramen soup or a two-dollar debt. People cling to their meager possessions and many are trying to find an angle to hustle others out of their money.  It's exhausting. Everything is a hustle. And everyone is a hustler. All of them have an angle. Not Vince.

There was an older guy who was struggling financially. His family had abandoned him. Vince had two lockers full of food, about $800 worth. I watched him just give the guy everything—everything. 

This might seem trivial, but this is a grand act of compassion in prison—$800 worth of food in prison is equivalent to about $24,000 dollars on the outside.

That act of compassion really stuck with me. Vince did it without a second thought. He was so casual about it, like he was giving someone a piece of chewing gum. It wasn't because Vince had a bunch of money. He didn't. He had some money. He got by, but he was hardly well off. His explanation for giving the guy (who had nothing) everything: "Oh, I need to go on a diet anyway."

When I came back from the courthouse after receiving a 30-year federal sentence (with no parole), I was absolutely sick. I wanted to curl up in a ball and die. Vince took the time to come in and cheer me up. When I had problems getting people on the outside do things for me, Vince would have his wife help me.  He was a very sensitive guy in that respect. I never had to ask for anything. He had high emotional intelligence. He would just offer. If you wanted the shirt off of his back, it was yours. His timing was impeccable. He constantly picked me up emotionally.  He was such a light.

I watched him talk about how his daughter and wife were visiting college campuses. You could tell that it broke his heart that he was trapped in prison while life was passing him by. My heart broke for him. It was really painful for him. At that point, I was almost happy that I never had a chance to get married and have kids, as I can only imagine the pain that a long prison sentence would cause—an entirely different dimension of emotional pain and suffering.

He once told me a joke. We had a mutual friend, Tommy Quinn. Tommy was in his 70s. Vince (a Black man) said, "Tommy was white when being white actually meant something." Vince was always cracking jokes like that. He didn't take anything too seriously. It was refreshing to find that a white man and a Black man in prison, where everything is strictly racially divided, could joke about race. I didn't care about the racial lines. Vince and I were great friends, and we hung out all day. If the "whites" didn't like it—and, they didn't—then, well, I guess they didn't like it. I was unapologetic. That is a hill that I was willing to die on. 

About two years ago, I reached out to Vince's wife. She told me that Vince had won his appeal and that his 25-year sentence had been shortened to about 15 years. During Vince's trial, he would come back from the courthouse every day. Vince, Tommy Quinn, and I would discuss the trial and the day's events, and he was already working on his appeal. Vince and I were eventually shipped off to different prisons.  But given that Vince had already spent some time inside, he was getting fairly close to release when he won his appeal. He could see light at the end of the tunnel.  

I reached out to his wife about six months later expecting to hear good news about his release plans. Instead, she told me that he was dead—tragically died from a brain tumor at 39. His poor wife stood by him the entire way. What an angel. She never wavered. She told me that they fought to get Vince out so that he could at least die at home. He was released and he died at her home a month later. She also told me that Vince had been reporting extreme headaches, blurred vision, and other inexplicable problems that plagued him to the prison for a long time, but to no avail. The prison officials didn't catch it until he was on the ground having a seizure. They told him that he had six months to live.

LISTEN TO HIS WIFE TELL THE STORY.

BIG BROTHER

Next is Frenchi Collins, an African-American. Frenchi is a big, muscular guy with a massive chest and bulging arms. He's an alpha male. He's originally from the hood. Like Vince, he's super smart. Now he's a different kind of smart, but he was every bit as savvy as Vince.

They called Frenchi "Big Brother" from his TV commercials: "If you get into a car wreck, call Big Brother." Like Vince, Frenchi has a wife and kids.  And like Vince, Frenchi's wife and kids stuck by him.

Frenchi and I were to top pin pong players at the detention center, so we bonded over our intense two-hour ping pong matches, as about 50 onlookers watched us battle it out. That was the catalyst to our friendship. We then began to chat with growing frequency, and it eventually turned into a meaningful friendship. Again, Frechi and I are from different worlds. He was the leader of the African American inmates—street smart and street tough. I was the white-collar guy who read and helped people with legal work. But we clicked like old college buddies who were finally reunited. Like Vince, I would absolutely hang out with Frenchi, even outside of prison. He is truly a lifelong friend.

FROG

And last but certainly not least is Jerry. They call him "Frog," an African-American. Frog and I bonded over college football. He has a gold tooth. He’s from the hood too. And yet, he's probably the most pleasant person that I've ever come across in prison—in fact, he's probably the most pleasant person that I've ever met period. He laughs at everything and he’s constantly smiling. He thinks that I'm the funniest guy in the world, so that's a bonus. He laughs so much that he makes me feel funny.

He got railroaded by the U.S. justice system. He was given 20 years in federal prison. He's been in about 13 years or more. When he told me that he was in his fifties, I was incredulous. He has such a young spirit. His upbeat energy is infectious. He and I would sit and talk for hours. For perspective, I talk very little in prison. People don't really hear me talk unless they are close to me, and there are only one or two people still on the inside who are close to me. 

Given that we are from different worlds, he wanted to know everything about my past life. He soaked it up like a sponge. I consider his prison sentence a travesty. Like Vince and Frenchi, I consider him a lifelong friend, a brother. I would make him part of my life outside of prison.  

PRISON, A HIDDEN TREASURE

What makes these three relationships so remarkable and extraordinary and special is that prison is so racially divided and hostile that yes, most people do develop a deep-seated disdain for other races. I've been attacked by other races during race wars that have broken out. Races simply do not mix. 

I guess I'm the exception. Remember that white guy who told me that if I wasn't racist before I came into prison, I would be when I left? He was wrong. Prison opened my eyes by exposing people to me that I never would have been exposed to, given my racially homogeneous circle of friends.

I consider this a gift—an invaluable lesson that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

I believe people who are stuck on race are incredibly small-minded and they are missing out on lifelong friendships. 

These three relationships are different from the hundreds of casual friendships that I've established over more than a decade in prison. They are special.

I'm the rare bird in prison who is still embraced by the white community while at the same time stepping across racial lines to establish significant friendships. I've never apologized for it. 

To me, prison offered me a golden eye-opening opportunity to establish lifelong friendships with truly remarkable people that I otherwise would never have met, changing my perspective and paving the way for future relationships.

I've learned that people are not one-dimensional, a seemingly self-evident truth. I've learned that you cannot quantify human chemistry. On paper, things can make absolutely no sense at all, but work out perfectly in the real world. It's about getting past those preconceived notions and cognitive biases. And I consider this to be one of the more precious gifts that prison has given me—yes, you heard that correctly: prison has given me intangible gifts that are priceless. In that respect, I've gained more than I've lost, a silver lining indeed.