Related stories: Doing time

Related stories: Transferred

A new inmate can only imagine the state prison system

Editor’s note: Prison officials won’t let anyone even take a close-up photo of the front gate at the Lexington Assessment and Reception Center, where all Oklahoma inmates begin their sentences. Until now, only the guards and the inmates themselves ever got a good look at the other side. Here, for the first time, the Tulsa World follows one prisoner through the gate.

Part 1 of 3

LEXINGTON — A white Chevrolet van pulls off the highway and stops in front of a tall chain-link Lgate, topped with barbed wire and surrounded by surveillance cameras.

Shackled hand and foot behind the tinted windows, 13 men have endured a three-hour ride from Tulsa County, but now the van has arrived ahead of schedule.

The gate won’t open for another 45 minutes.

Out the back window, Craig Bryan Steed can see the sun

Under the relentless orange glare, Steed can see the watchtowers and the rows of concrete cell blocks, each surrounded by its own razor-wire fence.

Now he has another half-hour to sit and think about what’s going to happen on the other side of this gate. There’s time to replay every bad prison movie he’s ever seen: jack-booted guards with high powered rifles. The stern warden pacing back and forth. German shepherds straining at the leash.

Steed has been arrested a few times but never sent to prison before, so he can only imagine.

When the gate finally opens, the van backs up near a pair of garage doors, where Steed and the 12 other men line up next to a stack of water bottles and surplus office furniture.

With the shackles removed, they simply wait for their names to be called before stepping one by one through a side door and, officially, into the custody of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.

This is the threshold between freedom and incarceration — a greasy, cluttered garage where prisoners are delivered with as much drama as the mail.

A couple of guards sip coffee and snack on doughnuts while they fill out paperwork.

Steed needs to sign a consent form to let the Tulsa World photograph his face.

“They gonna make you famous,” one teases him.

“I hope not,” he chuckles.

Nearly 30 years old, with a receding hairline and three days of stubble, Steed still has a boyish grin. He tucks his chin down and looks up at the guard with big, green eyes.

“I don’t want to be the poster boy for Lexington Prison.”

‘Violated’

Herded through a metal detector and down a short hallway to a windowless, gray room, the new inmates are told to change clothes, replacing the orange jumpsuits from Tulsa County with slightly brighter orange jumpsuits from Lexington.

Between outfits, the men stay naked for several minutes while a guard walks around the room with a clipboard, documenting every bruise, scratch, freckle and tattoo.

Once dressed, the men sit down to have their heads shaved bald with a pair of electric clippers — a fate Steed avoids only by wearing his hair shaved already.

Then it’s time to strip again.

With the orange jumpsuits crumpled around their ankles, the men take turns bending over the back of a chair while a guard steps behind them, pulling on a pair of latex gloves.

“Turn,” the guard says. “Lift.”

“Spread.”

“Bend.”

It’s not just a matter of searching for contraband.

“You have to break them down, shock them into the system, just like going into the military,” says Sgt. Everett Shea, whose sleeve is rolled up to show off an eagle tattoo, celebrating 10 years in the Army.

After trying what he calls “a normal, civilian job” for a while, Shea wanted to be a prison guard because he likes the uniform, the chain of command and — best of all, he says — “that sense of brotherhood with the other guards.”

When inmates transfer from a county jail to the state prison system, they call it “chain pull.” And it gives Shea the chance to play drill sergeant.

“This is prison boot camp,” he says. “You have to let them know who’s in charge. They aren’t. We are.”

Looking down at the floor as they rebutton their jumpsuits, the men avoid eye contact as they come out of the exam room. Sitting down on benches in the hallway, no one talks.

The youngest guy barely looks 18, a pudgy kid with round cheeks and a clean face that never needs a razor. He starts giggling, almost under his breath at first, then cracking up completely.

“Oh, man,” he laughs, slapping his knee. “I feel violated.”

“Yeah,” someone else chuckles. “They found holes I didn’t know I had.”

Suddenly, the hallway lights up with crude jokes and bawdy laughter, guys high-fiving and slapping each other on the back, with Steed in the middle of it, still flashing that boyish grin.

‘Think’

The “reception process,” as the guards call it, quickly settles into a mundane routine.

There’s form after form to fill out.

Line after line to stand in. Brochures to read and laminated IDs to wear.

It might as well be enrollment day at a junior college. Most of the guys look about the right age to be freshmen, with a few older students like Steed thrown in.

Everybody just happens to be wearing orange jumpsuits.

The room could even pass for a small cafeteria, overcrowded with plastic chairs and long wooden tables. Just ignore the locked door, a solid slab of metal with a small bulletproof window. It doesn’t slam shut — it slides laboriously into place with an electric hum, as if the motor is struggling to move so much weight.

Reading directions from a clipboard, the guard slips into a tedious monotone, like a school counselor who’s reading the same set of instructions for the 101st time. Never mind the automatic pistol on his hip.

While a nurse gives a brief lecture on safe sex and the danger of sharing needles —a lesson that would sound familiar to any high school graduate — everybody breaks into cliquish groups. The blacks segregate themselves in a corner while a couple of Hispanics sit face-to-face nearby.

The cool kids with tattoos grab a table for themselves, and Steed sits down with the other first-time offenders — the geeks. He mentions that he graduated from Edison High School in Tulsa, and that starts a game of “Do you remember so-and-so?”

“I think she was a year ahead of me. . . . Yeah, I had a couple of classes with her brother.”

In the packet of forms to fill out, they eventually turn to a page titled “Last Will and Testament.”

“This,” the guard reads in the same monotone, “is in the event of your death while incarcerated.”

The conversation stops.

“Man,” Steed sighs, shaking his head.

“It makes you think. You get a three-year sentence and it could turn into life — you could go home in a box.”

In a room that echoed with voices just a few seconds ago, you can hear Steed’s rollerball pen scratching on the paper.

This is no junior college.

‘Advice’

What makes Lexington unique is that every state prisoner comes here, from shoplifters to murderers.

It doesn’t matter whether you were convicted in Little Dixie or the Panhandle, whether you’re headed for maximum security or a halfway house. No matter what crime you committed and no matter where you committed it, in the state of Oklahoma, every prison sentence begins here.

A pothead can find himself in the shower with a sex offender. Somebody who’s never been arrested before can sleep in the same cell with a career criminal. Everybody gets thrown together for the first several days before fanning out to correctional facilities across the state.

“Some people come in here and act like knuckleheads,” Sgt. Shea says. “And we have to straighten them out.”

This batch from Tulsa County has been nothing but cooperative so far. No fights.

No disruptions. The guards haven’t had to raise their voices even once.

“You’re a good bunch,” Shea tells them. “Keep it up and you’ll all do fine here.”

They’re sitting on benches in the hallway again, and nobody — Shea included — seems to know what they’re waiting for.

“I told you it’s like the military,” Shea says. “Hurry up and wait.”

Some of the inmates sit off by themselves, arms crossed and heads down, never saying a word unless somebody asks them a question. And then the answer is “yes” or “no” or just a shrug of the shoulders.

Others won’t stop talking. Cracking jokes and swapping stories, they seem almost light-hearted.

Steed falls somewhere in between — friendly but not extroverted, joining conversations but not starting them.

What surprises Shea — what surprises him about every new batch of inmates — is that nobody seems distraught or emotional.

“Every once in a while you see somebody come in here and freak out, break down. But not very often, and I don’t know why. If I was on the other side of this, if I was wearing orange right now in- stead of blue, I’d be pulling my hair out.”

Steed and the other first-timers—four or five guys who have never been to prison before—seem to recognize each other instinctively. They gravitate together at one end of the hallway, just around the corner from the locked door that leads into the garage where they arrived just a few hours ago.

Sgt. Shea sits down in the middle of them, leaning forward to rest an elbow on his knee, almost whispering as if he’s about to reveal a secret.

“Do you have a problem with somebody telling you how the cow ate the cabbage?”

Everybody huddles around.

“You want some advice?” Shea continues. “Keep your mouth shut. Don’t borrow anything from anybody. Don’t accept any gifts. Don’t try to win any favors. If somebody tries to mess with you, just walk away. Swallow your pride. Pride will get you hurt.”

The inmates look at each other for a second, then turn back toward Shea and nod their heads. Satisfied that he’s been understood, he sits up straight again and clears his throat.

“So what are you guys in for?”

Usually, the guards don’t want to know — it keeps them unbiased if they think of a guy as “just an inmate” and not a rapist or a thief or a drug dealer.

“They’re all the same to us,” he says.

But this time he makes an exception, and the inmates answer one by one down the line.

“Possession.”

“Burglary.”

“Possession with intent.”

“Assault with a deadly.”

Only one of them — the pudgy, baby faced kid who started giggling after the strip search — professes innocence.

“Framed,” he says. “Railroaded.”

Steed comes last.

“DUI.”

‘Binge’

Steed hadn’t had a drink in four years and never planned to have one again. Instead of an alcoholic, he was trying to be a workaholic, pouring more than 60 hours a week into his lawn-care business, then making extra money on the weekends rebuilding car engines.

“I made good money. Had a good wife.

A good home. A good life,” he says.

Then his wife left him. In hindsight, of course, he should’ve seen it coming — the marriage had been neglected for years. But he compares it to an IED in Iraq.

“I’m just going along like nothing and all of a sudden this bomb goes off and my life is blown to pieces.”

With her gone, Steed couldn’t think of a reason to live anymore.

“Binge drinking is just a slow form of suicide,” he says. “I knew when I was doing it that it was going to destroy my life — I just didn’t care.”

One night last May, about a month after his wife moved out, he went to see a friend play in a band at Crow Creek Tavern, a popular hangout in Brookside. Not wanting to take any chances, he arranged for a designated driver, he says, but the guy ended up drinking even more than Steed.

“My house was just a couple of miles away. I figured, ‘What are the odds?’ ”

He lived near 31st Street and Harvard Avenue, but Steed missed a turn and found himself crossing the intersection of 31st and Yale Avenue, a mile out of his way. He wasn’t speeding or swerving or driving suspiciously. A police patrol simply noticed that his pickup’s tag light was out.

“I was probably going to get a warning until he leaned in and smelled my breath,” he says.

Steed stumbled out from behind the wheel.

“Do you want to take a sobriety test?” the officer asked.

“No,” Steed shook his head. “I wouldn’t pass. You got me.”

It wasn’t the first time.

‘Reason’

Back in November 1996, Steed was speeding down a rural Osage County road in a vintage ’67 Ford. Trying to go around a sharp curve three miles west of Skiatook, he lost control and hit a tree.

His passenger, a 38-year-old woman who lived next door to Steed in Tulsa, was thrown out of the cabin and pinned between the truck and the tree, where she was declared dead at the scene.

Steed himself, only 18 at the time, went to the hospital in stable condition and later spent 173 days in the Osage County Jail for involuntary manslaughter.

Within months, he was driving in Osage County again, this time in a Chevrolet that swerved across the middle line several times before a police officer pulled him over. A judge sentenced him to another six months in the county jail on a drunken-driving conviction, his first.

Steed quit drinking for a while. But in 2003, he was driving a Nissan hatchback that hit a motorcycle on Interstate 44 near 41st Street, injuring the rider’s leg.

Police arrested him for leaving the scene and for driving drunk.

But right now, sitting in the hallway with the other inmates and Sgt. Shea, Steed doesn’t go into all these details. He simply tells them, “This isn’t the first time that alcohol has ruined my life.

“But it’s going to be the last time.”

Now facing three years in prison, Steed has lost his wife, his house, his truck and his business. But instead of feeling depressed about it, he sounds hopeful, even upbeat. If binge drinking really is a form of suicide, he might be dead by now if he hadn’t been locked up.

“God is doing this for a reason. I really believe that,” he says. “It could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Over the next several days, he’ll face a battery of physical and psychological exams that case managers will use to determine where to send him for the rest of his sentence. But the options all fit under two broad categories — treatment or lockdown. Steed has a preference.

“I’m an alcoholic, not a criminal,” he says. “I need help, not prison.”

The way he sees it, the state of Oklahoma can accomplish one of two things.

“I can walk out of here sober and rehabilitated and ready to be part of society again, or I can walk out of here bitter and broken and ready to give up on life.”

A lot of it depends on Steed himself if he makes the right choices; if he keeps the right attitude.

The rest will depend on what happens here at Lexington.

‘Blame’

Lunch comes in a brown paper sack, tossed into Steed’s lap while he’s still waiting in the hallway, five hours after the Tulsa County van drove through the prison gates.

He unwraps it to find a sandwich with an unidentifiable type of meat. It smells like a dirty sock, and Steed wraps it again without taking a bite.

“Come on,” Sgt. Shea motions for him to stand up. “It’s time to go.”

With Shea in front and another guard in back, Steed waits at the end of the hallway as a metal door slides open, triggered by someone in a control room behind bulletproof glass.

The door leads into a sally port, where the first door has to finish closing before a second door can start to open, leaving Steed and his escort momentarily trapped between them.

“I did this to myself,” Steed admits, looking at his reflection in the door’s window. Shoulders slouched and eyes half-shut, he hasn’t slept for 36 hours.

“I don’t have anyone else to blame.”

The second door leads to a long, empty corridor, with everything painted gray. Dark gray on the floor. Lighter gray on the walls. And concrete-gray for the ceiling.

After 40 or 50 feet, the hallway takes 90-degree turn to the right, then after another 40 or 50 feet it turns back 90 degrees to the left.

Everything looks clean. Empty. Quiet.

And gray — relentlessly gray — except for one isolated pair of windows, where the afternoon sun paints a yellow rectangle on the floor.

Shea and the other guards walk ahead, footsteps echoing, as Steed falls behind, walking alone. They don’t have to worry about losing him, because there’s nowhere to go but down this empty corridor.

Down to Cell Block II.

Down to Quad No. 4.

Down to cell “M.”

“You OK back there?” Shea looks over his shoulder.

Clutching that brown paper sack, Steed doesn’t say anything. He just grins. But this time, somehow, it doesn’t look so boyish.

Michael Overall 581-8383
michael.overall@tulsaworld.com

The wreck that killed a mother

She was going to drive her Toyota SUV until they noticed that a taillight was out. Instead, they took Craig Steed’s Ford pickup.

He wanted to go for a drive around Skiatook Lake because Tammie “Renee” Fox liked the scenery out there. What they talked about remains unclear, but apparently it involved Steed’s desire to date Fox’s 18-year-old daughter, according to Fox’s mother.

“She decided to go with him,” Teri Franklin says. “And that was a fatal decision.”

In November 1996, officials estimated that Steed’s pickup was going 80 mph in a 40-mph zone when it strayed off the road and hit a tree, killing Fox, who was 38.

Steed spent six months in the Osage County Jail for involuntary manslaughter.

“I never understood why he didn’t go to prison right there, right then,” Franklin says.

“There’s a lot that I don’t understand about the justice system, and frankly, it has left me bitter.”

She says she thinks about Fox every day.

But facing the 11th anniversary of her child’s death this year, she’s been thinking about her daughter even more than usual.

“She was a talented musician, you know,” Franklin remembers. “She could play the piano by ear.”

Franklin’s been thinking a lot about Steed, too.

“I never knew him myself, and I don’t want to,” she says. “Knowing that he’s finally being taken off the streets, all I can say is, ‘It’s about time.’ ”