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Prison gives a man hours to think on why he’s there

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 2 of 3

LEXINGTON — Somebody left a King James Bible in the cell for him to find. Now it’s lying open on the desk in front of the window, the iron bars casting two parallel shadows across the pages, turned to Acts, Chapter 12.

In the passage, an angel opens a prison gate to let St. Peter walk free.

Craig Steed has read it over and over again, but right now he’s sitting on the lower bunk and gazing out the window. If he leans back on

“Do you know about ‘The Candy Bar’?” Steed wants to know.

It’s a video that new inmates watch as part of orientation at the Lexington Assessment and Reception Center, now,” Steed says, leaning back to look at the prison gate again.

It could be tomorrow or next week or even next month, but someday Steed will leave through that gate—not with an angel, but with an armed escort.

He won’t know where he’s going until he’s on the way, but he could spend the rest of his sentence in a drug- and alcohol- treatment program.

Or he could wind up in minimum security, with at least some degree of freedom.

Or he could go to maximum security, where even a candy bar would seem like a threat.

“There goes a van right now,” Steed says, still leaning against the wall to see the gate. “I wonder where it’s going.”

‘Ingenious’

He wakes up every morning and, in the fog of sleep, expects to reach out and touch his wife. For a moment, he thinks he’s going to open his eyes and see her face gazing back at him.

He forgets that she ever left him, that he ever started drinking again, that he ever got pulled over for driving under the influence.

So it’s a bitter surprise when his eyes come to focus on a gray concrete wall with graffiti scrawled next to his pillow. A black circle surrounds a cross with the letters “AC.”

“Instead of waking up with a woman, I wake up with the Aryan Circle,” Steed says.

Gang symbols decorate a lot of cells at Lexington.

“This can’t be happening to me,” he says. “This isn’t my life. This isn’t who I am.”

The rest of the wall looks like a math professor’s chalkboard, cluttered with complex equations where previous inmates have “calculated time.” Factoring in good behavior, overcrowding and parole guidelines, a prison calendar becomes algebraic, and nobody has a short answer for “How long until you get out?”

Steed hasn’t written on the wall, but with a three-year sentence, he hopes to be out in less than 12 months.

Waking up in a cell that measures 10 feet by 8, Steed barely has room to stretch out on the floor to do his morning push-ups. Then he can use the “desk chair” — really just a small metal stool bolted to the floor in front of the desk — as a kind of stair-stepper machine.

When he runs out of breath, the stainless- steel toilet doubles as a sink for washing up and a water fountain for taking a drink.

“It’s ingenious, really,” Steed says, demonstrating how to turn on the faucet. From the sink on top, water drains into a tank, where it waits to be used for flushing the toilet bowl.

“And watch this thing flush,” he says, pulling a lever to trigger a mighty torrent of water. “You could put a bowling ball down that thing.”

During his time at the Tulsa Jail, before coming to Lexington, Steed learned how to make a “sheetline,” which most inmates pronounce with a short “i” instead of “ee.”

It means stringing a bed sheet from wall to wall in front of the toilet to preserve some privacy. Although Steed doesn’t have a cellmate here — a rare luxury at Lexington, where the cell blocks almost always stay at maximum capacity — he still has to worry about the windows.

One overlooks an exercise yard, and a smaller one lets a guard peek through the door.

“You’re not supposed to do it,” Steed says. The rule book forbids it. “But you have to. You just have to.”

‘Pressure’

Growing up in rural Osage County, Steed was 14 when he stole a six-pack from his mother and took it down to the creek for an overnight camping trip.

“I didn’t like it,” he remembers. “And I promised myself that I’d never be an alcoholic.”

As a boy, he watched his mother drink and, although Steed won’t talk much about it, the experience obviously scarred him.

“I never wanted to be like her. Never.”

About a year later, he left his mother’s house to live with his father in Tulsa, where he enrolled at Edison High School.

Used to his mother’s strict rules, where he had to come straight home after school and rarely invited friends over, Steed wasn’t sure what to do with his newfound freedom.

“My dad didn’t really care what I did. I mean, it’s not that he didn’t care. He just thought that I needed to make my own mistakes. He wasn’t trying to protect me from every little thing.”

A loner when he lived with his mother, Steed made a lot of friends in Tulsa. One night in somebody’s bedroom — it might have been his own house; Steed doesn’t exactly remember — his friends wanted to drink.

“It was peer pressure, just like an afterschool special. It really was,” he says. “It was like, ‘Hey, come on. Everybody’s doing it.’ They were my friends, and I wanted them to like me.”

Steed opened a beer, and this time, he didn’t stop drinking until he passed out.

The thing is, he liked it. He liked it a lot.

Not the taste — that you can get used to. But being drunk.

“I was probably drinking again the very next night,” he says. “I just liked the way it felt. And I think there’s something genetic; I really do. Some people, when they start drinking, they just can’t stop, and I’m one of those people.”

Now, after 15 years of on-again, offagain drinking and three DUIs, Steed might finally get the help he needs. If he can talk his case manager into it, he hopes to be sent to Vinita, where the Department of Corrections has one of the most respected drug- and alcohol-treatment programs in the state.

“I have a disease,” he admits. “I’m not saying what I did wasn’t my fault. I belong here. I’ve done this to myself. But I need help. I need treatment.”

‘Lucky’

Until mid-afternoon, Lexington stays as quiet as a library — only the occasional guard’s footstep or a clanking door comes echoing through the cell block.

Steed reads the Bible for a while, then he works on a letter to his grandfather, rambling for several pages before running out of things to say.

Day after day, for hours at a time, he will do nothing but sit on the lower bunk and gaze out the window, watching birds attack insects in the grass, following clouds as they morph into different shapes, counting cars as they drive down the highway.

The guards won’t allow televisions or radios in the cells. Other than his Bible, Steed doesn’t even have a book or a magazine to interrupt the monotony. Nothing is allowed into the cell unless it comes in an 8ô-by-11 manila envelope from the Legal Department, which so far has offered Steed a notepad with pencils and a copy of the Lexington rule book, which he’s virtually memorized from reading it 10 times a day.

The window provides the only distraction, and that makes the window absolutely fascinating. Steed will notice even the smallest change in the weather. He’ll remember every obscure type of bug that crawls across the sheer glass. And he’ll recognize all the faces that walk back and forth from the next cell block.

With the front gate in view if he strains to look from the right angle, no vehicle comes or goes from Lexington without Steed noticing. Some inmates might relish having a cell to themselves, with the top bunk left empty. But not him.

“I just want somebody to talk to,” he complains, fidgeting nervously with the seam at the bottom of his orange shirt. “I don’t care if he’s a nut. He could be an ax murderer — at least he’d be interesting.”

Never the kind of guy to loaf around, Steed used to work two jobs most of the time — not so much for the money, but just to stay busy.

Now he spends a lot of time trying to sleep. Or he paces back and forth. Writes another letter. Gazes out the window. Turns on the sink faucet just to hear the water running. Then sits down to read the Bible again.

Acts has become a favorite, although Matthew and Luke seem interesting. Revelation doesn’t make sense, and the Old Testament grows tedious.

“So-and-so beget so-and-so,” Steed says. “Even in here I’m not bored enough to read that.”

One afternoon, a fruit fly provided an hour of entertainment as it flew around the cell, until it disappeared into an air vent and never came back. The window offers the only consistently reliable source of amusement, and Steed never stays away from it for long.

As dusk settles in, the window will give him the first glimpse of dinner as trustees come down the sidewalk with a wheeled cart.

“Oh, man. The food,” Steed sounds excited.

“You wouldn’t believe the food in here.”

A typical dinner might include chickenfried steak with mashed potatoes and cream gravy, served with sweet bread and double-layer chocolate cake for dessert, all courtesy of the prison’s culinary arts school for inmates.

“When I get out of here, that’s the only thing I’m going to miss,” Steed says.

“People who aren’t in prison should be lucky enough to eat like this.”

‘Staring’

Lexington grows louder after dark, with the inmates yelling through the closed doors, faces pressed against the small windows that look out into the cell block.

The muffled words echo against the concrete walls, everyone screaming at once until the voices swirl into an unintelligible clamor.

“You know the old Charlie Brown cartoons?” Steed explains. “It’s like when the teacher was talking and all you heard was ‘wha-wha, wha-wha-wha.’ It doesn’t even sound like English.”

The other inmates apparently know the language, because the conversation will go on for hours. But Steed will catch only a few random phrases, most of them unprintable.

Between 8 and 9 o’clock, a guard will open Steed’s door to let him walk across the cell block to the showers. With 20 cells in this “quad,” and two inmates in most cells, the guards will open only a few doors at a time to avoid a traffic jam in the bathroom. But the open stall has only two shower heads, so Steed will still have to wait in front of the sinks for his turn.

Nudity doesn’t faze him anymore.

“It’s like the old high school locker room,” he shrugs. “The first couple of times, you think everybody’s staring at you. But then you’re like, ‘Get over it.’ You just mind your own business and get out as fast as you can.”

If the shower doesn’t take too long, he might have time to step into the exercise pen, a concrete rectangle about four times bigger than his cell, empty except for a picnic table. A landscaper by profession, Steed dreams about grass, but there’s none to be found.

“When I get out of here,” he says, a phrase that seems to be starting more and more of his sentences, “I’m going to roll around in it. Smell it. Taste it. Cover myself in it.”

Back inside his cell, the lights will go dim at 11:30 but not go completely dark.

Standing on the desk stool, Steed can reach the cell’s light bulb to unscrew it, breaking a rule but allowing him to lie down without the glare.

Periodically through the night, guards will come to the door for bed checks. The nicer ones will shine a flashlight off the ceiling, using the reflected light to make sure everyone is still present and accounted for. Others will shine the flashlight directly in Steed’s face.

But it doesn’t matter much, because he probably won’t be asleep anyway. He’ll spend most of the night gazing out the window, straining to see the front gate, watching the overnight traffic. When will it be his turn to leave Lexington in one of those white Chevrolet vans?

And where will it take him?

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

Lawmaker seeks drug programs

When state Sen. Richard Lerblance recommends adding thousands of new beds at Oklahoma prisons, he finds an enthusiastic audience at the Legislature. But when he recommends using many of those beds for drugand alcohol-treatment programs, the Senate chamber falls quiet.

“Nobody wants to touch that issue,” says Lerblance, a Democrat from Hartshorne. “They’re afraid of being seen as soft on crime. Well, I say, ‘Hogwash!’ ”

A past chairman of the Oklahoma Sentencing Commission, Lerblance made statewide news this fall when he proposed a $309 million bond issue to add 3,818 beds to the prison system.

“It’s a matter of necessity,” he says, noting that his proposal has gained broad support and the Legislature will likely vote on it next year. “The prisons are overcrowded and getting more overcrowded, so we have to do something.”

A related proposal, however, has quietly disappeared into a legislative committee, where it appears to be “dormant, if not dead,” Lerblance says.

Senate Bill 635 aimed to provide “treatment without delay” to drug and alcohol offenders as soon as they enter Oklahoma prisons, but it met with little support, he says.

Drug- and alcohol-related offenders by far make up the biggest chunk of the state’s prison population — more than 35 percent.

And more than half of all inmates, regardless of what crime they were sentenced for, are diagnosed with a “moderate to severe” drug or alcohol addiction when they first go to prison.

But of the inmates who are diagnosed with an addiction, about half will be released without receiving any treatment. Prison officials say they simply don’t have enough funds to offer treatment to all of them.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to house these people for a year or two and then open the door and kick them out,” Lerblance says. “It won’t be long before most of them are right back inside.”

Officials haven’t released details, but the Oklahoma Sentencing Commission is working on several recommendations to increase the availability of treatment.

Lerblance plans to bring those recommendations to the Legislature next year, but he doesn’t sound optimistic about the reception those ideas will have.

“Everybody wants to be tough on crime, but being tough means being smart, too,” he says. “Drugs are a big problem for the prison system—a big problem—and ignoring it or sweeping it under the rug won’t make the problem go away.”

Whether Lerblance receives much support in the Legislature or not, he’ll find willing allies at the Department of Corrections.

Prison officials often mention the “Broken Window Theory” to support the idea of treating an inmate’s addictions — and treating them after the first offense, instead of waiting for multiple offenses.

The theory dates from the 1940s, when sociologists observed — with a touch of hyperbole —that just one broken window can start to turn a nice neighborhood into a slum. In other words: If left unfixed, a small problem can turn into a big one.

“Intercede the first time that a kid breaks a window,” says Mary Smith, director of Treatment and Rehabilitative Services for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, “and that kid will never get to the point where he’s robbing houses and killing people.”

In the case of drug users and drunken drivers, the “broken window” is the first offense, Smith says. Force the defendant into treatment then, and the state will likely avoid repeat offenses that lead to prison, she says.

“Statistically, without treatment you can expect this person to keep committing and recommiting the same offense until he is finally put through treatment. Then, after treatment, the statistics swing the other way — you can expect not to see this person in jail again.”

With that in mind, Smith has a simple question: “Why not save time and money and go straight to treatment the first time?”