What Everyone Should Know about Prison Life: A closed Society Where There are No Video Cameras

By Hassan Kariem

Prison is a closed society, and even the news media has an extremely difficult time getting inside to interview prisoners. Special permission is needed from the warden, which is normally denied. This book does not criticize prisons. It gives the reader a view of prison life in a way not seen or heard. It is full of true stories, true events, and true situations.

Mama, I wish I would have been a better son.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662454066

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What Everyone Should Know about Prison Life

A closed Society Where There are No Video Cameras

Hassan Kariem

Copyright © 2021 Hassan Kariem

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-6624-5403-5 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-5406-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Back in the Day

UCLA Shoot-Out

Apparent Clean Getaway

To the Youth

Bigger Fish to Fry

An Odyssey into the Unknown

On the Run

My Resurrection

Indeterminate Time

Foreword

Every person (adult), male or female, who has never gone to prison has an innate fear of prison, and they should. Any person who has never gone to prison and says they have no fear of going to prison is lying. In reality, it’s a fear of the unknown, and for some, it’s a petrified fear. If a person is unfortunate enough to go to prison when the prison bus pulls up in front of the prison, they will sit on the bus wondering, will they leave alive?

The first time I went to the county jail, on my way to prison, there was a guy in the cell with me who I had gone to high school with. He was also on his way to prison. He had so much fear of going to prison. He said to me, I am going to go to a mental institution. I tried to talk him out of it, but his fear was overpowering.

To get to a mental institution, he cleaned the toilet as clean as he could and put a glob of peanut butter in it. He sat on the floor next to the toilet, waiting for a deputy sheriff to walk by, taking a head count. At the moment the deputy looked into the cell, he reached in the toilet, got the glob of peanut butter, and put it in his mouth. Needless to say, he went to a mental institution.

This work is not for the faint of heart. It is for anyone seeking the raw truth!

CHAPTER 1

Back in the Day

Iwas born on January 4, 1945, in White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, California. I came into this world, and waiting for me was my mother, my father, and my sister.

I was born into what would have at the time been considered a prosperous Black family on the east side of the city. We were buying the three-bedroom home that we lived in, and we had a small one-bedroom house in our backyard that we rented out.

My father worked for Southern Pacific Railroad as a cook. He was an alcoholic and a gambler. Because of him being an alcoholic and a gambler, life for my mother with him was not peaceful and serene.

My father was killed when I was two years old. I know very little about him. I do know the circumstances of his death. He went to this little house in our backyard and knocked on the door in an attempt to collect overdue rent monies. The man of this little family refused to open the door. My father kicked the door in, and the man shot him in the face with a shotgun.

My mother later remarried. He was a plumber, carpenter, and an electrician. He raped my sister from the time she was nine years old until she was twelve, something I had no knowledge of until I was an adult. He would beat my mother, and even though I was a child, he would beat me as if I were a grown man. He was an alcoholic who drank Old Crow Whiskey. When I would see him drinking that Old Crow, I knew he was about to turn into a monster. He taught me how to do construction work and to read blueprints for the construction of houses at a very early age.

When I was nine years old, our family took a summer vacation to Texas to visit my grandmother and other relatives on my mother’s side of the family. The year was 1954. It was my very first experience with racism. I remember that we stopped at a highway restaurant in Texas, and on our way in, a woman came out to meet us and said, You all will have to go around to the back.

As I started for the back, my stepfather grabbed me by the back of my collar and said, Come on, let’s go.

I said, She said for us to go to the back.

He looked at me with fire in his eyes and said again, Let’s go.

When we got back in the car and took off, he explained to me that they did not feel that we were good enough to come through the front door and that they wanted Colored people to come through the back door. This was something that I had never heard of before, and it made me very angry. It was a strange kind of anger.

Shortly thereafter, we stopped at a gas station. I was sent to the soda machine to get us cold drinks. As I started back to the car, a very tall and heavy, what would be termed today Red Neck, said to me in a deep southern accent, Y’all from California, huh?

I said yes. He said the same thing again. I said yes. The third time that he repeated himself, I just walked away. When I got back in the car, I said, That man must be crazy. He kept asking me the same thing.

When I repeated his words, my stepfather said, He wanted you to say, ‘Yah, sa.’

I asked, Why?

He said, White folks think they are better than Colored folks.

Once again, my anger began to rise.

We stayed at my grandmother’s home in Marshall, Texas. While there, I met a first cousin by the name of Jessie. We were both nine years old. One day, Jessie and I took off for a few miles walk to the general store to buy some candy. We walked down a dirt road with tall trees on both sides, like a forest. When we got to this place called Jonesville, there was a general store, a post office, and a gas station. When we walked into the store, an old White man said to me, Boy, you ain’t from round here, is ya?

And now, knowing that he wanted me to say, No, sa, I said, Nope.

With anger, he asked me again, and again, I said, Nope. He told me with extreme anger and rage to get out of the store. I left, and my cousin came out a while later with the candy.

About halfway back to my grandmother’s house, a White man in a car pulled up beside us and stopped. He looked directly at me and asked something about a train. I told him we hadn’t seen a train. He gave me a hard look and drove off. Decades later, when I thought about that incident, I got the feeling that he had come to do me harm. But by the grace and mercy of Allah, with the innocence of my reply and my demeanor, I was saved.

One year later, on August 28, 1955, a fourteen-year-old Black boy by the name of Emmett Till was murdered so viciously that it drew worldwide attention. Young Emmett was dragged from his great uncle’s cabin near Money, Mississippi, by two White men. Emmett was beaten senseless, shot in the head, weighted down, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. His offense? Allegedly whistling at a White woman. His body was so horribly disfigured from the severe beating, and from the water, he looked like a monster. I saw the photo in a Jet Magazine when I was ten years old, and that photo is still imprinted in my mind to this very day. These photos were available because Emmett’s mother insisted on a public funeral and an open coffin.

I had come from California to Texas in the summer of 1954 at the age of six—gone to a general store with a cousin to buy candy and could have lost my life for no other reason than raw racism. Emmett had come from Chicago in 1955 to visit relatives in Mississippi. He and some cousins had gone to a store to buy candy. The store owner’s wife claimed that Emmett whistled at her when the two were alone in the store.

When my cousin and I got back to my grandmother’s house, someone had called, saying for me not to come back to Jonesville again and that it would be best if I got out of Texas. We left that night under cover of darkness, going to Louisiana to visit other relatives.

I had an enjoyable vacation, meeting relatives I had never seen before, but by the time we got back to Los Angeles, I had gotten a lesson in racism that created ominous turbulence in my soul of what the world was really like. As prior to this experience, I had been sheltered from racism by my mother and stepfather. They had never said anything to me about it until our vacation. I came up in an all-Black neighborhood and went to an all-Black school and did not have a clue. That is the America I grew up in back in the day.

My mother taught me a lot of sound values that I failed to embrace as a young man. I left home and went into the army at the age of sixteen under a strange set of circumstances. At the age of fifteen, I would go to Exposition Park to play football. Exposition Park is the park that the LA Coliseum sets in. At this time, there was a National Guard Armory there. I looked at the men in uniform, the military vehicles, and the weapons with such a recurring fantasy to be a part of it all that one day I went over and told the recruiting officer that I wanted to join. When he asked how old was I, I asked how old do I have to be. He said seventeen with a parent’s consent. And although I was fifteen, I told him that I was seventeen. He gave me some papers for Mom to fill out.

She and my stepfather had been divorced for a few years at this time. When I took the papers to her to fill out and sign, she said no! But after a couple of weeks of begging, she finally filled out and signed the papers. She told me that the responsibility was on my shoulders.

I attended high school as well as my National Guard meetings. In the summer of 1960, I attended a National Guard, a two-week training camp. Very few of my high school friends knew that I was in the National Guard.

One day in April of 1961, I arrived home from school and received a phone call from my first sergeant. He informed me that my year was up and that I had to go into the regular Army for six months active duty. (The policy of the guard at that time was that a person had one year from the date they joined to go do six months in the regular Army.) I told him that when I joined the guard, I was fifteen years old. I was now sixteen, and I would probably get a scholarship playing football, and therefore, I could not go. The first sergeant put the captain on the phone, who said that if I did not go into the regular Army, they would get my mother for perjury. At the time, I didn’t know what perjury was, but it sounded like it was as serious as murder. I wasn’t going to let them do anything to mom, and I told him that I would go.

I went to school the next day and told my football coach that I had to go to the Army. He started laughing. I explained that if I didn’t go, they would get my mother for perjury. I didn’t think to ask him what was perjury.

During my first week in the Army at Fort Ord, California, I was miserable. I was home sick. I missed my girlfriend (Leatruce). I didn’t know if I would ever play football again. I just wanted to tell somebody, Hey, I am only sixteen!

In every aspect of my training, I tried to be the best soldier in my company, and in certain aspects of my training, I was the best. I counted each day. I never drank any of the 3.2 beer served at the PX. I didn’t smoke cigarettes. I didn’t gamble or even think about another woman other than my sixteen-year-old girlfriend. I saved all my money and just looked forward to going back home and getting back in school. When I was down to my last two weeks, I was called to our headquarters building and told that my National Guard Unit, the 161st Ordnance Company, had been activated to active duty by President John F. Kennedy because of the Berlin Crisis. I was told that I had a ten-day furlough and that I was to report to Fort Lewis, Washington, at the end of the ten days. Needless to say, I was devastated. I felt like the whole world was against me. It seemed like regardless of how hard I tried to control my life, circumstances and events would win out over my plans. This was, to me, the final crushing blow to my dream of going back to high school and getting a scholarship to play football in college and hopefully the pros. I went home on a ten-day furlough and told my family, girlfriend, and friends what had happened. It was a sad ten-day furlough for me.

When I arrived at Fort Lewis, I wondered would I go fight, kill, and maybe die at the age of sixteen in a place called Berlin, a place that I had never heard of.

All during my stay in the military up until this point, I had not let anyone influence my thinking because I had a goal that I was trying to achieve. Now all of a sudden, I didn’t have a goal. I had nothing to strive for. I wanted to turn the clock back to the day that I joined the Guard at fifteen years old. I was just plain feeling sorry for myself.

I was now compelled to really play the part of an adult, and it seemed that all the guys in my unit either drank alcohol, dropped pills, smoked weed, gambled, and chased women. Within a few months, I was doing all of the above. Obviously, I ran with the wrong crowd, but it was the only crowd in town for a young Black underage soldier in the US Army in 1961 and ’62 with the rank of private and a $64 a month salary.

The three things that stand out the most from my military experiences are the following:

One night, another guy in my unit and I were on our way to the town of Tacoma to take a couple of ladies to Seattle to see a James Brown concert. We decided to stop by the None Commissioned Officers Club on the base and check out some of the ladies there first.

We spent about an hour there, and we were late for our dates. We were in his car. I didn’t have one. When we walked out of the club into the parking lot, he said, I am going to call and let them know we are on our way. They both lived in the same house in Tacoma. He went to the phone booth, and I started walking to the car. Just before reaching the car, I heard someone behind me say, Let’s get him. He’s by himself. I turned around and saw five White guys. I stepped to the front of a parked car with my back to it so that I would only have to concern myself with 180 degrees, and no one could get to me from my back. Just before the combat would commence, my partner, who had observed what was taking place, ran from the phone booth, hollering with a gun in his hand. When they saw the gun, they all froze. My partner said to me, Whip all of them! Anybody fight back, I am going to shoot him. I had never taken advantage of anyone in a fight, and it just wasn’t in me. And because I had felt no fear at any time during the ordeal, I told my partner, Let them go. He did.

Fort Lewis was a very large base, and as we drove about a mile to get to the exit leading to the main highway, we saw red lights blinking at the exit. Military police (MP) were there. My first thought was that there had been an accident. We stopped as MP vehicles had the ramp blocked off. With weapons drawn, they approached in loud panicky voices for us to exit our vehicle with hands in the air. We complied. They ordered us to lay flat on the pavement, facedown. One MP pressed a sawed-off shotgun on my temple and said, Just breathe too hard, nigger, and I’ll pull the trigger.

Another one pressed a 45-caliber pistol on the back of my head and said, This forty-five will blow a big hole in the back of this nigger’s head. I remember lying there, thinking, In a war situation, I may have risked my life to save either one of these guys, and for what?

They handcuffed us and took us to the MP station. When we walked in, all five of the guys who started this whole thing were there. They lied and said that my partner held a gun on them while I whipped them, and yet there was not a mark on anyone of them—no blood, no torn clothing, nothing, no marks on my fist, nothing. I had not known that my buddy even owned a gun, but it did come in handy.

He and I were given a summary court-martial, which is the lowest form of a court-martial, and it does not prevent one from getting an honorable discharge. However, I was a private first class, meaning I had one stripe on my uniforms. They took my one stripe, confined me to the base for thirty days, and forfeited nearly all my little pay for a month. And I had done absolutely nothing to deserve the punishment I received. In fact, I said to the lieutenant colonel conducting the court-martial, Colonel, sir, you know this didn’t happen the way they said it did.

He looked me in my eyes and said, It probably didn’t, but there is nothing I can do about it. When I heard those words, I knew I could not and would not put my heart into any aspect of the military again.

Another incident that stands out in my memory. I was walking down the street at Fort Lewis, and as I was passing Fourth Division Headquarters, a lieutenant general’s (three-star) sedan pulled up in front of the building. The general was in the back seat. I bent down to get a look at the general, and he was looking at me directly in my face. The normal and natural thing for me to do was pop him a salute. But because I was still nursing my feelings from what the MPs had done, I refused to salute him, and I continued my walk. He got out of his sedan and hollered, Hey, soldier, come here. I stopped, turned around, and just stared at him. He started trotting toward me, and my thought was, His fat ass can’t catch me. And I took off running, knowing that I could go to the stockade (jail) for such a bold yet dumb thing. I ran around a corner, cut across a motor pool, and came down a roadway to the back entrance of our barrack. I came into the barrack, walking slowly as I passed the first sergeant’s desk. He paid no attention to me as I walked up