“What is the crime of robbing a bank compared to the crime of founding one?” —Bertolt Brecht
Sean calls to tell me he’s writing a cookbook, “a prison cookbook,” he says, as though I need clarification. It’s based on the meals he surreptitiously makes in his cell. He lays out his Deep Blue Sea Menu, detailing the ingredients of his favorite dish—fried seafood tortilla, a concoction of crushed ramen noodles, refried beans, canned mackerel, and jalapeño cheese, all of which he spreads onto a corn tortilla. “The trick to frying it,” he says, “is to place it inside a vending-machine potato chip bag. Wrap the bag in newspaper. Make sure none of it is exposed. Then microwave it for two minutes. Fries right up.” I have my doubts about this method. But since I don’t know jack about the physics of microwaves or the secrets of prison life, I take his word for it.
“The seafood tortilla pairs well with convict apple wine,” Sean says. I chuckle at his use of fine-dining discourse. He’s an exceptionally intelligent but often troubled man in his mid-thirties, who, having grown up in residential treatment facilities and then spent much of his adult life in prison, has had to teach himself from inside the institution nearly everything about life outside of it. Once incapable of focusing his powerful mind, he’s now a voracious reader. I imagine him coming across the word “pairs” in a cookbook, perhaps read in preparation for his own, though he sometimes talks about those brief moments spent outside the prison walls in which he hustled his way into feigned social respectability.
He pauses. I wonder if he’s worried about prison administrators listening to our conversation. His deep, sand-papered voice drops an octave. “I’ve never made this,” he says. “I’ve only seen others do it.” I picture him winking at me through his thick, DOC glasses, his lively blue eyes conveying the real story. “You need a shit ton of apples, so you’ve got to sneak them out of chow, stash them, and hope they don’t rot. Either that or barter for them. You also need thirty-two of the two-ounce apple juice drinks. Those you can get as an advanced partial payment for some of the wine. Cons front you the juice and you knock a few bucks off the price when it’s ready.” He tells me that the hardest part, aside from allowing the hooch to ferment in a plastic trash bag, is finding sugar. Most Virginia prisons don’t serve granular sugar. “You’ve got to use candy, hard candy, fireballs, if you want a little kick,” he says. “Personally, I prefer Jolly Ranchers.” I try to imagine the syrupy sweet taste. Mad Dog 20/20 comes to mind. “If you can find a way to burp the bag twice a day without getting caught,” he says, “you’ll have your wine in about two weeks.”
He’s in the planning stages of the book and wants some editorial advice, especially around aesthetics and formatting. I’m excited about the chance to work with him. But I’ve got to resist coming off like an English professor—don’t want to shut down his creativity with formal concerns. He asks about slang. Should he use it to spice the book up with authentic flavor? Best to write in his own voice, I tell him. “Don’t force it,” I say. “When the slang comes, let it rip. Otherwise, stay the course.”
I ask him about his experiences making these meals. He recounts times when a dish didn’t turn out or he had to substitute ingredients because he couldn’t cop an onion or carrot from chow. Tells me about a blueberry pie he whipped up that was so delicious it transported him outside the prison walls. Should he include the stories in the book? “Yes,” I say. “Yes. There’s your authentic flavor. Reveals your creative process, its failures and rewards.” Along those lines, I suggest a chapter titled “How to Make Prison Meals at Home.” Might give the book a shared experiential quality, a way to bridge the gap between the incarcerated and their families.
It’s only then that I make the connection.
When Sean was a boy, I pulled together meals similar to those on his menu. After the kids’ mother had split for good, I moved him and his sisters from Philadelphia to Boston to get a fresh start. I was getting clean from a savage addiction, driving a forklift, and counting pennies at the end of the month. We lived close to the bone in a cramped three-bedroom Southie walkup. Edison’s twin salmon-colored smokestacks chugged out toxic fumes a few hundred feet from our home. Material dangers lurked everywhere. If my uninsured shitbox broke down or the babysitter quit, I’d lose my job. If one of the kids got sick and required medical attention, I’d come up short on the rent. There were always hard choices: winter clothes or adequate heat. But I learned to cut coupons and shuffle through the grocery store’s dispiriting discount aisles searching for the best deals. On a monthly grocery allowance I now sometimes spend in a day, I created all kinds of tasty dishes, relying on boxed starter kits and the cheapest cuts of meat, a dash of hot sauce from the packets I’d swipe at Taco Bell. Sometimes I’d add egg noodles and corn starch to canned soup to make stew. I flavored mounds of white rice with boiled frozen vegetables and pan-fried Spam that I’d sauté in a beef bouillon and garlic salt sauce.
Trailer Park Chicken was the kids’ favorite—thin fried cutlets breaded in pancake batter that I served with store-brand mac and cheese. I’d sprinkle in imitation bacon bits to give the meal a crunchy bite. I made it once a month during the fall and winter. The kids would rush into the kitchen, sit at their places, and bang their fists on the table like hungry orphans in some nineteenth-century British novel. I’d fork over the cutlets and slap great gobs of mac and cheese onto their plates. As they greedily devoured their food, the joy on their faces struck a parental chord in me I didn’t know existed. I’d always loved them. But until I alone had to feed them, I’d never felt fully responsible for their lives. Watching them fill their bellies, the single-mindedness of it, momentarily at peace with themselves and one another, perhaps forgetting about their mother and the new city to which I’d dragged them, where snotty brats with grating, nasally accents teased them about how they called the national bird a “bald iggle” and drank “wooder” from the tap, sparked in me a commitment to live better for them.
I had no idea what I was doing. Having grown up without a father, I didn’t know how to be one. But I knew what hunger felt like. It seemed to me that filling my kids’ bellies was a good place to start.
I ask Sean if he remembers those meals. He says he does but claims that until this very moment he hadn’t realized he’d been making versions of them in prison. “I guess it’s a family tradition,” he says. “You make do but make it your own, too.”
We laugh at his silly rhyme. It is deep, genuine laughter, conceding some common ground.
“Yeah,” I say. “Never mind basic survival. Those days felt like a challenge, some existential competition I was determined to win even if I didn’t know the rules.”
“Guess you figured it out,” Sean says. “Gonna need your playbook once I get out of here.”
“No playbook,” I say. “Luck. And a lot of help.”
“I don’t think so,” he says. “If you could do it, kids climbing all over you, my nonsense, I can do it, too. I’m going to follow your lead.”
Nonsense, he calls it. We both have a way of avoiding the pain of those days.
Sean was eight when he began experiencing violent psychotic breaks and inexplicable fits of rage. In school, he beat the hell out of classmates. I’d sit with teachers and school administrators, listening to their concerns, while I remained silent about the night he tried to escape out of his bedroom window, dangling forty feet above the sidewalk as I held onto him. The day he fired baseballs through our walls, they blistered just above my head. He began to lie and steal. To remain in school, he required a special education teacher, an aide, and a counselor. He tortured them. When he tried to light a girl’s sweater on fire, I argued for temporary residential treatment to keep him and others safe and because I needed a break.
But I didn’t know what I was asking. Once caught in the system, he would spend the latter part of his childhood and most of his adolescence in one crumbling, underfunded facility after the next, where well-meaning but overwhelmed therapists learned that Sean was much better at manipulating them than they were at treating his illness. The school district paid for all it. None of it taught him anything about living outside of confinement. On the contrary, it habituated him to what he calls a life of “high custody.”
We talk twice a week, sometimes more when he’s struggling with the loneliness and hardships of prison life. Each call lasts twenty minutes and costs about two dollars. I should be grateful. It’s a reasonable price, considering that other telecommunication companies charge up to twenty-five dollars per call. More to the point, the phone provides us with a lifeline. He’s in Virginia and I’m in Boston. With a distance between us that is more than geographic, it has allowed us to rebuild a relationship long shaped by mutual resentments and prolonged silences. We’ve worked through more shared emotional trauma in the last two years than in the previous twenty-five. But every aspect of our weekly communication costs something. Phone calls, emails, video visits—each requires a bank or credit card payment, the strengthening bond with my son determined by my available cash or credit. It’s not that I can’t swing it. The days of feeding my kids Fluffernutters on bleached bread belong to a seemingly different life, before college and graduate school and a university teaching career. It’s just a reminder of the extent to which even our most intimate experiences result in some corporate fuck’s profit.
In the background, I hear a riot of voices, shouts of indignation occasionally rising above the din. I imagine men in starchy denim jeans and blue work shirts pacing the pod, loudly talking shit, stealthy gang activity all about, the Crips, the Bloods, the Aryans, while others play cards or chess or dominoes at steel tables bolted to the shiny concrete floor. All eyes suspicious and watching for trouble. Sean stands at the phone with his back to the wall. At six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-forty pounds, ripped and heavily inked, a man with no gang affiliation and therefore no protection, he has on a few occasions drawn the attention of young bangers trying to prove themselves.
I remember him as a scrappy little kid, a bit of a happy hellraiser who enjoyed life until a bicycle accident caused a serious head injury that I’m convinced led to the psychotic violence. His mother and I were separated at the time. He lived with her in a rural part of Pennsylvania that lacked good emergency medical services. No neurosurgeon on call. Time wasted to find one. It’s useless to entertain the “what if?” But it nags at me, anyway.
Looking outside at the tree-lined street on which I live, a bright autumn day, watching my neighbor toss the football with his teenage son, I ask Sean if he’s worried about catching a charge. If he’s caught with contraband from the kitchen, like the green pepper he needs for his Playoff Pizza Bowl, he’ll get bumped to a higher security level and transferred to a rougher prison. After serving part of his sentence in isolation at Red Onion Penitentiary, one of the most notorious supermaxes in the U.S., along with a stint at Wallens Ridge, Red Onion’s evil twin, and several stays at the Marion Correc-tional Treatment Center, he’s finally settled into a medium-security prison where he’s earned some privileges. At Greensville he has a job, goes to programs, and prepares himself for his eventual release. Not that he’s going anywhere any time soon. He’s doing a twenty-year bid for multiple bank robberies. These weren’t Hollywood-type heists, where men in pinstriped suits and Richard Nixon masks stormed through glass doors with machine guns blazing, pistol whipping security guards and forcing people to the floor. Sean was alone and didn’t carry a firearm. He simply passed a note to tellers and walked out with a small bag of bills. Now, down for ten-and-a-half, he’s looking at seven more years if he maintains his good time. Provided he stays out of trouble and holds a job—cutting hair for forty-five cents an hour—he’ll receive a sentence reduction of twelve-and-a-half percent. If all goes well, there’s a chance he’ll come home while I still have the energy to help him find his way.
With so much on the line, I tell him he’s got to tread carefully, keep his cooking on the DL, as though I need to remind him of his time in isolation, twenty-three hours a day in an eight-by-ten cell with nothing to do but think about the mess he’d made of his life; after months of that, he took a razor blade to his throat. Perhaps I’m being selfish. I want to protect him in order to protect myself. But he just laughs playfully at my naïve concern and tells me not to sweat it. “It’s common practice if you’ve got the means,” he says, “which, thanks to you, I do.”
I send Sean cash twice a month. After the prison takes its cut, it goes into a credited commissary account from which he can draw to purchase goods. Virginia provides inmates only minimal nutrition and comfort. But it’s reluctant to divest them of their role as consumers in the prison industrial complex. Every two weeks Sean goes shopping at “the Canteen.” A variety store run by a private company that works in partnership with the state, it sells groceries, toiletries, clothing, and electronic products. He buys new clothes when he needs them. When he first got to Greensville, he bought a television that he watches in his cell. On his tablet, he listens to music and sends and receives emails. Books line a shelf next to his bunk. But it’s the canned and bagged food from which he creates his original recipes that accounts for most of his spending. With only a 1700-calorie-a-day diet provided by the prison, the extra food is essential for a guy who regularly hits the weight pile.
His appreciation for this money far outweighs the expense of it. I can’t grasp its full significance. But I understand that it constitutes the difference between living as a human being and existing as a penned animal. Cooking allows him to find dignity and self-worth in a depraved and dehumanizing place. In an environment where he’s told when to “shit, shower, and shave,” his nearly every move dictated by someone else, what he eats and when he eats it serve as a source of agency. “I can sometimes watch TV and pretend I’m not stuck in here,” he says. “But then a Papa John’s commercial comes on and I feel like shit. It helps that I can buy my own food and invent a dish I enjoy. Gives me a sense of the outside and the belief that there’s one thing I can control.” That control, he tells me, forges his only act of quiet defiance. “The correction officers don’t make scratch working here,” he says. “Most of them drag their sorry asses home to spaghetti and Ragú. I take pleasure in knowing that I’m eating better than they are, despite the disgusting crap they try to shove down my throat.”
Officially, Virginia’s DOC forbids inmates from bartering commissary goods or creating forms of currency or labor to purchase them. But unless drugs or weapons are involved, correction officers rarely enforce this policy. As a result, the commissary system gives rise to a thriving prison-population economy. “It’s not that much different from the outside,” Sean says. He pauses. I can sense him searching for the right words, his vast prison experience in communion with an insatiable intellectual curiosity that has led him to educate himself. “Demand,” he says, finally. “They create it. It would be one thing if they let us suffer. But once you get that menu and see all those goodies —canned meats and snacks and coffee, soap and shampoo, underwear and socks and sneakers, and all the rest—you want it. And when you see other people living better than you, well, then you’ve got to figure out how to get it.” But because the cost of these goods bears no specific economic relation to prison labor wages, those who receive money from family or provide some sort of underground service like tattooing or engage in even more illicit activities live “prison rich.” In contrast, the “prison poor” are inmates who have no jobs and no money coming from home. “Usually,” Sean says, “they’re the guys cleaning cells and doing people’s laundry. It’s about power. Who has it and who’s trying to get it. Just like on the outside, getting yours, especially if it means you’ve got to deny somebody else his, that’s what drives the system in here.”
A tinny, automated voice interrupts us. Our time is up, it says. We have one minute to say our goodbyes. Sean promises to email me some of his recipes. I tell him I want to write about his cookbook, ask him if it’s okay. “Hell, yeah,” he says, just as the line goes dead.
Christopher Craig is at work on a memoir about his relationship with his son, an incarcerated person in the Virginia Department of Corrections.
