The Squeeze Machine: Autism Goes to Prison
+ my latest piece with the Marshall Project
The next installment of The Squeeze Machine is below! You can also read my latest piece with the Marshall Project on raising puppies in prison here.
Like all the prisons I’ve been in, rules here are posted on ever-present signage, yellow lines on the floor signal a stop or an out-of-bounds area, and an inmate rulebook spells out in black and white the myriad no-nos. Yet these are all dwarfed by the customs and mores of peers: just how much contact with a guard is sufficient to get one labeled a rat; how to maneuver safely around the invisible boundaries in the yard, those which demarcate the home courts of respective gangs or crews; what types of publicly-made insults to your person will cause others to look down on you if you don’t respond with violence; et unwritten cetera. There is a steep learning curve on this minefield of nuance, and a misstep can result in an official misbehavior report, isolation in the Box (the prison’s prison), or an extrajudicial thumping from the goon squad; violating the prisoners’ code can leave you shunned by peers, get your face sliced by a jagged can top, and, in extreme cases, get you killed.
Some have a harder time adapting to this rigid place — those who are themselves inflexible. A couple of years ago, my wife Lily ran a residential school for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder. ASD is typified by rigid behavior and debilitating adherence to routines, poor social skills, hypo- or hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli. There was one student who had a particularly inflexible cast of mind, and was smart enough to know just how much he was his own worst enemy. After becoming aggressive with staff and injurious to himself, he was placed in a locked psychiatric facility, and ultimately barred from returning to the school.
Despite the fearmongering around Adam Lanza, the Newtown gunman, people with spectrum disorder are seldom violent, but they often present with socially awkward behavior that, depending on context, has the potential to pull them into the criminal justice system — exactly what Lily feared for this young man. One of her program directors mused that he might actually do well in prison, with the strict routines and standardized uniform. The comment, related to me over the phone as I stood in the yard, underscored just how little free-worlders understand about prison, and caused me to parse aloud how the young man would fare in here. True; from what Lily shared, he was fixated on routines and rules, but these were what he thought should be the routines and rules — in here, the Big Machine grinds you into groove when you fall out of step, and staff frequently disobey the rules governing their conduct. Prison is one-size-fits-all, accommodations for those with special needs are rare, and an inability to quickly and accurately read social cues can result in being victimized. Social contact — something not engaged in with ease by those on the spectrum — is constant in here, you need to ask a guard or a peer for everything from toilet paper to legal information, and those you brush up against are rarely paragons of compassionate understanding. No, I told her, he would not do well.
But the question lingered, like a splinter in my brain. What is life like for someone with a pathologically rigid personality structure in this most rigid and unforgiving place? In October, 2014, my conjecture ceased and observation began.
Working as a peer counselor, I naturally key in on guys who look like they need a little extra help adapting. The young man who walked into the orientation room that Monday morning was central casting’s version of someone who looks out of place in prison: light blue eyes, mid-twenties and boyish, mussed brown hair, five-foot-six. Elijah Woods’s “Frodo” in The Lord of the Rings.
Alex made little eye contact, having to consciously look up from speaking to the floor, and sounded like he was talking through clenched teeth. Over four days in group, his differences were made clear. While most guys in the room have very specific, immediate concerns — How do I get a haircut? What’s the best block? Who do I have to see to buy a (black-market) cooking setup? — Alex asked, in a grave tone, how to proceed with a grievance against some guards in his previous prison, a reception center. They had either roughed him up or just harassed him, and the interaction left him feeling angry and powerless. I explained that the grievance was likely made moot by his not being there anymore, since the action he’d request in his grievance would be that the harassment stop, and furthermore, it could easily trigger local guards to begin harassing him. “You gotta let it go, man.”
“It’s not right,” he said, emphasizing syllables with a pecking nod of his head.
I explained that there’s a lot that’s not right about prison, and he’d do well to get used to it. So it’s about picking your battles, I counseled, keeping safe, minimizing contact.
I wasn’t getting through. He was comprehending, but I saw that Alex had begun reviewing whatever happened in the reception center. “Focus on here, bro.”
His interactions with the men in the orientation group were stilted, and I don’t think he initiated a single one of them. I kept an ear open to make sure he wasn’t being victimized. Several of his peers tried to offer advice on how to do a bid, but Alex was focusing on past interactions with guards, and the peers began to get frustrated with him, figuring he didn’t have the good sense to pick up what they were laying down. I noticed that he also wasn’t decoding the gestural explanations of his peers, the shrugs, the eye rolls, raised brows, or hand flourishes that shade most of the conversational palette, signaling everything from assent and reassurance to dismay to the strong desire to abandon a topic.
They began to look askance, and it didn’t help that Alex would repair to the sink area when he entered the room in the morning and afternoon, stand facing the comer, while blowing his nose for about five minutes, quickly depleting the one roll of toilet paper we’re provided each week.
Communicating with him felt like observing a small animal: direct eye contact caused him to look floor ward and mumble, emerging only when he thought it was safe. There were private moments before group started up when we’d be able to talk, though that makes it sound more fluid an interaction than we shared.
“How’re you doing?” I’d begin. “O.K., I guess.”
“Yeah?” Leaning in for privacy: “Have you been seen yet by Mental Health?” “Umm-hmm. They’re taking me off Konini.”
Utilitarian and expedited goes the drug wean in prison. From experience, I know that the aggravations of this hard place are made almost unbearable when withdrawing. It takes months for the brain’s serotonin levels to rebound after getting clean, months that pass in a dark funk. He and I both, it turned out, self-medicated with heroin, and that was my foot in the door with him. I disclosed how I mainlined heroin because I was scared of the future and found myself loathsome; how the obliterated bliss of a warm eight-bag shot kept the nagging, intrusive thoughts at bay for a little while. Alex used it to stifle rage. Off heroin, being weaned from the Konini script that was begun in county jail, his neuroses flared big and bright. Alex was a raw nerve ending gnashing against tin foil, sense receptors turned up to eleven. He would wince when a loud guy in the neighboring row asked a question; when I turned off the lights so we could watch a DVD, he seemed to become less tense, blossoming in his chair.
My wife recounted an interview of a prospective student, a girl who had such a bad reaction to the ticking of the office clock that Lily removed it from the office. There are people whose entire existence feels like the climax of “The Tell-tale Heart.”
I asked Alex, “Have you been given a diagnosis?” “OCD.”
I wondered if he wasn’t also on the spectrum. (Much of my understanding of autism is to be credited to Lily’s talking shop with me, and the self-directed reading that ensued. The mistakes of an armchair diagnostician are mine alone.) Many of the students at Lily’s school had more things going on than autism. There’s often co-morbidity: ASD and obsessive-compulsive disorder, ASD and anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, mania, schizophrenia.
And just like that, Alex returned to the grievance issue that he broached on the first day.
Clinicians refer to this as perseverating, the tendency for intrusive thoughts to cycle over and over and over again. He disclosed that he’d done a previous bid for drugs, about six months in a diversionary program modeled on a boot camp, and he washed out in the last week after arguing with a guard.
From the little I knew of him, I could see that happening. Alex said he felt like a “piece of shit” for this bid, an assault on his wife while she was holding their child, something that earned him ten years. He made a serious suicide attempt in county jail, leaving a shiny red scar running three inches along his carotid artery. I couldn’t see him married, let alone fathering a child.
Alex expressed to me a strong desire to take the department’s aggression replacement program, a mandatory for almost all of us, Alex included, but he wanted in, like, yesterday so the court would allow visitation with his child. That was his new fixation. I didn’t want to burst his bubble — take all the programs on offer and, with a case like that, the court still won’t allow him to see his kid. Instead, I tried to focus him on adapting, getting right.
Because mental health issues range along a continuum, it’s relevant to note that, in regards to obsessive compulsivity, I am closer to Alex than I am to Lily, or perhaps you. For as long as I can remember, I’ve nurtured silent tics — tactile, repetitive, and often involving a counting feature. You’ll recognize me as the elementary school boy tapping handles, doorknobs, drawer pulls, and light switches, manipulating them until the control center in my brain sounded the all clear. I slept with a blanket way past an appropriate age. The cracked and bleeding comers of my mouth in middle school was a fun little byproduct of an absurd series of tongue movements. Today, if I’m barefoot or in socks, and the floor is judged to be dirty, I scrunch up my toes and walk on the sides of my feet; badly produced handouts at work will torture me until I can get to Excel, and iterate until I get an acceptable format; it shames me that when Lily shares content she’s created for her professional life, I can’t help focusing on, say, the shade of orange she used in one graphic, and how it should be “less murky.”
So you see, I know what it is to have compulsions straining against their leash, a brain that sometimes feels confined in a hot, itchy sweater, a pebble in its shoe. I sympathize tremendously with Alex and those like him. Though I am a social, neurotypical creature and quite adaptable, I am unlike most of my peers. Their interests and tastes are not mine, and even when I find a simpatico soul, I still find it overwhelming to sustain long, banal conversations, preferring lots of quick contact, where I can help someone or receive warmth, then move on rather than bear the loungers. Over fifteen years in prison I’ve learned to be good to myself while learning how to adapt and maneuver in this environment by becoming a fully-matriculated student of the school of human nature.
However, someone on the spectrum is not wired to pick up the social cues that comprise the bulk of human interaction’s scholarship. They spend a lifetime misreading the emotions and motivations of those they come into contact with. In Alex’s case, this manifested pretty quickly, as one of the more considerate men in the orientation group related to me what went down in the yard the night before, when, like any other night, inconsiderate thugs cut to the front of the dozens-long phone line, placing themselves near the yellow line in front of the guards’ booth (on some nights the guards call out over the PA, deliciously making the cutters hangdog it to the back of the line, but usually they allow the behavior to go unchecked, so the rule followers have to just grimace and thug it out). Most of them are gang members, but there’s little chance Alex noticed that they were all wearing red, and even smaller chance that he formed the supposition that they’re members of the Bloods. And forget about his leaning on any sort of acquired wisdom of The Code; he stomped up to the guard taking ID cards for the phone, and said, in regards the line cutting, a rule being broken, “This is bullshit.”
“Uggh,” I said to the guy who told me this. “What’d the guard say back?” “He said, ‘Get the fuck back in line.’”
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Annual, DSM-5, has moved away from differentiating between high functioning autism (think Dustin Hoffman’s “Rain Man”) and Asperger (think Mark Zuckerberg), preferring the all-encompassing autism spectrum disorder. The behavior of those on the spectrum is viewed as odd (and when they’re older, “eccentric”), they are often socially isolated, and use language concretely and literally; they have difficulty recognizing irony or jokes, are sensitive to noise, color, food odor or taste, or clothing textures; an inability to perceive danger from situational cues like smoke from a stove or oncoming traffic; indulge perseverative interests, a specific, narrow, and obsessive interest or activity, like memorizing the entire subway system for a large metropolitan city; childhood play is different, rather than having action figures interact, the child might arrange them in ascending height, then spend three hours staring contentedly.
The diagnostic criteria of many people, my peers included, is more reductionist. Either someone’s a “bugout” or not. But keep in mind that these same men think nothing of stuffing balloons of drugs or weapons up their asses, nor do they, avowed homophobes, appreciate the irony; should they be suspected by staff of stuffing, they are sent to an observation cell — naked save a thin gown, the Plexiglas-fronted cell stripped bare besides a mattress — where they have to shit on a tray for a guard to poke around in. It’s quite common for a guy to surreptitiously pass the balloon, wipe it off, and swallow it again to avoid detection.
One would think that such a populace would be a skoosh more tolerant of aberrant behavior.
Instead, the general consensus regarding Alex was that he ‘just needs a beating.” Shortly after orientation, Alex moved to the same cell block I’m in, so I began to keep closer tabs on him, making sure he knew he had a friend, trying to signal to others that Alex is “all right.” I spoke to some of the men who’d tried to befriend him, helping them understand that there’s a reason he’s not acclimating as quickly as your run-of-the-mill new jack, and, no, he’s not a “retard” (in her home, Lily cringes as I write that word).
Increasingly, when I asked Alex how it was going, the answers would be dark. He had recurring thoughts of having to “be a man,” “prove himself,” or “stand up to bullies.” The language was not his own, and I could hear echoes of his dad or some well-meaning peers. This is what clinicians refer to as scripted language. It turned out that the objects of his fixation were usually guards, and more than once I had to talk him out of a preemptive strike, calmly but assuredly challenging his belief that his fighting one of them would cause the others to leave him alone. It was flawed logic from an obdurate mind: he’d been told to stand up to bullies, some guards are bullies, so he must stand up to them. We’d usually have these talks at the pull-up bar in the yard, as Alex did set after set of pull-ups, struggling to do a few each time. I did some quick and dirty cognitive behavioral therapy, reframing his plight, showing that he could learn to become a man in here — not through violence, but by not being violent.
One evening, I noticed that he had a library copy of Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence. I’d forgotten recommending it in orientation after he told me he was the black sheep in a family of lvy League grads and was interested in how the brain works. I tried to engage him, asking what he found interesting in the book.
He said, “You know, the neuroscience.”
“Totally,” I said. “Some fascinating studies in there. It’s been a while, do you recall any in particular?”
“Not really. It’s hard to concentrate.” “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“Just a lot of noise,” he said.
I expressed sympathy, then tried a few downward comparisons, painting scenes from my prison years that include more tortures than merely noisy neighbors, and moved on to what I’ve heard of prisons in the Third World, atrocious places boiling over with ultraviolence.
“They just won’t shut up,” he said. “I tell them to shut up.” Chuckling, I asked, “You say that?”
“Yeah,” and he smiled a rare, gap-toothed smile. “Hmm. Sometimes it’s better not to say stuff like that.”
It was around that time when I noticed that if Alex wasn’t doing pull-ups or taking excessively long showers, he was standing at Billy O’s table in the yard, something I felt was not a good sign.
Billy has a few more years in than me, but we’re roughly the same age. We have mutual friends, have done time in some of the same prisons, but we don’t really speak. He’s a violent sociopath, and on the several instances I’ve had to pass him a message, I’ve regretted the encounter. What was his motivation in speaking with Alex? Since whites make up only about twenty percent of the prison population, it’s not uncommon to befriend another white face simply on the strength of minority status. But unlike California, Texas, and some mid-Western state prison systems, most of us mix freely with the other colors and creeds. People like Billy are different, though. They speak to blacks and Hispanics only when needed. Perversely, they are the ones who quickly snatch up a young white guy who looks out of place, and put him under the wing. In their own antisocial way, they mentor the new jack, teaching him whom to avoid, who’s a piece of shit (most everyone). They trade in the pop culture clichés of prison narratives: To make your bones, pick someone and smash his face in with a soup can in a sock. Their school of thought believes that even if you lose a fight, it’s a win because it shows people that you’re willing to get busy.
Though I’m thirty-eight and Alex is twenty-six, I felt like a parent watching his child associate with a bad influence. Sitting next to Alex at chow, I steered the conversation to Billy, and told Alex that I overheard an exchange the two of them had, where Billy said, “You don’t fuckin’ listen. You wanna do what you wanna do.” I asked if everything was all right.
“He was just giving me advice.”
“I see. You know, not all advice is created equal. He’s an angry dude who likes to fight, just be careful is all.”
“No,” Alex said, “he tells me he doesn’t want me to repeat his mistakes. Says I have to get my shit together.”
Billy, it seemed, was capable of human emotion. The advice Billy offered was likely designed to reach his former self, retroactively getting himself on a better path at the start. As to its impact on Alex, despite the good intentions, it felt like rigidity being applied to rigidity. Get his shit together, I think that’s one of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Just like today’s cutting edge mental health knowledge will seem quaint to a layperson fifty years from now, Billy sounded like a teacher who thinks he’ll cure a child’s hyperactivity by putting him in the time-out comer.
Still, I had the sneaking suspicion that Billy was telling Alex more than just to get his shit together, and could almost hear him counseling, Sometimes you gotta punch a dude in the mouth. It would’ve jibed with Alex’s state of mind: weaned off Klonopin, Zoloft in its stead, which didn’t seem to be curbing the intrusive thoughts and general irritability. And then one morning in the mess hall, my ears perked up at an escalating beef emanating from the table to my rear. Turning, I heard Rachman, a fifty-something black Muslim, tell Alex, whom he was sitting next to, “I will fuck — you — up.”
Rachman, a few months from release, was back in prison on a parole violation, serving a year because he was found to be in area of known drug activity. An institutionalized man, prone to violence, I’d witnessed him argue with tablemates whose elbows got too close to his. He was a rigid personality, too, but a street guy, well versed in the application of violence.
I shook off the morning fog and tuned in my viscera, making sure a fight wasn’t about to go down right there and then, debating whether to lean back and try to make the peace, when Rachman said, “C’mon, kid, let’s go,” as he stood up and walked out. Alex finished his remaining bite of toast, and then got up to follow him, awash in fear and resolve. I was sickened to hear it go down, berating myself for not doing anything to stop what I imagined would be an ugly brawl.
When I returned from work before noon, I heard Rachman, in his cell on the floor above mine, quietly replaying the quick scuffle for a neighbor. They squared off, traded blows; he knocked Alex down. Alex got up, and got knocked down again. They broke it up when Rachman heard keys approaching. He wasn’t gloating, and I detected a hint of regret. “Someone should give that kid some Ritalin.”
That evening at dinner, I played coy, and got Alex talking about the incident. He said Rachman called him out, so he had to fight. It wasn’t the time to tell him my school of thought, which lies in opposition to the norm around here: even if you win a fight, you lose — you either get in trouble, get seriously hurt, or have to worry that your opponent will take revenge and literally stab you in the back. For me, even coming close to a fight prompts a serious examination of what I could’ve done to avoid the encounter.
“Is it over?” I said.
Alex didn’t know, and thought that he’d have to fight Rachman again. Why? Because that’s what he thought was expected. I told him I didn’t think so. It’s usually the fights over money or serious violations that get repeated. “He got his shit off,” I told Alex, “and that’s that. I’ll confirm it with Rachman.” But I didn’t have to, Rachman reached out to Alex, and I was glad to see them sitting next to each other at chow the following day.
Our touch points often brought bad news, but I’ve learned to chalk that up to occupational hazard. A week later, a distressed Alex told me at breakfast that a sparrow was stuck, its wing pinned in an exposed pipe, ten feet in front of his cell. “The C.O.s don’t give a shit, because they’re cruel.”
I said, “A porter will tie some brooms together and free the bird, it’s happened before.” Quite ingenious how ripped bed sheets, contraband packaging tape, and two or more small brooms can be jerry rigged into a Seussian lifeguard pole. If you want to have your faith in humanity reaffirmed, check out the beefy, jail-tatted chap with knife scars on his face, and watch as he employs bomb disposal-like care to gingerly unpin the frantic sparrow’s wing. So it went.
A week after that, Alex, returning from the mess hall, stormed onto the flats — the ground floor of the open-tiered cell block — and challenged anyone to fight. He was after the person who’d been imitating him (or who he imagined was doing so). No one took him up on it, and a guard told him to scram. Not Alex’s finest hour.
The general consensus in the block was encapsulated by someone a few cells over from me: “That bugged-out white boy gonna get his wig split.”
Temple Grandin, perhaps the most visible face of autism, invented a “squeeze machine,” which applies deep pressure feedback and calms her. Prison is also a squeeze machine, but not one designed for comfort. It is loud, smelly, too fast to grasp, too slow to fathom, wholly indifferent to your suffering, and I’ve watched helplessly as men were crushed beyond recognition. An assault on your senses that is never calming, and almost constantly aggravating. In Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the narrator, a British teenager with autism, describes his brief stay in a holding cell: “It was nice in the police cell. It was almost a perfect cube, two meters long by two meters wide by two meters high. It contained approximately eight cubic meters of air.” Should he have gone to prison, the big leagues, I suspect his narrative would have sounded more like Alex’s. Less about the four hundred thirty-two cubic feet of air (our cell’s dimensions) than the four cockroaches he killed under his bed last night, the three guards who gave him the business when he walked back from chow, or the two neighbors who are driving him to distraction with their loud rambling.
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires that reasonable accommodations be made; the hearing impaired are provided hearing aids, and, in acute cases, a bed-shaking alarm clock to wake him for the daily counts. But it’s laughable to think of the Department instituting changes like those made at schools for kids on the spectrum: softer lighting, quiet spaces, transition plans that ease a person from one activity to the next, etc., etc. You want accommodation? Swallow your pills with a full cup of water, and enjoy your coma. Mental Health is understaffed and overworked, and, when in doubt, inmates are overmedicated. They run a high-throughput triage, and focus the bulk of their resources on the men who are threats to themselves and others, the men who violently and extravagantly go to pieces — these chaps get souped-up with the heavy shit, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, funky off label cocktails. The men in the med line shuffle up to the window that dispenses a smorgasbord of Seroquel, Depakote, Risperdal, Lithium, Haldol, Thorazine — their mouths are then checked to make sure the pill has been swallowed. If an inmate presents with autism-like symptoms, he’ll likely be prescribed an ill-suited medication and given photocopies of a meditation guide. When the unit chief came to orientation one morning to give his quick, weekly spiel to the participants, I asked him privately if the Department has specific training for dealing with inmates on the spectrum. They do not.
Security staff employ the same crude labels as most inmates, but I’ve gotten the sense that they don’t exactly know what to make of Alex, who doesn’t present like the overmedicated catatonics, the wild-eyed schizophrenics, or the rubbery manic depressives. When Alex is stopped by staff, he often takes an aggressive stance, which, despite my pointing it out, he’s not cognizant of, and staff responds in kind. Guards, especially when they’re in small groups and we’re walking by ourselves, like to have fun at our expense. They’ll ask what we’re in for, and take it from there. Either Alex self-disclosed or one of them Googled him the night before, and I overheard them taunt him about striking his defenseless wife. And if Alex didn’t respond to such meet-and-greets, they’d eventually move on to their next plaything, but he does respond, he can’t help himself, and tenses up.
In the estimation of certain prison staff, we come to prison not as punishment, but for punishment, and what’s the point of having absolute power if you can’t abuse it whenever the mood strikes you? I feel at my most powerless when I’m walking back from chow with Alex and a guard calls him over to where a klatch awaits. Once, I moved in his stead, pretending that they were talking to me. ‘’No, him,” the guard said, pointing.
But they harass and intimidate, and sometimes shove him. Thankfully, he’s kept his cool.
Though, there are times when Alex gives them ammunition. One morning as he walked outdoors to his vocational program, I was about forty paces behind-hanging back, admittedly, in observation mode. He buried his hands in a mound of snow that was next to a guards’ shack, removed them, and wiped them off on his jacket. One of the guards opened the door, called Alex over, and gave him somewhat for. When I couldn’t slow my gait any further without appearing obvious, I passed in time to hear: “Now go to fuckin’ school.”
I fell in step with him, and asked what was up. The guards thought he was hiding a shank in the snow. “But I just needed to clean my hands.” “You can see why that looked sheisty, right?”
“I guess,” he said. His hands were dirty and the compulsion to clean them spoke louder than the voice that said to be careful of how it would be viewed by guards — assuming there even is a voice that’s mindful of how he appears to others, which is no certainty (Alex is the undisputed king of leaving his cell with bed head). Watching the interaction, debriefing with him, made me realize that these types of scenarios are likely playing out over and over again. In a sea of black faces, Alex stands out from the jump. But with his balled-up fists, stiff gait, and piercing blue eyes, Alex has the look of someone who’s looking for trouble. So if a guard has interacted with him, they look even more closely, and Alex’s already peculiar behavior appears that much more peculiar; he’ll tum to his coworker, Hey, look at this numb nuts. The prime mover will stop Alex so a coworker can get a little taste . Alex, meanwhile, knows he’s being targeted, so his interaction with the guards is even more awkward and confrontational seeming. There’s a psychological phenomenon called “affective realism”: what you feel influences what you see, like police officers shooting a man who brandishes a wallet. The guards are primed to see us as threats and that’s exactly how they read Alex’s posture. Alex feels bullied, so that’s how he interprets each of these exchanges. Taken together, you have a feedback loop guaranteed to result in an altercation.
About a month ago, I watched one night from across the yard as Alex was surrounded by three guards and a sergeant, made to walk with hands behind his back to the block, at which point the sergeant and one guard peeled off. Thinking Alex was in a fight, I went around to those in the vicinity, trying to find out what the rumpus was. Jay, a big, friendly Native American kid, who’d made an early attempt at befriending Alex, gave me the skinny: “He was blowing his nose in the bathroom. I told him to stop that shit. You know how he does it.”
I did indeed. Thing is, Alex’s nose blowing, snuffling, and expectorating had gotten on the nerves of all the men who lived in neighboring cells — one told me, “It’s like living next to a fuckin’ goose!” — and Alex, feeling their ire, began to refrain from blowing his nose during the late night and early morning. But this self-restraint claws at him, and he looks for opportunities to be alone and honk away, mainly in the bathrooms in the yard. The bathroom in question is fronted with Plexi to prevent any extracurricular business from going down. Alex had gotten in the habit of “cleaning out his sinuses” in that bathroom when we were in the yard. Standing before a stainless steel toilet, his back to the window, praying hands at his face for minutes at a time. It is the textbook definition of a scene. The guards likely thought one of several things that night: he was ingesting a large quantity of drugs; throwing up after snooting a bag of dope or smoking K2; trying to check the flow of blood from a punch to the nose or stanch the bleeding on a sliced-open cheek.
I was happy to see Alex the next day in the yard, and asked about the previous night’s goings on. What I gathered: after calling him out of the bathroom, the guards asked what he was up to; Alex made a sudden move to produce his ID, which made them flinch; they told him not to make any sudden moves to his pocket since they didn’t know if he had a weapon. As an aside to me, he said, “I would never have a weapon.”
“But they don’t know that.”
For Alex it was absurd that they’d think he’d have a weapon, which made me think about the theory of mind test. Designed by Simon Baron-Cohen as a potential marker for autism, the test is structured something like this: the lid on a clearly-labeled box of chocolates is removed to reveal to a test subject that inside there are pencils, not chocolates; the subject is then instructed to imagine a stranger walking into the room and encountering this clearly-labeled box of chocolates, and asked what the person will think is inside the box. Those who lack theory of mind, the ability to infer what another person is thinking, will assume that the person has access to the same knowledge and thus knows that, even though the box advertises chocolates, there are pencils inside. That moment with Alex, when he didn’t understand the guards’ inability to see into his mind and know that he wasn’t carrying a weapon, felt like an impromptu test for theory of mind, and Alex, like many on the autism spectrum, failed.
After being questioned by the guards, Alex was brought in for not having his ID on him — he forgot that he’d given it to the guard who runs the line for phones. I asked what happened when they brought him inside. He said that two guards escorted him upstairs to his company, and, on the landing, out of view, one said, “My sergeant gave us a green light to do anything we want.”
It’s always a rougher crew of guards who work at night, after the brass goes home for the day; the roving rumble units are often young, amped up on energy drinks, looking for some action. The green light to get “hands-on” is implied. My response in such situations over the years has been to look the primary officer in the eye, but not confrontationally, and earnestly say that I fucked up and it won’t happen again, placidly breathe through the tense moment, and Jedi-will them out of beating me. To which they confirm that I’m an idiot, then tell me to scram. Our boy handled it differently, and tensed for combat. The guard said, “No one will care if we do something to you right now.”
“That’s not true,” Alex said. “My mom and dad will care.”
“No one who matters. Get it?” Out of the comer of his eye, Alex sees the bigger one sidle up a fraction of a second before he uncorks a jab to the side of Alex’s face.
Alex was knocked to the ground. “And then what happened?”
“I got up. He said, ‘Copy that?,’ then told me to go to my cell.”
I took this hard. It was such a pitiful scene, and I felt complicit for making him relive it. “Are you O.K.?”
“Yeah.”
“They had no call to do that. But it could’ve gone worse — you could’ve gotten up from that punch and attacked, at which point they’d pull their nightsticks and really do a number on you, then take you to the Box.” Alex saw the truth in that, and, I think, felt a little better. I regaled him with a few of the close calls I’ve had over the years, and tried to script for him an easier way out of his next interaction.
That business stuck with me, it was one of those times when your heart breaks for someone. I imagined that he felt pathetic after being knocked around for sport. I was perseverating in my own way, torturing myself: imagining that Alex was my brother, and I had to watch helplessly as he was beaten. That’s a little game I play with myself. Though I keep the darker stuff from Lily, I finally succumbed and recounted the incident. After a moment, Lily asked, “But why would they hit him?”
The question threw me. My go-to is to think how it could’ve been avoided. It is a mark against me, a proof of just how inured I’ve become to prison’s brutality, that I answered the Why of her question by saying, “Because they could.”
That didn’t satisfy Lily, who, when a practitioner comes to her for guidance managing the behavior of a difficult child, begins by asking what’s the function of the behavior. All behavior, she tells me, serves a purpose: sensory, escape, attention, or tangible. To posit that Alex was punched for a tangible reason, say, to teach him the value of more submissive interaction with staff, is to give the guards in question too much credit. Yes, all behavior has a function, but it’s also communication, and what they were saying is that they’re bullies.
After five years together, Lily’s not naive to the realities of prison, but she can still be shocked and dismayed at the sinister combination of bureaucratic indifference and anarchic violence. She’s someone who’s made a career of helping people like Alex learn to cope with their environment, so she comes naturally to her dismay at the lack of understanding they are shown in prison.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the incidence of autism is 1 in 68; 1 in 48 boys. Not too long ago, that number was 1 in 150. It’s not occurring more, the diagnostic tools are becoming more sophisticated. What in the past would’ve been called “weird,” can now sometimes be classified as ASD. Like ADHD before it, ASD has become the en vogue diagnosis (more precisely, Asperger has). But the numbers of ADHD diagnoses were given a serious boost courtesy of the makers of Ritalin and Adderall. Should a marketing department get their hands on a pill that alleviates the symptoms of autism, watch the numbers skyrocket.
In the past, autism was mainly a diagnosis given to white, middle class children whose parents had the time and money and knowledge to bring the kid to a clinician. Poor children of color have historically been misdiagnosed as having an emotional disturbance, and expelled from school at a significantly higher rate than their white peers. This is slowly changing. Not that long ago, most of these people would’ve been stigmatized and locked away at home or in an institution, kept on the dusty fringes of the fabric of society. They are now integrated, and that is for the good. But, in this age of heightened terror alerts in public spaces, and police shootings, it is worth considering the worries of a parent with a child on the spectrum.
He’s a big fella, in his late twenties, and takes public transport to work. A woman gets unnerved at this imposing person sitting near her, staring, seeming to stalk her. Naturally, she doesn’t realize that he couldn’t care less about her, but is fascinated by the shiny and intricate closing mechanism on her purse. She calls 911, and the police intervene, thinking they have a pervert or psycho on their hands. Say that the intervention gets physical. He’s booked on charges of resisting arrest, aggravated battery of a police officer. Those charges stick, and cause guards in the small county jail to dole out the added punishment they think he deserves. There are currently 2.2 million people in American prisons, seven million under some form of criminal justice system scrutiny — prison, parole, or probation. What percentage are people with autism is anyone’s guess. I’m curious to know whether they’re over- or underrepresented in prison. What’s certain is that they are here, and I have to believe, given their rigid nature, they are overrepresented in the Box; the men like Alex I’ve met over the years have often gotten themselves in further trouble, usually for offenses no more serious than being their typical, unyielding selves, not knowing when to bend rather than being broken by the system. And just like Lily’s program director mused about their student’s outcome in prison, there are some who might think the extended isolation of the Box would be just what the doctor ordered for someone on the spectrum — he wouldn’t have to interact with other humans and their indecipherable emotions. Those who manage to survive the Box without decompensating, and make it out without scrambling their brains, are those who can self-regulate and keep themselves stimulated. They work out, keep themselves to a regular sleep schedule, read, write, maintain human contact in ingenious ways, like using a cardboard tube to blow the water out of the U-shaped sink trap, and communicating with an upstairs neighbor by talking into the drain. Thriving under the toughest conditions requires robust inner resources and mature coping mechanisms. The Alexes of this prison world leave the Box worse than they went in, their thinking more ingrained, and their repetitive behaviors and tics — allowed free rein — are now that much harder to unlearn. Perhaps, years from now, the Department will begin training staff about autism.
I began this little project with the conjecture that someone with autism would not do well in prison, and the limited observations of my single-case study, unfortunately, haven’t proven that wrong. So, is Alex on the spectrum or not? If not, his behavior is spectrum-y. What I can say with more certainty is that Alex won’t do the type of beneficial time I’m doing. I’ve made a handful of good friends, men I think of as brothers; worked meaningful jobs that have given me a sense of purpose and provided invaluable people skills that will benefit me should I be released; dumb-lucked my way into marrying a spectacular woman — throughout, working to repair the numerous deficits of character that landed me in prison, doing twenty-five to life for murder.
He spends the bulk of his waking hours blowing his nose, finding places besides his cell where he can blow his nose, or perseverating about past injustices at the hands of guards. Alex has seven or so years before being released, and they will likely be bumpy. But who am I to edge in on the prediction racket? There were those who looked at me in county jail fifteen years ago — a twenty three-year-old gawky white boy, newly-detoxed junkie — and cruelly wondered aloud how soon it would be before I was raped.
It’s been four months since Alex passed through orientation. He’s more stable today than he was then. He’s established the semblance of a routine, has some people who look out for him, has gotten a few visits from his folks. He’s even interacting with people in a way that he probably never did in the past. Just the other night in the yard, while I was on the phone with Lily, I watched Alex twenty feet away, waiting to get on the phone, when a big kid came into his area, and appeared to strike up conversation for its own sake, not to bum a cig or get a light. Alex had moments of eye contact with the big, black kid, and the tableaux was one of those incongruous interactions that tend to happen in prison. In his own way, Alex was socializing. He eventually noticed me watching, so I gave him the nod. He smiled, then looked at his sneakers as he toed the light dusting of snow.
It warmed me, but only fleetingly. Before I could work myself into a sentimental, Hollywood style voiceover ending, I replayed the conversation Alex and I had the previous night, when he asked, again, about Comstock, where he now hopes to be transferred so as to be closer to his folks. I’d done three and a half years at Comstock before being transferred here over a year ago. We’d been through it before, my telling him that the guards at Comstock make the guards here look like boy scouts, and that the institutional culture there is harsher. Doing time there is an altogether different proposition. He wasn’t so much interested in that, not anymore, at least, and asked, “How is the bathroom in the yard?”
Battling my sense of comedy, I remained serious and described the bathroom for him, thinking we’d quickly move on to something less surreal, easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. But no, he wanted details, the layout, visibility from passing guards, and proximity to the guards’ post. When I said inmates were only allowed in one at a time, he asked if there’s a line, and whether anyone would object to his being in there for too long (“cleaning his sinuses”). I found myself shuffling through a deck of images, the countless times I’d passed the bathroom in that yard, focusing now on the state of the line. What does it say about me that I was able to parse the details for him, to say that in the afternoon there was often a line, but in the evening there wasn’t?
“Do you think anyone will say anything to me if I’m in there too long?”
Anyone? Anything? Why can’t there be a yearly conclave for inmate peer counselors, a place where I could tell this story, and have it received with knowing nods? I told Alex, All things considered, he shouldn’t have any issues cleaning his sinuses in Comstock’s yard, but that I would be remiss not to again mention the bigger picture shittiness of that place.
“But the bathroom’s O.K.?” he said.
“Yes.”
“O.K.,” Alex said, nodding his head with intent. “O.K. Good.”