The Arduous Journey.
Okay, let us see; the trip was a real gas! As you know, I packed up all my possessions on Monday afternoon. At 5:00 AM Tuesday, I was escorted down to the "draft" area with two other inmates from PC.
After waiting around for a couple of hours, I was fitted with some great jewelry. They wrap a chain around your waist which is attached to a pair of handcuffs.
The new thing this time is they also use what is called a "black box." This cute device was supposedly designed by an inmate and is intended to fit over the chain of the handcuffs so that the two cuffs are "welded" together. This arrangement was only used by the feds as punishment for those who were on discipline transfers or had escapes on their record. In New York State, everyone gets to wear them.
Then you are fitted with an ankle chain which is either attached to both your ankles or one ankle of yours and one ankle of another inmate. In two days of travel, I had a different "chain pal" each day. Try walking up the two or three steps on a Greyhound-style bus single-file with another person tied to your ankle by an eighteen-inch chain. It's a neat trick.
We finally left around 8:00 AM and headed towards western New York State. This was the first inkling I had that I was screwed, since I knew that we would head north toward Oneida, or west to Buffalo. The day quickly turned into the makings of a bad country song, something along the lines of "Sitting in a bus trussed up like a turkey, driving further west so my buddy can't see me, Oh Yeah, doing the jail house shuffle."
So we travel along the highway and actually pass Magic Mountain and finally pull into Elmira Penitentiary. Somewhere around noon we eat lunch; we are inside the walls of the prison but still on the bus, still cuffed and shackled. Try eating a sandwich and drinking from one of those little imitation six-ounce barrel-shaped bug juice containers like that.
One or two prisoners got off and several more got on. Another bus was also parked there having come down from Auburn that morning. We stay on the bus but the staff switches. With a new crew, the rules change from being able to talk to your neighbor quietly, to no talking at all.
Our destination was Auburn Penitentiary, where we arrived at around 5:00 PM. We did make one stop a half-hour from Elmira to exchange some prisoners at South Park Penitentiary.
We pull into Auburn, and the cuffs and other jewelry are taken off. We actually enter the "big house." It is a massive building that has four tiers of at least fifty cells long, and looked just like something out of an old prison movie. They use the ground floor tier as a holding area and we are quickly paired off into two-man cells.
Each cell is about five feet by seven feet. The cells consist of a bunk bed and the ever-present sink and toilet combo unit. We are fed a tray of hot food. I ended up being celled with the same person I was chained to all day in the bus. (He is sitting with me at the table as I write this) and we actually kicked around some "What is wrong with America?" bullshit for a few hours.
The noise and general depressive nature of this accommodation is hard to explain. Well, despite any of my usual creature comforts: books, snacks, or even a couple of blankets, I finally fell asleep sometime before 11:00 PM even with all the screaming. I woke up sometime later to find us in complete darkness with one lone radio droning on in the distance.
Morning arrives and it is confirmed that we will be leaving shortly. Thank God! I heard that inmates have gotten stuck in this place for a week. So I get chained up to a different person and we now take off for what is now known as Wende Reception Center AKA Buffalo State Prison.
We arrived at Wende around noon. The trip from Auburn was all country roads and a good portion on Routes 20 and 5. Then when they split 20 some more. Why we did not take NYS Thruway, since we certainly crossed paths with it several times, I do not know.
Well by 1:00 PM we are moved onto a minibus that seats about eighteen and we make a very roundabout trip that finally drops us at here around 5:00 PM. Before we started the trip, the CO/bus driver said the trip would take about two hours. How those two hours turned into four is the magic of prison. We did happen to have two guys on the bus who know the area, and they were freaking out at all the bullshit turns and double backs the driver took.
