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The Meaning of Thanksgiving on death row

In a land of punishingly bad food, the vending machines are the stuff of dreams

The people who visit inmates on San Quentin's death row are a mixed bag. Women by a large majority, plus a few toddlers, lawyers, religious nuts, activist journalists and the occasional serial killer super-fan. But mostly nobody visits.

Even knowing that, even seeing the sparse crowd, I wasn't especially moved by the symbolism of a Thanksgiving visit this year. Neither was Ray*, the man I've written, visited and interviewed for about 5 years. We both shrugged it off with the middle school cool that the frozen-in-time, strangely juvenile atmosphere of prison demands.

Many people hate the idea of sitting down to talk with a really serious criminal. They're right to be nervous, because the briefest conversation sends the moral compass spinning. The day-to-day miseries of an inmate are obvious. But misery also touches corrections officers and visitors. So does the taint of guilt. The air in prisons is clammy with guilt. It condenses on the walls, slicks your palms and seeps through the seat of you pants from the cheap plastic chairs.

For the most part, the men are damaged, wheedling, sly. They're also frequently dangerous and angry. The dangerousness, if not the anger, begins to fade when they get to their middle thirties or so and join the permanently humiliated regiment of back-handcuffed ghosts.

San Quentin, California's oldest and most storied prison, is a sprawling complex of decaying buildings painted dirty yellow. Behind the polygonal Tower One - an old watch tower that says "prison" the way the Empire State Building says "New York" - is a landmarked brick façade from a few years after the prison was first established in a nearby ship at anchor in 1852. Local real estate developers have long coveted the prison's site on San Francisco Bay, and the talk is they may get it one day.

Inside, the moral contrast is turned up as high as possible. You can't buy a bag of potato chips for an inmate without wondering whether he deserves it. And what does buying potato chips for him say about you? Yet in a very Thanksgiving-like way visits are all about food.

I told Ray I was sorry he didn't have a more traditional Thanksgiving visitor, wife, kids or mother. Just me. "Are you kidding?" he asked. "I don't care. When you come, I get to eat something decent for a change - decent for us, I mean." That wasn't the limit of Ray's stripped-down but still surprising thankfulness.

Earlier I'd been to Salinas Valley State Prison in Soledad to visit an accomplice in the grotesque murder Ray was condemned for. Though the accomplice has a theoretical, if remote, possibility for parole now after 15 years, I couldn't help feeling his situation is worse. Ray agrees. People like to say death row, discreetly called East Block or the Condemned Unit here, is for the "worst of the worst." Down in Soledad, hours from anywhere, were the forgotten of the forgotten.

Early on, one of Ray's lawyers told me a secret. As long as executions are suspended in California, death row is really one of the better places to do time. Inmates have unusual stability, special privileges, individual cells, well-monitored conditions, the interest of charitable people from San Francisco and a certain malevolent status within the prison culture. The population is older and the atmosphere calmer. Ray's lawyer told me some of his death row clients were panicked by the idea that he supported abolishing the death penalty. "What are you trying to do to us?"

That said, it has to be a unique feeling when a group of normal people, after thinking about it long and carefully, decide you don't deserve to live. If that doesn't get to you, the food is punishingly bad - bad by, at least, passive design.

With someone like Ray, who's been a ward of the court or locked up for most of his life, it's easy for a visitor to provide a first ever mango, the 2nd avocado of his life or the 1st fresh tomato since High Desert Prison 10 years ago.

In the condemned unit, food "service" comes 3 times daily. Lunch is box-style, a pair of vacuum-packed bologna slices, four slices of bread, a baggie of baby carrots and an unripe pear. Really sweet fruit that would lend itself to fermentation is never offered. Breakfast and dinner are served on rubbery trays (shards of which can't be turned into blades). Food is slopped directly into TV-dinner-like compartments. Ray grimaces about something called "enchilada casserole," formerly known as "enchiladas." But a bitter sweet-and-sour chicken, he says, is worse. In fact, he tells me he religiously rinses any kind of sauce off vegetables and hanks of processed meat.

Inmate dreams of food revolve around the five half-full vending machines in East Block visiting. The cuisine is "gas station," although the healthy stuff, oranges, chef's salad, avocado, cottage cheese, is actually popular. Truly notorious criminals may get a lot of visitors and develop a connoisseurship about what's on offer. Ray was grateful for a plasticky slice of cheesecake in a bag, because a serial killer friend told him it was particularly good. The bagged hamburgers are the most sought-after item and sell out fast. Microwaved for a minute or 2, topped with spoon-slices of avocado and a squeeze of taco sauce and mayonnaise, that's what we had for Thanksgiving. Since no ice cream is served inside, Ray begins every meal I've ever had with him by eating a locally famous ice cream sandwich called an IT'S-IT - he eats it first so it doesn't melt. It's a little ritual, our couple-of-times-a-year tradition, which, for one of us at least, is uncomfortably close to Abraham Lincoln's original intent for the holiday: giving thanks while recalling the victims of war "with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience."

* Not his real name

Source: Esquire, David McConnell, December 4, 2013 - David McConnell is the author of American Honor Killings and The Silver Hearted.

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