Too Heavy To Bear: Life On Federal Death Row

On federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, life is bleak, the concrete cold, and the steel unforgiving. This place has a way of getting inside me, permeating my mood, inducing bleakness, coldness, unforgiveness. It’s much easier to slip away into a dissociative state and float outside yourself into world of fantasy rather than undergoing the harrows of deprivation in which I now lie.

I lie in bed staring at the white ceiling, the metal bed frame pressing hard through the thin mattress. I turn onto my side, giving my back some much-needed relief. A few minutes ago, I’d stirred awake to find myself, once again, entombed in a small concrete cell, my mood supersaturated with the death-life of death row. I sense precipitation condensing on my eyes, tears forming on my lids. I can no longer shake this feeling of living death, of being alive and yet somehow dead–dead to the world and bereft of social stimulation.

A tear slides down my cheek. I mourn what my life has become, what it has been reduced to. My suffering is too heavy for me, more than I can bear.

Contemplation aside, I focus on my surroundings. From the vent above my stainless steel sink-toilet combination, the sound of air blows hard into my cell, a monotonous soundtrack to my existence. If it weren’t for that sound, it would be dead silent, as it ought to be in death. It’s summer outside, but winter resides within the tombs. During rounds as an orderly who cleans up this entire unit, I see men in winter coats, skullcaps, and jersey gloves, trying to keep warm, wrapped up like mommies. But nothing they do keep the trembling at bay. We shiver not just from the cold air, but from the absence of social rapport, that affective warmth we experience in intimacy with others.

These mental wonderings evoke far-flung associations to Cain’s punishment. Cain who, according to the Bible, murdered his brother Abel, his spilt blood crying from the earth. As the story goes, Cain was a farmer; his punishment was that the ground would no longer produce its strength. As it turned out, he became a vagabond on the earth, his calloused soles wandering from one place to another. And so he cried to the heavens that his punishment was too heavy for him, too hard to bear.

But at least Cain wasn’t uprooted from the earth and entombed in a barren concrete cell, where neither weeds nor thorns grow. No matter his wandering, he was still connected to his environment, to nature. It’s been years, almost two decades, since I’ve felt soil. I don’t remember the touch of grass underfoot, nor can my palms recall the feeling of the cool Georgia dirt of my childhood. I would eagerly barter my circumstance for Cain’s. Capital punishment is most excessive, greater than Cain’s punishment.

At this idea, my thoughts seem to unravels; I start to fidget. I snatch the dingy white sheet and beige blanket off my body, and sit up in bed, my bare feet thudding on the smooth concrete floor. It’s piercing cold, shocking my soles. Reflexively, I raise up on my toes and tiptoe to the window, a footstep away.

I can tell it’s dark morning, for dawn’s glow is absent outside. I cannot really look through my window; it’s frosted over. An opaque film adheres to the outer glass, allowing only light to filter through. But on this window, the frosted film dead-ends 1/16 of an inch before reaching the right edge, providing a sliver of transparency to peer through.

I press my face to the glass, one eye up close to the edge, as I try to make out the world beyond. I discern nothing but the light from the stadium-style floodlights reflecting off the beige stucco building of my imprisonment. I thought I would have caught a glimpse of my dear old friend the moon as she glows in the light of the sleeping sun, tucked below the horizon. But she’s no where to be found. “Where are you, my friend?” my heart reaches out to her. “Don’t you know that your moody light thrills me, the way it waxes and wanes, reflecting the warm light of your lover, the sun?”

Disappointed, I turn from the window and pace. Seven steps from the back of my cell, where the wall hosts the window, to the front of my cell, where the steel door locks me in. As I step up to the door, and look out the narrow plexiglass window cut into the steel, I see my neighbor across the range from me. On the outside of his maximum-security door is a photo of his prison ID displayed within a see-through case, magnetized to his door. In bold font is his last name: Rodriguez. A capital H for his race: Hispanic. In the photo, his head reaches a little above the 62-inch line, marking his height at 5 foot 2. He looks to be in his mid-60s.

We’ve lived in proximity to each other for years. He’s reclusive, rarely ever talks. I hear from him only if he has a question. “Taylor,” he calls out, his voice weak and hesitant, perhaps from a lack of use. “Are we on lockdown?!” He asks questions of this kind when things seem off, when the daily routine is interrupted. What’s strange about this is he never comes out his cell, neither for recreation nor for computer, but every blue moon he gets a visit from a nun with Saint Marry of the Woods.  Yet somehow, intuitively, he feels interruptions to the routine of our unit.

I see him standing at his door, looking out his window onto the range. His eyes scan the concrete floor, as if he’s tracking something scuttling about. He never eyes me, not even once. I wish I could get that look of acknowledgement from him, that look that shows me I’m seen, so I won’t feel so alone.

I look out onto the range to see if there’s anything crawling below. I see nothing. “Is he hallucinating?” I ask myself. I have never seen him do so, but surely something has caught his attention, whether real or imagined. I’ve read psychiatric accounts of how the brain can produce its own stimuli in the absence of objective stimuli. Plus, I’ve seen men here who hallucinate, who wander off in their heads to desert lands where they hang out with friends, talking about the good old days. “It beats being here, in this hell hole,” a friend once told me.

Make no mistake about it, federal death row is solitary confinement. On average, we’re lockdown 22 hours a day. We are allotted about 6 hours per week for recreation, one hour per day for computer. At the computer, we can buy music for our MP3 Players, use the Corrlinks email system for 5 cent per minute, and do legal research. In our cells, we eat, sleep, shower, use the toilet, and talk on the phone.

No matter my staring, my neighbor pays me no mind. Though I really want company, I do likewise. I turn from the door and continue my pacing. A lone tear rolls down my face.

Surely this death-punishment is greater than I can bear.

Rejon Taylor 41070-074

USP Terre Haute (Death Row)

US PENITENTIARY

TERRE HAUTE, IN 47808
USA

Source: prisonwriters.com, Rejon Taylor, October 2022

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde