BIG ENOCH WAS JUST SHIFTING into third gear in his exegesis of the prophetic nature of Amos 7:9 when D-Town Filo stabbed Sidetrack in the cheek with a sharpened welding rod.
I admit to having zoned out a bit in the middle there. It had something to do with Donald Trump being a new Jeroboam, with the semicolon between verses eight and nine implying a pause that translated into Trump’s interruption of power, especially when one properly understands 2 Kings 14—something something something. I had just been moved to the god pod that afternoon, and I was still early in the process of calculating risk tables and evaluating personalities: all the normal prison basics.
Big Enoch seemed decent enough, if you could ignore the angry, racist tattoos that blanketed his face like a deranged acupuncture map of male insecurity. He had this interesting tic where a couple of times per minute he would tap his left pointer finger on the steel day-room cage that separated us. Since dust had been piling up on its slats for decades, little clouds poofed off each time he felt he’d scored some kind of hermeneutical touchdown: See the prophet coming down the mountain, bringing the new law from the god of grime. Poof. I was mentally drifting along with one of these swirling nimbuses when the screaming began.
It doesn’t really matter what the altercation was about; the concrete doesn’t care where the blood comes from or why. Sidetrack wasn’t exactly a victim, since he was carting a slingshot and three spears to the shower so he could harpoon Filo in the dayroom. Filo had learned about this from his blabbermouth neighbor and took advantage of his foe’s inattention when Sidetrack had to step around the officers escorting him to bathe and came close enough to the dayroom cage that Filo was able to reach out and stab him.
More interesting to me was the conversation that erupted after both men had been gassed and subdued by the thugs of the extraction team and dragged down the hall to F-pod, the hole for the hole. Normally, you’d expect commentary on who won, or whether the victim deserved it (and he always seems to, somehow). There was a bit of that, victim-blaming. This time, however, there was more concern over how this latest altercation might affect the program we had all enrolled in: McConnell Unit Restrictive Housing Faith-Based Pod, an eighteen-month elective program that sought to provide a safer environment for offenders wanting to prioritize religious practices, unofficially known as the god pod. What would the warden think, when he heard? If this kind of thing kept happening, would he start to wonder if there was any point to the entire project?
My peers were right to worry. I have spent seventeen continuous years in solitary confinement—what the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDJC) once called administrative segregation and now refers to as restrictive housing, given the old term’s negative press. Until the McConnell Unit instituted its faith-based pod in late 2021, I had never heard of options for prisoners like me—they simply didn’t exist.
Since the advent of the supermax prison in the 1980s, nobody in the TDCJ’s administration has felt much desire to offer any form of education or vocational training in solitary. Why would they? From their perspective, there are basically four types of human failure that end up in restrictive housing: confirmed members of a “security threat group,” i.e., gangsters; the incorrigibly assaultive who cannot keep their fists to themselves; the severely mentally ill; and people like me, the politically troublesome class, who file lawsuits or publish essays describing what we have witnessed. We are the prisoners the TDCJ would most like to forget—and the ones for whom forgetting has the highest consequences. Until recently, nobody in the administration cared whether we had the potential to be reformed. Their focus was on selective incapacitation.
I have now nearly completed the eighteen-month program. During these long months, I’ve seen multiple assaults, rampant use of narcotics and alcohol (including one overdose death), deranged conspiracy theories masquerading as religion, reams of political propaganda, frequent casual racism—in short, all the variegated expressions of hate and delusion typical of the carceral setting.
I’ve seen a small circle of men straining to pull themselves out of the darkest of pits, figuratively and literally. And I’ve watched the light dim in the eyes of some on realizing that the freedom on offer didn’t include any genuine autonomy—that we might be forgiven in some metaphysical sense, but not nearly forgiven enough to be let out of solitary confinement. Instead of the hope and brotherhood we were promised, some of us discovered a new flavor of disillusionment.
I have grown increasingly skeptical that faith-based programs in solitary confinement reduce recidivism in any appreciable way. There’s certainly a loud chorus singing their praises, but not from people who know they work in any empirical sense.
The TDCJ’s chaplaincy division regularly trumpets that increased religious programming has resulted in reduced interpersonal violence over the past fifteen years. And it’s true that these halls are not quite as gore-splattered as they used to be. But this decrease coincides with the state legislature apportioning hundreds of millions of dollars for hundreds of thousands of security cameras in these facilities. It might be the programming, or the cameras, or something completely different—but I know where I’d bet my money.
A number of academic studies claim to have detected a correlation between Christian programming and reduced recidivism. All of them attempted a straight comparison of program participants to nonparticipants, which runs face-first into the self-selection problem: People who choose to enter programs—whatever their nature, religious or secular—tend to be motivated to change. Programs with zero effect or even a negative one can still appear to produce results simply by collecting the subset of prisoners prone to achievement.
The program is run not by ordained clergy but by “field ministers”—prisoners who have graduated from a four-year seminary program established by the TDCJ in 2011. While the field ministers technically work under the auspices of the chaplaincy division, I have only seen an actual chaplain twice. Some of the field ministers are okay guys with honest pastoral intentions (minus the one who got locked up for ferrying drugs), but they haven’t received much in the way of theological training or pastoral experience. What they do have is a particular religious perspective, one that gives them zero interest in telling a prisoner he doesn’t meet the basic criteria for entry into the faith-based pod, or in admitting that a course correction might ever be called for. Their goal is to save souls, not investigate why we ended up in prison in the first place.
If prison is society’s rubbish bin for the misfits who refuse to play well with others, solitary functions the same way for prison itself. Since the field ministers believe in the curative powers of their religion, they regularly let in men trying to escape gambling debts or snitch jackets, or guys like D-Town Filo and Sidetrack, with extensive histories of assault. Because they have been taught that mental illness is a spiritual rather than a neurological condition, they have opened the door to prisoners who scream and kick the walls all night. Most problematically, their worldview has blinded them to the severity of the narcotics problem.
When you admit a known peddler of K2 or meth into a group of men dealing with addiction issues, no matter how badly they want to change, the result is predictable. Good intentions have a pretty short half-life when your neighbor has some truly man-down dope. Anyone with a nose can tell there’s just as much drug use on the god pod as on my old wing. I’ve lived in five maximum security prisons, and every single one was saturated with drugs. What I mean is this: If I wanted to get high right now, it would be easier for me to procure any one of two or three narcotics than a shot of coffee, so long as I had the means to pay the dope boys. The new synthetic drugs can be sprayed on paper. I’m staring at a guy right now who is passed out at table four. Smokers of K2 do this little dance when they are stoned, where they grab onto something and then bob their knees up and down. This guy’s homeboys just pulled him away from the showers and planted him at the table, to try to make his state less obvious. He may get beaten up later, since he’s in a family and they at least impose some level of discipline. This isn’t abnormal, but real psychic damage accrues from watching human beings get wheeled off the pod on stretchers. Most come back from the hospital, but some don’t. When they rushed my friend Snow Man out, the stretcher rolled right over a small pile of plastic wrappers—the detritus of a meal that he’d sent to the dope man to pay for the K2 that killed him.
The chaplain stormed onto the pod a few months back to ream us out collectively for violating the contract we all signed promising not to use narcotics while enrolled. The goal of saving everyone for Jesus, dealers included, has ended up putting men back in the grip of addiction, while the rest of us grow progressively more cynical or pissed off because we live in a section that smells like a chemical refinery.
Even for those who truly want to better themselves, the way the courses are taught makes learning difficult. A couple of times per week, the field ministers roll in carts laden with TVs, amps, and speakers and set them up in the atrium by the central guard picket. Since we are never allowed direct contact with each other, we watch from our cells—through the metal mesh of our doors and the multiple layers of dayroom cage bars, from a distance of sixty feet. You only see a tiny quadrant of the screen, and never mind hearing well: The endless concrete and steel surfaces, with their profusion of odd angles, reduce all sound to auditory mishmash by the time it reaches your door.
The lessons themselves are mostly provided by churches. Some are pretty juvenile, like the one asking us to imagine what heaven might be like (“back-flipping off a cloud into a lake of fudge,” one memorable minister opined). Others border on the sinister. It was not lost on us that many classes seemed designed to engender an acceptance or even tacit endorsement of the need for harsh punishment as a component of forgiveness. Nor did we fail to grasp how this was meant to legitimize prison systems in which throwing away the key was the accepted norm. Whatever the content, no course was ever graded or evaluated in any meaningful way. Most of my neighbors stopped completing (or even opening) the course materials after a few weeks.
And so, who was reformed? Hardly anyone.
This is a more important point than you may appreciate. Whatever issues prisoners brought with them to solitary, they were not static, and being put in these oubliettes of sixty square feet was more than likely going to make them worse.
If you were trying to send people the message that they were not, in fact, human beings, you would be hard-pressed to improve upon the architecture of a solitary confinement wing. Maintenance is rare: I’ve lived in more than a hundred cells, and in at least half of them I had to make sure I left no property on the floor when it rained, because I was about to be living on top of a pond. The showers, usually cold, have mold growing in them. Every corner is infested with roaches, spiders, ants, and mice. Prisons in Texas are not air-conditioned. In summer we roast, sometimes literally to death, and in winter we freeze. Although we are supposed to be allowed out of our cells regularly for a shower and an hour of recreation (spent alone, in a cage slightly larger than our cells), out of the last 237 days, this only happened on fifty of them. We sometimes go more than forty days without being allowed to recreate. At night, the guards shine sun-bright flashlights in our cells every half hour.
It isn’t hard to imagine the effects: a progressively worsening, simmering rage; a sort of radical alterity that makes compromise or even basic decency seem like foreign concepts; a metastasizing sense of paranoia that finds confirmation multiple times a day—in other words, sociopathy, as an adaptive strategy rather than a disorder.
For their part, the guards respond in kind to the violent and unhinged behavior they witness each day. Their view of us as subhuman, and incorrigibly so, is constantly being confirmed. Such a hellish environment would seem ripe for programming of any sort. After being told for years that we are worse than worthless, it isn’t surprising that some of us initially responded positively to the attention of the field ministers. Whatever tales of moral depravity and lack of remorse our prosecutors offered the jury, most of us feel pretty awful about the choices that put us here. Being told that we have value—that we have the opportunity to be made new, washed clean—is heady stuff.
The problem is one of sustainability. Words, no matter how pretty or well-intentioned, just can’t compete against the reality of these halls. It took a few months, but the more perceptive among us eventually realized that nothing had changed: We weren’t actually made new, weren’t any cleaner than when we started. Some may have felt forgiven, but this came about without any genuine evidence of restoration of our humanity, our dignity, our civil rights, our freedom. To me, the program felt designed for one thing: to manage me, to create in me a sort of acceptance that I had been buried alive.
I grew up in the church. I was easily the most religious child I knew. As a teen, I had almost no friends, because I felt my peers were leading me to sin—chasing status, fighting, drinking. In an attempt to protect what I believed to be eternal, I willingly chose alienation, only peripherally aware of the psychic damage I was doing. Despite my increasing loneliness and all its attendant strangeness, I deeply loved Jesus and the gospel message, and I thought it only wise to sacrifice the good things of this broken world in order to store up treasure in the next.
After more than a decade of doubt and internal warfare, I turned away from the faith in my late twenties. I could no longer believe that an omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent deity could create such a disaster of a world. Neuroscience eroded my belief in free will; geology in a six-thousand-year-old earth; comparative religion in creation myth as history. All of that came later, though. The catalyst for my disbelief was the creeping realization that very few members of my church seemed to live by its teachings.
Shortly after my confirmation in the United Methodist Church, my father moved us to a more conservative Baptist one. The congregation was massive and rich, the campus elaborate. It sat at an interstate exchange between two highways in Sugar Land, Texas, a wealthy suburb of Houston. Under this concrete behemoth there was a homeless encampment. Every Sunday I watched a few thousand supposedly pious Christians drive right past in their Mercedes and BMWs, and I begged my god and fellow man to show me some tiny proof that the faith I had sacrificed my entire identity to had some validity. In more than five years, I never saw anyone drop off a single item of food or clothing, not once.
The faith of my youth seemed to be less about kindness, stewardship of the planet, and forgiveness than about market-driven populism, nativism, and Southern culture: a carelessly driven, gas-guzzling land-yacht of a political movement with a gilded cross as a hood ornament. I know that’s not a complete picture of religion. I have met many religious people who use their faith in the ultimate goodness of the cosmos to power some truly remarkable actions. I have had the good fortune to come into contact with victims of crime, including my own father, who have forgiven horrible acts because of their faith. Unfortunately, that humble form of religion is not what is winning the battle of ideas here in the faith-based pod.
What’s on offer is overwhelmingly confrontational. Services often start with a minister repeatedly screaming a single question over the PA system—Do I have any soldiers here in the army of the Lord?—until the response is loud enough to proceed. We have lessons with titles like “The Warrior’s Call” and are encouraged to “mow down all antagonism” when someone has the temerity to challenge us. Opposition is confirmation of our righteousness, we are told. Given that many of us committed acts of violence, this seems unwise. In the “Authentic Manhood” class, we are enjoined to proselytize in the workplace, an activity that would have earned me a pink slip at any of the jobs I worked prior to my arrest.
Most alarming is the persistent feeling of paranoia, filtered through an apocalyptic sieve. Churches, mostly evangelical, and a smattering of prosperity-doctrine nonprofits, mail us books and pamphlets claiming that environmental radicals used space-based lasers to incinerate portions of Maui in 2023, so that advocates of so-called fifteen-minute cities could better usher in an era of mass imprisonment. I listened earlier today to an earnest conversation between three of my neighbors about a false messiah, who might be the Antichrist, performing miracles in Jerusalem. One of these men tried earlier to convince me that Larry Fink of BlackRock was developing a superintelligent machine that would impose a despotic one-world government. Everything is part of a massive plot against Christianity.
How can you love the world and the people in it, how can you accept responsibility for helping fix its problems, if you see yourself as a persecuted minority standing against an opposition that is diabolical in the most literal sense?
How did we arrive at this point? The blame can certainly be spread around, but I think the largest portion belongs to the groups currently involved in prison ministry here at the McConnell Unit. When the TDCJ created its seminary program for field ministers, it mirrored the conservative, evangelical faith held by its directors and the legislators in Austin that back them. There are no Catholic field ministers at the McConnell Unit, no Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist ones.
I do not know where the liberal or progressive mainline denominations are in this exegetical tournament. Politically, their members tend to favor liberal prison reform, so you’d think they’d be the ones backing these programs and classes. Instead, they leave them to be dominated by the “hang ’em high” constituency. On occasion, I have wondered whether religious conservatives advocate for eternal sentences and draconian prison conditions only so they can step in and offer their brand of consolation. None of us is completely immune to the cynical spirit of this place, apparently.
In a recent conversation with my father, we were discussing the moral failures of political leaders who claim the mantle of Jesus. “They will have to answer to God one day,” he concluded. I don’t think that is nearly good enough. It assumes too much that cannot be proved and postpones justice beyond the present age.
On the god pod, men give their testimonies, in which all roads lead to a moment of salvation. The man in the cell below mine recently gave his: A childhood roaming free from adult supervision led to him slinging dope and buying trap houses, and ultimately to the murder of a customer who refused to pay his debts.
These stories always end with an explicit claim that the tellers have been forgiven and are now new men, a point that fills me with unease every time I hear it. I am certain the victims’ families don’t feel that way; I bet they miss their loved ones every day. And who can account for all the damage done to kids and friends and coworkers and all those who interacted with these souls afterward, with the way a single act can echo down lives and generations, warping everything it touches?
I can’t stop thinking about my own actions in this way, and it seems absurd that supposedly reasonable people feel they can spend a few minutes saying words inside their heads and suddenly be square with the cosmic house, the winding pathway of destruction erased. Their sense of absolution is just a brain state; it has no bearing on objective reality. It is a form of self-deception that replaces action, which to me is the only true means of potentially finding forgiveness.
Most people leave prison thinking they will not recidivate, but the statistics are clear. Many, if not most, will. I am convinced that the idea of being born again prevents genuine contrition and can only decrease one’s chances of remaining free. On the god pod, people are told day in, day out that they are sufficiently altered to avoid repeating their mistakes; but without truly feeling the heavy weight of remorse, they’ll likely return.
Absolution that comes too easy—that can be had in less time than it takes to order a hamburger from a fast-food joint—works against this feeling of constant, overpowering regret, this deep sense of being haunted. And I do mean haunted. We offenders need to remind ourselves that we are the dark silhouette in the nightmare, the monster under the bed. This needs to hurt. We need to stay permanently afraid of what we might be capable of doing. We can never afford to think we are new.
I am responsible for the deaths of my mother and brother. I have sweat-inducing dreams every week, not just about what happened on December 10, 2003, when they were shot, at my order, but about my brother Kevin’s two children—kids I’ve only imagined, kids he never got to have because of me. I remember their names when I awake, the words to the songs that the eldest would have learned in kindergarten. I have seen them open the gifts I dreamed I bought them for Christmas. I shoot out of bed with my heart rate in the stratosphere. Once awake, several times a day my mind connects something I am seeing or hearing to my mother or brother. The guilt doesn’t dissipate as time passes—and not just for the big stuff, the criminal stuff. I am constantly wincing over some memory that has decided to kick down the door of my Cartesian theater and force itself onto the stage. Things I said or failed to say, things I failed to do for my friends, basic levels of honesty that I didn’t live up to in my relationship with my ex-fiancée. It is no mystery why virtually no one from my former life has anything to do with me now. It seems sometimes like the sufferings of the past two decades ought to have burned at least some of these comparatively minor items off my karmic balance sheet, but that has not been my felt reality. Rather, everything hovers about, waiting, reminding. Convicting.
And that is exactly as it should be. The harms we commit against others should irreparably mar the existences of those who commit them. We ought to be able to trace the keloid braille of our scars and read the lessons inscribed there. Although I once believed that vicarious redemption was possible, I now find it untenable that someone else’s actions could make those scars vanish. Someone can work for me, sacrifice for me, even die for me, but they cannot obliterate my obligations or responsibilities, undo my mistakes, or change the past. Even if such a thing were possible, it would not seem moral to me. Two people have already died for my sins. Why would I want to add another? Of all the lessons I’ve learned in hell, the most important is that good people carry their own crosses, all of them at once. They don’t shove them into the arms of others.
Being miserable is hardly a marketable anti-crime model, especially compared to the all-day spa package for the soul currently on offer here on the god pod. Yet it seems to me to be one of the few that might actually reduce recidivism. We aren’t here to feel better, after all, but to get better.
When I think about the free world, I don’t dream of big houses or fancy watches or beautiful women. I think about touching a tree again, seeing the stars for the first time in decades, finding a job where I can contribute to my vision of what I want the world to look like. The American dream of material abundance doesn’t appeal any longer, and I can’t quite figure out why I ever bought into it in the first place. People matter, not stuff. Prison taught me that, but only through the solidarity that stems from shared suffering—and, man, have I been given a master class in that subject.
This essay was supported by the Ridgeway Reporting Project, managed by Solitary Watch with funding from the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation and the Vital Projects Fund.
Thomas Bartlett Whitaker is the founder of and a creative advisor to Minutes Before Six, an online journal for incarcerated writers. His work has won awards from PEN American Center and been published by Guernica and Solitary Watch and in the anthology Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement. Originally sentenced to death, he is now serving a life sentence in Texas.
Image: Daniel Bernard. Unsplash, 2020.
