 Hi guys and welcome back to the shakedown. Last time I told you that this episode was kind of a mess and we had a lot of interruptions and Ben David broke into the house and we haven't even gotten to the point in the episode where he explains why he came over to Malone's house. We're getting there. We're gonna break it down into small chunks and there's some good points. This part right here, we're talking about what got us into comics. Malone started by asking me why I got into comics and we go from there. We both tell our stories about why we got into comics and kind of what it was like to draw comics in prison. I know it's not our normal stuff but hopefully you guys find it interesting. All right and here it is, the continuation of this episode of the Shakedown. You were inspired, you had a vision for this Green Lantern character, the Colorado Green Lantern. It's not what you're gonna do with someone. It just led you down. Were you already a writer before this and did you pursued writing as a hobby or a profession before this? Yeah, so that is a good question. So when I came to prison, I was a software developer before I came to prison and I knew beforehand that I did not, I wasn't gonna be able to keep up my skills. I knew that before I was going in. I was trying to think of what I would be able to do and even though I was forewarned about the ridiculous situation of Texas prisons. Well, not necessarily about Texas prisons, I just kind of logically figured it out. I knew I wasn't gonna be able to use a computer. I just, I mean, like, so one thing is like, it's not just even just about using a computer. It was, I was doing, I was actively going to classes, reading literature and I'd have to constantly teaching myself new technologies all the time to keep up, to get better jobs, to improve things at work or to get new jobs that I wanted. So if I wasn't gonna be able to do that and I was gonna be falling behind the entire time I was in prison, I needed to find something else. I needed to find something else I wanted to do. I wanted something else that I could do as well that would help people out. My ultimate goal was always to not have anyone do, not have anyone make the same mistakes that I did and prevent that in some way. That's always been the ultimate goal and I've always tried to do that. I knew one thing I could do that might lead to that is write. So I actually, before I came to prison, I started trying to write down my story about the accident, about what led up to it. I was trying to write that down. I was just writing. I wasn't looking for any guidance. I wasn't taking classes. I wasn't looking at any suggestions. I was just writing to write. And in prison, I started taking sociology courses and started writing essays, just for my college courses, my college correspondence courses. And then I started looking for other ways to write to practice my writing. I became a reporter for the prison newspaper, The Echo, which did not help me practice my writing because... How often did they publish any of your reports? They published zero of my reports. Which I honestly take as a badge of honor because I would never want to write anything that they would be willing to publish. One of these days, one of our podcasts is going to have to be about... The Echo. ...the situation about The Echo because I've got a perspective of The Echo that you're not going to get too many people. I was around, The Echo used to be a legitimate newspaper. It was considered the press, right? And had all the freedoms of the press that allowed every other newspaper in the world. In the United States of America. All the constitutional rights that any other reporter had actually were granted to the prisoners that were writing for The Echo, right? Pretty darn amazing. But they were never used and the prisoners were oftentimes told what they could publish or what they couldn't publish. It's up until an actual real reporter for the Texas Monthly got locked up in Texas. And where they put him, they put him in the walls unit where he immediately got a job working at The Echo. And he published a couple of gazing articles. This happened roughly around 2000 because I can remember clearly when it happened. Because it happened at the exact same time that they had had a real high publicity. Matthew happened on the actual lethal injection table there when they were executing a guy. A guy coughed up a handcuff key as he was dying, right? And because he had some kind of plans. He was planning some kind of escapement. He obviously never did get off the ground. He had a handcuff key and it was so embarrassing to Texas. I mean, immediately, of course, you have reporters that are watching the execution. And so they see this and so what do they do? They need to know a lot about it. And it's a lot of egg on their face. So what does Texas do every time that they have a situation like this where they're getting embarrassed? They do nothing that would actually prevent what happened. They just do a whole bunch of absolute nothing. So they decided they're gonna shake down everything in the entirety of TBC. They got locked down as if some guy up in Dalhart could possibly affect the death row and they're hacking up a key. I love that response. That's, remember, that's the classic TDCJ response. That's the, did someone escape? Shakedown all of TDC. Did a gun make it into a unit? Shakedown all of TDC. Did someone have a heart attack? Shakedown all of TDC. But I mean, it's everything. Exactly. And they went overboard with this one. Whereas, you know, in the past, their shakedown generally, there's a lot of inmates that are still considered essential workers that are out and about. Well, this one? No. They made sure that every single inmate, every trustee, all the way to every day, every one that was in administrative segregation was locked up tight while only guards did all of our, did all of the DDCs that normally were done by inmates on the unit. We had guards washing our boxes. We had guards making our Johnny. We had guards sweeping the run. All of these things were being done by guards. As you can imagine, that didn't go well. Guards hate that so bad. Well, yeah. So, I mean, they're not going to wash your clothes. Oh, no. They're going to have, they're going to say they did. They're using dirty boxes that some other inmates have been wearing. And then they're not going to, are they going to prepare your food? Well, they don't eat it. Why the heck would they care? Look at this. Right in your peanut butter sandwich, throw it in the bag, crumpled up. It was horrible. It was a horrible situation all the way around, right? And then they told the initial orders given to the guards, for the shakedown is that everything, every rubber band, every paper clip, every, everything gets a major case. Everything. So where do they start with these shakedowns? The trustee camp. So, the trustee camp got blasted with over a thousand major cases. And one day, there's over, you have a roughly maybe 200 men somehow caught a thousand major cases in a single day. So, they, so think about that situation. That became overwhelming real quick. And so they backed off of that. Sadly, the guys that were the trustee camp, hold on. They got the full force of that. But, I want to break something down because it makes total sense to us, but it's not going to make sense to people listening. The trustee, the trustees do all the stuff, all the work outside of the unit. Trustees can actually leave the prison. So like the guys who are cleaning the toilets inside the prison, those aren't trustees. The guys who are handing out toilet paper and stuff like that inside of prisons, those generally aren't trustees. So sometimes they are. In general, the guys who are inside the prison walls are not going to be trustees. Trustees can have a huge range of jobs. Trustees can drive trucks and deliver the food to other units. They'll do maintenance on other buildings. I worked at a furniture factory and we built courtrooms. We, they would, and they would sleep overnight places so they could finish, you know, they'd take all every, we'd build up basically the courtroom on the unit and then put everything on a truck. The truck drivers would ship it over and the trustees would take it over and actually assemble it over at the city hall. So, or at the city building or the county building or whatever. So if the trustees get major cases, they can't be trustees anymore. They're gonna send them back to the building. If you lose all of the trustees, if all of the trustees get major cases, then they can't do that work and you have no one doing that work. So not only does that mean that the inmates can't do that work, but then the unit that makes the peas or the carrots or the corn, that can't be canned and shipped to the other units around the state. The units that like have the truck drivers, they can't drive. If there's supposed to be a courtroom built on such and such a date, there's no inmates to build it because they decided to shake down everybody and give everyone major cases. And it's like a rubber band is not a major case and you honestly, you need a rubber band to like hold up your lamp light or whatever or, you know, two by three by one box or whatever to hold all your commissary on there. But they don't sell rubber bands on commissary so therefore it's considered a contraband by them. Right. If I take like a plastic bag that is, that like holds my coffee on commissary and I put my pencils in it, that's technically contraband because now I have, I'm using it for its unintended purpose. Like what you're talking about, that would be a major case. And we haven't talked about this yet either. Our podcast called The Shakedown, like that's what we're naming this after is these shakedowns where they go through and inmates have to take all of their, pack up all their stuff, put it in front of officers. Officers go through every single one of their items and say, this is contraband, this is not. And then write them up for stuff that is considered contraband. Right. Which interestingly enough in the context of what we're talking about, oftentimes your art supplies that you have in prison are contraband, are considered contraband. That razor we were talking about to make the pencils, that's contraband. To sharpen a pencil properly, to do some artwork, your razor blade will be considered contraband to get a mechanical pencil, which is an enormous advantage if you're gonna be doing something like drawing comic books. Infinitely better. That is considered contraband. Any kind of quality, any kind of truly professional quality materials, paper or colors or otherwise, would all be considered contraband. You can get them in the craft shop, but you can't take them out of the craft shop. A lot of units don't even have craft shops. You can use the tail block and the craft shop to dye and things like that. Those things are going out. People, you have no idea how many, how many full sets of pens and pencils and markers and so forth else I have gone through in the course of my stay in prison that have just been just, I'm doing nothing with these things and doing artwork. I'm not hurting anybody that you can't possibly cause anyone any more harm than any of the other pens and pencils that they sell or the razors that they gave you and forced upon you every single week in prison, they hand you a brand new range of blade, but for some reason, a mechanical pencil, you can't have. For nothing more than the purpose of, their whole entire reasoning is they don't sell it on a comic book that makes a comic book. Which is ridiculous because there's a lot of stuff they said they don't sell on a comic book that's not a comic book. All the books that we got, they didn't sell on a comic book. It was a thing that got into the mail. And it used to be that you could actually, they could send in paper, but now that's contraband. You can't get paper or notebooks. Notebooks, that drove me nuts. I'm like, I would have begged someone to send in a sketchbook or something like that. And they can't do that. That's contraband. And it's, I mean, it's really, so you'll buy everything from commissary. So no one other than TDCJ gets your money, which is insane. It's your family's money, not your money. You don't make any money. Yeah, that's true. I made zero money in that time. None of us made any money. While you were doing your comic books in prison, you were also having to work a full-time job as whatever else you were doing in there. So you're writing your Green Lantern story and you were working in the furniture factory or wherever. Yeah, the majority of the time I wrote that story, I was working from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the maintenance shop Monday through Friday as a clerk. I couldn't do much in there as far as writing. Sometimes I'd be able to use that job to actually type up my Green Lantern stories. That's why I had cool, typed up versions of my story. I could, I had lying around that you could look at. But in general, what I would do is I'd work 6 to 6 then when I get back and I had cell time, I'd do some writing back in the cell and then go to bed and that was it. Basically avoid the day room. And then on the weekends, I'd do some more writing. And that was my free time is just going through and writing those plots out. It was a lot of fun. It was fun coming up with those and it was great. The Shakedown is recorded in luxurious Longmont Public Media Studios and our theme song, Shakedown, is provided by Envato Elements.