The 13th day in ‘the hole’ has been an eye opener.  This is the first time I’ve experienced it after 28 years in federal prison, for breaking a prison rule (for sending a picture to my family through an unauthorized device, a cell phone).  

‘The hole’ is a prison within a prison.  It is made up of 54 two-men prison cells. They are 8×6 ft and metal-barred, like the ones in Alcatraz prison.  If you’ve seen the movie ‘Escape from Alcatraz’,  Starring Clint Eastwood, then you know what I mean.

Each cell is stripped to its bare minimum: a stainless-steel toilet and sink, in metal bunk-bed for two occupants, paper-thin mattresses, sheet, blanket, and a small metal table with its attached metal stool. The first day I was thrown in one of these cells, I was strip-searched.

I was told to remove my clothing until I looked like the day I was born.  “Raise your arms, open your mouth, and turn around, raise both feet, bend over and open your cheeks, turn back, lift your testicles and pull back your foreskin,” the prison guard sternly ordered. “My what?” I asked. “Your foreskin”, he smiled “that’s also a place you hide the dope in”. Then I was given one pair of orange pants, t-shirt, socks, boxer, underwear, and see-through plastic orange sandals. I looked more like a carrot than a pumpkin. I still do.

For the first 3 days, I kept asking the prison guards making their rounds every 30 minutes or so for pen and paper. I needed to write a letter to my family to let them know I was in ‘the hole’.   After much pleading, I was issued two sheets of paper and an envelope. I had to wait another day to obtain a rubber pencil without an eraser, the size of your pinky finger, which tins to bend between your index finger and the thumb Play-Doh every time you write; then wait another week to buy a stamp from a limited Commissary list that sells stamps, medication, envelopes, writing paper, and three peanut butter snack crackers each week. 

We are fed three meals a day, the portions are small.  More than once, I’ve tried to save a piece of bread or half apple for those late night hunger spikes that won’t let me sleep at night; only for the prison guards to throw them away during their constant cell shakedowns to make sure everything we possess stays at a bare minimum. 

We are issued one roll of toilet paper every two days.  My cellmate (who’s here on a similar disciplinary fraction), and I have to ration each sheet when we wipe.  The toothpaste is the size of a small thimble that slides over your index finger, with bristles big enough to brush the teeth of a mouse (there are a few around at night but I doubt they’ll let me).  The toothpaste, a slice of plastic that oooses a glue looking substance that tastes like Vicks Vapor Rub.  

The punishment is more psychological than anything else.  We are afforded three showers a week, on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. The process is tedious.  Each inmate, along with his cellmate, are handcuffed behind their back through a partial slot between the bars of the cell door.  After the cell door opens, they are led backwards and onto the tier (hallway) outside their cell.  They are hand-patted down then a guard holding a metal detector rod, the size of Harry Potter magic wand, scans them as if looking for a gun or explosives at an airport, including the bottom of their feet for homemade weapons such as toilet paper weapons.

Once in the two shower stalls side by side, miniature as if for small people, a barred-metal door closes behind each.  The handcuffs are removed through the partial slot on the barred-metal door, and each inmate is given a towel and a transparent plastic container (soap and shampoo and one) the size of a salt shaker, with the engraved words: ‘maximum security’ and ‘manufactured exclusively for Bob Barker’.  Not the one from The Price is Right… but then again in this day in age anything goes to turn over a profit, even prison toiletries.

After the 4 minute time shower, each inmate is issued a clean shirt, boxer underwear, and socks.  All orange of course.  You keep the same pants, you can only exchange those on Sundays.  The same cautionary procedure is employed by the prison guards leading the two inmates back to their cells, including the magic wand scan, which I tend to assume the inmates wish they would disappear and end back at Hogwarts; until all the nine cells on our tier have gone through the same soap and rinse process, “Until squeaky clean,” one of the main guard says.

The showers are something I look forward to.  It is the only time I am let out of the prison cell.  The rest of the time I’m spending it in a stand-still-capsule 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Funny is the fact that after you begin to experience something negative long-term, the experience begins to feel partially normal, or so you assume. 

It no longer bothers me that each morning at 5:30 the bright lights above my head splash my face as I lay down on the top metal bunk bed, where I’ve struggled to sleep throughout the night because I was either cold or hungry.  The heating system does not work on this part of the prison.

After nearly three decades in prison, I’ve learned resilience. I’ve learned to put into practice the words of a man of faith in the Bible who said, “I have learned the secret of peace and contentment in whatever situation or place I can find myself in,” Phil 4:11.

Also funny (perhaps not so funny) is the fact that for the past 13 days I have requested a Bible, even from the chaplain who walks the tier once a week to make sure no inmate is on the verge of committing suicide; not that it would be easily manageable to do with strands of toilet paper, a sheet or blanket, underwear or socks (I stand corrected, one could jump head-first from the top bunk onto the concrete floor, but it would do more than put bruises on you than anything else.  Unless you break your neck, and even then you run the risk of being paralyzed from the neck down in prison.

The only reading material I’ve been given is Stephen King’s novel called ‘Mr Mercedes’ Brady, one of the characters in the novel, kills his little brother and mother, and smashes a crowd of people with the car, killing eight people.  Hardly a therapeutic tool for someone like me, in ‘the hole’.  Whatever is happening to me, I refuse to allow ‘the hole’ to break me.

I’ll keep on persevering each day staring out my prison bars at the windows on the opposite wall of the tier I’m incarcerated in.  Windows covered with metal blinders on the outside, blocking the view to the outside world, and the rest of the prison; where the unseen dawn breaks each morning, and you know it’s morning because you hear the chirping of the birds in the distance, and a foghorn that goes off at six o’clock to remind is prisoners the beginning of another dead-end time prison day.  

However I feel, there’s not much I can do, but breathe in and out to remind myself I still exist in one of the most dreaded places on the planet.  I don’t know how long I’m going to remain here.  Some say 30 days, others 90.  Whatever the case, I must endure through this place where my life choices don’t have any value, where I’m just another number without a name, where I’m just another orange animal in a prison cage.

I was informed today that the reason I’m not being issued a Bible is because they are all ‘hard back cover Bibles’. I might use the hardcover as a weapon to kill another inmate.  Welcome to the United States Bureau of Prisons, Special Housing Unit, better known as ‘the hole’!

Edwin Rubis is a non-violent cannabis prisoner serving 40 years in federal prison. He has been incarcerated since 1998, his out date is 2031.  At the time of this writing Edwin was in the hole waiting for the disciplinary hearing officer to determine how many days he was to serve in the whole for breaking a prison rule.

You can help free Edwin: tinyurl.com/FreeEdwinRubis

You can send Edwin a text message through corrlinks: (256) 770-4280

You can see more of his article and the Beard Bros’s efforts to have him released here.