Caged by New Jersey Prison Theater Cooperative (2020) (read in 2022)

“OMAR: How long this gonna go on?

“OJORE: ’Til they break you. Or ’til they don’t. Three days. Three weeks. You don’t break, it go on like this for a long time. An’ if you don’t think you can take it, then don’t start puttin’ yerself through this hell. Just tell ’em what they wanna know from the door.”

“The worst is the psychological, the humiliation, sleep deprivation, sensory disorientation, extreme light or dark, extreme cold or heat and the long weeks and months of solitary. If you don’t have a strong sense of purpose you don’t survive. They want to defeat you mentally. An’ I seen a lot of men defeated.”

“If you are poor and Black, however, you are conditioned for prison in dysfunctional and overcrowded schools where in the morning you are greeted with metal detectors and police and where in the yard there are fights. You live in dangerous, rundown housing projects, whose smell and decay are replicated in moldering prisons. You navigate the streets in deindustrialized wastelands where despair is rampant and the exit doors of drugs, alcohol, crime, and violence are ubiquitous. You are hauled in front of courts to face lists of charges invented by the police, who oversee mini reigns of terror in your neighborhood, to force you to plea out. Few of the incarcerated ever get a jury trial. The justice system does not work for us. Prison was not a huge culture shock for me. And it was not a huge culture shock for most of the brothers I did time with. In America they prepare you for your future.”

“As the United States devolves into a system where the ruling elites have total power, it behooves those on the outside to look closely at what the state has done to those of us in the inside.”

“Prison is a lot like the outside world. There is a stratum of people you try to avoid. There are the majority who spend most of their free time slack-jawed in front of a television set, and then there are those who have recovered their integrity and even, to an extent, their moral autonomy. They have risen above prison to become better people. Yet, even they can be arbitrarily disappeared into solitary confinement or shipped to another prison by the administration. Everyone in prison is disposable.”

“You so fucked up when you start you don’t care about nothin’. That’s the energy … hit a motherfucker over the head with a stick! Pause. But when you start to care about shit, then you fucked.”

“I don’t know why niggas even try to steal. We ain’t no good at it. Grab a box of Pampers and we head straight to jail. Now white people, they the Olympians of stealing. Can’t compete with white folks when it comes to takin’ shit. They wrote the book. Stole the whole damn country.”

“I ain’t stop throwing them dice till I turn every last one of they pockets to rabbit ears! Boy I lit their ass up like downtown Atlanta!”

“OMAR (STANDING UP): Ma, I had to take a plea.

“CHIMENE: You ain’t going to trial?

“OMAR: They stacked too many charges, Ma. If I go to trial I get thirty. They willin’ to cut it to seventeen if I cop.”

“OJORE: I expropriated monies in Newark from a capitalist bank … got into a gunfight with the political police.

“OMAR: Political police?

“OJORE: Yeah, all police is political. They serve the system don’t they? An’ what’s that system? Capitalism.

“OMAR: That’s some heavy shit, Ojore …

“OJORE: Look son, our bodies ain’t worth nothin’ to the man on the streets. Once we locked in a cage we worth $50,000 a year to all dem prison contractors, guards, food service companies, phone companies, laundry services, medical companies an’ prison construction companies. An’ in here we can’t create no problems. People say da system don’t work. That’s ’cause they don’t get it. The system works jus’ the way it designed to work.”

“CHIMENE: Quan and Zaire takin’ this awful hard. I want you to talk to ‘em. He didn’t kill that boy, Jimmy.

“JIMMY: Since when that matter?

“CHIMENE: If he went to trial the truth come out.

“JIMMY: That never happen, Chimene. The system see to that. The ones go to trial get the longest sentences jus’ to remind everyone else they better do jus’ what the man tells ’em to do.”

“SOCIAL WORKER: Your request for a funeral visit has been approved. Sign here. This is the $800 charge to your account for the officers’ overtime and the vehicle fee.

“OMAR signs the form.

“SOCIAL WORKER: This is the breakdown of the costs. You leave in ten minutes. Get dressed. Don’t make any calls or your trip gets terminated. The administration doesn’t want you to go so don’t do anything stupid, they’ll bring you back, still charge you and toss you in the hole for a week.”

“Bitches do strange things for change. Feel me? Monsters walk the halls at night, stand outside a cell and start yellin’, sayin’ the woman inside smokin’ just so they can enter the cells. The jailhouse relationships intense! Girls on girls. They be drainin’ the toilet pipes to talk all night to their man downstairs. You should hear that chatter. The freaks really come out in the dark. This one girl so loud an’ she never stops talkin’ … day and night. She be, ‘Hey, blah blah blah.’ She talkin’ to different men, which you definitely don’t do. She a ho, on the bowl. Bowl phone love. Crazy.”

“MCU—Management Control Unit. It was created in Scarborough State Prison in 1975 for prisoners who had not broken prison rules, but who were, because of their political beliefs, deemed to be a threat by prison administrators. It was first used to quarantine members of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. Prisoners in the MCU spend up to twenty-three hours a day in their cells, are isolated, under constant surveillance, and have their correspondence and reading material heavily censored. It is, in essence, a prison within the prison.”