Life Inside Menard Prison’s East House: Illinois’ Harshest Prison Unit

Robert Maday describes how Menard Prison is a place where confinement goes far beyond bars, breaking down the mind as much as the body.

Menard Prison is without question the worst Illinois prison, and East House is Menard Prison’s worst housing unit. By “worst,” I don’t mean most dangerous or violent. East House is a general population unit, but in actuality it is a disciplinary unit. Out of 30,000 Illinois prisoners, the 500 dumbest, most obnoxious and most immature are in East House, and for 98% of these 500, the last place they were before East House was disciplinary segregation (the hole), either at a different prison or here.

The Slow Descent Into Madness Behind Bars

It is a terrible thing to be pushed toward insanity. Like the laboratory chimp that frantically screams and bounds from one side of its cage to the other perhaps, unable to process despair but certainly understands it is in distress, I feel my own distress growing worse by the day. I am aware of a steady, creeping descent, an almost slow-motion plunge into madness. It is not nice. It is the great unfolding of events that gives life its full drama and beauty; the unraveling of self is life’s horror.

If you ever saw the move The Fugitive, I am in the prison (Menard) Harrison Ford was en route to when the prison bus when rolling down the ravine onto the railroad tracks. I can’t help finding a little irony in that, since I got national (even a little international) attention for a high-profile escape of my own 16 years ago, but that is a different story.

I am part of the tiny 2% who do not find themselves in East House because of disciplinary reasons. I am in East House for administrative security reasons connected to the high-profile escape I mentioned. I am on a mandatory and automatic transfer every 15, 18, or 24 months, from one max joint to another. The problem is that the other max joint (Lawrence) is relatively smooth and easy, while Menard will undo you, pulling the threads of your psyche like a ball of yarn. We all have our inner fractures which we deal with. Menard Prison will take hold of those fractures and unleash a full-scale fragmentation.

No Preparation Can Shield You From Menard Prison

In the van on the way here, I tried to prepare myself. Since I’ve been here twice before in the past eight years, I know what to expect. My attempt to prepare was useless, and within six days, I was confronting a genuine “Epstein moment” out of pure frustration.

I am a man already under tremendous pressure, and the daily struggle to maintain an already fragile equilibrium is not easy. Under the surface is an always lurking inner anguish. It stalks for its chance to surface, to evade my repressionary tactics. It is “when we are alone that the worst and saddest thoughts come to us,” and holy shit! East House in Menard Prison is a place where those “saddest thoughts” come calling.

I like being alone. I have always been good by myself, solitude being a close friend. But solitude can only hold up its end when aloneness and contentment are in harmony. Then solitude becomes that intuiting, welcoming place, where alone with our thoughts we can wander through the fertile fields of memory and the woods of imagination. All my life, I have been eager to retreat there.

But solitude loses its luster when the ground is poisoned. When aloneness morphs into loneliness and isolation into alienation, solitude vanishes. When we begin to feel alienated even from ourselves, we know we are in terrible trouble.

Thrown Into Chaos: My First Days Back at Menard Prison

I transfer to Menard Prison from Lawrence on a Saturday. I immediately discover that East House is on a level 1 lockdown (big surprise), which means zero movement. Not even the workers come out to pass out trays or anything. I go into a cell that is beyond filthy. I get nothing—no toilet paper, no soap, no toothbrush, no sheets, nothing. All my property came with my. My little 15″ TV, my tablet with my music, coffee, food and toiletries I bought from commissary, etc. But I would wait nine days to get my property. Nine days with essentially nothing. About 30 hours after arriving, I get a roll of toilet paper and a bar of soap (the only “supplies” you will ever get) and only because Sunday is supply day. Had I arrived on Monday, I would have been fucked.

It takes two days to get sheets to put on a mattress that looks like it has been unearthed from Buchenwald. I ask every officer that passes my cell for four days if I could get a toothbrush and toothpaste. On the fourth day, I finally get them, gratefully brush my teeth, then lose the toothbrush the next morning due to a cell house repression campaign.

The level 1 lockdown that was in force upon my arrival was the result of a staff assault. Now comes the retaliation. Before 6:00 a.m., hundreds of officers flood the cell house, all of them decked out with helmets, face shields, and three-foot-long wooden sticks which they will certainly use. “Lights on! On your feet!” After are are all strip-searched and put clothes back on, we are handcuffed behind our backs and marched to the chapel about 200 yards away. There are enough officers to stand shoulder to should on either side along the 200 or so yards, all with their wooden sticks. “Eyes down! Heads down!” They mean it too.

We sit in the chapel for over two hours, handcuffed the whole time, while our cells are absolutely trashed. This entire ordeal is stupid and ridiculous. First of all, not one man caught up in this collective bullshit had any culpability for the staff assault. Whoever did the assaulting was absolutely dragged to the hole immediately and will most likely be there for months.

Second, the assault may or may not be even legit. If someone tries to take a swing at an officer, he barely connects and is instantly swarmed by five officers. That little non-event is enough to trigger this absurd response. Why? Because that’s Menard Prison. Heavy-handedness is the order of the day, every day, and they happily engage in demonstrating who is the boss like 16th century nobility would repress a peasant rebellion, except in Menard you get the repression even without the rebellion.

When I return to my cell, I see that my toothbrush—the one that had taken four days to get and that I only used once—is gone.

When Inner Turmoil Meets Institutional Cruelty

Frustration, deprivation, hardship, and stupidity are all part of the prison experience which must be endured and absorbed from time to time, maddening as they might be. They aren’t easy to shrug off, though, when you are already struggling against colliding forces that are bringing you low. My inner turmoil and anguish are forces I can contend with day to day, but it doesn’t take much, unfortunately, to tip the balance. And the misery at Menard Prison isn’t limited to the periodic chapel ordeal.

As I write this, we haven’t had outside yard in 15 weeks, and if you don’t have an appointment and pass to go somewhere, like a visit or to see the nurse, or to go to property to pick up an item, you don’t leave your cell. Period. I go weeks without leaving my cell. If we are lucky, we get to walk over to commissary once a month—$100 spending limit. The food on the trays is trash. (Breakfast comes to the cell at 3:30 a.m. for some insane reason.) East House is five galleries high, 25 cells per gallery (approximately 250 men per side), and the noise never stops. The overnight hours are torture if you can’t ignore the noise.

To make it worse, the noise is so dumb and banal, it make Beevis and Butthead look like scholars. The other night at 2:00 a.m., I got pulled out of sleep because two brainiacs below me were arguing about whether or not there is any such thing as “Black Mexican bitches,” like there are Blacks in Brazil or Cuba or elsewhere. If I had a hand grenade to toss down there, they would have gotten it.

When I stop and consider that this is actually my life, I feel shame and disgust. I had a good life. I have been poised to succeed more than once, but recklessness was my undoing. I have about 15 more years in prison before I can stand free in the world again. I can feel the damage being done. Existing almost entirely in the cell is a degree of confinement that is simply cruel. A two-hour trip to commissary has been the only excursion out of my cell in the past six weeks. I am constantly sleep-deprives, which doesn’t help.

I could go on for 100 pages. These are just the highlights. I’ll quote Schopenhauer to sum up what I’m trying to say: “Not to be occupied and not to exist amount to the same thing.” Stuck in this stifling stagnation, I am frequently asking: Am I still me? Hopefully the damage and the toll this is all taking on me is only a wound that will heal and not a disease that will destroy. I still have hope, even anticipation, for that small slice of life that will be left at the end of this. Is 70 too old for someone to find happiness? I don’t think it is.

Nothing is more painful than a self-inflicted doom. To not participate in life is awful. Will the sun actually rise and fall enough times for me to take the final steps out of this soul-crushing maze? I hope so. James said, “Life flowers out of the profoundest tragic depths.” if so, I am sowing the seeds for a vast and lush garden. May I see it one day.

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