Chris Dankovich describes the summer they had Pokemon in prison. In 2023, the new game was added to prisoners’ tablets and became the #1 source of entertainment. 

Summer is when tensions are highest in prison. It’s hot and everyone is both miserable and outside. Tattoos flashing with no one wearing a shirt, groups cliqued up, men strutting and sweating.

Rico, Jake and I were pretty much doing the same as we walked around the half-mile track on a bright, hot day in mid-July 2023. Individuals, crowds, and gang crews walked past, heading one direction or another.

Santiago was clearly walking directly at us. I didn’t know him personally, but few prisoners were as noticeable. Sporting a faded, buzzed haircut and a handlebar mustache, he was an imposing individual around the age of 40. He looked much like “Smiley” in the movie Training Day, who had almost killed Ethan Hawke’s character in a bathtub. But Smiley was a made-up gangbanger, and Santiago, with an MS-13 tattoo that took up his entire back, and gang-related words across the front of his neck, was the real deal.

“Vato,” Santiago said to Rico, a (mostly) reformed former Latin King gang member. “I need you. It’s important.”

“What’s up, my man?” Rico replied.

I went to step away. You don’t want to be around gang business if you’re not part of the gang. Santiago stopped me, though. “No, you good, homie.”

“What up, then?” asked Rico.

“I need your help with something.”

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He pulled out an electronic Android tablet, made by the prison company JPay, that we’ve been allowed to purchase for its electronic messaging service and to listen to music. Punching up something that I couldn’t see, he held it in front of Rico.

“Vato, how do I get through the Ice Cave? And what Pokemon do I use to defeat the gym over here?”

Pokemon took over prison for a few weeks in the summer of 2023. The prison system had allowed JPay to sell us a few basic games for years, but one day, shouts echoed through the prison hallways that their catalogue had been updated to include the 15-year-old Pokemon Gold, Silver, and Yellow edition Gameboy games redesigned as an app.

No fights occurred for a weekend as everyone was swept off their feet by what might be the most engrossing kids game of all time, including teenage “fish” fresh off the streets, grown men who had never played the game, and old men who had been in prison since before video games were invented.

Even Bob, an elderly man convicted of murder 50 years earlier and incarcerated since the Vietnam War, came to me. I’d played the predecessor of these games as a kid in the 90s. He wanted advice nearly every hour for about two days, and to show off his leveled-up Snorlax.

Ahhh, the laughable side of the Prison Industrial Complex. Hardened gangsters and normally grumpy, elderly men frolicking in a colorful kids game, all while a prison-related industry made around $5,000 off of this game in one single Michigan prison (out of about 32).

Throughout American history, prisons have allowed prisoners some form of leisure activities, and human privileges at times (visitors bringing cakes for birthdays a century ago, Andy Dufresne earning a case of beer for his fellow roofers in Shawshank Redemption, or the chain gang being allowed a respite in a movie theatre in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”). Only over the past decade or so have businesses that are part of the Prison Industrial Complex started commodifying and capitalizing on the few privileges found in prison.

As states increasingly privatize their services, including justice and incarceration, those private companies that take over those services gain a say in what services are offered and how those services are rendered. Control of these services goes from the sole domain of voters, legislatures, and bureaucrats and becomes part of capital-seeking enterprises beholden by fiduciary duties to investors.

But hey, enough of that. Because of all this, I played Pokemon for the first time in a quarter-century. The game I loved as a kid in third grade is now what’s keeping my cellmate and me willingly in our cell for a whole weekend. When a fork comes in Route 10, he takes one path and I take the other. “Hey, where is HM03?” I yell down to him.

“You gotta get to the Safari Zone and find your way to the end.”

Goat is a man who has known hard times. Incarcerated as a young teen, he was the opposite of tough. He was picked on in prison. And then he had two strokes and an aneurysm. Blind in one eye, partially blind in the other and with a giant scar around his head, he stands out in a place that can be cruel to anyone who stands out or is perceived to not be strong. In the heartless environment that prison can be, he’s been bullied, beaten up, and robbed merely for looking the way he does.

But not anymore. In an incredible twist of fate, Pokemon became one of the most popular guys in prison. It gave Goat a chance to shine. Through his heartbreaking health issues, he somehow managed to recall every detail of each Pokemon game he’d ever played, where every item, Easter egg, and Pokemon was located, and how to get there.

All of a sudden, drug dealers, hitmen, gangsters and Goat’s own abusers now came to him for secrets and tips on how to be the Pokemaster.

Chris Dankovich #595904
Thumb Corr Facility
3225 John Conley Driver
Lapeer, MI 48446

The post The Summer We Were Consumed by Pokemon in Prison first appeared on Prison Writers.