053803: Life at Fifteen
053803: Life at Fifteen is the frankly horrifying memoir of Robert Gagnon. Hoping to get access to drug and alcohol counseling by getting arrested, fifteen-year-old Robert held up a savings and loan with the help of a friend. Unfortunately, their simple robbery went wrong, and Robert wounded a bank employee in the resulting struggle.  A prosecutor and hard-nosed judge conspired to get Robert tried as an adult; thanks in part to their manipulations, he was sentenced to life in adult prison in 1976 at the age of fifteen.   A smart guy and a good judge of people, it didn t take long for Robert to learn how things worked inside the Florida correctional system. By listening to older inmates, he avoided most of the cons run on new inmates that ensured they wound up at the mercy of older men. Nonetheless, Robert found himself navigating brutal fights, gang wars, sexual violence, riots, and a corrupt system of prison guards and parole officers.   As part of a relatively small population of white prisoners among a larger population of African Americans, Robert was told by an old-timer, Don t accept any loans and stay away from the blacks.   Robert describes a complicated system of sexual favors and violence, made even more volatile by the presence of crooked prison guards willing to beat confessions out of prisoners. Prisoners entertained themselves with casual acts of cruelty, such as exploding frogs in the machine shop and running mind games on other inmates. Robert was no exception. In a complicated plot to regain his lost status as head of the small machine shop, he invented a cult of Ra that sacrificed whatever animals it could find. It s a smart manipulation of his fellow prisoners, but the cruelty on display is stomach turning.   Robert knew that many prisoners who were released couldn t cut it on the outside and  ended up back in the system, so he devised ways to maintain his sanity. He devoted himself to learning auto mechanics so he d have a trade. Ten years after sentencing, he walked out of jail and into freedom.   Robert Gagnon is a good storyteller, and he certainly has plenty of material here. While  typographical errors lend the book a less-than-polished air, they seem somehow not out of place in this nightmarish memoir.   Gagnon seems to have escaped deep scarring from his time in prison; several appalling episodes are related with an almost devil-may-care insouciance. Even so, it s difficult to tell if the air of casual bigotry and cruelty has lodged itself in his personality, or if his references to sissies, fags, and hamsters (a prison expression for African Americans) are just a device to recapture the flavor of prison language.  Not an easy read, 053803: Life at Fifteen will be most compelling to those interested in the criminal justice system.  BookWire Review  July 27, 2006 --Bookwire reviewsBook Review By Bob Howdy phD  This autobiographical, 10-year segment of a young convict's life in Florida prisons starts December 19, 1975 with the robbery of a Savings and Loan in Fort Lauderdale. The 15-year-old is quickly busted and dragged off into the Lauderdale Police Station, then sent to Pompano Detention Center for Juveniles with a court appointed lawyer. He is indicted at the Broward County Jail and winds up at the Annex of the Fort Lauderdale City Jail.   Once there, his naive opinions ("The one thing I was always good at was using the rules against themselves ;") begin to unravel. His smartass mind is sharp but undeveloped. The justice system recognizes the bad attitude of a social misfit when he refuses to plea bargain, tries to outsmart his Psychological Evaluators, and pays no attention to his "bad attorney. Disrespecting the judge, he and his concerned family turn a jury trial into such a fiasco that he is found guilty of armed robbery in the first degree. After six months of rigmarole and jail time, he is sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 3 years before parole. It takes him about ten years to obtain release. .   He spends these years bouncing around the dormitories and compounds of the RMC (Reception and Medical Center) near Lake Butler, the Butler Transit Unit, Sumpter Correctional Institution, and the Desoto Correctional Institution, until he is transferred eventually to a work release complex across the highway from Tampa stadium. Release finally comes mainly because the state is pressured from prison overcrowding.   Sumpter, his first permanent camp, is 10- Located in the middle of Florida, surrounded, by swamp, deep woods, and watermelon patches. Most of the memoir is set there, a large, well maintained camp with good and ample food. When a contract on him is let by other convicts, $30 for a fight, and $75 for whoever stabs him, he turns down a transfer to Desoto, considering that a sign of weakness. Ultimately, he is transferred there where accommodations and conditions are poor and the food is bad. He avails himself of the leather shop at Sumpter and the auto mechanics shop at Desoto. 053803 describes prison work vaguely, but activities outside supervised work explicitly, in a profane style that screams with obscenities. These activities revolve around fighting, copulation, drugs, and thievery. Cell block violence and romance dominate. The fighting involves extreme violence, injury, deformity, and gruesome death. The copulation involves freakishness, violence, sexual disease (gonorrhea, syphilis, etc.), and bloody death. The drugs involve What ever can be innovated or bought inside prison,eg. huffing wood putty in bread bags, makeshift injections, or robbing the infirmary of Demerol. The thievery involves anything which can be considered property, ego cigarettes.. Koolsare the main cigarette of the astute convict and DC's , Department of Corrections cigarettes, are supplied by the state. Convicts can get killed over cigarettes.   He describes a riot on January 10, 1982 in which he is "clocked in the head twice with a fence post and knocked senseless. The riot develops over a measly scheduling conflict between a TV football game and a prisoner head count by guards. It turns into a race conflict over property, and ends with a gang rape where the victims are burned alive with butane lighters. Punishment for violations sometimes involves an isolation tank air conditioned to 45 degrees, placement on a restricted diet, sprayed with mace, doused with a fire hose, and left to freeze. This treatment is repeated every four hours never allowing sleep until pneumonia sets in. Bizarre factual events like these are recounted with a studly nonchalance that is unbelievably hard for a reader to accept. --- --Bob Howdy PHD