From “Endgame: BigJon Moreland and The Genocide in South Kingston” by Greg Munchi.
“The first time I ever heard about Xino was twenty-eight years ago, just about a year before they broke ground to build it.”
It’s an old man’s voice. Walking while he’s talking, looking at the ground.
“The guy who told me…Heh, as a matter of fact, the guy who told me is a big guy now, important guy. I can’t even say who it was he’s so important. But back then he was just a guy worked at Brad. He was an, an executive there, just under Warden I think. This was at the 1988 Christmas party for the staff at Brad, but not the whole staff , that was another one. This one was just executive staff, and then some political people. And we were over there, and we were just puttin our coats on, ya know? Getting ready to leave…Holiday season and everything.”
He makes festive finger-motions.
“So, we’re just saying goodnight and I said something like, “home sweet home,” or something like that and he says, he saystomehesays, “home safe home, right Glen?” And it’s the end of the night, he knows I live right on the grounds, you know. And we probably were drinking anyway and I raised my fist, you know.”
He mimes a gun-hand, sets the thumb-hammer with a vocal “click.”
“And the guys laughing, but then we turn to go and he’s…He’s coming outside with us. It’s weird because it’s not his house and I know he’s not leavin’ - his wife’s inside. As we’re walking out…Well at first I think he’s givin’ me a stink-eye is what it looks like and he’s brass, and me, I’m nothing so, you know, I’m getting in trouble right here. I said to my wife I said, “wait for me,” you know? And I give her the keys. Boop, she goes off. Now, just me and the guy. I’m trying to think: was I late, is it gambling? I’m racking my brain. He must have seen I was confused cause right away he’s like, “Oh Glen, you know, I din wanna get you or your wife nervous but I feel I have to tell you this” and he starts telling me about it: A new wing, security clearances, no public relations or press. He tells me a little about VAI. Not everything but enough.
For a little while we just listen to the earth, whisper and vibrate.
“So then he’s like, “Come on over my car for a minute.” So we go to the guys car and he starts askin’ me about any guns innahouse? I’m like, “you shittin’ me?” I tell him about like, two out of twelve. He says, “That’s good, but I am gonna give you this” he seztome’sez:, “Courtesy of state of Connecticut Criminal Penitentiary Division.”
More silence.
“He’s reaches in and he grabs a beautiful, I mean this had been done like by a real guy, it was goddamn beautiful.”
He says beautiful like an old man, touching hard off the ee-YOU-tee part.
“Brand new .12-guage military shotgun, sawed off at the mid-stock, and just after fore-stock. It was in a mahogany case with a black leather covering and black velvet inside. This is a weapon only for killing. I mean like people, killin’ people. Unless you hunt for dear that you don’t plan to eat. This weapon, if you shot a full-size deer with it, it would make a deer-sized hole you get me? I mean like all hole. No deer. All hole.”
We stand and he fidgets.
“He says, “this is for you.” Now keep in mind there’s me and three other families live on them grounds. He says: “This for you, and when are you gonna see your buddies?” I looked in the trunk there’s four more cases in there just like the one he’s givin’ me. I guess he got to keep one for himself.”
The old man laughs an old man laugh.
***
Bradford State Penitentiary has a misleading name. Being called “Bradford” one would assume it’s location to be somewhere within the limits of it’s namesake town. Anyone driving up through the woods on old CT Rt. 66 in Bradford would understand immediately that this is not the case. The red brick brutality of the Bradford Pen’s 1950’s institutional architecture bursts like a sudden malignancy invading the pristine tissue of the central Connecticut greenway. As quick as it appears, though, it’s gone. If you aren’t concentrating it’s possible to drive right through “The Brad” - as it’s known to every one of Bradford townsfolk - without noticing. The town of Bradford itself doesn’t appear until The prison is miles back in the rear view mirror.
The Brad, for all it’s fearsome architecture and oral tradition (everyone around tells stories of it’s various uprisings, escapes, and general unwholesomeness) has been a boon to the denizens of Bradford. Most of the townspeople work there, and most of the vendors that tend to it’s needs have storefronts in town. In addition, the prison contributes boatloads of discretionary funds to Bradford’s annual bottom line and pumps millions of dollars a year into infrastructure and educational concerns for the town. Although it is a maximum security facility, and although there is a “death row” for penitents awaiting execution (CT has had the death penalty for 90 years) the fact that the Brad provides so much and is so interwoven into the fabric of life here creates a kind of benign bubble around the prison and those who work there. Even Its nickname “the Brad” belies an easy, harmless nature. Good ol’ Brad. Like family.
***
The same however cannot be said to the newest facility on the grounds of the Brad. The Stephen E. Xino Penitentiary Barracks has, since its original commission in 1989, been the central stimulus to a massive and interminable storm of conjecture and drama. Up until 6 months ago a Pentagon security clearance of three or higher (the President has a five clearance) was necessary to even be allowed to know that the place existed; which is especially strange because Xino is not a military facility.
“It’s interesting that the general public thinks of the death penalty like some all-powerful tool that sets the scales right again, automatically back to zero.”
The man speaking is the Stephen Xino that the Xino Facility is named for. He’s driving me out to what appears to be a small (maybe 12x12 square house in the middle of big field of dirt. The BSP van we’re in is traveling at a snailish 15 miles per hour, and after driving 5 or so minutes we appear to be no closer than when we started. Xino - 5 foot 9 and all of 205 pounds - talks loudly for the entire ride.
“I’m going slow because all this area is mined” He says as an aside and continues his civics lesson:
“This premise [of the death penalty] is that death can be a punishment of some sort, and then we don’t even make it hurt. Fucking painless. There were times in Viet Nam that I would beg them to shoot me in the face, shoot my fucking skull please, anything to make this end. There were times there - in the jungle - when I prayed for death.”
The “this” he refers to is a six month bid at a Viet Cong prison camp at the Cambodian border. Xino was Army special forces, in the very middle of his second tour in southeast Asia, when he was taken captive. He talks about it a lot.
“The Green Berets didn’t serve with units as such in Southeast Asia. Most of what I did - the part that I’m allowed to discuss anyway - involved far-forward recon and sometimes assassination. It was like: Here’s a knife, a compass, and a name. See you in nine months.”
After two tours and two purple hearts, Xino decided to come off the front lines, trading his jungle BDUs for the stars and bars of an MP. He mustered out as a Sgt. Major in 1998. His job, just before he left the military, was the building and filling of top-secret prisons wherever the army needed them. His experience taught him the math involved in locking people up, but his time in a hanging bamboo cage taught him the dirty part.
“I was hung in a 3x3 foot bamboo cage for two months. Would’ve been longer, but I got rescued. Air Mobil - God bless’em. The VC though, those guys were good at prisons like they were good at killing people: They made it happen on the cheap. No frills.”
Xino’s cage was never opened and he was never allowed to get out of it. He’d been captured with the two injured American pilots who had crashed and bailed out deep in VC territory.
“The first guy, guy named Rick, he was definitely gonna die. Had a suckin’ chest wound, been in shock for like, since I got there. He’s a goner. I know it, the VC know it. His partner and him, they both fuckin’ know it. That fucker couldn’t so much as moan in agony at the end there, much less escape. You think Charlie let‘em outta the cage to die like a man instead of an animal?”
He’s talking and chopping out the action with tight circles, swipes of his arms. When he gets to this point in the story you can tell that the man is no longer here, in the present. He let’s the silence settle and fester, as if in memoriam.
“They didn’t let him out. And after he died they stuck his own dick in his mouth and put his severed head into his buddies cage. They told him he wasn’t gonna be getting anything to eat until next week, and suggested he get to know his friend a little bit better.”
***
Xino was out of the service three years before his home state of Connecticut agreed to sit with him and hear proposals regarding the construction of a super-maximum security prison in his own back yard. It was to be the state of the art. The very edge of the envelope. As we gain the 12x12 structure I’m struck by the sheer scope of land. A gaze in any direction from tiny cube goes uninterrupted for miles, so far in fact that the twin 12-foot electrified fences which I know surround us on all sides are all but invisible. Only barbed wire and concertina topping giving them away with distant tell-tale sun-spots.
The Cube, oddly enough, is known to both Brad and Xino personnel as “The Cube” . No vehicles are allowed to park anywhere near it and so Xino and I are dropped off, he assures me, at the front door, which looks just like the rest of the building. Xino, however, produces a gadget the size and shape of an Iphone and the cement edifice pushes out, revealing at least three feet of fine-poured cement and a crack that’s big enough, but nothing like a normal door.
We get inside and are greeted by a man dressed in what looks like a black jumpsuit with no logos or insignia of any kind. He is however holding an M-4 assault rifle at the combat ready.
“Safety’s off, in case you were wondering,” says Xino. The man introduces himself as Matthew and from just behind us another voice says, “Daniel”. We turn to meet a similarly dressed man, also bearing a combat load and not much else.
Xino says, “These guys are sort of the gate keeps here”
Matthew: “Yeah, except there’s no gate.”
Daniel: “Yeah, anybody dumb enough to approach here without escort deserves to get rewired.”
And they have been instructed to do it. In addition to the two sentries here, there are two more on every floor and the place goes down for nine floors. 1,478 feet deep into the earth. Twelve cells. Twelve convicts, each with enough concurrent life sentences to make even the hope of a hope for release seem profoundly ridiculous.
The floors are circular. They are eighty yards across, with ceilings exactly four and a half feet high. Every surface is covered with a three-inch layer of smooth Kevlar, all of which has been colored bright, Tylenol white. There are white florescent bulbs burning seamlessly in the Kevlar and lining a ring around each floor. The white light and flat white reflecting surface has a disconcerting effect on the equilibrium that is wholly on-purpose. We are given safety glasses with a heavy tint as soon as we climb down the central hatch bolted into the floor of the Cube.
As we carefully scaled down the tiny ladder hole and start going through the floors you can see the dazzling white light is blazing away on each floor, rendering almost invisible the 5x5 holes lining the outside of each floor. Xino is tour guiding from above me:
“The twelve cells are sunk five feet into the floor on each floor, or tier. Each cell is covered with fifteen 8 inch steel bars that lock three feet deep into the opposite side. The bars open and shut at the command of another sentry located in an underground command center just adjacent to the tiers.”
It’s hot down here, and I’m wondering how far it is to the command pod.
“Oh it’s down here but there’s no access from the tiers, I just wanted to get you the lay of the place. If you’re here to talk to BigJohn you might as well get a peek at how he spends his days.”
We climb back up and all the way to the top of the cube. When we get there I am led to a staircase sinking away and down some stairs. More freaky white glow down there. We go, me after he, down into the white.
“The command center encircles each tier , but is divided from each by four feet of steel and cement. There is a 360 degree view from which we can take firing positions here.”
He gestures to a three-inch slot at just about head height. I bend a bit and look in: White. But it’s clear that it’s one of those creepy tiers.
“We keep it hot for the same reason teachers in inner city schools keep it hot: We like ‘em drowsy. Also, the air environment can be controlled directly from the computer system. One button will inject a mist of tranquilizer that will put them all to sleep within two minutes. One button will make breathing painful. There’s a button that will cause hallucinations. Those are all security measures of course, strictly riot control type stuff, but to be honest, the guys here…We probably don’t need it. Once you’re driven a mile into a field and climb 150 feet underground to live naked in a 5x5 white cell…It kinda takes the fight out of you.”
He’s right. There are 105 men here now, which leaves three cells empty and ready should they ever be needed. Math and entropy both tell us that they probably will. Just as every prison in America probably houses at least a few women and men who are innocent of the crime that ultimately put them away, so every prison in America usually has at least one incurable problem child.
Nobody is sentenced to do time at the Cube. Instead, they are put here as a last resort. There isn’t any way to misbehave here, because if you do the “guards” positioned in the surrounding control pod will shoot you deader than shit. Don’t make it to your cell before the bars close? They shoot you. Don’t answer the first call of your name over the loudspeakers mounted on your tier? They shoot you. Fuck around on weekly rec detail? Shoot you. Do anything that can be considered anyway out of the ordinary? Guess…
Twice a week the patients are allowed to climb, one by one by one, to the top of the tower and spend five minutes in the cube. While they cannot be allowed to look out of the skylight in middle of all that concrete (they shoot you) they can, and do, stand in the warm yellow glow it creates. This represents the sum total of the prisoners interaction with the outside world for the entire time they spend here and - in respect - the Sentries in the cube can usually be persuaded to look away for a few minutes.
“Yeah, most of‘em you kinda say “alright, I don’t agree with the guy but we can give him this small thing. I mean it’s like two minutes. Most everybody here gets that, ‘cept BigJohn of course. When that guy’s up here I get an extra gun from the control pod and post him in here with us. Honestly when he’s in here I still don’t feel like that’s even enough. I feel, it’s fuckin’ embarrassing to say it, but I feel exposed almost. Three M-4’s trained on him with cold motherfuckers at the switch and I fuckin’ feel like he’s got us right where he wants us. When he hits the column I watch him all the way down. All the fuckin’ way I watch him.”
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