Over the course of my nearly 30 years in Tennessee Department of Correction custody, I’ve seen many friends die painlessly. Frank was in the computer class I tutored when one day he just fell down dead over his keyboard. My friend Hawk fell down dead while jogging around the track. No warning signs with either of them—they just went down, and that was that.
“I wish I would drop dead right now while we’re talking,” said James Hayes, a neighbor of mine at South Central Correctional Facility. “That would make a good story.”
James, 71, has been in prison 22 years. He has liver and lung cancer, and diabetes rotting a foot that would have been amputated already if he weren’t so close to the end. His pain is such that he’s prescribed oral morphine, but to get it he has to go to medical three times a day—even though he now uses a wheelchair—to take the tablets in front of a nurse. He is not eligible for parole.
Gary Garrett, 72, has been in prison for 39 years and now has cancer in his thyroid and throat. Unlike James, he has a release date. It is in 2085. Gary became eligible for parole in 2002, and a mere two decades later was scheduled for his first parole hearing in 2022. He was told to come back in 2024. He recently did so, and was told to come back in 2026. The Tennessee Board of Parole is aware he will not be with us by that time.
Doctors estimate that James and Gary each have a couple of weeks left to live. The hope is to make it to the end without being moved to the prison infirmary, which they’ve both managed to avoid so far. The infirmary is a cold, desolate place. No one wants to die in prison at all, but we especially don’t want to die there.
At times when working on this story I wondered if there was something inappropriate about it; something voyeuristic. Perhaps in other cases there would be. But both James and Gary wanted to talk, and as someone who in the coming years will die in prison too, I wanted to listen.
Many deaths in prison are gawked at just for the sake of it. But many, many more pass by unnoticed, the way our culture of mass incarceration means them to. The public doesn’t usually have to decide whether or not to look away from James or Gary, or the the countless others reaching a similarly lonely end, a lifetime after whatever events got them taken away from the rest of the world. The public isn’t usually burdened with their existence at all.
“In the middle of our darkest fear there is a place of peace,” Gary said. “If we can manage to get to it.”
“I went through the first round of chemo thinking that I would make parole.”
Death here is cold and impersonal. It’s an imposition on everyone waiting to go to chow or to work. It disrupts the routine, and if there’s one thing that long-timers hate in prison it’s anything that disrupts the routine.
“It’s just a nuisance. I’ve seen old guys be in such pain and misery that their buddies don’t want to be around,” Gary said. “Makes them think of their own mortality, and who wants to do that? So death in prison is a lonely experience, so that frightens me. I enjoy being around people, and hoped that I would be able to be around my family on the street when I pass.“
Gary’s cancer predates his first parole hearing. Though the chemo made him sick every day, to the point that he could barely eat, he was optimistic that it would be worth it.
“I went through the first round of chemo thinking that I would make parole,” he said. “[I] wanted to stay alive to have some days on the other side of the fence, in the free world.”
The days that followed Gary’s 2022 parole denial were miserable. But he kept up with the chemo, because there was still hope. After he was denied again in July, he decided not to put himself through chemo anymore. To him, the point of doing so was to live long enough to be freed, and even if against all odds he did hang on until 2026, he knows the board’s decision at that time would be the same. The basis for his denial was “seriousness of offense.” Like everyone denied for this reason and told to try again in two years, his original conviction won’t change between hearings. Gary’s conviction would be the same in 2026 as it’s been since 1985.
“Back in the day, if two guys had a beef they would duke it out; the guards would allow it. Now, shanks are drawn and they want to kill each other.”
Gary has been in prison long enough to remember when all the corrections officers were white.
“They treated the Black inmates bad,” he recalled. “We would get beat down for looking at a guard in the eye. It’s not so much of that going on now, [although] there’s still some Black hate, that’s for sure.”
But in almost every other way, over the past four decades Gary has seen prison become more violent and less livable. When he first came into the system, and for a number of years after, everyone had access to things that passed the time. There was educational and recreational programming, and enough jobs to go around.
“Now, more people don’t work than do, and that just leads to trouble,” he said. “Back in the day, if two guys had a beef they would duke it out; the guards would allow it. Now, shanks are drawn and they want to kill each other … young folks just know how to use a weapon, they don’t know how to fight up close.”
He hates that so many youngsters are packed in here. He also wants them to know that once they are in here, they better face some hard truths, the first of which is that they’re in this alone.
The earlier in their sentence you accept that the state has abandoned you, the sooner you can begin trying to effect some positive change on you own. His second piece of advice is to resist the isolation this place pushes on you, and find some friends. Third, stay out of gang world; that’s not the place to find friends. Fourth, pray. If you don’t believe in God, you better believe in something.
The dreams James remembers are wonderful. In one, he’s walking on the beach. He can feel the water on his feet and the breeze in his hair—really feel it, like it’s real.
“I don’t want to talk to any church people, they only scare me,” James said. “This one chaplain came to visit me in the hospital one time, and he leaned over the bed and asked me if I was going to Heaven or Hell when I died. I told him I was going to the same place he was going to—the dirt. He left.”
James didn’t get his cancer diagnoses until 2023, after four years of CoreCivic, the private company that operates this facility for profit, telling him he didn’t need a costly biopsy and that acetaminophen would do instead.
“I thought I would be all messed up,” he said. “But the sicker I get the more calm I seem to find.”
James is tired. He’s ready to be done. Every day he feels his body eating itself alive. He can’t piss or shit on his own. He wears diapers. But beyond that, he no longer feels any sense of purpose to being alive. Without any access to jobs or anything to keep the mind occupied, he doesn’t see the point in sticking around.
James isn’t afraid of death. It seems straightforward—we all come from nothing, and we all go back to nothing. At times he’s afraid of what his final breath will be like. Will he be conscious; will he be in pain. It’s the pain that scares him.
“It gets so bad I don’t know what to do. If I had an easy way to stop it I would, and yes I mean kill myself. I guess if I really wanted to, I could find ways to do that,” he said. “But then, when I do manage to go to sleep, sometimes I remember my dreams. My dreams are the things that keep me from wanting to die.”
The dreams James remembers are wonderful. In one that recurs every so often, he’s walking on the beach. White sand, blue ocean. The waves pushing up over the tops of his feet. He can feel the warmth of the water, the coolness of the breeze in his hair—really feel it, like it’s real. In the dream it’s like he’s young again, like he could do anything. So he starts to run, and he runs and runs until he wakes up out of breath.
In another dream, he’s five or six and holding his granny’s hand while they walk down the block. They stop at a soda shop and get ice cream. His granny, the only person who ever made him feel loved, smiles at him and wipes some ice cream off his chin.
While Gary has known what life is like with a loving family, James has not. He wants the next generation to know that if, like him, they got a raw deal, it’s a waste of time to be angry about it. For much of his life he didn’t bother reaching for anything; too much disappointment already to invite more. But over his years in prison he has come to understand that not everyone in his life is there to use him or to take things from him. He isn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of having friends, but he accepts that he has them.
“However young you may be, if you are not happy or people are hurting you, leave. Get out. Do what you have to to be happy and safe,” he said. “I’m sitting here in my own piss and shit in prison because I took what the world handed me and didn’t try and shake it off and do better. When you get a shitty hand, deal with it. Life’s not fair. You can spend your days mad at the world, like I did. Or you can say, ‘Fuck this hand’ and find another game.”
Photograph (cropped) via Washington State Department of Corrections