gilbert has made little, if any, progress while in seg, and prison officials have confiscated his most treasured possession, a chess set. right now, your behavior warrants no transfer. okay? anything you would like to talk about? you about summed it up. i sure would like to have my chess pieces back. why can t i have my chess pieces? this is segregation. what are you going to do with chess pieces? play chess! let me tell you what you do, get you some paper, draw you out a checkerboard i saint playing in my head. i just don t see where it can hurt anybody to let somebody have something semiconstructive to do in their cell. ask the law library clerk to bring you a copy of the reg and see if you re supposed to have chess pieces.
and his tattooed eyeballs continue to fascinate. [ bleep ] punk, sit here and [ bleep ] over. you want to think [ bleep ] it s funny funny about some [ bleep ] face. another inmate attempts to harness the rage he felt behind bars to build a new career inside the ropes. and for one young woman, life after lockup means coming to terms with the devastating childhood memory of witnessing her father murder her mother. and i was saying, please, don t kill mom, and she was laying in the hallway and blood was coming out of hurry mouth. and now for the first time, she will watch the video of her father s final hours before his execution. most of the inmates featured on lockup dream of the day they will leave prison and everything associated with it behind. but for one of them, forgetting will be virtually impossible. though he is now out of prison, he will forever carry an inescapable reminder of his days behind bars. we first met david boltjes when he was serving four
pop or i owe him a soda pop and they come to me and say i need to get that soda pop you owe me, i spit in their face and talk to them like they a bitch or something and they kill me, whose fault is it? it isn t about the soda pop no more. on the street, you call the police to put a stop to it. what do you do in here? i tell you what you do, you go get you a knife and you stab that son of a bitch and say you ain t taking nothing else. that s the end of that. here s what happens when you come to take something from me. a-1 to a-4. gilbert s life behind bars is often punctuated by his frequent battles with holman s warden. grant culliver. at the time, culliver and a disciplinary committee were about to review gilbert s behavior and a transfer to a prison closer to his family s
it s the same thing. nothing changes. 90% of prison life is actually boredom. and it s what the inmates do with this down time, this lack of stimuli, that has led to some of the most interesting parts about lockup. you do your time. don t let it do you. the monotonous grind of life in prison can push some inmates to the limit. in trying to understand how they deal with the specter of never being free again, we ve met some of our most memorable characters and recorded some of our most dramatic footage. i m serving a life without parole sentence, two life sentences, two 99-year sentences, a 40-year sentence, a 20-year sentence, and a 10-year sentence, all together. at the time of our visit bobby gilbert had been at
alabama s holman correctional facility for only four years. but he first landed in prison at the age of 18. he told us how a minor dispute over money led him to murder an acquaintance from his town. he said basically the only way i would get my money is over his dead body. you know. i was hot-headed then. so that s how i got it. how much money did he owe you? he owed me $36. i paid $37 for the gun i killed him with. so, you know once behind bars, gilbert s violent temper led to numerous other crimes, including stabbing another inmate to death. this time for much less than $36. but gilbert made it clear to us, in prison, things aren t always as they seem. everybody wants to talk about i killed somebody over a carton of cigarettes. you know, it s not a carton of cigarettes. that may be the catalyst that leads to something, but, you know, if somebody owes me a soda