a menace himself in his younger days. let s just say i hurt a lot of people. it seemed to be the best way to get aggression out. i was taking pills, drinking. because back in those days, we had real liquor in here, not wine, not hooch. we had real liquor. stone used to be kind of a rebel. major robert cavanagh was a correctional officer when stone first arrived. me and stone got to know each other quite a bit when i was in charge of cell houses. i was the captain in charge of cell houses. i used to walk the ranges a lot. that s when it was fist fighting with officers was allowed. they opened up your cell door and told you to step out, it was punch for punch and forgotten about. there was no writeups involved. it was all about respect. get your teeth knocked out, next day, everything s forgotten about. can t do that now, though. now they call it spouse abuse. he would go around and drink, smoke, get in different kind of
them. and our cameras were rolling as the latest van full of trouble arrived. we re expecting 12 inmates coming in. they ll be processed in, their photos taken, height and weight and they ll be processed and sent to the appropriate cell houses. among those on their way to cell house 220 is jeremy fickling, a baby-faced inmate with a penchant for violence. fickling is serving four years for assaulting a police officer. he was transferred to iowa state for allegedly throwing bodily fluids on a correctional officer. you don t feel like you re going to hurt anybody else? no. if things change, you re feeling bad, feeling like you might hurt yourself or somebody else, you need to tell the officers, okay? all right. despite his sheepish demeanor, officers aren t about to take any chances. a police dog escorts fickling all the way to 220. some of the inmates are assaultive.
this is administrative segregation, also known as ad seg. the first time i entered ad seg, i was completely blown away by the cacophony of noise. every single prisoner seemed to be screaming at the top of their lungs and every single scream was an insult directed toward someone else. iowa state penitentiary is a maximum security institution, and there are challenges every day just by a virtue of the type of inmate we have here. many are here because of their lengthy sentences but an awful lot of them are here by virtue of their conduct at other prisons. this is the end of the road for them. and our cameras were rolling as the latest van full of trouble arrived. we re expecting 12 inmates coming in. they ll be processed in, their photos taken, height and weight and they ll be processed and sent to the appropriate cell houses. among those on their way to cell house 220 is jeremy fickling, a baby-faced inmate with a penchant for violence.
laying up underneath there. they use this strap for getting underneath the bed, because we ve found shanks there and had to fish them out. success rate, that s hard to say. sometimes it goes in spurts. we might find a lot of shanks one month and the next six months might not find any. this is numerous contraband we ve found throughout the years here at the penitentiary. this is a zip gun. stick a .410 shell in there. we have a screw in there. a shank made out of a pen barrel and a nail. these are nonlethal but they put your eye out. this is made out of a plastic comb. just a piece of plastic. a turkey leg bone. certain cell houses are not allowed to have chicken bones or rib bones because they can do this with them. these are the dangerous ones here. the ones you don t really see. when a guy carries something like this, he really means business.
machete, went back out there and that s where it went down. i shot three people. he cut up two. one guy s got, like, partial brain damage and the other one just got his arm he ll never be able to use his right hand again. although both men faced life sentences for murder, michael pled guilty so brad could plea bargain down to lesser time. brad didn t kill anybody. i m the one that shot and killed the guy. so i didn t think it fair for him to spend the rest of his life in prison, which i didn t want that anyway. he gets to go home, where i ll probably end up dying in prison. the brothers live in separate cell houses on the prison grounds. but outside, they re always together. lifting weights, it keeps me from bugging out on somebody or hurting them. it s a good way to release your frustration.