personal problems. all he really wants to address is what s in the write-up. ziggy faces several potential penalties for attempting to alter his drug screen, including time in the hole, a loss of his prison job, and even a judgment that can make his whole plan backfire, a transfer to another prison. that s one punishment i really don t look forward to is being transferred somewhere else. ziggy s reluctance to leave prison became all the more puzzling when we learned some of what he d endured during his 30 plus years of incarceration. i was not born gay and every relationship i ve had has been a forced type well, this is what i have to do type of thing, but i didn t enjoy it. as a younger prisoner, i would be made fun of quite a lot, because the lord gave me a big butt. well, i decided to turn it
and just being a pain to the members of society and midtown memphis. ziggy had grown accustomed to life in riverbend s minimum security unit. he has what he calls a cushy prison job, editing the inmate newspaper. my punishment is not going to begin until i walk out those front gates because this is the world i ve gotten used to since age 12. but when i get out there, it s an entirely different world, and it s a changed world, and to be honest with you, i m very, very scared. our crew would soon learn just how scared. every once in a while you meet an inmate who has been in prison so long, that they ve really developed a comfort zone. but ziggy took it to a new level. he apparently was sabotaging his own parole hearing by tampering with his urine test, not to conceal the drug use, but actually to make it appear that he was using drugs in order to be denied parole and stay in
prison. during our shoot, ziggy was facing a disciplinary board hearing for altering his urine test. let me see the text in the write-up here. in his hour of need, ziggy turned to an unlikely ally, fellow inmate and convicted serial rapist mark higgins. higgins prison job is as an inmate adviser, a sort of layman defense lawyer. therefore, inmate hull is being charged with dsa, drug screen alter. i did this for a reason, was because i m coming up for parole here in less than three months, and i needed a way to delay that, to delay getting out. i m not ready to get out. lieutenant vance, the d-board chairman, has a tendency to have an attitude of don t know, don t care, when it comes to your
you don t have to marry him. yeah, i mean, it seem that way. you re placing this inmate in the cell with me. i mean we re not we re not outside the cell all day. we re inside that cell all day. yeah, but that should have been a consideration before you went to prison. the committee is baffled, not only by hamilton s stubbornness but by its sudden appearance after nine years behind bars at other state prisons. you have been taking a cellie up until the time you got here. once you got here, you stopped taking cellies. that s not a luxury of being in prison. he should have thought about that before he went to prison. he s got to have a cellie. escorted back to his ad seg cell, hamilton is optimistic that he will win his battle and return to general population without a cell mate. i m happy. i ain t got to stay in the cell.
nope, you ain t doing nothing. but at the brushy mountain correctional complex in tennessee we met two cell mates who were not only successfully living together, but doing so in a maximum security unit, locked up 23 hours per day. it s not any kind of fun, stuck in a cell. you go out. me and him go out and work out every day, come back in the cell and watch tv and listen to the radio. that s our life every day. sky bishop was sent to the hole when he refused to share his cell with an inmate the prison assigned him. what about your cell mate now? i ve known him for over a year. that s my buddy right there. i don t have any problems with him. we always get along. i had him moved down here. he wanted to move in. makes time a lot easier if you got a roommate you get along with, you got something in common with. makes prison life a lot easier. when it came time for his interview, sky s cellie, jason davis, expressed reservations.