Nothing left to lose

“Surrender, surrender

But don't give yourself away”

(( Cheap Trick ))

“I'll be the one to protect you from
A will to survive and a voice of reason
I'll be the one to protect you from
Your enemies and your choices son
One and the same I must isolate you
Isolate and save you from yourself”

(( “Pet” ~ A Perfect Circle ))

It all began almost four excruciating months ago – Friday, January 24th. Sometimes a January sun warms the Earth just enough to remind me of dandelions, and that particularly Friday felt like Spring. I walked down the prison's boulevard, headphones jamming Rancid, coffee cup in hand. I wore a bright orange hoodie with WORKER stenciled on the back. I had no idea that in seconds prison officials would handcuff me and lead me to solitary confinement for two months.

Just ahead on the sidewalk, three officers donning black CERT (Correctional Emergency Response Team) uniforms approached nonchalantly. As always, I ignored the officers, pretending they didn't exist. As an incarcerated person who routinely follows the rules, my interactions with the "police" are kept to a minimum. After a year in this prison, I know only two officers by name, and that's because they’re my work supervisors. So when the three guards approached, I thought nothing of their presence.

Except when, feet away, my spirit felt an overwhelming sense of doom: "They're here for you!"

That brain-scream faded as quickly as it manifested. I walked one step closer to my fate. Step. Step. My last steps of relative freedom. Just as the officers passed, one stopped, turned and asked, "What's your name?"

My name? Why would you ever want my name? I'm nobody, I'm insignificant, I'm not the body, I'm the shadow.

"Anthony Rhodd."

The officers perked up as a cloud covered the sun and smothered the January warmth. "Turn around," the big one with reflective glasses said. After decades behind bars, I've been cuffed thousands of times. The best reaction is to remain silent. The saying goes, "You have the right to remain silent," but this right is more of an obligation. Don't say anything, don't ask any questions. Silence is your only friend in this scenario.

The officer took my cup and locked my hands behind my back. The last click of the cuff signifies the collapse of the comparatively stable world I had worked extremely hard to create behind bars.

Prison works on a level system, kind of like kindergarten’s red - yellow - green. Over the course of the past year, I channeled patience to steadily climb all the way back up to the highest privilege level. (I was steady on this level for years back in Newton, but when they transferred me in December 2023 they ignored IDOC policy and took it away. I had to start all over). So by June 2024, I once again lived on a unit designed for guys who stay out of trouble. While 80% of the incarcerated persons here in this prison are confined to their cells for 20 hours a day, the unit I lived on allowed me to be out of my cell all day, with several hours of "yard" time. This sweet freedom allowed me to make calls to my loved ones between 8a-8p, and to maintain a balanced schedule where I could read, write, play guitar, and maintain a job. (I cleaned showers. Might seem small but any opportunity to contribute, to be part of a team, to do something with pride is life-saving. And it is one way to earn money, $0.27/hr, for commissary.) I lived with a cellmate I liked and respected. I spent hours on the phone with my partner daily, telling stories, laughing, supporting each other. I focused my energy on creating bridges between the "inside" and "outside" worlds. In other words - I had access to multiple ways to remember who I am outside this cage.

This was gone in an instant. The guards walked me to the solitary confinement unit as the shock of my new normal dawned. They walked me through two heavy sliding doors that slammed open and then shut, one at a time. Once inside, the officers placed me in a small cell with a large window. They removed the cuffs and demanded I strip.

I couldn't think. I couldn't breathe.

I removed my clothes in full view of three male guards and a female officer. "Turn around, bend over, and spread your cheeks," the man who cuffed me said without much thought. I complied, embarrassed and confused.

Strip searches are a normal part of incarceration, but after 17 years, this demeaning and humiliating process still stings.

The guards handed me a set of clothing designed for segregation housing; yellow pants with an elastic waist and no zipper, a blue t-shirt, and used underwear. I put everything on and took a deep breath. I don't know what's going on or why I am here. Less than ten minutes ago, I was a "free" man. I feel scared, but mostly spinning. My thoughts refuse to venture beyond the rudimentary and repetitive questions, "What's going on? What's happening?"

A new guard leads me to my cell, handcuffed after the strip search. In segregation, or the "hole", officials strip search and handcuff a person whenever he is out of his room. The "hole" consists of two long hallways which come together to form an "L". Cells line both sides of each hallway, for a total of sixty. Each room houses one incarcerated person.

I'm led down the hallway. The cell doors hold the identification tag of each specific person housed in that room. I look at the tags to see if I recognize anyone. I don't. Halfway down the hallway, there's an open door with my identification tag, ominously declaring this my cell. I step inside, and the door slides shut with a loud bang and mechanical click.

I fear that these cold, metallic sounds — the doors, the cuffs, and the shackles — will invade my dreams for decades to come.

But it's not really the sounds that are the most terrifying. It’s the silence and loneliness they precede.

Especially in the hole. Sometimes the silence is deafening. In my new, empty cell, the silence swells and suffocates me. There is a small toothbrush an inch and half long. There are tiny containers of deodorant and toothpaste. There is nothing else except a small Dixie cup I will use for water. My sink only has a hot water spigot, so all my water is warm.

I sit on my plastic mattress, worn flat two inches thick. Every time I move, the mattress crinkles echo through the cell. The security light above me stays on twenty fours a day.

"What have I done? I think. " What is this?"

Minutes after being led to my cell, a guard comes to my door. "Rhode!" He says, mispronouncing my name.

I walk to the door and look out my small window. I feel alone. I feel small. I feel scared, "Yeah?"

"Captain wants to talk to you. I need you to strip out."

Ten minutes haven't passed since my last strip search. I take off my clothes, and repeat the humiliation. I put my hands behind my back and stick them through the food port. The guard, again, locks the cuffs in place. My door slides open.

I walk back down the hall, studying the names on the doors once again. The officer leads me to a room with a computer and a place for me to sit. The bright room smells like an office. A serious looking man wearing a black CERT uniform sits in the room, notebook in his lap. Above his lip hovers a disgusting thin mustache I associate with asshole authority figures.

"Where's it at?" He asks.

I think for a second, not comprehending exactly what he's asking me. "Where's what at?"

"I don't have time for games, I'm gonna cut the head off the snake right now. If you want to play dumb, you'll sit back here for sixty days until I figure everything out."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Sir. I have no idea what you're asking me."

He pauses. "Okay if that's your story, get comfortable." He walks out of the room, briefcase in hand and the guard leads me back to my cell. I never saw, or talked to this man again. But he wasn't lying. I stayed nearly sixty days before I left the hole.

But my story doesn't really start on January 24th, and as crazy as it sounds, it's not really my story. The story began Tuesday January 21st when a young African man ingested synthetic cannabinoids, (better known as "K2") in his cell and died. But he was brought back to life (the rumor goes), twice. I don't really know what happened to this man for sure, but three days before my own demise, I watched paramedics load this young man into an ambulance across the prison yard. That's really where this story begins.

Six weeks after this man nearly died from an overdose, authorities placed his friend, Baby Joe, in my cell in the hole. I had graduated from the single cell units on "A-Unit" of the segregation wing, to the double bunked cells on " B-Unit". This new cell house was still considered “isolation”, but allowed those well-behaved enough on A-Unit an opportunity to have their own hygiene supplies and one extra book a week.

B-Unit means cell mates — which can be a blessed departure from total lack of human contact or an added nightmare of being enclosed in a tiny space with a highly traumatized individual without respite.

In the cell, Baby Joe told me his story. He grew up in a poor immigrant family from a rural village in Africa. His mother came to America on refugee status with Baby Joe and his younger sister when both were young. He tells me his few remaining memories of Africa, of music and song and a strong sense of community. This all changed when his family came to Des Moines in the early 2000's, when – as both immigrants and people of color — he and his family felt the debilitating loneliness of life in red America.

Baby Joe struggled in school, gravitating to the few other African immigrants his age. His single mother struggled to put food on the table and often worked long hours at work. Because of this, Joe had little structure and discipline, and by the time he was fifteen, authorities moved him to juvenile placement where he adopted a "gangster" persona that kept him safe in group homes but also contributed to a life of crime several years later.

At the age 17, authorities arrested Baby Joe with a gun linked to three shootings in the Des Moines area. After spending two years at Ft. Dodge prison on these charges, and just as he was up for parole, federal officials indicted him for the same gun charge for which he is currently incarcerated. At 19, Joe is preparing to spend the next 10 years in a federal penitentiary. Lost, poor, and alone, he made a decision to provide for himself by smuggling drugs into the Ft. Dodge Correctional Facility. The same drugs that would nearly kill his friend, and the same drugs I came to learn I was also locked up for.

Back in January, a few days after the near overdose, a man I've never met before approached me on the unit I work. Short, slicked back hair, muscles, tattoos: the man's solid demeanor screamed, "Not to be messed with."

"Hey, you're A-Rhodd, right?"

"Yeah," I responded, confused why a person I do not know would ask me my name. This could mean trouble. In prison, questions come few and far between. Someone asking your name could definitely mean he wants to hurt you.

He looked me in my eye, "I need a favor and someone said you're a solid dude."

Every so often, I'll help people out. I guess over the two decades of incarceration, I have learned to use generosity as a defense mechanism. Being useful is being safe.

"What do you need?"

There's some things I will not do. I won't pass drugs, or anything that can send me to the hole. He asked me to make a call for him because he didn't have the money to do it himself. This is a small ask, it's not much for me to ask a friend over the phone to relay a message. The man asks me to text his partner and ask her to send $150 to another number to get it on his account. This is no problem, and something I can do.

I call my childhood friend. We talk about X-Box for most of the call, and I ask him to relay the message. Hours later, both the man and I are in the hole.

My first night in the hole, my nervous system numbs itself. It's hard to feel anything. The flimsy mattress on the concrete slab makes sleep almost impossible. My shoulders hurt. I toss and turn all night, drifting in and out of a dream of falling. I'm on top of the Empire State Building at the edge cautiously looking down. Cars look like ants. My foot slips off the railing. I fall, screaming all the way down, fearing impact. It's terrifying. I can't stop the descent.

The cell walls are made of cinder block, and I peel back the paint in the middle of the night. Layer after layer peels off, revealing decades of graffiti from poor unfortunate souls. These walls hold pain like toxic emotion batteries. It pulses around me, a dense palimpsest of despair, insanity, terror…. This oppressive presence sticks to my every thought. I've been in this room for less than twelve hours and already my sense of self begins to slip. With little human interaction, I'm left only with the antics of my mind and the felt shadow of unhealed trauma from previous stints in solitary since age 16.

"Was that man serious? Will he really leave me in here for sixty days, just for making a phone call?" It can't be true. I refuse the nightmare. I'll be in here for a week, tops.

Inside the cell, someone left several sheets of paper with information explaining the rules. One of these pieces of paper is a "phone kite," or paper request to use the phone. Each person locked in solitary receives two 20-minute phone calls a week. I need to call my partner, who has no idea where I am. The hardest part of solitary is being excruciatingly and completely cut off from your loved ones. One day you're there, living life in some rhythm of togetherness the best you can despite barbed wire, the next you've disappeared off the face of the Earth.

Prison authorities require a 48 hours notice before scheduling a call. They locked me up on a Friday, so I planned my call for Sunday. Then, at least, someone would know my circumstances. Those 48 hours were the hardest. I barely slept the first night, by the next day my body began to reject everything. A headache began to swell at around 2pm Saturday. By 6:00, I began to vomit about every hour. My head pounded with each beat of my heart, every drink of water induced violent dry heaves, pain piercing down my spine. I'm still not sure what ailed me – food poisoning? Caffeine withdrawal? The stress of a crumbing world collapsing down around me?

I didn't sleep Saturday night, but by Sunday morning I could hold down small sips of water.

I waited for what felt like hours, my head pressed against the reinforced glass of the door's thin window. On the call, I'd be able to explain to my partner that I'd made a stupid mistake and made a phone call for someone. I'd explain that "misuse of phone" is usually a minor infraction requiring at most 10 days in solitary – but because of the recent overdose of drugs in the institution, prison investigators were treating minor infractions as serious.

I waited and waited and waited, my nervous system convincing me of catastrophe each minute the phone did not come. Finally, the guard made a round. I stopped him, "Sir, I have a call scheduled for 9:00 AM. Can you tell me what time it is?"

He looked at his watch, "Its 10:00. All your communication is blocked per the Captain. No phone, emails, or mail."

You know in movies when the world slows to a crawl, and all you hear is the sound of the protagonists heart beat? I mean, that's a thing. The entire world stopped. My senses dulled, like they belonged to someone else completely. "That's not true." I heard someone say. "That can't be true," he said again.

The guard looked me in my eyes, "Are you alright, Rhode? Look, you can talk to the captain tomorrow. If I were you, I'd cooperate with everything he asks you."

"But I don't know anything." I heard myself reply, but I felt a million miles away. My communication with the world is my life, how could they just take everything away? How would my partner and I cope with 2 months of communication restriction? My body collapsed on the bed, and I wept. I cried until I had no more tears. Like my stomach the night before, I purged. I can't survive this. I can't survive this.

My pillow didn't even absorb my tears. Everything in the hole is liquid resistant: it's easier to clean when someone cuts themselves or wipes bodily fluids everywhere. Loneliness induces mania. It doesn't take long for a person to break. When they do, there's no stimulation in the cell other than what your body naturally provides. The lucky ones fixate on shit and piss; the other ones self harm. Throughout the years, numerous friends died by suicide in the hole. After awhile, your mind deceives you into believing that death is the singular sane escape from boredom and loneliness. Once that seed plants itself in your mind, it grows invasively.

I read a book last year in which the author described violent reactions commonly experienced in long term solitary confinement. She described people eating their own fingers, people spreading feces and blood on themselves and others. People lose it. And I felt myself losing it within two days. The total loss of communication pummelled me, exactly as those who enforced the ban intended. I couldn't sleep, every few hours I woke up from violent nightmares, usually running from something terrible trying to kill me.

At first, I lost touch with reality. But humans are astonishingly resilient. After four days my nervous system adjusted and I began to access clearer thinking again.

On Tuesday, officials came to my door for an "initial classification" review. I stripped out, handcuffed and shackled. The guard led me to the same room where the captain told me I'd spend sixty days in the hole if I didn't tell him who had the drugs. This time, three prison administrators sat in the room: a guard, a unit manager, and a psychologist. I walk in and sit down in the same chair.

The unit manager looked me up and down, "Got any information for us?" He asked.

"No. Look, all I know is that some guy overdosed the other day. I made a call for someone, but I'm pretty sure it didn't have anything to do with drugs. I'm not the guy you think I am, I couldn't help you even if I wanted to. I know my communication is blocked, but can I please have my e-mails and mail? I didn't abuse either of these privileges."

The unit manager looks me right in the eye this time, "Why should we help you, if you won't help us?"

I get angry, but I can't afford to lose my cool. These people control every aspect of my life. "If I could help you, I would. Can I just please have my emails back?"

He looks to the guard, who shrugs his shoulders. The unit manager tells me to leave. I walk out, defeated.

Although the unit manager didn't say so, he did approve e-mails and regular mail so I could contact my loved ones. Twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, a guard wheeled a rickety cart with a computer to my cell door and opened the food port. Sitting on the ground, legs crossed, hands typing out the open food port, I had ten whole glorious rushed minutes to read and respond to all my correspondence. Ten golden minutes of bridge to the outside. Read quick, write faster. Each weekend felt hellish, slow longing for ten minutes to come again on Tuesday.

Weeks passed by this way, just as the Captain warned me. Eventually, authorities transferred me to Boone Unit -- the cellhouse with less restrictions. This is where I met Baby Joe, and learned that I am awaiting a "major report," or the official notification of the specific rule violation I am accused of breaking. Until I receive this report I will not leave the hole. Several years ago, the Iowa Department of Corrections (IDOC) decided on a more humane approach to solitary confinement. The department wrote new policies to cap the amount of consecutive days an individual could serve in solitary confinement at sixty days. Even the most serious infractions resulted, at most, in sixty days of lock up.

Despite this, prison administrators find cruel loopholes. One is to withhold the report for as long as possible. (Once an individual receives a report, they see a judge, and get sentenced to a specific amount of "days". Depending upon their rule infraction and policy, a person at least knows the amount of time they're facing.) To circumvent this process, authorities withhold the report, leaving a person in administrative limbo for months at a time. After forty five days, I began to beg officials for my report.

Each Tuesday, an officer brought around reports to those on the unit. Those lucky enough to receive one saw the judge on Thursday. By the following Friday, or Monday the judge provided a decision. Four Tuesdays in a row I spent at my cell window, praying the officer with reports in his hand would stop at my door. He'd walk up and down the cell house, passing out the papers. My heart beat rapidly the closer he got to my cell. If I could just get served, I could move beyond this point. I could move on with my life. Each week, he walked right by. Each week, my heart crumbled.

…………..⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕…………

Fear stalks like a curious hyena, pursuing my existence. He targets my senses, my will. The relentless burden of empty time creates a void. In this empty space, thoughts of suicide manifest. I convince myself that everyone I love will leave. It has always been this way. It will always be this way. This fear touches something deep, a shadow from youth when I left home in cuffs and never really took them off. There's a scene in the movie "The Shining" where Jack Nicholson drives his family into the vast, empty expanse of the Rockies. The camera zooms out until the car is a miniscule dot surrounded by endless terrain. When I first watched this scene for a Rhetoric class at the University of Iowa, I recognized it: "That's it. That's solitary confinement." After several weeks of isolation, Jack Nicholson goes nuts and tries to murder his family. If the camera zoomed out in my life, you'd see the same empty expanse.

I need to find a way out, away from the poisonous fear and spiraling thoughts convincing me of my own insignificance. Where can you find strength in an environment designed to annihilate your humanity?

A door opens. Hi, Hyena.

<Silence.> No escaping.

All this space, it is empty. It is terrifying. It is responsibility. It is opportunity.

It is for me to create.

To the ego mind, surrender means giving up.

To the spiritual mind, surrender means giving in and receiving.

– Marianne Williamson

…………..⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕ ⎕…………

After fifty five days, I received my report. In three sentences, the narrative stated that I made a call for an individual who was seeking to buy drugs from another individual. The confidential information the investigator received acknowledged that I didn't know the call involved drugs, but – I made the call anyway, which is against the rules. I waited nearly sixty days for three sentences. I felt an immediate and unbidden thrill. I wanted to see the judge as soon as possible, get my time, hit the road. Usually, a judge credits "time served" for any days a person spends in solitary confinement. However, for weeks prior, this particular judge had refused to give any time credit, making a horrible situation even worse.

The next day, I spoke to the judge over a computer screen. I laid out my story from the beginning: a person I didn't know asked me to relay a message. It was a dumb thing to do. I learned my lesson. The judge typed my statement, and told me I'd get a decision in a day. This was on a Thursday, and I did not receive my decision on that Friday, leaving me to agonize again over the whole weekend. By Monday morning, I felt convinced that I'd receive thirty days, with no credit for time already served. Fear-sick again, I began to throw up in my cell. Monday came and went. On Tuesday morning, an officer strip searched me at 7:30a. It was my day to speak to the unit manager, who sees each person every thirty days. Since I’d spent nearly sixty days in the hole, it was my time to see him again.

I walked, cuffed and shackled, into his office. Before I sat down he said, "We got your decision back from the judge. You're lucky, you got credit for time served."

A flood of relief.

I got back to my cell and told Baby Joe the good news. He had not received a report yet, so I tried not to seem overly excited. Despite this, he felt happy for me. Ten minutes later, I received the official decision. The judge sentenced me to ten days (when I'd already done close to sixty); but then he banned all my communication for thirty days forward -- zero calls or mail; only visits.

This ban felt unnecessarily cruel. But my nervous system only registered “I’m finally leaving the hole!” For two months, I survived hell. Teetering between torture and surrender, I prayed for this day. It arrives. I gave Baby Joe, drug smuggler, immigrant, brother, a hug as the guard opened our cell door. I did not get cuffed, shackled, or strip searched. I could walk a “free” man.

But the nervous system takes its own time to unwind. After two months of isolation, I actually dreaded social interaction. The new unit I moved to allows for only ninety minutes out of the cell each day; I semi-dreaded the exposure. Solitary confinement forces a person to shrink, to sustain a thread to Spirit with no external resource, to shutter and shield the self to survive. Survival requires concessions. Losing everything in an instant is a system shock, and so is getting everything back. Both feel terrifying. I told my new cellmates, "When the door pops open for the hour of recreation time, I'm not talking to anyone. I'm going to the shower, and coming back to the cell." I did just that, and locked the door behind me. Any sense of safety.

For these next thirty days of no-contact, I couldn't stop thinking about Baby Joe. He's still in the hole. I wonder if he regrets his decision to smuggle in drugs, or if he'd do it again? I'm not sure. I can't stop thinking about what it means to be an immigrant in the U.S., all the odds stacked against him. What kind of life did Joe's mom flee from? Something desperate? Maybe desperation is what this is all about. During those two months, I felt desperate to leave. Joe felt desperate to make money. The man who asked me for the phone call felt desperate to get high, as did Joe's friend who overdosed. Maybe Beth Skinner --Director of the Iowa Department of Corrections -- felt desperate when she ended statewide drug programs in prison because of budget issues. We live in a maze of desperation.

One night during solitary, the voice of a South African immigrant sang across the cell house. Startled by the sheer beauty, I laid my book across my chest and listened. With a deep, smooth voice, he sang about love. As if his voice was a portal to the cosmos, I took a rare deep breath and surrendered to my own internal expanse of desperation. And I smiled.

In a desperate world, can we surrender?

Surrender is clearing space for intuition and guidance to be realized and followed...It is the

courage to open to what we don’t know we don’t know...It is allowing higher energies to

work through us to use us...to bring forth results that are often unexpected and of a higher

order. – Roger Teel

I don't know why this man chose to sing that night. Did he sing from love? Desperation? Boredom? No matter his motivation, the cell house took a collective breath and sighed. He opened up a space to listen beyond the chaos of our minds. In that moment, I felt connected despite a system intent on severing me from everything and everyone. I surrendered to desperation, releasing the control of fear and doubt in my life.

Right now, tens of thousands of humans are locked in solitary confinement cells across the nation. They almost certainly come from desperate lives, where they made desperate decisions and tripped into a system that feeds on desperation. The odds are overwhelmingly stacked against their wellbeing. Baby Joe's story is our story. My story is our story. The immigrant story is our story. And what amazing stories they are! Their desperation is ours. And so is their brilliance, resilience. We are all related. These months gave me practice: surrender is not giving up. Surrender is opening toward the greatest love. Surrender is not taking control, it's relinquishing it. When I stop attempting to control and manage everything, I can breathe with the whole of life, wind in trees. Is me. I feel the whole moment in all its terror and promise. And then I am free. And freedom, inside a cell, is a pretty rad feeling.