Note: This is the opening chapter of my autobiography, "GhostExodus". My book has been vastly delayed because of what it takes from me to write about my time in prison. Thus, parts of the book aren't chronological and starts with the darkest moment of my life.
This chapter was not written by me. It was written by my personality, GhostExodus.
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Order 66: Seagoville Prison, 2012
Wind Rose, Fellows of the Hammer
“People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel.” - Ivan, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Article 1 of the United Nations Conventions Against Torture, prohibits “physical or mental pain and suffering, inflicted to punish, coerce or discriminate for any reason. (This is international law, by which the United States is a signatory in accordance with the United
Nations Covenants and Treaties. In 1995, a United Nations report criticized the United States for operating “inhumane and degrading prisons.” 1 Keep that in mind when you pour through this chapter.
Allow me to lead you by the hand on a trip down memory lane. I will guide you to a place of buried memories that Jesse keeps caged under lock and key just south of Elysium. Now this memory, as it were, is embowled within the ninth gate of Hell, in his ERROR 404 vault of living nightmares.
The substance of things he desperately wants to forget about. For this very reason, I am here. I shall tell it as I remember it.
I’m looking for the tape of this dark memory. It’s somewhere around here.
As I write in his stead, I search for the right words to bring up the sheer emotional force surrounding his memories, because his emotions have been fatally compartmentalized and locked away somewhere in a vault that he deliberately misplaced after being imprisoned for so long.
In order to call these fragments, he listens to music. It is the only bridge by which he has left that can momentarily reconnect him to what it is to be called human.
The music carries him to a place that contains what feels like the last vestiges of his humanity, on the fringes of life and death. The bridge reaches out across this chasm, this seemingly endless void, and into the mist where his heart is hidden where no one can touch it.
Yes. Now that I've tracked down the scarlet thread of memory, I can bring his heart up from stasis. I keep it there. He fills his lungs with air.
He disappears beneath the surface of an ocean of memories and lost dreams, holding the scarlet thread I’ve found for him, carefully untangling it from the knot of memories both beautiful and revolting, following it down, down, down…
Down…
Into the crushing depths of an unpleasant place deep within his mind where he never ventures, to awaken the trauma of living nightmares, the kind you can never wake from.
The closer he gets to it, the hotter it gets. Of a certain, his lungs are going to burst.
Hotter.
Hotter still. It’s burning here. Our skin starts to burn as he sweats uncontrollably. I can hear the cacophony of wailing from the inmates who wail for ice, just a cup of ice. Their voices bounce down the halls. I am there with him, as his true warden.
They are all in excruciating pain here. So much pain. So much indifference to their suffering by the beasts who keep them here. One committed suicide. Another was rushed to the hospital.
Ashes, ashes. We all fall down.
Panting with an endless thirst that twists the body and the mind, fracturing the soul forever.
Welcome to Seagoville FCI’s Special Housing Unit. The Crematorium.
“Come here into the fire,” I said to him.
“Stop fighting it,” I urge him. If only, he’d listen. “Let the fires purge you, lest it destroys you. Accept it. Dominate it.”
Sometimes he listens. Fighting that which cannot be undone causes pain that is unnecessary. Together, we burn. He falls. I lift him up. Together we fall. Notwithstanding, he cannot stand on his own. Not without me. I always restore myself so I can restore him.
Let me introduce you to Officer Frank. He’s like a saint among these immoral reprobates in blue uniforms. Today, he took a temperature reading from our cell. The look on his face was that of abject horror as it dawned on him that the inmates weren’t screaming for ice just to get some attention.
The temperature was 125 degrees Fahrenheit. How could he know? The hallways are frigid with air conditioning - air that never enters our cells, and he, nor any other guard for that matter, has entered these 8x12 cells this summer.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made that face - that mask of shock when he realized he was being an accessory to torture and other human rights abuse.
He was keeping humans in easy bake ovens.
But they know. They have to know. Perhaps some of them do not want to face the truth.
“If this place burns to the ground, only we will remain”, I tell him. He knows this is true. Even though he aches to die. I will not let him.
Officer Frank initially disbelieved him about the intensity of the heat within these walls. That arctic blast drifting down the hallways is deceiving. Don’t believe it. It doesn’t exist. This is the reason why our body is flushed red and covered with heat rashes and sweat, both old and new.
Jesse and his cellmate live in their boxers. They all lay upon the steel pan frame of our bunk, sometimes curled up on the floor. Clothing and mattresses only cause us to burn even more.
There are no fans. There is no air conditioning. There is no adequate ventilation. We have a grated window that opens a quarter of the way, blocking any hope of an air draft.
There used to be an air conditioning system, we believe, because each cell has a grated vent above the stainless steel toilet. Our vent leaks toilet water from the cell directly above us, which is caked with black mold.
Oh, is the ventilation system functional? He fantasizes about air conditioning as his blood boils without relief.
From his peripheral, he sees flames that only burn from within the theater of his fractured thoughts. It gets worse from here.
It only gets worse. Be he will only survive it as long as I am there.
Then one day we knew. Some diabolical little sociopath turned the heater on them during one of the hottest days of Summer, multiplying heat upon mind-bending heat, leaving them screaming out through their narrow vertical grated windows in the steel doors for anyone - anyone to listen and turn the thing off.
But nobody believes them. Only Frank believes it after Jesse showed him. The Officer extracts us from the cell to inspect the vent himself. It was never determined which of the guards was the one responsible for hitting the inmates with the heater.
They enjoy watching them fight to stay alive. It excites them, as the inmates break from anxiety, pain, and despair while entombed in these cells, burning. The inmates are defenseless and vulnerable while the officers wield absolute power over life and death, all the while laughing with their smug faces and pedophile mustaches.
They’ve no idea that they’ve caged a hungry lion.
You would have to experience the American Prison Industrial Complex yourself to truly understand it. Only a closet sociopath working for the Federal Bureau of Prisons could be so creative in the machinations of torture and abuse.
In my opinion, they should all be hanged.
Imaging having sociopathic behaviors and tendencies. You would seek out jobs that would give you power over the lives of others, where you could find job security while at the same exert absolute power over others, especially if they were vulnerable or defenseless.
Law Enforcement. Justice. Politics. This is where they hide. Within these realms, they can access an unlimited number of victims who have little to no status, or power, and no one will save them, because no one can even if they wanted to.
They walk away from lawsuits unscathed because the prison system protects them. They’ll chalk it up to a lack of additional training, meaning that the officer requires additional training to know how to not inflict suffering on others.
This is an epidemic in this nation’s prisons, and it will never change unless power is taken from them by force, and they are force-fed accountability, for the uncountable crimes of their social terrors.
By standing armies? Nay. Arms will never break the pride of corruption here.
I am GhostExodus.
Where is Jesse McGraw? That is the question. He is being illegally detained without due process within the Special Housing Unit (SHU) at Seagoville FCI - a maximum security 23/5 lockdown administration segregation unit used for disciplinary housing.
This prison once operated as a Japanese, German, and Italian internment camp during the second world war. It was operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).
Back then, it was called the Seagoville Enemy Alien Detention Station. But because of The Geneva Convention of 1929, it was prohibited to operate a facility for the purpose of detaining prisoners of war, as well as enemy aliens (civilians) in prisons, which consequently excluded the United States FBOP from being allowed the duty to intern civilians during World War II.
Originally built by the BOP in 1941 as a minimum-security women’s reformatory, Seagoville Enemy Alien Detention Station was transferred from the Bureau of Prisons to the INS on April 1, 1942. 2
The age of this facility and much of the architecture are archaic and not adequately modernized. Even the paint on the walls, when you peel it back, reveals half a dozen layers or more, which cleverly conceals the lead paint beneath the surface.
Jesse is bunking with Batman, a well-known member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. Batman has been confined here for almost a year now by the infamous Warden Maureen Cruz herself, simply because he managed to get himself stomped on the back of the head, which sent him to the hospital.
He refuses to identify the person responsible, and testify against him. She decided to leave him to rot back here, so he would experience the intensity of the heat, with the expectation that he might change his mind and decide to testify.
I’m supposedly a danger to society. Haha.
I’m an apex predator.
So get this, Jesse’s access to the inmate electronic messaging system (TRULINCS/email) was revoked back in July 2011 just a few months after he was sentenced and convinced on March 17, 2011 on 2 counts of Transmitting a Malicious Code. Don’t worry. The answers will come the more you read.
But why did this happen?
Fun fact: For people with hacking-related convictions, revoking their email access is pretty standard. But hey, no worries! Inmates are allowed to use alternative means of communication, including writing letters and/or using the phone at .23 cents a minute - long distance. That’s a fair alternative, don’t you think?
Nobody really writes letters anymore, and phone calls are less popular than text messages.
So this is how this whole thing started, which led to us burning in this Crematorium. A pal of his named Jerry let him use his email account - this was a relief, because being left to uncommon means of communicating caused Jesse to panic.
Jesse’s case was now on direct appeal, and suddenly he had no quick or affordable way to communicate with his attorney, or his family and friends.
Think about it. You’re cut off from society. You can’t use the internet. Likewise, you have nothing to your name, which is now a Federal ID number. It’s an inconvenience to family and loved ones to email inmates from the BOP’s stupid little website. Few have time to sit down and write a damn letter these days.
Jesse saw it, a future where all his loved ones just moved on with their merry little lives as the least convenient means to communicate cheaply was unceremoniously revoked.
Not being able to email meant that he could kiss his family and friends goodbye. It would create a deeper level of insulation, barring him from being able to maintain some semblance of social normalcy or maintain meaningful relationships.
Look, inmates are only given 300 minutes a month to use on overpriced phone calls. Email and visits are an inmate’s lifeline, and to take that away from them creates another barrier that obstructs them from cultivating and keeping important relationships, or having access to current information.
Therefore, when the prison revoked his TRULINCS access, it devastated him to his core, as his worst dreams were realized. I mean, sending an email costs .5 cents a minute. Now he’d be forced to watch the last of the people he loved and cared about begin to slip through his fingers - and that is exactly what happened until it was only we remained.
Well, he ended up getting caught, and his good ole pal Jerry told the investigating officer that he had no clue Jesse was using his account and that he must have hacked into it.
There was just no other explanation. Any other explanation was inconceivable because here we were, dirty rotten little hackers. Oh yes, we’re always up to mischief. No doubt.
Everyone knew he was a computer hacker. We’d been on TV, reruns, in the papers, and on the radio. Our reputation as a hacker precedes us.
I’m that guy.
As the lying lips of the false witness uttered the fateful accusation, Jesse was unceremoniously escorted in handcuffs to the Special Housing Unit and placed under investigation.
What’s more, they notified the FBI about the incident, and so they set out to determine if he had truly ained unauthorized access to the TRULINCS system and if there was any evidence of hacking.
The summer of 2012 was the hottest Summer on record. If it was hot enough for one of the guards to fall unconscious outside on the sidewalk, can you imagine what it was like for helpless human beings locked in on the inside? This is what hundreds of inmates must endure each year at Seagoville prison’s Special Housing Unit. 3
The intensity of this inferno sucks the breath out of his lungs, like reverse respiration. He can never really fall asleep, except in sporadic instances, which only last a few minutes at a time.
The light is never turned off, and the heat never ceases to rage on. He gets up to rehydrate himself from the sink through all hours of the night because if he doesn’t, he will die from dehydration. That is something I cannot allow. Staying alive is our greatest act yet. Yes, our greatest act of defiance against this diabolical machine.
They never relent, and neither can we.
I will not. I cannot.
No matter my defiant tone, Jesse has gone barking mad. He is absolutely insane from the heat, as well as the social and environmental deprivation.
What’s so cruel about his insanity is that he actually gets to know that he’s become insane, which takes the fun out of insanity. It’s sad to have this awareness. Shameful, even.
All the necessary elements of being human to have numbed and suppressed much of his sensory faculties, leaving his brain to conjure up extreme auditory hallucinations to fill in the gaps where the environment and social stimulation used to be. Humans were never made to exist in cages.
His personalities bounce back and forth inside his head like a pinball, ricocheting off each other’s thoughts like a football, bouncing in random directions. His thoughts bounce off my thoughts, which crash into her thoughts. Then causality tips the thoughts back to him, ending in a confusing swirl of who said what.
Tearing. Rending his ego in twain, and thrice, leaving me to sew him back together again. His psyche is ever fighting the trauma. His senses burned by fire as he searches for a foothold to stand on, trying hard not to trip and fall into the jaws of despair and die.
Die a nobody. A nameless husk with a prisoner registration number.
Let me explain the auditory hallucinations. It all started with a faint, barely audible radio station in his head playing marching band music, which ironically he’s never liked a day in his life. For one, that uppity music is ridiculous.
At first, it sounded like it might have been coming from somewhere else, like outside the grated window. But it wasn’t coming from outside, but inside - he was tuned into a non-existent radio station. There are no stations like this in Dallas county dedicated to ear-raping the city with completely bizarre, abstract, nonsensical marching band music - with Bagpipes? Since when? And Sitars? Electric guitars and classical piano arpeggios? Yeah, not on planet Earth.
The funny thing was, he still wasn’t completely convinced that this cacophony of terrible music was a figment of his imagination.
There was another hacker in the hotbox with him who used to go by the alias PhanOP, which is short for Phantom Operator. We’d get to see each other a few times a week early in the morning when the guards extracted those who wanted to go outside for an hour in the recreational cages, sometimes called “Kennels”.
Mind you, dogs go to kennels. So that says a lot about how humans are perceived by the system. But I digress because PhanOp tried to reassure him that what he was experiencing was a completely natural phenomenon due to the metal fillings in his teeth, which were allowing Jesse to receive radio signals.
Obviously, Jesse wasn’t the only person who’d gone crazy asf, and to Jesse, PhanOp seemed completely insane. But the more he thought about it, the more he decided to believe it. Hey, there was no Google.
Yes, this is totally normal. Yes. *Eye roll*
The music is insulting. Jesse was classically trained and a child prodigy on his way to Juilliard when he was just twelve. If it could personify itself and manifest a physical body, I would beat it over the head with a flaming two-by-four. With nails. And what in the raging turd crap is a helicopter doing landing outside our window? Are we at war? Yes. I had to listen to this shit too.
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