The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [53]
BOOK TWO
7
BATTLE OF THE BILL
Scarcely was the ink dry on the first note from the press of the Treasury, before its bogus counterpart appeared in circulation.
—LA FAYETTE CHARLES BAKER, 1867
On April 30, 1999—three years, two months, and nine days after his robbery arrest—Art Williams stepped out from behind the security gates of the Holiday Unit in Huntsville like a man preserved in ice. He was dressed in the same pair of jeans and white T-shirt he’d worn on the night of his arrest, and in terms of his plans for the future, he hadn’t evolved much further. He had spent most of his time coping with the present realities of one of America’s worst correctional systems.
While serving out his sentence, Art had gotten the grand tour of Texas’s penal system, which at the time was the second-largest in the country and the fastest-growing system in the world. After riding the merry-go-round through transfer and processing units like Gurney, Moore, and Huntsville, he finally wound up at the Lopez State Jail, which was both geographically and spiritually the ass end of the system. Located at the southernmost tip of Texas in the town of Ed inburg, it sat twelve miles from the Mexican border, in a parched, three-hundred-acre parcel that the twelve hundred prisoners farmed for vegetables while shotgun-bearing guards on horseback watched over them like extras from every bad prison movie ever made. During the summer, temperatures routinely broke a hundred degrees Fahrenheit while humidity from the Gulf of Mexico turned the whole place into a soul-sapping sweatbox. Although the unit was brand new, it was brutally Spartan: there was no air-conditioning to speak of, and prisoners often had to boil their own water to make it drinkable. The running joke among the inmates was that they were no longer in the United States. “We’re in fucking Mexico,” they’d say, and invent stories about how then-governor George W. Bush had struck a deal under NAFTA to export Texas’s prisoners south of the Rio Grande.
“It was just hell,” Art remembers. “It was a hundred degrees in a tin box, and people were so angry because of the heat. At different times of the season we’d have billions of mosquitoes and they had to cancel rec because people were getting eaten up. When you could go to the rec yard, there were also rattlesnakes. You’re hitting iron, and fucking baby rattlesnakes are coming up behind you!” The social ills weren’t much better. Statistically, Texas was the state where an inmate was most likely to be raped, and most likely to die in prison. A few years after Art was sentenced, a federal judge (who was aptly named William Justice) declared that Texas’s penal system was rife with “a culture of sadistic and malicious violence.” Art participated in it firsthand. Early on, another inmate had demanded he hand over some of his commissary goods, a brief exchange that resulted in the other inmate winding up in the hospital and Art spending a month in solitary confinement. That was the only time he was attacked, but on numerous occasions he faced down other inmates, mostly blacks and Mexicans, who are disproportionately represented in Texas. Having come from Chicago, where race is less important than your gang affiliation, Art found the self-segregation utterly weird. Most of the time he read books and kept to himself. As one of the few inmates who could read and write well, he ended up working in administration, which was considered