A Force To Be Reckoned With

Jack was taken from the county jail to the ‘Deuel Vocational Institution’ in Tracy. The primary purpose of DVI is to serve as a reception center for newly committed prisoners to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation from northern California county jails.

The facility has been frequently referred to as "gladiator school" by inmates and staff, because the DVI is widely known for the fights and homicides that take place within the prison walls.

Jack was put into general population for the first time. Many of the inmates already knew who he was and that he was formerly a cop. Nobody in prison seems to like cops for some reason. The other inmates avoided him. One reason was that he was a big guy and looked like he could handle any situation.

The prison in Tracy is one of the most overcrowded prisons in the state. Jack was told to find an empty bunk in a large room that was at one time a gymnasium. He quickly discovered that the room was divided up along ethnic lines. The blacks, whites, Asian, Northern Hispanics and Southern Hispanics each had their own section. Taking a bunk in the wrong section usually meant trouble for someone. Jack found one in the Northern Hispanic section and settled in. The guys around him ignored him at first but there is always at least one guy in a group that just has to cause trouble. The guy in this group was called ‘Tiny’. He was 6’ 7” tall and had about 2% body fat. He was also as stupid as a can of corn. Nobody ever told him that of course because he also had a vicious temper. Behind his back, they all called him ‘raging Bull’, Tiny actually grew up on a cattle ranch in Texas where he would raised a bull from calf to stud ranch.

The big problem with DVI is that they don’t segregate felons with different propensities for violence. They have a guy that has murdered numerous people sleeping in a bunk next to the guy that didn’t pay his child support. Fights are inevitable and a common daily occurrence.

On day 6 of Jacks' residency, he was walking down a hallway when Tiny just happened to be coming in the opposite direction. Tiny moved over slightly, enough so that if Jack continued walking in a straight line, would run right into him. Jack noticed this and mentally calculated that in 5 more steps he would either have to move to the side or run into the middle of Tiny’s mass, which was considerable.

Jack did neither; he stopped walking and waited for Tiny to come to him. When he got there, Jack took one step back and said “Your friends told me you were stupid. You don’t look it to me. Why would they say that about you?”

“Who said I was stupid?” Tiny said.

“Those goons you hang out with”, he said, pointing to a group of 5 Hispanics standing off to the side.

“I ain’t stupid”, Tiny said slowly.

“I didn’t say you looked stupid, they did”, Jack said nodding his head in the direction of the goon squad standing nearby.

At this point, Tiny was totally confused. He was told by his friends that the new guy was going to “beat the shit out of him the first chance he got.” He looked at Jack and said, “What are you doing?”

“I’m just heading down to get some lunch; you want to join me?”

Tiny looked at Jack and tilted his head to the side trying to determine if there was any threat in Jack’s invitation. “Sure, why not”, he said, and they both headed for the lunchroom while getting looks of dismay from the guys who tried to set up a fight. Jack glanced back and caught the eye of Diego the ringleader and smiled.

Jack and Tiny filled their trays with what the penal system passed off as lunch and walked over to a table that had several Asians sitting there eating. When Jack sat down, they all grabbed their trays, got up and moved to another table leaving plenty of room for the 2 big men.

Jack leaned over and said, “You know there’s going to be trouble, don’t you?”

“What kind of trouble?” asked Tiny.

“Those goons you hang out with want you dead”

“Why and how do you know?”

“Because I was a cop on the outside, and they want me dead”, explained Jack. “If you were to kill me, they would turn you in and get you charged with murder. Thus, we would both be out of their way.”

“Why would they want me out of the way?”

“Because they can’t control you anymore”, Jack explained.

“Nobody controls me”, exclaimed Tiny. “I don’t take no orders from anyone.”

“I know that, but those goons think that you’re stupid and want you do all their dirty work. But you just showed them that you’re smarter than that.”

“I did?”

“Yes, you did”, said Jack. “And now they are going to want you dead as well. If they can’t control a big guy like you then you become a threat to them and they want that threat, you, eliminated.”

“Eliminated”, Tiny said slowly. “They want me eliminated. So, you think they will try to kill me?”

“Absolutely, if not today then tomorrow for sure”, said Jack. “And not just you, but me too.”

“What do we do?” asked Tiny.

“We beat them to the punch.”

Two days later Jack and Tiny were walking together down the same hall where they had their first encounter. This was the hall that Diego and his band of merry men thought of as their home turf. Diego saw the 2 big men coming towards them and signaled his men to get into position to surround them. Jack noticed the gesture and said quietly to Tiny “Here it comes. You take the 3 on the left and I’ll take the 3 on the right.”

The goon squad never saw it coming. Jack moved quickly toward the man closest to him and gave him a karate chop to the throat and grabbed the second man by the wrist and swung him into the third man knocking them both to the floor. Jack dropped on one of the men’s chest with his knee, breaking 4 ribs and expertly hitting the second man in the face breaking his jaw and nose. Meanwhile, Tiny charged directly into the 3 men on his side of the hall and picked the first one up and lifted him over his head. He then threw him at the remaining two, knocking them all to the floor. Diego, not expecting this instant retaliation, decided it prudent to get the hell out of there before he too ended up on a stretcher or worse yet, a marble slab in the morgue. Unfortunately for him, Jack was up and grabbed him by the collar and yanked back hard, pulling Diego completely off of his feet and he crashed onto the concert floor, squarely on his back. A smaller man would have broken his back, but it just knocked the wind out of Diego. Immobilized and trying to catch his breath, he laid on the floor looking directly into Jacks eyes. At which point Jack jammed his thumb into his right eye, destroying it. Jack said quietly into his ear, “next time I see you, I’ll kill you.” He thought of putting out the other eye but decided not to.

Within seconds, 7 men were on the floor groaning and in a world of hurt. Jack and Tiny got up and moved out of the area before the guards arrived. In a hallway full of people, no one saw what happened, or so they told the guards. Thus, Jack and Tiny established themselves as a ‘force to be reckoned with’.

It took the State of California six more months to finally decide what to do with Jack Alvarez. He was placed on a bus and taken to San Quentin in Marin County. His reputation both as a cop and as a bad-ass inmate preceded him.

Prison is a world unto itself. It has structure that is dictated by the State, and it has an underlying structure dictated by the inmates themselves. Jack went through the indoctrination process with the Prison administration and was basically told to mind his manners and things would work out well for him. The inmate introduction, however, was quite different. On Jacks first day in ‘the yard’, Jack was set upon by a group of thugs and had a shiv shoved into his side. The man holding the shiv said into Jack’s ear, “Glad to see you made it copper.” His mistake however was in not shoving the knife all the way in. Jack reached back and grabbed the wrist of the assailant and quickly brought the hand up and jammed the knife into the man’s chest so hard that the blade sank all the way into the heart and broke off at the handle, leaving just a small stub sticking out of the chest. Retaliation was swift and brutal. The remaining group of thugs lunged forward and started pounding Jack with their fists. Jack went down but he took three of them down with him. All three ended up with at least one broken bone. Jack would be sore for a few weeks, but nothing was broken and the stab in the side did no real damage. The guards reacted quickly. Within seconds of the start of the fight, eight to ten guards had arrived to get the incident under control before anyone else got killed. They were yelling for everyone to drop to the ground and those that didn’t do it fast enough got a face full of pepper spray. Two inmates were hit with 40mm rubber bullets shot by the guards on the gun gallery. Jack and three other inmates were taken to the hospital and the first assailant was taken to the morgue.

Jack knew that another attack would have to come. He just didn’t know when and from what direction.

A week passed. Jack spent most of his time in the yard or library and was settling into the dull routine. He was pretty much left alone. Everyone knew that he had a price on his head, and nobody wanted to be around when someone decided to collect it.

It next and final assault came the next day. The fight only lasted a few seconds, because the guards were quickly on site and yelling for everyone to lay face down and stay that way. Jack was bleeding through the many holes that the assailant had managed to put in his side and the assailant was lying face down on the ground with a broken neck.

Two weeks in the infirmary and Jack was back out. The first thing he did was to walk over to the lunchroom table where Rocket, the de facto king of the yard, was sitting, he leaned down and looking him directly in the eye, said “you make another move against me, and I will kill you. It became evident that there was a new boss in town.