Behind the Chicken Wire: 5 Surprising Truths About the Secret Sociology of Prison Life

 

Everything Got Complicated

My First Prison Husband: Part 2

By Rodney "MC Shakie" Roussell

 

Nobody tells you what happens the morning after you get a prison husband.

They tell you to get one. They explain why you need one. They run you through the hierarchy, the protection, the social math of it all. But what nobody sits you down and explains is that the morning after you exchange those locker keys, you wake up and you are now somebody's wife. For real. Not symbolically. Not loosely. Wife. With responsibilities. With an emotional landscape to navigate. With a whole other person's needs inside a place that was already trying to crush yours.

I woke up the day after my prison wedding and realized that the education had only just begun.

Prison Wifely Duties

Let me tell you what being Mike's wife actually looked like, because it was not what I expected.

Mike worked maintenance—painting, fixing things, whatever needed doing around the compound. He'd come back to the unit with paint on his uniform almost every day. And here's what I learned very quickly: he now had a wife, which meant he no longer had to make up his own bed. That was my job. Every morning after he left for work, I had to make that bunk to regulation—tight, smooth, inspection-ready. Because when they came through to check, that was a direct reflection on both of us.

His shower stuff had to be organized and ready when he came back. If he wanted a snack, I went and got it. If he needed something handled, I handled it. These were not things he demanded loudly or ruled over me with—they were just understood. This is how it worked. This is what it meant.

Now, I want to be honest: I didn't feel forced. Not exactly. I could feel that he genuinely cared about me in the way that a person who has never cared for anyone quite like this before fumbles through caring. He was learning. I was learning. We were both doing something neither of us had done before, in a place designed to make everything harder. What I did feel, though, was something I hadn't expected—something that felt like being chosen, in a place where most things are just assigned to you without your input. That part, I held onto.

In return, he was protective in a way that made me feel like the compound had a different temperature when I walked through it. Nobody stepped to me wrong. Nobody lingered too long. If someone was looking at me in a way Mike didn't like, he handled it before I even registered there was something to handle. That kind of protection, in that kind of place, is not nothing.

It is, in fact, the whole thing.

The Jealousy Chronicles

The problem with that same protection is that it did not know when to clock out.

A man from Shreveport named Travis moved into the bunk right next to mine. Red-boned, skinny, quiet—had a scar on his face and a whole story behind it that nobody told all the way. He was not a bad person. He was just my neighbor. And late at night, when the lights went down and the unit settled into its particular version of quiet, we'd talk. Laugh. Keep each other company the way people do when they're both awake and the night is too long.

This should've been fine. This was, in fact, completely normal human behavior.

Mike did not see it that way.

He would wake up in the middle of those conversations and just look at Travis. No words. Just presence—heavy, deliberate, unmistakable. The kind of look that doesn't need translation in any language. Travis would go quiet. I would go quiet. And then Mike would lay back down and pretend to be asleep, but we all knew nobody was asleep.

Eventually Mike got my rack moved away from Travis and right next to his own.

I was, in prison terms, grounded.

It was kind of cute for about a week. Then the holidays came around, Mike's work unit had time off, and he was in that dormitory all day, every day, not going anywhere. And suddenly I couldn't breathe. I am naturally a people person. I write letters for people, I talk to people, I solve problems—men on the compound were always coming to me to spell words for letters home or to help them say something they didn't know how to say. That's just who I am. Mike hated every second of all of it.

“If they need something, they can talk to me,” he'd say. “I'll get it to you.”

The only people I was allowed to have full access to were Sissy Leroy and Midnight. That was the list. Two people. In a dormitory of almost two hundred.

Chile.

The Night Everything Changed

We were playing Casino one night. Cards. I was losing badly, not because I don't know how to play but because I wasn't really present—I had gotten some difficult news from home about my legal situation, federal charges that might complicate everything, and my mind was somewhere else entirely. Mike was winning and talking his mess the way he did when he was feeling himself. Playful. Loud.

And I said something back.

I don't even remember exactly what it was. Something sharp. Something that, out in the world, in a kitchen or a living room with nobody watching, would've just been banter between two people who knew each other. But we were not in a kitchen. We were in a prison dormitory with people nearby, and what I had done—without thinking, without meaning to—was publicly challenge his position.

In prison, a queen does not raise her voice to her husband in front of other people. Not because of some outdated sense of gender roles, but because of something more specific and more dangerous: his respect on that compound lived in how he was seen. And if the person he was responsible for publicly disrespected him, his standing took a hit. The only way to repair it was immediately, and visibly.

He popped me.

Not a beating. One swift, blunt reminder of where we were and what the rules were. And my body—my reflex—almost hit back. Almost. But my brain caught up in the half-second between impulse and action and said: remember where you are. Remember who else is watching. Remember what happens if you escalate this. So I didn't.

He walked away. I laid there in my bunk staring at the ceiling, angry and shaken and trying to sort out what I was feeling, which was too many things at once. The dormitory had gone quiet in that specific way places go quiet when something just happened and nobody wants to be the one to acknowledge it.

I don't know how much time passed. Long enough. And then I felt my cover lift at the back—that specific feeling of knowing someone is there before you can see them. He slid into the bunk behind me. I pushed forward a little, putting distance between us, not ready to let him close the gap yet. And he put those big arms around me anyway, pulled me in, and held me there without saying anything for a long moment.

Then: "I'm so sorry. I love you."

And everything that came after that was the rest of the night.

I don't need to map it out for you in detail. What I will say is that it was gentle and slow and he was careful with me in a way I hadn't expected from someone who'd had a completely different energy twenty minutes earlier. And what I will also say is that something shifted in both of us. Whatever line we'd been standing next to, we crossed it, and there was no going back to the side we'd been on before.

For Mike, it seemed to unlock something that hadn't known it was waiting. He became, if anything, more protective after that. More watchful. More certain that I was his and he was not sharing any part of that with anyone. For me? Well. All I can say is that a person can handle a lot of discomfort when they feel genuinely wanted by somebody who means it.

Mike meant it.

Sissy Leroy's Schemes: The Education of Strawberry

Meanwhile, Sissy Leroy had been watching Travis.

She had been watching him the way a chess player watches a piece they intend to move in about six moves. Patient. Calculating. Already knowing the end of the game before the other person even knows they're sitting at the board.

You need to understand something about Travis: he was straight. Or at least he had come in as a straight man, with a straight man's standing, and that status was everything to him. Because in prison, the alternative—losing it—meant something permanent.

There's a term for what happened to Travis: a turnout. A turnout is a man who was straight when he came in and lost his manhood inside—through force or through trickery. Not the same as a queen, who came in already knowing who she was. Not the same as a real man who keeps his standing regardless of what he does privately. A turnout is somebody who got got. And once you're got, the prison totem pole does not have an appeals process.

Sissy Leroy engineered it. She spent weeks talking to Travis, being warm, building something that looked enough like genuine interest that he leaned into it. She was very good at that. She had spent years building exactly that kind of trust with exactly that kind of person.

The double bunks at the back of our unit were where things happened that weren't supposed to happen. Hang a blanket across one of those double racks and you had something like privacy in a place that had none. People went back there to gamble, to talk on cell phones, to do all kinds of business the deputies weren't meant to see.

One evening Sissy Leroy gave Travis a signal. He went back there. She went from the other side. I stayed at my bunk and minded my business, because I had enough going on with my own situation and I figured Sissy Leroy just wanted some time with the boy.

What I did not account for was Sissy Leroy.

She came out first. Calmly. Straightened her clothes. Went about her evening. Travis came out behind her, still processing. And then Midnight and a few of the New Orleans boys were just—there. Watching. Three witnesses was the threshold. Everyone on that compound knew what that meant.

Travis went through the rest of that night in a daze. His standing was gone, flipped in a single evening. And now there was one final question—a kind of ritual the way it was enforced—that would determine what kind of person Travis was going to be from that point forward.

In prison, a homosexual sits down to urinate. Always. Standing at the urinal is for men. Out in the world that sounds like nothing. In there, it is the line. And the whole dormitory was awake that night, waiting to see which side of it Travis was going to land on.

He rocked back and forth in his bunk for a long time. I watched him from where I was. Mike's arm was around me and I was watching this man try to make a decision he knew was going to define what the next months or years of his life looked like. If he stood up at that urinal, he'd be beaten—possibly badly—and then put right back in the same dormitory with the same verdict still standing. If he walked to the stall and sat down, he had accepted it.

Travis walked to the back. Looked right toward the urinals. Looked left. And then he went to the stall.

He sat down.

Some people around the unit exhaled. A few made noise. I turned my face back into Mike's chest and said nothing, because there was genuinely nothing to say. I had just watched a person have the last piece of who they thought they were taken away, and then make the only decision available that kept them breathing. The cruelty of it was not lost on me even then.

Sissy Leroy named him Strawberry. He was hers. That was how it worked.

Daughter, You Are the Hustle

Now. I need to tell you what Sissy Leroy did to me, because I would be leaving out something essential if I didn't.

After she lost her front job—they caught her moving something she shouldn't have been moving, and even good favor with the warden has limits—Sissy Leroy had to get creative about income. She was always resourceful. You could drop her in any situation and she'd find the angle within forty-eight hours.

The angle she found was me.

Here is something you may not know about how Louisiana prisons worked during this period: the Muslim community had their own chapel on the compound, positioned between units. The administration trusted them—they were disciplined, they didn't cause trouble, they regulated themselves—and so their chapel operated with a freedom that nowhere else on that compound had. No deputy stationed inside. Just a check-in every now and then. The Muslims had earned real trust.

This made the mosque the marketplace.

If you were in one unit and needed to do business with someone in another—cell phones, drugs, gambling debts, contraband of any kind—you paid the Imam a few cigarettes and conducted your transaction during service, right there in that back space, while the Muslims did their thing at the front and paid no attention to what was behind them. It was one of the most organized informal economies I have ever witnessed. The whole thing operated on trust, discipline, and a few packs of cigarettes.

Sissy Leroy started going to Islamic service. She started bringing me along. “Come watch my back, daughter,” she'd say. “Just keep your eyes open.” I didn't ask too many questions because I had no reason not to trust her. Every time we went, she'd come back with a goodie bag—Zuzu and whammies, cookies, cigarettes, snacks. She'd hand me some. I'd say thank you. We'd go back to the unit.

This happened again. Then again. Then again. Each time, the bag she brought back was bigger. Each time she handed me my portion. I noticed but I wasn't asking questions, because I'm not stupid but I also, apparently, had limits on my suspicion when it came to the person who'd been looking out for me since the day I arrived.

On about the fifth trip, on the walk back, she handed me a portion that was notably more substantial than usual. And she looked at me with an expression I can only describe as motherly pride—which I now know is the most dangerous kind.

She said: "Daughter. You are the hustle."

I looked at her.

She said it again. Calm. Certain. "This money? I got paid for you."

And then it all landed at once.

I was not watching her back at the mosque. I was the reason people were paying to come to the mosque. She had been running me. Setting me up with men in that back space while she stood watch and collected. The goodie bags weren't gifts. They were my cut. She had been my manager, my booker, and my employer without ever once telling me I had been hired.

I was so angry I could barely form words. Hot all over. My first instinct was to tell Mike. My second instinct—which arrived approximately one heartbeat later—was that telling Mike was the one thing I absolutely could not do, because if Mike found out what had been happening in that mosque, nobody was going to be okay. Including me. Especially me.

Sissy Leroy knew all of this. She had replayed every possible outcome in her head before she ever opened her mouth. That was the thing about Sissy Leroy—she didn't just play chess. She had already run the game six ways and knew every ending.

She said: "Daughter, a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. But remember one thing" + em + "I gave you the game. The game is not to be dirty. The game is to be smart."

I didn't speak to her for a little while after that. Not forever—I didn't have many people, and I was not willing to lose even the complicated ones. But I needed some space to be furious in peace.

What I took from it: know who people are. Not who you want them to be, not who they've been to you so far, but who they are. A prison mother is not your real mother. The love can be real and the agenda can also be real, and both of those things can live in the same person at the same time. I had mistaken familiarity for safety. I had trusted the relationship without trusting my own eyes.

I don't blame her. Not really. She was surviving the only way she knew how, and she did look out for me in every other way she was capable of. But I never forgot it. And I never let it happen again.

Pack Your Things

The thing about prison is that it moves without asking you. One day you know the faces, you know the sounds, you know exactly how the light looks at count time—and then they call your name and tell you to pack your things, and just like that, it's over.

The prison system was downsizing. The Jindal administration had put through changes, facilities were closing, and people with nonviolent records were being sent to satellite camps. My name came up on that list. I was going to Catahoula Parish.

In all the time I was with Mike, I had seen him be many things: possessive, protective, funny in that deadpan way of his, loyal past what the situation required. Firm and tender in the quiet way that men who've never been taught to be tender manage it anyway.

I had never seen him cry.

When they called my name and I started packing, Mike came and sat on the edge of the bunk and didn't say anything for a while. And then his face did something I wasn't prepared for. It broke a little. Not loudly, not dramatically—just this quiet, devastating leaking of something he had no other way to let out. He said I was the only thing he had. He said he wasn't going to be okay.

I told him I wasn't going to be with anybody else. That I'd wait. I believed it when I said it. I think we both knew, on some level, that a prison promise made across a transfer is the most sincere kind and also the least likely to survive geography.

Midnight and some of the others came around to say goodbye. "The baby girl is leaving home," somebody said. A few laughs—the kind people do when something is sad and laughter is the only tool anybody has. Mike watched all of it from his bunk like he was memorizing something.

I picked up my bag. I walked out of Fox 4. I did not look back.

What Happened to Everyone

I've thought a lot about how to write this part. Whether to leave it out and let the story end at the transfer. But that would be lying by omission, and these people deserve more than that.

Mike came home eventually. I came home. We tried—genuinely tried—to put ourselves in the same place and make something work out here. But our lives were shaped too differently by the time we both got out. He was over there. I was over here. The thing that had made us work inside didn't have the same architecture on the outside, where nothing was forcing proximity and everything required a different kind of effort. We tried for a little while and then we stopped trying, the way things do when neither person is wrong and it still doesn't work.

Some time after that, Mike was shot and killed.

I want to sit with that sentence for a moment instead of rushing past it. He was my first real connection inside. He was the one who set the standard for how I expected to be treated—how I expected to be protected, and what I refused to accept after that. He was funny and difficult and genuine in a way that didn't know how to be anything else. He only hit me once. He cried once. I saw both of those things in that order and I have never forgotten either.

He is gone now and I am still here and I think about that more than I let on.

Sissy Leroy—the woman I called mama, the one who taught me everything I needed to know and then ran me without my knowledge—I found out not long ago that she passed. I came across it while searching for something else. The cause pointed toward what people died from during those years when they were dying from those things. She was from Donaldsonville, Louisiana. She was exactly who she was every single day I knew her, and I think that is the most honest thing I can say about her.

Midnight came home. He's out there. He'll see me and say "What's up, daughter" and give me a hard time the same way he always did. There's something in that continuity that feels like mercy.

Strawberry—Travis—went home eventually. Came back to jail. When I ran into him again later, in a different place, he was living as a boy. That's a story for another time.

This particular stretch covers about the first year and a half of a nine-year sentence. There is a lot more road ahead.

What I carried out of it: that people can genuinely love you and still use you. That protection can look like possession when it doesn't know its own edges. That family is real even when it isn't blood, and that real doesn't mean safe. That intimacy in an impossible place hits differently and leaves marks you don't always know are there until you're somewhere quiet enough to notice.

Next time, we go to Catahoula. The second husband. And the knife.

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