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

Married Before I Knew His Middle Name

 My First Prison Husband: Part 1

By Rodney "MC Shakie" Roussell

The moment I stepped off that bus at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, something shifted in my chest before my brain could catch up. Not fear exactly — I had done fear in jail already. This was something else. This was the silence.

Not church-quiet. Not library-quiet. A controlled quiet. People were moving all around me, but nobody was loud. Nobody was reckless. Everything felt like something — or someone — was orchestrating it from somewhere above, and everybody in that yard had already memorized the choreography. Everybody except me.

I had been in jail before. Orleans Parish. Baton Rouge. I knew jail. Jail was loud and chaotic and unpredictable, with a deputy somewhere in the back not fully paying attention. Prison? Prison was a different planet. And I was standing on the surface of it with no oxygen tank and no map.

Jail had not prepared me for this. Not even close.

Two Stages, Three Levels

Before we get into it, let me give you some context, because Louisiana's incarceration system is its own world within a world — and if you don't understand the geography, none of the rest of this makes sense.

There are two stages. First is jail — your local parish prison, where you sit while the courts figure out what to do with you. Everything is pretrial, everything is in motion, nothing is settled yet. The second is actual prison, which is where you land once the gavel comes down and they assign you to the system.

Inside prison, there are three levels. At the top is the penitentiary — Angola. One of a kind in Louisiana, and not a place I ever saw from inside a compound. Below that are the state-run prisons, massive facilities, and I've been through two of them but only lived on the compound of one: Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, Louisiana. And then there are the satellite camps — smaller, scattered mostly up north, more like work facilities than traditional prisons.

Now. I could tell this whole series by location. But that's not the story. The story is the people. Specifically — the husbands. Because through most of my time inside, I had a prison husband in one way or another. So that's how we're going to go. By husband. Starting here.

Welcome to Fox 4

I came to Elayn Hunt after getting sentenced out of Orleans and Baton Rouge parishes. Before they let you onto the main compound, they run you through what they call RDC — Reception and Diagnostic Center — where they screen you for everything: drugs, STDs, blood pressure, psychological history, all of it. That lasted about a week and a half. Uneventful. Almost peaceful, honestly, because I was mostly alone with my thoughts and nobody was asking me anything complicated.

Then they sent me to the compound. And assigned me to Fox 4.

Let me paint you a picture. Fox 4 had four tiers — one through four — facing each other across the middle, separated by what they called chicken wire. On each side: a TV area, a microwave station, tables for card games and chess. Then rows of bunks stretching toward the back. And at the very back, as far from the guard station as architecturally possible — the showers.

One guard. Stationed in the middle. Responsible for roughly 160 to 180 men across four tiers. Do the math: 44 bunks per tier, double-stacked, times four. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of everything happening where that one guard could not see. And the showers being all the way in the back? That information is going to matter very shortly. Stay with me.

I Had Never Held a Hoe in My Life

The very first morning, I heard it: “Work call.” I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know what half the calls meant — they were rattling off car numbers and I'm standing there blinking like a lost child at a Walmart on Christmas Eve.

An older man — somebody from New Orleans, God bless him — pulled me aside. He said: “When they call work call, don't be late. You'll get written up.” So I got dressed. I followed the line. And they marched us out to a field.

A real field. With crops. Growing out of the ground.

They literally put a hoe in my hand. A garden hoe. A real one. With a guard up on a horse carrying a gun watching over all of us. And I am standing there holding this thing like it is an artifact from a civilization I have never visited, because I had never touched a hoe in twenty-five years of living. I genuinely did not know this was still a thing people did in real life outside of a history textbook.

The only hoe I had been acquainted with up to that point was on a very different kind of battlefield. (I know how that sounds. I meant it exactly like that.)

I'm looking around watching everybody else just go — flipping the earth, bagging it up, moving down the row like they were born into this. And I am just standing there with a hoe like a prop. Then another inmate came over, looked at my face, clocked the whole situation immediately, and said, “Girl, I got you. Just hold the bag.”

I held that bag for the entire row and I thanked every ancestor I have for putting that man in my path. Elayn Hunt grew its own vegetables — everything they served in that cafeteria came from that compound. There were cows somewhere across a fence I never crossed. It was a whole agricultural operation. And I, personally, was not the audience for it.

The Shower That Changed My Whole Understanding of Life

I came back from the field that afternoon hot, sweaty, and completely done with the concept of agriculture. All I wanted was a shower. I walked to the back of the unit, turned on the water, and baby — that shower was everything. I was washing the Louisiana soil off my body and feeling like I was being reborn.

What I had not accounted for — and what nobody in orientation had bothered to mention — was that the showers at Elayn Hunt were completely, entirely, unapologetically open. No curtains. No dividers. No partitions. No nothing. Just shower heads mounted on a wall in a room that anyone could walk into at any time.

Now. I knew the rules coming in. I had learned them in jail: homosexuals do not look at “real men” in the shower. You face the wall, you wash your face, you mind every bit of your own business. You do not make eye contact. You do not make any kind of contact. You are a ghost.

I was doing everything right. Facing the wall. Handling my business. Minding every last one of my concerns. And then I heard it — footsteps. A lot of them. Coming in fast.

Because field workers, it turns out, are the first group in from work.

I suddenly understood why everyone had been smirking when we came in from the fields.

I turned around just slightly — not on purpose, just a reflex — and baby. It was a Rolodex. Every field worker in that unit was now in that shower with me. Muscles. Sweat. And absolutely no shame about any of it, because why would there be? They lived here. I was the new one.

Now look. Under normal circumstances, in a different context, a scene like that might register as something spectacular. But I was terrified. These were not free-world circumstances. I did not know these men. I did not know anything. Nobody in my life had ever prepared me for a live-action prison cologne commercial happening around me while I still had soap in my hair.

I rinsed the important parts. I grabbed my things. And I exited that shower at a pace that can only be described as a dignified sprint — soap still behind my ear, towel barely wrapped, moving with the quiet urgency of someone who has made a decision and is fully committed to it.

I could hear them laughing as I left. They knew. Everybody always knows when it’s your first time.

Finding My Prison Family

Here is something they don’t tell you about prison, and something I think about a lot when I look back: prison is designed to strip you of everything that makes you feel like a person. Your name becomes a number. Your clothes become a uniform. Your schedule belongs to someone else. And your humanity — your warmth, your humor, your need to be known by somebody — that doesn’t disappear. It just goes looking for somewhere to live inside a place that wasn’t built for it.

I found it in the people I’m about to introduce you to.

That same first day, the old timer who had tipped me off about work call pointed me toward my homeboys — the New Orleans contingent. Because here’s another thing you need to understand about Louisiana’s prison system: it runs on two poles. New Orleans and Baton Rouge on one side, Shreveport and Monroe on the other. If you’re from Lafayette, Alexandria, or Lake Charles, you navigate the middle depending on the compound. But if you’re from New Orleans, you go find your people. That’s just how it is.

I was standoffish at first. I don’t know these people, I don’t know this compound, I don’t know what’s being tested right now. But within a few hours, I had met two men who would shape the next stretch of my life more than I was ready for.

The first was Midnight. Now, Midnight got his name for two reasons. One: this man was the deepest, most absolute shade of Black I had ever encountered in my life — and I say that with full love because I am Black myself, but this man made me look bronze-tinted. And two: he always played chess with the black pieces and had a particular obsession with his knights. Double meaning. Perfect fit. Midnight was in for drug distribution and was working on getting his time cut down.

The second was Mike. About 23 or 24, brown-skinned, low-key fine in the way that men are fine when they genuinely don’t know it yet. Easy to laugh, but firm underneath it — the kind of person who could read a room without saying a word out loud. Mike was in for armed robbery, with ten years ahead of him.

They put together a hygiene bag for me — toothpaste, toothbrush, razor, the basics — and told me to wait for the warden’s orderly, who would come by and get me oriented. And then she walked in.

Sissy Leroy entered that unit like she was being announced. Light-skinned, Creole-looking, tight pants, hair done, moving with the specific energy of a woman who knows exactly what kind of real estate she occupies in any room. She gave Midnight a half-hug, looked across at me, and I thought: Oh. Okay. This is going to be a whole entire thing.

She walked straight up to me. “What’s your name?” “Shakie.” “I’m Sissy Leroy.” And just like that — I had a prison mama.

Prison Survival 101

Sissy Leroy was the warden’s orderly. That means she cleaned the front offices, made coffee for the administrators, moved through this institution with a freedom that most people in there could only dream about. The warden kept her around because she was smart, charming, and — critically — unlike some of the men who got put up front and immediately created a different kind of problem with the female staff, Sissy Leroy wasn’t going to do any of that. She was professional. She had social intelligence and she used it like currency.

She had leverage. And she absolutely knew how to spend it.

She sat me down and gave me the real orientation. Not the one they give you in intake. The one that actually keeps you alive.

Rule one: You cannot be renegade. A renegade is a homosexual in prison without a husband — no protection, no standing, no one accountable for your safety. You are a walking target. “You need a husband,” she said, “and we’re going to find you one. Don’t even worry about it.”

Rule two: No body hair. None. Not on your arms, not on your legs, not anywhere below the belt. “Real men don’t like hair. First chance you get to commissary, you’re getting razors.”

Chile.

Rule three —and this is the one that saved my actual life — she reached into her locker, pulled out a ramen noodle packet, tore it open, and handed me the little salt packet inside. “Tomorrow morning before work call,” she said, “put this entire thing under your tongue. Don’t swallow it. Just hold it there. By the time you get to medical, your blood pressure is going to be through the roof. They’ll yank you off field duty immediately.”

I stared at her. Then I said: “…okay, girl.”

Now mind you, I did not know this woman from a hole in the wall forty-eight hours ago. But every single thing she had told me since she walked through that door had turned out to be correct. So the next morning I woke up, went to breakfast, slipped that ramen salt under my tongue, shuffled up to the deputy looking sufficiently pitiful, reported to medical — and that blood pressure reading came back absolutely unhinged. They changed my work status from regular duty to light duty before I could finish my thought.

Light duty meant: clean the common area in the morning when everyone else went out to work. Wipe the microwave. Straighten the tables. And then — and this is real, this actually happened — I had to watch the soap operas and call the boys back in from their bunks when commercials went off so nobody missed a scene.

My first prison job was watching soap operas. I had been training for this my entire life.

My mother and grandmother had raised me on those shows. I already knew every storyline, every character, every betrayal. In jail, watching the stories was practically mandatory for reasons I still don’t fully understand, but whatever — I was prepared. I was the most qualified employee on that compound for this exact position.

The Perfect Storm

Let me explain why I had options. Because I did, and I want you to understand why.

I was twenty-five years old. I was slim at the time. My friend Eric had put $5,000 on my books before I came in, which in prison commissary terms is generational wealth — I had enough to last months without needing a single thing from anybody. And then — critically — I was from New Orleans.

On that compound, New Orleans ran things. Socially, politically, hierarchically — the New Orleans contingent was the center of gravity. Everything moved through that group. So if you were a young queen from New Orleans, with your own money, your own face, looking the way I was looking at twenty-five — you were the perfect storm. Every man who wanted standing wanted to be able to say the New Orleans queen was his. It was about status as much as anything else. Being with me meant something on that yard.

And here is another thing you need to understand about prison sociology, because this matters for everything that follows: as a homosexual in prison, your social standing is inseparable from your husband’s. You borrow his respect and he is anchored by your loyalty. It is a real arrangement with real stakes. Which is why Sissy Leroy had been very clear: don’t just start handing yourself out because people are paying attention. Your value does not go on sale.

She had also been clear that I needed to pick somebody, because the renegade situation wasn’t sustainable. People were already talking. Suitors were leaving gifts on my bunk — Zuzu and whammies, which is what they called snacks inside: honey buns, Grandma’s cookies, Snickers bars, cigarettes, little folded notes. “I heard you just got here. I’d love to get to know you.”

I put every single one of it in my locker and didn’t respond to a soul. Sissy Leroy said keep it. “That’s a parting gift. They threw it on your bunk knowing the risk. You don’t owe them a thing.” So I kept it. Because in prison, you are navigating a social economy with its own rules and exchange rates, and you better learn them quickly.

My Brother Mike

The four of us — me, Sissy Leroy, Midnight, and Mike — had fallen into a real rhythm. Every evening, somebody made a hookup: ramen noodles mixed with whatever box dinner could be sourced — red beans and rice, jambalaya — plus chips, summer sausage, whatever seasoning could be scrounged up. All of it cooked in a microwave. And I am telling you with my whole chest that prison microwave ramen is better than it has any right to be. I don’t know what it is. I have theories. But it was good. We ate together every night like a family, because that’s what we were.

After dinner we played cards. Spades, Uno, Phase 10, Gin Rummy — always me and Mike against Sissy Leroy and Midnight. We were a good team. We clowned each other, laughed too loud, had opinions about everything. Mike was funny in a specific dry way where he’d say the sharpest thing so casually that it took you a second to register what just happened. I looked at him like a brother. That is genuinely what I thought he was to me.

Which is exactly why I missed every single sign.

If Mike had a honey bun, half of it ended up on my rack without a word. If he made something in the microwave, he’d leave a piece in his locker for me. When mail came, he’d ask me to read it with him. Small things. Constant things. The kind of things that, out in the world, would be obvious. But I was inside, and Sissy Leroy had specifically told me Mike didn’t get with punks, so I had filed him under not a possibility and moved on with my life.

Whenever I’d mention one of the boys on the yard I thought was cute, though, Mike would go quiet. Not dramatically — just a slight temperature change. A little short. A little distant. And then it would pass and we’d go back to Spades and I would not think about it again.

This should’ve been my first warning sign.

One evening we had gotten real burgers and fries from the kitchen — Mike and Midnight had people back there. We’re sitting together eating, and Mike says, almost to himself: “The only thing that makes fries better is Shakie’s.”

Sissy Leroy looked at him slow. “You mean Shakie? Like, the one sitting right next to you?”

He laughed it off saying something about always dipping his fries in the shakes from McDonald's. But it wasn’t really funny, and the air in the room had shifted, and I noticed — but I still told myself it was nothing.

That night Sissy Leroy came to my bunk. “Daughter. Mike likes you. Really likes you. Not prison-games likes you. Likes you. Everybody on this compound knows it except you.”

I told her she was wrong. He’d never said anything. Never moved like that. He was my friend and we played Spades.

She looked at me the way mothers look at you when they are tired of watching you lie to yourself.

And here’s the thing I didn’t say out loud, even to myself: there was a part of me that had felt it. Not as a crush exactly, but as comfort. As safety. Prison takes so much from you — your privacy, your name, your sense of time — and Mike had been giving me small things back every single day without making it a transaction. I hadn’t named it because I hadn’t wanted to risk it. Sometimes the things that are real are the ones we’re most afraid to look at directly.

The Barbershop

I had been stalling on picking a husband. There was a man I’d been working light duty with — I’ll call him Jack — and I had told him, tentatively, that I’d pick him. He was excited. Already planning where his bunk was going to move. Already talking about hookups we’d make together. He had the whole thing mapped out in his head.

Saturday morning, Mike came to my bunk. “Roll with me to the barbershop.” I told him I just got a haircut — I get one every two weeks, still do to this day, that is just my thing. He said: “I’ll pay for it.” I said alright.

We went. We both got cuts. He paid for mine. And on the walk back, he asked me about Jack. I started running down every reasonable quality I could think of while Mike walked beside me saying almost nothing. I was talking about compatibility and convenience and how it seemed like it would work.

Then: “Can’t you think of somebody better?”

“Like who?” I said.

He grabbed my hand. Pushed me back against the fence. And kissed me.

And I am not being dramatic when I say — I was shook.

Not because it was bad. Because it wasn’t. Because Sissy Leroy had been right and I had been the last person in that entire institution to know it. This man had real feelings — not prison strategy, not commissary math, not social positioning. He was standing there looking at me like I was something worth having. Like I was a person, in a place that spent considerable resources reminding you that you weren’t.

When we came up for air he said: “You can’t marry him now, right?”

“I guess not,” I said.

The Key Exchange

When we got back to the unit, the first thing I had to do was tell Jack. He was so excited, girl. Had the whole thing mapped out in his head. And I had to stand in front of him and say it wasn’t going to happen.

He walked away and never spoke to me again for the remainder of my time at Elayn Hunt. Not a word. Not a look. Just pure, uncut contempt from across the dormitory every single day. I understood it. It didn’t make it pleasant. But that’s the cost of changing your mind in a place where changing your mind is not supposed to be an option.

The prison marriage itself was simple. Mike came to me with one of his locker keys on a chain and gave it to me. I gave him one of mine. That was the whole ceremony — your locker, my locker, everything I have is yours. If I want honey buns at five in the morning, he gives them to me. If someone comes for him, I’m standing there. The prison version of for better or worse — and they meant the worse part sincerely.

On Sunday we went to church service together and said something like vows. That was it. That was the wedding.

What I know now, looking back from a distance, is that it worked so well because it started from something real. We were already friends. We already trusted each other. We already knew each other’s humor, our rhythms, the things that made the other one laugh on a hard day. The husband-and-wife part was almost a formality on top of something that had already been built quietly, without either of us naming it.

Prison had taken my freedom, my schedule, my name, and my hoe-holding innocence. But somehow, in between the work calls and the soap operas and the ramen salt tricks and the open showers — it handed me a person. A genuine one. In the most unlikely place, in the most unlikely way.

Nobody tells you that prison will teach you intimacy and survival at the exact same time.

I arrived at Elayn Hunt not knowing how to hold a hoe, afraid of everything I didn’t understand, and completely convinced Mike was just my Spades partner. I left that unit with a prison husband, a prison mama, a brother, a locker key on a chain, and a reputation I hadn’t even tried to build.

Part two is where everything gets complicated.

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