MC Shakie's Blog

  Motel 6 and the Country Boys My Third Prison Husband: Claiborne Parish, Part 4 by Rodney "MC Shakie" Roussell They called it a disciplinary camp. What they meant was: you've made enough bad choices to end up here, and we want you to know we know that. I arrived at Claiborne Parish Detention—Claiborne Parish being located in Homer, Louisiana, which is so country it's not even country like I understood country—and the first thing I noticed was the quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Ordered quiet. The kind that means everyone has already learned what happens when it gets loud. The second thing I noticed was a white homosexual working the booking desk who looked me up and down, clocked my energy, and said:   + text + Miss Drew, the officer at booking, looked up from her paperwork and said:   + text + I had never been there before in my life. But a queen knows a queen, and she saw something in me that said: put her with her people. I went to A-6. A-6 was called Mot...

  The Miscorrection of MC Shakie My Second Prison Husband: Part 3 by Rodney "MC Shakie" Roussell By the time they transferred me out of Elayn Hunt, I thought I understood prison. I knew the rules—spoken and unspoken. I knew how to carry myself, how to read a room, how to survive. Elayn Hunt had made me literate in a whole other language. Catahoula laughed at all of that. The Catahoula Correctional Center was a private prison—private meaning it was run by a company, not the state, which meant it had a fraction of the funding, a fraction of the programming, and a whole lot of improvising. It sat near Alexandria, Louisiana, halfway between the New Orleans world I knew and the deep country I was about to learn. They sent me there because I was non-violent. Because the state was moving people around to cut costs. Because some office somewhere looked at my file and checked a box. I got there and immediately knew I was not in Kansas anymore. Eight Dorms and a New Educati...

  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...