In Minutes, I Went From Respected Human Rights Attorney to Federal Inmate # 87103-054

Monday May 16th, 2022

The photo on the left was taken outside the main entrance to the Danbury prison on 27 October of last year just minutes before I entered. The other photo was taken minutes after I emerged 45 days later on December 9.

First things first: I am so grateful you are here and have chosen to subscribe to my Substack and support me during my transition to freedom. I feel like we are creating a community and I feel supported by you during a time of great change and uncertainty. It is here that I feel free to openly process all that the fossil fuel industry is throwing at me — and at an even more personal level — all of the experiences I have had as a man, a father, a human rights attorney, and a federal prison inmate.

I’ve been out of my 993-day detention for three weeks now and hardly a moment goes by when I don’t think about the 45 days and nights I spent locked down in a federal prison. The incredible men I met on the inside, and the larger plight of all of those incarcerated in the United States for some of the longest prison sentences in the world, touched my soul deeply. (For those who don’t know, I am a lawyer “convicted” by a private Chevron law firm in a non-jury trial on a misdemeanor contempt charge after winning a pollution judgement against the company in Ecuador’s Amazon. I am the only lawyer in U.S. history prosecuted by a corporation and locked up on a misdemeanor contempt charge. For background, read my interview in Esquire via the link just below.)

I want to write briefly about how prison is designed to strip away individual identity and crush almost all manifestations of personal autonomy — sort of what Chevron via its 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers has tried to do to me for years on the outside. I believe that the central dynamic of prison is the never-ending battle between “inmates” asserting their autonomy and the institution trying to crush it. This dynamic is particular important given that we live in the most incarcerated society in history: we have 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prison population. Roughly ten million people in the US spend at least one night in prison in a given year.

My first hour as a human rights lawyer going to prison to be transformed into a convict, which I remember clearly, illustrates this dynamic. I’ve never written about this and I wanted to share some of the details for the first time with you.

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First, a little background. I was in a mildly frantic state as I drove myself to prison in my own car on the afternoon of October 27 of last year. I already had been locked up at home for 813 days with a the “black claw” monitor shackled to my ankle; the judge detained me at home on the preposterous theory I was a “risk of flight” and would leave the country even though I had no passport and was facing a minor misdemeanor charge (and would never do such a thing anyway). An appeals court decision the day before came down suddenly and gave me only 24 hours to “report” to prison. This meant I had to be on the inside by 4:47 p.m the latest or I could face another contempt charge. The previous night I went with my family to a restaurant for a “last supper” where we tried to process what was ahead. I had concluded the only way I could get through prison was to make it a positive experience and to accept the fact that the only way for my nightmare to end would be to take my “medicine” and serve the draconian six-month sentence being imposed for an offense in which no other lawyer had ever gone to jail for even a day.

My wife Laura Miller and young assistant Xander Tillou (a brilliant college student who helps me with social media) were in the car for the 90-minute drive from my apartment in Manhattan to the federal prison. We headed to a rural part of Connecticut near the town of Danbury. I had just hugged my 15-year-old son and said goodbye. The sadness on his face haunted me and still haunts me. He was trying to appear brave. Underneath, I felt his turmoil and fear. I had told him that I never thought the day would come where I would have to actually go to prison. I always assumed some court would intervene or the case would be dropped. And to be completely vulnerable here, I also had a deep fear that because of the nature of my case against the fossil fuel industry that once I got into prison there was at least a small chance I might not get out. I thought I could die either due to COVID (which was spiking at the time) or some other manufactured reason.

We turned into the grounds of the prison from a two-lane road and drove up a long driveway to the top of a hill. Fences and barbed wire were immediately visible; it did not feel like a low-security prison and in fact was not one when it was built decades ago. I did not know if this would be the last goodbye. Did not know how long they would keep me or whether Judge Kaplan (who charged me and appointed a Chevron law firm to prosecute me after the regular prosecutor refused to press charges) might come up with some creative way to keep me there past the end of my sentence.

I walked into the main entrance where visitors and administrators enter. It felt like an airport security line with an X-ray machine. I gave my name and asked if they were expecting me because the judge had been trying to force me in to one of the most dangerous jails in the country in Brooklyn, even though the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had designated me to Danbury. After waiting around for a few minutes in a waiting room with Laura, a correctional officer told me to go outside and walk to the side and look for a gate in a fence. Laura and I said goodbye. I called my lawyer Ron Kuby to tell him I made it by the deadline and they were letting me in; he promptly sent a letter to the judge saying the man whom she had found to be a “risk of flight” had driven himself to prison. I felt relief as I wanted to stay at Danbury to avoid Brooklyn. (Far too many inmates who enter the Brooklyn jail die before they get out.)

Another guard opened the locked gate which allowed me to pass through a 20-foot-high barbed wire fence. He had dozens of industrial-sized keys attached to his belt that made a distinct clanking noise when he moved; this noise was constant around the prison and always felt like a sort of power play on the inmates, given that those keys were the devices one needed to gain freedom. The guard took one key, opened the gate, and let me pass through. The gate locked behind me and suddenly I was on the other side of the fence. Door #1.

Ahead was another locked gate which I call Door #2. Once Door #1 locked and I couldn’t get out, he opened the other gate that allowed me to pass through a second 20-foot fence with coils of barbed wire on top. Then through another locked door into the low-slung building that contained the processing room for arriving inmates. It was about 5:30 p.m. and not much was going on. I was the only “new” person who was there — most new inmates arrive early in the morning after exhausting all-night bus rides from other facilities.

I was wearing my standard casual “lawyer” work outfit: collared button-down shirt, blue blazer, jeans, dress shoes. I later learned most arriving inmates come from other prisons or jails and do not enter wearing their own clothes. Those allowed to “self-report” like me generally are treated with slightly more respect and curiosity by the staff who look up their offense on the computer to see why they are there. The first question they must answer is whether the person is a sex offender; if so, that triggers all sorts of security measures that generally do not apply to other inmates with more “respectable” offenses.

Then the transition from being respected lawyer to inmate picked up speed.

A rotund lieutenant with thick forearms came in and led me to a nearby room which felt like a large closet. He told me to sit on a plastic chair that had been placed in a shower stall while he stood in front of me with some paperwork. He proceeded to take me through all sorts of questions about drug use, gang affiliations, diseases, tattoos, sexual preferences, criminal history, and religion. He asked if I had ever testified in court against anyone. If I took medications. If I had TB. Had any STDs or HIV. Used drugs or had used drugs. Felt any perceived danger. He wrote down all of my answers.

It was time to change clothes. I knew at this point that my previous identity was about to be extinguished. Hundreds of inmates all wearing the same bland outfit and distinguished only by a prison number is one of the main hallmarks of institutional control. Since over a period of decades I had been in about 50 different prisons as a lawyer visiting clients, I had always wondered what this moment must feel like.

In front of me was a large shelf with all sorts of prison-issued pants and shirts of different sizes piled on it. The lieutenant told me to strip down. The clothes consisted of loose khaki pants with an elastic belt, slippers that felt like little more than paper, and khaki T-shirts. I took off my clothes in that desolate shower stall. There was no curtain and I stood naked in front of this complete stranger who had massive keys strapped to his belt and massive forearms and massive power. I had a bracelet on my left wrist I got in Ecuador from my Indigenous friends that I had been wearing for years; it was snipped off with clinical precision. I was suddenly standing naked before this guard in an empty shower stall with nobody around. Then, a strip-search. Lift them up, turn around, squat and spread the cheeks. I was then ordered to put on the prison clothes and stuff my nice jacket, pants, underwear, socks, belt and shoes into a small box that I was told would be mailed home. The only way to get the clothes to fit in the box was to crumple them up and jam them in. Something inside of me felt they were the clothes of a man who had just died. And I shuddered to think about Laura opening that box with when it arrived at our apartment in Manhattan.

One thing that was clear is that I was no longer me as I had understood myself just minutes earlier. I was another body in an institution with roughly 900 other men carrying out the mass incarceration mandate of our society. Even my name sort of disappeared. I was given a number to use for identification purposes in prison or when dealing with the federal Bureau of Prisons. I will never forget this number: 87103-054. It was needed to make phone calls, sign on to the prison computer system, see a doctor, and to buy food at the commissary. Then they took my picture and gave me an ID. I was officially in the system.

My official prison ID in a photo taken at home after release. The ID photo was taken moments after I had been forced to strip, had my body inspected, and was ordered to put on prison clothes.

Finally, it was time to go to my unit and and be assigned a bed. I was escorted by a young man in civilian clothes who I later learned was a counselor. The little crew in the processing office already had looked up my offense on the computer and learned it was a misdemeanor. They said they had never seen anyone with my profile (non-violent misdemeanor offense) in a secure federal prison like Danbury. Literally every inmate in the prison but me had been convicted of a felony. Some of the staff had been working at Danbury for more than 20 years and they seemed stunned. The counselor talked to me and treated me with respect which I took as a promising sign.

We left the processing room and went through more locked doors before emerging outside into a large courtyard surrounded by a three-story buildings on all sides. He led me to the door of what was Unit K. He took out one of this gigantic keys that were clanking as we walked. We went in; he enormous door locked behind us with that distinctive sound of the key turning and the lock sliding into place. Hearing that sound was the first time I actually felt like I was completely locked up. We climbed a set of stairs and entered a large open room filled with men who were either laying on or standing near dozens of double-decker bunks lined in rows from one wall to the other. The overwhelming sensation was the lack of space. For months this room was locked down because of COVID and nobody was allowed to leave — not even for 5 minutes as meals were brought into the unit.

It felt like everybody turned to look at me at the same time. I later learned that when an older white man enters the prison the automatic assumption is that he is a sex offender unless proven otherwise. As the counselor led me to my bunk, about a dozen of the leaders of the unit converged on me and starting firing questions: “Are you a child molester?” “Are you a chomo?” “What did you do?” The counselor quietly indicated to the leaders of the unit that I was not a sex offender. Most seemed perplexed when I told them I was convicted of “contempt of court” so I simplified it and said I got into a conflict with a judge on behalf of my clients in the Amazon and he locked me up. They liked that I fought hard for my clients.

There were two people who clearly were leaders. Dynamic leaders. They ran the unit; correctional officers were almost never in the unit except to do count 5 times per day. They stayed in the courtyard or on the perimeter to make sure everybody was where they were supposed to be but the internal administration of the units was left to the inmates themselves, who worked out a leadership structure. The leaders gave me a toothbrush, toothpaste, a T-shirt, clean underwear, some soup, tea bags, and other little items that must be bought in the prison store which is only open one day per week

That first night was jarring on many levels and I’ll give more details later or in a book I hope to write. I knew my family and those on the outside who deeply cared about me would lose sleep worrying that first night. I was taken with the richness of the environment but feeling completely ill at ease. I immediately saw open drug use. Creative cooking where inmates heated burritos with a clothes iron. There was a separate entertainment room with four televisions — one for the whites, one for the blacks, one for the Latinos, and one just for sports. And I saw some super-intelligent men who descended on me like I was a fresh opportunity for whatever economic activity they were engaged in in our little ecosystem. My bed assignment was given by the inmates. As I lay on my bunk, I retraced in my mind the nine locked doors I would have to pass through in the other direction to get back to freedom. A six-month sentence that first night seemed like an eternity.

It also felt a bit like a temporary camp for displaced persons: clothes hanging from pipes in the ceiling, giant fans blowing, card games, and people working out with homemade weights. The only privacy was when you pulled the covers over your face at night when the overhead lights were turned off around 11 pm. My body was jarred and stressed. I lost my appetite. Had no idea how I would handle what I was facing. It would be 5 days before I felt comfortable enough to go to the bathroom.