Thomas Bartlett Whitaker is a contributor and editor for Minutes Before Six, an online journal for incarcerated writers. His work has won multiple awards from PEN America, appearing also in Guernica, Solitary Watch, and the anthology Hell Is a Very Small Place. 

Whitaker spent more than a decade on death row in Texas before Governor Greg Abbott commuted his death sentence to life without parole in February 2018, just minutes before his scheduled execution. Whitaker went on to spend several more years in administrative segregation before his release from solitary confinement in 2024.

Since then, Whitaker has continued expanding Minutes Before Six into one of the largest platforms for incarcerated writers, now featuring work from over 100 contributors alongside 150 pieces of his own writing, including 22 chapters of a novel. He continues to write, edit, and mentor other writers still behind bars, helping their voices reach readers on the outside. 

More of Whitaker’s work and reflections on his transition out of solitary confinement can be found in his series “Transitionish”. —Kylie Price

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The Lord of Table Six arrived with very little fanfare. We, the poor unwashed commoners of 4F-2, were lamentably ignorant of the grand personage that was moving into our midst. In our defense, his lanky hair, greasy seborrhoeic skin, and stained yellow uniform spoke more of poverty than of peerage. The disdainful glance he shot in the general direction of the dayroom didn’t exactly endear him to anyone sitting at my table. “B-Sider,” Bear voiced after giving him a long look, referring to the side of the prison complex where the four disciplinary buildings were located.

I would know the look, having spent seventeen continuous years in administrative-segregation, the prison inside the prison, the metaphorical drain for that end of the facility. Those years of wandering the wayless dark of the Hole taught me many things, the careful fashioning of a wary, cynically clairvoyant lens through which to observe human behavior not the least among them. So while I definitely agreed with my tablemate’s analysis, my more finely calibrated radar was pinging off of something else as well, something jagged down there in the shadows beneath the contempt. It didn’t take long for the deeper layers of the palimpsest to become visible.

Normal procedure for moving into a new cell goes something like this: You haul your property to your new address. If your cellie is present, you perform the whole how’s-yer-father routine, attempting to determine if there is going to be any compatibility issues. His Lordship’s cellie, Trip City, was at work, however, and we watched as he took each item out of his red mesh bag and laid it out on the floor outside the door. This was, to put it simply, not quite comme il faut.

After he had everything sequenced in a manner pleasing to his aesthetics, he moved down the stairs and began walking in a large circle around the dayroom’s perimeter. Most of us did this sort of thing numerous times each day, so this wasn’t what stood out to me. Rather, it was the Lord’s occasional pauses in his circuit. These were brief, just a couple of seconds. His creepy half grin would slip, and he’d close his eyes tightly. His right leg would twitch, and then he’d be off again. It took me a few minutes to notice this pattern. I didn’t know what to make of it—I still don’t, in a formal, clinical sense, though I definitely knew what I was looking at from a risk perspective: trouble. 

I witnessed many changes in seg over the years, but none were more consequential than the shift from the Hole being a well into which the most dangerous gangsters were dumped into a repository for the severely mentally ill. This was gradual but inexorable. By the time I was let out in 2024, it had been years since I’d lived in a section where a considerable proportion of my neighbors weren’t suffering from profound mental disease. So while I only had the barest psychoskeletal outline of His Nibs’s schizophrenia spectrum disorder, I knew I was witnessing the arrival of someone who was going to cause a problem for himself or one of my peers.

He may have been off, but the Lord had done some time. He understood dayroom politics, especially those surrounding seating arrangements. 4F-2 is a pretty soft section: this was designed for guys that had graduated other programs. The average age and maturity level of the other 47 men was therefore a bit higher than normal. The degree of drama normally associated with four dozen large, hierarchy-obsessed social mammals being crammed into tight quarters was consequently comparatively low. 

This is nowhere more evident than on the subject of the chairs. Dayrooms like the ones at the Polunsky Unit possess eight tables, each with four chairs. A small bench is bolted to the floor in front of each of the two television sets. No matter how many people you try to cram onto them, however, there’s nowhere enough seating for everyone. We have therefore done what all human beings have always done when a valuable resource is limited: we protect what we deem to be ours. Some people claimed their chairs via violence or the threat thereof, others amongst us obtained them due to relationships or general prestige. However you managed it, having a chair proved that one existed on the higher end of the social totem pole, and once it was yours, it was yours until someone had the testicular fortitude to try to take it.

That His Royal Weirdness understood this became increasingly obvious to me as he made his peripatetic way around the dayroom, in the way that he was clearly evaluating the size of the men seated at tables with currently empty chairs. He hadn’t paid much attention to my table. Bear is only slightly smaller than his namesake, and easily as mean, especially before ten o’clock in the morning. Brethren has evil tattoos plastering his shaved head and a braided, longship-worthy beard that nearly reaches his ample gut—basically, the only item Central Casting didn’t send with him to complete the Platonic Ideal of Surly Biker Hoodlum package was a Harley. Within a few minutes, the Lord had begun to focus his attention on Table 6.

4F-2 is a G3 section—a pod designed for prisoners serving sentences of more than 50 years. What that means in practice is that the section is made up mostly of two kinds of convicts: killers and child molesters. In a normal section, the pedophiles would never have even attempted to find a seat at a table, but in 4F-2 they made up almost half of the group, and none of the rest of us was motivated enough to impose the norms obtaining in other sections. Table 6 was one of the two “chomo” tables, and the Lord had clearly (and correctly) sized up the two men seated there and liked what he saw. I watched as he diverted from his loop and approached.

“Who sits here?” he asked loudly, pointing at one of the empty chairs.

Rodney was clearly taken aback. You could see the fear spring forward to blanket his topology: was this the dreaded day when someone was going to banish him from a table? “Um…Willy usually sits there, but he’s in the ce–“

“Good!” His Lordship proclaimed, raising his right hand shoulder level, palm downward, as if he was performing a benediction. “Then I shall be Lord of this table!”

I admit to having laughed, along with quite a few of my peers. I’d expected something sui generis, but not quite that.

Rodney clearly had no idea what to say to this, and he kept his trap shut after the new conqueror of Table 6 plopped down.

“Well…that’s…something,” Bear muttered, before turning back to his book.

It certainly was. Prison regularly forces you into all sorts of complicated moral conundrums. On the one hand, you learn pretty quickly that the administration doesn’t have your well-being at heart. Their job is to functionally incapacitate your ability to harm society. What you have to deal with on the pods while they manage your inability to fly away is your problem. You may have friends here, but for all their good intentions, for the most part you are on your own: no one is here to hold your hand. This means you had better develop a strong sense of self-preservation. 

The administration knew this guy was a whole serving of nutcake, but they still sent him to a program section. If he had been placed in my cell, I would have come to the same conclusion that I knew Trip City was going to arrive at: there was no way anyone could feel safe around such a person. This would mean having to force His Wackiness to leave, which meant the possibility of violence, with all of the inevitable disciplinary consequences associated with such an action. It wouldn’t matter to anyone that you were legitimately and reasonably afraid of a delusional fool putting a knife to your throat at 2 a.m. because a mosquito told him you were an agent of the Illuminati. If you touched him up, you’d take a multi-year trip to B-Side regardless.

On the other hand, I have been dealing with people like the Lord for many years, and I couldn’t help but to sympathize with him. Nobody would willingly choose to live in the Boschian hellscape that has to exist inside a head like his. When I was in seg, it outraged me that the state was so apparently bankrupt on options for men like the Lord. It seemed beyond obvious to me that locking them into tiny oubliettes was only going to exacerbate their illness. Seg was a challenging mental health environment for me, and I am not ill. For most of the hundreds of men I knew, being exiled from the community of mankind was the absolute worst possible outcome for them.

Witnessing the Lord briefly take over Table 6 made me realize that my previous solutions were naive. Placement in isolation equated to harm, yes, but so did releasing them into the general population—either to men like the Lord or to the people forced to deal with them. There are a couple of prisons with wings designed for the chronically mentally ill, but the beds are few and those assigned to them get cycled back to regular units quickly. 

In the past, I’ve opined that society needed to build more institutions to house those suffering from mental illness in a humane environment. This is undoubtedly still true, but from my remove it doesn’t feel like your world is heading in that direction: all I see from here is progressively more meanness, more silliness, more delusion, a daily antidote to my identification as a humanist. You’ve chosen to give us no practical solution for men like the Lord, and have then chosen to pretend you either can’t see his plight or have chosen to feel he deserves whatever happens to him.

My choices were therefore limited to either minding my business or attempting to intercede with Trip City when he returned and therefore minimize the harm. Several of my peers came to the same conclusion, so when first shift kitchen workers were released, we were waiting. Trip listened to us, at least, before telling the Lord that he had to go. The agreement we had fashioned required us to be present during this discussion, in case the Lord got violent. He did not. In fact his eery grin never left his face—which was almost as bad, in its own way. 

We dispersed when it was apparent that he wasn’t going to get punchy, but we were all watching him when he banged on the section door and motioned to the officer in the picket to let him out. We expected him to proceed to the control desk for 4-Building, where he would have to tell the sergeant that he needed alternate housing or, following her refusal, request offender protection. That is what a normal person would have done.

That adjective did not regularly apply to our soi-disant-roi. Instead of moving through F-Pod’s rotunda, he decided instead to take all of his clothes off. Baby C was the first to notice this, but within seconds everyone was responding with anger or amusement. The guard in the picket started aiming her flashlight at the Lord, and could be seen talking animatedly into her radio. It only took a few minutes for a sergeant, lieutenant, and an Extraction Team to arrive. 

A decade ago, they’d have given him a direct order to put his uniform on, and if he refused, they’d have gassed him and beat him senseless. They’d still probably have done this in solitary, but this was A-Side. To his credit, the lieutenant kept his gas canister holstered, and after about ten minutes, managed to convince His Nakedness to put on some boxers and submit to hand restraints. We heard later that evening that they placed him in a Continuous Direct Observation cage in 7-Building, and I hoped that this was a mere prelude to him being shipped to a unit where he could get some kind of care, even if only temporarily.

That didn’t happen. Three days later the administration tried to place him in 4E-3, which is definitely not a soft program section. By the time I learned of this, he’d already been beaten to a pulp. I work in a position that gives me access to quite a bit of paperwork, so I was able to track his progress through the disciplinary process simply by noting which cell he was assigned to. It didn’t come as much of a surprise to see that he eventually landed in 12-Building: admin-seg. 

Until society decides otherwise, there is only one kind of ending for stories like this.