I arrived at the Telford Unit on 9-11-09. When the bus leaves a woman, whose day it was to do intake, tells us to gather around her. She has chevrons on her collar which means that she is a sergeant. She has fox-like features and she looks like she is not one to be crossed. We leave our bag of property and stand in a semi-circle around her as she begins her speech.

I have heard these speeches so many times that I could give them, so I drone her out as I think of getting to a shower and a bunk. It was a rough night and I am very tired. It caught my attention when she began to recite the prison's mission statement. I like to watch to see if they can say it with a straight face or if they know it is bull.

"The mission of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is to provide public safety, promote positive change in offender behavior, reintegrate offenders into society..."

I couldn't help it; I burst out laughing. The sergeant turned to me as if she just found her dinner. She walked close to me saying, "Do you find...," but stopped and sniffed the air and said, "Have you been smoking?"

You never look a fox in the eye; they will take it as a challenge. I just looked down and thought about my one night in transient:

The rooster hasn't even crowed yet. Whoever came up with this ought to be drawn and quartered. 'This' being the prison's transporting of prisoners from one unit to the next.

Texas has over 100 prison units and they must have a hell of a logistics person. Almost every unit runs a chain daily, either to the prison's medical facility or to transfer inmates to a different unit. There are always buses coming and going, dropping off or picking up inmates. You may have seen them on a Texas highway, an old yellow school bus painted white.

The prison used to lock a chain around the inmate's neck during a transport, hence the name 'chain'. The name stuck and it has sunk into the prison slang dictionary. And just to obey my fourth grade teacher I will use it in a sentence: "Hey, Bubba. Did you hear that little Johnny caught chain? Yeah, he went to a new unit."

The one thing the tv/movies got right is when they show a bus transporting inmates. An inmate's worst fear is the bus either crashing or flipping 56 times. We are handcuffed to another inmate and there are not any seatbelts and, well let's not even go there, I am sure your imagination can figure it out.

The buses start out early, which means the unit has to have us ready even earlier. Our property that we are allowed to carry on the bus with us was collected the night before. You thought the TSA was bad, come to prison. The rest of our property will be shipped to us months later. The term 'shipped' is used towards us inmates also. Just like 'chain', it is not uncommon to hear an inmate tell his homeboy, "I'm being shipped to another unit." And it started with the correctional officers, or CO. In this mass incarceration, it is easier to refer to us as less than human, and they come to our cell and say, "Pack your s___," referring to our property, "You're being shipped."

It makes you feel all empty inside to be considered a product in a warehouse, but such is the life of us prisoners inside this machine called mass incarceration. As I sit in this holdover early in the morning waiting for the bus to pull up, a sergeant brings an inmate in the holdover. He is one of the sergeants that likes to harass us for no reason. And true to his reputation he used a racial slur to rile the guy he just brought in.

The sergeant is ex-military and very gung-ho about his job. The problem is he thinks his job is to make us miserable. When I got sentenced I didn't hear the judge mention him. In the past I have talked to him just to find out his views but he was quick to see where I was going and he cut me off.

"The only people who worry about mass incarceration are the ones who are in it. The rest of the world wants y'all locked up," he said.

"So you don't believe in rehabilitation?" I asked.

"Only people who want to change will change."

But how is anyone going to want to change when they are thrown into this mass incarceration full of..." I tried to counter.

"Inmate, are you attempting to establish a relationship with me?"

This is a typical response from a CO or sergeant when they want you to leave them alone — they threaten us with an infraction of the rules. That convo was not going to change anything anyway so I just walked away.

Now, this sergeant starts something, then he calls for back-up on his radio. Cos just show up out of thin air and they wrestled the irate inmate down and put him in restraints. I am glad that they didn't spray him with gas, then we would have had to get on the bus with him and the gas would have affected all of us.

There is a line of buses outside the back door. I pray that the bus I am getting on is next. I still have to spend the night at another unit — Beto Unit — and then go to Telford the next morning.

The transport officers walk through the back door with a metal box full of handcuffs. One of them yells, "Beto Unit," and all of us products get on the conveyer belt to be sent off to our new warehouse. The inmate in restraints has to be taken out of those restraints and placed in the ones the bus driver provides out of his box. But as soon as he has one hand free he swings at the sergeant that began this. And I spoke too soon on the gas. The sergeant and a CO empty their gas canister on this inmate. Then they place him in full restraints and unceremoniously escort him on the bus.

Then we are told to get on the bus. I'm handcuffed to another guy, our noses are dripping snot, tears are rolling out of our eyes and our one bag of property is in our free hand. We do the inmate shuffle and get on the bus. The guy I am cuffed to says "Let's go to the back." I nod my head and follow his lead as we stumble down the small aisle.

Everyone is coughing and trying to get our fingers in the holes of the stainless steel that is placed over the windows so we can open the windows to get some fresh air. This is hell. The bus finally clears the back gate and we get some air, but it's not enough. All we can do is suffer, but we are used to that. The only light we get comes from other cars' headlights shining through the window holes. I am thankful that this is only an hour and a half drive; it could've been more.

Once again I spoke too soon. Beto Unit is in Tennessee Colony and there are about five other units all in this area. And, of course, the bus stops at all five units before going to Beto Unit. This extends our torture to three and a half hours.

At Beto we are made to sit in a holdover for hours before we are brought to our cells where we will spend the night. It is almost 3 pm when we enter the cell block that is designated for transient. It looks like a war zone, trash everywhere, and burned mattresses all down the bottom row. I can see rats running around. There are three tiers of cells and 32 cells on each tier. I see mirrors sticking out the bars, and I hear music coming from prison-made speakers. The smell is horrible — a mix of urine and burnt trash.

All I wanted to do was get some sleep. But we have to wait in this dayroom until the picket boss comes over to open up our cells. Two hours later the rover calls our names and we go to our assigned cell. There is a guy in my cell which means that I have to get on the top bunk. After introductions he tells me he can see that I have been through an ordeal and he stands at the bars to give me some privacy to get cleaned up at the sink in the cell. I then make up my bed and fall asleep.

I got to stop making plans. One of my favorite novel characters puts it this way: You make a plan and then someone punches you in the mouth. The guy who was gassed was placed in the cell next to me, and he, still angry at the sergeant and the system that allows that type of treatment, spoke in the only voice he had. He set his mattress on fire.

An idiotic thing to do while you are in the cell with the burning mattress, but sometimes this is the only way we can cry out for help in a place where all the officers wear caps that have the embroidery, "We take care of our own" on them. And they stick by that motto.

Black and gray smoke is sucked into my cell by the vent that pulls air into our cells at the back of the cell and it woke me up. I could feel and hear the intensity of the fire as a few Cos walked by my cell to look into the cell that was on fire. They stood there laughing and one of them commented, "That's not a fire." As if they rated the fires that seem to happen all the time.

Two trustee inmates brought a fire hose and the CO doused the fire and the inmate for good measure and they left. They didn't even call the rank and report it. I grabbed my mirror out of my bag and used it to look in his cell. The guy was sitting between the toilet and the wall with soot all over him and his clothes, and he was soaking wet. I am sure that he had put his head in the toilet bowl and flushed continuously so he could breathe while the fire was raging.

I laid in my bed trying to find sleep and failing. The one bright spot was that that guy was not going to be on the bus to Telford with me in the morning. That product will get to the warehouse he is going to 'slightly damaged,' but still deemed fit to sit there and wait until parole orders for his release.

On the Telford Unit the guys began to tell the fox about the fire at Beto last night, speaking up for me in my defense. I was glad to see that the solidarity of us in these white uniforms was still there. I braved her fierce glare and just raised my hands and told her, "I'm okay. Just a little 'cover torn'. I don't want no problems. Pardon the interruption. I think you were at 'reintegrate...'."

She continued in her speech with a straight face. She was assimilated. There was no purpose in telling her how the prison's mission statement was contradictory to the actual practice that happened inside these walls every day. And that mass incarceration worked against the prison's so-called mission.

No, that fight is with society and Texas' 'hard on crime' politicians. As for me, well, I will continue to walk that thin line and hope to prove that resistance is not futile, and not be assimilated to either side.

Such is the life of an inmate stuck in mass incarceration.