The most insidious feature of prison is not its violence, though violence is ever-present. It is the monotony. Day after day, week after week, month after month, the same concrete walls, the same steel doors, the same faces, the same food, the same fluorescent light humming above your bunk. Time does not fly in prison. It crawls like a wounded animal. The challenge is not merely to survive the days but to prevent them from hollowing you out, leaving nothing but a shell where a man used to be.

In módulo 118 of the Valparaíso Penitentiary, where I spent the bulk of my pretrial detention. And for most of the two years that followed the trial, the routine was dictated entirely by institutional authority. You did not decide when to wake, when to eat, when to go outside, or when to be locked back in your cell. The gendarmes decided everything, and their decisions were often arbitrary and subject to the mood of whoever was on duty that day. Yet even within that imposed structure, a man can find—indeed, he must find—a rhythm that preserves his dignity and his sanity.

The Daily Schedule

In Valparaíso, the day began when the locks turned, and the cell doors opened, typically between eight and nine in the morning. Roll call followed, conducted by the gendarme assigned to our módulo. After that, inmates were free to descend to the patio—a small concrete yard, perhaps nineteen steps wide, enclosed by the four-story cell block and the bathrooms and showers called 118 on one side, and workshop and a smaller, two-story structure called 118 A/B on the other. This was our world. The universe shrank to the dimensions of that yard.

Breakfast was bread plus whatever you could scrounge—a hard-boiled egg, a slice of cheese, or lunch meat if you were lucky. The prison provided meals, but the quality ranged from barely tolerable to inedible and often came with diarrhea as a bonus. The daily food—what the inmates called rancho—was typically a thin soup with boiled or mashed “synthetic” potatoes or a bland rice dish that bore only a passing resemblance to actual nutrition. Some meat came with it for those who could get to it on time. At times, even getting meat required a bribe. Those of us who had family members bringing food from outside—“from the street,” as we called it—supplemented the institutional fare. My wife, or her childhood friend Nadia (Jana), or our Pentecostal maid, María, regularly brought bags of food during visitation, and I spent money at the prison kiosk for cheese, lunch meat, cookies, juice, and chocolate, all sold at above market prices (in Rancagua, prices could be double or triple the market price outside). Once I arrived in Casablanca, my Baptist co-pastor, Valentín Navarrete Urbina, who lived in the town, shared the burden of bringing me encomienda food and supply sacks—close to 250 times! The mozo—the inmate serving as the módulo’s administrative assistant (usually more than one)—collected the orders, and the gendarme often carried a wad of cash from the profits of various things sold through the mozos.

The hours on the patio constituted the bulk of the day. Men played cards, gambled with dominoes, carved elaborate ships and birds from wooden crates purchased from the guards, lifted makeshift weights, or simply stood in clusters talking. I played chess—obsessively, as it turned out, reaching over a thousand wins in my first eight or nine months—and I read. Reading became my lifeline. Over the course of my imprisonment, I read my Bible multiple times, as well as works of history, political philosophy, theology, and the occasional novel. The only books I kept permanently were my Spanish and English Bibles and my concordance.

In the afternoon, men returned to their cells. The lockup usually came in the late afternoon, and from that point until the next morning, you were confined—on average, sixteen hours per day in your cell, depending on the módulo and the current regulations. During the long Covid-19 lockdown months, 2020–2022, those shut-in hours averaged closer to twenty-three. The cell contained bunks, a television, if you were fortunate, and the accumulated possessions of its inhabitants. The close quarters bred friction. I shared cells with men, largely pedophiles, who played music loudly for hours, men who smoked pot at the doorway, men who stole my food and linens, and men who argued over breadcrumbs on the table. When Mauricio, one of my cellmates, started yelling because I had left a tiny crumb on the surface, I knew it was time to find a new cell. But finding a new cell was its own political ordeal, requiring the approval of the gendarme on duty, the willingness of potential cellmates, and the absence of interference from petty tyrants in the módulo hierarchy.

Cell Conditions

Let me describe the physical environment plainly so that those who minister to prisoners understand what they are dealing with. Módulo 118 was a small four-story building. The first floor contained the guard’s station, an office with a small bathroom, a narrow lunchroom where inmates met with their lawyers and social workers, and the staircase. One door led to the patio; the other to the larger open area connecting the módulo to the infirmary, visitation hall, gendarme offices, and other módulos. On the patio level, there was a dining room, the bathrooms and shower, a barber room, and a couple of storage sheds.

The cells were small—room for two or three bunks and very little else. The better cells, on the upper floors, were occupied by inmates who paid the mozo handsomely—fifty thousand to a hundred thousand pesos (around sixty to one hundred twenty U.S. Dollars) monthly—for the privilege. These men had wooden or tiled floors, painted walls with pictures hung, and good television reception. The rest of us lived with what we had. I usually slept on the middle bunk, although sometimes I got stuck up top with the ceiling inches above me, my possessions crammed into a backpack and a small metal cabinet.

The shower was cold. This is a simple fact that outsiders do not adequately appreciate. For months at a stretch, the only shower available was cold water. The workaround, as an inmate named Sergio taught me, was mixing cold water from an empty paint bucket with water boiled in an electric kettle—50/50—and pouring it over yourself with a big cup. It is hardly a shower. The one exception was the conjugal visit cell, which had a shower with hot water, though it never worked when I had a chance to use it during Pamela’s visit. For those with qualifying relationships, this three-hour monthly visit represented the only warm shower of the month—a luxury almost as prized as the visit itself.

The vermin were constant companions. A large rat—nine inches long plus its tail—was once flushed from its hole with three buckets of water. I took up a preventive position like a football free safety. Sure enough, the scared critter chose the path of least resistance and ran right at me. I caught its long tail with one shoe and broke its hip and back leg with the other. Ricardo clobbered it with a broom. I was hailed a master rat killer—one of the few titles in prison that I wore with some satisfaction. On another occasion, Ismael, Manuel, Aníbal, and Carlos ganged up on rats near the Virgin Mary shrine. Two tiny mice perished. The rats were not merely a nuisance; they contaminated food and water. One could only imagine what accumulated in the inmates’ bodies after drinking prison water for years—I could see the mineral deposits caking on my toaster oven tray after washing.

Then there were the bed bugs. After changing cells, I awoke one morning to find a bed bug behind my right ear. Miami (the nickname for Miguel Correa Navarrete) found bugs crawling over my clothes and those of others he washed. Miami—a Chilean-born former naval flight engineer with more flight hours than any other officer in the Chilean Navy, later a city bus operator on the Viña del Mar lines—was the most disciplined, capable, and self-sacrificial man I encountered in nearly five and a half years of incarceration. He submerged all clothing in chlorinated water, and we baked the mattresses in the sun to kill the critters. Everyone could see the bed bugs infesting them. Seven baby bed bugs and five or six full-grown ones were found floating in the trough water. Blood stains appeared when they were crushed. A new mattress was provided with instructions not to remove the plastic until the bugs were gone. Boris the barber, a veteran inmate, offered his philosophical wisdom: “They eventually get tired of you and leave you alone.” Small comfort.

Medical care was rudimentary. A doctor appeared from time to time. Getting to see the nurse might require a tip to the gendarme. During my initial imprisonment, I suffered from macular degeneration in both eyes, hypertension, hypothyroidism, insulin resistance, diverticulitis, and various other conditions, having undergone eight operations in the preceding decade. Neither the trial court nor the Supreme Court was willing to authorize me to see an ophthalmologist or to grant home arrest on medical grounds. My eyesight deteriorated behind bars for want of proper care. This is not unusual. It is typical. I would later suffer from more serious diseases: Covid-19, pneumonia (twice), and renal cancer, not to mention the total degeneration of my physical strength and torn joint ligaments.

The Unwritten Rules

Every prison has two sets of rules. The official rules are posted on walls and enforced—selectively—by the guards. The unwritten rules are enforced by the inmates themselves, and violating them is far more dangerous than violating the official ones.

In 118, the unwritten rules governed who cleaned what, who controlled the television, who sat where in the dining room, what you could and could not say about another man’s case, and how you handled disputes. Respect was the currency that kept the peace. The brutal sound of all-out war from módulo 114’s patio—perhaps six feet above and fifty feet over from our own—reminded us regularly of the consequences of breaking those rules. On one occasion, seventeen men with homemade spears and knives faced off against seventeen others similarly armed. The shrieks, yelling, and clanging of metal were impressive. The battle went on for perhaps ten minutes, and when the guards finally broke it up and hauled the combatants off in chains, one machucado was dead, and many others were wounded. That was not exceptional violence. That was a Tuesday.

You did not insult a man’s family. You did not touch another man’s food without permission. You did not gossip about a man’s legal case within earshot of others who might use the information against him. You did not borrow money you could not repay—or rather, you could, but the consequences escalated quickly.

For a man accustomed to civil society—to the rule of law, property rights, and institutional dispute resolution—prison’s social dynamics are bewildering. I was scammed out of thirty thousand pesos (35 USD) by a man named Rodrigo, who offered to sell me a cheap cell phone and then disappeared with my money, leaving me falsely implicated in the theft of another inmate’s device. The episode nearly resulted in my being stabbed. A libertarian friend outside the walls was kind enough to reimburse my loss, but the lesson was expensive: in prison, mendacity is a survival skill, and the trusting man is perpetually the victim.