Then there was Castro, back in charge of 118. After roll call, he asked who was responsible for cleaning the patio. No one said anything. Then Sergio said it was my job. “Why didn’t you speak up?” Castro barked at me. I replied, “My job is to clean the patio bathroom, and I collaborate with others to clean the patio.” That answer seemed to mystify the scrawny man. A few hours later, he called the reos to an exceptional lineup, holding a printed page of assigned duties that would be posted behind the glass notice box at 118’s patio entrance. The list finally included duties assigned to the loafers in 118B. A couple of them were assigned the patio (yard), which somewhat alleviated my burden, but Castro must have realized this and assigned me the duty of cleaning the barber room and the toilet in addition to the bathroom-shower complex. If I had not already wiped the floor with Rubén in four straight chess games, I would have felt more afflicted by Castro’s edict. But as it was, there was no dramatic difference between such new minor afflictions and the added afflictions of most other days. They certainly did not reach the level of the “light affliction” that the Apostle Paul described in 2 Corinthians 4:17—that “light affliction, which is for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”

Feeding the Afflicted

At least I had better food than those imprisoned in the First Century. I had brought down to share a few peanut butter and raspberry jelly sandwiches and a pair of breakfast burritos stuffed with what was left of the chicken breast, chanco cheese, and golden potatoes that Pamela had brought. The latter tasted much better than one would have expected. And for our Friday lunch, Miami, Rubén, and I shared some of the pork, chicken breast, and golden potatoes from the previous Saturday’s encomienda that had been in 118’s freezer. I pulled the forkful of what I could not eat and offered it first to Ismael, who was not interested, and then to Sergio, who most certainly was. Outside of prison, unwanted last bites went into the trash can; inside, they drew considerable demand from any machucado afflicted with rancho or dieta (prison fare) daily.

The reader may wonder why I devote so much attention to food in these chapters. The answer is simple: in prison, food is one of the last remaining expressions of human dignity. When a man has been stripped of his liberty, his privacy, his professional identity, his physical safety, and most of his relationships, the quality of what he puts in his mouth becomes a matter of enormous psychological significance. The shared meal—even a modest one assembled from encomienda ingredients and heated on a battered electric element—becomes an act of fellowship that pushes back against the institutional degradation surrounding it. When I made guacamole from the avocados and onions, Miami slipped through the square hole in the steel door, or when I plopped a big spoonful of it on the turkey-cheese-lettuce-mayonnaise-BBQ sauce sandwiches I shared at lunchtime, the recipients were happy for a moment, maybe even forgetting their hellish environment. Playing chess while eating likewise seemed to enhance that illusory effect.

That is probably why there are so many outdoor chess players in Eastern European cities, I thought—people who made their little escapes from the communist hell they were forced to endure for the bulk of the twentieth century. I had a lot of hell to forget, too.

The next day, Castro spied trash and an apple core on the patio at lineup time. He rebuked the lazy machucados in 118B, who were assigned to the task for not keeping the place cleaner. He did not know that they had been busy—Sergio in particular—making a delicious cake out of soggy cookies mixed with milk, layered with jam and manjar (sweetened condensed milk), and topped with chocolate, before being stuck in the freezer for a day. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” as Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Swift observed. Cakes are rarely seen in prison, so everyone was happy to get a piece. I was, too, though five hours later, I had some intestinal issues and should have known better.

The System That Feeds on Suffering

Learning more about Chile’s criminal justice system was enough to raise anyone’s blood pressure. Miami’s public defender, and mine, lawyer Gonzalo Morales Morales, obtained information through the Transparency Act—a request filed in February 2019. Miami showed me the documents when he received them two years later. I did not retain copies—taking photos or making duplicates of legal documents inside a Chilean prison is arduous if not impossible—but I report the figures as I read them in his hand. The documents showed the payments made to an expert witness psychologist, Giovanna Carolina Arancibia Parra. The amount of money flowing through the criminal justice system is incredible, albeit hard to get anyone to divulge just how much the players are making. Arancibia was just one of hundreds of peritos (expert analysts and witnesses) in the Fifth Region. She worked on twenty-five cases in 2017 and fifteen in 2018, earning 6,120,000 pesos and 3,110,000 pesos respectively—approximately 8,850 and 4,400 U.S. dollars.

Since a psychological interview and a boilerplate case report can be done in under eight hours, and court appearances average less than two hours, one may estimate that Arancibia worked approximately 3.4 hours per week in 2017 and 1.7 hours per week in 2018, earning more per hour than eighty percent of Chileans earn working a nine-hour day. And she is a relatively small player. Some peritos (experts) are part of larger groups handling hundreds of cases per year, milking the system for many times what the vast majority earn.

Herein lies the main answer as to why an inept, evil-imbibing, inefficient, wayward—if not outright corrupt—judicial system can continue unchecked: the extraordinary sums of money being made by peritos, lawyers, public defenders, prosecutors, and judges. Documents from Chile’s Library of Congress confirm that the latter players generally earn salaries ranging from three to over nine million pesos per month, placing them in the top three percent of wage earners in Chile. The gendarmes earn between 500,000 and 4 million pesos per month, excluding significant cash from corrupt activities and kiosk sales. There are also a host of food and goods suppliers, plus dozens of social workers, psychologists, and medical professionals on staff—many of whom make more than the pacos.

Why would any of these people want to radically change the system by making it more efficient, by adding oversight to ensure judges and prosecutors do not deviate from the paths of justice, or by adding twelve jurors to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to accuse or convict a man—as in criminal trials in English-speaking countries? None of those professional players wants fewer accused and convicted people being run through the system. Their livelihood depends on a constantly increasing flow of guilty people and innocent people found guilty alike—let the truth be damned. The last thing any of these “rent seekers,” to use economic jargon, want is to expose the maladies of Chilean criminal justice. They have expensive car payments, private school tuition, and luxurious lifestyles to maintain.

Taxpayers, prisoners, and defendants foot most of the bill, but most have no idea just how lucrative the system is and how unjust it has become. Each prisoner costs the taxpayer around 780,000 pesos per month—more than the average person earns in the Fifth Region. Few people outside prison ever complain. Instead, they naïvely presume that the system is working, more or less, to serve the public interest, when in fact it serves private interests far more. Innocent people going free is not suitable for good business; plea bargains and bonuses for closing cases are. Training inmates for reinsertion into society to prevent recidivism is likewise not profitable; a revolving door is. Who among all the aforementioned players can one reasonably expect to fall on his sword or even cut his lifestyle to serve “the good of society” and let innocent people go free? Miami and I knew the answer: “Few and far between.”

The Things One Never Gets Used To

Some things in jail are simply unforgettable—like the terrible sensation that runs through one’s mind the first afternoon they close the cell door behind you and lock you in for many hours, particularly if you are confined with a man you have only just recently met. One eventually gets used to it, though, just as my brain had been adapting to the many spots before my eyes, displaced by a soupy brownish gruel and those amoeba-like floating things. I hoped my vision problems were getting better, and in some sense, they were. Or maybe I was just getting used to the reduced eyesight in the same way I had gotten used to being locked in a large-bathroom-sized cell for eighteen hours each day.

Yet even with the relatively mellow patio time under friendly guards—Penailillo one day and Cisternas the next—there was always something memorable or surprising that would take place, something one could never get used to. There were so many machucados taking cold showers that I had to squeegee the water out two, if not three, times a day. Walking past the pesebre (manger-like wash basin) adjacent to the showers and toilets, I noticed it was half-filled with water. That was unusual, but I made a note of it and carried on, my thoughts soon replaced with disgust upon seeing the used toilet paper once again strewn along the sides of each toilet. Shortly thereafter, I had to do a third cleaning since the warm summer day seemed to have driven more machucados to bathe. And there he was: Louis, a twenty-seven-year-old who had recently arrived from módulo 102, had climbed into the pesebre (trough or manger) and was taking a bath. For the last fourteen months, I had never seen anything but men washing dishes, clothing, or rancho (prison slop)—with perhaps two or three brushing their teeth on occasion—in the pesebre. None of that could now be done while this weird, bald young man was frolicking in the water.

The rat hunt, the bedbugs, the armed conflict, the beating on the metal cell doors, the sudden loss of power when some imbecile decided to use high-amperage devices without warning, Che threatening me—all of these were memorable patio experiences. Now, crazy Louis would be added to that unforgettable list. He told me that he was only in 118 temporarily while he waited for a room to open up in módulo 117 next door—the psychiatric ward, which was always full at the Valparaíso penitentiary. No surprise there.