Concertina wire across the top of a barbed wire perimeter fence

Scenes of Prison


26. Mean Mugging


W hen young men come to prison, you can forgive them for being a little nervous. Gone are the pistols they used to carry tucked snugly into their belts which offered them protection and gave them courage. In the prison, without their pistols, they often became painfully aware of just how skinny and young and vulnerable they really are. And some of these young prisoners came to believe that all they really needed to bolster their courage was an intimidating image, so they made one up.

Graham was a young man occupying one of our segregation rooms who believed this to be true. He believed he needed a new, intimidating image. I visited him the day he invented one.

Graham was energetic with an easy smile. He had many friends, and he was always ready for a conversation, but he was lonely in Segregation. He stood at his door looking out through the glass windows, and he stopped nearly everyone who passed by to chat. He stopped me, and he seemed to enjoy talking with me. I enjoyed his openness. He would answer questions, and he would talk about anything.

One day, I was doing room checks, and I looked into Graham’s room, and I noticed him standing by the door, straddling his toilet and facing the wall behind it. I wondered what he was looking at. The only thing behind his toilet was a piece of polished steel secured to the wall with heavy screws. It measured roughly six inches by eight inches and was reflective. These were installed in inmate rooms to serve as mirrors, so I decided that Graham must have been looking at himself. I looked more closely.

Graham was intently staring at his reflection and trying on different facial expressions. He also shifted his posture from time to time, holding poses and assessing what he saw.

“Graham, what are you doing?” I asked.

“Mean mugging,” he answered cheerfully without looking away from the mirror or stopping what he was doing.

“What on earth is mean mugging?” I asked.

He stopped what he was doing, stepped up to the door, and explained it to me. Graham needed an image, he said. He was barely out of his teens so he needed an image that would communicate to other inmates that he was no one to be messed with. He had to look tough and mean, so he was practicing a new image. It was called “mean mugging,” he said, and all his friends in the prison were doing it. Graham thought he was making good progress. I thought he looked pretty silly.

Part of mean mugging is the walk. It needed to be slow, full of self-confidence and swagger, and contemptuous of those around him. The gait he practiced was a slow walk, dragging each foot slowly past the other. Step, slide. Step, slide. The facial expression, the tilt of the head, and the walk were intended to say to the world: “This is one bad dude you’re lookin’ at here. This guy is tough and mean and dangerous. Do not mess with this person.” The goal of mean mugging was to be safe from exploitation and abuse by other inmates.

One of the daily events in the Disciplinary Segregation Unit is the exercise period. Inmates are escorted in restraints from their rooms to the small exercise cages outside, and they are locked into one of them for an hour. The yard holds six inmates at a time in separate cages, so typically, five inmates are in a position to watch movements as each inmate leaves his exercise cage and returns to his room and another inmate takes his place. This was the situation on an otherwise uneventful Monday morning when I escorted Graham to the yard. Coincidentally, this was the very day that Graham decided that he was ready to reveal his new mean mug.

We emerged from an outside door with five other inmates looking on. Graham was in full restraints with me following along behind him holding the end of his come-a-long chain. Immediately, Graham assumed his mean mug and began walking slowly to his exercise cage across the yard. Here was the “walk” he had practiced so diligently in his room. It was kind of a stroll and kind of a strut. Step, slide. Step, slide. He swayed slightly from one side to the other as he walked, and, of course, there was the expression on his face and the tilt of his head. Here was the mean mug he’d worked so hard to perfect for all to see. He was on stage, and he was putting on quite a performance. The other five inmates in their cages on the yard were watching.

For a couple of steps, I watched Graham slowly walk just ahead of me, and I noticed the other five inmates on the yard were smiling. They were amused by the demonstration. When I secured the gate and removed his restraints, I noticed that he relaxed and began chatting normally with the inmates in nearby cages.

When I returned after an hour and escorted Graham back to his room, I noticed that the mean mug had been forgotten. Perhaps the other inmates had convinced him that looking ridiculous was hardly a way to intimidate other prisoners.

But I remembered enough of his mean mug to demonstrate it for my wife when I returned home for the evening. We had a good laugh.


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