I’ve had the thoughts at bad times-real bad times-that’s true.
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This illogical hope, Blake writes, is what keeps him from committing suicide: “I’m not sure I’d even know how to quit. Stay strong because better days will be here soon and you are gonna be shining and telling.'” I’m the kind of guy who you can give 3 life bids to, still in the box for a quarter century, beat me, make me in shit, literally freeze me, spit on me and take my clothes and leave me naked, even steal my money and leave me broke and after all that I’ll be thinking ‘OK, things are a bit tough presently, kid.
“I’m a dreamer who refuses to accept that my dreams won’t all come true, some however eventually. And he told us how bad he feels about having deprived two children of their father when “the one thing I never wanted to do was hurt kids.”īlake’s subsequent letters, which run twenty-five pages or more, describe his “magic ingredient” for surviving the Box. He described abuse in the SHU, some of it confirmed by a lawsuit he won in 2000. We discussed his childhood (he says his mother’s partner was abusive), his poetry (some of which he recites by heart), his love of playing the stock market (he sometimes gives tips to the guards), and his fascination with military history (his dream is to someday walk the battlefields at Omaha Beach and Thermopylae). It was the first time he’d had a visit in more than two years. (The machine was out, so we got a grayish-looking cheese steak instead.) We then waited in a special SHU visiting room, watched over by a guard.īlake entered-wiry, sandy-haired and smiling-and talked virtually nonstop for three hours. After being signed in and searched, we stopped at the vending machines to buy what he had requested in a letter: Dr. We visited Blake in December 2011 at the Elmira Correctional Facility, a dreary building on a hill near the edge of town.
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For this reason, he is one of the few New York prisoners in “administrative” rather than “disciplinary” segregation-meaning he’s in solitary more or less indefinitely, despite periodic pro forma reviews of his status. As a cop-killer and an escape risk, Blake is considered a permanent threat to prison safety. He is now 49 years old, and is serving a sentence of 77 years to life. Since we posted the essay, it has received more than 150,000 hits on Solitary Watch alone–and many more, no doubt, on the numerous sites around the world that reprinted or excerpted from it.Ĭonsidering the interest in Billy Blake and his writing, we are republishing here an account of a visit to Blake in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) visiting room at Elmira Correctional Facility in south central New York. (A somewhat shorter version of this account appeared in our July 2012 article in The Nation, “ New York’s Black Sites.”)įirst, some background: In 1987, while in county court on a drug charge, Blake, then 23, grabbed a gun from a sheriff’s deputy and, in a failed escape attempt, murdered one deputy and wounded another.
On March 11, we published an essay entitled “ A Sentence Worse Than Death” by William Blake, who has been held in solitary confinement in New York State prisons for close to 26 years.