Letter №7 · Notes from the inside
Thirty days, two flights, and a cellmate called Shadow
The Ungovernable network spent yesterday evening and today publishing the seventh letter from Keonne Rodriguez, written from federal custody. It is an account of being moved between two prisons four hours apart — and of what the journey cost.
The distance was four hours by road. The transfer took thirty days, two transcontinental flights and three multi-hour bus rides, and it ended with Rodriguez summing up his accommodation along the way in four words. One cellmate was serving time for murder. The other, the account notes, could not stop shitting. I preferred the murder.
In Oklahoma City the cellmate introduced himself as Shadow. He was on his way to a penitentiary to serve twenty years. Rodriguez was on his way to a camp, in his own description, for the fake crime of not having a license I didn't even need in the first place.
The Bureau of Prisons put them in the same cell.
The full letter runs at ungovernable.network, under shows/specials/letter-7-notes-from-the-inside. Each of the three posts carries a video telling of the same passage, which the paper cannot play and has not watched.
What the letter does not do is argue. There is no paragraph about open-source software, no claim about financial privacy, nothing about the case. It is a man describing a bus, a sheet, and a telephone he cannot reach — which is a more effective piece of advocacy than the argument would have been, and is presumably why it was published this way.
The last instalment, posted this afternoon, is the quietest and the worst. It is eleven at night and Rodriguez has asked his cellmate what time they turn the lights off. They don't.
He covers his head with a sheet that smells of motor oil and sawdust, lies with half his body on bare metal, and asks himself if a year off his sentence was worth leaving Morgantown. … All he wants is to call his wife, Lauren.
