The Five People You'll Meet in Prison
Q&A with Brandon M. Stickney
Q: Explain the rather curious title of the book, The Five People You’ll Meet in Prison.
I had been at work on the memoir for several months, playing with silly titles like Prison Diaries, Journalist in Jail, and others, but nothing seemed to hit what I was trying to say. How was I to sum up my experiences behind the razor wire, mixed with commentary on the sorry state of America’s $182 billion-a-year prison industrial complex? As a journalist, I had to tell both stories, including the fact that I made it out alive, mental and physical states intact.
Around the same time, my father and I were watching an old movie, “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” based on the bestselling book by Mitch Albom, and I saw a humorous parallel. There really were five people in my prison experience who stood by me during my darkest days, protecting me from the nasty elements of prison. Rereading the developing manuscript, I saw how these five important men floated to the surface of the book, made their presence known, and changed me in various ways. It just seemed natural to give them the title of my story, while acknowledging Albom’s indirect contribution.
Q: How did your career in journalism begin?
Let’s start with how it ended (laughs). I just felt like I was the only actually “armed” inmate in the four prisons I entered and I was going to use my ammunition to show America what was going on within its prison industrial complex—a lot of bad behavior by people who think they are above the law because they are the law.
I started as a journalist in 1990--after classes at the University at Buffalo--at a small newspaper in my hometown of Lockport, NY. The paper was the Union-Sun & Journal and I was a general assignment reporter for five years, including duty as the police reporter and wire editor. Five years along, Timothy McVeigh masterminded the Oklahoma City bombing and I covered the story for our paper. McVeigh was from my hometown area and he wasn’t talking to the press. So, I wound up covering the story for the national news as well, appearing on all three networks as well as cable news. I obtained a book deal that winter. I appeared in several documentaries for ABC, CNN, A&E, and Court TV, as well as sourcing stories for Time, the Associated Press, and the Los Angeles Times Wire Service.
Though I wound up moving on to PR careers at Prometheus Books, Mercedes-Benz Financial, and several ad agencies, I remain a journalistic contributor to many newspapers and magazines, to this day.
Q: What is the state of today’s prisons?
I can only speak for the prisons I entered and the research I have conducted. We have the largest prison system—some call it an industry—in the world at a cost to taxpayers of $182 billion, annually. Now, that’s a monster. I really didn’t know what a monster was until I was thrust into this one. And I learned there are five kinds of people who go to prison: addicts, the mentally ill, the physically challenged, minorities, and the poor and marginalized—they represent the majority of the 2.3 million people in our prisons. About 500,000 of those have a serious mental illness that corrections officers—those on the front line—have about three hours (that’s it!) of training to deal with.
Tough on crime laws, power-hungry prosecutors, and the big pharm/opiate epidemic have taken our prison system and turned it into a citizen-destroying, money-eating industrial complex. Though there are legislators trying to enact laws that will ease the burden on prisoners and prisons, powerful employee unions and good-old-boy networks ensure that nothing of any significance will change anytime soon. Thank God for lobby groups like Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), which remain at the center of this battle to change prison. FAMM is affiliated with Florida Cares, a prisoner advocacy group that I serve. Talk about fighting city hall—these are some very brave people.
Interestingly, federal and state prisons and local jails have no central reporting mechanism to keep them all in check—they are very much sets of smaller fiefdoms managed in secret by wardens, administrations, sheriffs, and police. There are also detention centers and juvenile centers. How many people die behind bars annually? We don’t know. There are no statistics for this. We know, down to the person, how many opiate deaths there are in a year, nationally, but nothing for jail totals. Who’s running the show here? Who’s keeping track of $182 billion? Nobody?
Q: Why did you go to prison?
A little thing called entrapment. And my own foolishness and alcoholism. An agent provocateur in Lockport named Israel convinced me to sell him some of my suboxone painkiller because I needed money for beer. I was drinking heavily at the time and using drugs. Israel was working for the sheriff’s department. There was a grand jury and I was indicted. I opted for “drug court,” where you attend counseling and go about your normal life, submitting to weekly drug tests. But I was using opiates and alcohol every day—I failed out of drug court and was sentenced to two years in prison.
Seeking a reason behind all of this drug use, I met a psychiatrist at White Deer Run rehab in Pennsylvania in 2015 who found me to be suicidal. I had suffered anxiety and been bipolar for years. She prescribed lithium and it worked. I no longer wanted to kill myself at the end of a needle. But I kept drinking, and wound up in prison, where the drinking ceased and my psych meds got a chance to work.
Q: Explain your process for writing this book.
When I finally got to Collins Correctional, the fourth stop on this prison journey, I had time to sit at my dorm room desk and write out some notes. As a journalist, I’m a professional, trained listener, and I let the stories unfold as they happened, the events of the cell blocks and the dorms, mess halls and yards. In prison, there is always some kind of action going on or something being planned, whether it’s on behalf of the inmates or the corrections officers. Even when there’s nothing going on, it’s far from boring because you can bet something is going to happen.
Once I was released, I reread all those notebooks and piles of paper, put them in chronological order, and began writing. It was hardest to write about losing my family, and a little easier writing about prison because you metaphorically get slapped awake every morning and several times during the day.
Q: Who was your mentor(s)?
There are three main mentors I’ve had over my fifty years: my father, who seemed to make a conscious decision every day to be inspired by art and music; Dan Kane, my editor at the Union-Sun & Journal newspaper; and Geoffrey Giuliano, the rock and roll journalist. I picked up different aspects of the fine art of interviewing from each one.
Q: What was your drug of choice?
Alcohol made me feel vibrant, rich, alive, and creative. So, alcohol is the first drug I would jump toward. I loved marijuana when I was trying to give up drinking, but I haven’t even tried it since my second year of college. It’s all the rage in America today. I was kind of obsessed with cocaine for a decade during my later university years and then in news, but I didn’t use each day, or even each weekend. Opiates, specifically pills, became my new daily obsession after a 2003 chest surgery. Opiates and alcohol ruled my world until 2017, when I was sent to prison. I tried meth and X, but alcohol remained my DOC (drug of choice).
Unlike so many people who abuse drugs, I was normally out of the house, seeing friends, looking to start parties, enjoying the sunshine, being a hedonist. I guess the biggest misconception of the addict is that he’s someone who doesn’t leave the house, uses in secret, and avoids family and church. I was the opposite.
Q: What are your parents like?
That’s another misconception. Everyone thinks that, if the kid turns out to be an addict, the parents must have been abusive. My father was an ad exec and Mom was a homemaker. When Dad was in college, the ’60s revolution raged, but he wasn’t really a hippie. For him, there was pot, speed, and love beads, but no protests, sit-ins, or alternative politics. My father was also a painter and a rock singer; Mom read tarot cards. They had a tight-knit group of friends. In fact, I was the first child among this group of counter-revolutionaries, and this crowd of older folks became my friends as I was growing up. As a kid, I liked Mad Magazine, Fangoria, KISS, Matchbox cars, and my Huffy bicycle.
Q: How have you evolved?
How do addicts evolve? I started as a busy, curious, creative kid, grew into a shy but normal teenager, discovered beer at sixteen, and broke out of my shell. I had a certain attitude that developed, turning me into an outgoing journalist, my first professional job. I excelled at this, and took it on from all angles: research, journalism, communications, PR, marketing, and even business development. The CEO of my subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz Financial offered to enroll me in the State University of New York at Buffalo to obtain my MBA, an offer I foolishly declined because I had moved into my alcoholic period. I left Mercedes shortly thereafter. After years of drug abuse and a few of homelessness, I was placed in state prison, where I sobered up. There, through meditation and other psychiatric exercises, I found a separate peace from the daily chaos and lived the kind of Zen I employ now.
Q: What is your daily routine?
It varies. I still suffer crippling panic attacks that can last for hours. I still feel depression, but it’s nothing like I felt before I had lithium. And I still have racing thoughts. On good days, I write in the mornings and research in the afternoons. The research is for the writing I expect to do the next day. Late afternoon is for bike riding and correspondence if I am up to it. My life is very simple. I don’t even socialize, unless it’s at AA.