Summary

During “The Great Tobacco Fiasco of 2009” (139), when the state started phasing out smoking in its prisons, “the nonsmokers had banded together to form a brutal black market” (139). Those who did not make it through the mandate, through relocation or otherwise, became “causalities” (139). The first-person narrator (whose name or nickname is later referenced on his business cards: “Ollie Peacock”), a smoker, was working off his debt by selling tattoos and handmade cards. If they could not make up the money, they sought Grand Rapids corrections officers’ protection.

While tattooing “13½,” “code for an inmate who had twelve fuckhead jurors, one shithead judge, and a half-assed defense attorney, adding up to a life sentence” (141), onto an inmate who never had a trial, new inmate Maurice Jenkins (nicknamed “Mo”), severely burned and on the drug Depakote to treat seizures, arrived to his cell. Mo had survived a...