Jared Loughner, the confessed mass murderer and social outcast who also seriously wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was recently declared mentally competent to plead guilty. He'll likely spend the rest of his life behind bars after a year of psychiatric treatment at a federal prison in Missouri.
I know that prison. It's the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, and it's on Sunshine Street. Really.
I spent a lot of time there in the mid-1970s. I was not an inmate, but one of my best friends was. I visited him once a month for most of the year and a half he was locked up for draft evasion. It was a pretty grim place as far as I could tell, but my friend Bruce said it was less dangerous because of tighter security than the county jail where he had been held before he was transferred to Springfield.
As the name implies, it's where male federal prisoners are sent for serious medical and psychiatric treatment, among other things. I remember one particular inmate who looked to be in his mid or late 20s and who was in the visiting room whenever I was there to see Bruce. I was told he had murdered a family member. He was tranquilized to the point of being comatose — Thorazine, Bruce said — and sat in a chair, staring straight ahead with unfocused eyes and occasionally drooling. Someone I took to be his sister tried to chat with him, although I never saw him respond to anything she said.
That's the kind of future I imagine for Loughner, who may be competent but was demented enough to think that killing six people and wounding 13 others with a handgun was a valid way to express his feelings. A daily diet of mind-numbing sedatives on Sunshine Street for the next 70 or so years seems about right for him.
From what I remember of the place, Loughner is bound to find someone he can relate to. Bruce told me that the prison population contained a wide representation of the criminal element, from violent and dangerous big-city crime family members to flat-out crazies to harmless social misfits such as himself, and every abnormality in between.
I'd spend all day Saturday and Sunday with Bruce. After signing in, I was eventually allowed through the three electronically controlled doors that opened into a short hallway that led to the visiting room, a brightly lit space that was furnished with plastic-covered sofas and chairs and a couple of coffee tables. A few vending machines lined one wall and a guard sat at a metal desk near the entrance. The overhead fluorescent lights cast everything in a harsh glare.
The room wasn't that big — probably 20 by 40 feet — but it was never crowded during my visits, which seemed odd for a large federal prison. Because there was no privacy, most of the conversations were conducted in hushed tones. Voices were kept low and gestures were restrained, which I took to be behavior molded by prison life and which visitors seemed to instinctively understand and adopt.
There was one window and it looked out on a part of the exercise yard where five or six muscle-bound prisoners were usually lifting weights. They were an unsettling sight and their exaggerated appearance and preening demeanor caused me to worry about Bruce's safety.
Bruce and I chatted about prison life, old times at home, mutual friends and what Bruce would do when he was released. I told him a lot about my year in Vietnam, which I hoped was sufficiently depressing to cheer him up in his present circumstances, and I was careful to avoid topics such as good food, women, beer, travel — anything that pertained to pleasures he could not experience, which was nearly everything.
This is what life will probably be like for Loughner until he dies. Delights of the outside world will soon have no meaning for him. He'll forget the taste of a charcoal-grilled steak, the touch of a loving woman, the chilling refreshment of a cold beer on a hot day and the length of any journey he makes will be measured in feet. He'll probably even forget why he killed and wounded 19 complete strangers.
But Jared Loughner, crazy or sane, will never be able to forget that he lives in darkness on Sunshine Street. And that's the way it should be.
Bill Federman is a Times Union editor. His email address is bfederman@timesunion.com.