On June 9, after forty-five days in Mansfield Reformatory, Allen was put on a blue Ohio State Reformatory bus with fifty-nine other inmates handcuffed in pairs to be transported to the Lebanon Correctional Institution.

He tried to avoid the eyes of the armed guard sitting in the cage at the front of the bus. How would he survive for two years? The fear expanded inside him as the bus pulled up to the prison and he saw the barbed-wire fence and the watch-towers around the walls of Lebanon. The prisoners were taken off the bus and marched into the receiving entrance.

The first of the two remote-controlled doors hissed open, then closed behind him. It reminded Allen of Chalmers hiss, and the fear in his stomach exploded. He never got to the second door …

Ragen heard a hiss as the second door opened. He nodded and shuffled along to the cell block in the line of handcuffed prisoners. Now Arthur no longer had dominance. Here, Ragen knew, he would finally rule. He and only he would decide who came on and off the spot for the next two to five years. Ragen Vadascovinich heard a loud clang as the iron door closed behind them.

Chapter Seventeen

(1)

Ragen found Lebanon an improvement over Mansfield Reformatory. It was newer, cleaner, brighter. At the first day’s orientation session, he listened to the lectures on rules and regulations, the descriptions of the prison schools and jobs.

A big man with heavy jowls and a football player’s neck got up and, arms crossed, rocked back and forth.

“All right,” he said. “Ah’m Cap’n Leach. So you guys think you’re hot shit? Well, now you’re mine! You done fucked up on the street, but you mess up down here, Ah’m gonna bust your heads. The hell with civil rights, human rights, everything else rights. Down here you all nothing but a piece of meat. You get outta line, Ah’m gonna grind you …”

He hammered away at them for fifteen minutes. Ragen decided the man was trying to whip them into line with words, just blowing hot air.

Then Ragen noticed that the psychologist, a thin, sandyhaired man with glasses, took the same tack. “You men are nothing now. Just numbers. You have no identity. No one cares who you are or that you’re here. You’re nothing but criminals and convicts.”

As the little man insulted them, several of the new prisoners became upset and started shouting back.

“Who the hell are you to tell us that?”

“What kind of shit is that, man?”

“I ain’t no number!”

“You fucking crazy, man!”

“Blow it out your asshole, shrink!”

Ragen observed the inmates’ reactions to the verbal assaults. He suspected the psychologist was intentionally provoking them.

“See?” the psychologist said, jabbing his forefinger at them. “Look whats happening. You can’t fit into society because when you’re put into a pressure situation, you don’t know how to control it. You counteract a verbal statement with raw hostility and violence. Maybe you can see now why society wants to lock you away in a cage until you learn to adjust.” The men, realizing he’d been teaching them a lesson, sat back and grinned at each other sheepishly.