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twice, seeking some minor clarification here or amplification there. Other than that, it was Barnett’s story, told in his own words and his own voice.
    When he’d arrived at Green Haven in the mid-1970s to begin serving the latest of his prison sentences, Barnett had been accompanied, as all inmates were, by a jacket. A jacket, at least in prison parlance, isn’t something you wear. It’s your file, containing a certified copy of your conviction, your indictment, your presentence investigation report, your entire criminal record, your photograph and your fingerprint card. All of that is kept in a folder, or jacket, to keep it private and confidential.
    But “private” and “confidential” are concepts that simply don’t exist within prison walls. With guards on the take and inmates assigned to work as clerks in receiving, classification and records, every detail about aninmate’s past is not only visible to prying eyes but is currency. And with respect to Alonzo Barnett, there were two details that stood out.
    The first was that at age twenty-two, Barnett had been arrested and convicted for the felonious forcible rape of a fifteen-year-old girl. Never mind that the two of them had been in love and already had a child together, that there’d been absolutely no force involved or threatened, and that they would get legally married three years later. Or that in order to resolve the matter quickly and inexpensively, Barnett had waived his right to counsel, pleaded guilty to statutory rape as a misdemeanor and paid a twenty-five-dollar fine. If you’d opened Barnett’s jacket, all you would have seen were the initial felony charge of forcible rape of a fifteen-year-old female and the fact that the arrest had resulted in a conviction.
    The second thing you would have found, had you taken the trouble to read the indictment handed up in the case that had most recently landed Barnett in Green Haven, was that in addition to the usual counts of sale and possession, there was, way down at the very bottom of the list, a charge that had been added to the Penal Law only recently. “Sale of a Controlled Substance in the fourth degree upon school grounds” it read. Once again, the dire official language masked a far more innocent reality. The legislature, it turned out, had defined “school grounds” in such a way as to include “any area accessible to the public located within 2,500 feet of the boundary of any public or private elementary, parochial, intermediate, junior high, vocational or high school.” In other words, anywhere within nearly half a mile of any such place. In Manhattan, that translated into a nearly ten-block radius, resulting in just about anyplace in the borough qualifying as school grounds. The law has since undergone severalamendments, and the 2,500-foot zone is these days down to a slightly more reasonable 1,000. But labels being what they are, the charge made it look and sound as though Alonzo Barnett had set up shop in the playground and started handing out free samples of drugs to kindergarten kids.
    Put that together with the forcible rape of a child charge, and Green Haven had a new arrival who might as well have had a bull’s-eye painted on his back.
    â€œPrison is a lot like the street,” Barnett explained. “Only it’s, like, concentrated. Out on the street, the strong gang up together and prey on the weak. But the weak have choices, at least. They can split. They can move out of the neighborhood. They can lock themselves indoors. And they can complain to the police. Inside, you don’t have options like that. You can’t move out just because you don’t like the neighborhood. You can lock down in your cell, but only for so long. When it’s mealtime, you got to come out and go to the mess hall. When it’s rec hour, you got to go to the yard. You got a job—you got to go to work. As for the police,