To survive the box, you learn to fish. People on the outside call it solitary confinement, but it isn’t really, not even at a place like Upstate Correctional Facility, the supermax prison in Malone, New York, ten minutes from the Canadian border. It’s true at Upstate you’re locked down twenty-four hours a day. It’s true you spend twenty-three of those hours in a small concrete and steel cage, and that the twenty-fourth hour is spent in another concrete and steel cage that’s connected to, but even smaller than, the first. It’s true that for the whole time you’re at Upstate, you might not touch another human being, and it’s true you won’t see another person except through a tight mesh of steel wire and reinforced glass. And it’s true you might be locked down for years.
But man is a social animal, and even in a place like Upstate, people will find a way to communicate. They will always buy, sell, and barter stuff, they will always shout to be heard, they will always exchange ideas and create community, and most of all, they will always frustrate the facility’s insistence that they be alone. The New York Department of Corrections calls it “secure housing,” the outside world calls it solitary, but to the people inside it’s just the box. Social and economic life goes on in every box in every New York prison, and the string that holds it all together is fishing.
“So, there’s a space underneath the door about yea big.” Lucas Whaley held his index finger and thumb about an inch apart. “And you’ll take a toothpaste tube and squish it flat. You know, like half used ones but flat, and you’ll poke a hole through the back of it and unwind some string from your blanket and tie it through that hole and then attach whatever you’re gonna attach to it, and you. . . . Like, guys are really good at it. They can like, bank it off the wall across the cell to get it down. And then, you’ll call down if it doesn’t reach the guy. ‘Hey, anybody see that line? Can you send that down to whatever cell?’ And this is how things move back and forth. That is fishing.”
He explained that for a lot of guys, the worst times come when they’re alone with their thoughts. When you’re out of your cell, there’s always something that keeps your attention.
Anything you can attach to a string, you can fish. Food. Tobacco. Rolling paper. Porn. It all gets slid under, passed through, or tossed between the bars of New York State’s prisons. But you can also fish an ideology. You can send the banned books that have been surreptitiously passed for decades. The administration seizes these books when they find them, but another copy will soon arrive, smuggled in by inmates or carried in by correctional officers. You can find them in every prison in the country. They’re the sacred texts of prison gangs, studied and debated with a reverence that would be familiar to any religious scholar.
“Every organization has like a list of books that they would push and like, it was required reading,” Lucas said. Everything was laid out, “almost like a syllabus. They’re like, ‘you have to read this here. Read this next. Read that next.’ It was your education, and really, it just radicalized the fuck out of everybody because it was radical stuff.” Radical, but also deadly serious. “People would be pissed if you got given this book and you still haven’t read it,” he said. “People would get upset like really, really angry with you. You become a conversation in the group, like, ‘Listen, man, you need to start like studying. Like, be more serious about it.’ It was serious shit.”
If there’s one place where gangs don’t have to worry about their literature getting read, it’s in the box. In New York prisons, the first week in the box is a special kind of torment. No reading material of any kind. No radio. No music. No pictures of family. No personal property. No paper. No pen. Nothing but a cell about the size of a parking space. Concrete floor and ceiling. Steel bed, steel toilet, steel chair, and steel sink, all of which are bolted to the wall. One blanket, one sheet, and a two-inch thick mattress. When you’re locked down, especially in the beginning, you’ll read anything. If somebody fishes you something to read, you don’t just read it. You devour it.
And it’s not just the boredom, which is hell. A lot of people inside have told me that the most dangerous place in any prison is their cell. The first time someone who had spent decades in prison told me that, I didn’t understand. I thought he was talking about being attacked by his cellmate, and I muttered something about a single cell being safer. “No!” he said. “That’s even worse.”
He explained that for a lot of guys, the worst times come when they’re alone with their thoughts. When you’re out of your cell, there’s always something that keeps your attention. A correctional officer is hollering at you or somebody else. A fight is about to break out. “There’s always drama,” Lucas told me. You have to be hyper-attuned to the infinite number of rules and risks that come with living in prison, which means there’s always something to occupy your mind, and anything is better than being locked inside your head.
Lucas said when he first got to prison, he went looking for trouble. And why not? He was seventeen when he was arrested and eighteen when a judge sentenced him to twenty-five years to life. If he was lucky, he’d be out after a quarter century, but that might as well be life for an eighteen-year-old. “The only thing that helps you escape from something that’s that big is something that’s more immediate. And so, you know, I did things to put myself in dangerous situations to avoid thinking about doing twenty-five to life.” He got into a lot of fights, smoked a ton of weed, and drank as much alcohol as he could get his hands on, which is pretty much what he had been doing in the years before he got locked up. “The action gives you something else more immediate to focus on. You never have to think about what’s going on with you.”
He was also scared shitless. “I was like 160 pounds soaking wet. I was so young. I have pictures still from those years and I was a little guy. I was from a town that nobody had ever heard of. I didn’t belong to any gang. It was tough, and it was scary.” So, he could either cower in the corner, which is the surest way in prison to become a victim, or he could punch somebody in the face.
Before he was shipped to Upstate, Lucas had been at Coxsackie Correctional Facility, an especially violent prison in Central New York. (“Five kids died in my first summer there,” Lucas said. “They used to keep an ambulance on standby in the truck trap when we would go to the yard.”) Because Lucas had strangled a man to death, the administrators at Upstate put him in a cell by himself.
The literature gave him a new language for an old anger.
So, there he was, alone with his thoughts and nobody to punch. By this time, he was nineteen. When they first put him in the box, he was relieved to discover it was freezing and filthy, which meant he could get pissed at the guards for putting him in a hell hole, and that he could spend a couple hours cleaning it, using part of his tiny allotment of toilet paper. Anything to keep his mind occupied. But you can only clean a prison cell with toilet paper for so long, and when he was finally done, his head was waiting for him—the people he beat up, the relationships he destroyed, the opportunities he wasted, the life he took. When his mind finally came to rest, the voice in his head resumed its familiar refrain. “Whaley, you’re a colossal fuck-up. Your step-dad was right. You’re such a fucking waste. You’re gonna die here and that’s exactly what you deserve.”
And then the skinheads fished him an escape.
Nearly all the recruitment literature of white supremacy slid to a stop in front of Lucas’s cell. Deceived, Damned, and Defiant, the collected writings of white supremacist David Lane, who coined the infamous 14 words, one of the most important sentences in white supremacist ideology: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Lane was convicted and sentenced to 190 years in connection with the murder of Alan Berg, a Jewish radio host in Colorado. In prison, he drafted his White Genocide Manifesto, proclaiming that “all Western nations are ruled by a Zionist conspiracy to mix, overrun and exterminate the White race,” and calling on all true Aryans to rise up and resist “the Zionist destroyer.”
The Creed of Iron, by Lane’s protégé, Ron McVan, included apocalyptic exhortations to defend WOTAN, the Will of the Aryan Nation. As McVan saw the world, Aryans are responsible for all the greatest achievements in Western civilization, yet “Aryan man must now face the very real prospect of total race extinction. Every second of every day the future for our children dwindles before our eyes in the stepped up, relentless onslaught of forced integration, immigration and miscegenation. Whether we like it or not, we are living under the dictates of a tyrannical, anti-White ‘One World Government’ whose interests are in complete opposition to the welfare of our kind.”
The White Man’s Bible, by Ben Klassen, revealed “the awesome power of Jewish money and how it has enabled this perfidious race to capture the government, the news media and every other nerve center of power.” As Klassen wrote, Jews use their “treacherous deceptions . . . to mongrelize us, the White Race, in order to force-feed and pump the black blood into the veins of White America.”
The literature arrived at a moment when Lucas was “just really susceptible to this kind of thinking.” He thought back on his time at Coxsackie. “There were a lot of fights that I had that were started simply because I was white or somebody thought they could take advantage of me because I was white or they didn’t like me because I was white.” The literature gave him a new language for an old anger. Yet even then, Lucas knew the fights and racial conflict he’d had were not the most important thing in his turn to white supremacy.
White supremacy welcomed his rage, and that made it irresistible.
Slightly more important was the message that has seduced countless young men since time immemorial: Become part of something bigger than himself, something noble and pure. Be welcomed into a band of courageous warriors, all of them steeling themselves for the battles to come. “We were so against drugs. Like, ‘you have to quit smoking, no drug use. Nobody drinks.’ Everybody was like, you know, ‘you got to have a clear head.’ Strong mind, strong body, that was what we used to say. Strong mind, strong body.”
The literature of white supremacy promises what so many young men have always sought: the chance to become the hero. Different causes appeal to different people, but it is no coincidence that, if you swap out the proper nouns, the recruitment pitch to join ISIS sounds a lot like the recruitment pitch to join the Aryan Brotherhood. The imagined nobility of it all has lured countless people into extremism, especially young men, and while it appealed to Lucas as well, this too only took him so far. “I had already read Mein Kampf by this time and pretty much concluded that Hitler was a clown.”
Even more important than being a noble race warrior was the sense of absolution that white supremacy supplied. As Lucas said, “Being racist is like having a superpower in a way. It feels empowering, because you don’t have to like, take the blame for any of your problems. All of your problems are because of someone else. You were born absolutely awesome. You were born superior to everybody else. Everything that’s wrong is somebody else’s fault. I’m awesome. Fuck these guys.
‘Yeah, you’re fucking right. God damn, this is everybody else’s fault. Fuck these guys.’ That’s how it felt. It felt like absolution. Like, ‘oh, I’m not to blame for any of this.’” For Lucas, white supremacy had the glorious ability to make the voice in his head shut the fuck up. Yet there was still one thing that had an even more potent effect than absolution. White supremacy welcomed his rage, and that made it irresistible.
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Excerpted from Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration by Joseph Margulies. Copyright 2026. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.
