Alexander Smith: Lockdown

I'll never forget the judge's closing speech when the jury announced the guilty verdict. He stood, his walnut desk like a pulpit and his booming voice and thrashing limbs like those of a preacher damning the devil.

"Your crimes are heinous and unforgivable," he shouted, the flecks of foam around his mouth visible even from where I was standing. "Like so many of today's youth you have taken your life and squandered it, turning to crime instead of honor, sickness instead of decency. You have killed in cold blood, you are a coward and a thief and a murderer, and like all the other festering waste of society who come through this court I am happy to sentence you without remorse and without pity."

He leaned forward, never taking his eyes off me.

"You knew very well when you pulled that trigger what your punishment would be," he hissed. "There is no longer any leniency for child offenders, not since the Summer of Slaughter. And like those murderous teenagers you will never again see the light of day. If it was up to me, I would see you hanged by the neck until you were dead. But alas I must settle for this." He paused again, smiling wickedly to himself. "Or perhaps settle is the wrong word. Perhaps this is a fate even worse."

I knew what was coming. I clenched my fingers around the bars, praying one last time that something would happen to end this sick and twisted dream. But it was too late. It was over.

"Alex Sawyer, I hereby sentence you to life imprisonment at the Furnace Penitentiary with no possibility of parole. You will be taken from here this afternoon and incarcerated for the remainder of your days."

The resulting wave of cheers and shouts, the banging of the gavel and the roaring in my ears as the truth sank in drowned out the only thing I could think of to say.

"I didn't do it."

I DON'T REMEMBER much else about that day. I have a vague recollection of being dragged from the courtroom by the armed guards, the men in black holding open the door and telling me once again that they'd see me very soon. I couldn't quite remember how to use my legs, so they literally pulled me along the marble-clad corridors, past the crowds with their expressions of hatred and disgust, past my own parents, whose faces I could not make out because they turned away.

I recall only one thing with any clarity. As I was passing a second courtroom the doors flew open to reveal another boy, a similar age to me, being hauled kicking and screaming from inside. He was giving the bailiffs a hard time, his flailing body sending one crashing to the floor and causing the other to reach for his taser. With a flash fifty thousand volts sent the boy hurtling across the corridor, leaving him in a groaning, smoking pile. But even then I could make out his protests and they sent a chill down my spine.

"It wasn't me," he whispered as the men picked him up. "It wasn't me."

For the briefest of seconds our eyes met. It was like looking into a mirror-the fear, the panic, the defiance. I knew instantly that what had happened to me had also happened to him. Our dark fates entwined by the same men, our lives broken by an identical deception.

And then he was gone. I was carried down the corridor, my memories of the moment lessening with each step and fading away completely as I climbed into the truck that would take me to my new home. To the place I would spend the rest of my life. To my own personal hell.

To Furnace.

I'M BETTING YOU'VE ALL seen some prison films, or watched cop shows where the bad guys get sent to jail. You know what they look like: miles of fences topped with razor wire so sharp it hurts just to look at it; sprawling grounds watched over at all times by million-watt spotlights and towers with guns; lifeless buildings that rise up from the ground like great gray tombstones; tiny windows from which ghostly faces stare at an outside world they can no longer know.

Not Furnace.

Our prison bus took us straight there. Me, the kid who'd been stunned, and two other teenage guys, all as pale as church candles and cowering back into our seats as if somehow we could avoid arriving at our inevitable destination. All the while the police guards shook their shotguns at us and jeered, asking us if we'd seen Furnace on the newscasts, if we knew what it looked like, if we had any idea of the horrors that lay ahead.

I knew. I'd seen Furnace on TV like everybody else. After that summer when so many kids had turned to murder, they made sure that everyone in the country got a good look at the prison. They thought it would make us too scared to break the law, too scared to carry knives and to cut people up for just looking at them the wrong way, too scared to take a human life. Looking around, I guessed they hadn't been too successful.

There had been protesters, of course, the human rights supporters who claimed that locking a child away for life was wrong. But you can only argue with the truth for so long, and that summer when the gangs ran wild and the streets ran red everything changed. Even in the eyes of the liberals we weren't kids anymore, we were killers. All of us.

I used to always think that the waiting was the worst part, but when we rounded a corner and Furnace finally came into sight, I knew I'd rather have stayed on that bus for an eternity than get any closer to the monstrosity ahead.

It was just like on the news: a towering sculpture of dark stone, bent and scarred like it had been burned into existence. The Black Fort, the way in. The windowless building stretched upward, its body merging with a crooked spire that resembled a finger beckoning us forward. Smoke rose from a chimney hidden behind the building, a cloud of poisoned breath waiting to engulf us. All in all it looked more like something from Mordor than a modern prison.

As we neared I could make out some of the details that the news crews had left out. Carved into the cold stone were vast sculptures designed to inspire fear into anybody who saw them-tortured statues, each five meters tall, showing prisoners on the gibbets, hanging from ropes, on guillotines, pleading to executioners, being dragged from loved ones, and, worst of all, a giant head on each corner impaled on a spike. The dead faces watched us, and if I didn't know better I could have sworn their expressions were of pity, their sorrowful eyes wet from the gentle rain that fell.

"Doesn't look so bad," said one of the other boys, his quivering voice betraying his true feelings.

"Well, that ain't the half of it, boyo," replied one of the guards, tapping his shotgun on the window. "That there is Furnace's better side. You know where you're going." He lowered his weapon so it was pointing at the floor. "Down."

He was right, of course. The building ahead was only the entrance, the gateway to the fiery pits below, the mouth that led to the sprawling guts of Furnace, which lay hundreds of meters beneath the ground. I remember when they started building it-I must have been six or seven, a different person-how they'd found a crevice in the rock that seemed to go on forever. They had built the prison inside the hole and plugged the only way out with a fortress. Anyone wanting to dig himself out of this mess only had a couple of miles of solid rock to get through before he was free.

I guess that's when it finally sank in. The thought of being down there, underground, for the rest of my life suddenly hit me like a hammer in the face. I couldn't breathe, my head started to swim, the bile rose in my throat. I sat forward in my seat and stared at the floor, desperately trying to think about something else, something good. But all I could see now were the stains of a hundred other prisoners who had thrown their guts up on confronting the reality of their fate.

I couldn't hold it back. I puked, the mess hitting the seat in front and causing the guard to leap away. I retched a couple more times, then looked up through blurry eyes, expecting a furious reaction. But they were laughing.