Author's Note: One thing you may not know about me is that I have a long-standing interest in criminal justice and prison reform. This is one of the reasons I enjoy Life so much, and why I suspect NBC dropped it so soon—it was willing to look deeper into the flaws of our law enforcement and criminal justice systems long before it'd become mainstream. All accounts of Pelican Bay—a real place—contained within are based on true stories I discovered about the prison.

Tags included: 5+1 Things, Backstory, Prison.

1. Taste

In prison, men lose things they've taken for granted all their lives. Freedom of will. Safety. Innocence. Charlie knows men who were guilty long before they were walked into Crescent City with their hands cuffed behind their backs. Yet, comparatively, even they enter with a sense of innocence: you are not truly guilty until you pass through the gates.

He learns too late to appreciate the freedoms he'd had in his life before Pelican Bay. Things he felt entitled to, never considered the possibility of losing until the officers were at his door and cuffing him like he'd done so many times to so many others.

The first real thing Charlie lost to Pelican Bay was taste.

Good food is a privilege, in this world. It is not necessary for survival; it is only necessary for the body to receive nutrients and vitamins so it may sustain itself. Flavor is extra.

There is no flavor in prison.

The meat and undefinable sides are hot and tasteless, and the fruit is canned, watery, and pale. For the first few weeks, the green Jell-O is the only thing Charlie can stomach. And he hates the stuff. Cheerful, jiggly bits of bone marrow and sugar pretending to be fruit. It had never appealed to him. But what other choice does he have?

Within a week, Charlie's hunger wins out, and he forces himself to eat the cheerless brown and white lumps of whatever it is. He burns his tongue and throat as he wolfs it down. Tries to ignore the churning of his stomach, swallowing thickly.

It becomes routine, and after a while, Charlie finds himself wondering if he'll ever taste anything properly again. Nutraloaf is the worst; they give it to him as punishment, for the smallest infractions. They all think he's guilty. They all think he killed his friends. Killer cops don't make friends in prison.

Mostly, Charlie just misses the taste of fresh fruit.

2. Smell

Jen visits occasionally, those first two years. She sits in the little call booth and holds the phone to her ear and it looks like home, if not for the clear plastic between them and the prison jumpsuit he's dressed in.

There are no holes in the divider, but Charlie swears he can smell her perfume on the air, stronger than the stench of sweat and unwashed bodies that he'd only noticed the first three days. He places his hand on the plastic and watches the hesitation in her face as she does the same, that last time.

A week later, the divorce papers come in the mail.

Jen doesn't visit again.

That's just another thing he loses in prison. Jen and the smell of the outside world. Sure, he gets an hour in the yard every day, just like everyone else. But the trees are miles away from the cement of the prison and the only thing Charlie smells outside is dust and hot concrete. Like with anything else, once he's been exposed to it long enough he fails to notice anymore.

Charlie picks a fight and loses, and he's left lying on the concrete with blood flooding out of his nose, no longer able to smell anything but iron, the guards and inmates all laughing at him.

Charlie learns to pick his battles more carefully.

3. Sound

Prison is noisy. Until the lights go out at night with a resounding clunk, there is constant banter among inmates and guards, the shuffling of feet, the swish of clothes. There's crashing and swearing and the wet sound of fists on skin. There's noise from the kitchen, pots and pans- or whatever they heat up the slop in.

Sometimes the noise is so overwhelming that Charlie can't think straight. He can't focus on the words when he's reading until he goes outside, and the sky and trees absorb all that noise.

Charlie had found the book under his bunk mattress, likely left behind by whomever occupied his room before. It's ragged and missing some pages, but Charlie sucks up the knowledge inside greedily. The Path to Zen teaches him more than he'd ever gleaned from school; spirituality and faith and focus and living without wants.

Charlie takes the lessons to heart, and designates himself a messenger: he repeats phrases to his cellmate and the men in the yard, spreading the ideas of calm and peace.

Most of them laugh at him. Some hit him.

He carries on.

There is one guard, though- one who has made himself an enemy of Charlie- who takes Charlie's advice on finding happiness as an insult. Laughs outright at the flowery words and tells Charlie to go fuck himself, burn the book while he's at it.

Charlie has learned patience. He comes back.

It's a stupid decision.

The guard beats him so thoroughly that he's taken to the infirmary only half-conscious. He can't hear anything. His head throbs and he winces at the bright lights over him, vomits into the trash can beside the bed. Charlie is bad at lip-reading, but someone says concussion and he is not terribly surprised.

His hearing returns after a few days. But with it comes something new, a twinge in his chest. It's ugly and cruel and violent, and no amount of Zen smothers its flames.

He's kindled hatred.

4. Sight

Years later, when Charlie walks free with a badge on his hip, he will be feared by guilty ex-cons and despised by correctional officers. The names Charlie Crews and Pelican Bay will make criminals sing like a bird. He will be a legend, level with saints and archangels, his name still tossed around in prison circles, the ex-con you don't want to mess with.

When it starts, though, he is still only the killer cop, disgraced and locked away for something he didn't even do.

Sight is one sense prison cannot take from you by mere existence. Unless you are blinded or beaten to unconsciousness, you will always see the world around you; the barbed wire fence, the concrete walls, the white jumpsuits on men caught in the spider's web. It's inescapable, and when the realization of that fact settles in after two long, difficult years, a new kind of anger stirs in Charlie's breast.

Schmidt, the guard who gave Charlie his concussion, takes it upon himself to make Charlie's life miserable. Charlie is a lone wolf, not associated with any of the prison gangs, and has no friends outside of the infirmary. (There is one doctor there who cares. Only one.)

The other guards had often singled him out, played pranks and gave him a few scrapes, but nothing serious. Most of the guards stay away from him, knowing he's still a cop at heart.

But Schmidt is different. He's in with one of the gangs, likes to beat inmates nearly to death and throw them in solitary to heal without any medical care. It's sick and twisted, but nobody cares because these things happen in prison. Charlie remembers following criminal justice journals when he was working; remembers thinking there was no reason to care about what happens to criminals behind bars. To his disgust, he remembers laughing when a well-known convict was killed in this very prison, beaten to death by his cellmate.

Prison gives Charlie a lot of time for self-improvement. He does push-ups and curl-ups daily, regaining the muscle he'd had back when he graduated from the police academy. He reads The Path to Zen over and over again, committing its lessons to memory. He practices being in the moment, honing his focus and developing that mysterious sixth sense.

He's getting ready.

Charlie practices. He starts fights with the men in the yard, comes out victorious more often. He takes it upon himself to protect the vulnerable, taking the weak ones under his wing and leaving their aggressors flat on the cement, bleeding and crying for their mamas. Word spreads. The killer cop is filling out his own skin, accepting the darkness inside of him he'd denied for so long.

Charlie makes contacts, other lifers and many more who are due to get out soon. He will be associated with these people for the rest of his life. Many are indebted to him. Angel, the transvestite prostitute he will later mention to Reese, gets him access to the kitchen, expanding his territory. There's a turf battle over that one - three guys against him, they get him on the floor, bleeding and hissing in pain, but it's a feint. He snaps back up when they crow victory, catching two by surprise and dealing with the third quickly enough.

After that he winds up back in the infirmary with four cracked ribs and his nose broken for the third time, but the other three guys look worse than him, so he counts it as a win. And anyway, Angel bakes him a carrot cake and sneaks it in for him, delivering it with an affectionate kiss on his cheek, and it's a damn good carrot cake, at that.

He gets out after a week and (happily) discovers that the guys he'd beaten up were some of Schmidt's goonies.

As expected, Schmidt finds that reason enough to focus entirely on Charlie, who takes his beatings in good spirits. By the end of his third year in Pelican Bay, he's had over 50 stitches.

It happens in April.

Schmidt's gang pits several fights against some of Charlie's guys. It starts off small - squabbling over food, marking territory, the like. Petty stuff. But then something happens- and to this day, Charlie has no idea what it was- and Angel takes a blow hard enough to dislocate his jaw.

That hits home.

Charlie instigates a brawl right smack in Schmidt's territory and takes down five men before the guard himself shows up. Charlie is seething with rage, all Zen koans forgotten, blood splattered on his clothes and dripping from his clenched fists. Even Schmidt blanches at the sight of him, swearing under his breath.

He charges at Charlie, his movements bullish and predictable. Charlie dodges the blow with grace, delivers one of his own. He floors the guard in no time, then descends into the same savagery Schmidt used on him all those times. He's blind with rage, seeing only red, red, red.

By the time Charlie has his hands wrapped around Schmidt's throat, the other guards arrive to intervene, apparently having thought Schmidt would win and ignoring the fight, before. It takes four guards to pull him off of Schmidt, who is bleeding and gasping wetly. He won't survive. Charlie's head snaps back as one of the guards deals a right hook to the side of his face, and everything fades to black.

5. Touch

Charlie's world is suddenly reduced to a 6x4' cell. He is confined for 23 hours a day in a room not much larger than an apartment bathroom, equipped with a toilet and a green vinyl-covered bed that's too short for him to lie down straight. He gets one hour in the yard with the others condemned to SHU. They are not allowed to speak.

He's lucky enough to have his book, which he's taken to carrying just under the elastic 'belt' of his jumpsuit. Now he wears navy sweats and a grey t-shirt with laceless sneakers.

It's not so bad at first. Charlie is rather ashamed to admit that the first week had been pleasant. Away from the crowd of other prisoners, he had the peace and quiet he'd missed since the trials began four years ago. But it'd gotten too quiet after two weeks.

He doesn't talk to himself, though. He just does push-ups and reads his book, wonders if Schmidt is dead or just suffering in a hospital somewhere. Wonders how Angel is getting along, if his jaw is fixed up by now. Charlie tries to remember how his carrot cake had tasted. He can't recall.

After a month in solitary, Charlie can feel his senses dulling. The bleach-white of the walls around him seem to sap the color from everything else. His skin turns paper-white, almost translucent. The walls absorb all of the sound outside, so all Charlie can hear is the hum of industrial fans and the sound of his own breathing. Taste is gone, has been for a long time. Solitary provides food even worse than the outside. There is nothing to smell except disinfectant and sweat, both of which fade away quickly enough.

Charlie is left with textures. He runs his hands over things constantly; touches the vinyl bed, the stiff cotton sheets (they are air-dried), plays with the fabric of his clothes and the smooth, cold steel of the toilet pipes, wet with condensation. He develops a habit of running his hands through his hair and over his unshaven face, just to remind himself that he is alive.

The book is a favorite. The yellow, curled pages and the peeling cover, with its embossed text. It becomes such a comfort that he sleeps with it beside his face.

After two months, give or take, Charlie can't take the silence anymore. He begins talking to himself, conjures up memories of home and describes everything in detail to the unchanging white walls of his cell. He tries to remember faces of people he'd loved. What did Tom Seybolt look like? His wife, their son? Rachel- she'd called him Uncle Charlie- where was she now? How old is she? What does Bobby look like now? Jen- she must be married to someone else by now. Is she different?

The wall never answers. Sometimes a guard will, when they came to take him out to the yard. Mostly they just laugh or shake their head at him. He is silent in the yard, like a good prisoner. He returns to his cell and resumes his conversation with no-one.

Once, his toilet had clogged, and they'd let him out while a plumber fixed it. He'd lapsed into silence and stared blankly out at the people in the yard, hopelessness aching in his chest. It was the first thing he'd felt in four weeks.

Charlie goes numb after that. He gives up on exercising. He forgets to eat. He curls up in a corner on his bed and chews his nails until they bled, presses his bloody fingers into his closed eyes until he sees bursts of colors he'd not seen in what felt like a lifetime. Charlie talks about everything and nothing all at once, parroting lines from his Zen book and describing a life that is no longer his.

Sometimes he feels the sting of tears, feels something burning tight in the back of his throat or deep in his chest, but nothing ever comes of it. He'd stopped keeping track of time after four months, stopped thinking or feeling. Charlie ran on autopilot.

There was a hunger strike in '01. He participated, secretly hoping it'd kill him. It didn't.

Once, he'd slammed his head against the hard steel toilet rim, just to feel something. He was bleeding and probably had a concussion, but nobody came to help for fifteen hours.

He'd gone numb again, anyway.

6. One

When Constance first visited, he was still in solitary. He didn't say anything, just listened as she talked, overwhelmed at the colors of her dress, the smell of her perfume, the volume of her melodic voice. When she'd finished, he'd spoken for the first time in weeks, his voice rough. He asked her to go away.

Charlie thought he was guilty. Constance knew he was innocent.

She came back.

She kept coming back, every time he turned her away, and after six visits he finally gave in and let her take his case. The worst that could happen was that she'd lose the case; Charlie had nothing to lose now, and she could find another client easily enough.

Constance pulled some strings, got him out of solitary, where he'd been for five years now. He was put in a cell with Ted Earley, whose life he saved soon afterwards. Five years of solitary had done a number on Charlie: it left him pale and shaky and spooked by everything happening around him, but the animal parts of him that made him want to protect Ted won out and he smashed in a neo-Nazi's face on his first day out of SHU.

Ted helped him recover, coaxed him out of his shell and made him laugh and smile, something which pinched and hurt at first but grew easier over the last four years he spent in Pelican Bay, even if it was rarely a genuine expression.

Charlie's senses wake up again, slowly, as if coming out of hibernation. He soaks in the sun in the yard and breathes in the smell of Ted's hair sometimes, when he gets too worked up to function and Ted wraps his arms around him. He eats the green Jell-O and flavorless white pears and finds it satisfying in a way it never would have been if he hadn't been in solitary.

He discovers that Angel is gone; he'd gotten out on parole two years into his stint in SHU. The gang he'd formed is still there, faithful to him even now, but he pulls them out of territory wars and senseless fighting, prepares them for inside work on the chance that he gets out soon. Ted paroles out in '06. Charlie is left with Constance and trials, stuffy rooms with too many people and scratchy suits that don't fit right.

Charlie hadn't actually expected Constance to get him out.

The day he left Pelican Bay is significant by virtue of having happened at all. He is led through the same process that had admitted him into the prison, only reversed. They don't do a body check, though, just toss him a pair of clothes that aren't his (the clothes he'd been arrested in were long gone now) and tell him to leave the jumpsuit on the table. He dresses, shivering as the unfamiliar fabric scrapes against his skin, fumbling to tie his shoes with fingers that tremble with nerves.

When he leaves it is announced with loud buzz and the heavy clank of the lock. A guard swings the door open and Charlie is almost blinded by the Los Angeles sun. It's different now, brighter somehow. He steps out of Pelican Bay and feels his heart clench. Charlie walks towards Constance's car, his heart thudding in his chest as he sees the gates, the people crowded outside of them with cameras flashing and microphones thrust in his general direction. Charlie hears the door shut behind him and can't help but to turn back and look.

The image of Pelican Bay Penitentiary behind him, framed by the summer sky, is one that stays with Charlie forever.