Chapter 3

I spent twelve years working my way into Marion State Prison.

As a boy, I lived in a small town in the oil fields of central California, which was like being in the desert or the outback, many miles from anything.

When I was ten and a half years old, I was called from class to the principal's office.  My aunt and uncle were there and they told me my Dad had been in an accident and my mother was at the hospital.  I was going home with them.

My Dad had been working on an oil derrick as a "roustabout".  Most of my family on his side worked in the oil business.  He’d been up high on the derrick when a large pulley, weighing about two tons, broke loose, swung over and hit him. The safety belt he had on, stopped him falling to the ground. They lowered him down and rushed him to the hospital by ambulance.  The doctors tried to save him but after a while they decided he was dead and gave up. However, a young intern who had just graduated from medical school and was doing his residency, tried a new technique and this saved my Dad.  He was a physical wreck though and in a coma for a year.  He'd had one side of his body and face totally smashed.  He lost an eye and his face looked grotesque; plastic surgery wasn't too advanced in the mid 1950's. The accident also left him brain damaged.

My aunt told me that with my Dad in hospital, I was now the man of the family.  That sounded good to me.  I'd never been close to my Dad; if he wasn't working, he was playing poker somewhere so he wasn't around much.  My mother was a beautiful redhead who was sad and scared a lot.  Her parents had been killed in an auto crash when she was young and she'd been raised by her older sisters.  She was the twelfth of thirteen children.

I thought being the " man of the family" meant I could quit school, get a job, and be in control of when I went to bed.  It didn't work that way.  I had to stay in school and go to bed at ten o'clock.  But I now felt responsible for my mother and my brothers and I was trying to take care of them.

Dad came home after eighteen months in the hospital. I was resentful of his being back and we started struggling with each other for the "man of the family" position. The brain damage he had sustained in the accident caused him to go into a rage once in a while, and these were directed at me.

One day, when I was twelve years old we got into a fight and he tried to strangle me.  I decided to leave.  The town we lived in, Taft, California, was out in the middle of nowhere, forty miles from the highway that ran to Los Angeles.  I went downtown and stole a car.  It was a 1949 Chevrolet and it had the keys in it.  Next to it was a new 1955 Chevrolet which also had keys, but I took the older one because I didn't know how to drive and knew there was a possibility that the car would wind up smashed. I'd gotten a friend, Keith, to go with me.  He said he knew how to drive but he'd lied.  He didn't know any more about it than I did.  We drove around town for an hour or so, trying to get the hang of driving.  I was behind the wheel and took off from a stop sign and was trying to shift from first to second while still accelerating.  I lost control of the car and crashed.  We ran away from the scene of the accident and went home.  My Dad had cooled off by then so he left me alone. I was scared and shaken from the accident but I couldn’t tell anyone what I had done.

A couple of weeks later, I was in the bowling alley where I worked setting pins and keeping score for the bowling league. I was sitting at the counter drinking a coke on my break, when a policeman walked in and came up to me. "Are you Kenneth Windes," he asked.
"Yes," I answered.
"I want to talk to you about the car you stole. Come with me."
He took me to the police station and I saw they had Keith there too.  They took me into a room and began questioning me about the car.
"Why did you steal the car?" one of the cops asked.
"I didn't steal a car," I responded.
I was wondering how they had found out and I was feeling scared and intimidated.
"We know you stole the car and wrecked it.  Don't you know how to drive?" the cop said.
I continued to insist that I didn't know what they were talking about.
"Keith has already told us all about it", another cop said to me.  "If you tell us what happened, you'll probably get probation.  We know you're a good kid and you haven't been in trouble before.  But if you keep lying to us, you'll wind up in reform school."

I was in a classic trap.  It's called 'Prisoner's Dilemma'.  I had four options; 1. If Keith had already confessed and I now confessed, we'd both get probation. 2. If Keith had confessed and I didn't, I'd go to reform school. 3. If Keith hadn't confessed and I did, I'd get probation but he'd go to reform school. 4. If we both stood our ground, we might walk away or we might go to reform school.

One of the cops opened the door to the room where Keith was being held and I could see him sitting on a chair, crying.  Then my mother showed up and she was crying and begging me to tell the truth.  So I confessed.  It turned out to be the right decision.  Keith had already confessed. They took us to the county seat, Bakersfield, and booked us into Juvenile Hall.  The charge was Grand Theft Auto. I was arrested, spent two weeks in a juvenile detention center, then placed on probation and returned home, to my Dad.

For a few months life at home was calm but then he blew up again and came at my throat. I stole another car and drove off. I had taken a few driving lessons since the last time, so I got as far as Los Angeles where I was arrested. I spent another two weeks in the detention center, reinstated on probation and sent home again where nothing had changed.

After this occurred a couple more times, I was formally declared a juvenile delinquent and sentenced to the California Youth Authority until the age of eighteen. I spent most of my teenage years in California’s reform schools. These schools were not “schools of crime” though I did learn many criminal skills there. They primarily taught me how to be a Convict. I learned how to walk the walk and talk the talk of a Convict. The friends I was making were all kids locked up in reform school. I would get paroled from a reform school every once in awhile and sent home. My mother and Dad had divorced so he wasn’t in the picture anymore. But I didn’t have any friends outside of reform school and my walk and talk only fitted a criminal culture. So after a few weeks, I would get into trouble, my parole would be revoked and I would be sent back.

When I was seventeen, after trying to escape from a reform school, I graduated into the California Adult Prison System. For the next seven years, I was in and out (but mostly in) of the state prisons at SoleDad and San Quentin.

At twenty four years of age, I was paroled from the State Prison at SoleDad, California. I realised that I had spent eleven years of my life locked behind bars and I could not see a future that didn’t include more of the same.  So I did something I’d never done before. I bought a gun. I’d never used or even fired a gun in my life. I put the gun in my pocket and told myself that, when they came to lock me up again, we would settle the whole matter right there. I’d either shoot my way out of the situation or they would kill me. And I didn’t care which way it turned out.

Copyright 1994-2009 Liana Di Stefano & Ken Windes