Where this was said
Pretrial Detention: Con Air, Shady Grady, and the Baltimore Supermax
At 2:05:25 · chapter starts 2:03:40
The journey from LAX to Baltimore is a masterclass in what prison advocates call 'diesel therapy.' Wall moves through Orange County jail, boards a Con Air flight that stops at Victorville and McCarran Airport, and lands at Grady County in Oklahoma — known to inmates as 'Shady Grady,' a filthy overcrowded facility with triple-stack bunks, bologna sandwiches, and cockroaches. There, within hours of arrival, he witnesses a man stabbed in the back with a sharpened fiberglass plunger handle during processing — and is later chewed out for not joining in on the racial prison gang violence. After two weeks, he's flown to Harrisburg and transported to Baltimore's Chesapeake Detention Facility, a former state-level supermax built for solitary confinement, where he will spend the next two and a half years waiting for trial.
Black Americans are statistically punished approximately four times more severely than white Americans for cannabis-related offenses, a disparity acknowledged as a documented statistical fact.
The recidivism rate for people who have been to prison is estimated at 60–70%, meaning once incarcerated, a person is statistically more likely to return to prison than not.
The United States incarcerates more people than the next 10 countries combined, representing approximately 20% of the world's total incarcerated population.
Under federal law at the time of Wall's trial, cannabis was Schedule 1 — legally a higher-priority drug than cocaine or fentanyl, both of which can be obtained medically. Fentanyl was only upgraded from Schedule 3 to Schedule 2 around the time Wall was first fighting his case.
