It was the middle of August when we arrived and this was the hottest time of the year in Victorville. When I say hot, it was hot. Dry heat that made one hundred degrees feels like one million. It was like stepping into a furnace, a hellhole on earth. This was the first time I felt the high desert heat. I had heard people use the term, but the real life experience was something altogether different.
We were escorted off the plane and onto a bus that drove us to the facility. Since Victorville was next to an old military base we drove through some military style barracks. The neighborhood looked like something out of the movies with blasted woods everywhere. It looked like a bomb or a draught hit the area, it was a crazy sight.
“Welcome to Victim-Villa,” was what you heard as soon as you stepped off the bus and onto the compound. I arrived at Victorville not knowing what I was heading into. I had been in the system but I didn’t know that Victorville was a disciplinary facility. It was a complex, which meant that it had a penitentiary, two mediums, a one and a two, and a women’s camp.
I didn’t know that a riot had just occurred right before I got there that left over fifty blacks injured. I was walking into a danger zone. They were sending blacks from all over the United States out there because they had just transferred over five hundred inmates out due to the riot.
California was a place where racial jailhouse agendas were crazy. It was all about politics. In Cali, it wasn’t gang versus gang or state versus state like other areas, it was race against race. On the compound, there were eighteen hundred inmates total. One thousand Mexicans, five hundred blacks, two hundred whites, and one hundred other races. And basically it was every race against blacks. So that made it fifteen hundred against five hundred.