Resurrection Walk

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The family gathered in the visitor lot. Jorge Ochoa’s mother and brother and me. Mrs. Ochoa looked as if she were going to church in a pale yellow dress with white cuffs and collar, her hands wrapped in rosary beads. Oscar Ochoa was in full cholo regalia: baggy low-slung jeans cuffed over black Doc Martens, wallet chain, white T-shirt, and black Ray-Bans. His neck was wrapped in blue ink, complete with his Vineland Boyz moniker “Double O” prominently on display.

And me, I was in my Italian three-piece, looking good for the cameras, wrapped in the majesty of the law.

The sun was dropping in the sky and coming at a nearly flat angle through the prison’s twenty-foot exterior fence line, casting us all in the chiaroscuro light of a Caravaggio painting. I looked up at the guard tower and through the smoked glass thought I could see the silhouettes of men with long guns.

This was a rare moment. Corcoran State wasn’t a prison where men often left on their own two feet. It was an LWOP facility, for men serving life without parole. You checked in but you never checked out. This was where Charlie Manson died of old age. But many inmates didn’t make it to old age. Homicides in the cells were common. Jorge Ochoa was just two steel doors down from an inmate who had been beheaded and dismembered in his cell a few years back. His avowed Satanist cellmate had strung together his ears and fingers to make a necklace. That was Corcoran State.

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