

On a typical day, he mops in the predawn morning, then watches TV until sunrise and sleeps. Then he applies for a midnight-shift job, mopping floors for 12 cents an hour. Vick witnesses certain things - "things that should stay in prison," he will later say, refusing to comment further - that disturb him too much to sleep. Night after night, cockroaches roam the floors. There are only bunk-bed units, like a barracks block, eight inmates per group.

He stayed in solitary for a few hours while his papers were processed, and then he was led, without explanation, to the neighboring camp he'd been promised.Īfter lunch, after the terrible-tasting pork, he sees his cell for the first time and realizes this is worse this is actually much worse than solitary confinement. A guard took him inside, handed him a khaki button-down shirt and pants and said, "Do your time and get out of here." Vick was placed in solitary confinement, peach-color cinder blocks surrounding a sink and a toilet.

Vick panicked and thought, Man, I've been told a lie. But then the car pulled up to the Big House - concrete and capitol-like, with 40-foot walls and a long row of stairs that flopped like a tongue from its domed entrance. An officer drove him over the rising and falling wheat-color countryside, frozen for the winter, past the cows and into the town of Leavenworth. 7 Vick flew from Virginia to Kansas in a small plane and climbed into a car. He would be housed in a smaller neighboring facility on the prison grounds.Īnd so on Jan. Vick said he had assurances from officials there that he would not spend time in its infamous Big House. (He'd gotten caught smoking pot before his sentencing, a violation of his pretrial agreement.) So he applied for the program and received a transfer to Leavenworth.
#Kijafa frink pictures full
He was supposed to stay in Virginia for all of his 23 months, but he heard that a federally sponsored drug-rehab program could shave maybe a full year off his time. When the door closed the first time, the reality of it all set in. After a visit, he'd go back to his cell, small as a dorm room, with a toilet, shower and sink. His 3-year-old daughter, Jada, would ask him why she couldn't see his feet. That's where Vick began his sentence in November 2007, where he could talk to guests only through glass. It was different at Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Va. For one thing, it has a visitors lounge - a square room with glass doors that open to a courtyard dotted with round tables.

But Leavenworth doesn't quite feel like prison. Vick expected Leavenworth to be like what he'd seen on TV: barren halls, dank cells, the entirety of the outside world closed to him and the partitioned remains guarded by expressionless men of the law. He bites into the pork, but it tastes weird. He says nothing, tries his best to look at nothing and no one. The black side is full, so Vick, not wanting to make a scene, joins the whites. A few inmates brazenly eye him the rest act preoccupied. Black prisoners sit on one side, whites on the other. Just as he's about to face the other inmates, he pauses and thinks, Here we go. Vick is handed a plate of pork and a roll. But he feels the stares burning his back, and he hears every whisper. Vick doesn't pause to scout his new surroundings he turns around, drops his eyes, grabs a tray and slides down the lunch line. A few days earlier, word passed quickly through this Kansas federal prison that Vick would be serving the remainder of his 23-month sentence for dogfighting conspiracy here, making him the most famous athlete ever to pass through its doors. He's led by guards to a small cafeteria and left alone, inmate No. Michael Vick arrives at Leavenworth in time for lunch.
