Sunday night at around 530pm the officer in our dorm at Yazoo yelled “Harris!”. He told me I needed to be ready to leave at 930pm. I had been expecting to take the bus out to Oklahoma City Monday night/early Tuesday morning but it turns out they did it Sunday night/early Monday morning. I think things must have gotten moved up because of the June Teenth holiday on Wednesday.

Anyhow my friend was busy preparing a meal for us in the dorm for dinner (beef and chicken tacos on corn tortillas with rice and beans) and we were just going to have a chill evening eating and watching some tv. I had plans to get my haircut and beard trimmed on Monday with my guy at the barber shop and say goodbye to my boss at Unicor and some friends. Turns out the only thing predictable about Yazoo is the unpredictability, they definitely keep you on your toes. So needless to say I was a little shocked and frantic. I ran and told my friend, hey man we need to eat as soon as possible because I need to get my things in order, shower, use the restroom, etc. before this long bus ride plus I didn’t want to eat a big meal at 8 to 830 and then have to go to Receiving and Departures (R&D) at 9:30pm.

My buddy got the meal ready, I hurry and took a shower, and said my goodbyes. I am the type of guy that hates surprises and they give me anxiety. I have no problem making quick and sometimes impulsive decisions. Those do not bother me because I am in control. However, curveballs like this one definitely give me anxiety. I was at Yazoo Low II in the same dorm for 16 months and when you live with the same 100-120 people for that long you definitely make some good friends. It was tough to say goodbye to them but I knew it was for the better. Of course nothing happens on schedule at Yazoo so they end up calling me at 10:30pm instead of 9:30pm to go to R&D. Funny thing was (not funny at the time) the guard who came and got me in my room says “Ok Harris, you are good to go now. Report to the lieutenants office.” The lieutenants office is where they send people who are in trouble and are getting incident reports, and likely sent to the Special Housing Unit “SHU” aka the hole. I said to the officer “do you mean “R&D”? He says sternly, “no the lieutenants office”. I am thinking to myself, what the hell. Anyways I walk out of the dorm and the lieutenant and two guards are standing outside of the lieutenants office, which is next to R&D, and I see one of the other guys leaving with me walking from the other dorm. The lieutenant is yelling “Can you guys walk any slower!” So we get up to the lieutenant and he is like hurry up and get to R&D.

We get to R&D and they proceed to lock the 4 of us leaving in a holding cell where we sit for 2.5 hours waiting to have our wrists and ankles shackled and put on the bus. At around 1:00am we finally get shackled and loaded on the equivalent of like a greyhound type bus. We then drive over to Yazoo Penitentiary and we pick up the inmates going to Oklahoma from there and then proceed to do the same at the Low 1. The pickup process at those two prisons took about an hour each so at 3:30am I have been shackled for two hours sitting on the bus and we have made absolutely no mileage towards Oklahoma City. We get everyone loaded and head out. I sleep most of the way, they give us two sack lunches when we get on the bus with bologna sandwhiches. I wait until we are like 120 miles out from OKC to eat the first one. We finally arrive at Oklahoma City transit center at around 1pm and pull into the prison.

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