If there's one thing that's clear right off about visiting a federal prison, it's how utterly depressing it is. The employees, the inmates, the visitors -- they all seem to be shuffling through the painful process of completing their day.
And that's partly why Elroy "Eighty-Six" Phillips, the subject of this week's cover story in New Times, hasn't taken a visitor in four years. He has told his mom and five kids that they shouldn't bother going to Kentucky, where he's housed at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington. He knows he'll be putting them through something he doesn't want to witness.
"My family comes, and they cry," Phillips told me in the visitors' room during an interview
July 14. "It's just not good for me. I know they're going to cry, and
all of us will just go on feeling worse for what happened to me."
Phillips
is serving a 24-year sentence for allegedly selling an undercover cop
$50 of crack. Phillips and legal experts say he has collected enough
evidence to possibly prove his innocence. He's waiting for a federal
judge to rule on his request for a hearing to present the facts that he
has dug up in the ten years since he was convicted.
In that time,
Phillips has bounced around to several prisons across the eastern
United States. He's one of about 2,000 inmates at the Federal Medical
Center, which houses prisoners with medical issues and then others, like
Phillips, who are there to help run the place. The prison is a massive
brick and stone building with art deco flourishes. It sits in the
sprawling green hills north of Lexington and is surrounded by two layers
of razor wire.
"In this place, everybody is hopeless," Phillips
said as visitors began filing in to the sprawling visitation room. "From
the time I was sentenced, I was going to fight. I've never been
hopeless."
Phillips says he hasn't had a visitor since his son
came to see him in Miami in 2007. His son, 22-year-old Elroy Phillips
Jr., says that's hard on him. He's currently a student at the University of
Central Florida in Orlando and working as a graphic designer. He was in
elementary school when his father went to prison. The last time he saw
him, they spoke by phone through a glass partition at a federal prisoner
holding facility.
"I wasn't even able to touch him. I had to
speak to him through a window, and now it's been eight or nine years
since I've even given my dad a hug," he says. "It's hard to think about
that, you know. And then you realize it might be that long again."
They
still talk on the phone weekly, though. Phillips, who earned a
paralegal degree in prison, even walked his son through how to set up a
business when he became a graphic designer. "He keeps me on the straight
and narrow," the younger Phillips says, "even from prison."
Four
out of five of Phillips' kids are either in college or already have
degrees, something he says happened because he kept after his kids
during those weekly phone calls. He has a daughter in law school. "One
of her motivations to be a lawyer was to get her dad out of prison,"
Phillips says.
When he talks to his kids, Phillips says he rarely
talks about his appeals and requests for a new hearing. And he never
speaks of prison. He wants to hear about what they're doing and just
continues to tell them he'll fight the court system for his freedom --
eventually.
Elroy Phillips Jr. says he shares his father's
confidence, even though he has so far been unable to convince a judge to
hold the hearing. "I know he's going to get out," Elroy Jr. said. "It's
gonna happen. I know it."
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