Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (48 page)

He comes in to my world, my life, and tells me roo-roo-rah, some old punk-ass motherfucker shit that’s going to get me killed if I don’t put up some force fields in his mind to get his ding-dong ass off of me. So I tell him, get off of me. If you don’t get off of me, I’ll teach you how to get off of me. And he leans that, and he turns that around and he tells the inmate, you get up against that wall and shake down.

And then he learns his man from getting the man and when they feel real secure, then they have to get them 115s in before I get to parole, because they want to get them 115s in because they don’t want to ever let me go, because if they let me go they lose the best thing they’ve got because they feel secure as long as they got me locked up in a cell. And they feel like—yeah, they feel like they got the man right there in the box where they can go back and say what’s what to who and says where, and you represent and who in what part or whose courtroom, see.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: All right.

INMATE MANSON: Here’s the thing—let me say this to you Chief Thomas [sic]. When we—

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Hold up, hold up just a minute. My name—

INMATE MANSON: Brown—excuse me, Mr. Brown.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: My name is written right there and don’t you ever call me anything but that name right there. Do you understand?

INMATE MANSON: Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Now proceed.

INMATE MANSON: Sure. So it comes to this, it’s like, I’m not going to try to kid you. I’m not going to try playing nothing with you.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: And I’m not going to play with you and let me tell you something else—

INMATE MANSON: Now, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute—

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: No, no, no. you wait.

INMATE MANSON: Oh, you want to kick me out of here and [inaudible] go home.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: No, I’m not going to kick you out of here. No way I’m going to kick you out—

INMATE MANSON: Well, I just don’t—you know, like the words you like—

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Hold up. Will you—

INMATE MANSON: What do you want to prove here?

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: And I’m not going to tell Corrections what to do with you, but we’re going to follow some kind of decorum and procedure in this hearing room.

INMATE MANSON: Uh-huh.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: I’m going to let you go just a little bit longer on this that you’re talking about, then we’re going to move to your psych reports. Now go ahead.

INMATE MANSON: I reflect the procedure back to stay alive, man, and I’ve got to get nasty sometimes, because everybody you sending here working over me is not a nice guy, you know. I think if any of you have any experience in jail, you know that jail is not a very nice place to be.

And you have all kinds of different people in all kinds of different levels and I have to deal with all those levels. I have to deal with every kind of psychotic maniac you got in the world trying to burn me up, trying to beat me up, trying to get some attention to get me in any kind of direction he can. And I have to propose a certain image and keep a certain kind of guy stuck up there to keep those bullies off of me. Because if I show any weakness, if I fall down in any perspective, I get ate up because I run with a pack of wolves and I’ve got to be a wolf.

And when it reflects back to you that I’m a no-good so-and-so and so forth, I’m reflecting a procedure that’s reflected onto me. If I don’t have any other choice but to get a 115 to stay out of something more dangerous or more terrible, rather than stand—rather than stay out of my cell and fight this big old ugly guy, I’m going to call him a bunch of names so he’ll put it on paper. And then when he puts it on paper, I say, whew, boy, I didn’t have to go with that physically, then I could do it mentally.

As long as I run my jaw mentally and I get it put on the paper, then physically I can walk around all the violence and I can stay in peace and harmony.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Are you saying that you’re deliberately keeping yourself placed in a security holding unit?

INMATE MANSON: No, I’m saying that we’re all doing this. We all only use each other in different perspectives all the time. If the song’s saying, love won’t let you go—it ain’t got nothing to do with, love won’t let you go. It’s people who need you that they don’t want to let you go.

They need you for different reasons. They need you to feel secure in—because if they got guys they’re afraid of, you got two or three dudes over there that are bad and you’re afraid of them and you’re a correctional officer, but yet you got a guy over here that ain’t afraid of you. It’s like this woman come to work and she goes over to this guy and tells him, “Turn your radio down,” and he tells her, “Shove it right up your ass [inaudible],” run her off.

So she comes over to my cell and because she sees that he’s afraid of me, so she takes my radio away and looks back at him and says, “Humph.” So then she uses me to stand up over you, because in the darkness on the yard out there, you do what I tell you to do.

When you’re on that committee, I’ll do what you tell me to do. I’m the man in here. And that’s a fact.

[Off the Record]

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: This is Tape 2 in the case of Charles Manson, April the 21st, 1992, California State Prison, Corcoran, California.

We’re going to proceed to your psychiatric evaluations. You don’t have one. Well, you had one for this year, but you didn’t have one completed for the Board of Prison Terms specifically.

Bruce T. Reed, Ph.D., Clinic Psychologist, went over to see you on February the 19th and you refused to be evaluated. Any reason why?

INMATE MANSON: Yes, I had two other doctors trying to evaluate me at the same time. I couldn’t—I can’t write that many books.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: What doctors were trying to interview you at that time?

INMATE MANSON: Well, see the front side, you see the doctor coming to me to give me help. The back side, he get his information, he’ll go to Turkey. He’s over in France writing books about the psychotherapy or [inaudible] therapy—

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Which doctors came to visit you at the time Dr. Reed tried to get in?

INMATE MANSON: Dr. Christopherson, Dr. White.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Where are they from?

INMATE MANSON: Right here. Since then, I think Christopherson’s been fired for ethics violation of some sort. Then there’s Willis—Dr. Willis.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Willis came over to see you this—

INMATE MANSON: Willis has been my psychiatrist. We went through—if you’ll check the record, we went through two sessions. He said I was okay for level 3. He said that I was all right for level 3.

What this latest doctor wants is a—what’s happening out of Frisco is this law firm is coming up with new psych evaluation with the prisoners union. The prisoners union in San Quentin, they got a bunch of inmates to sign a suit for better psychiatric treatment. What that means is more political power because they’re using the psychiatric base to get their doctors in here so they can get doctors up over the uniform, so they can hold the reality up over the courts and the minds of the people that live inside the prisons. Because when they can do that, then they can do Vacaville.

See when I left Vacaville, there was 12 dead doctors there of heart attacks. Dr. Morgan was the last doctor that they found dead in the parking lot with his brains blown out. I went to doctors—

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Dr. Christopherson saw you on January the 24th of this year.

INMATE MANSON: Yes, sir.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: And in his report of that date, states that he went over to see you because you were not eating. Staff was concerned.

INMATE MANSON: Yes, he came to see me two or three times about that.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: But he didn’t appear to be concerned because he said you were eating something, either candy bars or canteen or—

INMATE MANSON: Yes, I fast a lot.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN:—or whatever, but he wasn’t concerned about your not eating. He talked about your paranoid delusional disorder at that time in his report.

INMATE MANSON: Perspective.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: He prescribed a plan for you and that was to put you on [inaudible] and said this will have two affects. One, they will support or deny the fact that he is on hunger strike, and they will also give the inmate a chance to get out of his cell on occasions as a form of environmental stimulation.

On the same vein, one, will have more frequent visits to the psychiatrist. This too will monitor signs and symptoms of active psychosis versus malingering; three, if indeed he’s on a hunger strike, he should be considered for the M.O.U. What’s M.O.U.?

INMATE MANSON: It’s some kind of—

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Memorandum of Understanding? If he does refuse psychotropic—

INMATE MANSON: Medical observation unit.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Medical observation unit.

INMATE MANSON: Uh-huh.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: If indeed he’s on a—if he does refuse psychotropic medications, we may ask him [inaudible] our decision, which is adjudged ordered involuntary medication. It should also be noted that we should have a careful monitoring of his intake and output including material from the canteen.

So he’s suggesting that you were kind of faking things a little bit.

INMATE MANSON: Whenever you do something beyond someone else’s understanding, and they don’t want to understand it, they—they’ll hate it and look at it as being bad. It doesn’t really—it isn’t really bad. I fast. I fast to tighten my stomach up. It makes me healthy. It’s a spiritual experience. Sometimes I go ten, 15, 30 days. Sometimes I go longer than that. I fast until I can get my mind straightened around.

Whenever—when a bad circumstance comes to me and I have to deal with the mental situation all around me, I’m surrounded by inmates and officers and all kinds of things beyond your comprehension, I have to sit and I have to balance all those things in my mind.

So what I do is I quit eating, and when I quit eating, what happens is that everything trusts, and trust is going one way, but trust it goes the other way too. I’m your economy. If I don’t eat, then you don’t know whether I’m trusting you, because the only way you know if I trust you is if I eat from your hands.

So I hold all the trust with the food and when I don’t eat, then everybody gets scared and they start going through—they’re not sure and then I’m paranoid, because anything around me is going to be my fault because I’m the last chicken in line.

One chicken—the dogs bark at the chickens and the chickens get to pecking on each other and then you get the last chicken in line and they just peck him till he’s either gone, or they get it straightened around, you know.

And like, being the last chicken in line, I have to take up the slack, so I—what I do is I quit eating. And then all the fat people that can’t quit eating, they start going through a lot of changes when I show them I’m about ten times stronger then they ever thought about dreaming about.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Let me ask you something, now that you got the fat joke out. What have you done in all the years that you’ve been on prison that this panel or anybody could look at that would indicate that there’s been a change in Charles Manson?

INMATE MANSON: I change all the time, sir. Every day I’m going to change.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: Well, I can’t measure that. You have to tell me.

INMATE MANSON: Can I ask you a couple questions? What did you do before this—so I know what foundation in your mind where I can speak to you from? You got any jurisprudence? You got any correctional officer experience or policeman or what?

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: I don’t think you need to know that. All you need to know is—

INMATE MANSON: Can I ask you?

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Just answer the question.

DEPUTY BOARD COMMISSIONER BROWN: All you need to know is that I’m sitting on this panel today.

INMATE MANSON: Okay. Well, we’ll go to the judge. The judge sits on the bench and he takes in his mind the crime. It comes to him for judgment. If it goes through his understanding and he watches it, judge itself. The judge really doesn’t judge it. He judges—he lets the district attorney and it passes through his understanding.

He does this six hours a day, seven days a week, five days a week. He retires 65 years old. He’s done that for 8,000 hours. I’ve done the same thing all my life, 24 hours a day, so I’m about 15 street poor judges in my mind. In other words, I know more about law than anybody in the world. I know more about courts and procedures and criminology and penology and procedure than any card shark dealing devils off the bench in Monte Carlo.

I know more about the economy, more about money, more about the government than any ten presidents you got. You know, in other words, I’ve sat in solitary confinement and I’ve watched everything you guys do, and the truth is you’re all lying to yourselves, you know. And like—

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: Mr. Manson, you’re not answering Mr. Brown’s question.

INMATE MANSON: I’m not?

PRESIDING BOARD COMMISSIONER KOENIG: No. He asked you what have you done in the institution to show the Board of Prison Terms and society that you’ve changed?

INMATE MANSON: I’m real with you. I don’t pretend. I’m not bringing you a bunch of phony garbage. I’m not trying to tell you that I’m a good guy. I’m just myself, whatever that is. I believe in God and I do the best I can every day by everybody I can, you know. When something bad comes up, I react bad to it, you know. I can fight. I can’t read and write too good, but boy I can fight. You wouldn’t believe how I could fight because I’ve been fighting all my life to survive, and I live right on that edge of survival, you know. I just survive.