A few hours before dawn, when the 150 men in his giant steel cage are finally silent, Stan Craddock wakes and thinks about God. He knows, lying there on his lower bunk, that the day's lesson will be Matthew 10:27: "What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light, and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops." Just before dawn, when his prayer circle claps to bring Jesus to the Richmond City Jail, that's what he preaches, practically shouting over the squeal of aging pipes, the jangle of jailers' keys, the shouts echoing off concrete walls.

 

Alonzo Scott is on the edge of exploding. He's standing beside a blackboard, trembling. Four dozen men have just filed into the school tier, the cinder-block and steel cage where Scott lives. They walk past the bunk beds where some of their classmates sleep and settle down in the 20-by-20-foot space that serves as a classroom. The clang of iron doors slamming echoes off concrete and tile. It's another morning, just like all the other mornings in the Richmond City Jail, where the empty hours and the rumbling undertone of threatened violence make doing time harder than in the toughest state prisons, many inmates say.

 

Julie Haines runs her hand across her wide belly, pressing her swollen fingers along the top curve. The baby is restless. It's almost time. Her due date is weeks away, but she knows she won't make it that long. A mother twice over, the birth doesn't scare her. But detoxing in jail does.

 

Sheriff's deputy Anthony Washington pushes open the sky-blue iron door to a cage full of demands. The smile has dropped from his face. As he steps next to the bars of the Richmond City Jail's F-2 wing, he scans the crowd of shouting inmates, who are clustered by the front of a cage packed with 140 men. But he's not listening. He's looking for the tensed muscle, the glaring eyes that say a fight's about to happen, the slumped bodies of men who are ill or high or beaten up.

 

Getting out, like most things in jail, involves a lot of waiting. Felix Thomas practically was hanging on the bars waiting for the deputies to lead him out, a broad grin creasing his face. But he didn't forget to call back to another inmate not to touch his stuff: a stack of court papers, a copy of the Quran and two badly worn atlases, all carefully tied together with strips of cloth.