A rapper’s time in solitary

DMX is very familiar with the U.S. justice system, said Mark Anthony Green in GQ. The 48-year-old rapper, born Earl Simmons, has been to jail some 30 times, for charges ranging from drug possession to robbery to impersonating an FBI agent. Raised by an abusive and violent mother, DMX was first arrested at age 10 for arson. And for most of his life, he didn’t mind being locked up. “I’d be like, ‘I’m going to jail and [I’ll] have fun.’ People were sneaking weed in. I was sneaking into different cellblocks and battling rappers.” He finished his most recent stint in January, having served a year for tax evasion. DMX spent much of his sentence in solitary, punishment for paying other inmates for their phone time and for being caught by guards with a bag of wine. The worst thing about the hole, he says, is the way guards try “to make your time harder. They give you rubber pencils. I swear to God, a pencil that bends. I’m saying to myself, ‘How do they make lead bend?’” Now that he’s achieved real success in the outside world, the multiplatinum rapper admits, his last visit to prison was a lot harder. “Because I knew that at any given time I could be smoking a cigarette and enjoying a glass of Hennessy, eating what I want. There’s so much more to life.”