“He was a heavy in the Mexican Mafia,” Weiland says. Soon after his arrival, Weiland received some “kites” – a kind of unofficial inmate telegram – from a neighbor. Weiland left the room in handcuffs and was immediately transferred to his shoe box at Men’s Central. On August 13th, 1999, he had walked into the Los Angeles County courtroom of Judge Larry Paul Fidler, where Fidler told Weiland that he had run out of last chances: After repeatedly violating his probation on a 1997 conviction for heroin possession, the STP frontman was going to prison for a year. There was a huge part of me that didn’t want to go on.” “It was,” Weiland confides in a sudden hush, “a struggle not to commit suicide. It’s just your own head – the wheels inside, turning. You wrap yourself in your blanket and hope they don’t crawl all over you. “When the lights go out at night, the cockroaches come out. block there, which has bars – it also has rats and cockroaches,” he says brightly, as if comparing two pieces of real estate.

But to Weiland – inmate 6158735 – his accommodations were solitary confinement in all but name. As a member of an 11 million-selling rock band, the Stone Temple Pilots singer was deemed by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to be at risk in the general population of Men’s Central Jail in downtown L.A. Technically, Scott Weiland was in protective custody. It was a one-man cell, furnished with a bunk, a toilet and a wash basin, all made of steel.

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