What Jail is Like in California, Part I

Brought into the back door of the jail in handcuffs, interviewed by a bald, fat guy in a shiny disco shirt and a gold pendant, sitting up high behind a long desk (presumably so the criminal cannot lunge across to attack him), he asked personal statistics, color of eyes, weight, etc. When he got to, "What is your sexual preference?" having never been asked that before by such a person, I was confused and replied, "Tall, dark and handsome." He got mad and yelled, "Are you gay?" "Oh," I said. "Do I have a better time in the cell if I say yes?" Yanked away moments later by a dark-haired woman stuffed into her black guard uniform, I was shoved into a cement-lined room and told to strip off all my clothes. Jail clothes (grey-black stripes, for real) were shoved through a slot and I was told to put them on. In one of many rooms over the next 27 days I would be left in for indeterminate amounts of time, I put on the clothes then sat down to wait, then stood staring disgusted at the toilet and sink, then paced, then waited, then sat down. She came back. "Follow the yellow line," she yelled, a prison version of the yellow brick road, except this one is to hell rather than Oz. Each time we paused, she'd yell, "Face the wall." Into an elevator with three guards, all as if they have permanent sneers plastered on their faces. Into a wide reception area with a metal staircase, a guard desk, a tinted glass guard post looming above and several "blocks" of cells with different names, the names being A, B, C and D. I was in black-grey stripes which matched D, which was also called Classification, where they put you when they don't know what to do with you yet. Each command to do something is in the form of an angry yell. "Pick up that bucket!" "Pick up that roll of bedding." "Take your shit up to that door." "Open the door. I said, open the door." You enter D Block. Sometimes other inmates are roaming around the main room, sometimes they're in their cells; depends on what time it is, which you never get to know, no matter how many times you ask, no matter how you ask and there are no clocks in view. Then you hear the commands bodiless, yelled through a bad intercom. It yells which cell you are to go to, by number. You walk up the stairs with your bucket and bedding and thin plastic mattress. A loud metallic click goes off and your door opens. If you're lucky, when you enter, no one else is in there. But nine times out of ten somebody is in there and they're in the bottom bunk, that being the best one, and they're staring at you and you don't know who they are or what they've been accused of doing and they don't know you from Adam, either. So wary glances and hellos are exchanged and you try to put your stuff down as unobtrusively as possible and try to make your bed above them with them right there at knee level and you try to not step on any of their stuff as you climb up to your bunk since the only way to get up there is to stand on the desk.

The cell is longish, relatively speaking since it's small. Cement walls painted beige. A long florescent ceiling light, always on at some level, 24 hrs/day. What is there is made of metal, a metal toilet attached to a metal sink, one cleverly designed, ugly as hell unit. A metal desk riveted to the wall, a metal stool riveted to the floor. The beds metal riveted to the walls. One window made of a thick opaque, textured glass with the majority covered by a metal panel. One of the commands is often, "Get that shit out of the window." Since the only shelf is the window ledge for the top bunk, you tend to put things there but it's considered such a bad thing to do as if you may be tunneling through the opaque glass. The small slice of glass above the metal panel is a godsend because it makes you know if it's day or night although you can't actually see anything but a bit of light. Part of that light, though, appears as moving, long diamond shapes and they are what you can see of the sheriffs' cars coming in and out of the jail so you can tell if they're coming or going by if the diamonds are white or red. That makes the reality of the fact that there must still be something outside stronger. It's helpful. Sometimes a train goes by and you can hear it. When that would happen I would put my hand on the cool glass and this was a treat for me; I made it a daily thing to look forward to and always do; a ritual. The train whistle and the coolness of the glass against my hand, a single pleasure during the day and night.

Female and male guards, all professionals which translates as cold and mean or at best formal and maybe a sympathetic heart? One hoped to be able to detect that. Wasn't common. A large number of them, however, clearly sadistic personalities who had found employment that suited their psychoses very well. Enjoyed torturing the tortured, so palpably true. Always in at least two's and oddly superstitious. Like they wouldn't let the smiling woman who had allegedly murdered her entire family even out of her cell for a single stretch though she had no way of defending herself much less attacking considering they are all heavily armed and in at least twos with the guard tower of tinted glass looking over. Like they believed evil was catching, though a lot of the time they were so very much more evil than the typical inmate. The typical inmate, at least in the women's jail, being sad, lost drug addicts, in there for a drug charge, a violation of their probation because they didn't pass a drug test, or in for a crime like robbery because they needed drugs. They said that 85% of all women in America's prisons are in for drugs or related to drugs charges. I don't know if that's true. I'd say the percentage was far higher than that in our jail. I'd say it neared 99%. Imagine if drugs were legalized. Imagine if instead of jail these women automatically went to rehab. Imagine if they got counseling, job training. Imagine all the money taxpayers spend on overcrowded jails totally relieved. Imagine drug traffic taken out of the hands of the truly criminal element. Imagine all the taxes that could be levied like is done on cigarettes. But we've all heard this all before. Still, when you're there, it hits home. Once in a while I'd notice an inmate that did seem evil, did seem dangerous but mostly that wasn't the feeling they'd exude. So I asked one of my cellmates about it. She said yeah, in there you know there's two types, the criminal is one and the other is "women who've gotten in trouble". Like I said, it seemed to me that by far the most were the second type. So why is all the cruelty necessary? Why do they have to sit all day every day doing nothing but hoping they can get out? Why is ricitivism ok in this country?

I remember the day I lost it. I was alone in the cell and for the third week in a row the commissary forgot my order so that I didn't have paper, ink, or stamps, which is a big deal when you have no other contact with the outside world. And when I begged them to find it, they laughed at me and I started shaking the door and screaming. And then I couldn't breathe and then I started screaming worse and the emergency buttons, which nobody is supposed to push, started being pushed by every inmate on my floor. Didn't know I could scream that loud or long. Only one deputy came running. I could hear her weapons jangling. She opened my door with a key rather than the machine unlock. By then I was heaving into my ugly toilet. On my knees, my face down and swollen, I told her my story. This hardened woman in a guard's black uniform started crying. She said she thought a lot about if something happened that ended her up in there, how she couldn't handle it. She knew she wouldn't be able to. The next morning I warily walked down the stairs during unlock to the rest of the inmates, worried what reaction they were going to have to my screaming the night before. The woman who allegedly stabbed to death nine times that drug dealer a few years ago, came up to me and hugged me hard. She said in my ear how they all knew how I felt; that it was ok, that I was going to be ok. Later others told me ways of coping. "When you get out, you tell them all you were at a fantastic health spa," one said, and strutted across the floor in her stripes as if she were a movie star and everyone laughed. I think it was then that I had "earned my stripes" (I realize the irony of this statement); they let me be the one to do the crossword completely in a couple of minutes and bragged to new inmates to leave me alone because I was that smart. They shared their commissary orders with me, which was incredibly generous. I can't tell you how generous that was. It was generous like tears come to your eyes. One gave me a small bag of chips, so amazing. One gave me her envelope. One gave me the insert of her pen (we weren't allowed the whole pen since it can be used as a weapon). Humanity at its grandest in the form of cheap little gifts. People can be so lovely.

That was by the time I was in C Block, in green stripes. I wasn't in D Block, nobody is, long, being Classification. But when I was in there I met one of the kindest people I've ever met in my life. Her name was Anna and she came in for attacking a woman in a department store for saying something bad about her mama. She was in for felony assault. She was terrified, a very short, portly woman with sleep apnea who snored like a hydraulic lift. She was too afraid to go outside the cell, which meant she never bathed or got trays of food. I gave her my food since I couldn't eat I was so scared. I hadn't eaten in a long time. She started telling me I had to eat. I wouldn't. She tried all kinds of ways, rationally, angrily, sympathetically, I wouldn't. She wouldn't give up. One day she said, sadly, "Just eat this orange." I reluctantly ate part of the rind. After that I could eat again. She told me funny stories. About the butt party her brother held where he took pictures of everyone's butts (before the party) and blew them up like posters and hung them all over the party room and gave $300 to the person who could identify the most butts. All the men at the party got mad because none of their wives or girlfriends could identify their butts. Anna nailed both her boyfriend's and her brother's butts so she won the money. She told me about her dog who could talk and carried a small pink purse in its mouth when they went for a walk. I cried and held Anna tightly the day they took her out for not bathing and made her move to another facility. I told them I didn't care that she stunk; to please let her stay. Then they really wanted to take her out. "You aren't supposed to be FRIENDS," one guard said as mean as she could muster. What do you think your response to that would be? Believe me, if you're smart you say it silently.