Shakedown!

8 am and the loudspeaker blares, “Shakedown!”  You can hear the groans echoing off the walls.  Nobody enjoys a shakedown, which involves the guards and sometimes the case manager and unit counselor rifling through your belongings.  They may be respectful of your things or they may not, but either way you can’t do a thing to stop them.  Usually one or two people are the target, but they hit the entire unit anyway.  The idea, I imagine, is to keep us all guessing who they’re after.  They go through everything, including personal photos, letters, even your underwear!

Safely ensconced in your living room at home it may be hard to understand how invasive this feels.  As I’ve written before, I share an 88-ish square foot living space with another guy.  I have one locker with roughly 9 cubic feet of storage and two clothes hooks.  Everything I may be said to “own” is stored in this restricted space.  Letters from my kids, my crochet projects, pictures, my journal.  All of it open to inspection on the whim of the authorities.  And I hate to have my possessions messed with.  Even on the outside I was like that.  But in prison, where we jealously hold onto whatever hint of privacy we can have, these searches feel like a violation.

Then when you consider that you may have accumulated some little extra thing to make life easier – maybe an extra pillow or blanket, a handmade shelf in your locker, a mesh bag for your shower stuff – and that they can confiscate it all, well, we hate that.  Guys do not like having to start from scratch after having paid or bartered for that confiscated item.

Shakedowns seem calculated to interfere with our sleep, too, and guys in here take that seriously.  But the reason we really hate these invasions is that they’re most often instigated by a snitcher.  Somebody is not minding his own business.  He's snooping on others even when nobody’s bothering him in any particular way.  So you may have that precious second pillow swept up because of somebody else’s petty beef or their desire to curry favor with the staff.  This violates a cardinal rule of prison life:  mind your own business, keep your mouth shut.  If it doesn’t affect you, let it go.  And if it does affect you, work it out without getting the staff involved.  Because that brings the heat down on all of us.