It's the Little Things

You might think that a federal government entity spending billions of your tax dollars to incarcerate citizens at the highest rate in the civilized world would at least do so in an organized fashion.  Consider that depending on your source, each healthy guest of the Bureau of Prisons costs between $45000 and $95000 each year to keep behind bars.  This does not include investigative costs, the economy’s loss of taxpaying citizens who are in jail, and the medical expenses for aging and sickly inmates.  With that budget, you’d think the BOP would have all this down to a science, right?  All top notch and well done?

Not even close.  It’s the dumb, little things that keep me chuckling, the absurdity surrounding trivial matters.  Examples?  I have lots, but they may not strike you as funny as they do me.  For instance:

Signs professionally produced in a sign shop with misspellings and grammatical errors, such as:

• Seen at the Chow Hall:  “Your Allowed to Bring….” (Not You Are or You’re)
• The same sign in Spanish reading “I am Allowed to Bring….” (not You Are)
• Both signs saying that you may bring in the following list of condiments:  “hot sauce.”  (That’s right, the whole list consists of one item.)

Bulletins are posted and reposted due to grammatical mistakes, such as:

• Invite to a lecture:  “All Our Well Come.”
• Recreational Rules:  “Yard May Close at Any Time for Inherent Weather.”
• Sports Team Posting:  “Cop Outs Must have Real Names, No Knick Names or APBs.”
• (We guess that must mean nicknames or AKAs, but maybe Carmelo Anthony is just not allowed to play.  All of us in here, too, are well past the All Points Bulletin stage.)
• By the way, if you ever dare to make note of these mistakes, the guards get all indignant about it.

Ah, the guards!  Miscounting once, twice, three times per shift because they cannot keep the sequence of numbers in their heads.  Lest you forget, our cubes amount to just about 45 square feet of standable floor space.  The two or three guys in each cube must stand silent and unmoving while the count goes on.  The guards can use pen and paper if they need to, while walking up and down the rows.  Yet they still lose track constantly.

The day before an outside inspection, suddenly sexual harrassment/assault signs that are required by law appear taped to walls, scribbled on notebook paper.  You can tell this is a real priority for the administration.

Sometimes the furnace breaks down and it can get cold in here.  The guards – bundled in hats, scarves, windstopper fleece, etc. – order us to take our hats off because, “It ain’t that cold!”  Don’t get me started on how the guards butcher the language, then make fun of us for being idiots.

In a strange way, these little things help keep me sane in here.  Leaving me with the question:  Is it worse that the guards think they are good at their jobs or that they take themselves so seriously?  Will have to get back to you on that.

Goose Sh*t Crazy

Maybe you’ve used the phrase, “Never seen anything like it!”  Most of the time you've said it probably just to emphasize your point, not to say that you really haven’t ever seen such a stunning/incredible/amazing thing.  We say it all the time in prison, because, well, prison.  Along with its corollaries:  “Craziest sh*t I’ve ever seen!” and “That’s some crazy sh*t!”  I teach an English as a Second Language class where we teach the guys “Esta mierda es loca!”  A more or less literal translation.

Anyway, it finally happened.  If you know me you will have trouble believing this, but I was actually left speechless by something I saw!  And I mean no, I’ve never seen anything like it before.  The other witnesses were equally stunned, but even more surprised I think to see me standing there gob-smacked and unable to speak.

Okay, have I built this up enough?  Are you ready?  Okay.  I mean are you really ready?  Here we go.  Setting is a sunny winter day, 45 degrees, out on the walking track.  I’m with my fellow ESL instructors having some nonsensical, non-prison-related conversation.  About 20 yards ahead of us, strolling along, is one of the many guys in prison with the moniker Doc.  (This guy, though, actually was a former OB/GYN – a guy with Internet connections checked him out.)  Well, this particular Doc has a few quirks.  For instance, he has an imaginary dog name Spirit, writes thriller novels with OB/GYN alien themes (don’t even ask).  You get the picture.  But in prison is this odd, strange, unique, insane?  Meh.  But um, well, back to the bucolic day (I know bucolic is a stretch for a walking track behind barbed wire, but cut me some slack, this is prison, okay!)   

So we’re strolling along, trying to mentally escape the place for a few minutes.  Up ahead Doc can be heard delivering an extremely pedantic lecture on Nutrition to another inmate who seems to be intensely listening to his instruction.  Calories…nutrients…minerals… digestion…healthy…get used to it, etc.  Seemed normal enough.  Then they stop and as we draw closer we hear Doc ask, “Are you ready?  The first time is the hardest.”  He then leans over, picks up a fresh, steamy goose turd (mierda de gansos), pops one in his mouth, chews, swallows, and hands the second delicacy to his student.  Who obediently follows suit and devours the turd.

Drop the mic.  Leave the stage.  We have a winner!  Stunned silence.  Even awe.  Maybe some nerves and fright.  Just to make sure they got all their nutrition, they took 4-5 more snack breaks as they walked their laps.  I got nothin’!  Maybe you aren’t as stunned.  Maybe you had to be there.  But….

In class the next day we tried to tell the story to the Spanish guys in our best broken Espanol.  We also taught them a common English idiom with a slight change (and yes, I understand that this is incorrect Spanish, but it’s part of the joke).  “Loco como la mierda de murcielago” has become “Loco como la mierda de gansos!”  Literally, “crazy like the sh*t of a bat (batsh*t crazy) has become “crazy like the sh*t of geese” (goose sh*t crazy).  We had so much fun over this and laughed so hard that one of the guards came in to ask what was so funny.  One of our students replied with his distinct Mexican accent, “It’s just we love the English so much!  Go Trump!  Build the Wall!”  She smiled and told us we were doing a great job.