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.