Dealing with Overcrowding

Ever had to wait in line to take a shower?  Brush your teeth?  Use the phone?  The toilet?  Get hot water for your instant oatmeal?  Pick up your mail?  Lines!  People!  Crowds!  Aggghhhh!!!  This occasional inconvenience for most folks is almost an hourly event in prison.  And in the past few months it’s gotten steadily worse as our numbers increased from 145 people to 170 on the unit.  Per BOP guidelines, maximum capacity is no more than 2 men per each of the unit’s 62 spacious cubes.  That means we are zoned for 124 people.  And that’s crowded.  Now add 46 extra guys to the mix.  That’s 46 extra showers, 46 more trips to the toilet, 46 more crowded in the tv room, etc.  Everybody competing for resources, not always respectfully.  I’ve seen guys wait in line from 8:30 pm til after 10 just to get a shower.

Now I know that you may be reading this and thinking, “Boo hoo.  You’re in prison!  Lucky you even get to take a shower!”  I hear that.  You’re entitled to your opinion and yes it could definitely be worse in here.  But someday we’ll all be getting out.  The great early critic of American society Alexis de Tocqueville is one of many who has considered that fact in accordance with his belief that you judge a society based on how we treat the least among us – the poor, immigrants, the incarcerated.  Maybe crowding doesn’t seem like a big deal, but if you were in here, you’d get it.

For one thing, always having to compete for basic stuff like food, water, the toilet, it leads to stress and that leads inevitably to conflict.  As you may appreciate, most of the 170 guys on the unit don’t have graduate degrees in peaceful conflict resolution.  Preferred adaptive strategies include arguing, hustling, stealing, bullying, lying, cheating, etc.  The prison administration appears confused by all this discord.  They assume we’re just whiners, and respond by cracking down on petty rules that were never previously enforced, which only leads to more frustration.  Here’s an example:  If you are in line for a shower or the laundry the procedure has been to hang your towel or place your bag in line, so you don’t always have to stand there for an hour or more.  We all follow the plan, it works just fine.  Maybe your turn comes up, you’re not back yet, no problem, the next guy goes and you bump back one place in the line.  But now, out of the blue, we’ve got the guards walking along collecting the towels and laundry bags, tossing them in a bin and shouting, “No line saving!”  Really?  Seriously?

So here we have this vicious cycle developing.  But the one upside is that the sudden rule enforcement is pulling us all together, galvanizing us in a solid opposition to the administration.  Maybe, as some believe, this niggling crackdown is a ploy intended to distract us from the stifling overcrowding in here.  If so, I tip my hat to them (only not inside, since they won’t let us wear hats indoors anymore).  Score:  BOP 1, Us, 0.  Except, shhh, don’t tell.  I’ve got my hat on,   writing this with a contraband mechanical pencil while eating a muffin smuggled from the kitchen.  Small victories!