Hunger Games

Stealing!  This is the Number One Worst Thing you can do in prison.  Funny, huh?  When you think that some of us ended up in here for exactly that offense!  But in here stealing from one another gets you outcast status pronto.  You can get in an argument, call the other dude’s mom a name, punch him, whatever, and an hour later all is good.  But get caught stealing from another Guest?  You’re done.  Shunned like a leper.

On the other hand, taking what you can from the BOP – no problem.  Which, sadly, has become the Captain’s latest point of emphasis.  His new rules include no second helpings at meals, no slipping uneaten food back to your cubbie for later (not even a banana or an apple), and no kitchen items like muffins, quesadillas, etc. hitting the Black Market.

From the Captain’s point of view, I’m sure it’s about losing money, repressing criminal thinking and extortion, and so on.  What he may not have considered is that we just don’t get enough to eat.  Picture grown men subsisting on three school lunches a day, single serve, no extras.  Especially those of us who try to stay active for our mental and physical well-being.  They say we can always buy food from the commissary, but that’s impractical when you consider that the average library clerk now earns about $9.50/month and a spare shopping list might include 1 box oatmeal/week, 1 bag of healthy nuts/week, maybe 2 protein bars/week and, the only luxury, a bag of instant coffee/week.  Add in a bottle of Advil/month for assorted aches and pains and you’ve spent $67.85 in a month.  That $9.50 paycheck just doesn’t cover it.  A lot of us don’t get money from home.  So can you blame us for slipping an apple in a pocket from time to time?

You might say that I’m just rationalizing criminal behavior, but the way I see it, being behind bars is our punishment.  We just want to stay as healthy as we can and get home when our time’s up.  I’m not advocating for Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, or Panera – just asking not to be hungry all the time!  Every day!  So, you may be thinking, get a second prison job to make a little more cash.  Against the rules!  Switch to a higher paying job?  Well, on the compound there are about 150 so-called premium jobs, and there are 1,350 of us vying for them.  Negotiate your pay?  LOL.  So we’re in a tough position.  Picking up a banana or bag of chips that would end up in the garbage otherwise doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me.

But if you get caught doing so, the punishment is – wait for it – no commissary for 3-6 months.  So then you cannot buy any food even if you do have the money!  Repeat offenders even end up in the SHU.  So, my usual refrain applies – you just have to shake your head, chuckle, and carry on.  Would be nice, though, if you could cancel your reservation at this establishment.  I hear the Motel 6 always has a light on…. 

Captain's Rules

I know my blog posts fluctuate between incredulous and maudlin, but most people here – both the “guests” and the guards – live those extremes.  Their actions and attitudes rarely keep to the middle of the road.  For instance, the guards are either so extremely lazy and uninvolved that they might as well be just cardboard cut-outs, or they’re so over-the-top amped and antagonistic that they do nothing but stir up trouble.  Is it asking too much to have quietly professional guards?  I don’t want to go off on a rant, but if you’ve ever read Orwell’s Animal Farm or heard about the Stanford Prison Experiment (I understand there’s a new film about that), then you may be able to imagine how our new belligerent Captain has emboldened a few uneducated knuckleheads to abuse their power over us.

We’ve begun to wonder to what lengths he will allow the guards to go.  I try to tone down some of the ridiculousness of all this when I share it with you, because “who would actually believe it?”  But here’s an example that may help clarify what I mean.  During the baseball playoffs, the tv room has always stayed open until the game ends.  One tv shows the game, but the others may be playing something on other stations.  No big deal.  Until the Captain decided that only MLB could be watched after hours.  When we made the mistake of not following that rule one night, a guard marched in, turned off all the tv’s and demanded to know who had been watching an unauthorized non-baseball station!  Of course, everyone had been watching the game (wink, wink).  So the guards decided that they could tell who’d broken the rule by where they were sitting in the room, threatening “shots” (disciplinary action) for all of us who had until their arrival simply been peacefully watching tv. 

It seems like every hour of every day some stupid behavior like this happens.  We’re all just hoping to ride it out until the Captain moves on.  Word is he wants to be a Warden and hopefully that will happen – only, please, somewhere else!  As for how nutty we guests behave, see my other posts.  For most of us, though, it all rolls off our backs.  I remind myself daily to remember kindness and compassion.  Everyone wants someone to listen to their pain, and I try whenever possible to be that guy for others.  The benefit?  You definitely hear some stories you’d never hear anywhere else!  Okay, it’s cool and drizzly today.  Gotta go grab my orange hat and say hi! to the Captain!

The Great Hat Debacle

The day had finally arrived, to great fanfare:  HAT DAY!  September 30.  Captain Douchebag (sorry if that offends, but it’s the nicest nickname he has, don’t even want to repeat the others) finally decided that yes it was finally cold enough in the mornings and after sunset to allow prisoners to wear their hats outdoors.  Glory Be!  Hallelujah!  I slapped my hat on my chilly bald head and happily strolled outside to greet the day.

But wait, what’s this?   Down by the guard shack some kind of fracas is underway.  Guys lined up, handing their hats over to the guards.  As I draw closer, I hear, “He’s changed his mind, now says it will be cold enough to wear hats on October 8^th.”  WTF?  But I’m cold now.  That’s crazy!  The complaints rain down on the guards, some of whom allow us to at least stow our hats in our pockets instead of confiscating them.

Flash ahead – it’s October 8 – heading out the door with my hat on!  But then I meet guys coming the other way, saying, "Nope, now it’s October 12^th, take it off!"  At this point even the least cynical, bitter, angry, etc., person among us (the guy I try to be) has to admit the Captain is just f—king with us.  To rub it in, the loudspeaker announces that wearing your hat can earn you a Shot (disciplinary report) for being out of uniform.  When pointed out to a guard that technically we would be “in too much” uniform, since the prison issues us our hats, dude did not even smile, responding with a gentle (sorry kids for the language), “Shut the Fuck Up!

Well, on the 12^th, lo and behold, we wear our hats outdoors without incident.  And you have never seen grizzled, hardened men so giddy with delight!  Sight was funny, entertaining and sad at the same time.  But wait, not done yet.  Remember the title of this post is not “The Hat Incident”.  It’s a full-blown Debacle.

So all of a sudden there’s a new rule that we can’t wear our hats in the chow hall.  Why is this a problem?  Well, normally you walk in, and while waiting by the door you leave your hat on, grab your tray, sit down, remove hat, and eat.  If you forget, a guard just reminds you and you take it off, no big deal.  But now, the Captain has decided that when we walk in the chow hall we must pluck our hats from our heads and THROW THEM AWAY!  In the trashcan!  One lieutenant particularly loves this idea, our throwing out our headgear willy-nilly.  But then an older lieutenant is overheard telling him, “I don’t care what the captain says, this is stupid.  Here’s the problem.  The gray caps are bought with the prisoners’ own money at the store.  If they have a receipt and you make them throw it away, they can file a tort claim and the prison will have to pay them, which means paperwork, hassle, money.   The tan hats are given to them as clothing, they’re BOP property, so if you make them throw it away, then we have to give them a new one!" To which the new lieutenant replies, “I don’t give a shit!”

Next morning a long line of guys shows up at the laundry seeking new hats.  The officer there unleashes a string of expletives but agrees that they should get them.  Only problem is, the storeroom is out of tan hats.  They only have one box of orange – and I mean hunter’s vest orange – hats.  So he passes them out to about 25 guys and says he’ll order more.  These hats, it turns out, are nicer than the tan ones.  This guard earns the rarely bestowed “he’s cool for a guard” label.  Because he did the logical thing, giving hats to men who needed them, and also, even cooler, said, “Fuck the Captain.”  Which now means that every bright orange hat in our sad little world represents a stab at the Captain.  I’m sure you can guess how this goes over.

Next day, on Captain’s orders, all orange hats must be confiscated.  He apparently thinks they are contraband sneaked in from another compound or something.  He demands that all inmates must have laundry issued tan hats.  But you know, it only took two prisoners who absolutely positively refused – they stuck out their hands for the cuffs, said, “Take me to the SHU!” – for the captain to storm off to the laundry to figure out where these outlandish orange hats came from.  You should have seen his face when the laundry officer told him, “Damn straight I issued the orange hats!  It’s MY laundry and it’s YOUR people who threw the hats away!”  Huge round of applause.  I swear it was like the rousing nerd-stands-up-for-himself speech in a John Hughes film.  That is, if Hughes had shot the movie in prison and all the actors were tatted up and dressed in prison garb, but you get the point.  And get this, we kept our orange hats!  Ka-ching! One for the little man!

And let me just tell you, I do love my orange hat.  Even though it’s gotten a little warmer the past few days, you should have seen all the guys making a point of parading past the Captain, nodding smartly in their new orange hats!