Prison Science

Step aside, Bill Nye the Science Guy, for a new installment of Cutting Edge Prison Science.  What you are about to read is agreed upon FACTUAL information as approved by unit consensus:

FACT ONE:  The reason diabetes is so prevalent among African American men is their high rate of unprotected sex.  (How does this matter, you might ask?  And um, what?)  The prison scientist explains that diabetes is actually a sexually transmitted disease initially planted in black women by the Government to weaken their men.

DISCLAIMER:  Please remember, I do not, in fact could not, make this stuff up and I am in no way endorsing these important scientific discoveries.  That said:

FACT TWO:  Sweat is the body’s way of getting rid of disease.  That’s why you should always workout in multiple layers of clothing, no matter how hot it is, so you can “trap” all illness away from your body.

FACT THREE (as shared by two keen prison scientists):

Genius 1:  I hear the flu is going around.

Genius 2:  Yeah, that sh*t is bad, it gets everywhere.

Genius 1:  Yo, you know how that joint got its name?

Genius 2:  No, how?

Genius 1:  ‘Cause them germs can fly, they from birds, so they like flew (flu) from one fool to another!

Genius 2:  Wait, I thought flu and flew spelled different?

Genius 1:  Come on fool (laughing).  You know back in them prehistoric days MFers couldn’t spell!

Genius 2:  (Nods head.)  You right.

FACT FOUR:  Trump’s border wall will definitely work, because everyone knows that “Mexicans hate to climb!”  (I don’t even know where to go with that one; that statement is crazy in so many ways.)

And my favorite Scientific Prison Fact, are you ready?

FACT FIVE:  Asians are good at math because they are so little!  (Not a person in this conversation skipped a beat at this obvious truth, despite all being basketball fiends who no doubt have heard of 7’6” Yao Ming formerly of the Houston Rockets.  No, this is an iron-clad fact not to be disputed, period.)

You know, this would make a good tv show.  Fake News is popular now, what about a show on Fake Science?  We could start by debunking the Global Warming Hoax (clearly a government plot to take away our cars), move on to the President’s discovery that we are all born with a finite amount of energy that is dispersed by too much exercise, and move right into my collection of prison science factoids.  Anyone interested?  We could get rich!

Crazy, Crazier, Craziest

I’m on a mission to come up with the ultimate life in prison slogan, the one true phrase, a clear concise statement that will summarize the essential situation, the massive totality of the experience.  This may be impossible, but I pursue it with the tenacity of Sisyphus, the old Greek king of myth condemned to push a rock up a mountain only to see it roll back down again.

I have tried out “In Prison What’s Up is Down and What’s Down is Up” (as compared to the outside world).  Evidence for this Opposite World claim includes the many terms in use to characterize incidents that do not make any sense.  Like the Inuit’s having so many words for snow, in here that sort of creativity is reserved for variations on “crazy.”  For instance:

C-r-a-a-a-a-a-z-y!

That’s sh*t’s ridiculous!

That sh*t don’t make no sense!

Dat N___er’s Craaazy! (Used only by black guys)

That man is burnt (for the behavior of someone who has been in prison so long (18, 19, 20 years) that they make no sense at all).

That sh*t is twisted!

That’s some bullsh*t.

Basically you can start with “That’s some….” Or “That sh*t’s….” and finish the sentence with almost anything.  I’m trying to popularize a few of my own, such as:

That’s some gobbledygook!

That’s some poppycock!

That sh*t’s incomprehensible!

That sh*t’s apocryphal!

And my favorite, based on the unwritten prison rule that curse words must be included in any exclamation, thus improving the import of the message:

That sh*t’s some sh*tty sh*t!

To my great disappointment, so far my additions to the crazy lexicon do not seem to have caught on.  But each day seems to offer new opportunities to try them out.  For instance, the administration has just announced that we will no longer be allowed to have Sharpie pens.  Why?  Were people graffiti-scrawling the walls?  Nope.  Were they being used for some other illicit purpose?  Possibly, I guess, but wrong again.  We were told that some people had begun labeling their possessions with their real names and that sort of behavior must be discouraged.  What behavior, exactly?  Acting to protect your belongings?   Please choose any of the above listed phrases re this new rule (as we have).

Trick is not to give it too much thought, or you’ll go crazy too, and then they’ll have to come up with a phrase to describe you!  Instead, I’ll keep looking for that perfect one sentence prison description.  After all, the rock won’t push itself, and the mountain just keeps getting steeper!

Transgender Politics

"She" is a very innocuous word out in the world, as we call life beyond the fence.  In a men's prison, things are different and that word can mean a number of things that at times can get confusing.  Forgive my slang, it's how we talk in here, but you have the Queens who refer to each other as she but are cool with everyone else referring to them with the masculine pronoun.  Then you have the homophobes who can't deal with that concept, but this being an easy-going (relatively speaking) low security prison, they have learned to co-exist.  Some guys, however, insist on everyone calling them by feminine names and pronouns, and that pushes the envelope a little, so you'll hear some harsh words.  For example, Hater Dude pushes through a crowd, grumbling, "Move over, Joe."  Joe, who insists on being called Jane, ignores him and the next thing you know the names being used are things like b__ch and d__khead.  Usually it's just posturing.  We all live on a tightrope, trying not to fall off.

About a month ago something happened that made the tightrope bounce.  This will forever be known as T-Day or Tranny Arrival Day.  The BOP announced its official policy on transgender inmates, granting them protection as a minority.  As a result, we now have four card-carrying transgender prisoners.  I do mean -- literally -- card-carrying.  They were issued a special identification card that allows them to receive hormone therapy to help them assume a feminine shape, wear bras and panties as underwear, and style their hair long.  But think about this for a moment.  In a men's prison, we now have four inmates who not only identify as women but who clearly look the part and have the BOP's official permission to do so.

I'm sure you can imagine how this has blown up our world.  Guys are fawning all over the ladies.  Alpha Male chest-puffery has gone off the chain.  Other guys storm up and down the block raging over this "abomination" as an offense to God that should be punished.  Most, myself included, take a live-and-let-live approach.  Except for the both scary and welcome disruption to our dreary routine, we could care less.  The problem, as with most things in life, is that those with the loudest voices get the most attention.  So at any time of the day or night, the Haters and the guys now being called Tranny Lovers can fall into some very loud arguments.

Then as you'd expect, the number of late night bathroom trysts has increased, primarily attributed to one of the transgender inmates behaving, well, like a kid in a candy shop.  The prison authorities have tried to discourage this behavior -- we all need our sleep, they say -- but what I want to ask them is one simple question:  "What did you think would happen?"  You drop people who look more or less like women, who identify as women and act like women, in an all-male population?  You publish a policy that backs their female identity, and then you act all surprised when some guys actually treat them as women?  The guards have actually begun to punish guys who become romantically interested in the transgender group.  But the authorities started this, dropping the fox in the hen house.  No, I guess it's the hen in the fox house, but you get my drift.

I don't have an answer.  Seems to me that a person who is going through gender re-assignment medications and all that in order to have the woman's body to go with her woman's identity should be in a woman's prison.  Or maybe in a special prison called, maybe, Alcatrans?  Okay, bad joke.  I was distracted for a moment by the stream of guys heading down the hall to talk up our newest inmate, Miss Tasha.  Just a friendly hello, offering to help in any way possible.  Something tells me this will not end well.  I'll keep you posted.

Shower Curtains

In preparation for an inspection by ACA (an independent, non-BOP organization) -- that had been expected for over a year -- our fearless jailers suddenly leaped into action.  Spray fresh paint over mold, check.  Problem guests shipped elsewhere, check.  The proverbial lipstick on a pig approach.  But no single effort garnered as much attention as the surprising addition of shower curtains.  We all thought, whoah, a truly private shower!  What a concept!

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, we’re fortunate that we don’t have to shower in a big open room, like you see on tv prisons.  We do have these rectangular stalls, sort of like the toilet stalls in public restrooms, but with a shower nozzle on the wall.  Dividers go from floor to about 6 feet high.  But they’re open, no door, so a curtain would be awesome!

The inspectors, we’ learned, insist on curtains because we have three official card-carrying transgender inmates (yes, the BOP issues an ID card for that).  Legally, they must be afforded a private shower experience, so the simplest solution (so you’d think) is to put up shower curtains on every stall.  Big deal, right?  How could anybody screw that up?  Well, let me count the ways:

1.     They never ordered the curtains, so they had to…

2.     Make them here, but…

3.     They didn’t want to spend the money to do it right, so…

4.     They cut pieces of vinyl and stapled (yes, stapled!) Velcro tabs to the sides and…

5.     Screwed the Velcro pieces to the wall of the shower, but…

6.     The Velcro was immediately swiped by inmates and…

7.     The curtains are hard to keep clean, because…

8.     We aren’t allowed to spray them down, and…

9.     THE KICKER FOR THOSE OF US NOT OVER 6 FOOT 6 INCHES TALL, the curtains are located halfway down the length of the stall, so you have this little 3 foot by 3 foot space to shower in and the nozzle is not adjustable, so if you’re my size or thereabouts when you turn on the water you get blasted with an industrial strength fire hose of water directly in the face.  Move back and you run into the curtain (yuck!), move forward and you hit the wall.  It’s like getting water-boarded or pressure-washed in the skull!

So, basically, I’m done with the curtain fiasco.  We had such high hopes, too.  As I write this, I’m listening to two guys discuss what “dat good vinyl can be used for….”  After all, incarceration is the mother of invention!

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.

The Storage Problem

My parents visited recently and somehow the talk turned to the size of the lockers we are allowed.  My mother chuckled as I griped, saying it’s not like I have that much stuff anyway.  This sent me into a faux-ticked off rant which I summarize here for your edification.  Let’s not discuss the size of our cubes/rooms just now; let me just examine our lockers and all the stuff we have to store in them.

Each guest of the BOP is allowed two hooks on a coat rack and half of a two foot bookshelf where you can only store five (no more) books.  And a locker.  Rules say everything you own must be on or in the storage apparatus.  So you can hang your uniform and coat on the hooks, or maybe a laundry bag on one, that’s it.  Your small/medium-sized locker has to store everything else.  If you’re lucky, your locker may have four shelves that can function as cubbies, but usually they only have two.  In this space, you must fit the following:  2 sets of sweats, 2-3 pairs of shorts, 5-7 t-shirts, 5-6 pairs of boxer shorts, boxer briefs for exercise, 7-8 pairs of socks, a hat, gloves, and maybe a scarf.  You may wonder why I need two pairs of sweats?  Well, one’s for working out and the other for lounging around the unit or the library.  In such close quarters, it’s important not to have smelly, unwashed clothes, so you need this wardrobe to make it through to your weekly laundry.

Okay, you’re thinking, maybe that could fit in a locker.  But don’t forget toiletries (and backups for things like toothpaste, soap, and deodorant in case of a lockdown).  Pencils, pens, markers, paper, notebooks, letters, envelopes, books (if you have more than the five allowed on the shelf), craft materials (like my crochet stuff), it’s all got to fit in the locker.  Maybe you teach or take a class in the ACE program and have some reference materials?  In the locker! 

And then there’s food.  But don’t you guys get three meals a day, you ask?  Yeah, but it’s not great, and just having some crackers, peanut butter, maybe instant coffee or oatmeal packets and some candy can help you get through the day.  And all that goes in the locker too.  Along with your coffee mug, your utensils, a couple bowls and a tumbler.  Let’s see, what else?  Oh yeah, we can only have two uniforms out, so any extras have to be put away where?  You guessed it, the locker. 

Somehow you have to cram in your radio and headphones without getting them crushed.  So just take a moment to imagine, every time you open the locker door, it’s like a clown car unloading.  With one arm you try to hold back the flood, while with the other you rummage around for whatever you need, then you smush everything else back inside and slam the door as best you can.  Then you spend the day worrying about a shakedown, because God only knows how you’ll get everything back in again if the guard messes it up.  Okay, that’s my locker rant!