The culture of jail is one of banality, of a sameness and predictability. My clothing consisted of 3 sets of identical dark blue scrubs, with white boxers, white socks, a pair of flipflops for the shower and “lounging” around and a pair of low-top sneakers, a la Converse. The sneakers are actually made by a company in North Carolina owned by Bob Barker. Yes, you heard it right, Bob Barker, the one-and-only host of The Price Is Right. Apparently he makes a lot of money because of the corrections community and is a major supplier of clothing for much of the country’s institutions. Now that is banal. The Price Is Right, C’mon down!
My days, without incident were scheduled to insure orderliness. We were locked down for the night at 9:30PM. At 7AM the electronic doors would unlock,CRACK!, snapping open in a procession from cell to cell. Breakfast was at 7:15. We were back in the pod by 7:45 at the latest. Most of the guys went back to bed and slept until lunch. Some of them sat down in front of 1 of the 2 large color TVs and vegged out. It is possible to do your time that way. Many people do, from what I’ve seen. Those are the same people that keep on coming back through the revolving door of the system. They never change themselves or grow. I don’t think I watched more than 6 or 7 hours of TV in my entire 19 months. I made myself busy and began to read. I read as much as possible. There was a library cart with about 100 books that would be replenished every week or so, at the whims of the inmates. Most of the selection was crap; cheap detective writing and whatnot, but there were occasional nuggets (Waiting For Godot springs to mind) of history, literature, and biography. Where these books came from I don’t know, but I hazard a guess that they were donated to the facility. I supplemented the cart with tons of books from the outside. The policy was that we could have books sent in from the outside as long as they were not hardbound and had been sent from the publisher or a bookstore. That was no problem for me. My father was fond of Amazon.com and my mother utilized The Oblong Books And Records in nearby Millerton, N.Y. Through this great gift I had a huge pipeline to and from the outside world. Magazines were allowed through the regular mail so I had my subscriptions to The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and the AA Grapevine transferred to the jail. Although my calls were somewhat limited, my family had the money to set up a calling card system for the telephones so that I could call them whenever I was able. I tried not to abuse this, however, and became a prolific letter writer. Much of my letter writing was full of self-hate, although some was full of hope. Such is the path to a clear conscience.
Compared to the majority of the inmates, I was a very wealthy man. I had a visit every week form someone, I received tons of mail, and I was very active in the programs offered to me by the system. I took part in a writing course, an art course, all of the sobriety programs, and I had a job. All of these activities took off time from the end of my sentence. But as I said, these were the days without incident.
We spent a lot of time locked down, for one reason or the other. Usually because there was some kind of fight. Violence was a common occurrence in the pod. Card games would dissolve into chaos over a bad hand, inmates would turn Neanderthal over where they were going to sit and watch TV, telephones would be demanded and denied, the list goes on. The point to remember is that violence was the only coping mechanism that many of these guys knew about. Their whole lives had been lived around violence and fear, so that’s how they lived in the present. I avoided them as much as possible. There were a few who were OK. They were a sad lot, though. Invariably they were in for drugs or alcohol, or the results thereof. But still, we could talk program, and all the things that we would do when we were released, and the places we’d go…These are the dreams of the jailed; to go and not stop going, to move like you cannot move within the walls of a jail.
The best philosophy was to do your own time, not someone else’s. I saw too many guys waste energy and lose their shit over someone else and their crime. I tried to not rent space in my head, and sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t and this, I believe, was a result of resentment over the many advantages that I had compared to most. All the visits (including my weekly Tuesday morning visit from my therapist), the stacks of mail, the books, the phone calls, etc…All set me apart from the masses. Many inmates never received a visit, and the mail they picked up in the evening was all bad news. There was no hope for them outside the concrete walls. The best that they could hope for was a profitable summer selling crack and then a warm place to sleep in the winter. This last hope was typically jail, a viable alternative to freezing to death on the street. I’m sure I was the cause of many resentments, and I certainly had a few when I arrived. Over time they were washed away, though, because of the work I did on myself. I changed in jail. I will never be the same. There are ghosts that will always haunt me and I have made peace with them, clutching their cold hands like the friends they need to be.
Here are the haiku…
#8.
A shined steel mirror
throws a wavy reflection
on my waking face.
#11.
There are no sounds here
only noises late at night
that disturb my sleep.
#110.
Heavily wept tears,
thick and salty, hot with pain:
my awakening.
Inmate #1229
Published by