The Time I Went To Jail.

     So a few years back, some bad things happened and I went to jail. It was just county jail, not prison, which is arguably better depending on the circumstances. 

 What's getting arrested and booked like? You've been cuffed and put in the back of a cop car, it's hard plastic back there and you're pretty much sitting on your cuffed wrists or hands. It's super fucking uncomfortable. Every bump in the loose-ass shocks on that old cruiser will send you pitching around the back of the car struggling to keep up straight. You don't have your hands in front so this is a harder task than one would think. The cops don't drive nicely. They will take  some hard turns and go a little slower over potholes. This will hurt. Do some sit ups every day just in case so you can keep yourself upright. 

  Now, once you get to jail you go to a room with a cop who asks you to put everything that's in your pockets and purse on the table and take out all your jewelry. This officer has gloves and a mask on because you are a dirty, dirty human and I guess they get gloves but we don't? I don't know. Anyway, when the officer says "all your jewelry" they mean all of it. Tongue studs, eyebrow rings, wedding ring, belly rings and all the really fun ones down below that. Ears gotta be clean too. It all goes in a bag. When you get out you get it back, or you can release it to a family member but why would you do this and lose your street clothes? It's a mystery. 

  Okay, now you're stripped off all your dangles and deelibobs and sat out in a waiting room. They take your shoes and give you sandals. You'll be wearing these for a bit so be nice to them. You could be in the waiting room for five minutes or five hours, you just sit in the bad plastic chairs that are literally designed to not be comfortable.  The tv is on but you can't hear it either because the mute is on or there's three people trying to make phone calls on the payphones in this room. You pretty much have access to a phone from the get-go, at least from 9am to 9pm.  

  You wait till the next officer calls you up and takes all your info and makes you use the phone at the desk to call into the system so you can even use the phone because it's all voice recognition. (It's REALLY bad though!) Then, you sit some more until another officer shows up to take you to the locker room for your mugshot, (That's mine up there, btw) and finger-printing.

  They give you a ill-fitting uniform that they eyeballed your size on and then they stand there and watch you undress and redress. Yes folks that's right, you've got one or two cops in full dress wearing pistols and you're naked and vulnerable in front of them and you can't cover yourself or they'll think you're hiding something. Dear dog just hope you never  have to hear "squat and cough" because it's just as demeaning as it sounds.  I've never felt like the lowest scum on earth and never more inhuman than being forced to undress for them and them wearing guns and pants.  

  Moving on, after you're dressed and they put your clothes with your other stuff, they relocate you down the hallway to a holding pod. It's just a big room with some cells in it, it's probably got one big public shower at one end and the exit and phone at the other. Your county's jail might be very different, I'm just relating what ours is like because I've been there. 

  You get a cell, it might be just you, it might have another person in it, you never know. If there's another person, even if you end up hating them, you have to establish certain things like dressing and what to do if it's after hours and you have to poop. This is real, people!  

  They'll keep you in this temporary pod until they've figured out if they need to cut you loose on bond or put you in a permanent bed and this could take anywhere from 1-3 days. If you are figured to be spending more than 5 days in jail, you'll go to general population. You want this. Other classifications are maximum security and are less fun than a  tow trucker driver using his truck to pull a tooth. The people in there, are fucking crazy.

  You get shuffled again, you get a itchy as fuck wool blanket and toiletries like Donkey-Ass Tastin' Toothpaste and Straight Up Lye Soap. You also get this whack-ass toothbrush that the bristles fall out of like, right-thefuck-away. The soap is also the size of a biker's pinky so don't expect to be washing your hands for very long. If you're poor and got no one to put money in your inmate account, just get used to being a dirty, sweaty, halitosis having human.  No shampoo, no conditioner, no deoderant, nothing! I was very surprised to see that deoderant was not something they supplied. 

  You're in Gen Pop now in one of the bigger pods. I'm a girl and the facility I was in only has beds for 42 females so I just went there. There was one big room where there were 20 cells then two on the sides which had 9 cells and then another two rooms with 3 cells each. I went to the big 20 at first. My first day was filled with going to different rooms and doctors. They checked me for Tuberculosis and poxes of all kinds as well as MRSA and anythjng contagious. During my psych exam they determined I was bi-polar and put me on Lithium and gave me some BAD AS FUCK antibiotics for an infected tooth I had had before I came in. This was weird to me, to be put back on Lithium after nearly 15 years but I was curious to see if it had an effect. Not that I noticed. Then after that it was the same thing, day in, day out.

  I had a pretty cool cell mate (celly) and we had a good system going for nighttime sleeping, morning cleaning and poopin signs. It's all relative, we weren't friends just did what we said we'd do.  

  The worst part about it now is the lockdowns and headcounts. Not every place is this strict but we followed a very set schedule. 

  The lights would get brighter at 5am and the cells would unlock. There's a headcount where everyone lines up and gets (gasp!) counted. The cleaning supplies would get put out and we had to clean our own cells including mopping, glass, sink and toilet scrubbing too. We did this gladly because the least you can do in this place is clean. Breakfast is served at 5:30. Sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's eggs and toast. Cold. The trick to making jail food edible is to mix a bunch of it together.  If you got a blueberry cake with breakfast and some nasty tasteless oatmeal, you put those two together and now you have blueberry oatmeal. After breakfast the nurses come around and people who have to take daily medication (I took lithium and antibiotics for a tooth infection) have to line up and take it through the food slot. 

  Then it's usually back to sleep for most people. The best time to write a letter or do anything that you can for yourself is from 6am until 9am. No one is doing shit during those hours. 

  At 9 there's a lockdown and another headcount and you have to stay in cells until 11am, when lunch is served. You come out, eat, then go back in for another half hour, so the next time you can come out is noon.  This is when people come out and socialize and ask to go to the gym.  (We write out requests on peices of paper and the inmate worker takes them to the co all day) People play cards and chat out in the day room or chill in their cells with the door open.  Every other day we can take a shower. We can ask for a razor but they don't work and you don't get shave lotion or anything so everyone gets kind of hairy. Also every other day you have to put your laundry in a bag and it dissapears for 24 hours then you get it back clean and hot-smelling and repeat. I wouldn't be surprised if that laundry got as hot in the dryer near the point of combustion. Ruined the elastic on all of the pants. All of them. 

  At 5pm they serve dinner then if people are on prescribed medication they'll put it through the slot after dinner. There have been some stupid fucks who think it's cute to put the meds in their cheek and not swallow them to trade for stuff or just get high whenever. If the nurse even suspects that this has happened (they watch you take it) the whole place goes berserk, nuclear lockdown complete with headcounts, searches, water getting shut off so stuff can't be flushed down toilets and everyone getting herded to the gym for personal and cavity searches. 

  So if you go to jail and risk all of us getting cavity searched because you can't wait to get high? Fuck you. 

  After night meds, your options are to watch group tv, read alone in your cell, socialize or ask to go to gym again until 9pm. (I keep saying gym, there was no equipment just a gym floor you could walk or run on) 

At 9, there's a lockdown and at 9:30 there's the final headcount and lockdown and the lights dim at 10pm.  

 That's a typical day. Nothing ever changes, it's like a bad painting of life, a large representation of the word stasis.

  I got lucky and wrote a request to become the female inmate worker and after 30 days I got it. The changes? Fucking night and day. 

 I got my own cell with a single bed, for starters. This was the turning point of tolerable, no celly to bother me! I scrubbed a lot of nasty shit but that's a story for another post. 

  After the initial shock wears off, you kind of get used to the strict routine. It's the same tv shows, the same people, the same mealtimes, the same card game, walk in the same circle in gym and so on and so on for however long you're there for. 

  Waiting for sentencing is the pits. You don't get to just talk to your lawyer whenever you want, it pretty much has to be during business hours and since calling from jail is a collect call you can't leave a message. You can write a letter but that takes time too. Just waiting those days can make them stretch into what feels like weeks.  The people who come to see you, you have to know their names, addresses and birthdates and the list takes time to approve. You may have come in on a weekend and you can't order anything from the canteen that week so you use the Donkey Ass Tastin Toothpaste until you can get some

Mother fuckin Colgate. 

  After everything settles down and your court dates start coming through, you still don't know how long you'll be in, just that I took a plea deal and still spent 89 days in jail and didn't know when I was getting out until the day I was released. That was the most fucked up feeling because I was in complete frozen mode where nothing really mattered, I couldn't change the course of fate so I just went with it until I was shoved back out on the street. 

 That's the last part of this whole thing, the release. I did not play to the co's but I didn't make trouble for them either, I just tried to be and do my job. They were professionally polite to me, as in, did not ticket me for eating an extra tray that another inmate didn't want or include my cell in random searches. I came back from court to a couple of officers who were not polite and quite gruff in the instructions to go back the way we came in, like a reverse arrest. We went back to the locker room where I got dressed in the clothes I came in with, no they hadn't been washed, it was indeed gross. I went back to the waiting area like when I came in and just sat in my stinky clothes from early spring, waiting to be released in the dead heat of summer. They gave me everything I had in a plastic bag, letters, some candy, my toiletries and pictures and the bag had no handle. It was like a desk garbage bag. They booted me out without my phone or ID but instructions to report downtown to my probation officer and gave me one bus token. 

  I was wearing pants and had lost a lot of weight so they wouldn't stay up and I had to hold the bag too and walk two blocks to a further bus stop because I couldn't stand the thought of waiting in the jail lot for another 45 minutes for a bus.  It didn't sink in that I was out and it was over until later the next day when my good friend bought me a cheap, greasy fast food meal.  It was the best damn thing I'd  ever eaten in my fucking life. It was the richest tasting food anyway and it was very hungry indeed. You could say I was hangry.

 That's the story of the time I went to jail. It wasn't fun and I didn't really see it as a fitting punishment for a lot of the crimes that people were there for but I didn't get gang raped or have to braid anyone's hair. There are a few interesting stories but they'll have to be for their own separate posts.  Night everyone and stay out of trouble!

 .