I wanted to get more in-depth about some of my experiences while I was in jail and the first one is being an inmate worker. An inmate worker or pod worker is when a jailed person does manual labor for the jail in exchange for time off the total sentence. It's a very sought after position because it not only gets you home quicker but doing work is the best way to pass the time and make it seem shorter.
The way the jail I was in worked is that the jail holds a fuckton of male inmates compared to females and so there needs to be a chance for more of them to work off their time. This jail had a laundry and bakery for the meals and inmate clothing and there are a number of janitorial positions available for men. This was not a luxury the females had. Since there were only beds for 45 women, there's only one worker. Where men get to spread the load out among many, there is a lone woman who takes care of everything in the one female section. Where there will be two or three different workers who work two shifts on the men's side, there is one woman for both shifts on the women's side. I don't mean to make this sound like it's a hell hole and it's so hard because it isn't. It's actually better in the long run because I don't have to share the hours with anyone and I had my own private cell where I got to have a few more liberties.
I applied to be the pod worker the very first day. The girl on the job when I came in still had 24 days to go before she was released based on her hours worked and projected to work so I knew I just had to sit back and wait till it got closer to her release date. Once her time was up I knew that my request had been sitting there long before anyone else's and I didn't cause trouble nor did I get very involved with dayroom drama. I had a very good chance.
I don't remember all the names of the guards and I don't think I could tell you their names anyway but this particular guard was a well groomed man who shaved every day and all the girls loved him. I'll call him Officer Cutie Pie.
Well, Officer Cutie Pie comes in one day while I'm working through Stephen King's The Drawing of The Three for the 3rd time because it's the only decent book out of all the bibles and romance novels and he calls out my name. He asks if I still want to be a worker and I answer in the affirmative. I'm told to pack up my stuff and meet him out in the corridor.
This section of the jail was set up like a nav station in a military movie. The officer sits in a large room with all the dayrooms like the points on the statue of liberty's crown in front and on the sides of them. There's one door that goes into the dayrooms from the desk side and one going out into the maintence halls. I never got to go out there. Behind the desk there's the supply closet and the "gym" which is just a big room you're allowed to walk and run in. Beside the gym is another supply closet and the double locked vestibule that leads to the rest if the jail. The only time I ever went out here is when I sat the trash out at night, going to court and of course booking and release. The whole desk area was rather dark and with the old microphone intercom it reminded me of an old war room or a mad scientist keeping subjects in an experiment. It didn't help that there were giant one-way mirrors everywhere. I could see them but they couldn't see me. So if I did a good job, you can imagine the area and the quiet, secretive atmosphere from being shut off from the inmates but still able to see them from all angles.
I got moved from the 20 cell room to one of the 9 cell rooms because the handicap single bed cell was there. This meant I would likely not have another cellmate as long as I was working, which was fine with me but I'd also have to give it up in case an inmate came in who needed it, which I was more than fine with. This didn't happen. The rules got to be a little different. There were certain hours I had to work and ones I didn't. I could choose to do more work but during those "off" hours I could come and go from my dayroom to the officer's station whenever I wanted to, never had to use the intercom and didn't have to participate in most of the headcounts or lockdowns. I had to be in my cell during the night and right after lunch but other than that, as long as I was busy doing something, I had free reign of the whole pod. You bet your ass I didn't stay in my cell for a moment more than I had to.
The job also came with several unwritten and written perks. I didn't really have the choice the not clean a mess but I was rewarded pretty nicely for having to do so. I'll expound in a minute. I got to keep anything anyone left behind when they transferred and if someone refused a meal, well that meant I got that meal too. To be real, that's the whole reason why I really wanted to be a worker was the extra food. I was so hungry all the time. It never ended. I ate a lot of double breakfasts and some double lunches but everyone ate dinner so I did the most horrible thing ever, I just sneaked untouched desserts when I was taking back the trays and supposedly looking for missing spoons. The officers never said a word as long as the job got done. This was also how I finally got real shampoo and toothpaste. A girl left them behind when she got shipped off to prison. I never said I was proud of any of this it just proves that it's not a nice place to be even if you do the best you can.
I said I didn't have the choice to not clean a mess. That means every time someone left I had to clean their cell and they always left them in the same shape that public bathrooms in apocalypse movies are in, graffiti with pencil (harder to remove than you think), toilet paper mâché stuck on everything, shit in the toilet along with several rolls of paper, piss puddles on the mattresses and one delightful girl left me with a scrawl written in her very own menses. That one was REALLY fun. The joke was on them for the toilet because those fuckers would eat a horse. I would just flush it, paper and all, and down it would go and be the easiest part of my job, HA! Suckers.
I also had to get up sometimes in the middle of the night (midnight literally) and go down to the temporary pod and clean out the drunk tank. Fuck that shit. There was always shit everywhere. I never saw any throw up thank god but there was ALWAYS shit. Like a person had no right to project their excrement in such interesting arcs but somehow I routinely hosed crap off the ceilings, frosted windows, light fixtures and walls.
Once, someone pulled one of the sprinkler heads off the wall and it set it off in that cell drenching the inmate and the entire cell from stem to stern with putrid, rotten, black nasty water that had been sitting in the pipe for ages. Whose job was it to clean that up? Mine. Lol.
I AM NOT COMPLAINING. For real, I am grateful for every mess I cleaned and every gross thing I did or saw because it did make the time go a hell of a lot faster and I have you to tell it to! I got a giant squeegee for that and a big hose and the entire orange cleaner budget to work with and from what it looked like before I started and what I left it looking like, I'm fucking proud of how I did.
There were rewards for doing all these dirty jobs and it was usually food. For the really bad ones I even got a respirator and a hazmatesque suit and double time worked so it was relatively fair. The food was always something I wasn't supposed to have. They once let me have an entire good meal and eat it in my cell because it was after midnight. (It was always after fucking midnight!) I got an orange, a peanut butter sandwich, a styrofoam cup with real orange Gatorade and a bag of Cheetos. It was the best! Again, even with the sometimes extra meals I was constantly motivated by the thought of more food.
During the breakfast and lunch service there were official happenings like guard changes and their lunch breaks and because of this, the timing would be very strict. I had only as much time as everyone else to eat but three times the things to do so I actually only had about 7 minutes to eat either breakfast or lunch. Here, I'll explain the run down of my typical day so you can get the feel for it. I'll try to be brief so if you have questions, please leave them in the comments and I'll try to explain.
At 4:15 am the intercom buzzes and I get my wake up call. I go out and get some hot water to make coffee and get dressed in my khaki jumpsuit. (Everyone else wears orange) I do it quickly because I want to wake up before the food cart comes in. I rush to get the cleaning buckets together for the dayrooms. Inmates need a toilet brush, glass cleaner, mops and brooms to clean their own cells with so I have to put those in there. I collect them again after breakfast.
The food carts are delivered by dudes from the kitchen and are massive. They come in at 4:45 and me and the other workers aren't even really allowed to make eye contact. No one is hot though so it doesn't matter. The carts are partially prepared. All the food is on it, I just have to make sure all the trays have spoons and to pour the cups of drank. It's not even real Koolade, it's just powder drink mix that is so tart it's nasty. It's drank, I don't care what the spellers say. There's a couple of 80's style jugs that the drank is poured from and that motherfucker spills a little every goddamned time. Fuck those jugs.
After I've poured the drank and made sure every tray has a spoon, I gotta put these trays through a slot while people on the other side take them. Everyone lines up in the day room and eats out there. That's the easy part. Did I say that before? That the only utensil you will ever eat with in jail is a spoon? Because it is.
There are usually one or two people who don't want to eat and so I'd get their eggs, oatmeal and blueberry cake. Then, I'd go back out and collect the trays and count the spoons to make sure someone didn't throw one away or shove it up their ass or whatever and once the spoons were confirmed I pushed the carts out and started on morning mopping.
I had to mop the outer desk area, the gym, and the two 3 cell rooms. I could drag this task out very nicely and I included windexing the glass and wiping the countertops to make it longer. I also cleaned the guard's private bathroom and I could usually drag that out for about 15 minutes by humming whole songs. I usually spent the whole morning until lunch just lazily mopping and legit cleaning everything that could be touched.
At lunch, the carts came back and the whole process was repeated like breakfast with one exception: if the woman guard was working, I got to take extra food in my cell to eat after she went on her lunch. If the male officer was working (mostly he was, argh) then I had even less time to eat than breakfast. I would be shoving unwanted food in my mouth as I was taking trays back and trying to gulp down a few more bites as I counted spoons. Tuesday or Thursday was hot dog day and always there were 4 or 5 hot dogs that didn't get eaten. There were no buns just a slice of white bread and a dollop of mustard. I fucking LOVE hot dogs so I tried, every single week, to eat all of those spare dogs. By the time I was released it wasn't difficult.
So now the cart is back in the vestibule and I'm in my cell because the guard is on lunch. I write the first half of a letter to my husband and then I nap for a while.
I wake back up after lockdown and go back out to do some rearranging. The laundry room gets whites delivered almost daily. Whites are all the other clothes you wear under your jumpsuit, socks, undies and shirts. The reason they're called whites is that everything is white. There can be no color on any of it, not even a gray band or heel square. You either have someone bring you fresh ones that fit from outside or you have to use the ones the jail gives you. If they don't fit, you can keep requesting the size you need until you get it or you get out. It was my job to try to keep the stacks of laundry sorted so I could easily fill requests. I wasted three days breaking down the piles and organizing them by size and type so yay. I did this after lunch and continued to pretend to refine it daily until my release.
After I've gone full reverse tornado on the whites, I grab my custodial cart and start going from dayroom to dayroom scrubbing the windows, public sink, showers, toilets and any concrete walkways. This does take a while because I pay attention and really do care about how clean I get this stuff. These are people no matter what and no one deserves to get sick because I want to go home early and am a lazy shit. I used very strong solution and cleaned all the surfaces with different scrubbers and cleaned the scrubbers after. I removed the hair and the shampoo residue and tried to get the scum off the floor so people wouldn't slip. I used paper towels to clean touched surfaces and did that several times a day. I even put in a request for a new mop and was granted it for the sake of not using the same mop to do both bathrooms and outside areas.
By the time I'm done with all this it's dinner time and this is the only time I don't have a limit on meal time but everyone always eats their dinner so what's the gain?
After dinner, I go around and collect the trash and restock the toilet paper. I collect any games and books that are not being used in the dayrooms. I collect the little request slips and give them to the guard. Then I grab my mop bucket and start removing the scuffs from the gaurd's area floor. No, not kidding. I need to be doing something and removing scuffs takes a little over two minutes and there are a ton of scuffs.
The scuffs are done and I'm beat. It's a little after 7pm and I need a break. As a worker, I can have the water in the public shower turned on so I can clean up after I've done my nightly work. It's really kind of nice because I know it's clean when I go in there and I always clean it again when I'm done so others can enjoy a clean shower too. I go into my cell, write the rest of my letter, eat a lemon candy or a jolly rancher (still can't eat those today) and go to sleep for a bit. I wake up right about 9:15 and go back out to do the nightly cleaning. It's just a quick go-around to sanitize the doorknobs and surfaces like telephone and countertops. I vacuum the carpet in the dayrooms and then go back to my cell and go back to sleep. I never know when they will call me down to clean the temporary pod so I tried to make sure I got all the sleep I could. Even if I had to clean that night I still had to get up and do breakfast service at 4:45 so I'd still need to be up at 4:30 just to be awake for that. Sometimes the messes took a few hours to clean and those were rough days but for the most part I got along.
Thus ends one day and begins another. Clean, scrub, collect and fill requests, serve food. That was my whole day for the next month and a half. I never got a change in schedule except to go to court and I never got a day off. It was a gruelling existence but it gave me something to do every day and things stayed clean and no one got sick so I wonder sometimes if I could use it as a job reference... Nah.
One last thing before I go, I was a fly on the wall for the first time in my life. I got to hear a lot of things and I was supposed to tell the guards anything I heard. I didn't unless people were planning to do really stupid shit like try to keep mess for later or trade. When people kept food in their cell without keeping it sealed, I tattled. We got ants frequently from improperly stored cakes and sweets from meals and I hated trying to get rid of them. I'd spray the persistent fuckers with an orange cleaner and try to sweep up the bodies but they always just mushed everywhere and I cleaned them up with paper towels.
If people got annoyed with each other and were talking shit quietly across the dayroom I told the guard because I fucking hate fighting. Other than that, I could give a fuck that you took an extra book or gave so and so some candy in exchange for some real soap. That shit doesn't need to be punished, we were just trying to make it a little better.
Some people had put in a request to work and didn't like me because they wanted the position. These were the ones who combined toilet paper, toothpaste and water to make mâché and put it all over the cells when they left. It's a little bit like concrete and when I chipped at it and finally broke it, there was usually a gift inside like more toothpaste, a bit of rotted food or in one case, human shit. Most of the time, people were decent to me because I listened to their requests and actually cleaned instead of acting like I was cleaning.
I may have missed a few things and over explained a few more but this was my experience as the sole inmate worker for the female section of a county jail. If you have questions, please leave them below and it should go without saying: stay out of trouble!
