A citizen pays his debt to society
by Mike Gibson
I knew from the jailer's reaction I'd made a grave error in judgment. His mouth fell open, chin hanging slack from the hinge of his jaw; his eyes rolled back, pupils bound for points unknown. He was making a kind of guttural noise down in the pit of his windpipe, sort of a cross between a slow tire leak and a duck fart.
His buddy, a younger jailer, saw it happening, wrapped both hands around his partner's flaccid bicep and gave him a good shaking. "Come out of it, Slim," he hissed, a little worry and encroaching desperation manifest in the rush of his breath.
Must've happened before, I figured. Fortunately for all of us, Slim snapped out of it short of critical mass, shook his head, as if to free it of the daze of impending seizure, and again tried to wrap his intellect around the fact that there were no less than five different medications sitting in front of him.
In that horrible moment, I realized I'd violated Rule One of going to jail, a truth gathered from my own hard experience and affirmed through commiseration with others: Any problem you (meaning the detainee) have that bears even the faintest whiff of complication for them (meaning your incarcerators), will cause them to make things more difficult for you without actually resolving your problem. God help me if I'd had a missing limb, or else ruptured piles, or something.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. A little background might be in order.
I went to jail recently. This was the third time in my life I've been to jail (first time on a charge later dismissed; second time, read on...). But this time the incarceration was voluntary, sort of, or at least planned, in that I surrendered myself on a duly appointed evening to serve the remainder of a sentence levied in view of a drunk driving conviction.
Understand that I'm not bemoaning my fate. I'll be the first to admit that I was in this pickle because I was guilty as all hell. The police didn't entrap or mistreat me; the judge who heard my case wasn't a fascist; my lawyer didn't suck. It was just hard for all of us to get around the fact that I'd been caught resting my eyes at a stoplight, sometime around 4 a.m., with my vehicle pointed South on a Northbound street, my breath foul with the stench of rum. And understand that I didn't witness any wanton brutality, Byzantine conspiracy or sleazy corruption while in jail. Those things may well exist hereabouts, but I didn't see any while I was there.
As a reporter, I've taken some interest in our local correctional officials and their facilities, even written a couple of stories about whether our county fathers could scrape up the shekels for a palatial new "justice" facility. I've also endured the rankling frustration of the Knox County Sheriff's Office stonewalling and departmental arrogance when (as a reporter) I made even simple requests for information.
Now I've had the not-so-rare opportunity to witness KCSO's curious management style applied to folks on the other side of the bars. And in the interest of journalistic thoroughness, I'm presenting for the reader's edification what Paul Harvey calls the rest of the story.
I took appropriate action in the wake of my arrest. I quit drinking (no, really). I went to court, and shelled out the equivalent of two or three cheap used cars in fines and lawyer's fees. I went to the overcrowded Hell that is our local DMV, and exchanged my regular driver license for a restricted one.
And then I found my self with one last penance, the mandatory 48-hour jail sentence all first-time DUI offenders must serve. Since I received 12 hours time served for my arrest, I had 36 hours remaining.
Our local penal facility stands off Maloneyville Road, deep in the wooded heart of the eastern sector of the county. On a hill just below the imposing concrete labyrinth that houses most of the inmates, there's a smaller bunker that houses offenders of a less worrisome classification, including work-release prisoners and DUI first-timers.
This is where I was to go on the eve of my sentence.
The work-release house is a somewhat less unhappy place to suffer an incarceration, if such a thing exists, sort of a purgatory to the county jail's outer circle of Hell. I could see, even as I reported to the officers in charge, the degree of freedom which the guests housed herein enjoy, as several of them walked happily unchecked nearby, partaking of the warm fresh air wafting in from the building's open-mouthed entrance.
I'd even been given a list of things I could bring inside, including fresh socks, underwear, and two paperback books (thank God in His heaven!) to mitigate the slow passage of time. This won't be so bad, I told myself, Socrates sipping smugly from a snifter of wine and hemlock, or Jonah staring nonchalant into the mouth of the whale.
Then I showed the chief jailer my five medications, most of which are related to blood pressure and cardiac maintenance. I'll spare you the details; suffice to say the math was enough to provoke systemic overload—for him, not me—and after he'd regained his equilibrium, he stammered, "Y-you'd better go up there to the main jail. I don't think we're equipped to handle you down here."
Someone had driven me to jail, of course. It's not an airport; there's no inmate parking, no Avis or Hertz outlets. And I'll readily admit that my father was probably not the best choice for this errand. He's not a patient man, which is akin to saying that Dahmer was not an epicure. And he doesn't suffer fools.
His incessant, surly grumbling was the soundtrack to my two-hour wait in the lobby of the main jail. There were two jailers attending the front desk, a man and a woman. The woman seemed a pleasant sort, and at least feigned some concern for the people, mostly family members of detainees, waiting in the lobby. The male officer displayed no such politesse, and looked on anyone with the temerity to interrupt his doings—which consisted mostly of drinking coffee, playing with pencils, and yapping with other passing jailers—with mingled contempt and apathy.
For some reason, apparently the same reason I had to go to the Big House rather than serve my time in the work-release bunker, the jail's resident nurse was supposedly going to oversee my admission. The lady jailer paged this phantom nurse on at least three occasions, but her pages seemed to have roughly the same effect as throwing pennies in a fountain; less actually, since the pennies at least make a splash. Whenever my dad would ask the male jailer when it would be all right for him to leave, the jailer would snort irritably, then ignore him, mumbling something about the nurse as he turned away to find a new pencil.
"Goddammit, they're gonna get a bill for the time I have to spend waiting here," my dad muttered no less than 83 times as we waited for the nurse.
At long last, the lady jailer said they were taking me back for incarceration. The nurse never materialized, of course; I suspect she was some sort of figment of the jailers' collective imagination, a way of explaining missing office supplies and other mysterious occurrences.
By now, my father was boiling, and he pointedly asked another jailer what time my sentence would end on Sunday morning, with the mute insinuation that terrible legal consequences would ensue if he had to sit around waiting another extra two hours for my release.
The man assured him that my release would be effected exactly 36 hours from the time of my arrival, which was 8:15 p.m. Friday evening. "You can just do the math in your head," he remarked, but I knew I was in trouble when he stopped to count it on his fingers.
"Yeah, so you see it would be right at 7:30 Sunday morning," he concluded. I wasn't sure what was more unsettling, his stunningly inept mathematics, or the possibility that dad wouldn't bother coming back.
The first items taken from me upon my entering the Big House were all the little niceties I was supposed to have been allowed to bring for my stay at the work-release facility, the clean socks and skivvies and (to my eternal dismay) my precious paperbacks, which were to have saved me from boredom and total misery. The jailers took my meds, too, handling them with the sort of ham-fisted, probing uncertainty of a monkey playing with a cell phone.
I felt quite sure I wouldn't see the medications again until my release, even though they were the alleged reason for my transfer from the workhouse. I could live without meds for a day-and-a-half, however, and I wasn't going to commit any further Rule One infractions by bringing them up again. Might end up swinging naked from a flagpole outside, or maybe peeling spuds in some sweaty Brushy Mountain boiler room.
A couple of officers took me back to the main holding cell, the repository for all of the fresh arrestees, and one of several ordeals I was to have been spared by going to the work house. An austere 25 foot by 25 foot concrete room with fluorescent lighting and three or four long steel benches, the holding cell's cruelest feature is that its plexi-glass windows allow you to see into the adjoining "work" area, and therefore see just how much the officers there aren't doing to speed along your admission to a living unit.
For about five hours, I sat there, in a room cold enough to hang meat in, watching the five or so jailers behind the counter outside piddle. Their jobs seemed to consist, in order of priority, of chatting, coffee-drinking, playing with pencils, and the endless re-examination of the belongings which had been taken from detainees and placed in plastic bags for storage.
The bags were placed in crates behind the counter. It was each jailer's responsibility to intermittently choose a crate for inspection, pull out the plastic bags and their contents, touch each item thoughtfully, replace and repeat. The individual crates were apparently to be re-examined in this manner any number of times, but never twice in a row. I imagine they feared that consecutive handlings might foster jealousy among the other crates.
This is what jailers call "processing," and its alleged purpose is to prepare detainees for their stay at the facility. Some of the less important aspects of processing include providing said detainees with trademark black-and white-striped jailhouse uniforms, and taking them to actual jail cells.
After three trips to the holding tank, I still haven't figured exactly what motivates the jailers, on rare occasion, to put aside their crates and their pencils and execute these latter two functions. Divine guidance, maybe, or perhaps the need for more plastic bags.
Absent from the processing process was trash pick-up. The holding area looked a bit like a Third World garbage mound, only with less aesthetic value. The floor was scattered variously with paper lunch-sacks, potato chip bags, fruit rinds, and cracker wrappers. Some of the detainees took advantage of the litter. A couple of them snacked on oranges left intact among the rubbish. One disheveled gentleman, a homeless guy with crazy hair and silver streaks on his face left over from the evening's paint-sniffing misadventure, found an uneaten cracker amidst the carnage. For reasons known only to him (or maybe not), he stood up and roared unintelligibly even as he devoured the orphaned wafer.
One of the jailers, a rude, big-bellied guy who seemed inordinately consumed with the heady power of his station, walked into the holding area and bellowed, "You're not supposed to be eating anything," his own feet planted deep in the litter. "Where did you get that?!"
Watching the "processing" going on outside, my tank-mates were also at a loss to explain its elusive nature.
"Process! Look at 'em out there!" said one older fellow, a frail-looking sort with a shiny pate and a sour look. "They say they gotta 'pro-cess.' They don't know what they doin.' I want to see my attorney."
A chatty sort, he'd been arrested that evening during an ill-timed bathroom break in an Old City alleyway a few hours prior, apparently while walking back to his East Knoxville home. The cop who collared him (or zippered him, as the case might be) found a crack pipe in his pocket during the pat-down that followed.
"One little ol' crack pipe," he harumphed, no less than 106 times during our five-hour acquaintance. "I shoulda just peed on myself and walked home."
Ah, hindsight.
My actual stay in a living unit, or "pod," was uneventful—not to say excruciatingly boring—30 (give or take) of the slowest hours of my life. The food was terrible, even worse than expected; we would have been better served foraging for insects in the grass outside. And without my reading material, I had nothing to do.
With some notable exceptions, my jailers were of the bumbling and apathetic variety. Some of them had a cruel streak, even if it wasn't manifested in physical violence; pathetic creatures like my homeless, paint-sniffing tank-mate were denigrated and verbally abused when they made extra noise or stepped slightly out of line.
Early in my stay, I was taken for arraignment along with several other prisoners who were arrested the night I checked in. That was an odd thing, I thought, given that the purpose of an arraignment is for a new prisoner to hear the charges levied against him and enter a plea, and given that I'd already been convicted, and had come here to serve my time.
Foolishly, I reminded the jailers of this. The inconsistencies here puzzled them for a moment, but only for a moment. Then they forged on, like elephants in a tulip bed, ignoring my protestations, convinced I needed arraigning even though I didn't actually have anything to arraign, or arraign about, or arraign on, or...
When my turn came, I sat before a two-way video terminal and talked to an Arraignment Official stationed in a far-away place, probably across the street or something. He looked a little puzzled as he shuffled through his papers, then asked, "Why are you here? You don't need arraigning."
I tried to sleep most of my time away, but this was also difficult, given that my bed-pad consisted of some sort of very thin and poorly-stuffed plastic material, not unlike an air mattress that nobody had bothered to fill. Flopped atop a steel platform bolted into the wall, it was more industrial fixture than Serta.
The medications cart came around to my living unit twice during my visit. My meds weren't on it, needless to say, and I certainly didn't care to ask why.
My release finally came around Sunday morning after a hardy 6 a.m. breakfast of cold eggs, the rubbery fake kind, and cold cereal, the healthy-but-inedible kind that looks and tastes like quarry siftings. When my belonging were returned, I found that my captors had neglected to return my medications, a fact that hardly surprised me. The officers in the discharge room didn't look any busier than their counterparts in the processing area, but they were marginally more efficient. One of them called the medical unit to retrieve my forgotten pills. "They'll get around to it, eventually," she said, with considerably less concern than I might have hoped.
I was released roughly 90 minutes late, about 9:45 a.m. My dad was waiting, thankfully. And he was seething, of course. "What am I going to be paid for my time?" he asked one jailer, who didn't seem to realize he wasn't kidding. "They're going to get a bill for this," he growled as I desperately hustled him out the door.
It wasn't until later that I realized one of my five medicine bottles was missing. This did surprise me, given that removing the pill bottle from the bag and losing it would have required uncharacteristic exertion on the part of jailers, and therefore the loss of energies better spent on coffee-drinking, or playing with pencils.
I called the jail, and found that, sure enough, the pills were sitting over in the medical unit, probably removed and set aside for some nameless purpose by the Phantom Nurse. Any time I wanted to pick them up, the jailer told me, they would be waiting in my name.
Then I made a happy discovery; I'd only taken a few of those particular pills with me, and still had most of a bottle at home in the medicine cabinet.
For a fleeting moment, I considered driving all the way to Maloneyville from West Knoxville to retrieve the remaining pills. Then I remembered Rule One, and settled into a soft couch for a very long mid-afternoon nap.
September 19, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 38
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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