I’d like to talk for a moment about my own experience with prison – not as an inmate, but as a visitor. I’ve found that people who have never been to a prison really have no concept of what it is like. It’s truly unimaginable until you are there. At least that was the case with me.
Several years ago I began visiting a cousin I’d played with as a young child, but who was recruited into a gang and has been locked up off and on since his early teens. The sentence he just finished was 15 years. I’ll call him John Henry just for fun.
![[:D]](http://www.aypsite.com/plus-forum/Smileys/akyhne/icon_smile_big.gif "Big Smile")
I’m going to leave out as much of John’s story as I can because it’s his story to tell, not mine. I want to tell you about the visits – the experiences and observations. I visited a high-medium security adult male prison with some X-class housing for people who had committed the very violent crimes. (In prison, they are not referred to as people at all; they are called offenders.) I’d drive for 2 ½ to 3 hours to get there, park, leave everything but my keys and my wallet in the car, and walk in the front door. The guard would buzz me in through the security door to the waiting room. I’d sign in, give John’s name and ID number, hand them my driver’s license, and wait for them to process me. While I was waiting, I’d put some money on a little plastic debit-style card that worked with the vending machines in the visiting room. When the guards decided I was okay to visit they’d stamp my hand with a little stamp that shows up under a black light. Then I’d wait for my turn with the shake-down.
The shake down is where most of the obstacles arose. After driving for hours to get there, you don’t want to get turned away and sent home for wearing the wrong bra, but it happens. The shake-down starts when the officer opens a second security door and points you into a little room with some lockers and a shelf. The officer comes in and closes the door, and you put your shoes and your wallet on the shelf. You get out your two quarters to rent a locker for your wallet, and you get out your little vending machine card. The officer examines the shoes and goes through the wallet. Then the officer asks to see inside your mouth, so you have to open your mouth and lift up your tongue. Then you have to turn around and hold your arms out to the side for the pat-down. The officer checks the collar, under the breasts, under the armpits and down the sleeves. Then the officer pats downward from the crotch to the ankles. They check the bottoms of the feet. They go through all the pockets, feel the back of the bra, and sometimes they take down the hairdo and go through the hair. Then you’re required to reach up your shirt, grab the front of your bra, and shake it out really hard. (Then you have to shake everything back in.) When the officer decides you don’t have anything on you, they ask you to walk through a metal detector, and then you sit and wait to be escorted to the visiting room. You’re allowed to take the key to your locker and the little money card for the vending machine.
Sometimes the shake down was okay. Sometimes it felt like a grope-fest. Different officers had different styles and some seemed to take a lot more personal pleasure in it than others. One officer, feeling on my butt, asked if I was wearing panties. I had to show her my panties. Another officer, feeling on my bra, asked if I was wearing a sports bra. (Sports bras were not allowed there for some reason.) I had to lift up my shirt and show her my bra, so that she could see that it had cups and underwires. Another officer had an issue with my jeans – ordinary blue jeans, and the same jeans I’d worn there dozens of times before. I never wore jeans to the prison again. I learned never to wear light colors, never wear a dress or a skirt, never wear nylons, never wear thigh-high socks. Crew neck shirts only. Work slacks only. Solid shoes only. I would shop for clothes that I thought might pass muster over there. They’re actually pretty hard to find, and I would spend money on clothes I didn’t like, simply because they would have a shot at getting through the shake-down. And if you think it’s dehumanizing to have an officer grope around on your breasts or examine your butt, it is.
To get to the visiting room, you exit the shake-down area, go outside, and enter another building. You wait for the officer in the control room to open the sliding metal door, and then you wait in the hallway for the door to shut. You put your hand under a black light and let the guard see your hand stamp. Then you wait for a second sliding metal door to open. Finally you walk to the visiting room, enter that door and give the officer your name and the person you’re visiting, and the officer assigns you a table. The tables are hard steel and plastic affairs with attached seats, which are bolted to the floor. You sit down at the table, and the officer may come over and tell you to sit at a different seat at the table. You must always sit across from the inmate, and the inmate’s seat isn’t always marked. I learned to ask which chair to sit in before I sat down. And then you wait. On a good day, I’d be waiting for no more than 20 minutes; on a bad day, I’d be waiting for nearly an hour. There are bathrooms in the visiting area, but an officer has to escort you, and then shake you down again after you relieve yourself. So I learned to hold it.
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Then the person I came all this way to visit comes into the room! John would see me sitting there, but would give no sign of acknowledgement. He would hand his slip of paper to the guard, and then go wait for his own shake-down. His was no simple pat-down. He was strip-searched before and after each visit. John had to get completely naked twice each time I came to visit. Finally, his strip-search finished, John came back into the visiting room. There was a threshold of about 10 feet away from me, where John dropped his steely demeanor and became the guy I knew and loved so well. We’d hug and then sit down and chat until my bladder couldn’t take it any more or the guards told us our time was up. I’d buy sandwiches, snacks, and sodas from the vending machine, and we’d have ourselves a really good time.
The visiting room was always busy. Murderers, kidnappers, armed robbers, and drug dealers all have families. Little children would play dominoes with their Daddies or color in coloring books. Little babies would sleep on the hard tables. It was against the rules for the inmates to hold their children, but sometimes the guards looked the other way. Actually, if I might slip in a political view, you can see the enormously high cost of our war on drugs right there in a prison visiting room.
For a few hours, the men in that visiting room would drop their masks just a little and be themselves with the people they loved. For a few hours, they would become human again. The tragic thing is that often, after a few months or years, the visitors stop coming.
Sometimes John Henry would tell me stories about the things that happened in between our visits. When a person is in the hole (Roy calls it in “seg”) they’re allowed to go outside for a short period of time. They’re escorted outside and put into cages to keep them separated from each other. Well, even in seg, you still have weapons, and even separated by cages, you can still fight. Chimpanzees aren’t the only animals who fling their sh*t. John Henry has been stabbed a few times in prison. Fights are a fairly regular thing and, probably because of that, they have a machine gun trained on them while they eat their meals. Prisoners very quickly develop a hard shell and learn to project a persona that shouts, “Don’t even think about f****** with me or you will pay.”
Roy slipped up and let his true self shine through for a moment and nearly paid for it with his life. Here on the outside, we do our practices, clean the mud of Karma off our faces, and shine to each other here in this wonderful forum. Roy can shine there in prison, but the muddy faces can’t reflect the light back at him. They either absorb it or they douse it with their own mud. Roy can shine here in this forum to a limited extent, but he’s hampered by my inability to keep up with his postings and by his own neediness, I think.
My request to you, the members of this forum, is to shine back. I know there are some serious limitations, and I know there may be some discomfort with communicating with someone in prison – maybe not necessarily because of the person, but because of the prison. I send Roy the replies to his posts via snail mail. (Carson used to do that. You’re awesome, Carson!) And I’m willing to pass on an anonymous message if you’d rather communicate that way. If you would rather communicate directly, I can give you the ins-and-outs of snail mail, and I can give you the scoop on phone calls too. If you don’t have anything to say, that’s wonderful too, but if you do, I’d like to help remove the barriers.
I have a feeling that parole is going to happen, whether Roy wants it to or not. And when it does, Roy will walk out of there with the clothes on his back and the knowledge in his head, and that’s it. I can’t do much to help him with his worldly problems (I have too many of my own
), but I can shine his light back at him and add my own light to the divine flame.
Lots of love!
P.S. I really admire anyone who made it this far! I hope nothing in this post offended.
